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The Mountain’s Last Flower

By Victoria “Stokastika” June-September 2009

Tagline: The mountain’s coming down! The mountain’s coming down!!! Aren’t you going to get off?!

Summary for the Back of the Book (for Agents and Publishers): The Mountain’s Last Flower is a surrealistic, precautionary
tale exploring the personal and universal denials of Heisen the Scientist, a rather obsessive and reclusive botanist. He refuses
to listen to the warning cries of Gonzo the panicky Child, who is frantically urging him to descend from the unstable,
rumbling mountain. Now required to deal with major sacrifice, the Scientist must consider leaving his once secure home of a
mountainside cabinshack and discontinuing his attendance to the endangered, neon-orange-petalled Neopentaspectavolus granelli,
which has served as a profound source of fulfillment in his later years. Through the interplay of antagonistic dialogues,
Heisen’s war of ideologies with Gonzo ultimately reveals that he is conducting warfare within himself, as his own suppressed,
youthful instincts are conflicting with the implanted, conventional “rationalities” of adulthood. Yet is Heisen able to come to
his senses in due time such as to escape the “erupting heartbeat” linked with “dragon’s shedding of the mountain’s skin”?

Biographical Blurb: Victoria Minnich, otherwise known as “Stokastika” (a seeker of order from chaos), is a Ph.D. student in
Environmental Media / Environmental Science and Management at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Upon asking
the question, “What is the definition of science when humans are a part of the experiment?” Victoria packed up her bags filled
with knowledge and tools in the Life/Earth Sciences and Arts in order to venture down the rabbit hole of addressing complex
human-environmental problems through multi-media storytelling, ranging from illustrated narrative fiction to film-making.

“Whosoever is delighted in solitude is either a wild beast or a god.”

–Sir Francis Bacon

Devotions
The Mountain’s Last Flower was written in memory of my grandfather, John Ray Minnich. The creative wheels of this story
began churning upon my first encounter with Duke and Dog in June of 2009 (then speeding up upon the incident of the 6.9
earthquake of Baja California in August of 2009). Thanks to Barry Spacks for challenging and encouraging me to write a poet’s
story, not a straw man’s plight… and so this short tale has transformed into a novella, and it took me three months, not three
weeks to write! Big hugs to Jeri Lyn and Steve for letting a troubled mind hibernate among the fruit trees and redwoods of
Sebastopol, California. Much gratefulness to all of my blood-and-mind family for supporting—or putting up with—me through
such an arduous journey of melding science and art. —September 2009

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 Part 1

There was this old man by the name of Heisen who lived in a rather small, self-built cabinshack on a shrub-coated mountain,
amidst a vast expanse of sparsely populated terrain, aways-away from any human-infested metropoliscapes. The cabinshack
leaned against the somewhat steep, west-and-ocean-facing slope of the mountain, which was also bordered by a meagerly-
fertile valley to the east, a village fairly near the base to the south, and a scanty continuation of the rugged range to the north.
Despite his past-ripening age, Heisen maintained a lean and surprisingly agile form, giving him the capacity to construct this
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marginally functional, scraggly-shaped cabinshack, sufficient enough to shut out any high winds and mild rains. The old man’s
untamed curly-grey-brown-hair-coupled-gruff-beard, horizontally-elongated, thick-lensed glasses, and gazelle-like defensive
posture summed into an epitomized portrayal of a reclusive scholar of seemingly great intelligence—or bona fide geeky-ness in
the least—as if he were a scientist of sorts.

And this man did in fact deem himself as a scientist. Heisen, the Scientist.

Before he trekked across swaths of vacant lands and established himself on this mountain three years ago, Heisen labored for
an incalculable number of years—perhaps 40?—as an odd Professor of Botany in the prestigious, urban-bathed URKLA
University. The man enrolled in this institution as an unfiltered, ever-so-curious, feisty boy with an exceptionally active mind,
who obsessed with exploring the Unbounded Outdoors lacing the fringes of the city.

Yet over time, Heisen’s unbounded, multidirectional passions had simply become more and more narrowly channeled and
folded and crumpled and scrunched by the myriad of academic and social pressures to a point in which he evolved an
extremely specialized, highly resolved adoration for rare and endangered plants, while the rest of his own primary vitalities,
diversely branching mind, and intriguing world around him had dwindled into some amorphous, fuzzy mesh of static
backdrop that mostly bypassed his conscious attention.

The Scientist had come to know and intensely admire these once mysterious plants, such that he perceived them as distinctive,
sprightly, ever-so-changing characters—almost human-like, with personalities, even more than human-like—for throughout his
career, he was asking these rare plants all kinds of questions about their color and size and shape and function (internally and
externally, from parts to whole and whole to parts), and why they had come to look and operate the way how they did and
why not any other way, and where they lived and why was this place-of-a-physical-and-living-matrix their ideal or marginally
habitable home, and how they related to their neighbors (their allies and enemies and apathetic bystanders), and how were they
born, how did they grow, how did they mate, and who were their family members and very distant ancestors—

Yet once again and furthermore, the stresses of rigid university conventions tapered the vibrant internal collage of Heisen’s
adorable floral obsession into merely, and predominantly one expressive outlet of technical papers, riddled with academi-Creole
megawords, numbers upon numbers, mounds of data sets, and complex computer computations of nearly incomprehensible
mathematical equations, which were nearly incomprehensible to himself (yet he was too proud to admit it).

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And slowly, over the period of a decade, to the obliviousness of Heisen himself, the demands of the university stripped him
from his childhood pleasures of immersion in the Unbounded Outdoors, as he had become more and more bounded to
exploring the musty-smelling abyss of pre-existing, library-housed scholarly literature, tediously operating highly complicated,
laboratory-confined machines (while several researchers sent him botanical specimens for analysis through classified mail), and
telling stories almost repetitiously of rare and endangered plants to densely packed classrooms of mildly humored students.

And so a boy’s dream of endlessly frolicking about the remains of Whatever Wildlands had steadily and unawaringly been
devoured and reshaped into the University Mold. But this feisty boy, now Heisen the Scientist, had become very good in his
haphazardly-fallen-into profession, and was highly regarded as an acclaimed expert in his field, exclusive to the scholarly
community, for that was the only community he truly came to know.

Other than his fixation with rare and endangered plants, the rest of Heisen’s personal family and hobby life remained largely
unknown to his collaborators and associates. And if there were any attempts of addressing such personal matters amidst more
formal discussions, the scholar plainly shied away from group conversations or abruptly diverted or ended one-on-one
exchanges with “Can we stay on topic here?” or “I am anticipating my next meeting, so if you could please excuse me,” which
were so brusque that such dialogue shifts seemed to reach a threshold of borderline social awkwardness. Some concerned
departmental colleagues had observed occasional intervals of silent heaviness and spells of exceptional seclusion about Heisen,
as they had come to jokingly theorize during gossip-mill-happy-hours that this man’s highly edited portrayal of his life simply
represented that he was even unknown to himself.

The mind of the Scientist was ultimately perceived to consist of somewhat labyrinthal folds of varying degrees of thickness,
binding and branching interconnectivity, permeability or porosity, and overall well-sortedness in space and time, with most
matters being highly impermeable to the folds, except for the selective-to-most-unrestrained percolation of mental fluids
associated with his inner-dendritic network of plants. And perhaps his head truly paralleled a sedimentary outcrop, punctuated
by the pervasive absence of much-needed, associative lithical material for secure structure, and dominated by unconformities,
or major gaps in the tape-recording of his lifetime, where the sole emerging line of strata that composed of a consistent
lagerstätten was that of rare and endangered plants, while the rest of the beds and laminations contained diffuse, fragmented,
fossils from the rest of his life… granted if fossil bones were even present, let alone any remnants of memoiric casts or molds.

URKLA was once sarcastically nicknamed University of Myopia by a renowned journalist, and some collaborators closest to
Heisen chewed him out behind his back, pointing fingers and labeling him as the poster child for the pun.

And finally, after four decades of extensive, ups-n-downs distractions from his original free-romping train-of-thought, the
Scientist was finally granted his retirement and relieved of routine duties. Though in some respects, the consequence of forty
years of severe constriction of juvenile livelihood was potentially the permanent encrustation of Heisen, to a condition of
coarsened rigidity. With a bland burst of suppressed energy, the scholar essentially wriggled out of some stagnant cocoon, and
glumly blossomed into some novel insect that could be born again as old—with battered, slightly decomposed wings, and
residual stains of faded orange on his antennae and abdomen. This creature of a Scientist seemed more than ready to abandon
any reminders of his past habitats of University and Metropolis, and was eager to return to the engrossing chatter of the
Uncharted Outdoors.

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Heisen, now retired, residing in a cabinshack on a ways-away mountain, apparently held two remaining permeable and highly
melding folds of adoration in his life that kept his mind from transforming to complete, unevolving stone. These folds were of
(1) the non-rigorous observations of sunrises and sunsets, especially those clipped by fog (the only “free” and “natural”
commodity left on planet Earth, according to the scholar), and (2) the elaborate scrutiny and tending to the great
Neopentaspectavolus granelli, a very rare, and government-classified “endangered” flowering plant with neon-orange-colored
petals, in which the end of each petal protruded two ornate, and sometimes curly projections that resembled strands of silk. A
sky-blue ball of pistils and stamens bulged out from the converging center-point of the petals, and a neon-green stem
connected the radiant blossom to the lower extremities, which usually displayed four prominent, neon-green leaves, and a
rosette-of-a-base that bore resemblance to a poofy skirt. These mildly fragrant, anomalous plants resided in three small
splotches of communities on the ocean-facing slope of the mountain, just a very short walk from the doorsteps of the
Scientist’s cabinshack.

A little over three years ago, around the time of his retirement, Heisen received a letter from a distant collaborator pertaining
to the news of the potential existence of a new, unidentified-and-unclassified, neon-orange-petalled plant in the far, far, far east
of the stretch of terrain aways-aways-away from the urbanscapes enveloping URKLA University. Yet this story was still
uncertain, being carelessly tossed around by the community of botanical fanatics, and yet it tickled the Scientist so fancy that
he declared to the Biology Department upon his farewell gathering that this case was deserving of an expedition.

After dozens of years of system-imposed linearity of life, the newly-spirited Heisen decided to sell his tiny city house and most
of his trinket belongings, sauf a small truck suitable for rough road conditions, and a few vital supplies such as highly-used
clothes and an extensive tool kit (including a few relatively compact gadgets proper enough for scientific data collection). He
soon lost all sight and remembrance of human-swarmed habitats along a very dusty, bumpy dirt road bordered by speckles of
lower-elevation valley shrubs. The scholar finally embarked upon a spontaneous quest into the neighboring boonies to find
this outrageously-described neon-orange-petalled plant, and to metamorphose this swirling academic myth into a concrete
reality, once and for all.

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And it was of simultaneous happenstance in which the Scientist turned on to the “right road,” which led to his stumbling
upon an isolated, near-coastal village of people who mostly derived their livelihood from caretaking adjacent valley ranches. A
few of the village elders, whose red-botched, dark wrinkled skin all over their forms made them appear to be in their sixties,
knew of the once nameless orange-petalled plants on the ocean-facing slope of the unpopulated mountain closest to their
community. As the elders eagerly welcomed Heisen to the region, for they had never met a “scientist” before, they mentioned
that two Government Agents traveled through their parish about a month ago, who informed them that these plants, which
were to be called “Neo-penta-specta-vol-us gran-ell-i” (they showed him copies of the official government papers, as he had to
teach them how to properly pronounce the genus and species) might eventually be enlisted as “endangered.” The Agents
provided the amiable, bulgy-eyed Village Head with a stipend that was to be offered to a local resident who was willing to tend
the plants while the Agents took samples to run complex tests back in their cities. The very keen and animated Heisen artlessly
bombarded the elders with questions, such as “How long will it take for the tests to run?” and “Do you know if they are rare,
and is this the only mountain where Neopentaspectavolus is found?” and “Was this plant previously abundant and now rare?” and
“Was this ‘natural’ rarity or human-disturbance induced, potentially by your activities?” but they all lifted their hands and
shrugged their shoulders in unknowing uncertainty. And then, the scholar popped out the question, “Is there anyone
observing and caring for the plants in the mountain right now?”

At that point in time, no one in the village dared to consider tending the plants, let alone set foot on that mountain, due to the
presence of a supposed “dragon,” as to which Heisen scoffed and disregarded as voodoo talk (which apparently was a similar
response of the government agents). He quickly formed a mental fold of near impermeability whenever the locals discussed
and pleaded with him to worry of the “dragon.”

With great stubbornness, the Scientist still hiked up the mountain, and to his astonishment, two-thirds up the ocean-front
incline, he finally discovered and developed a profound infatuation (if infatuation can indeed be profound!) with the patches of
neon-green Neopentaspectavolus, which flickered more vividly than those neon-colored signs clinging to the windows at 24-7 city
quikstop markets. The plants were also quite intriguing in morphology even though they were not in bloom upon Heisen’s
first encounter. A fondness for the spectacular, mesmerizing views of the turbulent ocean, its lofty fog layers, coastal mesas,
and green-brown-smudged valleys below grew within the old man soon after. Upon return to the community of ranch-hands
from his meticulous mountain scouting, the scholar insisted to the Village Head that he was overqualified and deserving to be
the curator of Neopenta (a shortened, pet peeve name that had organically evolved from the Scientist’s slip of tongue). And
after a series of arguments and deliberations among the aggravated and marginalized old-timers, the mediating Village Head,
and the anxious Heisen, an informal agreement was forged: to his discretion, Heisen the Scientist assumed the role of tending

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Neopentaspectavolus granelli in exchange for the government-provided stipend, on the condition that the villagers could not be
held responsible for any disastrous occurrences of the “dragon” in the mountain.

