On an early morning, too early for most cars moving, a schoolboy with a backpack, the last schoolboy of them all, with a head too big for his body, stops to use a parked car as a mirror. He leans down to see his face closely in the passenger window, he rubs off a spot on his ample forehead, and then he continues on.

What is it ever that they know. What is it ever that they don't know.

Some of the last remaining pedestrians that Walker noticed were people walking their dogs. People grew fat if they didn't walk themselves, but that was not as important as not walking your dog. Dogs go crazy and run in circles in the living room if you don't take them for a walk, so perfect drivers left their cars so they could keep up walking their dogs down the sidewalk, which meant that many dogs and their walking owners were victims of many accidents.

To play it safer, some dog owners tried to walk their dogs with their cars. The owners would be in the driver's seat and turning the wheel but had a long leash out the window and the dog would walk beside. But passing motorists and interference from the driver's own tires sometimes led to a strange bump rolled over and that was the dog or maybe the driver would not even notice it until she had come to the end of her ride and her dog's walk and all that was left on the empty leash was a few blood stains that could not be washed out.

The last few dogs as pets got walked inside the cars, making a circle inside on the seats and seatbacks. But this wasn't satisfactory for most dogs, who wanted the outside air and knew the difference if the sun bit their fur or only the dome light. Eventually dogs were abandoned as pets because of the high maintenance that they required.

Puddle lake

Knows the whole city down

A tire thru parts the mud

His watch stopped. Either that or it was still the same time as it was hours ago when he last checked.

Thru the white mist he saw the clock on the tower, ten after ten it said. He knew the time now and was happy enough for that, but when he walked a little farther and saw the other face of the tower clock he saw that it said ten to ten. The next clock he saw said 9:30. The next clock said eight, the one after that ten, then ten thirty then four forty-five. So many clocks and so many times - each had its own story. Walker was certain that this was a sign of something.

It had been a while since he had seen another pedestrian, another fellow pedestrian, either on his secret paths or in the more public places when he risked his footsteps there. He had recently glimpsed a pedestrian thru the branches and the mist and knew that there was at least one more out there, but the car defense classes were long gone. The number of attendees had kept dwindling until it was just himself the very last week and he had a lot to learn, but he wasn't the one to teach himself those things.

Some of those pedestrians had turned into drivers - he knew that sometimes when he'd glance at a pair of knowing headlights, but most had been hit and killed by drivers, and most of them were hit intentionally, even tho the police report, if there was a police report, always said, "accident," and went right into the filing cabinet not to be consulted again.

He had seen another pedestrian, but that was weeks ago now. He mostly walked in loneliness.

All the clocks had different times in their faces. He understood this to be a sign that he was now the last remaining pedestrian of them all.

He had a good memory, if anybody would listen, and that was important now. All pedestrian culture, thousands of years of walking forwards and backwards, thousands and more years of walking on two feet and not on four and not laying back for a roll, thousands of years of this and that now rested with him and in him alone. If he forgot something about walking, like how important it was to swing your arms to give your footsteps balance and speed, that particular trick would no longer be part of history. If he forgot it, somebody else would have to invent it again in future years, once again when the need was discovered. There were now millions of years of thousands of feet, of millions and billions of pairs of legs that walked now with his every step. He took them with him or else they were left behind forever. He felt the weight of them on him as if the pressure of the atmosphere shifted and pressed down on him instead of all the others in their cars stuck in traffic.

He was now the only pedestrian, the last of them all, and even if he didn't want to know this he kept remembering it, every time he walked and walked alone.

Most things

Will cost you

But gas is cheap

Before the haze grew so thick that he could see no more, he saw the following sights:

Houses that turned into garages, so that your entire life at home could be lived without getting out of your vehicle.

Street corner traffic cops directing the lanes of traffic thru their windshields.

Drive in movies in which the cars parked on the asphalt made love to each other while their people, passive, steered inside.

A man rolling down his driver's side window to speak to a friend and when he opened his mouth only honks came out.

The subtle shift of the grill of a car expressing the anger of its owner inside.

Stores with aisles wide enough for shopping with your seat belt on and your back seat as a shopping cart.

