I had grown tired of news, calamity and grief. I had grown tired of modern entertainments. I had lost faith in people and the things they made. Yes, my joys had dwindled, but that was offset by the great comfort in those I had left. The joy I felt became deeper the more I sloughed away.

I had been a patent lawyer specializing in electrical engineering. Now I could plow through contract work a few tedious hours each evening and have enough money to survive.

With this free time, I settled into my more natural preoccupations. In the basement, I tinkered with antique radios—a hobby I'd had since a child. Soldering tubes, fixing bent leads, playing with the capacitors . . . I restored vintage pieces and modernized others to my great satisfaction. When my hands cramped from the strain, I put on my boots and went outside.

As I walked, I searched for pieces of bone, discarded tools, rusted screws, mineral fragments. Anything that caught my eye. Bits, is how I'd explain it to company if I ever had any; but to myself, the special ones I gave the name karst.

The morning of my first, true divination, I had found: a black rock, sharp as a knife, a finger of lichen covered in spiky brown spores, and a rusted nail bent back onto itself more than seemed possible. Looking for new places to search, I bushwhacked through the dense alder and huckleberry adjacent to the river at the end of my property. Avoiding some poison ivy with a clumsy soft-shoe, I slipped and twisted my ankle, crying in pain as I went down. My fists sunk into the earth and something hard clipped itself against me, as if it was trying to swallow my hand. I scrabbled in retreat through the leaves and decomposed soil. Finally, I prized the thing off my wrist: a set of teeth.

On the forest floor, I held my prize up to the kaleidoscopic light shooting through the trees. I breathed through the open mouth. My first thought, sheep's teeth? They were held together oddly, covered in a sticky bitumen of tar, leaves and insect eggs. A natural mechanism kept them together and the teeth had discolored at different rates. Well, I thought, there would be time for inspection later. I had found what I was looking for: a new piece of karst. I pulled myself out of the gully and went home.

It was after this encounter that my process tinkering with the antique radios and televisions in my basement changed. Rather than performing maintenance, I began to rebuild them, working in more primitive methodologies. Rubbing pencils against paper, I created capacitors. I spent several hours magnetizing a spool of wire, scraping a screwdriver against the copper. I blued my safety razors with a propane torch and impaled them with lead to make diodes. Stripping layers, removing conceit, returning components to their essential materiality—this became my operating directive. Later, I came to believe that this was a crucial step in my journey.

One humid and dank Monday, I could not sleep. Down in the basement, I pulled the teeth I had found off the shelf. They did not belong to a sheep. I had found a set of dentures. The ivory jawbone I had held was simply the lower mandible. A thin plate — lead? tin? — held them together in one aspect. A trace of gold ran around the perimeter. Bits of lichen stubbornly stuck between two molars like pieces of lettuce. The teeth had certainly been modified from their original state with pieces being replaced over time. In death, the mineral formations and organic compounds had mixed into some interstitial object. I turned and rummaged through my electric parts bin and attached two leads to an incisor, delighted—I was replicating a decades old concept of using electricity to measure resistance in carious teeth. Three resisted at .0 Ohms. Porcelain. Two teeth looked to be soapstone. Several were vulcanite rubber.

On some subconscious instinct, I began twinning magnetized wire around the karst, pulling the copper tight against the crowns. When I was done, I set a primitive diode into a decayed molar as if it was a filling and used the existent gold wire as leads. With anticipation, I fumbled some batteries out of a flashlight. Taping them to the connectors, energy suddenly rushed forth. A thrumming vibration through the wiring and dentures confirmed what I already knew: the karst was responding.

Frantically I searched my parts bin for a spare speaker, finding nothing but an old handset from a telephone. I unscrewed the earpiece and, inside, a small, iridescent speaker sat like a pearl.

I added a second set of leads.

Eureka! Sound came from the tiny speaker! A voice in monotone: point 112, vector a6x, confirm. point 114, vector a6x, confirm bad sector. . . .

Coordinates of some kind. . . . What did it mean? From a local radio station? A walkie talkie bouncing signals off the lid of our atmosphere?