Heisen, the now-proclaimed Sovereign of Botanical Fetish, cultivated a bizarre, yet working relationship with the village
residents. The ranch-hands were curious, yet scantily charmed by his peculiarly dichotomous persona of predominant
introversion, punctured by a rather large island of obsessive extroversion, concerning all matters of rare plants. The Scientist
attempted to be very kind and occasionally act as an “attentive” listener, especially with the impatient old-timers. But when it
came to the subject of rare and endangered plants, the scholar began to beat his chest and dance around a figurative fire with
flowery floral stories revised from his past classroom lectures, as if he were an alpha male ape, demonstrating that he knew
more than anyone else around him. Most of the senior villagers were concurrently amused and annoyed that this man, in his
manners of subtle arrogance, could speak Greek and Chinese phrases intermingled with his English.

And yet again, when it came to several topics of his personal past, Heisen resumed to beat around the bush with his gauche
dialogue diversions. Within a few days of his arrival to the remote community, the elders had charted the boundaries of the
newcomer’s Knowns and Unknowns—or WorthSpeakables and NonWorthSpeakables—and they swiftly determined the
Scientist’s mind as a sizable pan of impenetrable clay with a trivial streak of sand on the side; the stagnant, murky water of the
pool above could only percolate through the sand, and that is where one overgrown, yet somewhat striking bog plant could
possibly subsist.

Though the scholar continued to discount the “dragon stories” of the concerned, yet irritated senior villagers—who had lived
in this remote region as long as the old man had “lived” in the university—Heisen unintentionally offset such lurking
frustrations by donating his off-road truck to the community. In addition, the Scientist rounded up and removed an
assortment of unwanted wood scraps and fragments of broken appliances from the villagers’ compact yards and back patios,
proposing to use these materials for a housing structure in the mountain.

After a month’s time of self-assembling the cabinshack, Heisen and the village members evolved a loose routine in which the
old man ventured down the mountain once every three or four weeks to retrieve a small stipend along with his mail, as well as
restock in fundamental supplies, especially in canned goods. He acquired a heightened level of patience to report to the locals
the state of the Neopenta patches while filling out the government data forms (the plant was defined as a unique species, and
had finally been declared “endangered” a half-a-year after the Scientist had occupied the mountain). And yet the scholar held
very little tolerance for listening to the village ranch-hand chitchat, especially when they muttered about the “dragon” issue.
Heisen found himself more than eager to depart to his meagerly cozy cabinshack with a substantial heap of provisions,
transported with the support of his sturdy, arching back and trailing, rustic pullcart.

This habitual custom solidified a stressfully synchronized rapport between the solitary Scientist and the village people. Over
time, the ranch-hands crafted an enduring notion of hesitant fascination of Heisen, pierced by ample irritable prickliness. Yet
overall, they did not seem to mind the presence of this obstinate old man, as long as he largely left them to their space in the
valley (chiefly minimizing the chances of receiving a rare plant harangue), and they went out of their way to leave the scholar
to his space up in the mountain.

And perhaps Heisen was happy… spending the majority of his days fully absorbed, critically observing, mentally manicuring
the immediate babble of his constructed pastoral universe, including the rhythmic dips, dives, and resurfacing of the cloud-
wrapped sun, and most importantly, the dawdling dances of Neopenta in the ethereal, mist-driven breeze, in which the old
man exercised a policing so extreme that he didn’t even allow the birds to meddle with his neon-green plants.

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 Part 2
Heisen the Scientist appeared to be in exceptionally high spirits these early spring days of late. He was more chipper than ever,
probably because the two year biological alarm clock rang since the last unearthly, spectacular bloom of Neopenta (hence the
name Neopentaspectavolus granelli!). The old man’s first-time witness of such a near-blinding, color-warped specter of biological
fireworks had left him in a stupor, lasting weeks after three full days of aligning blossoms! And the floral display was so intense
that even the villagers could detect the disfigured, neon-orange “button” splotches on the mountain from great distances!

The “fireworks” persisted at a landscape scale two summers after the spring flowering, in which an uncommon storm surging
through the faraway region generated high frequencies of lightning strikes. One bolt ultimately ignited a spot fire at the base of
the mountain slope facing the enraged ocean. The vegetation burned slowly, yet the fire perimeters did not expand far, as the
dense fog dampened the canopy, rendering most of the plants close to inflammable. From the safety of his cabinshack door,
the Scientist occasionally monitored the sluggish, creeping, then self-extinguished flames with weak interest and apprehension.
In aftermath, the lightning strike scarred the mountain with a small, shrub-denuded area, exposing charred soils, which in turn
received a fair soaking from the more usual winter rains. It was as if the mountain were a gruffly bearded man who only
managed to shave off and water-dab a minute fraction of his whiskers and tangled chin hairs.

As of present, Heisen effortlessly endured three weeks of no human contact. Remaining oblivious to his basic needs, he had
not dared to consider dragging himself off the mountain to carry out those accustomed errands among the villagers. Indeed,
the old man was adamant not to miss a single moment of such an extraordinarily melodious botanical performance, as he
fixated with new procedures of high-resolution-scrutiny of Neopenta. The concept of an outer universe beyond the Scientist
and these rare plants was entirely obscured.

Heisen’s patience and meticulousness amplified, waiting for the protrusion of that first silky strand, waiting for the first trickle
of orange, waiting for his second round of the much-anticipated fireworks show… waiting… waiting… waiting… as if he were
waiting for the birth of his first newborn—

* bumph! * rumble * rumble * rumble * (x 10, with decreasing intensity) * rattle * rattle * ping-cling! *

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—until all randomness of arbitrary randomness of space and time multiplied by a generously-dosed prescription of
randomness to the 10th or 11th power!!! Some alternative jolt of fireworks flared at the consciously unacknowledging feet of the
off-guard Scientist! Upon entering his cabinshack to replenish himself with water and fleetingly escape the skin-tingling sun
that eventually vaporized the goopy layer of morning fog, the old man took the form of a clumsy ballerina as he almost lost his
balance at the doorstep with that first ground-jerking pulse, which was then followed by this persistent, yet subdued rumble,
acoustically augmented by the rattling of his dust-ridden tools that were once restfully hanging along the now squeaking
cabinshack walls. The jolt only displaced a wrench and toppled over three trifling, musty boxes of winter clothes.

This earth-beat unrelentlessly transferred into a wave-pulse from crooked toes to thin legs, legs to curved spine, from spine to
twitched head of Heisen, spurring a whirled, panicky shortness of breath, followed by heavy, struggled huff-huff-inhaling,
surging an awareness of bulging beats, waves, rebounding off his internal seawalls of his skull, but having no place to drain nor
dissipate their violent energies. It was beyond a tolerable “head ache”—equivalent to traumatic, mind-pounding convulsions
the Scientist infrequently and inexplicably suffered through in the past, followed by deliriousness, blackouts of split-second
amnesia, with a lack of recollection of any immediate aftereffects. The scholar’s hammering heart further swelled his
unbearable aches, as he applied weak pressure with his shivering hands to his forehead for some sense of stability. And yet the
enraged thumping began to devour, disintegrate, unravel, obliterate several folds of high impermeability as it seemed that the
summation of past randomness of jolting occurrences could no longer allow stagnant subliminality to dwell dormant within
Heisen’s inner caverns, for these jabbing undercurrents yearned, craved, agonized, demanded with a frightening roar within the
old man to manifest itself into a discrete face. The moaning Scientist managed to limply lean against a barren chunk of wall by
the door and slightly peer up with his glossy eyes—for his neck was too stiff—merely to acknowledge the linear streaks,
shifting dots, and wormy smoke of a homogenously gray universe. Yet, within a few instants, this gray matter spontaneously
formed an infinite number of vectors precisely directed toward the scholar in a speed-of-light-collapsing-convergence-of-a-
Big-Crunch, as if all of reality were to attack and invade his murky hole of a mind. Heisen’s groans remained largely contained
within the cabinshack as he clumsily banged his knees on the floor. He was being subsumed by the most deadliest and most
cognizant of protuberating migraines, which was swiftly halted into a split-sec * blackout. * It was uncertain as to whether his
eyes were open or closed, but in another bout of a pressing, rewarped rewind, a diverging, gray-hued Big Bang re-occupied his
perception, except the only difference was that amidst the diverging streaks, dots, and wormclouds of homogenous all-else,
emerged and slowly converged three decipherable, then prominent strata of a yellowbrown hue, originally in a gently-arched
morphology of a rainbow. The distinct streams re-molded into a diffuse, yellow nebula embedded in backdrop gray, swirling
around the Scientist once, twice, three times… gradually, then more rapidly, as if a planet or planetary system were trying to
condense and consolidate into a consistent, unwobbly orbit around the old man—oh! he refrained from conceding to the
inhabitance of a ghost!—and as the cloud of tanned particles became more and more coherently fused, it sunk lower and lower
to the now distinguishable outlines of the gritty, ragged floor of the cabinshack….

Heisen could not help to notice a novel sensation of dramatic release—relief—an infantile lightness he had long since felt, even
sustained, while simultaneously coping with a major rewiring of his inner totality, which consequentially led to a level of
disorientation among his familiar surroundings. For low and behold, the more finely carved yellow plume churned and
plummeted to a point of a * pop * pop * pop * poof! poof! * bang!* a frantically scampering Child of close-to-out-of-control
screaming?! As if it were some gray squirrel with rabies?! What is this?!!

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The scholar, still bewildered, blinked once, twice, ten times, stood stone still on his knees as he watched in a skeptical daze,
then knowing surprise, this frenzied, clamoring Child running about the cabinshack as if it just overindulged itself with a
colossal portion of chocolate chip cookies! And then, as he squinted, dropping his brows, inspecting the finer features of the
Child’s unwrinkled, uncharred face, Heisen identified a strange, alien familiarity, as if he were gazing into some projection of
the past, some prehistoric bookmark of his very last shift of desired inward evolution. It was as if a tangy entanglement of Child
juice were squeezed out of the bygone-seasoned orange of a Scientist who was just smashed in an old-fashioned fruit press.

And yet this foreign familiarity somehow prevented the old man from asking the Child some introductory “Who are you?” and
“What are you doing here?” questions, let alone exclaim and inquire within himself, “What whacky revelations of head aches!
Why am I seeing this now and not before?!” The scholar’s self-unacquainted instincts furthermore instructed him to engage this
hyper kid as a long-time nuisance of a family member he had always unknowingly known. And before the Scientist could even
utter a single word, the bouncy, zig-zag-dashing-about Child squeaked to the top of its lungs, rendering as a blow-of-a-bellow
to the old man’s distortive ears:

“The mountain’s coming down! The mountain’s coming down!!”

And Heisen, crafting on-hand antagonistic resentment of this Child, howled back in scolding revolt, “Oh shush, shush! You
little beast! What outrageous manners! Don’t get your bowels in an uproar!” He decided to lift himself from his knees to a
towering stance over the kid, hastily wiping off his slender upper legs. The Scientist barked like a dictator once more, “Calm
down, you brutely thing, you!”

The Child continued to squawk as it slowed to a skip and a slight hopping by the door, “The mountain’s coming down! The
mountain’s coming down!!”

And the old man beckoned in a gushing, downward, arm-waving blast, “Nonsense! You innocent… lil’ … fiend! Stop crying
wolf!!!” He attempted to ambush the sporadic Child within his arms, yet it was too speedy with its foot-play and mad darts.

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“The mountain’s coming down! The mountain’s coming down!! I can see it with my eyes! I can hear it with my ears! I can feel
it with my feet!” the youngster peep-shrieked a few more times as it hurricaned all over the cabinshack.

Heisen was so provoked and exhausted, he needed to seat himself on a cubic metal case that mimicked a treasure box, as his
lower back leaned against the barren slab of wall. Hoping that this Child would subside its uninhibited energy on its own
terms, the scholar thought that perhaps he could reason with this rodent human. “Listen kid!” His upper legs provided restful
support for his more-than-ready-to-reproachingly-shake hands. “You can’t state those claims like so! Besides, who do you
think you are?!”

“Errr…Gonzo!” The Child crisply muffled as it decelerated across the room, gawking at the old man with sadistic curiosity,
only to beam the implications of “Why not?!” along the span of its posture.

“Speak up!” Heisen blurted in staccato.

“Gonzo! My name is… Gonzo!!” the youngster staggered, yet with righteousness, as if it were just inventing a virtuous label for
itself on the spot.

And for an untrackable moment of near-infinite thinness, the Scientist was confronted with an inexplicable smack, a frank
conceptual blow of unanimous inertia, upon hearing… listening to the existence of such an odd name. And surprisingly the kid,
who was deliberately model-posed as a deranged, midget clown for a Halloween costume store, never bothered to even ask of
Heisen’s name, as if it were always forced to know him in a dreadful way. The scholar, shocked at the Child’s awkward
pressing of its pause button, resumed with a lecturing tone of dignified formality. “Listen… G-onzo!” Heisen resisted to avow
this kid’s tag term, “You can’t invent stories from nowhere! You can’t just believe your stories—your hypotheses—and
foolishly, impulsively act upon them!”

The Child cocked its head and pursed its lips… and then bounced and sprinted once again as another faint, faint rumble from
the ground pricked its fright, “But I can see it with my eyes! An’ I can hear it with my ears!! An’ I can feel it with my feet!!!”

With a pinch of angst, the old man propped himself back on his feet and solemnly declared, “Listen ugGhh—will you?! You
have to collect data to support your claims! And I mean real, legitimate data!” It was as if Heisen renounced the name of Gonzo
all together.

