Jack Acid, Freelance Priest

By Miracle Jones

“Don’t say it...”

Jack looked at me sternly. His eyes were narrowed into squinty little slits and his jaw dangled at an authoritarian angle. I grinned evilly back at him, shutting my eyes to block out his derision.

“Don’t say it,” Jack repeated, louder.

I opened my mouth to speak. Jack began backing up, putting his hands to his ears.

I cleared my throat.

“For the love of God, spare me this one thing...don’t say what I know you are going to say. We’ve both been thinking it all afternoon, and surely you’ve had plenty of time to quash the need you must feel to express your utterly ridiculous, unbearably lame little joke.”

I opened one eye.

Nope.

“This place is a dump!” I shouted, laughing my face into a twisted rictus of joy.

Jack picked up his hat, like he was going to leave, like it was the last straw. I set the empty can of Shasta I had been drinking between frenzied bouts of work down on the floor and kicked it, pretending it was in my way. It bounced off a glowing wall-sconce and landed back at my feet, causing me to shake my head sadly in feigned frustration. Jack could maybe withstand my pun, but my pantomime of disgust was rock solid. When he cracked, I broke up again. The walls of our tiny little home both shook and supported us as we leaned against them, laughing our asses off.

“So what time are your friends getting here?” asked Jack.

“Hard to say,” I said, collapsing, spent, into a pile of pillows. Jack sighed. I got out my electric typewriter, put it in my lap, and thought I’d see about getting some more work done.

Not an easy prospect. There were plenty of distractions.

Our place was surely the most spectacular, gaudiest, most flamboyant domicile in which I had ever had the pleasure of leaving apple cores lying around. Jack’s purloined collection of oddities and effluvium from seemingly all around the world and my trusty, well-trammeled garbage sack full of low-class necessities meshed together perfectly in some sort of glittering, polyphonic rotisserie of sheer Rabelaisian excess. It hurt your mind just right.

Let me hit the highlights. Pretend you are standing on our doorstep.

When you walk in, you are immediately exposed to our most shocking set piece. Picture a deep red, crushed velvet divan next to a cardboard box with slits in it for shelves painted to look like a Looney Tunes ACME-brand safe. Atop the safe sits a dainty traditional Japanese tea service. Real porcelain, with jade handles. On the wall above the whole menagerie, framed in cherry wood and lit by a strand of chili-pepper lights, is a velvet blacklight picture of a thickly-muscled, mighty-thewed Norse warlord, holding his four-foot-tall pointily erect pecker in two heavy hands as if it were Excalibur itself. He is standing on a mountain, lightning is cracking behind him, and in red, 3-dimensional letters the words “Onan the Barbarian,” pop out holographically like Lucasfilm special effects. The expression on Onan’s face, unholy anguish and sexual torment, never fails to tickle my radish. You expect him to need an umbrella at any moment, as he looks like he is about two seconds away from being a manchowder blowout. We share the blame: the framing belongs to Jack - the painting is, of course, mine.

But that is just one example of the disconsonant weirdness. Here’s another. At the far end of the dumpster is a bookshelf which reaches all the way to the ceiling, filled with, among other things, my truly fantastic collection of pillaged vinyls from back in the early nineties when everybody made the switch to CDs and started chunking their records out their windows, noses in the air, like these previously cherished pieces of their history were Ebola-infected beer coasters. I like punk, and classic rock, and rock that grinds, and death metal, and basically anything fearless and heart-starting. Unfortunately, it has been years since I have owned a record player, having pawned it for food almost immediately after scrounging one up. No problem: Jack happens to own a wicked, mint condition Victrola phonograph, for God’s sake, and only a single album. Beethoven’s Ninth. He tells me he has to buy it new every year, because he listens the black off of it. To make a long story short, you haven’t lived until you’ve danced naked around your living room screaming along to the Violent Femmes as they spew forth their sonic angst from a phonograph you have to crank first.

