The formative years
Man-Rock lives in an unseen chamber deep in the Earth’s Mantle.
Man-Rock swims through solid stone like it was water. Man-Rock is a force!
Man-Rock knows everything there is to know about geology and he is ancient not nine and a half. Man-Rock: can surface and descend to the Mantle of the Earth at will. Man-Rock: can cause volcanic eruptions whenever he wants. Man-Rock: can take on the shape of anything as long as it is made of rock, even a mountain or any kind of rock. He could be a diamond and sell himself for three million dollars.
To transport supplies and visitors and also prisoners to his headquarters in the Mantle, which is called Tetraglyph Cavern, he drives a special tunneling car that looks like a submarine except with a giant drill on the front. It is called the Subterrain, from terrain meaning Earth and sub like the first part of the word submarine.
He is a friend and an ally with the Stalagnosaurs but the mortal enemy of Molton, King of the Earth’s Core, who is always trying to invade Tetraglyph Cavern and destroy the Surface Dwellers.
When he adopts his above-ground humanoid form Man-Rock lives in a house right here in Brooklyn. His alternate-identity mother is a medical doctor of psychiatry but she lives in Manhasset, Long Island, with a guy who is barely out of high school and probably does cocaine and drugs. Man-Rock at home and school wears a corduroy vest and slacks, normal clothes, and pretends to eat, but in reality his source of food and nutrition is lava.
His above-ground father has not guessed his so-called son’s secret identity because he never ever goes in his room. That is where Man-Rock keeps his maps of Tetraglyph Cavern and his Subterrain that when it is not in use is disguised as a bunk bed even though Man-Rock does not even have a brother. His dad bought the bunk bed before Man-Rock was born and his mother moved to Manhasset, Long Island. He bought it when he had Certain Expectations of Man-Rock’s mother which She Did Not Deliver On.
But as we were saying Man-Rock’s above-ground dad is unaware that his son dwells deep in the Earth’s Mantle with his only companions and friends being the Stalagnosaurs that look like stalagmites until they move and then you have to duck or they stab your head.
It is night, but a desk lamp burns in Man-Rock’s bedroom. He is working on pictures for a new Subterrain with a very-back seat for his girlfriend and baby who he will carve out of pure stone from the center of Mt Everest. He also has drawings of them. They are naked because rock people can not wear clothes or they will rip. And do you think clothes grow on trees? Like sweater trees or underwear bushes? No. There is no such thing as underwear bushes. And guess who pays for those clothes! Guess!
Man-Rock’s above-ground father is in the room all the way on the other side of the half bath but you can still hear him yelling at his girlfriend the stewardess who used to teach Man-Rock flute lessons. The yelling is loud but Man-Rock must concentrate. Must CONCENTRATE! What, did he Drink a Whole Bucket of Lead Paint, did the Stupid Nurse Drop Him on His Head? Takes After His Mother. The rear compartment of the Subterrain is going to be an eat-in kitchen where you don’t Burn the Goddamn Eggs in the morning because the stove is set on a timer that detects certain food groups and the times at which they cook. It has two full bathrooms. And when you go to the toilet even if you let gas there is a sonic barrier so No One in the House Has to Hear It.
She is saying Tim! She yells about the bitch and how he will not stay away from her. Let her go! He says that she is a whore and then he changes his mind and says sorry, did I call you a whore? I meant dirty whore. You are the one who parks outside your wife’s clinic out in Manhasset and waits for her! That is what she says to Man-Rock’s above-ground dad and it makes him get quiet.
Man-Rock’s future wife and baby are small enough for him to carry them around in a special crystal box. So that if they get out of line, pop! He can pick them up and put them in the crystal box like that and leave them in the trunk of the Subterrain. There is a special heat shield around the new Subterrain that keeps Molton’s lava rays from penetrating the hull. When he knows that Man-Rock is married he will try to take the baby away by blasting the Subterrain with lava rays and an Injunction.