Though the rumbling stopped, the Child carried on with its ritualistic darting dance in swaggering distress, “But the
mountain’s coming down—”

“So we have to collect data!” the scholar briskly interrupted. His muddled fury elevated as he came to recognize that this
uncontrollable Gonzo was starting to influence, even dictate his line of action.

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Briefly suspending itself within a skewed cube of sunlight filtering in from the cabinshack’s window, the youngster sloppily
jumping-jacked as it blathered away, “But the villagers! The villagers said the mountain has a heartbeat! The mountain has a
heartbeat! And the heart erupts once every ten years! And it’s almost ten! Almost ten!!!”

The Child was barely within reach of the now exasperated Scientist, who still desired to pin that little weasel down. He instead
ferociously shook a finger at this taxingly bubbly Gonzo, “Listen here, kid! Listen, for once! I don’t know where you get your
stories from!” Heisen was offended that this youthful creature was forcing him to recollect his past quarrels with the villagers
below. “Now listen! Those old-timers don’t know what they’re talking about! They don’t know anything! All they talk is
voodoo!” He shaped his hand into a fist and wielded it mercilessly into the narrow, imaginative space of scornful community
elders in between him and the kid’s sun-silhouetted shadow. “They don’t observe with rigor! They can’t assume that earth
cycles occur with such consistency, such predictability! Ten years to the T?! Ha! And of course, they don’t know the proper way
of coll—”

“And when the heart erupts, the dragon comes out!” Gonzo squealed. “The dragon of the mountain comes out and sheds the
mountain’s skin! Once every ten years! The dragon’s coming out! The dragon’s coming out!”

The scholar spouted off with surrendered animosity—almost a tormenting plea—as he gripped his curly hair and ears with
both of his arms, “Bah! Bah! What voodoo! What folklore! What boozy village talk!”

“They said the dragon rhythms come after the rains! After the fire shaves the plants and uncovers the soils, which are revealed
to the rains! The dragon’s tears!” The Child prolonged its chant while hurdling out of the slanted cube of sunlight, returning
into the residual, dim-mottled ambiance of the cabinshack.

“Do you believe in fairies?! Do you believe in Santa Claus?!!” Heisen challenged with a snicker, as he kneeled down to the
Child’s indistinct and unstable eye level.

13
“But the villagers! The villagers! They saw it with their eyes! They heard it with their ears! They felt it with their feet! Over
many, many years! Once, twice, thrice! Once, twice, thrice!!!” The kid’s voice was so shrill that the Scientist cringed.

“Now listen, you lil’ bugger!” The old man crept toward the slightly shifting cube of sunlight with bowed knees. “I am a
scientist! And I am from the university!” he asserted like an authoritarian. “And I have a few geology colleagues! And none of
them ever mentioned any problems with this here mountain! Nothing! No problems! And they would know better, because they
know the proper way of coll—”

“The villagers! The villagers! They said they never dare go on the mountain!” Gonzo fidgeted and paced with a skip. “The
Village Head warned that beauoootiful views come with a price! Beauty comes with a sacrifice!”

“There is no data for your claims! Show me the data!!!” the Scientist straightened his knees in a rampage. He had heard
enough. It was almost a necessity for his own peace of mind to figure out a method of pacifying this shrieking Child! “Then we
shall collect data!”

“But don’t you see with your own eyes?!” * yelp *

“But we shall collect data!” * repeat *

“But don’t you hear with your own ears?!” * screech *

“We will be collecting… data!” * aggravated repeat *

“But don’t you feel—”

“COLLECT DATA!!!” Heisen stomped after the nimble Child louse as they both maneuvered toward the door. At that
moment, the scholar exposed an alien familiarity of furiousness—more so to himself than to the kid, his stern bellowing and
imperious signals, amounting to some elusively desirable plot of whipping this pestly youngster with a belt—which latently
humiliated him to revisit. The invisible pull of reigns urged the Scientist to break his pace, as his eyes of contempt followed
Gonzo’s disappearance into the blazing, late morning sun. “And don’t you dare touch my Neopenta plants!” he grumpily called
after it. And yet Gonzo did not even register the request, for it could not even comprehend the term “Neopenta.”

Despite the fitful scatter of whispery rumbles from the earth below, the Scientist somehow remained unmindful to these
tremors. Perhaps it was the mere evocative presence of that Child—chronically absorbing these cogent externalities and
expressing them through its animatingly suffering gestures—who fulfilled as a cyst-like shield of detachment and denial,
buffering Heisen from willfully accounting for and conceding to those outer-worldly trembles.

And so the scholar of recurring disownment spun around while scratching his still mildly throbbing head, and directed himself
toward a mildewy, spider-webbed heap of gadgets at the most unlit corner of the cabinshack, farthest from the crooked door.
The old man had been procrastinating for over half a year to purge these futile clunks of metal, hoping they would appeal to
any villager’s knick-knack fancy. But given the current string of incidents, one metal “clunk” might prove to be particularly
handy. Heisen proceeded to remove and reshuffle a few formerly robust construction tools while intermittently tuning in to
that miniature wild horse of a Child outdoors, still squawking like a parrot, “The mountain’s coming down! The mountain’s
coming down!”
14
The Scientist rolled his head side-to-side as he began to mutter as he was thinking aloud, “Well, I don’t know any geology, and
I’m not an Earth Scientist! I’m not qualified to do this study! My few friends are, but I don’t have any easy access to them back
in the city. And this seems urgent—” The old man snorted through his nostrils and the grotto of his throat as he was irritated
by that riotous Gonzo. “And I need to get that ogresome kid off my back!” Heisen yanked on a few misaligned whiskers along
his chin, “And I don’t have any funding to pursue such a venture! It’s too far from my research interests… and I’m sure, no
doubt, this is not a hot topic; it’s not as important as endangered plant research! Now that’s a hot topic, big budget funding—
And what am I doing here?! In this danky cabinshack of mine?! I should be with my Neopenta plants… right now! This is
ridiculous!”

While adjusting his taut, lightly hunched back, and firmly situating his hands on his bony hips, the scholar frustratingly
assessed the encroaching overlay of clutter around two overcast bends within the cabinshack. As a more evident earth shake
surfaced to the attention of the Child, who swerved its rasping objections through the open window, the Scientist re-
descended into the moldy pile in avoidance, griping to himself, “But this is the mountain where I live, and this happens to be
my backyard… and I have this old contraption my Earth Scientist friend Bernard dumped on me as junk—because he thinks
I’m a nimrod and I value his junk!” he added in sarcastic reminiscence, “And now he has the latest model! And I don’t know
why I have this, but here I do have it—oh yes, the temperature readings! That’s why I wanted it! And why don’t I collect data
with this?!”

As if he were a sorcerer with capacities unconstrained by physical laws, Heisen elevated toward the dust-speckled streams of
sunlight his “massive magic box,” an archaic, green-grayish, rusting, borderline compact, yet still clunky gizmo of a machine
that resembled some prototype of a microsupercomputer that could be designed by a modern, geeky 11-year-old kid. With the
underpinning tone of resentful collaboration, the old man thrusted this inane box of buttons and knobs and screens and
antennas out the window toward the alarmed, sidestepping Gonzo and hollered, “And we shall collect data!!!”

The youngster, who tilted its rump into the air while having one ear to the grassy ground, still delineated the features of worry
across its jittery form. In counteracting his own inwardly cloaked negativity, the Scientist could not help but self-admit a
compelling urge to calm the youngster through a repetitive mode of false certainty. “Now kid, we will collect data with this here
contraption!”

Instead of demonstrating any preferred note of respectful appreciation, the Child remorphed into a bouncy-ball from its
ostrich position. It fanatically wailed as it flurried about, carving elliptical shapes along the grasses with its feet,
“Datadatadatadatadatadatadatadatadatadatadatadatadatadata!!! There is no time for data! There is no time for data!!! Don’t we
know enough?! The mountain’s coming down! The mountain’s coming down!!!”

* bumph-pumph! * rumble * rumble * rumble* x 5 (with decreasing intensity) *rattle * rattle * ping-cling! *

As Heisen groaned and viciously slapped his forehead treading out into the full sunlight, a second outbreak of jab-jolting
“fireworks” surged through the ground—perhaps less shocking than the first, as if the Scientist and the Child were being
plagued by desensitization—and yet Gonzo dizzily buzzed and scuttled amuck more like a horde of bees around the hunched-
over scholar, who thoughtlessly dropped the clunky metal machine on a heap of overgrown grass, unable to pay heed to any
erratic elements around him, for in this unaccounted-for stretch of helplessness, the old man’s mind was shuddered by more
rapid, frying-like pressure swells of electrical currents… than the first round of more protracted, yet seemingly uncontrollable,
15
agonizing waves. It was as if an ailment was pulsing his limp form that instead dislodged and expanded its own permanent
physical constraints rather than unraveling his malleable, yet impermeable mental folds. Somehow, amidst the frantic zooming
and grass-skidding, the Child feebly watched Heisen crumple into an ever tighter fetal position, still half-upright in a volatile
stance, as if he were ready to collapse to the tremulous earth at any instant. Yet several indications pointed toward an external
diagnosis of a less debilitating head ache, as marked by the Scientist’s less frequent, huff-heaving of shortness of breath. Once
again, the scholar’s perception had drifted to those streaks, dots, wormclouds of a gray homogeneous universe, followed by a
vectored convergence of a Big Crunch *blackout, * leading to a series of weighty whimpers in reacquisition of a rewarped,
rewind divergence of a Big Bang, desqueezing the virtuality of his reality, coupled with an inner drainage of colossal release—
relief. And instead of locking into focus of three decipherable yellow strata, there emerged three streaks in very apparent shades
of rustic-red, shaping a deeply sloped, upside-down parabola, which placed the old man in a fixated stupor, tracking this now
rouge nebula against the background gray fuzz, whirling around him once, twice, three times, slowly, then more rapidly, in this
second organic manufacturing of a planetary system. The plume trickled down lower, lower, condensing, consolidating, fusing,
exerting reddish-orange flashes of light… churned and plummeted to the grassy area below to a point of a * pop * pop * pop *
poof! poof! * bang! * a zealously scampering, ever to precocious, slick-lick-lick of a medium-sized, rustic-red-fur-coated
amiable dog?! What is this?!!

“Aoof! Aoofff!! I-hah! I-haahhh! Ihahahhh!!!” * wag-wag * lick * lick * slurp * lick * wag-wag * wag *

The Scientist, still perplexed, blinked once, twice, ten times, straightening out the curvatures of his spine, as he intently beamed
in a surprised, slight smile of a daze, with a notion of novel liberation, a quasi-conscious regression to a state of infantile
lightness. An internal reconfiguration generated another bout of disorientation for Heisen, who was in utter disregard of the
more fretful Gonzo. The Child, who did not understand the groaning convulsions the old man displayed, nor did it recognize
where this “hyper doggie gizmo” came from and whether it was “real,” began scurrying about as if it were floundering atop a
flaming bed of coal.

16
The scholar squinted, plunging his brows, mentally charting the dog’s finer features—perhaps it was a beagle, or some kind of
all-around, multi-bred mutt of sorts, but it was exceptionally bulgy-eyed and tarnished-red in color. Oblivious to the minor
ground tremors, it barked and yapped around and round until it paralleled the spurts of the frightened Gonzo, expelling its
endless supply of bountiful energy, which seemed equivalent to that of a border collie. The dog continued to stroke and rub
and tickle the Child’s stick-like legs with its soft, short hair and rubbery paws until the youngster finally slowed down to
acknowledge the tangible, friendly existence of this canine. The Scientist was appalled to observe this licky-lick mutt even
minutely transform Gonzo’s apprehensions into a few splashes of giggles, as if this creature were some type of amicable
mediator, capable of easing accumulated tensions between the scholar and the youngster.

After an extended interval of Child-canine bonding and skidaddling and play-hunting and gleeful screaming and * aoofing * and
* ihaahing * in front of the cabinshack, with these two wispwindy beings terraforming butterfly-shaped tracks and trails along
the grass patches, the rustic-red dog decelerated and appeared to shake off all interest in the pursuit of random diffusion of
energy. Its distressing rip away from Gonzo, while radiating a more rigid posture, determined, tunnel-visionary eyes, and
locked jaws clamping down upon its sloppy, slobbery tongue, represented a drastic metamorphosis of disposition, as if the
mutt shed its blossoming coat of diversity for a more monotone regime of ambitiousness, which solely craved for one
insurmountable task—of endlessly, repetitively chasing sticks and frisbees and carrots, incessantly catching and grilling various
manifestations of rodent burgers—all with such maniacal fixation and tedious precision, withholding cognizance of most other
potentially pertinent constituents of reality except for the assigned duty at hand. The canine’s gestalt of a trot beaconed the
trait of obsessive loyalty that breeched insanity—loyalty to running for the sake of running, loyalty to sniffing and probing and
collecting for the sake of sniffing and probing and collecting, loyalty to labor for the sake of labor—without barking a single
question, without a single eye-flutter or tail-wag of doubt, without ever, ever whining a “why,” as if it were more than willing
and eager to perform the same suite of tasks to its eternal end… at the expense of its thirst, its hunger, its need for rest… and
perhaps even at the sacrifice of its own life?! And all for the “ultimate” reward of a mere fleeting, nonchalant pat and rub and
gaze of loyalty and pride from its master?!

In abandonment of the turmoiled Child, the restless dog started to feverishly stride around the Scientist… closer, closer,
closer… as if it were an under-stimulated Martian Rover who was shipped all the way to Mars without a single mission—a
single, bold and perilous duty that needed to be accomplished for the sake of humanity beyond the desires any one specific
self. The tarnished beast of habit stared upward toward the baffled Heisen… so desperately, so addictively… that the old man
wondered whether this mutt would disintegrate into dust right in front of him, given that he didn’t provide this organic
machine with a task.