We don’t have too terribly much furniture. I strung my hammock up in front of the book case and Jack sleeps in his big disgusting black leather recliner - what I call his Sleazy Chair. We have a little table in the front that is designed to be sat at Indian-style, probably initially used decades ago for dealing weed and smoking a hookah on. There are tapestries, and all manner of pillows and crannies, and dangling from the center of the ceiling is a massive crystal chandelier with electric candles in it. Every other candle is, naturally, a G.I. Joe with a wick. Jack is fond of ornate mirrors, so there are many of those, giving the illusion that the dumpster is much bigger than it actually is. There is a mini-fridge, a couple of footlockers, a lamp or two, and a prison toilet bought at a surplus store. The toilet is tastefully docked behind a Japanese screen, although we have a courtesy leave-the-room policy when it looks like the situation is going to be inordinately noxious.

There are at least seven different kind of wallpaper, and three shades of interior paint. Our floor has yellow shag carpet, and somewhere Jack found a rug that looks exactly like the hide of a monstrously obese plaid-suited man. He looked at me knowingly when he brought it in, winked, and said: “It’s a writer-skin rug. There are elbow patches.” He was right. I don’t have the heart to tell him, but even though I know it is just a gag, I find it terrifying.

Oh, and then there was my little project. I took a Saturday, drop-clothed everything, and turned our ceiling into a Day-Glo reproduction of Heironymous Bosch's "Garden of Earthly Delights." When you squinch up your eyes just right, everything wiggles. There are pillows underneath the best part of it, and that’s where I like to sit and do my writing: where I feel most inspired by the gods of decadence and debauch. De Sade had a secret room with a single tapestry, and I feel lucky to have a nice big ceiling.

It was here I hacked away at my typewriter, trying to put the finishing touches on a story, part of a larger work, entitled “In which Miss Mona and the Gardner Discuss Alternate Uses for the Weed Whacker.” (Maybe you’ve actually read that one. It won an award, I think) We were expecting company, but I had a deadline and a reliable lead on a publisher looking for copy who dealt strictly in overseas milking mags.

Jack was doing something with a deck of playing cards. I got nervous energy vibes from him, but I was demonically engrossed.

“Miracle!”

He couldn’t stand the tension, eventually, and had to interrupt me. I sighed and reached for the White-Out.

“So they are definitely going to be here, right? I really do want to meet them, you know. It has been so long since I have entertained...company.”

“Jack, relax. Zeke and my sister are going to love you. I barely know you, and I already love you. You are lovable. This place is hard to find, and my sister has only been on time once in her life. And I don’t think it counts when it’s a C-section.”

Jack gave me a stink-eyed stare.

“Then I suppose I shall wait patiently,” said Jack. Jack sat down in his Sleazy Chair, crossed his legs, and began to do what I thought of as his meditation, but was, he assured me, merely sitting there and actively doing nothing, meditative or otherwise. His not doing anything occasionally required him to crack his neck and tap his fingers to some sort of unseen beat. And often when he did this for long periods of time he would end up talking and giggling to himself very softly...too softly for me to make out what he was saying. His near-silent internal conversations were only noticeable for the intensity with which Jack would try to hide them. It wasn’t quite creepy. Just intriguingly odd. Although, to tell you the truth, most things my new roommate did could be placed along a continuum ranging from the intriguingly odd to the charmingly eccentric to the just plain roasthouse cracker barrel loop-de-loo f-u-c-k-e-d - u-p. But I was beginning to get used to the idea that even if I didn’t know what was going on, Jack never did anything without a reason.

For instance, tonight was a special night. Here we were waiting for a late-night soiree to begin involving my best friend Zeke and my sister Veronica. It would mark our two weeks anniversary of living together in the new place, and the night in which we were finally all moved in and all of the things we needed were finally up and running.

