Lousy Sex: Creating Self in an Infectious World

7. The Wizards of “I”

87 7 The Wizards of “I” Much of what we come to think of our selves, how we see our selves, and what we believe our selves to be capable of come to us from others. How we are treated, how we are spoken to, things we are told as truths, and whether we are loved are the bolts and rivets of the constructed human self. Without art, science and medicine may become the wrenches and the chisels that will undo those bolts and those rivets. November 1957. It’s cold, flesh-cracking cold. The barren steppes roll off into the icy haze, unmarked save for a few low clumps of dead grass and three or four brick buildings. Light like flint flickers over the plain and a polar wind slams at the bricks over and over. Nothing changes. It seems nothing here ever changes, ever has changed. As if in argument, the center of this land of sleet and ice begins to burn deep orange. Miles off, the light gathers itself and roasts the thin air. Kerosene and liquid oxygen come together as though they have been waiting for this moment for a million years. A gray hare raises its nose to the wind, turns to see the light. DOI:10.5876/9781607322337:c07 l o u s y s e x 88 At the flame and the noise, men inside one of the small blockhouses run to windows filled with smoked glass. As they watch, the fire burns stronger and brighter. Seconds pass—nothing more happens. Though no word has been spoken , each of the men inside is afraid that nothing more will happen. Finally—a millimeter at a time—the fire begins to rise. Slowly, so slowly it seems certain to fail, the flame pushes itself and a two-stage rocket from the frozen ground at Baikonur Cosmodrome, USSR. The hare lowers its ears and its eyes fill up with flame. Behind the blistered bricks, the men turn to one another and smile. Over­ head, the light grows dimmer and dimmer, then disappears altogether. Sputnik 2 has left this world. Two stages, 10 tons of metal, 253 tons of kerosene and liquid oxygen, 1,118 pounds of aluminum nose cone, and 13 pounds of living flesh. November 2000. It is a mild dry day. Just beyond Pueblo, Colorado, my wife and I are headed south toward New Mexico for Thanksgiving. The light has gathered over the mountains to the west. A cool wind is blowing down their shoulders and everything smells of sage and an early winter. Colorado slides quickly past our windows. We speak of times past and times to come. As we talk, I am scanning a road map, hoping to pinpoint our whereabouts—an odd and nearly useless habit of mine. Suddenly, something appears in the road before us. Gina swerves to the left to avoid it. I look up from the map I’ve been studying and see that we’ve driven partway into the median, at about seventy-five miles per hour. Weeds are whipping past, slapping the front then bottom of the car. Gina swerves back onto the roadway. The car twitches oddly to the left, and we are abruptly in the right lane of the southbound highway. Gina reaches again for control of the 4,000 pounds of steel and vinyl beneath us. She tries hard to bring the car back in line with the road. Again it twitches. Again she reaches. Time itself splits open. I have no past. There is only future. Slowly, the car heels over onto its side—Gina’s side. Sound returns like a fist. The windows shatter. Everything we’d packed for the trip is in motion inside the T h e W i z a r d s o f “ I ” 89 car. Gathering speed, the car quickly flips three, four times. The world around us loops past our windows. Only we are fixed, all else is motion. Again the silence. A computer hovers behind me, in free fall. A pen is rotating just past my fingertips in the center of nothing. Gina and I are still, pinned to the instant by the nylon straps of our seat belts. Suddenly, the spinning stops. Gravity slaps a final time at us and our Explorer comes to rest upside down in the dirt in the median. The wheels spin, the car sighs, yellow...