“A task. A task! That’s it! A task!” the scholar sparked as he jumped a few grass-lengths off the soil. “Amen to my malaise!
That’s it!” At that moment, the Scientist derived a strange, alien familiarity, as if he were glancing at, then examining some
extension of his present, old-age inabilities… a sheer essentiality of an embryonic ally at hand… a mimicry of his own enviable
17
veins of compulsion for collecting data with rigor…. It was as if Heisen had acquired an extra biorobot device with four
evolutionary limbs and a puppet of a mind. Oh! Such immediate worth, this dog! This rustic-red dog!

The old man was quick to snicker toward the shivering Gonzo, who posed despondently, limply, as if it were chained and
locked in a prison. “Now kid, we will collect data with this here contraption… on this here dog!” the Scientist then whistled in
jarring notes not even found on the piano, and the canine swiftly responded, breaking all hesitations and spatial barriers, as it
crept up to nosily sniff and lick the scholar’s tattered shoes. Heisen sporadically scrubbed its fuzzy head for the first time, and
gradually progressed to rub its solid, meaty back, as its tail shot up to near-vertical position. He toyfully tugged on it, as the
mutt wagged voraciously within his loosely clenching hand.

The Scientist then decided to call it Rover Dog.

“Rover Dog!” the scholar resolutely ordered while the not-too-distant Child origamied its arms, then suspended its fists to its
imaginary jail-cell bars… as it still glued its attention to the trifling company of shaky terrains. “Now listen here!” Heisen spun
around twice until his eyes spotted the clunky metal apparatus, partially dangled and dampened on its side, embedded within a
bundle of overgrown grass just below the cabinshack’s window. “Wait a second!” He retrieved the contraption, shook and
rattled it around with impatience, fiddled with the antennas and wires, receded into the darkness of the cabinshack and
resurfaced as promptly as he vanished, flaunting in his palms the occupation of two bulky batteries within plain view of the
anxious Gonzo and Rover Dog, whammed the batteries within a fittingly empty slot just underneath the machine’s
motherboard, tinkered with three more antennas and double-checked two elusive rows of sensors, casually pressed five
random buttons, then two more, and with a grand grin, as if he emitted a false aura of masterly confidence, the Scientist bent
down as far as he could to plop and fasten the clunky device onto the Rover Dog’s brawny back.

The mutt whimpered upon first contact with the chilled, moist metal of the apparatus, but it wagged and jiggled its torso like a
snake, devising an impression of comfort with this extended “body part,” as if the canine were disposed to alter its identity to
a dilapidated camel. The unwieldy piece of equipment rendered a close-to-deficient portion of a jigsaw puzzle to the Rover
Dog’s morphology, as the Scientist managed to obtain a worn belt for steadying the machine as a marginally integral
component of the mutt’s overall physique. The canine stomped round and round, establishing its “innovated” posture and
burst of ambition. Heisen scrambled in and out of the cabinshack, only to re-target the shadowy corner where he first
discovered the clunky contraption, as he had come to retrieve the grimy, caked, and moderately torn instruction manual for
the device. He zipped back outdoors and surveyed with glee—and to the Child’s dismay—that there was no suggestion of any
major struggle for the Rover Dog to maneuver itself.

After clearing his throat at least 101 times while flopping through the instruction manual, the scholar plunked his knees to the
yielding turf, right beside the still-wiggly canine, and began reading bolded words and phrases aloud with clumsy authority,
while simultaneously shifting wires and buttons on the bulky apparatus. “Now listen, Rover Dog! You will be collecting…
uhn… a variety of… lots of… of data! Several lines of valid data! Ummm, let’s see here…. You will be… AHA! So here—”
* beep! * * beep! * “OH! Aha! Yes, the ‘on’ button!” * wzzzzzzzzzzzz * jjjshhh * jjjshhh * jjjshhh * The machine initiated its
whizzzing, whijjjing, and whirrring, then phasing into obnoxious jiggerbujhzzing, that eventually droned out as backdrop white noise.
* beep * click * beep * “You will be collecting data… uh… on grain size, or rock size!” Heisen firmly announced. * Ft! Ft! Ft! *
He flipped a few pages. * click-click * “And… uhn… degree of compaction of the soils, sediments, rock materials!” * Jggh-beep *
* Ft! * “And… and… you’ll also be measuring ummm… any signs of movement or recent displacement of any rock material,
if measurable…” * jt * jt * click-click * Ft! * “Hmmm… let’s see what else here…” * Ft! Ft! Ft! * “And you will be detecting
magnitudes of any ground quakes… if there are any!”
18
The Scientist pressed two more buttons, in which one sounded a lengthier * bzzzjjjjjhhh * and illuminated a dull, red light in the
square middle of the motherboard. He slammed shut the instruction manual, which exhumed a localized cloud of dust. While
propping himself away from the canine, both the old man and the Rover Dog violently sneezed. “Oh ya! Yes, yes!” Heisen
spouted off amidst his residual sniffing, “You are to look for any significant cracks on the ground! Any major fault lines that
could be associated with any rumbling!” The red mutt wave-wagged ferociously and dropped its unruly lick-lick tongue with
uncontainable contentment, now that it embodied a specific search image, and a scrupulous assignment requiring the
execution of a suite of noble, yet arduous duties.

Though he still revealed hints of uncertainty and tender discomfort of his own credentials in the Earth Sciences, the scholar—
upon the irking presence of that disgustful Child—was coerced to sprint forward as he hastily instructed the Rover Dog to
chronicle its “random walk” sampling regime all around the mountain. He even advised the canine to cover and collect data in
higher resolution and frequency within any particular zone that seemed more “problematic.” In addition, the old man coaxed
the mutt not to worry about the self-operating machine on its back, just as long as that mega-gadget remained secure and
clamored a * chugga-chugga-chugga * fnk-fnk * wsssssjjjshhh * when operating and sampling. Naively gesturing its newfound
purpose with a gigantic slurp-lick on his lower leg, the Rover Dog reassured the Scientist that it “understood” the underlying
meaning of its master’s orders.

After a last-minute sequence of functional confirmations of the whizzing contraption, Heisen finally bid farewell to the Rover
Dog on its ephemeral, yet demanding adventure. “You can and must go nearly everywhere, but don’t you dare get close to
trampling my Neopentaspectavolus granelli plants!” he megaphoned after it. And yet the romping red mutt did not register the
request, for it could not even comprehend the term “Neopentaspecta-aoof-gran-aoof-aoof-rouff!”

Briefly closing its eyes and tilting its nose upward, with an unintentional status signal of petworthy, snooty royalty, the red
canine sauntered right past the sullen Gonzo with such an air of concentration, it was as if it could no longer perceive its
existence. And the youngster simply glared at the Rover Dog as if it were some mysterious, mind-boggling alien, as it steadily
morphed and shrunk in size and shape with greater distance. It called out in mortified agony, “You puppet mut! The
mountain’s coming down! Where are your senses?! You don’t need a silly machine!”

And the scholar allowed himself to sigh in relief, as his beaming eyes followed the noble mutt disappear into the neighboring
gully, “What an extraordinary creature! At such impeccable timing! To think if I performed this wearisome sampling task on
my own—close to impossible!” The old man acknowledged the onset of frailty of his form, given his progressing age.

“And YOU!” Heisen eyeballed the now very silent, distraught Child, who squatted on a small bare patch of soil, expressing
extreme signs of depressing immobility. “And YOU! All because of YOU, kid! We are finally collecting data!” the old man
scolded, “Are you happy now?!”

Gonzo was too drained, too wilted, too fatigued, and perhaps even too stubborn to reply. Its brows sagged as if it discovered
the pointlessness of yelling and panicking and dust-deviling around the same recurring messages to this dense-headed Scientist.
It would only sit and remain glossy-eye-entranced by the hazy horizon of the choppy, white-washed ocean, paying petty heed
to a few isolated popcorn clouds floating by.

Fed up with its despondency, the old man glowered toward the lump-of-a-glum-Child, “Bah! You’re helpless! You’re
counterintuitive! Will anything please you?! Calm you down?!” Heisen spat in resentment, and yet he was secretly satisfied to
19
witness this rambunctious youngster truly subsisting in a “calmer,” yet downcast state, who was still powerlessly absorbing the
cryptic perturbations below. Re-inhabiting the shadows of the cabinshack to organize some of the messy interiors, the scholar
excitedly remembered his dear Neopenta plants; hopefully they refrained from displaying their first bloom behind their
caretaker’s back!

The Rover Dog sauntered away at a consistent pace, knowing that it needed to kick into a second wind as soon as possible,
such as to sustain its Martian Rover persona. It engaged in a supreme sniffing bout, as if it were concurrently attempting to
chase squirrels and conceded to loyalty of the Scientist’s random-walk needs. The clunky contraption whishjjjed and whirrred and
jiggerbzzzjjjed, extracting micro-core samples with its miniscule metallic “arms”—protruding outward, folding inward—and
recorded readings along the immediate vicinity of the red mutt with its few rows of highly activated sensors, while numbers
were being stored within a very slim, flat internal computer underneath the motherboard. “Random walk” was indeed the
march of this canine, as it ventured from peak to trough to peak, ridges to gullies, gentle to steep slopes, with all kinds of
rough and smooth surfaces of various rock types, coated by a spectrum of shrub densities. From an aerial, bird’s-eye view, the
Rover Dog’s trail resembled a series of highly packed folds within the anomalously shaped brain case of the mountain. It was
conducting its duty of rigorous, meticulous data collection, yet the mutt was unceasingly inundated with its own sense of
inadequacy, concerned of a gap-ridden census, feeling like it was missing vital information in minor regions, which could
potentially yield major conclusions. The jiggerbujhzzing device, which largely embodied a mode of dormancy and non-operation
for a questionable number of years, was probably not up to par—at least for “university standards”—for such a significant
task of assessing the mountain’s levels of stability and prospective risks. As Heisen relaunched his own systematic observations
of the three patches of Neopenta, he couldn’t help speculating in the outskirts of his thoughts as to whether the red canine’s
efforts would suffer from the pervasive Nyquist Disease, in which the sampling resolution would be so low that the resulting
data would not have the capacity to portray the true mechanisms, patterns, and phenomena of reality. Nevertheless, the old
man’s forceful fixation on his flowers was pillowing, buffering his turbulent mind from any pessimistic wrinkles of insecurity, as
he struggled to maintain a zealous confidence in the red mutt and the machine’s capabilities.

20
While the Scientist pursued his obsessive floral adoration behind the cabinshack, the Child never budged from the front. The
kid crafted a contrasting condition of antsy, cautionary stagnancy; though it registered subtle-to-magnified vibrations of the
terrain, it never garnered any intrigue to expose itself to the scholar’s passions for rare flowers. Just to lapse the achingly slow
pace of time, the youngster acquired some meditative, attractive focus—a distancing attachment of a search image for the dot-
sized Rover Dog against the sun-fading, textured slopes of the mountain. And it would slightly whimper with visual departure,
when the canine rescinded over crests into denser, shrub-filled ravines. The old man’s forceful fixation on Neopenta was
pillowing, buffering his turbulent mind from any conscious, pessimistic wrinkles, as he struggled to wheedle out a zealous
confidence in the red mutt and the machine’s capabilities.

During the red mutt’s quest, Heisen furtively approached the front side of the cabinshack only once. He wished that nuisance
Gonzo could just dart off the mountain, could just downright bail out of this whole scenario it wriggled—no, shoved—itself
into, and leave him and his Neopenta plants alone. But no, for some reason, somehow, to the scholar’s chagrin, the Child was
apprehensively anchored on the patch of bare ground, bundled in trembling aloofness… waiting… waiting… waiting… for the
Rover Dog’s much anticipated return… just as the Scientist had been waiting for the fireworks bloom of his Neopenta. Except
now, he was surveying his near-blossoms with distractions of friction and worry: tension between him and that kid, and
distress for the canine’s collection of data. For once Heisen started a project and implemented an efficient suite of routines, he
was adamant to finish it, or the task would remain an ever-growing tumor of preoccupation.

Oh! How unconformities evolved in the mental outcrops of the Child and the Scientist! They were riddled with thickened,
mounting beds and laminations of highest resolution in preservation, then punctured by missing layers of erosional
significance—blackouts, essentially—omitted chunks of swept-away memoiric sediments in split instants or millions of years?
How can hours compound like years, months, days, snaps of fingers—literally, figuratively—hours upon hours upon hours: was
it the same day? Or was it the staggering, later afternoon of a different day—but it was wearing such a similar sunny cast of
weather as the time when the Rover Dog embarked on its zen-like trek of pinpoint data collection! It was a deliriously
doubtful passing of time for both Heisen and Gonzo, for the scholar had been measuring time with the slothsome growth of
the Neopenta patches, and the youngster had been charting time with the gradual amplification of enigmatic grumblings of the
earth—

* bumph!-pumph! * bumph!-pumph! * rumble * rumble * rattle * wrrrrrrrrrrrr * bjjjshhhzzz * bjjjshhhzzz * fnk!

fnk! fnk! * Aoof! * I-hah! * I-haahhh! * Ihaaahhh!!! *

The jolting commotion was great enough to breach the Child’s stupor as it leaped to its feet like a once-floored gymnast,
peeping, scanning the proximate environs with new surges of unbottled madness, for this fireworks-of-a-rupture truly
resembled more and more… of a massive heartbeat. An excessively panting, exhausted Rover Dog, now with a distinctive limp
on its right foreleg, appeared as a shapely dot over the nearest slope and unhurriedly scraggled closer toward the cabinshack.
Barely recognizable in its grungy varnish of dark-brown soot, the once red canine quivered as if all of its fragile limbs were
ready to cave in and crack underneath its torso. It retained just enough energy to plop itself in bowed mercy onto the squirmy
and shaky feet of Gonzo! The bulky device awkwardly positioned along the mutt’s spine thundered a wissisisssssjjjjjzzzhhhing
noise, as if it needed to vent compulsory plumes of heat, as if shifted into a cluckercluckerfsjfsjfsjjjzzz non-data-amassing standby
mode.

