Noēsia
David Huntington
Foremost in life was the digital clock—in particular, the little black numbers on the scanner gun used to check parcels, backlit with an alien glow, in the dim aisles of the Fresno facility. The clock measured the time he spent on each parcel, the time he spent in the restroom, the time he spent requesting more time, and it held him unequivocally until 6:00 pm. Which was all true until a moment around 3:22, when something changed. He was holding a parcel just inches above a pile of other parcels. He had the expression of a man who just remembered he left the stove on, but only briefly, before a smile.
He set down the parcel and looked about him. He looked up at the steel between him and the sky. A battery-powered vehicle hummed past. His hand felt over the cool plastic of the dolly handle as he stepped into the central causeway, a shaft of cool, imperious, and subterranean air barreling towards a wall, at the base of which was a small rectangle of light. He laughed and walked towards it, past his coworkers who didn’t mind him, and into the day.
A woman with iridescent mascara was delivering mail in the next county. On this clear blue day the clouds looked like they enjoyed themselves. She rolled through the suburb in a snub, white mail car, stopping at each mailbox, each the same as the last. The sandy colored houses reminded her of the beach, and in the lapping rhythm of her work, she daydreamed of the beach, the hassle of getting a whole family to the beach, as she looked at addresses. In fact, she liked her job very much. But while walking back from a delivery, without warning, she stopped. And she just stood there at the edge of the light gray sidewalk in her brown shorts and office-blue shirt.
Her chest shook with a private laugh like a coil had unspooled itself. Looking around her, she became aware of her neck, and she rolled her shoulders. She placed a hand over her round arm, touched her belly and her breast, listened transfixedly at the yelping of a dog behind one of the homes.
A tall woman was buying wine in a Tucson grocery store. Her chin pointed slightly to the left. Suddenly, her eyes were flush with tears. She grew faint before her body took up breathing again.
Shortly after seeing her, down the same aisle, an old woman stopped pushing her cart. Another fellow dropped a frozen bag.
At the end of the aisle, a young man was stopped with a block of cheese in hand. He turned around to an employee leaning over a cooler, rearranging packets of bacon. A hand on his shoulder caused the employee to turn around. He had a lazy eye. He and the young man stared at each other until their faces scrunched up with joy.
One by one, everyone in the store stopped. Some of them, the ones standing nearest each other, reached out and touched. Meanwhile, the grocery store continued to exist. The PA system played a nasally recording. It was marvelous, mesmerizing, how much light was crystallized into so many products, so neatly arrayed, so framed by these walls and the front windows on the parking lot where there were cars. Real cars of such colors. And beyond them, the Catalina Mountains, which, if you were near them, would have been the size of real mountains.
At the same time, on the other side of the earth, in shadow, in an old steel town in Hunan beneath a storm cloud withheld for another region, and thus during an exceptionally heavy night, people were sleeping. In their dreams, across schoolyards and offices and all the permutations of ideas of light, all at once, they saw their hands, and they knew that they were dreaming.
But some were not asleep. Their cars rolled to a stop on the highway. One man was motionless in the center of the road. They had rolled and rolled, his daughter asleep in the backseat, until their momentum had been exhausted, and their car had nestled in the darkness. Both hands on the wheel, upright in his seat, his lower lip trembling: the whole of the atmosphere was towered on the landscape, as it has always been, billowing across the blacktop and suffusing through the windows of his little vessel, engine purring, dashboard signals emeralding.
The commuters of London all stood in the street. The sky was like a soft linen. Many of the drivers of the stopped cars stepped under the sky, left their engines running, their doors open, filling the air with soft digital bells. Hundreds in the street, of all sorts and ages, taking small aimless steps, drifting in place like particulates on a pond. An old man with a horseshoe of hair, standing in the street in front of the trolley stop, followed first with his eyes, then his neck, then a few faltered steps, the trajectory of the little black crucifix traversing the linen sky. It disappeared behind the imminent buildings. It crashed somewhere near Manchester.
In a preschool in Kuwait, kids stood up from their circle, or some rolled onto their backs, while their teachers appeared to recall a memory. They stared silent and content at the six surfaces of the classroom and the toys in all their ecstatic shapes. The walls of the classroom were so thin, so simple.
A neatly shaven banker in a tailored shirt sat in a cubicle beside a peculiarly small window in a Lisbon office. The window served only as a reminder that the darkness of the room was the shadow of the room. The spreadsheet on his computer was a sheet of light. He curled his fingers over his armrests and widened his eyes. His chair was dependent on the Iberian Peninsula.
A young nurse who had dyed a lock of her hair green watched a surgeon and two nurses. The surgeon and two nurses watched the blood pulse up out of a man’s chest on a table. Her hair was covered by a teal elastic cap. There was blood on the surgeon’s white-gloved fingers as she reached out and touched the patient’s face with them, leaving a mark on his eyelid. Behind their caps and masks, just by the crinkle of their eyes, one could see that these people were joyful. And the man on the table was having an unsurpassable dream.
It was midnight in Burma, and the sky was clear. Above a short rocky ledge by the sea, just a kilometer down from the hotels where they worked, a young couple was tucked among some necking trees. Their hands had fallen separate on the moss between them, wearing rings of folded paper. Their eyes were cast out to the sea’s horizon, a crease in blue velvet, that gentle curve that swung around the Earth like a pendulum. Their chests shook with private laughter. Their bodies were small and made of water. And beyond everything dangled the stars, which, if you were near one, would be the true size of a star.
With no warning, everywhere, the people stopped. They saw the five-point spreads of their bodies and that hair grew from their skin. They saw the uncanny familiarity of the eyes of animals. They saw how all things are suspended and spinning. They saw the endless permutations of the ideas of light. That all of them were people in the same manner. That everything real was real.
The Earth continued turning. That great ring dividing day and night swung over the people. Those awake in America wept at sunset; those awake in East Asia wept at sunrise. Skin grew cold and skin grew warm. Tiny hairs stood on end and relaxed again.
When it grew difficult to stand, those standing sat. Their mouths went dry and their bellies ached. They heard songbirds and distant barking; trees soughed, mostly.
In Tangiers, the trees howled—a storm tore through, bashing gases and liquids and solids together in such a way that confirmed everything. The elderly and infants and sick caught outside in the weather passed first into the lucid dominion of sleep, in which they waved their hands to find the light responded, before they died. A chill rain in Québec killed many more.
In Melbourne, the sky was a mass of silence, like an Arctic glass, eminently halcyon, receptive to all the hallucinations of those who had been out the night before, now lying on the sidewalks. Their skin had turned white and urine had frozen.
All the workers of Brazil’s fields now shivered avidly in the night. The sensation was remarkable.
By the second day, all those outside from Arizona to Southern California—and many in steamed-up cars—sweated and swelled until their innards dissolved in the rising heat. And for everyone else in more temperate shelter, dehydration had thickened their blood, and they fainted into open dreaming.
A few here and there died to tigers and wolves, the explosions of neglected machinery.
And then that great ring dividing night and day passed over their bodies. Over and over their bodies.
Their bodies still supported by the body of the Earth.
The flies still buzzed in the invisible air.
David Huntington's poetry, translations, and short fiction have been published in Literary Hub, Lucky Jefferson, Post Road, Spittoon, and elsewhere. As a PhD candidate at the University of Arizona, he studies critical theory and literary modernism.