Sometimes it felt as though they were all living within a Hieronymus Bosch painting, the beak of a bird-devil jammed up the ass of a donkey-man, flagellants in a garden of earthly delights….
As Officer Cheryl Fisher pulled her squad car onto the block of boarded-up houses, she could see black smoke curling up from the center of a ring of people gathered in a vacant lot the way the NGers sometimes made a bonfire of tires they’d stripped from Hummers, drinking and dancing at their flash parties. But as faces turned her way, she could see that many of them were too old to be part of that scene. And too well-dressed. No embedded chips. No piercings or top-knots. No odor of burning tires. Maybe it was some kind of other protest—like the flash mobs that had taken to burning the corpses of Climate Deniers—old dead men from the last decades like Rep. Lamar Smith, Sen. James M. Inhofe, and other politicians—their names were more famous now than when they were alive—men who could have done something to keep the planet from overheating but instead, gutted science budgets, kicked the legs out from under the planet’s last chance—the historic Climate Agreement of 2015—fought for the ‘rights’ of mines to poison rivers—and men like the Kroch Brothers who poured millions of dollars into electing RedHatters. We Cover the Earth. Pop-up Parties like the Vengeance Now Party would call for a flash raid, and mobs of angry people too young to have known these men in life would show up at a cemetery to dig up the corpse. After a brief trial, they’d burn it. Or hang it, if the body was still in good enough shape for hanging. Then they’d burn it. “Hot enough / for you now?” the mob would chant. So many had shown up for Trump’s trial that the guards either had to start shooting civilians or give up the body; someone kicked the corpse before the trial could start, then more and more people joined in—even the guards—stomping on it over and over—like the body of Mussolini—till there was nothing left….
Suddenly a flash of flame, howls of pain.
No such luck, she told herself, realizing as she approached what was going on. A couple guys in golf clothes—first timers—scattered, thinking they had something to worry about. But most of the others just stood there, glancing her way once in a while, thinking she was going to be part of the show, rushing to get her burn-victim blanket out of the car, and such. But she didn’t fuck with that.
She unholstered her service revolver and aimed at the burning animal.
“Hey!” someone yelled, others scrambling once they saw that she was going to open up whether or not they were in the line of fire.
Her gun sounded like a cannon as she put the burning dog out of its misery.
“The fuck! You could have hit someone!” a man in a red hat yelled as she walked back to the car, wishing a ricochet had hit someone. Then maybe the city would pass an ordinance against bear baiting, dog immolation, or any of the other shit social workers said some people on a dying planet were sure to do, politicians afraid to make shit like this illegal because social workers said men like that would beat their wives, or worse, if they didn’t have a ‘healthier’ outlet.
Her cousin, Ashly, wanted to take a selfie before an ancient undersea coral reef, rising from the desert floor of Texas like a tower of ash. “Ash, Ashly, get it?” she said, adjusting her distance so it looked like she held the ancient coral reef in the palm of her hand….
We cover the earth. The logo of a paint factory showed a cosmic-sized can pouring red paint onto the Earth, oceans of red paint dripping into space. After an exo-planet that was losing its atmosphere was shown to look like Blue Marble Earth—only red, like a red-hot marble—some NG designer took the We Cover the Earth logo and turned it upside down, its red drips now streaming off the planet the way the atmosphere streamed away from Red Marble Earth, as they called it. It became a meme.
“Abortionists, homos, and pornographers want you to believe in Global Warming,” the Rev. Adams said, “so they can go about their business of killing babies, fornicating, and poking God in the eye!... God’s not sending us Global Warming! He’s sending us Noah Warming! Driving an electric car to an orgy won’t save you! Nor will gay marriage to an organic chicken! No, the only way to save ourselves from the deluge is to climb aboard the Ark He has already given us,” he said, shaking his Bible at the cheering stadium of believers….
Euclid would have never made it at the Stitch ‘n Bitch, Mary Anne thought, crocheting her bit of the Evolutionary Tree. Nor Darwin. She’d been doing a math Ph.D. when she wandered into the combination knitting supplies and feminist bookstore just off campus, just to check it out, maybe knit a pandemic mask like some of her DIY friends did as a way to unwind. A class had been in progress—Extreme Knitting—with a crunchy standing in the center of a knitting circle: women on folding chairs, drinking kombucha out of jars, knitting and just hanging out. Most of them were also grad students, a retired philosophy prof, and a few
others. But unlike the hipster caps or baby booties she was expecting, they seemed to be crocheting abstract sculptures. “A coral reef, actually,” one told her. “We’re crocheting a replica of The Caribbean Coral Reef that died in 2012.”
It was part of a project begun years back by Christine and Margaret Wertheim who hoped to enlist women, and men, from all over the world to recreate all the extinct coral reefs in crochet, a technique that proved perfect for modeling the folding and ruffled surfaces that appeared in lettuce leafs and other plants and animals, including corals. So Mary Anne joined them, taking on an area that she reworked in white yarn, since before the reef vanished, it had been bleached of color by a warming sea.
She loved the non-Euclidian nature of it: the way the folds and curves were perfect representations of hyperbolic planes, that is, folded and curved planes that made it possible for a line and a point to have dozens, even hundreds of parallel lines, instead of just one, as Euclid drew it up on a flat sheet of paper. Crocheting in the circle of women one day, they got to talking about how lots of bio majors and paleontologists were into crochet. It was a mental margarita, and fun, but it also helped them imagine how an animal that had been squashed flat as it fossilized might have looked in its 3D form; they got to thinking about crocheting clams, sea slugs, nudibranches, and other creatures; they got to talking about the math, and how the non-Euclidian surfaces they were crocheting also resembled 3D models of Big Data problems. “I wonder if crochet could be used to put the two together, to model the evolution of an animal,” Zøe had said, “what with its ins and outs, its folds, and multiple parallel lines?….” Then, almost simultaneously, they all cried out, “Or the whole freakin’ Tree of Life!”—not the individual animals, of course, but the hyperbolic planes that species as a group could map onto, each thread of yarn made up of thousands of little strands; frayed strands would resemble all the dead ends that most mutations ended in, each branch that continued hooked into the others, the strands together making the millions of branching and parallel lines of individual creatures.
Crowd sourcing the labor was easier than anyone had imagined, thousands of women in hundreds of Stitch ‘n Bitches, or in their own kitchens, or in retirement homes, before TVs, at the pool, or in subway cars, all crocheting according to the patterns Mary Anne generated, then posted on Mechanical Turk. Her original group took on the line of dinosaurs that included Archaeopteryx—a small dinosaur that people used to think was an early bird, but had since been reclassified as a dinosaur ‘experiment’ in which lots of parallel evolutionary paths were trying to figure out how to create a ‘birdlike body.’ Mary Anne herself took on ancestral Psocoptera, the hundreds of parallel and branching lines of lice that eventually produced the feather lice that infested feathered dinosaurs, then later birds.