Por exemplar, water and electricity. Both stolen. Jack got us these staples in the most roundabout and incredible way and it caused me to think twice about the history of this man I had only assumed was some sort of fellow Bohemian escapist like me, but who I was quickly beginning to realize I knew absolutely nothing about. He had some amazing talents...and I was only beginning to get my fingernail underneath the last coat of sealant.

I suppose I can tell you about all of this since the place no longer exists. It’s been a long time since I’ve even heard anybody mention its name. I think the storms have passed, and I no longer sleep with one eye open anymore. But sometimes...just sometimes...I wonder...

Like I said, Jack never did anything without a reason. Eventually. Allow me to fill you in, therefore, on how he managed to procure our subsistence and comfort. Lo, by engaging in an amazing series of calculated moves, a ludicrous foray into intuitive genius which led to the very limit of my ability to follow a causal chain and which Jack shrugged off like it was breakfast in bed, we now had the ability to operate as many personal massage devices as any situation could possibly warrant. Now that I think about it, it’s a cool story. It convinced me to live with him: I decided posterity demanded that I begin to chronicle his insights and talents before people like him disappeared off the planet forever.

Let me rewind a bit. You won’t appreciate the full glory until you know all the details. It will probably be another good hour before Zeke and my sister get their dawdly asses here, so we’ve got time. Make sure your fingers are free from the tracking head, and don’t sit so close or the radiation will render you barren and sterile.


2.

This was back the day we met.

There we were, brigands and thieves, having declared minor jihad on municipal reality. We had stolen a dumpster, and we didn’t care who knew it. If all radio stations were not legally bound to play crappy music to keep the traffic accident rate low, I would have cranked something raw.

I drove, Jack spotted for cops. We were lucky. Taking the dumpster to Jack’s undisclosed location proved to be incredibly uneventful and without any further adventure. The attendant adrenalin rush, however, was heady as shit, and I, for one, badly needed the jolt.

Jack instructed me to take a left about fifteen minutes away from 29th street, and behind what appeared to be a random, painfully-average, modern (read boring) grey office building. Grey with an “e” not an “a” because it was just that kind of mealy-mouthed monstrosity, if you can dig it. It didn’t deserve long vowels. The developer had thrown in a sloping stand of dinky corporate trees behind it that created a manicured forest type-area in a pathetic attempt to arrogate aesthetic sensibility. I looked aslant at Jack when we pulled up, but he assured me he knew what he was doing.

“Dubious,” I said.

We dropped off the dumpster in the very back where the trees were thick enough to hide a building behind, maybe 150 yards in, and I prepared to take the truck back to Guadalupe. Jack said he had some business to attend to, and instructed me to meet him back there the following morning, before dawn, with as much of my stuff as I could get loaded up into whatever vehicle I could find.

“Hold on a second,” I said, “I still have to think about this before I agree without reservation to being your roommate. I mean, what kind of utilities are we going to get out here? I would do better at the YMCA.”

Jack paused. This was evidently a new consideration.

“Leave that to me,” said Jack, eventually “And do you have a nicer place to store your things? I get the impression that you have taken a bitter and unwanted plunge into the unglued great unknown and are subsequently without a net in this crazy world, friend Miracle. Perhaps I have been presumptuous.”

Everything I owned was crammed into the eave of an overpass of I-35. It was a good point.

“Alright, I’ll be here at 5, “I said.

“4,” said Jack. “And wear black.”

The next morning I showed up right on time, pushing a wheelbarrow full of my crap...er...borrowed from a nearby hardware store. It was sticky and still outside, the kind of Texas morning that if you were attempting to sleep through it, you would keep waking up and groaning at the alarm clock telling you how much time was passing without you actually getting any rest. I was glad I was out and about: rarely was I ever up this early, and I had forgotten what it smelled like. I had years ago dropped my own personal alarm clock from the top of the Texas Capital onto the Lone Star seal, where it burst into a billion ringing, vibrating bits. That’s a good memory: I hauled ass, didn’t get caught, and it was the most cathartic experience of my young life. I think the security guards even thought it was funny. This was back when terrorism meant blowing up schoolbuses, and not just general happy intractability.

