So look at this: ASEAN shipping analysis and updates. Published monthly, professional looking and glossy—take it, see—and distributed free of charge to a network of participating patrons.
Uh-huh.
Like an industry update thing, everyone pitches in some money to the org that runs it, and in exchange, they all get updates, ads, promotions, whatever. And so look at the table of contents in this one—
Reinsurance and the 2019 Typhoon Season, port communications technology upgrades—good stuff.
Great stuff. But okay, look, page 45, they have like a clips thing, like roundups, brief bits—
Yeah—
And so here, look here: new dredging project gets funded, change of leadership in the whatever governing body, labor crunch in Singapore port due to dockworkers disappearing by stepping through an unknown and indescribable void. Look! Like it’s almost incidental, that’s the—
Yeah.
No, look at it! Two day laborers round a container block in the yards, see something, come over and duck through it, and they’re gone. Perfectly perpendicular to the one security camera covering the area so authorities and the firm have no idea what exactly’s up or what they saw, but over the next hour, almost three dozen people—three dozen!—come through, see this, step through. Says it’s just low enough that the taller workers have to duck their heads. Largest group was nine guys single file. No word as to whether they hesitated or reacted in any way upon seeing the gap…. After about 20 minutes somebody makes a sweep of the yard to see why the headcount’s off, can’t find anyone. Checks the cameras and then they see what’s been happening, but by the time security gets over there, there’s nothing.
Yeah.
§
So. Does that not do—what’s your reaction here? Explain it to me.
Nonplussed.
Nonplussed? Zero, nothing—pulse not quickening a bit? Not even, like, a spark of curiosity—
It happens.
It happens?
It happens. Not to be…I’m really not trying to be condescending, but it happens. Extremely human event and reaction.
What?
I told you I used to work in logistics, right? Back before—
Yes, but what do you mean this is a normal—
It happens. Happened before and it’ll happen again. Last I worked on directly was six years ago, a guy…a trucker was driving through Kansas, nowhere land, just like miles and miles of fields of nothing, taking produce from the Central Valley to Chicago. Stopped for gas and coffee at a service center in west Kansas, and when he pulled out, he noticed that one of the guys working at the truck stop was walking behind his truck, keeping pace such that he stayed a constant size in the mirror.
I—what?
Hard to explain, but exactly what it sounds like. There’s video on these rigs, right, and we saw a guy come out of this station behind the eighteen-wheeler, walking with just impossible—you know seven-league boots? Like the stories?
No? What’s—
It’s a kind of magical shoe that comes up a bunch in folktales, shoes that allow you to break time and space and take seven leagues with each step.
Okay—
Clearly impossible, right, fairytales. But that was the only way to describe what these were. The trucker pulls out of the station, accelerates up to the 70 mph limit for his rig, and this guy—some random truck stop worker, lived alone, never married—stayed walking a few lengths behind him at a speed that kept him a constant size in the mirror and the rearview camera. Unhurried and unbothered, just like ambling along, but at impossible distance with each stride. The driver realized what was up pretty quickly and called it in, but a few moments later, the guy breaks off perpendicular to the road and that’s the last anybody ever sees of him. Last clip on the rearview cam is a mid-thirties guy just walking away at speeds…it doesn’t make physical sense unless he’s like forty feet tall, he just goes off into the fields and he’s gone. We checked the closest towns, satellite data—nothing. Never seen or heard from again.
§
And…what? How is this not, like, the single biggest news story ever—
That’s not news.
That is absolutely—
It’s not newsworthy. It’s very human. It got written up in a trucking periodical; something about funny little interactions on the road. Like a little blurb in the middle of a larger story, not even the ones in the back that are meant to be one of the two pages people actually read in these things.
But someone vanished in the most amazing way imaginable! That is literally what all news is based on, hearing about other people’s misfortunes—
Misfortunes? Did he die? Was he hurt?
I mean, I assume he—or all these people—they aren’t seen again, are they?