The set of amalgamated teeth grinned at me in the lamplight. Frantically, I looked for a pencil and paper to scribble down the words. The coordinates matched no map or system I knew. Turning on a shortwave radio, I searched for a channel broadcasting a match to that strange litany. There was none. I looked at the karst pensively and cradled it gently in my hands. I left the basement and went to sit outside on the front porch. The sun was just beginning to rise and the teeth chattered insistently. As if in a trance, I walked forward with my newfound talisman.

The wires dangled down my chest like the exposed entrails of an alien life form and the technobabble grew faster from the tiny speaker.

point 112, point 112, vector a6x, point 114, vector a6x, vector a6c, confirm. . . .

Leaving the driveway, I traipsed into the hummocked hillside. At the highest point, I stopped in a mud soaked meadow. In the distance, the serpentine river cut tightly through surrounding hills, defying the Appalachian ridge line. The waterway was older and a remnant of an ancient orogeny, the collision of two massive continents. Lay translation: the river went north and west, when all others sensibly flowed east. These thoughts jarred something loose in my mind and, in a flash, I understood. The content of the karst's message was irrelevant. Each bit of vocabulary meant nothing other than its placement and repetition in the sequence. Morse code as a way-finding system. . . .

I now ranged further to confirm my theory. With my metal mouthed Yorick, I methodically passed through the permutations, tracing fibonacci spirals across the landscape. After a morning of trial and error, I was lead to a culvert by the road. Carefully I pulled a silicified log out of the muck. Iridescent blue and green striping shimmered up and down its length as mineral efflorescence mingled with bits of pyrite, sending ribbons of gold across the ancient branch.

It was beautiful. Another piece of karst.

In the coming weeks, I discovered more. An acorn strangely punctured by tiny spikes of iron. A rusty graphics processor left buried in the creek had collected seeds of spirea in its cooling fan and still seemed to be storing electricity. A smashed calculator in my own basement whose sulfur coated batteries had grown into a microscopic forest of crystals. Not all pieces were ancient, nor were they all natural, at least by human definition. The further I searched, the more I understood.

Some karst needed to be situated properly, others had already freed themselves, and still others, like the false teeth, required assistance. Here is where I found my efforts most rewarding. A piece of pyrophilite found by nearby my overstuffed mailbox called to me for heat. I built a crucible using kaolinitic clay that let me approach eye melting temperatures and in that sweltering forge, the pyrophilite began to exfoliate, blooming feathers and unfurling wings. As it cooled, I set the beautiful thing into a slowly petrifying tree stump, an avian from another world. I interlinked pots of moss, connecting them with anodes listening to them thrum with pleasure. I built a boat. Hahahaha, I never was the naval type. But I carefully steamed balsa strips and wove them around the rib bones of some roadkill carcass, limning the ribcage with brimstone. Lead from spent shotgun shells found out in the garage weighted the keel. I sent the vessel down the river. That was what it wanted. The karst desired liberation.

Joy! Time passed with paradoxical speed, slow at one moment, whole days disappearing another. Occasionally I now slept in the basement, occasionally outside. It didn't matter, it was obscenely hot anywhere.

My walks took me further afield. I learned that karst could be bigger. Size had no relation to spirit. In the flats several clicks downstream from the house, the river overflowed into what my uncle would have called a pocosin, a native and anoxic bog of muck. There I began my first work in situ. Another stage of my discovery was about to begin.

A sorcery, a buried power was obscured in all that methane and burbling muck, but I was unable to easily free its potential. My first attempts, just meaningless pokes: I disposed of some offensive plastic that had floated in the turgid water, I moved some tree limbs that did not belong. The place was karst, I was sure of it, but in a vast and shapeless form I had not encountered before. Holes dug disappeared the next day. The landscape reconfigured at night. Everything was natural, but that excused nothing. The system was so complicated, so large, and forces against it conspired towards boundary and restriction. I strained to understand, studying the flow of water, the ph of the soil, the complex system of roots and organic matter. In August, the rains came, making my work even more difficult.

My frustration grew. It did feel as if I had reached the limits of my understanding of karst. Working indoors, I became suspicious of study. 17 pages into a book about ecological cybernetics, I threw the tome against the wall. With a soldering iron I burned out the eyes of the author.