Drivers grown so large they took up the whole two front seats of their vehicles, their faces plastered against the windshield like a child making faces on the pane of a window.

Infants driving their kiddy cars to find a breast for milk and steering by grabbing their fists around strings hanging with bright flashing mirrors dangling before their faces.

A large motorcycle, growling and squealing like a gigantic pig might while eating its own intestines, sets off every car alarm it drives by.

A gang of boys riding their cars running down the street. One by one the boys dies, exactly every five seconds, as each hits another car or some obstruction and crashes.

Twenty cars line up and down like a set of teeth and start to chew up the road like stringy dinner.

He saw the fruits of evolution, the changing shapes of human beings, as people evolved out of the tall lanky bodies so perfect for walking, so skinny to squeeze thru the envelope of atmospheric pressure on its own strong limbs, and into animals perfect for sitting in a car all day: egg-shaped beings without thick limbs but with tentacles instead that could reach down to the pedals or to the steeringwheel or to the radio or cell phone.

Light could touch the green world

Or it could touch your windshield

Which

She could be floating in space, she could be flying on a kite with the north wind on her toe tips, and that could make her smile. The smoothness so much closer like all life happened between sunrise and sunset, as if each day changed your life in an unbelievable way, one tick tock and another tick tock, and that was its own immensity all over again the same way place time.

It's a smoothness adventure, a sweeping hand to ride you on the circle one second after another without a click in between. No gap, no attack, just a slow ride Sunday from all sensation to its silly twin, the clock that starts you and the polecat action that repeats and separates and spins the bottle to circle your extensions. Around, around, the roller rink that cleans our clothes and wears our hair with a big smile mustache and a teddy bear.

As she approaches her velocity, as she looks into her own ferocity as she rows the boat across the sea with her green hands cupping the right night sensation, her change-up stirrups and the galloping cowboy Bobs. If the twice-upon a tribesmen came visiting with their business cards and spoke a speck of cleaning solution in their long grey hair, a trip on the air, a ride to smoothness city on the long trail interstate passing the restaurant flags and the sagebrush grooming and the little flights of fancy with their bird wing symphony, and the orchids and the underwear stores and the right words that track the notion, that lay in weights with their vowels and consonants to say something to you, to spare you the secret over your head or sometime in bed and if she drives one notch faster she might get there or be gotten and if you drive with your legs so furious you might never be forgotten.

If it could talk

It would be really obnoxious

Your car

Maybe he was all wrong, maybe he had gotten it all wrong from the beginning. Maybe he was wrong in his walking ways, in his sketching out his secret walking routes in his pocket notebooks, maybe he was just wrong. Maybe he was wrong and everybody else was right. Maybe he was wrong, maybe all pedestrianism was wrong from the beginning. Maybe the only true way was decided by roadside signs and their arrows and suggestions. Maybe the only map was the one at the gas station with all the blue lines and black already decided before you in ink, over the mountains and the long way avoiding the towns around. Maybe he was a walking illusion and everybody else drove the truth in their four wheels and mirrors for backwards.

Maybe it was so, maybe he was wrong, but it didn't matter to him, not now, not after he had gone so far. It didn't matter because there had been Ball, whose life bumped up to him and to a stop. It didn't matter because there were still so many miles to go just to go back and forth, and his feet just did it so well for him instead. It didn't matter because he had already decided long ago and wasn't sure what process to go thru to change such a decision if he had to make such a decision again. It didn't matter because he had thought this thing so long ago and he was driving his racecar at the moment that he thought it up and that day and moment still had all his emotions and contemplation. It didn't matter to him and yet it mattered, and yet he doubted.

Cars are feelings

Cars are knowledge

Don't leave your mind without one

After her first fog accident, she just had to ask the repair crew to hammer out some of the dents in her car. The second time, they had to do slightly more intense surgery.

Penny broke her legs and both her arms. She was immobile in the hospital bed with her legs and arms up in the air and attached with ropes to keep them straight, with ropes like so many telephone wires. By the way, you can't see telephone wires in the sky anymore because of the thickening clouds of particulate, because of the growing haze that hides your enemy, that hides what you would crash into next.