Man-Rock turns out the desk lamp and sits in the dark looking at the notebook where he can not see the drawings anymore except on his Mind Screen. When you switch off the light super fast you can see an outline of what you just looked at on your Mind Screen, but it is bright instead of dark. Like the purple mimeograph paper that rubs off on your thumb if you pick it up, so Don’t.
Now the above-ground dad is right outside Man-Rock’s door telling his girlfriend fine. He tells her fine, you are right. I should just leave Judy alone. I should not let the boy see his own mother.
Like you are just dropping him off. The girlfriend asks do you expect me to believe that?
I don’t expect anything. How could I have any expectations from you?
Man-Rock stands up quietly so the chair does not scrape and he sits in the cockpit of the Subterrain, leaning against a pillow. He lays his stone hand on top of a Pressure-Sensitive panel and the drill bit starts turning. It is so loud that you can not even hear the girlfriend saying some lawyer you are, can not even get divorced right. All you can hear is the drill boring into the yellow and dark yellow carpet of Man-Rock’s bedroom and through the finished basement and into the Crust and then the Mantle of the Earth.
Man-Rock: education
Man-Rock is eternal! He’s several centuries older than 19 even though he sometimes assumes the clever guise of a sophomore. But such is Man-Rock’s destiny that he so goeth over the face of the Earth as a mortal, performing such deeds as mortals do perform including college!
Man-Rock is a force! He can tap the energy of the underworld and focus it on a single point, use it to drive whole industries. Harness it to marshal armies of Petro-Soldiers or power fleets of Drill-Barges that penetrate deep into the Mantle.
Man-Rock embodies the wisdom of the Earth! He takes geology because he can pass every exam without studying, for his is an innate expertise of the planet’s strata and substrata, its tectonics and hidden plenitudes of energy. More than a hundred textbooks’ worth of knowledge reside inside the marbled ken of his brain. The professors are fools. He will crush them with his superlative intellect. He also takes Psychology so that he can peer into the minds of the Surface Dweller and comprehend its retarded ways, and Man-Rock is considering this as a double major.
With his test scores he could get into any small college or liberal arts program across the world. But would that be fair? No. Man-Rock refuses to leverage his ineffable mental powers of cogitation to gain inequitable advantage. Besides, he has an ulterior agenda. The collegiate institution where he has enrolled appears no different from any other large state school. But looks can be deceiving. The campus is in fact a secret portal to the underworld well traveled by Molton, King of the Earth’s Core, to perpetrate his volcanic crimes and destroy mankind by inflaming its own weaknesses. That is why Man-Rock has chosen to enroll here. Even though he could have gotten into a better school if he had applied.
Molton must be stopped!
In his surface alias as Professor Emeritus of Earth Sciences, Molton morphs into the likeness of a harmless hippie guy. He wears rainbow socks and speaks in the boring voice of a yoga instructor. He goes to undergraduate keg parties and hits on Deadhead chicks. His most well-known class is called “Fossil Fuels: Going the Way of the Dinosaur?” and it is popular with girls and English majors. Man-Rock alone sees Professor Molton’s class for what it is, pseudoscience and fuzzy math aimed at bringing the petroleum industry to its knees and severing its Hydra-like heads with the Deceitful Sword of Ecology!
How will Molton do it? By exploiting the Surface Dweller’s twin weaknesses.
One: Sloth; and two: False Sympathy.
Sloth: The Surface Dweller is a complete slacker. He will not dig if he doesn’t have to dig. He will not drill, or pump, or take core samples, or explore the oil-rich Arctic Wildlife Refuge if he can avoid it. If he can use solar or wind power, hydrogen or rendered onion-ring fats, he’ll do that instead. Molton knows this and will completely mess up mankind with easy promises of alternative energy.
False Sympathy: The Surface Dweller is sentimental and soft-headed, weepy and like a big sissy. He cries for the planet, for puffins covered with crude oil. He suffers from the delusion that he has done the Earth harm, sullied her honor and sapped her vital reserves.
