THE LOVER OF INVENTION
THE FIRST PERSON TO INVENT the wheel was a man named Charley Baekr, left-handed, five-foot-eight, mid-forties, a farmer (we think) and hunter who knew how to grind rocks smooth and who lived in what is now Montana if his burial site ten miles west of Billings is any indication. His remains were uncovered there last spring. “Baekr” is probably a misspelling of “Baker”; mistakes were common before man had a written language. Charley lived approximately three aeons, or two hundred sixteen eras ago, a darned long time. When dug up, he was nothing but dry bones.
His tribe was the Amminutians, a peaceable subgroup of the Western Mesa people who, like most stone-agers, were predominantly rural, religious, slow to change, preferring to squat on their rocks around a smoking fire and gnaw on semicooked caribou and watch for a change of weather, but Baekr was an exception. Two summers before he died, he produced a perfect cube carved from granite, four feet by four feet by four feet, which the Amminutians probably used for a jumping-off place. Jumping down off things was an important religious ritual for them, and his stone undoubtedly saved the lives of many virgins since it would have taken the place of a high cliff, the typical religious point of departure for persons with no sexual experience.
The perfection of the cube convinced the tribe of forty or fifty men and women that it was holy all right but some Amminutians were suspicious of Charley. His former girlfriend Verde was now hooked up with a high priest (or spensif) whose sacred duty it was to stand on the cliff (presper) and guide the faithful to the edge. When Charley’s cube took its place, her new guy, Cid, ordered his disciples to tie a rock to Charley Baekr’s left ankle to teach him humility (dompa). Perhaps the rolling of that rock inspired him to invent the wheel, we don’t know. Some facts aren’t completely verified but they represent a pretty accurate picture of what must have happened. At any rate, he did his work in a canyon under the sacred cliff and, early on a Tuesday morning when the dew was heavy and the air was sweet with new grass, he brought out the first man-made wheel for people to see. It was made from black quartz, ten and a half inches across, a couple inches thick, a small wheel. He placed it on a flat rock by the fire.
“You jump off that, you’ll never get anywhere spiritually,” said Verde, ruffling his long black matted hair and smiling down at him. He said, “It’s not a jumping-off place, it’s a roller. Look.” He rolled it in the dirt. The track is visible today, you can see where the wheel wobbled. It was warm, they had eaten small birds and drunk berry juice, and he kept shifting positions where he sat. His ankle must have hurt terribly.
“It’s the dumbest thing I ever saw,” said Cid.
“It wasn’t my own idea,” said Charley, lying. “I got it from a guy I met. But it could be useful. See how easy it is to roll it. Then push this other rock through the dirt. Two rocks the same size but one is easy and the other is a bitch. Compare them and make up your own mind.”
Cid did. “You’re right,” he said, “but so what?”
“I’m only thinking out loud now,” said Charley, “but it seems to me you could put some type of load on her.”
“Recidulous,” said Cid. “Don’t make me left.”
“Look, Charley,” said his former love, “you put a load on this rock, it slides off when the rock turns, you have to put the load back up, it takes more time, it’s lucidous.”
Charley looked up toward the sun. Around him sat his kinsmen and nearby was his perfect cube, which Cid had carved steps into and adorned with a dozen crude likenesses of bears, crows, fish, and spiders. All around them stood six hundred fifty sheep. Of that we’re dead certain. Some stuff never completely goes away.
“Would you please cut this rock from off my leg so I can go show this roller to other peoples?” the inventor asked, looking at Verde.
Tears welled up in her azure eyes. “You’d go leave us? your own people? The ones who brored you and knuckled you, the ones who gave you your sven, your brodske, the people who gave you your dialect? We’re your people, Charley! Nobody else in the wiemer would even understand you!”
He hunkered down, squinted, picked up a pinch of dry dust, and spat. Ptt. “I guess that what I’m trying to say is that I’d like to have the chance to see for myself.”
“Okay,” Cid said, untying the rock. “Go. But remember one thing: there is no paint.”
“What?” asked Charley.
Verde touched his cheek. “Don’t go. Don’t.”
“I meant what I said,” said Cid, “and don’t come back and ask me to repeat it.”
The inventor of the wheel left the Amminutians and headed northeast, believing in his heart that Verde would follow him—look at those whorls, those are places where he stopped, turned around, waited, paced in circles, hoping—but after a few days he stopped and scooped out a shallow trench and lay down in it. He was forty-five, which was much older millions of years ago than it is today. A man his age really needed wheels but he had only one, a small quartz disc that he perhaps still hoped would be a hit or maybe he had quit caring. He was utterly lost. The Amminutian tongue has no word for “go away,” no way to express “move,” “vamoose,” “cut loose,” “break free,” “take off,” “ship out,” or “make tracks.” The entire linguistic family of bye-bye indicators is missing in Amminese. So we have to assume this was a pretty new cultural experience for him, much like levitation would be for us.
He lay in the trench and looked up at the constellation they called Becker, which we see as the Big Dipper but which Amminutians saw as a god holding a club in one hand, a fistful of dirt in the other, and jagged shards for teeth.