"Hi, honey," she said as he entered the hospital ward, her hospital room this time. "It'll be a little longer before I can get home this time."

"How are you?"

"Oh, I'm fine. But the house I hit, that's not so fine. I'll be up and out of here before too long. I've got to write the script for the newest model, the Crashtangelous, the crash-proof car. It's so big that nothing could hurt it. You can drive thru the fog at any speed and if you hit something you can keep on going. I have some ideas but my arm is all up in this sling. I'm going to ask the nurses if they can take dictation. I asked one of the nurses and she agreed but now she's laid up because she had a crash herself. Her car crashed into a Crashtangelous, one of the first demo units. I guess they both had some damage but the nurse came out by far the worse."

Walker shows her his empty pockets to show her that he has no pen and paper.

"Where are your car keys?" she asks him, not seeing them in his empty pockets because they are not there to be seen.

"Oh, I left them out in the car," he lies.

"That's right. Who can even see our cars these days to steal them? You are such a careful driver. Not a scratch on you," she looks at him from under her bandages. Maybe she has some fondness left over after all the alcoholism and accidents. Maybe it's distrust she has or the kind of contempt that the victim of a terrible accident might have for those untouched by the disaster.

More strapped-together bandaged bodies get in his way, some on beds and some on boards. He walks the hospital corridor. When he gets to the door he doesn't go to his car thru the piles of car wreckage, because his car is far away and still parked around the corner from his house. He walks into the mist, like the soup that we live in, and its thickening broth, filled with the cracker crumbs you stirred.

The mist surrounds and tells him shapes and stories. Some of the shapes look like car wrecks, and he can hear the ripping sound of them, he can hear the abruptness and the horrible smack of solid rock sound. The mist tells it to him in movement, like a river always changing its course, the particles find a new bulge or a lower path for winding and paint the shape of the collision, and paint the shape of its impact force with new waves of sudden smallness and treble frequency.

The whole world around him is composed of particles in little chains; they form rivers and pathways in the clouded space beside him. He could follow a chain but he makes his own way thru, disturbing the waves of the world, making new rivers thru the mist all surrounding him. He holds his breath but not for long and the particles in their patterns, in their smiling waves for the whole wide world, go inside his lungs and take on his internal journeys and learn his body knowing more with the next breath out, with a sigh or a cough.

He reaches a place where all the waves are at peace and that's because it's such a pile of wreckage that he feels with his knees and he has to scale it like a mountain if he were to cross it exactly and there are small waves of the writhing dying bodies inside and he can feel their pulses in the dust all around him and he can feel their ghosts dancing in the white world all enveloping. When he feels his way down the other side of the Wreckage Mountain, he can feel and hear the new collisions that are building up the foothills, the jagged metal and the shrieks and the curses, and where there was once a mighty road there is now a towering peak, and someday he will climb it and at its top the clouds will end and he will see from side to side and he will breathe the fresh thin air so high above.

When he gets to his house and closes the heavy door behind him he sees that the indoor air is affected now too, that his chairs and his table look like they could be hundreds of miles away thru the distance mist, and when he sits to watch his TV he has to figure it out by the sound that vibrates the air around him, that twists in a river the long thin chains of particulate in the sky, in the familiar smelling air of his living room, his own smell and the smell of Penny and the smell of soot too taking over in his nostrils. He walks up close to try to see the picture on his TV set, but when he gets up close the mist is still too thick, or maybe that's his reception, or maybe that is what they found to put in their camera, but it is just a white glow, like the mist he sees outside, like the mist he sees inside, like a frosted light bulb replaced his TV screen.

He makes his dinner in the microwave oven but as he eats with his fork and eats with his knife he has trouble with the taste, he has trouble deciding between the taste of his burrito and of the particulate all around him, and maybe he's eating the burrito or maybe his teeth are gnawing on just the thick air, but his stomach still makes bubbles, it makes milky sounds and purrs.

He hears the scream from his TV screen followed by the rigid rippling metal impact. The TV reporter was crushed in a car wreck. It was an accident.