Arrogant Surface Dwellers! Don’t you know that the realm of biological life is a mere 14.4 kilometers thick, not including the microbes that live deep in the thermal vents or certain kinds of geese that can fly over Mt Everest. The Mantle on the other hand is 2,900 kilometers deep. To suppose that there aren’t enough fuel reserves buried in those vast depths? Why, it’s sheer biospheric arrogance.
The Earth isn’t like some charcoal briquette that burns out the first time you grill a burger. No. The Earth is a source of untold power, untold and unexpendable by pitiful human industry. Arrogance!
* * *
The dorm is quiet. It is late morning, and the surface creature who snores on the bed across the room from Man-Rock is the fool called Jim. He majors in women’s studies or something but doesn’t know shit about Mother Earth and her hidden riches. He is overweight by at least twenty pounds and Man-Rock has already demonstrated how easily he might crush him, by pushing him down in the dormitory’s group shower and leaving him there while his fellow Surface Dwellers laughed their asses off.
Jim is Slothful: He does not run time trials or work out with the rowing team. He does not bench press, for instance, 275 pounds. The Surface Dweller is unwilling to rise at dawn to practice tae kwon do at the Humble Dojo, even though it is but a short walk from campus.
But of all his totally lame attributes it is Jim’s False Sympathy that is the most vexing. For Jim believes the Earth to be like himself, a warm, impressionable entity that takes offense at every perceived slight and experiences pain and cries like some kind of total pussy. How many times will Man-Rock have to tell him that the Earth does not feel? It has no limbic system to manage and regulate emotions, no amygdala to generate fears, no sensitivities or expectations that can go unmet. And as for physical pain? Ha! The Earth knows no pain. The Earth scorns pain. Show me the central nervous system of the world! Show it to me. It doesn’t exist.
One of the Surface Dweller’s legs sticks out of his sleeping bag. His hairy foot rests on the floor. The bong has spilled and the air is redolent with better times, which were last night when Man-Rock and Jim were partying seriously hard. There are other reminders of festivities past. A throw pillow with a batik pattern or some shit lies all ripped up on the floor between the beds, a gift from Jim’s mother, now a victim of Man-Rock’s appetite for cruelty and disregard for human sentimentality.
A certain song has been playing on infinite repeat for several hours now. Is it true, wonders Man-Rock, that Iron Maiden were once Mantle-dwelling creatures like himself? This is Jim’s opinion, that they lived in a volcanic conduit before moving to England in the early 1980s. This was the idea that he posited last night when they were smoking weed. Is it conceivable, as Man-Rock’s roommate suggested, that the guitar of Adrian Smith is tuned to the sonorities and vibrations of Earth’s electromagnetic field? That his instrument is plugged directly into the superheated Core itself? This would be cool, but also complicated. Besides what does Jim know about the Earth and her untapped sonorities? What could he know about the vibration points of ancient metals or the conversion of tectonic tremors into masterful guitar solos? Nothing. Jim knows nothing. He has a turtle. But now, lying in bed and listening for like the hundredth time to the dueling leads of “Number of the Beast,” Man-Rock wonders, could the Surface Dweller be right? Or was Jim, as Man-Rock suspected, just fucking with him. Like everyone else. He listens to Joy Division and shit.
Then, quite suddenly, Man-Rock is racked with torment. He pounds his pillow with his wrathful granite fists and sits up in bed.
Why, oh why did Man-Rock say anything to his roommate about Tetraglyph Cavern? Why did he mention the Subterrain? Or Molton, King of the Core, and his secret surface identity? Last night’s conversation cascades over his brain like pyroclastic flow down a mountainside.
“Did you ever think that maybe there are inhabitants like deep in the Earth’s Mantle?” Man-Rock asked his roommate.
“Like humanoids?” said Jim.
“Yeah, more or less.”
“Why, did you see one?”
“No. Shit, man,” said Man-Rock, packing another bowl. “You’re fucked up, dude.”
Man-Rock gazes at his slumbering comrade (or is he the enemy?). He can see the yellow Post-It note that is still stuck to the guy’s forehead. The one that says WAKE UP in black Sharpie. It is supposed to remind him that he has a final and to get up extra early.