We don’t know if he stayed in the trench until he died or if he got up now and then and walked around. We think he got out occasionally, but “out” was frightening to a man of his background, and soon the trench got deeper and more comfortable. Five feet down, he saw less of the god overhead. Some little pebbles bothered him in the small of his back and shoulder blades but he cleaned them out and lay and slept and slept. Dirt blew on him and against him and he probably thought, “It’s only a little dust, I can shake it off.” Instead he faded down and out. That’s him, there. The crystal wheel is held by the left hand, flat, the perfect curve pressed against the hipbone, as if he were going to throw the discus but lay down to rest. He died of everything at once.
Baekr died before he could pass on his discovery, and the wheel as we know it was a team effort, not a shot in the dark by a guy with a dream but the work of King Hagged the Just, the hairy naked blood-encrusted one-eyed psychotic who led his bestial Walukas in one massacre of innocents after another, ridding the land of any humankind less wretched and horrible than themselves. One day, seeing his filthy hordes try to shove jagged boulders across uneven terrain to the killing ground to press the gentle Promosians to death with, the squat-shaped gap-toothed shit-headed leader stood up fearsomely in his stone sled pulled by three hundred Waluka women and screamed “DO—THIS—BETTER!”
The Promosians volunteered to do research. While the Walukas lurked around the perimeter, fouling the landscape, glowering, feeding on lizards and bats, the quiet and mannerly Promosians sat in the shade of the promissary trees calmly discussing geometry, considering one theory after another, deliberating in their patient and endlessly precise and cooperative and self-deprecating style the problem of moving weight across ground with less friction—“Darn, it’s going to be something so simple, I just know it!” cried a young fellow, and sure enough it was: a CIRCLE—of course—the Promosians chortled for joy, shook hands all around, embraced—of course, the Wheel, what else could it be? why didn’t we think of it sooner? they asked. “I was sort of thinking wheel,” said the young guy, “but then I thought, Naw, too easy. It just goes to show, I guess.” So the Walukas knocked off ten two-ton wheels, rolled them swiftly to the ancient blood-soaked killing ground, and pressed the Promosians, who died knowing they had made a great gift to civilization. King Hagged the Just went on to slay thousands and tens of thousands, happily, easily, with no pain or inconvenience to himself, and died in his sleep, drunk on excellent red wine, with eleven naked maidens pasted to him, murmuring his name.
How do we know all this? Well, we’re not certain how we know but we do know. We’re 100 percent certain of the results, if mystified by the process. But what is truly mysterious is the guy whose bones these are, Charley Baekr—his cracked skull, tibia, femur, radius and ulna, mandible, sternum, carpals and tarsals, and humerus, and next to the humerus, the pubic bone.
Frankly, it’s pretty obvious that he missed that woman a lot, which explains why he stopped, on that desolate plain. He must’ve felt certain she’d leave Cid and follow him, that she didn’t really see him as the religious doubter who introduced the low jump but as the inventor of the wheel and a guy she could fall in love with, so he dug in and waited for her. The ancient dilemma: he knew that once he developed the wheel and things started rolling, he’d become a somebody like Cid except bigger, and she could love him for that; but meanwhile, without her, he couldn’t go around the block, couldn’t even develop a cold. He lay in the dirt, waiting, his wheel at his side, hearing every little creak or whisper, dreaming of her, waking up believing she was close by. From trench (A) he walked out in all directions (B, C, D, E, like the spokes of a wheel) to watch for her and (F) made one last great circumference of hope before retiring to the hub to lie down and die.
It was rotten luck to invent the wheel in a rocky hilly place, among people with no concept of movement. If the land had been flatter, if the people had said, “Hey, go for it”—but no, it had to be in that rugged valley that held them like a cage, nobody daring to be movers, only jumpers, and when Charley did break out he only went 6.2 miles before he stopped.
And yet—to lie in the dark and wait for a woman to arrive—isn’t that exactly how so many of our finest hours have been spent? isn’t that when the poems got written, ideas thought up, jokes formulated, great art imagined? See right here how as he lay in the trench he tried to widen it to accommodate what was not yet, but which would be, the bountiful Verde, her generous body settling alongst his, saying, “Oh Charley, oh my darling lovely one,” and while he lay in wait and wonderful expectation, he saw our world in his head. He invented us. He saw every use and adaptation of the wheel, from the cart to the wagon to the barrow, the windlass and mill, the coil and the ball, screw and gearwheel, drill, hinge, pulley, globe and dome, ball sports, turntable, dial, chainlink, compass, roller skate, eggbeater, lawn sprinkler, revolver, rotary press, paint roller, ballpoint pen, lazy Susan, spin dryer, roulette, Caterpillar, flywheel, floppy disc. While he lay in fragrant anticipation of her womanly waist and hips and thighs, he envisioned us in one brilliant moment like a flash of lightning over a ruined amusement park in November, its Ferris wheel and carousel and Tilt-a-whirl lit up, wham!
He heard steps in loose gravel and desperately wanted them to be hers, the wind in the underbrush to be her saying, “Oh sweet love, I looked so long—let me come into your bed.”
If she came, the wheel didn’t matter, and if she never came, it didn’t matter either. Her face, her hair, her hands, her shoulders and back, her waist and belly, her legs and feet, her face, her hair, her hands, shoulders, back, and so forth. In her hand a crown of white spring flowers. Naked she bent forward and placed it in his hands and so forth. The rest nobody knows, but perhaps it was not so different then from now. Dying, he met her at last. A last faint sigh of disbelief, and then she touched him.