If you could see

For yourself

You wouldn't need four wheels

A few weeks of walking later, he meets Penny in the hospital again. She's rolled up in bandages like a mummy from the movies. She's barely a glow in the thick air of the inside.

"I just got out of the hospital and into my Crashtabulous. I did dictate the commercial and it made a good TV ad, even tho all TV ads look the same these days, all of television kind of looks like looking at lightbulbs, when you get right down to it. Anyway, I just got out of the hospital and put on my seatbelt in my Crashtabulous when a Crashtabulous Plus rear-ends me and totals my Crashtabulous. Now I've got to work on my ad campaign for the Crashtabulous Plus but the nurses say they can't even see a notebook to take down my dictation. Most of the nurses are in traction today any way; there were a few more totals on the highway this morning I heard about."

Her head cannot tilt to look at him. "I can't see you. Step closer. Closer. Closer." He's so close now he can see the advertising seals on her bandages. "You're such a good driver," she says. "You are all milky white, you are like an untouched road, like a brand new showroom car. Not a scratch on you, at least nothing big and red enough to see thru all the haze."

The clock tick tocks but they can't see it to check the time. They'd have to count the ticks to know, and that would be a full time job.

"You're sure you're driving, aren't you?" she says with a laugh, but it's the kind of laugh like she won't be laughing later.

You see it so much

It sees you so little

Car slicing into crosswalk

The haze is even thicker, if you can imagine that, and it still holds the sounds of perpetual traffic, but many of those sounds are echoes of traffic past still held in its grip like the favorite toy of the thickness of air. It is tough if not impossible if not improbable to tell what part of the roar is current traffic and what part of the roar is the echo of all the traffic in the days when you could still see your way, when the mist was new and faint, and before the collisions built the Wreckage Mountain and the surrounding ragged ranges.

The Wreckage Mountain is massive now, and its foothills have grown into an entire range like the Rockies. As Walker hikes across the cliffs of mangled bodies and vehicles he imagines that the peak of the Wreckage Mountain must be somewhere far above him, at a height and elevation where the air is clear forever. Trees are growing on the sides of the Wreckage Mountain, that's how permanent it is. Trees are growing there, tall and without leaves. Their hundreds of arms scratch at the thick sky that covers them like a tarp, or soup.

Walker walks the low road on the Wreckage Mountain and then the wreckage flattens out as he approaches the hospital. He thinks he can feel things moving to the sides of him but all that he hears is the echoes of past engines. He thinks he feels movement, but it has to be the movement of bodies, it must be that. Thru the mist he sees, or thinks he sees a corpse trying to walk. He imagines he sees in the thick haze a beat up washed white face and flapping white bandages from head to foot. The body attempts its steps, but is tripping with almost every stride. Walker thinks that he sees it thru the haze but then the haze turns whiter and waving and bites up the body with its bits of clouds and the vision is gone but he knows he saw it, he knows he saw something.

He walks the haze-loud halls of the hospital trying to find the room where his wife is. The sound of her voice carries him forward. He feels it when he mounts the last of the stairs he can find. The voice says, "Wreckanada, Wreckanada, drive the lovely Wreckanada with its stylish features," and he knows he simply has to follow that voice to find the room. He sees no nurses or doctors in the hall, but he feels their bodies writhing in bandages in the rooms on all sides.

In Penny's room he sees her head. It is sitting on a box flashing of lights and readouts and dials.

"Hi Walker," the mouth of her head says to him, her head not quite turning because neck there is none, but somehow bending with eyes and nose slightly like furrowed brows to make his acquaintance, to symbolize silent rejection.

"Hi Walker," she says from her head. "You can see that I had quite a day yesterday. I had a bad accident in my Crashtabulous Plus and my entire body was horribly mangled. A large strip of heavy metal serrated my head from my body, but the last surviving medical team was able to save my head and hook it up to life support. I don't know where my body is, it's probably still in the pile of wreckage. I don't suppose they had time to save my good old body, tho it had lately put on some weight," she says as tho she lost a rubber ball that bounced into a street and was crushed there by a tire. "I'm doing okay now, if you were asking; at least my head is okay. I think they wanted to keep my head alive because I come up with such great car advertisements. I've been thinking up an ad for the new Wreckanada. I think it's the car that's going to revolutionize the way people drive. It's going to take them past the wreckage and to a new world on the other side. To mountain roads that bend with the sky and to a bold new vision thru the fabulous super-scraping windshield. I've got to get my ideas down. They are running thru my head pell-mell like a hive of disturbed pedestrians. Would you take my dictation?"

