CHAPTER 1 Electricity
Sulfur Toughlove, hater of love, was in temperament and physical composition indeed all things blue fire and yellow brimstone. As he concentrated, vivid blue wisps licked around the ball of his smooth yellow scalp. His yellow eyeballs popped in puckering yellow eyelids, and blue flames the color of chicory flowers burned within his irises. Cladding him in an aging citrus yellow suit, a chintzy second skin tailored in the same hue as his actual skin, nature rendered him a plump piece of fruit gone bad. What tree this elemental monster had fallen from could only be named inevitability; for in a universe where each action had an equal and opposite reaction, someone had to hate love.
A round gray shadow claiming the grand mass of the grotesquely yellow, elemental man hovered like a cosmic cape over the black slate chalkboard in front of him. Yellow chalk comprised of pure sulfur squeaked, and a frenzy of bright blue sparks charged out from him while he furiously wrote in bold capital letters the name of a woman whose love for love he despised in particular, a woman who just happened to be the hottest woman in the world and was aptly named:
ELECTRICITY.
The haunting chalk squeak died off, then snuffed under the imprisoning vastness of the mine he used as his headquarters. The chalk he poised high between his ghastly yellow-stained and pudgy fingers while he paused in deep thought. His hands too were a bright yellow, his skin palpably sulfuric. He rolled the stick once, triumphantly, and his powdery yellow skin marked its contours.
A window into the human world swiveled around him, a ghostly optometrist’s assembly of examination lenses. Two binocular lenses hardened in tandem with his thinking, extended toward him from the subatomic television contraption and fixed to his eyes. Through the lenses he spied on the hottest woman in the world, discovering she was affixed to a wall of ice, her silver ice-climber suit rendering her into a reflective sideways profile, into a slick chrome decal shaped almost like the iconic trucker mudflap girl. She clung in this sideways position by the dint of metal claws bolted to her silver boots and specially engineered gloves, which reminded him of steel dinosaur jaws.
Sulfur thought hard about smiting her from the face of the ice cliff as much as one might flick an ash from a sleeve, but this thought tumbled uselessly. He did not have the power to harm human beings, not directly anyway, and so he mulled other options that would relieve this woman from her quest to find love.
A small animated pin on his lapel encased in a clear vial a singular atom of sulfur; it was not visible to any human naked eye and barely so to the human electron microscope. In addition, on a much larger scale, embroidered in sulfur crystals on the lapel of his sulfur chintz suit—which otherwise looked a lot like a business suit—was the identifying capital letter S with a smaller numerical denomination of 16. S16. Three atomic rings stitched around the S16 and, being animated with real electrons, whirled around the neutrons comprising his tiny heartless heart. By these markers he was, in the elemental world that functioned inside human reality, encyclopedically identified with the element sulfur.
This elemental male-mannish-entity was thusly named Sulfur. He had, after a few billion aeons of hating love, watching several spaghetti westerns during the advent of human cinema—and later becoming rather fascinated with the rise of the New York City mafia and Murder Incorporated in particular—brocaded in his imagination a vision of himself as a sulfur desert dwelling, train robbing, mafia don of hatred. Subsequently he enjoyed pulling his hand out of his pocket with two fingers pointed gun-style and playing imaginary target practice with human hearts. Eventually, though he really had no one to call him by it, the weird yellow loner had taken on the last name of Toughlove.
Performing his hateful deeds in the expansive sulfur bowel located in an anti-terrestrial nowhere, Sulfur further christened the cave which had birthed him, Toughlove Incorporated. Here the Element—which was what all of the other Elements recognized him as—strategized how to keep amorous people apart. What elicited from his elemental chalk upon his elemental slate always came into play in the world of human love. Such was the power of his hatred and its reach outside of his bright yellow darkness.
If the human loveless and lonely knew who they could blame for their plight, it would be Sulfur Toughlove, the King of Bad Timing. But humans did not know, so they blamed the causal effects of their world—Newtonian mechanics and its gravitationally guided rotten apples—on the hopeless condition of their solo hearts.
Sulfur, himself an aforesaid funky fallen fruit, performed his hateful acts simply by thinking them, or if he was feeling especially brilliant, by conjuring them up. Sulfur Toughlove’s negative vibes spasmed through the subatomic ocean of human reality. His tentacled intentions darted viciously into the positive juju of love just like wicked jellyfish stinging drowning divers straight in the heart.