It occurred to me that perhaps understanding the pocosin was arrogance.

With my grinning set of teeth set on the dash and plugged into the cigarette lighter, I decided to travel to town. I required inspiration, materials, the ingenuity of serendipity, so I threw the tarpaulin off the old jeep parked behind the house and cranked the vehicle to life. Slowly I drove past the pathetic smattering of local stores still left, looking for answers. Ace Vapes; Ben's Bail Bonds; Desierto's Deer Processing; Ken's Accountants, 'Your Money is Our Money!' (what!?) . . . and continued past the lone traffic light, driving past acres of kudzu and phragymites. A mile outside of town, the tiny speaker dangling from my rear-view mirror began to squawk. I stopped the car.

Walmart. Our burgeoning metropolis's original Walmart. Replaced years ago by an even larger "Walmart Supercenter" built a few miles closer to the interstate, this vacant poster-child for obsolescence hulked off the road, windows cracked, an 'EXCITING LEASE OPPORTUNITY' poster duct-taped to its forehead. The airport sized parking lot was now flooded with lagoons and cars set on cinder blocks.

I steered around pools of oil slicked water and to the back of the abandoned store. Unplugging my grinning companion, I gently set the karst on the passenger seat as I grabbed a flashlight from the glove compartment. The loading doors of the old store were tightly shuttered, but a steel access door was propped open. Something scuttled away as I tiptoed inside.

I trained my flashlight on to the immediate surroundings: a pile of dried feces to my left, to the right a case of AXE body spray, bottles of baby oils, and a tangle of intestines . . . no, no, a pile of used condoms, glistening larva-like in the glare. A giant ventilation tube dangled from the ceiling. With a tug, I yanked the tube down and it floated down like some astral snake. Stumbling my way across the abandoned racks, rotting cardboard and spilled bits of packaging, I felt the impending thrum of discovery.

I pushed open the main set of double doors to at terrible chorus of screeching. Pigeons. An explosion of talons and feathers scratched at my face. After they had flown away, my flashlight passed over their dead eyes and dull feathers. Hundreds of the startled birds flocked to the girders lining the ceiling of the vast showroom. A few floated passively in the darkened lake that puddled under a broken skylight.

I gawked at what I had discovered. Meters of ducting, panning, stack heads, diffusers and reducers scattered everywhere, much of it neatly piled against the walls. Solar panels salvaged from the parking lot were stacked head high. A giant oculus dangled from the middle of the room, a spider of scaffolding and wiring, smashed remnants of our surveillance age. To my left, the iron cage of an elevator led to a lofted second floor above the storeroom. There I could see the shadows of junction boxes, relays and switchboards. Electrical must have still have been pumped to the building. Why?

My excitement overflowed, I could not contain it. There were certainly bits of karst in the abandoned store and plenty of pieces to aid my work. Indeed, I had not needed more scientific understanding of the pocosin. I had been thinking too small. I needed industrial items this size to even begin to tackle my work in the swamp. With an overjoyed cry I rushed at the darkened mirror of a lake and the harpies bobbing there. Ha! I cackled.

A hand appeared on my shoulder.

Startled, I spun.

A boy stood there.

He held a small black box. The child pointed the box's two red eyes at my heart and pushed a button. An oscillating buzz sounded, two streamers appeared, and then a jolt of electricity slammed through my every nerve.

I woke in a shopping cart.

The boy looked down at me with eyes like two stones. He waved his taser about.

—Lectric juvimber.

—What?

I stared. Two chains and a spiderweb of bungee cords held me in the cart. The boy wheeled over a metal table that had been shoved in a corner. He hoistwd a large duffle bag onto the counter, then began taking out some bits and pieces: wire leads, some bolts, a voltage meter.

—Creole? Mulatto, Melangin? Whadarew?

The boy spoke in a barely comprehensible and peculiar southern drawl. His i's sounded like oi's.

I attempted to gather myself and assert some command.

—I'm a citizen

The boy shook his head.

—Don't know that place.