The youngster, who was tormented by the decaying company of the broken-record Rover Dog—who was about to collapse
from unadmitted overtiredness—wailed once more, “Oh! Oh! Rover Dog! You’re back! You’re back! But the mountain’s still

21
coming down! The mountain’s still coming down!” Gonzo aggressively stomped into the cabinshack and easily stumbled
upon a jug of water, a shallow pan, and a dented can of pickled meat in order to offer these visceral necessities to the subsided
canine. Yet the mutt was so wiped out that it had difficulty lifting its head to drink any water placed right beside its snout.

Sluggishly responding to the novel acoustic inputs of racket from the front of the cabinshack, Heisen labored to part himself
from his Neopenta plants. At first the old man was jealously annoyed to encounter the Child’s generous deed of spoon-
feeding the crumpled Rover Dog, but he quickly diverted his internal spotlight toward the chunky data-crunching contraption,
now tilted at a hazardous angle over the side of the dog’s back. In a status of visible salivation, the scholar sloppily pressed an
assortment of buttons on the lower section of the motherboard until finally some rather long “receipt-like” sheet of paper—
smothered with symbolic letters and numbers beaded in lengthy columns—began to unravel from a thin, perceptually
bypassable slit on the side of the machine opposite from the motherboard. The Scientist was so glued with the outpour of
numbers that he didn’t even consider attending to the somewhat failing gasps of the device, nor removing the now very
weighty piece of equipment from the strained back of the canine, who was too weak to moan in complaint. The grappling
Gonzo, still tipping the pan of water to the mutt’s sliver-opened mouth, watched in disgust the old man, who seated himself
on a partially shade-coated, rudimentary wooden bench by the door of the cabinshack, and indulged in scanning, scrutinizing,
dissecting, and assimilating the anarchic array of digits of so-called “data”… for a seemingly long, long time. Heisen muttered
oh-so many instances during this numerical orientation, as he kept yearning for his former university office computer, though it
was unfeasible to transport and operate in such a remote region without an electrical grid. Yet gradually, his own computer of
a mind started to generate some elementary associations, patterns, relationships, perhaps processes, perhaps even some vague
sensation of a profound equation of truth across the multitude of figures, while inquisitively talking to himself aloud—“Ya,
indeed, aha… oh, ummm, really?”—as backdrop tremors continued to churn the undersides of the earth.

Nevertheless, the conundrum of variables sprayed across that curling receipt rendered to be in a murky shade of
incomprehensible jumble. Was a mega-computer truly needed? Or was the “primitive” mainframe of the Scientist’s brain
enough to suffice a synthesis? Some patterns were identifiable by eyesight, yet was the scholar unadmittedly overwhelmed by
the overload of information?! Was he braving himself to conjure a coherent reality of visual connectivity that is ultimately too
multivariate for numerical analysis?! Or maybe, the present summation of inner and outer pressures formulated these folds of
tangled impermeability within the old man, preventing the craft of any conceptuality?!

Did Heisen come to perceive this extensive tapestry of numerals with a pre-existing notion in his head?! A presupposed filter?!
A preconceived hypothesis?! An underlying motive of a counter vision?! That could have either encouraged or hindered the
Scientist to see whatever order that he came to see in his informal magic prance of statistics?! And the chaos he chose to tune
out?! Was he just another plagued victim of congruent emotional dissension, yet entirely irrational dissonance?! Elaborating his
final, yet still evolving conclusion on the state of the mountain to be… complete inconclusivity?!

In a resolving and astoundingly self-gratifying inference that happened to oppose the Child’s proposition of “the mountain’s
coming down,” the scholar solemnly lifted himself from the bench and gained some level of awareness of his immediate
surroundings. He found Gonzo alone, engulfed by its droopy eyes, with an empty pan by its side, poking at the dying clunky
machine with an extremely low battery charge. And strangely, this youngster was besieged by a faint, reddish, smokey spiral of
subliminal heaviness… inexplicable to the senses of the Scientist.

Where’s Rover Dog? was the only mildly concerning question that popped into the forefront of the old man’s streamlined
thoughts, but as soon as he attempted to toss this trivial fret aside, Heisen was bombarded by this brash wave of mysterious
overcast as soon as he was in contact with this fading, red nebula… which then swirled about him, condensed to a dwindling
22
layer of mist along the soil, and vaporized toward no source in particular. However, the scholar was swift to accept this
cumbersome mass of air as he consumed more burden through the unwanted, enveloping accompaniment of that Tumor of a
Child in his environment, in his mind. And perhaps to the fortunate or oblivious witness of Gonzo, the Rover Dog had
soundlessly vanished into a red-brown haze, evaporating as fast as the sun-exposed mid-morning fog… fissioning, discretely
to diffusely… without a bark, a moan, a whisper, a sniff or lick good-bye…. Did this canine dissolve from the sheer dire
fatality of its exhausted existence?! From such a rampant, savage task of data collecting?!

One way or another, the Child radiated a dampened aura of trauma from the mutt’s ethereal departure. It crouched on its
knees, as if it were ready to implode in unbearable energy, as if the absence of the mediating Rover Dog fueled it with another
mound of chocolate chip cookies. Whereas Heisen, who was so pre-occupied with vaporizing this pestilent Child Tumor,
stormed up to the youngster and thrust the crinkly, coiled receipt of data into its face while sneering with pride, “AHA! Aha-
ha! There is inconclusive evidence demonstrating ‘the mountain is coming down’! Or most of it, that is! You can sink your story to the
bottom of the ocean! Alas, for now!” He then unexpectedly hesitated as his tongue rolled over itself. “There needs to be more
rigorous data analysis—” The old man retracted the sheet from the Child’s stone face. “I will send this research to my geology
colleagues—” His eyelids wavered in uncertainty. “But this is the first, substantial sweep of assessing the conditions of the
correlations—” His voice re-boosted its self-assurance. “And they are weak… very weak, dear Child! Ha-ha!”

The kid was more appalled and unyielding than ever, as it sprung to its feet much like a slinky, while the scholar more
complacently resumed, “There should be no concern, for the data shows general stability of the—”

“The mountain’s coming down! The mountain’s coming down!” Gonzo couldn’t help itself but interrupt in a nerve-jerking
scream like an intolerable brat in a riotous dance of a temper tantrum, “And I can see it with my eyes! And I can hear it with
my ears! And I can feel it with my feet! And these are my senses! And this is the story of the villagers!”

The youngster arm-and-hand-waved, fervently delineating several deposits of lines and shapes that provided a consolidating
impression of a painting on an airy canvas, in which Gonzo was trying to overlay this prototype upon the Scientist’s dot-
riddled paper. The somewhat smudgy, numinous image of the Child’s “data,” which elevated and suspended off the ground,
resembled some form of an elementary graphic model of the status of the mountain, except this model was daubed in a hasty,
homogeneous blurry style of Monet. And despite its degree of fuzziness, this image—errr, painting—may have elucidated more

23
order than the muddled properties of the numbers on the Scientist’s folded receipt. And yet, even with this effort of Gonzo’s
one-piece art exhibition, Heisen indirectly dismissed its labors by keeping his eyes rigidly pasted to the comfort food of his
numerals; he paced back and forth with his paper, remaining strictly entrenched in his own universe of data, drowning in his
own dots, still striving to concoct trends out of the compiled variables.

Oh! How the kid’s inherently inspired perception of terrains in a gestalt of emergent, nested scales was somehow not providing
any prompt comparison nor compatibility with the scholar’s approach, whose view embodied decades-upon-poundingly-
grieving decades of well-trained honing into the myopic scatter of his miniscule dots!

* bumph!-pumph! * bumph!-pumph! * bumph!-pumph! * rumble * rumble * rumble * rattle * wssshhh! *

The manufacturing of an ever-so-louder, prominently defined “heartbeat” from the underground dispersed the unconvincing
visions of Gonzo, as the rhythmic thumps re-instigated its panicky outbursts now in the highest degree of alarm Heisen had
encountered thus far. “Aaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhh!!! The mountain’s coming down! THE MOUNTAIN’S COMING
DOWN!!! Aren’t you going to get off?! Don’t you want to get off the mountain before it comes down?!”

In great unexpectation, this simple, startling query began to sketch the inner configuration of the Scientist’s mind as a ruffly-
feathered chicken with its head partially sliced off. Perhaps he was even more shocked than the shrieking youngster! As if the
Child had not only asked a question, but thee question: the question of treason—of scholarly treason—thee question no one in their
proper wits is supposed to ask. For this mere posing had just stripped to its pure nakedness the most vile, base, most
loathsome of patois blurring the dichotomized tongues of rational human and untamed, instinctual beast.

“Why don’t you once and for all, get off the mountain! And leave me alone! There is NO EVIDENCE to support your
claims!” the old man roared in an atrocious stance, as if he were in a hefty truck gleefully hissing, ready to transform a stray
dog into curbside roadkill. And this time he suffered from no regrets, no restraints, no guilt for his tyrannical brutality to the
quivering Child below. And Gonzo ricocheted in screeches and howls, viciously grabbing and pulling upon whatever it could
of its own short hair, as if it were stuck in a prison of its own brain… because it was plainly incapable of escaping the looming
confinements of Heisen the Scientist. The scholar, who could not tolerate the manifestation of juvenile self-destruction—by
then, the kid had been ravaging at its own scalp with its claw-like fingernails—limp-skipped away on the back trail of the
cabinshack in order to seek the mirage of consolation from his Neopenta plants. The bounded, hair-tugging, forehead-
clenching youngster had no choice but to follow the rather abusive Scientist, as if it were a baby bird that accidentally fixated
on a hungry, murderous cat for its mother. And as the old man discovered that the Child Tumor was still stumbling after him,
he continued to orally combat the kid like a brain-sliced chicken.

“And how dare you suggest this! Do you know who I am?! Do you know what science is?!” he breathed out figurative flames
corresponding to that of a wakened dragon. “I am a scientist! And I am objective! I am here to observe, collect data! I am
here to DISCOVER THE TRUTH! Whatever the truth may be! The light—”

“But aren’t you going to get off the mountain?!” Gonzo whined like the once-fatigued Rover Dog.

* bumph!-pumph! * bumph!-pumph! * bumph!-pumph! * rumble * rumble * rumble * rattle * rattle * rattle * ping! *

24
“And these truths are to inform decision-makers! To inform policy and management! And to inform any change of behavior,
change of mentality!” Numb to any tremored commotions, the scholar extracted a sole finger from his gripped fist to heave
into the unsteady air.

“But aren’t you—” Gonzo peeped.

“I’m not here to impose my subjective opinions! I am not here to change the system! Science is to inform policy, not to be
political!!!” Heisen fumed.

“going to get… off… the… mountain….” the Child’s voice tapered off.

* bumph!-pumph! * bumph!-pumph! * bumph!-pumph! * rumble * rumble * rumble * rattle * rattle * rattle * wssshhh! *

The infuriated Scientist stopped dead in his tracks as the misaligned kid adjusted to the unstable ground, almost bumping into
the man’s bony legs. He redirected his bruised, crooked finger toward the whitened face of the youngster, right in its widened,
nerve-filled eyes, “How… DARE… you call me a… POLITICIAN!!! You… you… you… little rat!!! How… DARE…
you… INSULT… me!”

Whether spitting was intentional or not, Heisen’s miniature droplets of mucous flared from his mouth onto Gonzo’s puffy,
white cheeks. The scholar repositioned his stiff lower back to a stretched, standing posture, with bracing support from his
hands. As a jab of pain shot from his spine, fireworks-ploding to the far reaches of his form, the Scientist bellowed, “I am to
discover WHAT IS!!! Not to create what OUGHT TO BE!!!”

“But, but, but…” the Child softly retorted. “When we learn something new, don’t we unthinkingly change the way we see?
Change the way we think? The way we do? Change the way we even maintain our home, our land?” Its tune lightened even

25
further. “And how much do we need to know to change our views? Change our doings? Our home? Must we be burned by dry
shrubs? Cracked by cobble? Drowned with mud? To finally wake up… and see?!”

It was the first time the youngster had ever faltered, had ever considered twice to utter a word. “And… and… aren’t you going
to get off the mountain?!! Aren’t we going to get off the mountain?!! I need to get off the mountain! Help!!! Help me!!!” It was the
first time this seemingly independent, unruly Gonzo asked for the old man’s help.

* bumph!-pumph! * bumph!-pumph! * bumph!-pumph! * rumble * rumble * rumble * rattle * rattle * rattle * ping-cling! *

Still so driven, so provoked to break away from the Child Tumor, so determined to bask within the sole neon-orange-petalled
streaks of optimism, lingering in his life’s well of floundering pessimism, Heisen persisted in his struggled, tremulous march to
the back area of the cabinshack, while blurting over his shoulder, “I am what the world is what it is what it is, WHAT IT IS! I
dare not venture to that dark side of the forest! Of all that can possibly be! Of all needing change! Of all needing help! It is OUT
of MY HANDS!!!”

* bumph!-pumph! * bumph!-pumph! * bumph!-pumph! * bumph!-pumph! * bumph!-pumph! * rumble * rumble * rattle *

The youngster’s eyes spilled a stream of tears during the most unrelentingly audible, tactile, even visibly discernable trembling
of the earth below. “I wanna get off the mountain! I wanna get off the mountain!!!”