Thinking back on it, I was seized with a sudden jaunty cheerfulness. I started making airplane noises with the barrow and rocketing it high into the air every time I hit a bump. Here I was, poised to throw something else from a very high place and watch it smash into dust and smoke. I was going to smash the bitter routine of my anodyne complacency.

I was more cognizant of the glowing neon sign that told what building the Grey Monster actually was while approaching it in the darkness. Salamander Technologies: A Long, Strong Handicap for the Coming Race. The font was classy, but I still couldn’t tell you what the hell the people who worked there did. I hoped, beyond hope, that they made explosive inflatable sheep for your enemies with barnyard fetishes. Like exploding cigars, except with more fluff. That’s what I would make if I had a million dollars to blow.

As I turned down the Salamander Technologies sidewalk surrounding its parking lot, I could hear a voice in the bushes, whispering to me urgently. Jack? Surely it was Jack.

“Hey...park your sundries, and get over here. The guard is about to make another round. You’ve got a minute and a half.”

I did as I was told, and joined Jack in the pine needles underneath a plasticky-looking power shrub of indeterminate genus and species. In the dark, all I could tell was that it didn’t have sharp poky bits.

“We should be safe here. This night watchman is just about to call it quits for the evening. He takes off an hour early and spends the rest of his shift inebriating himself in his Town Car. Even his name-tag says “Beer.”

I nodded, and then realized that there was no way he could see me in the blackness.

“Alrighty,” I said, “So what’s the damn deal? Are we breaking in? Will we be heisting jewels? Important government documents? Maybe upending all of their ficuses and spelling out dirty words?”

Jack chuckled, clapping me on the shoulder.

“Sure. You are codename ‘Patsy.’”

Not funny.

“Seriously, Jack...what’s the rumpus? I’ve always wanted to climb up the sides of buildings and fire grappling hooks from a homemade pocket cannon, sneaking through the inky night toward a rendezvous with the snake-pit of suffering we call the human soul. But I think there ought to be a crack team of covert operatives to help us. Somebody in a wheelchair, definitely.”

“Down!”

We both ducked as the fuzz made its pass. Probably unnecessarily. This particular cluster - Mr. “Beer” himself - did not command much authority or inspire much fear and docility. In order to maintain perspective, I tried in my head to imbue him with the signifiers of power that one in his position ought to have, but it was difficult. I kept actually seeing him. Um...his...powerful walkie-talkie jutted from underneath his...masterly paunch like the tail of a Death Valley scorpion. Pieces of his last, energizing meal hung in his beard like...warning signs to those who would attempt to usurp his tyrannical hold on his beat...by doing something like, say, trying to steal his dessert. His powerful smell was like...the beached corpse of an abusive, drunken whale.

Mainly, to tell the whole truth, I tried to not to hemorrhage my diaphragm with uncontrollable laughter as this guy waddled past. Jack kept pinching me every time I let loose an involuntary squeak. But it was really nothing, and without much ado the security guard made his way into the parking lot, into his lonely automobile, and, if Jack’s information was accurate (and I had no reason to doubt it) into a bottle of something poisonous and alcoholic.

“Alright, Miracle. Now’s our chance. You cover me: I’m going in. It shouldn’t take me more than fifteen minutes tops. But if something goes wrong, or if it looks like our man “Beer” has grown testicles, you’ll need to cause a distraction and give me time to evacuate myself, so we can try again tomorrow.”

“Try what exactly? And what do you mean distraction?”

With my irony radar, I could feel Jack smirking in the dark, like how a bat can tell she is stalking fruit. Jack reached inside the leather attache case he had with him and pulled out several items, one of which was something squeaky that smelled like latex. Oh shit, I thought. Nothing good has ever come from latex.

“I see,” I said, “My doom.”