His black art of bad timing was known keenly to the other beings of his atomic ilk: the much more charmed group named The Elements. Each Element also took his or her name from the periodic table of elements and his or her gender from somewhat superficial—even stereotypical—qualities each possessed. There was Hydrogen, whose explosive personality kept him away from events likely to split him in two. There was Carbon with her diamond eyes and tapering black nano-fingers that could reach through dimensions. There was youthful, androgynous Neon who loved to light things up, especially night and parties. And indeed there was within the aether forming the human universe every other Element. Together their atomic interactions comprised the sails upon which the terrestrial blue marble circumnavigated the incredible solar system.
At least some forty millennia after the Neanderthal phase, when burying the dead developed into the more specific culture of wearing black to bury the dead—and then black suits became a fashion rage for the serious and the artsy—the Elements voted to take on human form. Carbon, with her surplus abundance, helped tailor black nanotube skins for the Elements. Within the suit lapels a small pin with their uniquely identifying atomic insignias, borrowed from the human periodic table, were embroidered. With the exception of denuded Sulfur, who had outcast himself and whom Carbon refused to clothe, each other Element wore their full black carbon suit during business hours. Just as glass vessels in a chemist’s lab gave shape to the earthly forms of the elements—mercury in a triangular vial was triangular for example—so did the suits contain each Element’s equilibration between crystal, liquid and gas and provide them with their human shapes.
The black suited Elements assembled frequently in a United Nations stylized great hall. Here below the scalloped seating but above them all in pure power, reigned the eternally youthful Lord of Chemistry himself: Cupid.
Three Element seats had become vacant in the past five hundred years after the rise of romanticism. Sulfur, again, was the principal contrary one, having defected from the group after a coup, during which he had stolen an atomic pocket watch, which was key to orchestrating the timing of the human heart—not just its beating but its curious nostalgia for romantic company, indeed the timepiece governed even the precious aching and precocious swooning of the human heart. Sulfur had stolen this critical timepiece from his foe Cupid, and on his way toward building his own kingdom, he had managed to sway both Oxygen and Arsenic to join him in his poisonous quest: namely, to disrupt human love whenever possible. It was simply his bilious nature to hate love.
The cavernous Toughlove Incorporated echoed with an insistently sinister ticking-tocking, amplifying the atomic pocket watch now neatly fastened to Sulfur’s yellow waistcoat by a yellow crystal chain. against Sulfur’s bulk the watch was really no larger than a grain of sand. Through this watch rippling gold and silver energy danced, obeying an atomic waltz of love—perhaps even Strauss’s Voices of Spring. Indeed the potent and trade secret chemical formula for love was intricately wound and orchestrated inside its fine metallic machinations, which geared together like a Swiss watchmaker’s design of the human heart. Tiny titanium heart-shapes literally pumped liquid mercury, emitting the pulsating tick-tock, and as they did, nanoscale arrows filigreed from platinum shot around the interior body of the watch.
As much a Sulfur loathed the cutesy ornamentation and its lovey dovey soundtrack, he put up with it as he would an irritating pet bird. After all, whoever possessed this watch possessed perfect timing.
Sulfur pulled back from spying on Electricity, and the collection of lenses surrounding him withdrew, giving him ample space to review his chalkboard once again. Struck by a novel idea, he leaned forward. The sound of the pocket watch’s careful temporal precision was momentarily overwhelmed by another shriek of chalk against the board. Spidery blue flames skipped from Sulfur’s fingers as he etched out a plan. His face twisted with plotting, and with the intensity of a general commandeering a winning war game move, Sulfur slashed out a simple X then rounded out an O over the word Electricity. Under the X symbol, respectively, he wrote the name Lucky. The two words sat side by side, like yellow strangers on an expansive black plane of nothingness, too afraid to peer at one another:
O X
ELECTRICITY LUCKY
The words looped out in his generous, even baroque penmanship. He stood back, his seven-fold yellow chin bullfroggishly billowing over his tight collar. His bugging eyes clacked together like angry billiard balls as he contemplated his next move.
A soft felt-block eraser, rampant with dusty yellow handprints—indicating his intimate relationship with the object—snagged his attention. This was the special tool he applied when he wanted to erase attraction between two people. When he reached for the eraser, the fabric of elemental space and time, a quixotic puzzle of atoms and atmosphere, rippled violently around his girth into an eddy of energy, shoving him backwards into his cave. He grimaced and shouted, “No!”
Within the air engulfing him, the frenzied molecular world rapidly chilled, capturing Sulfur in an aetheric rain storm.
A teeny-tiny man-boy—Cupid—zoomed past him on wings beating as fast as a hummingbird’s. He even seemed to be a small bird from a distance, such was his size in proportion to Sulfur. He paused in front of the slate chalkboard with hummingbird stealth, his little plump body suspended in freeze-frame while his wings beat about seventy times per second. His black carbon suit was tightly tailored, and a heart woven of ruby crystals was woven into the fabric directly over his own heart; he looked like a baby meets a Wall Street heart broker. An incision between the shoulders allowed for the free range of movement from his wings that were at once jeweled in pink and red gemstones and woven together with fine gold crystals. His cherubic lips puckered and shimmered like sugar-coated crimson apples under white and flecked gold irises. In every way he was a candy box, Valentine version of himself come to life.
