Dreams That Burn In The Night (23 page)

They were lazing
about in the sun, pretending to be a beach before we ever got around to inventing the ocean, when
suddenly they found themselves plunged headlong into one of the very hot­test of the volcanoes
current at the time. It was an up-and-coming volcano and there was nothing timid about it. It
meant business.

The poor felsitic
grains of sand, they didn't have a chance. The lava was so highly charged with gas that it
erupted into the air, tossing the sand grain family out of the crater in the
unfit-for-polite-society form of effervescent foam. It blew them right out of the vent. A
shocking thing that, as I'm sure you will agree.

Well, what could
you expect. They all got sick, of course. They were down with the trots for a month, not to
mention a long-last­ing case of sniffles. They had gotten chilled up there in the air and they
had crashed to the earth as pumice. They said they felt like they were shot full of holes. It
wasn't until later when things had settled down a little that we discovered that they
were
shot full of holes.

In March, you could
hear the wind whistling through them. It made them madder than hell but there wasn't anything to
be done about it. In those days, you had to play it where it lay. And ev­erybody was getting
laid, one way or another.

Sometimes the more
risque of us would go in for a little bit of
foliation or a slight nip of striation, but the sensible ones of us tried to be as
inconspicuously molten as possible. We didn't go out of our way to acquire gaudy amounts of
minerals. We tried to be as flat and individualistic as possible. We tried to seek our own level
and not to complain when we were forced to move into a neighborhood with lower-class minerals. We
tried to make the best of what was basically a bad situation.

We had our regional
maturities and our intervals of aggrega­tion. It was the worst of times, but had we known the
future, we would have thought it, by comparison, the best of times. From one day to the next we
hardly knew where we stood or what we were. One day we might be wearing plagioclase sweat suits
and the next basalt bathrobes with feldspar lapels. Where we once extruded, we felt smaller
intrusive masses pushing up our pant legs. Nothing was fixed. Nothing was secure. Today you were
and tomorrow you might be eroded.

Kingdoms of
minerals rose and fell in the baked zones, oozed and slithered in the bleached zones. There were
batholiths on every block and no waiting. Volcanoes bleated honestly from every corner and
geysers goosed passersby with unrestrained glee and scalding water.

And the new things
that kept popping up. No way to count them, oh no, they just piled up. A jumble, chaos. The world
was practicing rhythmic birth control and it couldn't keep a beat. You name it (we tried to name
it but we quickly ran out of fingers) and whatever it was, we were getting densely populated with
it. One day it was the Precambrian and the quiet of unnamed species and the next day it was no
longer Pre-. It was the Cambrian and we had our little felsitic fists full. We were swamped. We
were bogged. We were washed with organic trivia. The sea, formed more or less on a hunch, once
sedate and respected by all, the sea turned silly and vain and creature-filled. It became uppity.
It began to have airs.

The warm shallow
seas repeatedly invaded the continents. Countless incidents of backyard barbecues ruined by
seasonal sea escapades became the order of the day. We were horrified. Righ­teously appalled. We
were alternately wet and dry and mad as hell. Rain was fine—if it had to be, it had to be—but sea
water, we instinctively felt, should learn to keep its place. We were jeal­ous, I guess. We had
worked so hard to be a continent. Pushing
up here, extruding here, uplifting there, trying vainly to associate with the best
minerals, trying to look as presentable as possible. And then, just when we had a particularly
winsome striation down pat, the sea would rise up and put us under water.

How often I
remember the trips to the seashore. I and the other pebbles would spit furiously into the ocean.
We would thumb our noses at the rude sea. The sea, heedless, even in those days, was just
learning to wave. It crashed on the shore, impudently. Some of us, leaning a little too close,
were splashed from head to foot, from hornblende to feldspar. It made us smooth and
angry.

It was hard to get
sedimental about the unromantic sea. For one thing, the sea was in its slime in those days. It
was full of un­pleasantness and involuntary creatures. It was murky with things. Had we known
then what we know now, perhaps in anger we would have attempted something quite violent against
the sea. I can't speak for my fellow feldspars, but I do know that I, for one, would have been
right out there urinating into the sea if I had known what lurked beneath its insolent
surface.