Walker puts all his weight on his right foot and then puts all his weight on his left foot. He does that over and over as if his legs could no longer both share the weight together and he cannot decide which foot is best to hold him.

"Honey, could you do that for me? I don't have hands any more, my hands aren't with me, I'm just a head, so I need some assistance. I think the doctors will be able to fix me up with some good prosthetic tentacles at a later time, so I can drive again when I get out of here. It would be horrible not to be able to drive, don't you think, particularly with the new Wreckanada rolling off the assembly line."

He can't really look at her head. Not even thru the haze. Not necessarily because he can't, but that is certainly part of it, but even more so because he doesn't want to. He looks down to imagine how his foot compresses his shoe when it is the one taking on all his weight. He doesn't want to say anything, he would rather just go on listening, but she isn't really giving him any options.

"I don't know," he says. "I don't know if I can do that," he says, he says.

"But I'm sure there's a pen and some paper around here somewhere," she says. She can't turn her head to look but she can squint and bend her brow to pretend that she is moving or nodding.

"It's not that," he says.

"You're looking so good, honey. You're such a good driver. I don't think your hands are even bruised. You're such a good driver. I should have asked you to show me a few things, a few good driving moves. I should have had you show me them back when I used to have a body. I think I was sometimes meaner to you than I should have been. Instead of being mean, I should have asked you for driving lessons."

They hear the tick tock of a clock somewhere. They don't know what time it is, they can't see it thru the haze, but they know that time is there, and it is going past them.

"I don't drive."

"You what?" her head says.

"I haven't driven for a long long time. I walk. I don't drive. There are others now too, there are others trying to walk. For a while there I think I was the only one, but not any more."

Her head is red. Her head is green. Her head looks like it is trying to uproot itself from the life support system, if it could, and fly thru the haze to his head and bite it off. Her head looks like it is trying to kick him or trying to strike him with its feet and hands but it has no feet or hands so it kicks him with words.

"Don't drive? Don't" drive? Do you think you should have asked me about it first? Don't you think you should have discussed this with me when you first considered it? How long has this been going on? Is this some kind of joke? What about me? How do you think I would take it? How do you think I'd feel? What about me? What about my feelings? Did you ever think about that? What about my shame at being married to a pedestrian? Did you even think about me? Did you think about how I'd feel? Always only thinking only about yourself. Never thinking about what I'd think. You, a pedestrian? A pedestrian? Me? Married to a pedestrian? What a laugh? What a tragedy! Did you ever think about me? What if you were found out? Do you know what that might mean to my career? Did you ever think about me? About the shame?"

He still hears her voice as he walks away in the hospital hall. He hears it still when he is back outside in the thicker mist. Maybe her voice comes from a window or maybe it comes from an echo or maybe it just comes from his mind but he hears it still, he hears it as if it is the only thing to hear these days. But he can make it go away by climbing the Wreckage Mountain.

His hand is in his coat pocket and he feels his old smushed up walking cap. He hasn't worn it in the mist, he doesn't really need it to hold back the sun, he doesn't really need it to hide him from the cars with the mist so thick so silent but he feels it in his pocket and he puts it on anyway. It has its old-fashioned feel all around, he feels it on his hair and he knows he has it on. Maybe it makes his eyes easier inside it; maybe it makes the mist not so cloudy, not so all.

The sun sets somewhere

A sudden new wind

Blows in new night

You can walk on the low steppes of the Wreckage Mountain but when you get to a certain elevation you must climb to carry it. You can walk on your feet with your body at a curious bend, as if your ankles were angles because the metal ground is at such a slant. At certain places, the slant is such that your hands must join your feet and you must crawl it like an animal that walks on four. There are cliffs of metal and handholds of tires. There are ridges of chassis and windshields like glaciers. There are scattered small parts like an occasional rock and a whole loose collision like a boulder in danger of rolling. And all about it runs the curtain of cloud, as if the mountain were growing a mist, as if flowers of fluff were sprouting from the metal soil.