“Go! SHOO!!! Go away you lil’ bugger! You pestly thing, you! Get off MY mountain! Leave me to MY plants!!!” The scholar twisted his
torso to maddeningly flail his curly drape of a data receipt in front of the Child’s face, hoping it would serve as a sorcerer’s
wand for receding the vaporizing the kid, just as the Rover Dog had petered out to a vague imprint of heaviness. And yet the
old man had to swiftly yank away the receipt as soon as the moping Gonzo had almost used the tail of the roll as essential
tissue paper.

Realizing the futility of beridding the youngster, Heisen fiercely wrenched his head and acutely, yet droningly repeated: “There is
inconclusive evidence from the Rover Dog! There is no incentive for me to move off this mountain!”

* bumph!-pumph! * bumph!-pumph! * bumph!-pumph! * bumph!-pumph! * bumph!-pumph! * rumble * rumble * rattle *

With each thrashing step forward, with each resisting stomp toward Neopenta, the pounding in the Scientist’s mind swelled,
inflated to an internal raging warfare, as he drastically attempted to barricade and gun down any budding alternatives than the
course of action he was currently carving. He refused to reveal to the weeping, abandoned Child—let alone admit to himself—
how he could not face up to being proven wrong by the local villagers, for he was a professor, and he was never wrong… and he
always knew everything that was required to be known. He refused to cut strings from his self-constructed “stable” home of a
cabinshack, immersed in the serenely brilliant Neopenta plants and the ghostly fog-eclipsed sunrises and sunsets for the last
three years… for perhaps it was the first time in over four decades he had established a self-desired routine of restful calmness!
He refused to renounce his bond to the Great Outdoors and relocate himself to any human-infested habitat of this planet,
especially those resembling the locale of a metropoliscape! He refused to acknowledge that he no longer craved to interact with
so many humans, let alone with this rabid Gonzo, one of the most distressing nuisances of all! He refused to be reminded of
those awkward transactions and selectively maneuvering conversations within the social matrix below. Flat out, Heisen

26
repelled any relations with human flesh—potentially even the flesh of his own form! The very last thing he needed was to be
reminded of any of his black box past, anything at all.

And such a summation of a conceivably irreducible way of life on the mountain—of mere plants and sunscapes and the
cabinshack—somehow kept the scholar in one outwardly sensible piece, urging him, moving him… perhaps tunneling him,
even cornering him… “forward” to this ultimately insignificant, yet converging point in space and time of the ongoing,
hammering, now, now, now…. And just for this apparently infinite span of a spliced moment, the Scientist’s accumulation of
interior maps subconsciously rattled, jiggled, and peeled away in a poundingly painful silence.

* bumph!-pumph! * bumph!-pumph! * bumph!-pumph! * bumph!-pumph! * bumph!-pumph! * rumble * rumble * rattle *

“But don’t you want to get off the mountain to SAVE YOUR LIFE?!! YOU HAVE TO GET OFF!!! WE HAVE TO
GET OFF!!!” While Gonzo shrouded the old man with ceaseless, jittery exclamations, it began to notice a horrifying paleness,
a whiteness pervading across Heisen’s body, a whiteness of failing combat, a whiteness of malfunctioning detachment, a
paleness of no longer desiring to deal… perhaps even with himself….

* bumph!-pumph! * bumph!-pumph! * bumph!-pumph! * bumph!-pumph! * bumph!-pumph! *

rumble * rumble * rumble * rattle *ping-cling! *

Through a few erratic blinks, even more erratic as the ground’s fluttering heart, the scholar tried to tap into the Child’s clamor
once more… but alas! The rim of the Scientist’s left eye pricked a glimmer of radiant neon-orange. His neck creaked slowly to
the side, only to detect a hairline of this overwhelming hue, and a sliver of a strand of silk scarcely jutting out from one of the
first blooming Neopentaspectavolus granelli. The old man desperately envisioned to sprint toward the budding grandeur of an
emerging idol of a flower—the luminous flourishing of one of the last remaining absolute loves in his life—but he could only
proceed in the clumsiest of his frolicky bouts, with arduous straining of peripheral muscles and tendons when coordinating his
strides with the reverberating earth. Heisen’s vocal slurs festered as they were shoved back into his tightened throat when
several racketed regions of his mind were blasted with micro-bombs, as he was challenging himself to decimate all else that
could possibly be perceived, “And… besides… if the mountain… does shed its skin… what is the likelihood… it will affect…
me?!”

The Scientist labored to seat himself by the most promising of Neopenta plants—the one flower seemingly destined to first
open to its full glory. And, oh gracious! It had been two unbearably prolonged years of a tiresome wait, just to witness, just to
splurge into these biological fireworks! Drenched in his inner-outer blockades of thundering rumbles, the old man finally
began to distinguish the fruits of his self-overbearing patience… a shy, slothful breaching of crimped petals. In a supersensory
hyperengrossment, the scholar jerked and resettled once again, digging his scraggling shoes into the soil, clutching to more
gangly strands of grass, clinging to already-dislodged pebbles… and just stared and focused and stared and focused… at the sheer
opening of this firecracker display… of a terribly bright, orange-flowered fleshy shoot amidst the golden hour of a glowing
sunset… as if he were bowing down to the magnificence of an Earthly SubDeity. And there was almost an instant in which the
near-blinding orange allowed Heisen to successfully obstruct all elements from his fixated mind… including that swarming,
ominous Child. The augmented, peach-like illumination of the core bands of petals, punctured by the centrally-placed sky-blue
fluffball of stamens and pistils instilled the fleeting splendor of quietness, the deceptive placidity of a static blur embracing this
crisply distinct blossom. Alas!—it was just the Scientist and his Neopenta, Scientist… Neopenta—at last—

27
And again, out of fortuitous unexpectations, a warped bedding of time evolved—much like a marker etch, no! a blazing scab,
no! a permanent tattoo—within the scholar’s interior realm. Were they re-shifting folds to be tumbled and deposited into near-
lagerstätten preservation? Or to an entire erosion, erasure? At the fringes of sacred idleness between the two—the old man’s
piercing mental consumption of Neopenta down to the flower’s crux of arbitrary pseudoexistence, to which it could not return
an equivalent reply—Gonzo the Child, upon its graceless, creeping advance (who had never come across any Neopenta plants
before, and never aspired to even see them) inadvertently and passingly laid, and even rested its sporadic, fretful yet curious,
darting eyes upon this extraneously blistering orange for the very first time… and paused in its glimpse with ephemeral
fascination and scrutiny. Its head bobbled playfully, with a reverential esteem for change of topic to all that it pursued…
aligning with any child’s intuitive motives of seeking, exploring, inspecting diversity, uncertainty, and non-linear dendricity…
only committing to a transient, whimsical liking of any particular sub-system belonging to a more extensive, perplexing atlas of
reality. And quite soon after, to the tampered vexation of Heisen, the youngster’s eyes sprung off, pulled away from such a
dazzling bloom in its innocent, youthful protocols, treating the flower like a toy to fondle and rightfully place… and then…
disposingly forget within a matter of minutes, seconds… ready to progress to the next intriguing item of the assembly line of
cerebral sparkles. And with this inter-linking-and-severing of the Child’s halfhearted stare, a most outlandishly fundamental
nuclear reaction of near-complete displacement and rearrangement of atomic structure continued to detonate upon the
Scientist’s eyes to a brief blindness of a broken spell… as if the interplay among the three unwillfully elucidated a recalibrating,
pervasive perceptual poison between the scholar and Neopenta.

Was it a beauty too emptily profound?! An attraction too unnecessarily true?! An animate divinity of too much insignificant significance?!!

Surrendering to the foreign, choking barrage of bending-and-fracturing accretions of mucky, caking layers of impermeable clay,
compounding into even thicker and chunkier folds between the old man and his precious flower, this mere state of shock
within this rudimentary domain of pristine veneration instinctively sparked Heisen to let go….

Let go….

As if his unkempt, overly hyped significance for Neopenta never held any significance at all….

The domino sequence of brokenbonding folds led to the Scientist’s detection of a discrete debility lurking within him, which
near-instantaneously distilled into a red-brown hue of a dust cloud, then reconsolidating to a flighty, bouncy, ever-so-
28
mischievous Rover Dog, scurrying, scampering, *aoof-aoofffing* and *ihaah-ihaahing* around the old man and the Child. The red
mutt was as chipper and as capricious as ever, as if it had been liberated from its repetitive, mechanical rigidity into infinite
euphoria of haphazard, yet incrementally accumulated pleasures of non-linear growth…. With the gushing of a novel wave of
undefineably entranced emancipation, the scholar dazed upon the Rover Dog, who was licking the once-giggly kid good-bye.
The canine stiffly grinned once more toward Heisen with a sloppy, overhanging tongue, and then drifted within a plume of its
own nebulous creation into the endless, unbounded orange skies above….

Then and only then, Heisen discovered himself inundated in his own frenetic viscosities—the black beating of his own ticking
time bomb of a panic attack head—from its ceiling to the wall, from the wall to the floor, the floor back to the opposite wall
of some vacuum scrunched into a black cubic box of nothingness… which as the walls smoothened and leveled out to no
corners, with no sensible orientation and direction whatsoever, schloppily converting into an uncontrollable clatter of a
revolving plunge within a stuffy guinea pig’s plastic bubble, ka-bumping along, hitting every single piece of rotting, moldy
trash, stagnantly lying in the sewage-runoff-filled, glum tunnels of the Scientist’s inner street gutters… the sites of instigating
the process of his own human taphonomy… decay, dislocation, dismemberment, and overall demolition… still chased, still
being chased, still being followed, pursued, hunted down by an additional bubble of that screaming, frantic Child—that
Phantom Tumor of Virtuousness—that never seemed to quit in its annoyance, that never seemed to go away and leave him
alone… even when being brutally smacked by the most despairing, lowly substructured metaexistences of being—the very
bottom of bottomlessness—which brought the scholar to a conscious recognition that his once core-solid neurovascular-rope-
channels of near-pious compulsion skewed awfully lean and inevitably snapped… as if an umbilical cord of vitality were
severed… way… too… late…

… that obsession could carry him no further…

… and obsession could not serve as his adhesive matrix of wholeness… any longer….

With a ghastly THUMP-THUD, the bottom of bottomlessness had cracked and shattered this plastic guinea pig shell
of worldly immunity, flinging the old man’s fragile, vulnerable mind and form in all possible outward vectors, exposing him to
the Child’s tumultuously screeching, wailing spheres of stormy turbulence, as if Heisen… for once… did not antagonize, rebut,
deny, detach… but finally come to accept, embrace, agonizingly admit, greet the notion that he was surrounded by a multi-
headed, aggravated, and abused lion of a Gonzo in an enclosed arena… which incurred violent, lightning-bolt convulsions
within the Scientist… that could have been diminished, dwindled… if he had come to the position of listening, absorbing…
earlier….

Oh! This youngster who had nagged him to the nth power of agitation, who never went away…. Perhaps it was always there…
always there… trailing after him from the very fork in the road, diverging, departing from his own youthful indiscriminations to
absurd grownup systematisms, linearities…. But now with the crushing, compacting, fierceful compounding of decades upon
decades of his life… the once subliminal face of Gonzo the Child had manifested, plagued him so clearly, so crisply… so real?!

And what had that kid been so fearfully squealing about all this time? So sincerely crying wolf?! The scholar’s internal
convulsions began to slowly attune, orchestrate with this alien otherworldly—

29
* bumph!-pumph! * bumph!-pumph! * rumble * bumph!-pumph! *
bumph!-pumph! * bumph!-pumph! * rattle * igggrrrrr-ihrrrrr-rrrrrghhh!!! *

* bumph!- And another layer, a fold, unraveled, as he stripped his eyes off the first blooming Neopenta, peeking,
then gaping downward upon his form, musing with the livid shaking of his feet, the quaking of his entire
pumph! * body, hysterically, autonomically attempting to synchronize, adapt a pseudo-stable posture to the pulsing
bumph!- tremors of the terrain. It was a novel, foreign, collapsing bed of externalities he had never confronted
before, as he was no longer buffered by the howling Child behind him… now… internalizing….
pumph! *
rumble * And then another layer, fold… a noise… an enormously muffled to apparent, unending riotous rumble,
unavoidingly associated with the exacerbating, steamy-hisss-whmmmmmbrrr breath of a dragon—no! indeed
bumph!- it was not the usual backdrop white noise of crashing ocean waves along the cliffs below the cabinshack…
pumph! * this was different—which triggered the Scientist’s ears to prick and trunk to creak to the side, as if this were
the startling first time he had ever listened to these eruptive vibrations….
bumph!-
pumph! * And with a solemn bow of his head, with an earnest surrender of a seemingly terminal affair with the
astoundingly brilliant Neopentaspectavolus granelli, the scholar unlatched one of his clenched holds to a jagged
bumph!- rock that could no longer support his grip. His hand reached out, and with his wildly twitching fingers, the
pumph! * old man gently caressed one of its super-coiled silk threads that dilated from one of its most extended
petals—
rattle *
igggrrrrr- As Heisen’s form partially twisted to a diagonally awkward stance, such that he could at least secure his
back on the ground without losing his foothold… only to perceive such random unexpectations of
ihrrrrr-
fireworks all at once: an appalling, unhumanly-bearable scene of unprocessable overstimulation:
rrrrrghhh!!!
* bumph!- The turmoiled Child, strangled by its torrential downpour of tears, eerily levitated off the earth and
unsteadily suspended itself in mid-air as an opaque, yet disbanding, sunset-tinted cloud… as a rather large
pumph! * slab of the mountain—notably affiliated with the barren patch of soils from the summer burn—gave way
and began to slide down, as if the rocks and sediments and young, shrubby sprouts had somehow become
bumph!-
fluid. Further slabs chipped and slashed off the mountain slope due to the spatial gap of the primary slide,
pumph! * at first continuously, then discretely, stepwise, similar to a chain of mud-coated dominoes… as a few
initial conglomerate chunks tumbled down onto the mesa and plummeted over the cliffs, greeting the
rumble *
churning ocean below…. It was a torrential downpour of lithical tears: dicey, slippery sliding coupled with
bumph!- rupturing faults and fissures…. The Scientist captured a phenomenal outlook, numbingly watching these
pumph! * pancaked, then more voluminous black-brown slugs slithering off the mountainside…. It was
unquestionably the emergence of a dragon with an extensively flaring, deconstructionist repertoire the
bumph!- scholar had never known… outside of him… within him….
pumph! *