Fishing back into the duffle, he removed a 2-tube regenerative circuit with red wires in a septagram, finned heat sinks, and yellow variable capacitors as neat as little balloons. It was shiny and new, as beautiful as the diorama of an advanced civilization, but I was also certain it was karst. With the flick of some switches, the machine crackled to life. It had been repurposed as a police scanner. The boy listened to the scanner intently for a moment and then turned down the volume. He watched me with a careful look on his face. Then he stretched one hand across the grimy workstation. A spool of wire shivered and floated across the desk and into his waiting palm.

—T'su shih. The love stone.

The boy uncurled his fingers and poked at some scars cutting their way across his hands. Tiny magnets had been embedded under his flesh and he massaged them in a circular pattern.

I strained at my bonds and sat up straight in the cart.

—Let me out of here.

—You got no token on you.

—You're a maniac.

The boy's cheek twitched. He reached back into the bag and pulled out a large, spherical monitor, an old naval plasma screen with its backside gutted and filled with a miniature forest of rusted wiring and bits of quartz. Then he took out old Yorick's teeth. Had the boy broken into the Jeep? Or had I left the car unlocked? The boy held the dentures with precision and moved them about between the shadows and light. With deft fingers, the boy hooked up two leads to the tabs I had crimped to the molars and then gently set the teeth down like a priest managing the eucharist. He pulled out an ice cube tray and screwed some ancient rusty bits into each opening. Then he turned his back to me and I could smell the acrid tang of urine.

I laughed despite myself: the boy was trying to make a primitive battery. I went silent when Yorick squawked to life, louder then he ever had before, spewing out his coordinates.

On the ancient monitor, a circular scene blipped in response to the karst. I gasped. A map.

Leaning close to me, I could smell wintergreen chewing tobacco on the boy's breath. His hands undid the bungees and unwrapped the chains. For the first time, I noticed that they hadn't been locked or knotted. He carefully unclipped the false teeth and placed them in my lap.

I looked directly into the boy's eyes and found a profound emptiness and distant light. It was clear to me now, I had gone as far as I could on my own. What I was evolving to serve, came to me not in words, but as a shape of signs. Something that came in forms of love, but also a certain type of permanent annihilation. A denial, an acceptance, and myself the conduit between the two.

—I'm a ferryman

The boy nodded and beckoned me out of the shopping cart.

The boy had hidden a trailer in the woods behind the access road. We maneuvered it towards the jeep. There was no need for words, I lowered the coupler and set the hitch. Silently we loaded as much material as we could.

The boy pointed out directions to my own property. That he knew where to go did not surprise me. Walking from the driveway, the boy skirted the house as if it held some pestilence. Quickly, we reached the pocosin. The boy sunk into the mud and I followed. My breath slowed, my synapses relaxing into a half somnolent state native to the fecund atmosphere. We lay there in the methane and mud like two caiman in a stygian swamp. At sunset, we began to lay ducts across the swamp in a a variety of geometries, experimenting with different arrangements. Bits and pieces of steel and aluminum we used as gates, observing the flows of water. We worked to the limit of our muscles, lugging the giant pieces of metal back and forth across the bog. The boy left in the early morning and returned with tools, puttering down the opposite slope on a tiny, one cylinder motorbike. Where the bike came from, I had no idea. There was nothing between the work and exhaustion. With mattocks we trenched the moist earth. Temporary shields and bulwarks held back the water as we inserted the ducting, the metallic veins and arteries of a subterranean heart.

Next came the tricky work of installing the system of gates and submerged dykes. Here was an advance I could not have predicted: using massive pallet straps and industrial rubber to create a natural, elastic system. The solar panels we had raided provided a modicum of energy to get the gates moving, but these newly installed elastic bands contracted and released with an ingenious system of tension and mechanical advantage. Quickly, I saw that even the solar panels would eventually be unnecessary. Once the rhythm of the swamp adjusted to its new state, the set of rubber tendons that flexed with the flows of water and movement of sediment would be all that was needed.