The weak-brained Surface Dweller will not remember what grave secrets he revealed to him the night prior because he can’t handle his liquor and when he smokes pot he gets all giggly like a total weenie. But Man-Rock must be more discreet in the future.
He consults the clock radio and determines that the solar hour is approaching noon. Late for class again. He unplugs the portable disc player. The manful strains of Bruce Dickerson, the lead vocalist of Iron Maiden who expressed the pervasive conspiracy of evil with a voice like high-pitched thunder and shook his leather-gloved fist in the face of human altruism, is sucked back into the subterranean antechamber from whence he originated.
Man-Rock goes outside and climbs behind the wheel of his Subterrain, which is retrofitted to look exactly like an ordinary production-model Jeep Grand Cherokee.
Today is his above-ground father’s sixty-fifth birthday and the only reason he remembers this is that his stepmother the ex-stewardess who once taught Man-Rock flute mailed him a birthday card in a manila envelope. It was already addressed to his father and stamped so Man-Rock would have no excuse this year and let his dad down again.
Man-Rock watches the birthday card slide back and forth across the dash. He circles the post office once, twice, before finally pulling into the lot beside a Le Car with a LOVE YOUR MOTHER sticker on the bumper.
Clutching the envelope in his mighty hand of pure granite he pauses before the slot for large envelopes and parcels. He inserts the birthday card but does not release it.
What is he doing? What simpering voice of human lameness has overcome Man-Rock? What use does he have for Surface Dweller niceties? What are birthdays to the Earth’s Eternals, especially birthdays for jerks like his dad who couldn’t even keep his mom happy? Their ways are not his ways. Man-Rock is stone. They are flesh. Stone has no nerves, no limbic system. Flesh feels; stone does not. Flesh cries, flesh smiles, but stone has no eyes with which to cry, stone has no lips with which to smile.
Man-Rock’s surface dad is a complete dick and shall not be rewarded for his unholy alliance with the stewardess who used to teach flute! He inserts the envelope into the slot still holding it fast in his igneous grip.
“Why do I do these things? Is it my paucity of will?” he says aloud. “Has the life force been sapped from my being after too long in this biospheric fantasy land of air and light?” He rests his head against the wall.
But what’s that? A voice from behind!
“That one’s for parcels,” it says. “You want the regular envelope slot over there.”
The woman wears a postal uniform that she has embellished with gold fringe.
“Oh,” says Man-Rock.
He moves to the proper slot and releases the birthday card.
Man-Rock charges out of the parking lot with a mighty squealing of tires and a thick cloud of spent petroleum vapor. He is way late for his Earth sciences class but does not care. Today is a field trip to the abandoned sand quarry where the Professor Emeritus intends to instruct his students on the so-called ravages of surface mining.
Man-Rock knows well the road to the quarry out past the airport, having spent many weekend nights there contemplating the frailties of man and drinking King Kan–size Molsons while passenger jets circled overhead. He pulls in to the gravel lot narrowly missing the white Econoline van with university plates. Man-Rock follows the path past the old foreman’s trailer. He crosses the tracks and climbs through a rusting box car to scale a windy bluff.
There he looks down into the sand-blown gash in the Earth. Below he sees the white ponytail and drawstring jazz pants of his rival, Professor Molton. His students gather while he fills the soft folds of their brains with falsities about the geologic toll of surface mining.
Man-Rock returns to the parking area and mounts his Subterrain, turning it over with a furious cranking of the key. He can hear the pistons firing inside like the engine of the Earth itself, the liquid outer Core spinning around the hard kernel of iron-nickel alloy. He guns it — past the trailer, over the tracks, and around the box car — until the Subterrain looms on top of the bluff, its grill snorting and the rear tires kicking up great gusts of silica and exhaust fumes.
Man-Rock turns on the radio and in an awesome harbinger of the righteousness of his cause the song turns out to be “Run to the Hills,” also from Maiden’s excellent third album. Molton looks up and in his wizened face Man-Rock can see all the sedimentary wisdom of geologic time. Molton knew this day would come.