The mist is thick and he has to feel his way up with his hands and his fingers and his feet and his toes. He has to be careful of the cutting edges and the random glass and even tho he is careful he does leave behind dark spots of his blood. His clothes take on rips and his skin parts in points and the blood does come out and drips in spots on the metal ground and maybe something will grow there someday, but Walker's skin will heal in time. It is a mountain and it stands up tall and he must feel his way on the knives of crash that cut, and he must know his way past the sharp leavings and collisions.

With some time and altitude, the thick mist gives up some thickness and he can see the hands that feel their way and he can see the faint mountainside that he climbs with his body. His hands grab further, and his feet in his shoes now tattered, and the mist draws aside like a gentle curtain and lets him see how tattered his clothes really are, and he can see ahead at the ragged steel as if it were painted with vanilla milkshake, but a little further higher and the milkshake has dripped away, and now he can see the logos and license plates of the crushed cars that make the mountain, and now he can peek into cracked windshields and see the bodies of death inside, and the upholstery.

At the top of the Wreckage Mountain the air is crystal clear. He can't believe he can see so much everything, as if he just had his eyeballs washed with the strongest industrial solution. He sees the slope of the mountain around him, and how after a few feet it dips into the cloud below like a mighty white ocean, and how the tops of the cloud of haze roll and boil as if they were jumping with a school of fish, as if they were playing waves and fancy. He has to hold his breath to just stare at one distance spot. He has to breath out with a cough or five or a hack that goes on for many minutes to clear his lungs of all the particulate, from all the specks of dust and pollution he breathed for so long when he lived below in the thickness and the speed.

After the fit of coughing he can breathe anew. With the cloud of haze below him he can see again and clearly. If there were other mountain tops as tall in the sky as the Wreckage Mountain, he would see them too, but there are none, so he has to look off at the pure color blue that turns to deep purple and then black at night. At night he lies on his back with the soft cloud just below him and he stares up at the stars like specks, like a cloud of whiteness spinning a slow circle in the hours before dawn.

The night is spectacular, absolute hush, but with the morning he expects will come some sounds. The river wash of traffic on some busy distant street, or a single acceleration to cut the rising sun in two. But dawn comes as quiet as night and he wonders if his ears might bleed when they don't have their customary morning car noises to hold. It is all so silent with the sun crawling above the cloud that he can hear the blood thudding in his head beside his ears.

There's a clatter nearby, like a pot and painfully over, like a bit of the Wreckage Mountain redistributing itself, like a steeringwheel rolling to a new location. And such sound could happen on its own and it also could happen because a hand needed to grip and didn't test it enough to know whether it would hold a whole body. And Walker thinks, maybe I am alone up here, or maybe someone else is coming.

His scrapes and scratches are healing with time and the mountain, he has found some comfortable upholstery to sit on and consider things, and people will reach to the highest ray too, they will also climb the Wreckage Mountain because it is such a tall thing, or maybe the rumors will spread, or maybe they are excellent information, that someone is on top, and someone names the great racecar driver or the pedestrian defense expert or just someone who has remembered how to walk and can show you a thing or two, and that is why they climb and crawl and that is why they slither their bodies out of the middle of the wreckage, and that is why they come from afar and climb all day long, and gather on the small flat spot on the tip top of the Wreckage Mountain.

The first person up is torn of clothes and body. She is still big but getting smaller with the climb. Walker sees the eyes beneath her flesh and the face still familiar. It is Tracia Manghanger making her last grasp for the last handhold and pulling herself, or trying, over the last crash wall up to the top. Walker holds out his hand and she grabs and he pulls her over the antenna and the smashed rear bumper and she is on all fours and she is on her feet.

On the next day they help each other repair their torn clothes. Walker can help bandage Tracia's wounds for his are healing well already. They don't have to say a word of sigh about the old stories because they know it is all in the pile of rubble beneath them.