“No,” said Jack. “This is merely a very brightly painted mask you can wear while you blow this air-horn, shoot these marker flares, and run screaming as fast as you can in the opposite direction.”

He flipped open his Zippo and snapped it aflame.

“Very cute,” I said, “I didn’t know they made Mother Theresa masks. And I won’t ask why you have one.”

“Probably wise,” said Jack, pulling a plaid ski mask down over his own eyes. “Wish me luck.”

And then he was off, leaving me alone in the dark to lasciviously fondle the faux habit of the Catholic Church’s next great saint. What can I say? I’m a sick man. I got a rush.

Fifteen minutes later, I heard a whistle off in the trees, and knew it would not be necessary for me to make an ass of myself and send “Beer” a’ chugging along after. I was disappointed, but I also realized I hadn’t the slightest idea how to operate a marker flare.

I grabbed the wheelbarrow, and made my way quietly back to the dumpster, trying not to think about the woodland creatures I was certainly turning to oatmeal with my bouncing tire tread. It’s amazing how easy it is to drive over wilderness in a car with no second thoughts, but how careful you are when there isn’t that isolating screen. I suppose, in even this pseudo- forest of corporate build, I could feel the wood’s agitation at our human imposition.

I parked the barrow and we entered our new home. Jack collapsed on the floor, grinning so big he pinned his own ears back. It looked like Jack had already made a couple of trips, as much of his crap was already in bags lining our walls.

“So what was that all about?” I asked immediately, trying on the Mother Theresa mask out of reflex curiosity. I caught my reflection in one of Jack’s mirrors. I was hot.

“Well, have a seat, and I’ll tell you. We now, with luck, ought to have our utilities taken care of. Within a couple of weeks, this place ought to be as operational from a light and water perspective as any building in town. We won’t have any air conditioning or heat, but I figure we are gritty enough to do without those particular luxuries, eh?”

“Speak for yourself, sailor,” I said, in my best Mother Theresa voice. “So how’d we swing that? Not bad for work done in the famously dangerous early morning hours. That’s usually when people like us get stabbed to death or OD on Aqua Net and model glue.”

“Speaking of pointless intoxication,” said Jack.

He pulled out a pink and silver glass pipe and a tiny bit of hydroponic weed in a plastic baggie from inside his ninja wrap. Super reefer. KB. It looked like Jack was ready to celebrate. He inserted a tiny plug, took three or four hits until it was cashed, and then offered the pipe and a fresh plug to me. I declined; he knew I would. Sobriety is piety, says I-ety.

Jack began smoking more slowly. He modulated his voice to sound dramatic and intense like a movie announcer.

“Salamander Technologies is not the innocuous bastion of bourgeois business respectability it pretends to be. They are, in point of fact, one of the three most powerful theoretical futurist technology houses in the country. Hidden like a kernel of analytic jade inside that building, some of the nation’s finest minds gather together on a regular basis to determine just what exactly the trends and metatrends of future normative scientific endeavor will be. For example, they decide like FIENDS and TYRANTS the extent to which computer processor speed will be allowed to increase in any given year. From children’s toys to ballistic missile defense systems, Salamander Technologies is seated, legs dangling, in the highest technological swing, forever poised to loop the swingset and send America down trajectories of intellectual possibility the likes of which you and I can only wet dream about. The Illuminati? Not quite. But up there.”

I chewed on this for a second.

“Hold on now,” I said, “you are definitely bullshitting the right guy, but I still don’t buy it. At my most paranoid, I think every building with more than two stories has a group of wretched old white men in suits planning new ways to keep me down. But that doesn’t make it true. No way. Where’s the security? Where’s the surveillance? You telling me “Beer” out there is some sort of highly-trained mercenary assassin? A master of Flab-Fu, the ancient art of Hypnotic Jiggle Destruction?”