He has been waiting.
It would be so easy for Man-Rock to spur his Subterrain. Throw it into gear. Peel out. Bound over the edge of the bluff into the sand pit and extinguish Molton forever! But that would be giving his nemesis precisely what he wants. Molton would merely slough off his Surface Dweller disguise and slip like nickel ether into the pores of the planet to hide in his Core fortress.
No. Better to retreat and live to fight another day, on another plane, deep in the underworld where they might meet as equals. Man-Rock rolls down the passenger-side window and leans across the seat.
“Jerkwad!” he shouts, his fist in the air. And then, with still more ferocity:
“Asswipe!”
Then Man-Rock is gone, the Subterrain burrowing into the soft bluff as he makes his steady, grinding progress toward the safety of Tetraglyph Cavern.
Man-Rock: career
The Subterrain reverts to its above-ground form, a corner office on the 33rd floor of Sellers Tower in downtown Houston. Man-Rock straightens his tie and assumes the capable frown of a VP of research and exploration. He works for a multinational petroleum concern, and though this is merely his surface vocation he must take it very seriously.
Across his desk Man-Rock spreads a large blueprint, pinning down the four corners with core samples. From his sterling silver case of Rapidographs he selects a .35-millimeter pen and sets to work making corrections, adding details and revising specs. But soon his gaze wanders from his work to the high office windows. It is a winter afternoon and the light is leaving Houston in a rush, to warm another frail swath of humanity. He offers the failing day a pitying look.
From his executive perch high in the corporate headquarters of ICI Petroleum Man-Rock surveys the city. The biosphere drinks deeply from the Earth, turning her vast reserves of power into heat, light, motion. The beltway is choked with semis. He hears music and voices and alarms. Curling irons make the not-so-pretty girls just a little bit prettier. Wimpy men are knocking off early to make their electrolysis appointments.
Man-Rock has attained distinction in his field, wealth, power, and political connections, yet to him mankind remains a mystery.
He stands and walks to the window, shielding the glare with his own shadow.
Leaning against his exercise machine, a crossbow with a padded seat, he feels the reflexive tightening of his deltoids. He feels another, unfamiliar, tightening, behind his eyes. Could these be tears?
Tonight his surface parents would be celebrating their fortieth wedding anniversary, had they remarried — and had they lived.
The Surface Dweller, Man-Rock thinks, is indolent beyond words. He will not work for greatness; he’d rather do okay things and then televise them. His industry is a workshop of playthings, his monuments straw huts, his legacy fleeting, a buzzing nuisance to the switching tail of time.
Dead. From two different kinds of cancer just three weeks apart. Alone. Wanting each other but alone. They could have suffered together, left the world together in one another’s arms. Instead the stewardess got almost everything his father owned, and Man-Rock took whatever his mother had left. Some antique books, worthless art. A split-level in Manhasset.
The Surface Dweller is vain beyond comprehension. He fancies himself the Earth’s great parasite, imagines that he is draining the world of its vitality. But the thin layer of life that stretches across the horizon — that anemic little word: society — is so thin, so insignificant that all its vast achievements could no more deplete the Earth than a slick of algae consume the ocean.
He paid his mother’s utility bills. Hired a cleaning crew. Sold the house for more than it was worth. At least she’d shown him the courtesy of dying while the market was strong.
Man-Rock sits again and switches on his desk lamp. His Rapidograph flies across the blueprint. He makes abstruse calculations in his head, wielding massive figures, carrying the one, doing math. Everything must be just so for his meeting with the director Monday morning. It will be an important day, not just for the Surface Dwellers but for the Earth herself. Man-Rock will at last reveal his true identity. He will make known his special purpose and the secret endeavor that has consumed his nights and weekends for nearly four decades.
The endeavor he has dubbed Project Molton.
Phase One: the construction of an underground observatory, possibly in Curaçao, possibly in Gabon, at the lower limits of the Crust, that will find the volcanic paths of least resistance to the center of the Earth.