Tracia, as she climbed up to the flat spot on top, where the air is clear on Wreckage Mountain, led the others who soon follow after. The second one after her, the one named Smedema Trucking, asks Walker, she says, "Tell us about walking. I've forgotten how to do it."

A small group gathers at the top of the mountain, a small group gathers and a small group grows. Walker has his walking cap on, and it is brown and bent and folded and has a brim to keep the glare sun from his eyes so his eyes can look at the other eyes and they seem to be waiting. He's a man of few words but he can think of a few things to say.

Walker is a man of few words but he has his little notebook in his pocket and he has written down a few things, some routes and some secrets, over all the years. He simply had to stop his walk and make a note and now he can look thru the pages for something that's like wisdom, or something he can tell them from so many feet on so many sidewalks and paths and streets.

"Here are my notes on how to get around." He pulls out his notebooks from this pocket and from that, from his shirt pocket and his hidden pockets, from outside pockets and inside pockets and those on his hands, and those in the stores and those in the air he breathes and in the clouds that drive by slowly the mountaintop in their sky sedans.

Tracia looks over the notebooks page by page and she knows she is reading a brand new bible, it's a plan of the earth and its secrets and the mind, the trip that we must take with our feet and our body, the way we need to think our way forward, the journey we take called life.

The lines are like magic, they could be the very first signs of art, they go on page after page, with amendments and corrections, they are a declaration of independence and of interdependence between legs and earth, they show the ways where the rounds don't bend where the path takes you somewhere, where you find your way in the shade and the sun and the trees know how to greet you with their arms and the ground is willing to teach you a little, to give you a chance.

"I am learning all the time," Tracia says. "I am learning just by looking." Page after page she turns like inside a church and the light shines on the pages and bubble to her face. "These are not just pathways - these are our lives," and the ink takes her places just sitting there above all the routes, just sitting there she hugs the boulders and her feet knead their way and now she knows she can do it and tingles with the expectation of just a first step of stepping.

"They are just some notes for me, and maybe for some friends too," Walker says, and then he pulls one more notebook out of the chrome of the cliff and it glows like a star, and it holds so many simple voices around this corner, goes straight for so many years, and curving.

He says, "When I drove I had to be everywhere all at once and I always wanted it to be now. But now that I walk I can walk for the changes. I can see them far off in the distance and prepare."

After some silence, Smedema says, "Show us how. Show us how you do it."

And when the new people at the top of the mountain try to walk, they do it so gladly, they stumble and don't place their feet correctly and then they laugh, they try to squeeze their steps with their left foot and back to a stop with their right, and instead of walking a corner by taking a bigger stride with one leg they try to turn their body with their arms as if walking had a steering wheel and Walker has to demonstrate with his body and they watch, and some understand, but for some he has to reach and use his hands and shape their movement as if he was the sculptor of their walking.

"When you walk," Walker says, "the closest things to you move the fastest, and the furthest things from you move the slowest."

And tho there is limited space on the flat top of the Wreckage Mountain, the walkers-in-training nod their heads yes, they do understand his words and they will pay more attention when there is more world around them to walk across and look at.

"Follow me or lead the way, and you shall walk," is what Walker suggests, and the others nod their heads in total agreement.

It was the rain that began the process that took the haze away from the top of the mountain, the rain that fell and fell and fell. It told them stories on the top of the tin that they had to huddle under and practice walking in their minds. It fell for a day, it fell for two, it fell for three, it fell in heavy bursts and then steady and slow and it washed the world clean like a Saturday bath. The famous rains came with their drips like eyes and they softened the steel and pounded in their eyes and it was gentle in their ears for it sang its steady sound in dreams. It was the rain that washed them, it was the rain with its rain name and they took its suggestions and tapped them back as if it was a conversation, as if they could make window wipers a game and not a necessity for seeing.

The rain came, and it did, longer and short, and it turned all and the world into its other darker color, and it tickled down in the metal below their feet and hands and it dripped its rust bucket and its gentle compassion of falling.