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bumph!-
pumph! *
rattle *
igggrrrrr-
ihrrrrr-
rrrrrghhh!!!
* bumph!-
pumph! *
bumph!-
pumph! *
rumble *
bumph!- The erosional downstream peeled and glided away the old man’s creeking cabinshack of a home *ieeek *
ieeekkk * irrrrrkkk * schweeerrrkkk * at first in a corresponding unity, then fracturing and splintering to two
pumph! *
major segments *PHAPHOOM!!! * schweeerrrkkk * then three, subsequently smashed by a head-
bumph!- on-collision with a toothy-edged boulder into five, then even smaller fragments from there… from wood
pumph! * planes to wood frames to wood chips to woody sludge, from shingle floats to shingle scraps to shingle
soup… with splotches of bizarre shapes and colors peppering the chowder of cabinshack—perhaps they
bumph!- were his tools or his clothes?—followed by a mud-riddled explosion of an ample-reserve of a propane
pumph! * tank

rattle * * Ba-BOOM!!! * irrrwhissshhhhh * irrrwhissshhhhh * splattering an array of human-speckled rubble

igggrrrrr- downslope, until the infrastructural gestalt of his cabinshack could no longer be deciphered, as whatever
remains braided and meshed with the mounting river of debris *
ihrrrrr- wwwhhhrrrvvvvvshhhjjjssshhhjjjjjssshhhwwwfffffrrrhhhjjjssshhhhh. *
rrrrrghhh!!!
Heisen could only wince with one water-blotched eye to the demolition of his major terrestrial ship of the
* bumph!-
last three years, for at this point, the terrain was quaking so vehemently that he dared not consider
pumph! * moving, misplacing his grip on the flimsy vegetative and pebblish foundation he was clinging onto… and
with a desperate moan punctured by lofty breaths, he chose to reposition… to sprawl entirely flat on his
bumph!-
back to the spasmic ground, as if he were a juicy bug that was just stabbed down for an insect collection.
pumph! *
The tempestuous breakoff of slabs derived a rhythm, an off-beat tempo, as a somewhat invisible “cliff”
rumble *
that kept advancing closer… closer… closer… * iiithump-bumph-pumph! * bump-pumph! * iiithump-
bumph!-
bumph-pumph! * bump-pumph! * toward the Scientist’s prostrate bearings up the slope, as if
pumph! * a great white shark were picking up speed in incremental gears to fulfill its first assault, at best its first
bumph!- devouring chomp into its prey—No, no! Was it a shark? Or was it the once dormant dragon unwinding its

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 pumph! * buildup of destructive, offshooting energy from its crammed, balmy cocoon of a mountain’s lair? Now
fuming murky-red-brown smoke, incidentally toward the scholar and his flash-frozen form, as if he had
bumph!- been metamorphosed into a rock, a clast, himself?—

pumph! *
*Fffssshhhhhaaahhhhhssssshhhaaaooomphhhboomphfffssssshhhhhhh!!!*
rattle *
igggrrrrr- Oh! The flame-saturated smoke crafted a gusting vacuum as the soil-grass-pad slipped and yielded beneath
ihrrrrr- Heisen’s firm clamp, with the old man first skimming on a flood of muck down to a series of whip-
whirring, pulsating funnels and wave barrels of superchaotic gluck *
rrrrrghhh!!!
rrrggggglllwhmmmggglllspaplooshggglllrrrggggglll * for the pad grinded away, no longer serving as a magic carpet
* bumph!- of salvation. The Scientist thrust-bumbled along with the gluck * umphr-ummmphbleh! * and his orange
flowers toppled over him soon after. His mental universe became mud-clogged with deafness…
pumph!—
muteness… or just a mere ambiance of simple humming… more so a nuisance ringing… ringing… of a
solo high pitch… faintly, yet incessantly droning in his ears….

Gonzo was ravaging all over the haze-filled orange sky with its playdough-stretched amorphousness nimbly dashing above the
mess of a mountainside. As the scholar peered toward the Child’s terrified eyes, the youngster’s skirting, airy hands were
placed forth, as if they were trying to latch onto and pull the old man out of the ruthlessly sloshing rubble. With eyes
struggling to stay open, it was the first time the Scientist tapped into the essence of that sprightly kid. He realized it was no
longer a matter of antagonistic debate. It was no longer a matter of who was right or wrong. It was no longer a matter of
preserving his pride. He acutely and fleetingly acknowledged, accepted… self-confessed… that the mountain was coming down…. As
neon-orange petals were strewn and chopped all around his frenzied acrobatic fumbles, Heisen never bothered to respond, lift
a hand, a sole finger, to the seemingly meager help of the rough-soaring Gonzo. He could only attempt to lock his eyes toward
the general direction of the kid. And with all of his residual charge of vigor, the scholar whispered “I’m sorry” to the Child…
or perhaps he was whispering this to himself.

All limbs and viscera sacks and their bony casings were forcefully serrated, snagged, and jerked around by the anarchic slush of
debris, as if an unanticipated tidal wave had knocked the winds of a fanatical surfer… and pinned him down to the ruffled
ocean floor. The neural cord connecting his mind and form was finally switched off, as the Scientist could sense no pain… just
a numb, roller-coasting bliss…. And somehow, his reality was still attached to this heavy numbness of a tattered, fluid-filled
bag with broken-boned edges and flaccid extremities…. The lack of primordial wakefulness allowed the dragon’s tail to flip-
flop the old man, much like a killer whale toys with its puppy-chow seal before a substantial meal. Yet in contrast, all the
scholar could feel was a carefree, ticklish euphoria of flying through turbulent jet streams on bumpy, antiquated airplanes.

Heisen’s mind shed a succession of very thick, armored skin, as if the plate of an armadillo were removed from his skull, as if a
fossil-packed sedimentary outcrop had been memento-ed in a rewinding deformation of time…. And all layers, strata, creases,
personally immediate to distantly universal, from proximal to ultimate, were disassembling, unweaving, parting and peeling
away to re-expose a vast, trench-like inventory of susceptible unconformities within the Scientist’s mental library, composed of
largely unsettled, unsorted, knotted, contorted folds and misaligned memoiric fragments, displaced and disassociated and
outright unaccounted for by the Protocols of Denial… eventually evolving into the cumulative Tragedy Reservoir of traumatic
life experiences. Aiiie! Those resurfaced wounds, those snipped stitches of unfinished open heart surgeries, those neglected
terrains of tender reminiscence were, by some means, clearly laid flat out on the card table, starring He versus Himself for his
second chance of internal reassessment and reconfiguration of his own harrowing relationship with the past. Those jenga

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outcrops—plump beds, finer laminations—were stripped raw-naked on their top-most planes, waiting where they all left off…
waiting… ready… to be re-written, waiting to be re-built… with the dependability of emotionally-resolved superbinding glue
for a sturdy matrix enabling rational fabrication and preservation.

And despite such a progressional revelation within the Scientist, could the treacherous mountain tremors even provide enough
time for the scholar to re-mend, re-braid, re-twine with cautionary care an already highly-edited one-chance-to-live-of-a-life? To
retain the Child’s infinitely porous, completely unfiltered, spongy clairvoyance upon witness to all of the deep-cut, festering
injuries on an already folding card table? Such brevity of stability didn’t even permit the old man’s self-perception of his own
readiness to reflect, to converge discontinuity.

Oh! The futility of such a dreadful exercise! The re-invention of a life already lived, yet without heightened consciousness?! The
re-invention of a life of a fly? Another anonymous black fly on a wall?! Whose closest kin of four were haphazardly, unluckily
swatted without a wince of sorrowful recollection?! A life that didn’t even allow a timely wince of recollection? Re-inventing a
life of retroactive diagnoses, personal paradigm re-shifts?! What’s the point of living twice?! What’s the point?! To rethink life twice,
again, once more, sunny-side up, two-more-times over?!

What’s the point of allowing himself to feel the pain of loss of two instant youthful expirations of his parents… precisely
overlapping the time upon the flowering of his own family, and the blossoming birth of his only son?! His mind, at such an
early age of adulthood, resorted to a deadness of pathos, consequentially a lack of deliberation over such a torturous event,
almost as a necessity. What’s the point of allowing himself to feel the pain of loss of his super-hyperactive, lung-choking-
asthmatic of a son with immense satirical wit and encyclopediac memory capacities, at the expense of his condescending,
egotistically-infested social awkwardness that was borderline tolerable in all of his disobedient outrageousness? Perhaps his son
was even more savage and maniacal than that persistently pestering Child! And yes! Oh yes! Those exotic surges of humiliating
desires to belt-lash Gonzo were trickling in from his own historical procedures of attempting to discipline his unruly son! And
then for the doctors and psychologists to accidentally and retroactively diagnose ten years after the boy’s asthma-attack ending of
life that this problem-child was a severe case of Asberger’s?!

What horrors of failed parenthood! And had he known, had he known from the very start, would he have structured such an
overbearingly strict, stoic-to-indignantly-unsympathizing belt-flogging of a tyrannical regime of fatherhood?! And re-grow that
boy with a novel assumption of re-understanding?! *aaarrrrrggghhhhh!!!* They should have notified him from the very onset that
the mountain of that boy was coming down!!! From the very, very beginning! But, oh, there was no official definition of such
mental circumstances. So then, why did they even bother to tell him then?! After the whole buried ordeal?! What was the point?!
Was it for their own medical amusement?! Not even considering the potentially torn psyches of their patients?!

And what was the very goshdanged point of informing him of his son’s would-have-could-have-been-life right upon the inception
of his obediently submissive housewife’s rapid downslide into the short-term repetitive, then long-term memoiric unfurling
decay of her own inner roadmap of self-worldliness, then viscerally discoordinating, fully disclosing the descent to a vegetative
state of stupored-baby-ness-in-an-elder’s-form of Alzheimers?!! And so it was a ten-year sweet suffering of deterioration, a
dragonslide battle that was toying and whittling away his own scanty existence within a mere ten minutes amidst the
sanctifying glow of a golden-orange sunset.

33
Oh! How he could not break, nor tweak his private, dictatorial role, inevitably provoking him to treat this woman with an
equivalence to his son—a demeanor of consistent brutality—for he insisted *no!* forcefully imposed to strap her down into
the house, adamant of encaging her in a subservient status…. And his own subliminal accretion of guilt from his long-term gig
of artificial authoritarianism wore on him, as he felt obligated to care for his wife during her own dragonslide; he battled to
keep her alive and at home, all alone… without any family aid, for the rest of his unacquainted bloodline was scattered across
the country, marginally accessible, and marginally of any utility through a technologically-mediated dose of communication.

And he fought and fought to the very bitter end, until she transfigured to an excessively wrinkled, un-potty-trained oldborn
puppy version of a Rover Dog! Or was it the crusty fetal blob of a lizard? A fish? A tunicate? A jellyblob? No, some giant
photosynthetic amoeba, given such creatures do exist?! Nevertheless, it was an unstoppable, biological debris flow of retro-
evolution.

Her passing was just a few years before his retirement from URKLA University. Oh, did he clench his mind as he secretly
clenched his fists, battling one of the most bewildering warfaring games of all: the incessant shielding of his familial
dragonslides from an exhibition or inspection within the absurd, tittle-tattle gossipities of the university arena, the strangely
perceived cannibalistic circus den of rumormongers, consisting of his professional fly-shooswatting colleagues, who also
paradoxically embodied his extended kin. He developed an interior flipping switch, un-people-person-ing his resultingly stiff
public persona, as he was in academia to explore and disseminate the intellectual ecstasies of rare and endangered plants, not
seek advice over beer from uncertified shrinks.

And such was the method to his madness, shielding his grief from his collaborators helped him shield his grief from himself…
recognizing that if he submitted, surrendered, lowered his guard… once… and only once… his own dragonslide would have
consumed him whole… much, much… earlier….

Oh! How to live a life in chronic alien familiarity of one’s own imperviousness, sheltered in a shadowy mind of shut-outs, in
which life never granted a foundation of solidity to let it mourn and heal, unfasten and patch up, replenish with multiple
paralleling branches along interrelated strata… than to exclusively, and narrowly grasp on to, adore with such exaggerated
worthiness, and such dangerous linearity, a subjectified object—the domain of rare and endangered plants?! As if he were
eloping with the affectionate figures of his own kin?! And even more myopically, just his three sparse populations of neon-
orange-petalled-green-leafed-blue-fluffballed Neopentaspectavolus granelli?

Of all the diversity of the Great Outdoors, why did he cling onto rare and endangered plants?! Why not any other organism?!
Or pseudo-creature?! Why not any other layer of the land?! Why not the rocks, the climate, the soil, any other plants, the people…
the people… the villagers… their conventions, their codes, their beliefs, their myths, their facts, their fancies, their tools, their
ways of doing… their interactions with the local landscapes?!