We pebbles had put
up with a lot in 170 million years. We had had it rough, we thought. If only we had known how
well off we were! The worst was yet to come. The sea was spawning. It was obscene and unusual. It
was demented. The sea was paranoid and it was out to get us. The poor, shivering, wet thing,
oozing down below with its oozes, perhaps unloved and certainly untutored. Surely, the sea was
not perceptive enough to realize the extent of its villainy. Perhaps it thought it was only about
to create a good topic for conversation. Perhaps there was no malice in its coral-encrusted
heart. No matter, the damage was done.

The sea broke out
in a rash of organisms and we, watching help­lessly from the shore, knew the game was up. We were
about to experience the Ordovician of Despair, the Silurian of Despond. We poor pebbles tossed
and turned uncomfortably on our conti­nental shelves. Our early paleozoic nightmares swarmed with
sponges, trilobites, brachiopods, corals, nautiloid cephalopods, and so many other forms of
lesser monetary worth that we arose in volcanic protest marches, heaved and foamed violently, but
all to no avail.

Troubled sleep and
endless woe were upon us. We sent the more sedimental of us down deep to get a closer look. Make
rec­ords, we said, we'll want to know just what it is they're doing
down there. They limped back to dry land, turned hard and impressed
unduly with the perfidious presence of the sea crea­tures. There was no unsolidified doubt in our
minds. The sea had pulled out all stops. Today jawless fishes, tomorrow the world!

We held prayer
meetings. We formed study groups, steering committees. We attended masses in the milestone
caverns. Speakers raged from stalactite pulpits against the ostracoderms. "If these jawless
fishes flourish," warned the speakers, "before you know it, they'll want jaws and then there will
be no stopping them!" We were in a panic.

We held extrusive
marches. Sit-ins, be-ins, sediment-ins, all to no avail. Some of the cooler heads tried to calm
us down. Oh, they tried. A cool, smooth-talking glacier pebble raised a question or
two.

"It's no big deal!"
he cried. "Let the ostracoderms get jaws, see if I care! If they get teeth and headlights, who
cares? Why bother with jaws if there's nothing to bite?" While the crowd was shout­ing him down,
behind our very backs and in some cases under our very noses, the placoderms were trying out
their new jaws on each other and preparing the guest bedrooms for the Age of Fishes. It was the
Devonian before we knew it. Before you could say "fossil cockroaches," the fish and invertebrates
foul were upon us. We felt them staring balefully at us as we laughed and played upon our
continents.

Although it was our
season in the sun, from the hidden depths of their watery homes, a sensation of restlessness came
to us. They had their eyes on land; of that there was no doubt. Count­less numbers of times, we
slapped their little tetrapod claws with rockslides as they tried to scale our thighs and clasp
our rocky bosoms. They might pretend to be outwardly peaceful, but we were not fooled. We knew
they were down there, growing feet. They were up to no good, that was clear, and we would be
damned if we were going to give them the satisfaction of an easy journey.

"There goes the
neighborhood!" we cried, when we felt the first amphip of the amphibian. "Goodbye, clean living;
hello, organic fertilizer!" we cried, when we felt the first rep of the reptile. We had no time
to sort out the anatomical particulars. While we, in a panic, cast our fearful eyes transfixed
upon the swarming sea, behind our backs the plants were festering on our tough hides like
blisters and tearing the very subsoil out of
us. We were caught be­tween the rock and the hard place, as the saying goes.

Plants tearing out
big hunks of our flesh on one side and tet-rapods mewling and whining all over our dancing shoes
on the other. We were trapped and we knew it.

We hid our heads in
the sand; we stood mute and silent, stunned by tragedy. We still had a trick or two left. We
shifted a continent or two, just to keep our hand in, but the fun had gone out of life. What
next? we cried. We wept, we made tearful stalactites out of ourselves. The worst has happened, we
thought. Oh, how little we knew!