Phase Two: the building of a new, vastly superior Subterrain. The blueprint shows a vehicle of unimaginable burrowing power propelled with his own patented Plas-Drill, a cone of emitters that shower the stone with plasma rays, carving a clean and ineluctable path to the center of the Earth.
Phase Three: penetration and exploitation of the planet’s greatest energy source, Molton’s Georeactor at the Core of the Earth. They will laugh. When he tells them, they will laugh. There is no nuclear reactor at the center of the Earth!
But how wrong they are. Man-Rock has seen it with his own eyes.
His discovery came one idle Saturday as Man-Rock patrolled his beloved Mantle in the form of nickel ether. As he approached the Core he could sense it, the presence of uranium 235, bristling and breaking apart somewhere below. Man-Rock’s eyes felt leaden and hot, his field of vision was filled with ghastly hallucinations, and sinuses pounded.
Yet he forged on. Soon the sunless depths of the Mantle were filled with the most spectacular adamantine glow. Before him appeared the Core itself, like a Japanese lantern of flowing metal. Man-Rock tore aside the white-hot scrim and peered inside Molton’s fiery lair.
He knew full well that his life was in jeopardy. If Molton caught him, he would declare Geo-War, an epic battle between Man-Rock’s Stalagnosaurs and Molton’s Fission Cobras. But still he lingered, at the gates of — what? — Heaven? Hell? Through the swirls of white fluid he could see a hard kernel of combustion. It was a small sun or an atom bomb.
Surface scientists call this the Georeactor, the hypothetical source of geothermal energy and the Earth’s magnetic field. But this was no hypothesis. It was real. The magnetism was so potent that Man-Rock was paralyzed. Locked in its grip, his very being was reduced to position and number — as inert as a Cartesian coordinate!
He knew he must flee — while there was still time. But no — it was too magnificent to look away! This was Molton’s engine! This was the treasure the evil king had been hoarding throughout the eons: The controlled nuclear maelstrom that fired the earthly sphere with an eternal source of ever-renewable energy! And Man-Rock would claim it — claim it in the name of mankind! Claim it in the name of ICI Energy Exploration, an ICI family company!
But first he had to escape the ever-tightening grip of its geomagnetic talons.
“Must … break … free! Must … escape … Molton’s … geomagnetic snare!”
Tearing himself away required an act of uncanny tectonic will. He retreated up through the Mantle to the safety of Tetraglyph Cavern, to reflect on what he had seen. He had visited Molton’s lair and witnessed the single greatest source of energy on Earth. And he would — even if it spelled his doom — return to claim it as his own!
A knock at the office door! Man-Rock rolls up the diagram and stashes it next to his mini-fridge just as an impudent Surface Dweller enters.
“Danny!” It is the one they call Mark Oswald, PhD, senior geochemist at ICI Petroleum and insufferable fool, who utters Man-Rock’s surface name. “It’s Rack Attack Friday, big man!”
This is undisputable. Every Friday night Man-Rock and Mark Oswald join in the bestial surface ritual of barbecued pork ribs and the challenge known as all-that-can-be-eaten.
The restaurant is in a stretch of big box stores fronting the beltway. As they approach the marquee smiles down on them with its meaty red light: LEN’S RIB PALACE. The hostess greets them with a pair of menus the size of tombstones. Across her bosom her t-shirt reads HANDS OFF MY RACK!
“We’ll take two specials,” says Mark Oswald.
A pair of plates arrive, the diameter of manhole covers. They are laden with spareribs and sides. The two men dine in near silence. Mark Oswald grunts, smears sauce on his glasses. Man-Rock feigns satisfaction. This is not food fit for one of Earth’s immortals! He hungers for mafic lava rich in magnesium and iron. His mind runs to mythic ribs, the seed of Eve torn from Adam. Adam the first Surface Dweller thrown in an act of cosmological pottery from the very clay of the Earth.
Mark Oswald tears open yet another Moist-Nap packet; his chin is red with sauce; he signals to the waiter for more Moist-Naps. He thinks he is the hunter, eating all he can. Man-Rock eats hardly anything, looking with scorn upon the ravenous Surface Dweller.