34
And why not perceive it all?! All of the Great, Unbounded Outdoors?!! A stunningly complex, intricate jigsaw puzzle,
buttoned up with rhythms and cycles, perhaps uncontainable to the numbers, yet still reclaimable to the overarching abilities
of human intuition?! A child’s mind?! His very own mind?! Just as the Child painted a sloppy, yet still interpretable Monet of a
model…. And, oh ya… oh, even those Monet villagers… despite their imprecise “cataracts”-ridden, grainy resolution of their
countryside when compared to high-powered computers—fancy Rover Dog machines of broken-record-hamburger-flipping
monotony—they still made keen observations, tuning into their terrains, their self-constructed homes that are much-needed-
to-be-sustained in order to ensure their own endured regional habitability….

He persevered through a mindheart attack in distressed rumbling of a wordless intraexposé: What’s the point?!! What’s the
point?!! To-relive?!! Live twice?!! Rethink twice?!! To dismantle the entire rooted congregation of assumptions that built some dilapidated
tree for nearly a lifetime?!! To re-imagine a fairytale of politics of my would-have-been family?!! Too many years have gone by, staggering through
stabbing impediments, intermittent straight lines punctuated by zigzags, thumping irregularities….

His mind was already so inattentive, so immune, that it found itself exempt from reconciling its historical chaos and presently
confounding existence. It was too much shock, too much torment to fling open all doors and windows of deficient tabs and
stubs… all at once….

Was he simply overwhelmed? By the overloadedness of his own rapt placedness-in-space-and-time?! And this condition of
overwhelmingness dampened, dulled him once more?! Permitting himself to face the consequences of a prolonged pursuit of

35
self-negligence?! Permitting himself to be engulfed by the pathological violence of his own dragonslide, which was so
compelled to vent, release a bundle of explosives to a calmer, more steady state?!

Loss crumbling upon loss roaring upon loss, all intimate and remote, tangible and representational spheres of
unconformities—mostly those ancient undercurrent stagnancies—washed up in a tangled heap of rotten kelp along the once
bleak shore of Heisen’s consciousness… and then kinked and snarled and crushed along with the mudflow of mutilations.

With every impulsive blast of a rock, a whispy current was knocked out of the Scientist’s form, at first eliminating the lifeline
to his hands and feet, shriveling to his upper arms and legs, punching out his organ sacs, then breeching an already suffocating
coordination of breaths between his mouth and lungs.

The folds of Demise and utter Existence in Nothingness shrouded over the scholar more and more, as his physical
disintegration succumbed to the encroaching dragonslide…. He allowed Nothingness to encroach upon him, as if Nothingness
finally had the opportunity to laugh at the ease of conquering the summation of his life as some failed, dead-end human guinea
pig experiment… as Nothingness sincerely felt it needed to modify, replace, transform his Existence into some alternate, more
viable, all-encompassing mode of Elseness… yet in the least, it would thoroughly mélange and embed him within his
surroundings….

Perhaps, in his last instinctual plights for survival, the old man attempted to engross himself in his crash-tumbling view of a
hazy, reddish-orange-brown sunset… in a hushed silence. Perhaps he tried to simultaneously smile and whimper, wondering
what his life was, living as not being entirely alive… versus if he had known... as if he had chosen to know… chosen to tap in…
accept… embrace… what his life was… versus what his life ought to have been….

Perhaps his impressions had morphed or been incorporated into some more complementary collection of stumbling,
plummeting clasts, along with the variable-size-and-shaped sludge of futile skin the dragon was so eager to shed from the
mountain. Maybe each fragment of displaced, mismanaged memories had either dissipated into the Child’s orange-red plume
of dust above or re-situated, toppled into his fluid-like rubble of bone. Yet there was not a trace of redness… soft flesh… just
the subtle scatter of rigid, brittle bones, intermingled with hues of fragrant, neon-orange fireworks derivatives in the newly
molded massacre of mulch.

36
The remnants of Gonzo the Child were eerily interspersed within the dragonslide’s cloudy veil, echoing an unclassifiable field
of pain in nearly every direction, singularly illuminated by a band of reddish-orange-purple-tinged rays of sun. The amorphous,
spirally-contoured delineations of the youngster willfully coated the skin-shedding expanse of the mountain, as if it were
engaging in some fruitless effort to decelerate, even halt a vast portion of this earth-bound process or even strap it down with
some shabby, ethereal fish net of a band-aid—or was it the fish net of its two diffuse wave-coils for hands?

And in the end of all beginnings-to-ends, it was as if the mountain’s last flower of a frantic, ghostly neon-orange-cheeked, arm-
swirling endangered species of a Child’s vaporous voice hollering and screaming and bellowing and bleating like a sinking navy
ship’s backup foghorn—so fiercely, so helplessly… so shrill… as if it intended for the entire world to hear—

“HHHHHHHEEEEEEELLLLLLLLLPPPPPPPPP!!!!!”
And it rung only once, but so alarmingly true.

Part 3
It took a rather long time, perhaps way into the night for the mountain’s ghastly fireworks display of a dragonslide to settle
into its new shape, size, and overall form; it was quite a drastic structural shift, still phasing in several minor adjustments for
stabilization, stretching from a “dumpster” spill over the ocean cliffs and rocky shores, all the way to the chilling, mal-formed
mushroom cloud of misty dust wafting over the mountain top.

The anxious villagers near the base of the mountain, who dared not set foot upon that dragon’s lair for generations, watched
the totality of eruptive fireworks race toward the sea in a powerless dismay, hoping—with some residents even praying—that
Heisen the Scientist retained enough energy and held enough sense to break his strict routines and bring himself down from
the slopes.

No one in the parish had anticipated the heartbeat of the mountain to burst at the specific instant that it did, but a few of the
old-timers knew that the dragon was about due for a resurgence. The community members were even more horror-struck and
bewildered to hear the ubiquitous cry of a child—or so they thought they heard the cry of a child, as some claimed it to be the
wail of the Scientist—resonating, piercing the paradoxical distant stillness of a dusty-red sunset. Many women of the
ranchhands were so concerned that they rounded up their children from the neighboring fields to make sure no one from the
village was missing. Most of the village residents had intrinsically congregated, just to lightly gaze or somberly scrutinize the
panoramic spectacle of obliteration on the sturdy walls and rooftops surrounding the village square.

The mediating Village Head, who was probably the most bothered about the absence of the scholar, managed to convince his
community to momentarily set aside their mystical fears, and form a group of more agile ranchhands to tread up the mountain
at first light of the following day in order to find and help the Scientist, as well as track down the source of the mysterious
screech of a child. The earnestly recruited villagers swiftly made arrangements to take urgent leaves from their usual field work,
and upon the onset of a bleary, purple-blue light of early dawn, a collaborative emergency team, led by the Village Head—
additionally accompanied by two curious, wise elders and a few rambunctious children who disobeyed their mothers—

37
cautiously ventured up the fragile dragon mountain of now freshly exposed skin. The troupe split in two or three smaller packs
to scout numerous ridges and slopes and gullies of the disturbed and more intact regions.

One village elder became very upset—frustratingly irate, in fact—as he discovered fragments of the rustic cabinshack on the
mesa, very close to the ocean cliffs. “I told the Scientist when he first came to our town that the mountain’s heart blows a fuse
once every ten years or so, and that’s when the dragon comes out! But did he listen?! NO!!!”

The other wise elder approached the site of fatality and also cringed with rage, “Why do we even try to help a man who doesn’t
even bother to listen?! Who doesn’t even bother to help himself?!”

Little did the old-timers know the Village Head was close behind the bickering seniors, as he called out in an abrupt
interruption, “Cut it out! This is serious! We are looking for two missing people! And we need to find them, alive! Your bitter
chit chat is not important, and not needed! There is no time for b—itterness….”

The Head finally looked down, only for his eyes to stroke across an array of woodchips, peculiarly dented chunks of metal that
must have been a part of a more generic, yet extensive tool kit, and ragged pieces of fabric that must have been scraps of
whole items of clothing.

Now dotting the ocean-facing slope of the mountain like perplexed, slow-marching ants who could not locate a solid trail of
sugary evidence, the scholar-and-child-foraging villagers were mostly in a state of chronic, trembling awe by the sheer
magnitude of the dragonslide, which must have undressed two-thirds—no, no!—three-fourths of the mountainside!

And soon enough, amidst the rubble of rocks and sprits of orange hue within the path of the most mangled and ungraded of
debris—fairly near the intersection of the base of the mountain and the mesa—a young, burly ranchhand found a few clasts
distinctive enough in their form, that he identified them to be broken bones. And adjacent to these strangely-outlined “bone-
rocks” of sorts was a heavily damaged metal wiring frame of the Scientist’s characteristic glasses. The villagers’ gestures spun
into spasmic motionlessness—eyes shocked open, bodies petrified, unfeeling, somewhat aloof—except each member may
have noticed a slight internal tug that someone was… of no more… gone… and possibly shapeshifted or transported into some
entity else.

A younger resident was bold enough to disrupt the fossilization of the ranchhand cluster, “Are we to write to his family?”

“But who is his family?” was the mumbling response of an unharmonized chorus.

No one answered. No one knew.

After the lengthy span of alienishly familiar silence among the mid-day reconvening of villagers—the very same bubble of
silence they felt whenever the scholar paraded into their community—a majority of members of this search-and-rescue team
began to feel uncomfortable being in the potential line of action of a dragon, and that the heartbeat could reactivate with more
devastating spurts. The Village Head encouraged the pack to speed up the course of surveying the terrain. The group was
divided in two, in which one band worked on salvaging whatever usable and carry-able ruins of the cabinshack on the mesa,
while the other band dispersed to scour the entire mountain in quest of saving a supposed child.

38
One of the infants strayed from the troupe of cabinshack scavengers to freely play about the wild splendors of the mountain.
Naïve as he was, the child wandered and trudged toward the peak of the dragonslide, where the mountain was still somewhat
untouched by the catastrophe. The kid was careful not to amuse himself flanking the newly-carved cliff edge, but to his
surprise, he uncovered a scrumpled neon-orange flower that was half-concealed by a rough stone. There were no other similar
flowers around this blazingly blossoming plant. How stupefy-ingly beautiful this untamed glory was to the child! It was a bit
too much to stare at for extended periods of time, for it seemed as bright, if not brighter than the sun! Yes indeed, it was the
great Neopentaspectavolus granelli, but the infant did not know such a silly tongue-twisting name! And yet… yet… was this flower
truly the last one left? The kid double-checkingly twirled around and hiked up and down the slope a little ways… and still did
not chance upon any resembling plant.

Casually deciding to muck around with the flower before he returned to the side of his papa, the boy removed the pebble and
tried to make the flower stand straight and tall, though it always leaned over with a mild crease in between the two pairs of
leaves on its stem. He brushed off the more desiccated dirt from Neopenta’s basal poofy skirt, and through its persistently
enthralling neon exuberance, the child thought, “Wow! This little orange flower is so lucky to live and beat the dragon, but it’s
so unlucky! How will it survive if it doesn’t have a friend?”

In an instinctive epiphany, the kid considered in picking this flower for his momma—she always befriended every villager,
every creature—until somehow, he detected an unnerving reverberation, a naggingly repulsive aura besieging the flower….
Feeling very insecure, the boy stepped back and no longer deliberated over this option.

And so the child was mesmerized by Neopenta, almost as profoundly fixated as the Scientist was, for all but an ephemeral
splice of time, just like Gonzo the Child… as the youngster was otherwise lured and distracted by the diversely sparkling
aurora of elements within the mountainous vicinity.

His carefree roaming demonstrated that he did not fully comprehend the passing of the Scientist, the missing status of some
other child, nor the troublesome implications of the dragonslide. The villagers below the steep slope were worried about the
kid’s safety and beckoned him to come down from the top ridge. While the boy skipped down the slopes, far from the border
of the dragon’s path, he couldn’t help wonder about next time…. “I guess it doesn’t matter if the poor flower has no friends.
It’s for sure that the dragon will shed all of the mountain’s skin… so I’m almost sure that the dragon will eat the flower
anyway.”

As the youngster was greeted by his papa’s arms, he blurted out with any hesitation, such that a number of villagers heard:
“Doesn’t the flower need a friend?! Who’s going to take care of that poor, lonely orange flower up there?!”

One gruff old-timer almost cut the boy off, “No one! No government people! No scientist! None of us villagers! No one! Can’t
those foolish flowers take care of themselves?!”

And the other elder chimed in, “If we thought from the very start that those flowers could take care of themselves, before that
pushy Scientist and those government folk came by, we wouldn’t be in this mess we’re in right now!”

“And now we’re gonna have to tell those governmentals what happened?!! Oh no!” the burly ranchhand tightened his jaw.

“Oh, bah!” the Village Head rolled his eyes in uneasiness. Another item on the to-do list.

39
And so that unruly child’s initial flaring candle of intrigue in the solitary Neopenta plant burned out as quickly as it was ignited;
it was most certainly shoved under the rug by bossy papa and logistical grown-up talk. The boy then re-gravitated toward the
interests of the other children, who were converging toward the re-assembling group of villagers, silhouetted by a second red-
brown pastel painting of a sundown, except the colors were more hauntingly embellished than the evening before. All of the
village residents were exasperated because they could not differentiate any indications of a missing or wounded or buried child.
They all started to second-guess each other as to whether they heard a youthful shriek or a Scientist’s off-pitched yelp… or
maybe it was the lamenting howl of a coyote.

The cabinshack salvagers were keen on treading homewards before dark, as they had been impatiently waiting for the other
search troupe. The Village Head’s sagging layered eyes and sunset-bathed posture of ingrained sympathy had somehow
summoned the volunteering community members to gather into an inward circle near by the bulk of cabinshack remains,
below the apparent radiance of the singularly lingering, now closing… folding… crimping… blossom of Neopentaspectavolus
granelli.

And in a brief blip of time that enveloped the highly splintering strip of a lifespan’s halted perpetuity, the villagers mourned for
the Scientist in a solemn, yet awkward uncertainty.

40