“Ah, Miracle...all of their insights and ideas are purely theoretical. There is nothing to secure or surveil. They deal purely in information. There is no need to call attention to themselves with Draconian security measures and expensive, unwieldy cryptographic procedures. There is merely one room inside that building that is locked up tighter than a solid gold walnut, and those who attend meetings inside know that nothing goes in and nothing goes out, not even clothes. There are few secrets among the naked. Pure and simple. As hermetic as a Mafia coup d’etat. They are probably not the only group of hard-line capitalist thinkers who know the exact size and dimensions of one another’s penises, but they are definitely the most powerful. If you know and trust your associates, and have nothing but a profit motive, it is in the best interests of everyone involved to keep the group’s secrets. They have never had even the slightest breach. Most likely, they never will.”

“So where do we fit in, assuming all of this is true? And why tempt fate by sneaking in and poking the snake with a stick?”

“Understand: I didn’t go inside. That would definitely be dangerously risky. I merely wanted to check their sprinkler system schematic in the janitorial shed. To see where the water pipelines must be,” said Jack.

Smart.

“I get you...so then we would plug into the sprinkler system, create some sort of reservoir, and just take what we need like hungry mosquitos.”

“Precisely. We will need to move this behemoth of ours north about fifty feet, but then we will be perfectly situated to reap all the rewards of civilized living.”

“What about waste water?”

“We’ll find some sort of chemical toilet, and use the great outdoors as much as possible. How do you feel about bathing?”

“As you can probably tell, I am of the opinion that it is a scam perpetrated by doctors and soap corporations to keep us weak, open to infection, and constantly insecure, socially and privately. Also, scent masking keeps the unfit in positions of power, by rendering us unable to smell their insanity and desperation.”

“Excellent. And I shall shower at the bus station.”

That seemed to settle that. And yet...

“But why here? You could steal sprinkler-water from any place in town. Why this particular nightmare factory?”

“It’s such a convenient location. We can walk to the library, and we have our choice of ice cream shops. Lots of pretty college girls. Oh, and I think we may even be on a bus route. What do you have against it?”

This was characteristically vague. I was beginning to realize that Jack’s obtuseness was a personality trait that made me want to throttle him. Out of frustration, I turned the wheelbarrow on its side and dumped out all of my possessions onto the floor.

“Plus,” Jack continued, “Like a remora clinging to the underbelly of a shark, we will be safe here. We will be so close to Salamander that they won’t see us, and their existence outside the loop will easily encompass us inside their protective umbrella, keeping the rain of social pressure and the heat of extortional authority away.”

He was too eager to convince me. I was not that naive.

“I trust that there is some truth in that,” I said, “But don’t try and pull one over on me. You’ve definitely got something cooking with these Salamander Technologies people, and you want to stay close to them. I can feel it. Otherwise you wouldn’t know so much about them. If you are seriously looking for a partner, it is not a good idea to shoot your only candidate off of Planet Reasonable and into low-earth orbit in a rocket-ship made of LIES!”

He chuckled. But I could see I touched a nerve. I had called his bluff. Jack suddenly got a tired and pained look on his scraggly kisser that spoke volumes. I decided to ease back, but Jack now felt like he had to qualify himself. He searched for the right words, but found only insubstantial half-starts. He finally shook his head and held his hands palms-up in the air, silently beseeching my more noble regions for patience.

“We have much to discuss, Miracle, when the time is right,” he said, finally. “But believe me when I say that tonight’s insanity has been a minor affair.”

“Alright, fair enough. But what about electricity? I have appliances that really love and miss me. We share something special.”

Jack laughed.

“I put a little package in their night drop, something I’ve been saving for a rainy day. A sheaf of plans, research materials, and original documents regarding Nikola Tesla, inventor of alternating current. It’s something I picked up from a friend of a friend who did some time behind the Iron Curtain, when the term still applied. It is sealed inside an average, ordinary FedEx box, and I addressed it to the head of the dummy corporation on the placard in their lobby.”

“And what is that supposed to do?” I asked.