Oh life! The pocosin exhaled and inhaled with its own purpose for the first time in centuries. Its breath now moved a vast web of openings — a telluric battery in a natural state of charging and discharging. When we finished, the fetid smell of methane already began to recede, new crisp air descending over the river bank. How alive! How free! How true to itself! A saw-whet owl swooped down to perch on a pond pine and whistled out its recorders’ tune. Three hooded mergansers flew overhead, gaining altitude gracefully. A phone tower blinked idiotically on top a distant plateau. The very molecules of the air seemed squeezed into higher definition. Every nerve of my body tingled, filled with an energy older and more vital than I had ever suspected.

During this period of initiation I saw many things.

On an unnamed creek, a cantilevered house jutted over a waterfall. Inside this abandoned modernist edifice, the windows were blown out and the floor cracked. Underneath a carpet of moss, a strange set of gears and stone peeked out like some ancient Antikythera mechanism, the clockwork gears of a giant. The air hummed with energy, a feeling of power radiated from the place. Outside, above the falls, the water rose in a dome, then formed a head, a beetle, a spiral . . . an ever changing aquatic topiary.

These otherworldly specimens, talismans from a decayed Eden! The karst were emblematic of something inconceivable to humans, a spiritual presence, a demonology of mineral matter: the ghost trails of time's impact on Einstein's convergence of matter and energy.

The boy's name was Joab and he did a steady trade in scrap parts with a never-ending parade of stubbly white men. But he also saved the pieces that seemed to work with mineral life's sensitivity to electricity, moisture and magnetism. These pieces were reserved for those in need, those a part of our clan. Because there were others. People who had discovered karst like myself.

My grinning Yorick on the dashboard, I crisscrossed the county. And I met these keepers of karst. This became my new calling.

In an abandoned quarry out from Barnard Bridge, two moving chunks of magnetite rotated around each other in slow orbit. These two tractor sized rocks moved almost imperceptibly about the underground lyceum in a dance of their own. A thinly mustached, pimply teen and his laconic girlfriend had created a dream theater. Did the children go to school? I didn't ask. A Budweiser blanket stretched across some splintered Ikea furniture that seemed to be their home. A Råskog cart held their cutlery and piles of Reader’s Digests. Three skinned coneys smoldered on a Sundlandet. Had I mistaken? Were they brother and sister? No, they were lovers, that was clear. No, again. They were not lovers, they were a form of love. One arranged patterns of light, the other managed the stage.

The formation of karst had to do with pressure, a gestalt of trauma that paradoxically contained an unfathomable message of freedom. The formative pressures were just as likely to be man-made as well as natural. Diodes no different than mountains. The karst were ruined, but perfect, and that paradox was the key, the reason for their openness. Intricate topographies and elements of decay only amplified their presence.

The formation of the keepers of karst had to do with a type of love, a mode of vulnerability and sacrifice outside of our sexual and familial understanding of the word.

Outside a suburban development designed by protractor, I met a polo-shirt and khaki irrigation salesman who offered me a frappuccino. Cheerfully he shared the schematics of an underground system of rivers. He’d enabled sensors that diverted human flows away from this natural grid, keeping the system pristine as it overflowed a grotto of gypsum mineral fields. That same day, a pregnant mother found me behind a trash heap, her two vapid children swallowing their iPad screens in the family's nearby minivan. Wordlessly, she took me past the fence through a tour of buried automobiles, foliage strung through their guts, blooming orchids and sinuous vines weaving through their exhaust and hydraulic tubing. With a delicate touch she showed me how the rusty metal, corroded electrics and plants had come to achieve some symbiosis.

No single personality type defined these keepers of karst. I found them in all colors, shapes, classes and creeds. I find them as I will soon find you. As I am finding you now.

Yes, I have left my old occupations behind. What have I to say? I am happier.

In the beginning, I collected karst. Now, I arrange for possibilities. Now I write this missive.

I search for more of our tribe. I am just the conduit, the ferryman.

point 112, vector a6x, confirm. point 114, vector a6x, confirm bad sector. . . .

My grinning lodestone of ivory, enamel and wire, leads onward. These false teeth speak a coded cartography, bringing us to those seeking new forms — to be right here, at this moment in time.

At these exact coordinates.