Code

When I look in the mirror, I see someone I do not recognize. Pronounced wrinkles replace the once-smooth skin around my eyes. Unruly tufts of ultra-thin white wisps have taken the place of my “salt & sand” head of hair, courtesy of more than a year’s worth of chemo. My decidedly overweight body has shed much of the evidence of seventy-one years of accumulated overeating, leaving confirmation of inadequate exercise. I wonder which image represents the real me…the overly-portly, well-fed man or his shriveled remains? And I question whether the two men are, indeed, the same person or indecipherable echoes of one another. Do the same kinds of thoughts reside inside those two brains? Did those men take different roads in a yellow wood? Are the lives they led radically different from one another?

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I woke up from a different dimension this morning, a place hidden from all the other places in the universe. My role in that distant dimension was to translate nonfiction books written in every language into every other language—but without the benefit of fluency in any of them. A solution to the problem was provided by detectives responsible for a small city’s police department library. They suggested I use the multi-language flash cards carried by police officers. Those cards, which served as language prompts for alleged criminals to understand charges against them, could be used in place of full-fledged translations in connection with my translation tasks. I tested the cards by using them to transform a German text into Tagalog, in neither of which I was fluent. My task suddenly changed from translation to conversion; I was to arrange for Tagalog to become the universal language. With that adjustment, I suddenly wanted desperately to return to a dimension that was more familiar to me; I woke to the sounds of police sirens and gunfire.

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An eraser—the sort commonly found on the ends of number two pencils—was in my hand. I was not sure what I was to do with it, but decided I should erase some strings of text from an open book that sat on the desk in front of me. Just as I was about to rub a line in the book with the eraser, a teacher screamed at me in a panic: “Don’t do that! If you use that eraser, part of your life will disappear forever!” The teacher’s panicked shout startled me enough to make me yank the eraser from the page, thus saving my teen years from oblivion. Who would put such a dangerous weapon in the hands of an irresponsible child?

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I haven’t shaved in days, but only by rubbing my face or neck would that inaction become obvious. I’ve never had a heavy beard, but ever since chemo initially robbed me of my hair, my facial hair (and the hair on top of my head) has been slow to grow. And it has become white and much softer. I wonder whether my “normal” hair will ever return? How does chemo change one’s body chemistry to cause hair to fall out and, then, change color and texture as it returns? No one has ever explained the process to me; perhaps because they do not understand…perhaps they believe the process involves voodoo or magic or electro-chemical storms taking place just beneath the skin where hair follicles happily reside. “They.” Who are “they?” All people who have never explained the process to me? That would constitute all people the world over.  And those on the International Space Station. And people who were secretly involved in the first human moon landing and who have resided there ever since. Did you know about them? Of course not. They landed there in 1959, long before the publicly announced “first moon landing.” The Australian Space Agency was delighted that their competitors (the U.S., Russia, and Peru) kept the secret, of course.

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My mood this morning may seem overtly strange. That is because I am using a complex coding structure to communicate a message of truth and beauty throughout the space between the stars. But you can only see it at night.