“The package’s contents gather together constellated clues that all point to the construction of a device capable of generating massive amounts of free power, based upon simple principles and cheap materials. They will naturally build the proposed device, and naturally test it in the first place they will think of. Here.”

“Why here? I thought you said this was purely an information and theory center.”

“They will be overwhelmed by the cost-effectiveness of the proposition. Do you have any idea how much it costs to power a huge office building like this one? Especially when the whole enterprise is a staggering sunk cost, quite literally a gigantic, 20-story meeting area? More money is wasted every day keeping the air circulating inside this building than it costs to send a classroom of underprivileged children to college. Well, community college anyway. They don’t even rent their unused space to those willing to pay ridiculous market prices, out of paranoiac fear that somebody might put two-and-two together about what goes on in room 222.”

“Go on.”

“Ahem. You may or may not be aware of this, but Nikola Tesla’s most famous dream was to somehow use the entire earth in order to transmit electric current. He was once able to light 200 lamps at a distance of 32 meters, by merely properly using the ground as a temporary conductor. It was Tesla who really invented radio - not Marconi - and he wanted to use the same principle to broadcast raw power. You would just – tune in. It was an obsession, really. He was hired by J.P. Morgan at the beginning of the twentieth century to implement his dream on a grand scale at Colorado Springs, but, as legend goes, as soon as Morgan realized there would be no way to charge for electricity if Tesla succeeded, he cut the program’s funding. Had Tesla finished his research, the new technology would have revolutionized the entire world’s existing economic infrastructure as we know it. Imagine a world where electricity is free.”

“Interesting...go on...”

“Well, it’s been a hundred years since then. Are you so naïve as to think that somebody didn’t come along and pick up where he left off? The package I have sent them contains some important, high-profile phone numbers. I will extend to them the missing crowbar with which to pry the lid off of total electric freedom. They will subsequently cut themselves off, like rabid libertarians, from the civic power grid by creating a localized generator that will, with luck, turn these few acres which we share into a terrestrial powerhouse. We’ll just make a receiver. I can do it with 20 dollars worth of equipment at Radio Shack. Determining the right frequency shouldn’t be too difficult – maybe a week of trial and error.”

“How did you find all this out?”

“Look: this stuff is pretty common knowledge. The government runs all of its secret installations on Tesla generators. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be secret. You could find them all by just backtracking the landlines. I would build a generator myself - it’s really not all that difficult - but I just don’t have access to the equipment and funds. No matter - we will simply let them do the work for us. Their free electricity is our free electricity.”

“Genius!” I said, “But Jack...how do you know about all of this stuff? And why sit on it? I mean, you could be powering the world! This is enormous!”

Jack did a backwards somersault up from the ground. He pointed to the horizon, evidently trying to ignore my queries.

“I don’t want to compete.”

“Jack!”

“Look, Miracle! It’s beautiful. When was the last time you saw a sunrise? The sun moves so much faster than we think it does.”

“Jack!”

“It is poetry in motion...neon nuclear death-ray beauty...”

“Jack!”

“I don’t know what to make of the sun, really. On one hand, it sustains our life and is singularly responsible for every tiny, tidgy thing I consider good. On the other hand...”

“Jack!”

He groaned, and made like he was going to shoot a marker flare at me.

“Miracle, trust me. Keep your mind sharp for problems that will really be difficult, like where we are going to put that chandelier to keep us from banging our heads on it every time we stand up. And what we are going to do about your dismal wardrobe.”

I blinked stupidly in the new sunlight.

“I just don’t want to be completely left in the dark about things, is all,” I said. “I guess you can tell me your story in your own time. I must say, however, that my curiosity limit is fast approaching critical mass.”

Jack nodded.

We watched the sun rise together. I could physically feel, in my gut, the tension leave as Jack realized I was not going to press him further. It was a good morning, and, true to Jack’s word, it would not be long before walking in the forest outside of Salamander Technologies literally put a spark in your step.