The rain came, and it washed their minds for a new brave day, and it remembered to them in drip by drip the green that once was, and that bloomed in the spring. It said so in its trickle and tickle, about the slow rub-out haze that made the world so grey no longer, and the rain told the colors in its down song, it played the whole spectrum in its peck pack peck falling, it sculpted back the edges and the surroundings and the brightness that had worn away under the steady air sanding.

The rain came and it told them what to do, and it told them the way down with its steady slip patter. It told them on its own, its drips did not drive cars, and it told them how it did the trip from up to down in the sound it made on the sides of things.

The rain came where it delighted their eyes and their voices. They may have shivered for an hour or two but its steady rinsing gave them the warmth of remembering. It was the music of a head, of the lightest of fingertips, and its said so with all its freckles, and no car could drive it down to the gutter now because the rain had washed all that to the past.

The rain came and slicked the night as bright as day, it played light in its tears and it cried to hush the silence. It dripped thru the haze, coursing its bullets thru the curtain, and rubbed the rub out down with its millions of seeing diamonds. The rain fell on the haze, and it bent it down like popcorn, and it hushed it flat like a pancake, and when they closed their eyes they dreamed it all back, all sounding like the tip tap, all sounding like the steady soft rain. It was the rain of the young that makes them the wet hair of the old, it was the rain that finds the secret cracks in your ceiling and comes in giggling.

It was the furious yearly rain, the rain of all young things, the rain that remembered the year before it and all that possibility, the rain that knew its own name slip slip slip. The rain wanting in the door or listening at the window, the rain playing racing games on the glass and telling you softly the time, and the time is now.

Atop the Wreckage Mountain the air was clear. But further down below, the haze still insisted. As the walking classes went on the people upstairs started to notice the difference just a day after the rains. First they saw the tops of the trees as if they were roots washed naked. Then the tree stalks themselves as if they were fingers you could count. And maybe it was because the Wreckage Mountain was even growing taller, but the world was really too silent and still, too silent and still for that to be happening.

No, the fact of the matter was that the haze was slowly settling, and more and more when they noticed. When they looked it simply remained the same but if they'd look away for a walking lesson or if night or a dream distracted them, when they'd look back they'd see more of the Wreckage Mountain below them, a particular crash up they hadn't seen the last time, a particular speck of windshield glass, or a face dead inside that they did not know before. They would see more of the car sides and tops and bottoms, and more of the cliffs that held the sky and trees, they'd see more and they'd see it clear and strong as if the haze waited for them to look away and then pulled back some of its curtain, and then collapsed some of its tower.

First the haze rolled back to show them car wreckage for miles and miles, but then the world below that came to them, first faint as an illusion, as a last memory returning, and then slowly growing to colors as the haze gave up and slowly dropped its pants. From light pink to not so light pink to hot pink to red. From light green to not so light green to turquoise to forest green. And if you had binoculars now, or glasses, you'd never feel the need to wipe them clean, you'd not really have to, because they both saw so well.

When the last particles of haze crashed down to the streets and folded themselves in piles on the city, the people that Walker trained and Walker himself looked down from the mountaintop. At first they felt the first shiver of responsibility. And then there was the horror of what they might find with a closer inspection and the air no longer the thing hiding their own true crimes.

They all looked down as if maybe it didn't happen. They all looked down as if they had all forgotten how to walk.

There was just a little cold wind and maybe it did make them really shiver. There was a light touch of rain like an occasional reminder. It suddenly made dark freckles on the crashed car hood he was waiting on.

The world below was quiet, for the haze was gone that could hold the echoes. The foothills of the Wreckage Mountain and all the world below it were white from the fallen haze, but the Wreckage Mountain was still all its colors of crashed cars and dried blood geysers. It was kind of like the snow was down below and the clear mountain on top, which is the opposite of usual.

You could go or you could hesitate. You could always wait until a bell to cue you or a scream of distress to make you daring. You could read another book to have some extra knowledge or just think out some more solutions to all the world's problems. You can wait until the TV news tells you it's not really so bad, or you can act by taking the first step and all the following ones after.

Walker and the new pedestrians all walked down from the Wreckage Mountain, down to the world to start things all over again.

Minneapolis, 2003

Sloppy BooksContact

: E-mail me