Windworker

I was working in the wind yesterday. I said, The wind is blowing from the southeast. I was working on the wind turbine. I like the wind turbine because it makes money and uses few people. A single turbine makes more money than a hundred solar panels, generally. A single turbine employs a few people, mostly on the maintenance. You can put a turbine anywhere, that is the main thing. You have to get permits, of course. But you can put a turbine anywhere that has good wind. The world is full of places with good wind. No, I’m telling a lie. The world is full of places with good wind and bad weather. The desert is full of places with good wind. It’s the desert that is in need of water. But the desert is not always hot. The difference between hot and cold is not just a matter of degrees.
To build a turbine you need steel and cement. Cement is made of lime and sand. Lime is made by heating lime rocks. At what temperature should they be heated? They should be heated until they glow. Then, they must be cooled rather quickly. It is known how to do that. I will not tell you how to cool the lime. You can guess. The cooling makes the lime clay-like.
Clinkers are leftover from the blast furnaces. You can make cement with clinkers. Clinkers are big and heavy. They are not very pretty. The people who make cement would like to rid themselves of the clinkers. The people who make cement can hardly afford to buy marble for their buildings. So, when they see a bin full of empty bottles and some soda pop inside (or whatever), they quickly go fetch an employee or two to load it into the cement truck.
Cement is a great long-term storage solution for bodies.
When the bodies are no longer useful for building, they can be turned into cement.

I was working, and needed the money. I worked on a wind turbine. The work was hard but I had the satisfaction of being useful. The days were full of different tasks, although they all centred on the generator. The work was physical, but no more so than when I had last worked at my trade. My body was different now, less robust and strong. Even so, I was able to do a day’s work. One day, while starting up the turbine again after a rest period I slipped on some grease and fell. That was that. I tried to get up but the blood rushing down into my eyes blinded me and made-me faint, so-I let out a cry. In my fall I had bumped my head against the edge of something and blood ran down into-my eyes.

I was working on a wind turbine. My hands and feet were damaged as I noted; there was blood on my sleeve. My head wore a patch over the right ear and part of my nose, with some portions missing; these were bloodstained. My hair was wild and matted with mud. My left eye had a puffy look. My body had the general shape of a human and I felt myself looking at it. The skin was covered with numerous grey blisters of various sizes. I felt my hands running over the bubbles, then pushing them apart. I felt how the words sounded like papers falling along with my steps on a long empty street.

I was working on a wind turbine. My hands held the bolts of one bolt that was out in spite of my best efforts to keep it seated, and I could feel myself slipping further away from what happened on the ground. Above me, my body suspended in the air by a rope tied to two pillars supporting an old pavilion. And I felt as a base for my legs the rope under me, and also in this way saw how low it was: about one metre. That was the limit: I slipped and had to keep both my hands busy on one bolt in order not only remain suspended, but also counterbalance all of that very ungracious fall towards a thump below. This is the situation from which my life took its start, you might say.

I was working on a wind turbine I had invented. There were many innovations in the turbine compared to those that came before, but two above all: one technological and another more human; indeed they belonged together because of this peculiar characteristic common from both domain as we will now illustrate in simple detail.

Technically, my turbine had an aluminium blade with a silver surface that made it virtually frictionless. I tested it out in the circular area we had carved into our 10 hectares of forest. You could travel at great speed inside the circle and not be thrown out: by having such a low coefficient of friction, your sliding surface became closer to that semi-circle whose circumference was equal in all. Naturally, we also needed a landing area at the end of our ride – another carved out section in that same 10 hectares which I must say some ingenuity was required to locate (mainly because its visitors were not all arriving from inside and thus entering parallel with my own trajectory. There had to be some way of knowing when a guest was arriving from the other half.

I was a wind turbine. *I spun in the wind and generated energy, which was stored in a battery.* *I had many batteries, arranged in a grid pattern around my home. The batteries were arranged in an elaborate system of trays, on shelves that rose from the ground. At times, I would pause in my work and look at the batteries. The system I had worked out for them was quite elaborate. I thought, when will it all come in useful?*

I was working a wind turbine. Like for everything else, I parted, this side and that side*, with my body.* I rubbed along and went in parallel lines. I went further and further, and whenever I encountered any kind of obstacle, I would simply part my body in two or more, safe in the knowledge that I would always be able to become one again at a later point in time, at some distance from where we parted. I knew it would not be the same body. One has to imagine that there are consciousnesses everywhere. I parted around the consciousnesses in the crowd. I passed through them as best I could, as evenly. I wanted to help them all at once, but sadly, I carried my heat with me.