Mark air-wipes his own cheek to indicate that Man-Rock has sauce on his face.
Man-Rock says, “This side?”
Mark says, “No, left side. Other side.”
Man-Rock says, “Oh.” He dabs.
“Everything okay?” says Mark Oswald. “You barely touched your side orders.”
Man-Rock eats a conciliatory forkful of slaw.
“What have you been working on?” says Mark.
Man-Rock taps the plastic fork against his teeth and looks up at the drop ceiling.
“Just the usual. Specs on that Resolute Bay project. Why do you ask?” Man-Rock takes another forkful. Picks up a rib and presses it nervously to his lips.
Just say it, Man-Rock! Tell the insolent Surface Dweller what you’re working on!
Tell him that you plan to tap into the inexhaustible power supply at the center of the Earth! Tell him!
“You know, just specs and stuff.”
“Okay, sure,” says Mark. “Because I saw you had some big diagram on your desk. Looked like some kind of drill.”
Tell him!
“Did I tell you my dad asked my mom to get remarried,” Man-Rock says. “Like six months before he died. I found a pack of letters when I was cleaning out her house in Long Island.”
“Get out! That’s weird but kind of sweet. Didn’t they split up when you were a kid? Didn’t he marry like your piano teacher?”
“Flute, but yeah.”
“What did your mom say?”
“Don’t know. I never found any letters on my dad’s end. The stewardess would have burned them anyway.”
“Speaking of death, I just got my funeral arrangements all set up. So my wife won’t have to … you know….” He salts and resalts his macaroni salad. Pushes his macaroni salad aside. “What about you, Dan? How you fixed for burial and stuff?”
Man-Rock’s answer does not come quickly. His gaze falls in the middle distance, somewhere just above Mark’s plate of ribs, where his mind conjures up the scene of his final horror and liberation.
“Um, Dan…you okay?”
The Funeral of Man-Rock
Man-Rock is so old. In his Earth guise he has passed a mere seventy-nine years. But in the underworld his age may only be measured by the geologic clock. And even the eon hand of that mighty timepiece must at last point to the hour of death. For all entities must expire whether they are hewn from flesh, from iron-nickel alloy, or from stone.
It is the day of his funeral, when the subterranean being known as Man-Rock will at last be returned to the Earth. The casket is hoisted above the grave but no mourners have gathered to pay final respects to the one they knew of as Dan Meese. There is no one left: Mark Oswald the geochemist, his college roommate Jim, the ex-stewardess, his surface mother and surface father — all dead.
The minister clears his throat and the casket is lowered into the soil. He walks away to let the undertakers finish the job, scooping and tamping the dirt with the backs of their shovels until Man-Rock’s resting place is a red scar in the green sod. Another lonely soul committed to perfect solitude.
One of the men takes a packet of licorice whips from his windbreaker pocket, offering one to his companion. They chew and talk about the ordinary consequences of death: the shovels that must be returned to the shed, the red clay that stains the knees of your jeans. But there is nothing ordinary about this burial.
Suddenly the graveyard is seized by a terrible tremor. The air is permeated with the odor of plasma and incinerated rock. The mounded gravesite pulsates and then implodes, sending the two men tumbling into a great chasm.
Inside the coffin Man-Rock manipulates a touch-sensitive panel, setting the coordinates for his final destination. The Plas-Drill strafes the bedrock, and his Subterrain bores down and down and down until it reaches the Mantle. Man-Rock enters Tetraglyph Cavern where he will reside in glorious loneliness forever.
* * *
Man-Rock falls silent, fixing Mark Oswald with his stony eyes. He does not smile.
Oswald laughs.
“Man, you had me going there for a minute!” he says, looking relieved. “You’re a hell of a character, Dan.” He wipes his mouth. “Hell of a character.”
Then Mark Oswald looks on in abject terror as Man-Rock eats first one, then two, then three half racks of ribs and two parfait glasses of banana pudding. Man-Rock is a force!