Cupid rotated from the chalkboard, focused with consternation on his heisted pocket watch, muttered the phase change equation for turning water into ice as if it were some form of abracadabra, then zipped around and around Sulfur, making a dizzying spiral. In response, crystal snowflakes illuminated and spun all around the cave. The air grew colder and colder until the criss-crossing snowflakes solidified into a blown out blizzard. Sulfur imploded into a yellow fleck, and after a moment he was buried deep within an inverted mountain; nothing but the sharp spit of white snow flakes blew in from every direction. Magnified, each flake proved to be shaped into one of Cupid’s arrows, and the mountain proved to be the peak known throughout the human world as the Shark Fin of the Himalayas.
Though the personified Element named Oxygen had crossed over to Sulfur’s yellow side, she was so abundant that Cupid easily harbored a reserve of her atomic power. This reserve, mingled with humble Hydrogen, produced molecules of water on such a vast scale that life and eventually love evolved out of the aquatic realm. Winter sports too.
Through this terrestrial snowstorm, two eyes as brilliant as diamonds pierced the white out. Steely striations radiated from the pupils, tightening to pinholes against the raging white out. These were the eyes of Electricity, the hottest woman in the world. The snowflakes covered her silver suit, wrapped sleekly around her curves and after a moment each miniature crystalline arrow, comprised elementally of chilled hydrogen and oxygen, melted. What other physics came together, what accident of natural intelligence, birthed both the mountain ranges and the woman who would climb them, birthed the majestic Mt. Everest and the Sherpas who would guide through them, surely played some role in the making of this woman.
Her irises seemed to be every known human color; at once they were blue and glinting with amber or star bursting emerald and flickering with white gold. Her black eyelashes were at once Asian and sub-Saharan, high-stepped, Eskimoan and Polynesian or a splash of Caucasian. Her lips were as full as Cupids. She was every woman, somehow, all at once.
The seemingly supernatural genes that had made her an every woman had, for reasons unknown to all, also wired her body temperature a little too high. A startling anomaly, she was in many ways simply too physically hot. The silver suit cloaked the color of her skin, but it was indeed a tangibly human skin—one could go so far as noting it as amber in color, slightly resinous and glowing as sunlight struck her face, exposing her body heat. Her bane: she was too hot for any man to touch.
She heard her name being called, “Electricity!”
Through the billowing snow layers the wind whipped back upon itself, and she spotted a fellow mountaineer submerged in a pristine and deadly drift. Black goggles with amber lenses shielded his eyes, but by the way his face sunk, she knew he had just fallen unconscious. She plowed toward him, the arrow-headed ice melting around her, and she dug the man out with her thinly gloved, hot hands. A sunlight shaft, a natural golden spear as finely wrought as any inside the pocket watch, shot through the thick gray snow clouds and bounced off her silver clothing, bathing her in a warm celestial glow.
Distracted by it, she looked up at the sky for a moment. Behind her she heard her name again. “Electricity!” She turned her head, squinted and saw a Sherpa, his face a slit inside the foxy blossom of fur around his head. He witnessed the woman, visually isolated in the orange-gold glow, and he was hypnotized—as if the howling wind was a siren singing love’s lost lament. But then the shrill wind pierced his numbing mind, and he snapped to. The sudden storm was the most alarming he, a native to the Himalayas, had ever witnessed, and he clocked his fear. “We must turn back! There is no way to make it to the summit!”
Within the origami-like folds of space and time, in his own headquarters within the elemental world, Cupid watched the scene in a kind of living, microcosmic box, and his candy-apple red lips pouted into a smile. He flew to his chalkboard, which was a circumference of slate literally miles long. It was riddled with endless equations sputtered out in his own tiny handwriting. Centered within it all, were written in his ornate penmanship:
Electricity Lucky.
He quickly halted and hovered, his wings spangling with vivid red light, revealing that the webbed scales were in fact overlaid heart shapes. He held up his own pink chalk stick—made of rose quartz calcite—and rapidly, within the beat of his own hummingbird-sized heart, he wrote out a plus sign:
Electricity + Lucky.
The very air throughout the entire earth became charged with pink static electricity, and a ferocious wind blew through the pursed lips of a gray cloud. A rose pink bolt of lightning ejected and splashed over Electricity, who might have paused again to reflect upon the majesty of nature if she was not otherwise engaged in saving several men’s fiercely frozen and soon to terminate lives.