What was that
enormous bleat? That thunderous, tunderous bump and grind? It was the Mesozoic 1920 with
Stegosauruses who could be another Al Capone (except they lacked his com­passion). The lights
went up on the saurian burlesque show. The dinosaur duckbill hit vaudeville. A baggy-pants
dinosaur was top banana. The straight man was a Tyrannosaurus rex, a Lizzie Borden with teeth
trouble.

The clip joints all
had teeth and big feet. Herbivore armor too tight? Need a shave? Step into the meat eater's cave!
Take a little off the top, shorten the tail. There wasn't a rock formation that didn't groan
under their tawdry weight, that didn't blush at the striptease of carnivore meeting herbivore. It
was bleat and eat and excrete and we were swimming in it. We were appalled. We were up to our
necks in it.

The shame! The
degradation! Trampled eternally by the dino­saur-footed speakeasy and carried by a big kick. We
hid our blushing crystals in shame. We melted our embarrassed gold in vein. Surely, nothing could
be worse.

But lo and behold,
it seemed like only a matter of minutes be­fore the mammals made their singing debut, hard upon
the heels of a ponderous inherit-the-earth act. The vaudeville cacophony of leather-winged bird
calls, dinosaur egg-juggling stunts, and saurian can-can dancers had hardly finished their
Permian encore when the mammals waltzed in and took our breaths away.

We were stunned, we
were knocked flat on our crop rotations.

We were pruned and
cultivated. Mammals! Marsupial monsoons!

Placental apartment
buildings! Archaic tidal womb, from cradle

to tomb, all those
beastly functions!

All the pebbles,
foully spattered with the soft-boiled egg, the
creeping embryo, wondered whence and whither and, gritting our felsitic teeth, tried not
to let it show. The egg exchanged for em­bryo, civilization and live birth and open sewers
couldn't be far behind. We searched our brains, probed our granite matter, racked our minds. We
were lost, busted, disgusted, and put away wet.

Clawed toes made
holes in our hides, hooves (of all things) hit sparks off our flat cheeks. And there was no
peace. There were no love affairs of chemicals, no sexual mineralogical grace, no crys­tal tryst
to perpetuate the race. We were finished, permanently glued in mineralogical displays.

Our porous cavities
filled with tears. The pebbles, once closely tied to their family formations, moved away,
weathering, never to be seen again. We pebbles began endlessly tumbling, homeless, erosive,
wearing away at the mountains, the sterile mountains that had betrayed us.

Had we known what
we know now, perhaps the world would have been different. Perhaps I, the lonely molecule, the
pebble too large for the sand of the beach, would tell a different tale. Perhaps I would be
skating across the silent sea on ferromag-nesian hooves. Perhaps I would draw the clean
geothermal steam into my silicone lungs and mate with a cute, passionate little red hematite from
the formation just next door. Perhaps, but now I live in the river unloved, resorting to bitter
abrasion and hydrau­lic action.

Perhaps it would
have been different. Perhaps, in another life, I would have taken a wife and raised little
garnets of my own. Why, I remember a cute little hornblende formation with the sharpest
double-chain tetrahedra! Ah, but where is she now? Asleep in the concrete bottom of a swimming
pool! Ah, life! It is as if we never had been.

I, the pebble, I
tumble endlessly, silent, unreproductive. Be careful, lest you wake me. Treat me kindly. Don't
skip me over the surface of the water. I am sleeping quietly with folded crys­tals. Like those
fossils, those records of time past we made, we sleep, never having understood what love was for,
uselessly we sleep, tumbled endlessly on this shore.

Sleep. The only
freedom we know.

We had to admit to
it finally, the planet needed entertainment. We had gotten quite a bit of amusement out of a
rabid dog, but it had been years since he passed through.

We still talked of
it, though. The dog had belonged to the Most High Poobob. It was an unremarkable dog, living
underfoot for years and years in a quiet, gentlemanlike way, winning the regard of all who knew
him. It was a genuine surprise to us when he began to hydrophobe in a most violent
way.