Where’d I say he died? Where’d I say any of these people died?
Do you know?
I don’t know. He went somewhere; nobody knows where. It happens.
Stop saying it happens—
You’re new. You haven’t seen it yet, or maybe you have and just didn’t know. It happens.
§
But I still don’t understand—
Human and understandable and unremarkable.
It is not—
Yes, it is. Happens all the time. Not regular but very much not unusual; it’s on the same spectrum as watching somebody cry in public. Not news. Just people being people. That’s why they only ever come up in trade mags, industry-specific forums, breakroom gossip…. They’re mildly interesting only to the kind of people who meticulously track and think about movements of any kind for a living. Resource minimization, right? There’s potential there, if you can understand it. But even then—I’m sorry if I came off as blasé. But I’ve seen it before and you will again, I promise. They almost never stick.
§
Have any ever—
Yeah, once. Close by where I was, actually, a decent chunk of a small city in the valley went…you’d see people not fly but go up. I saw it in person.
Go up?
Up. Got a write-up in an aviation regulator report, two paragraphs among thousands of pages in a yearly review…discussing who, if anyone, would be subject to fines for violation of airspace. Only lasted a week; rumor was the air force was about to start investigating.
Were they flying?
Blasting off. Team Rocket–style—I’m serious, don’t laugh—hurtling off. Flight isn’t human, and these things are always extremely human, humans…just human beings. Hence the lack of attention. Flight would’ve been news, but this was people gathering themselves and going up with without a moment’s notice; something painful. Any bystander could tell it hurt. You’d see someone brace themselves and kind of begin to vocalize something—not really a scream, the one I heard was like…an exertion, and then up into the sky.
Just gone, like that?
They didn’t try to resist or make any panicked moves once ascending, but then again, maybe they wouldn’t be able to because of the speed. They seemed alive, though, all keeping a stiff posture. Like the rocketeer: at attention, arms straight down by sides, legs locked, facing forward…or maybe something else was keeping them rigid. We couldn’t know. Tracking was difficult; missile defense systems weren’t designed to handle projectiles that small and fast. For sure, somewhere beyond the atmosphere. A few planes and weather satellites captured footage of people breaking through the stratosphere, clothes fraying to nothing in the cold. Best response was to treat it like a weather system and tell planes to give the town a wide berth until they were sure it was over.
And you saw one?
We had a project out there. I was walking the long way back from the market one day…out on my break, not going anywhere, just around the block because I didn’t have to be back yet, and I saw something across the street from the corner of my eye. Turned and in a split second followed everyone’s upturned faces up to the guy going up into the sky. He had on a red sweatshirt and the bottom of his shoes were still white. Must’ve been brand new, like bought within the past couple days: no time to gather dirt. It was like a dozen of us around, all looking up shading our eyes in silence. And then we lost him in the scattered clouds, and a couple seconds later, that was that. I went back to work.
Did you find out who it was?
Nah. I probably could’ve if I’d tried, but I didn’t see the point. It happens.
§
But you think about them sometimes.
Well. Yeah.
More often than sometimes.
Like I said, they’re mostly of interest to people who spend all day thinking about logistical problems. But even they can’t really get into it. Logistics is about sending a thing somewhere else to be consumed—a useful and sometimes cruel way to think about flows, but a way that offers a consistent logic all its own. Even that falls apart here, though, because we have no idea where they go. I do wonder sometimes…it’s funny. Back when that was my job, I’d think about a lot of things, but now that I’m away from it all, I just wonder where they go. Like those people, up through the sky—
Where did they go, do you think?
The truth? I think they go up into the sun. I think it’s a conscious decision. Zero proof or anything beyond a gut feeling, but I think they all knew. Can’t say I haven’t thought about it myself sometimes. Just at arm’s length up there, right? Just a leap away…difficult and painful but doable when you have a goal in mind. People make that decision every single day, y’know?
It happens.