Smart Meter
by Gabrielle Griffis
Lulu wanted to leave her body. She laid in bed and imagined pulling her soul out of her ribs with a rope. She visualized floating over town, above houses and cemeteries as if she was a bird or a luna moth. Instead, she laid there, plastered to her body, stuck in the heat, listening to the sound of windchimes and crickets.
Lulu had never felt comfortable in her own skin. Nerves coiled around her skeleton. Blood and muscle hung from her bones. From the earliest age, she felt weighed down, aqueous, which was the exact opposite of what she wanted to be. She wanted a door, an exit, flight — anything to get away from her physical form, which — since childhood — was plagued with congenital issues, allergies, headaches, and muscle pain.
Sweat and soaked cotton clung to Lulu’s back. Unable to sleep, she took out her devotional and read the morning’s scripture.
Again the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor. Matthew 4:8.
Lulu meditated on the meaning. The world had changed since she was a child.
Everything was available on delivery, covered in plastic. Chemicals, asphalt, dirty concrete cities, hot in their barrenness, the absence of God’s creation. She mourned the lost purity of nature, before streams and fields were polluted. Secular culture’s cotton candy veneer was rotten underneath. Bright colors and excess masked decay. She had her oasis in her rural town, but development was encroaching.
*
In the morning, Lulu sipped her coffee and read the translated works of Hildegard of Bingen. She collected quotes from her favorite mystic: The earth which sustains humanity must not be injured. It must not be destroyed!
Outside, warblers and robins sang morning songs. Nascent light edged along the front yard. Lulu listened to the forest as she prayed. She had gardening to do, and readied herself, mentally preparing to weed and prune after attending to some household chores. She enjoyed the solitude, the ability to be away from the chaos of society. Too many of her interactions ended poorly. The town’s selectboard was notorious for making backroom deals. She worked hard to cleanse her mind. To live charitably and with gratitude. She volunteered at the local food pantry, for instance, and delivered bouquets to seniors in assisted living.
The phone rang. A man asked if she needed better rates on her mobile services. Lulu politely declined and hung up.
*
In the side yard, iron bacteria sloughed through the stream. Rust colored clouds suspended in water. Lulu remembered when the water ran clear, before Jasper’s cousins dumped tires and car parts in the swamp. She frowned, standing over the bog, and exhaled.
Amber murk choked frog eggs, mallards, irises. The overgrowth was near impossible to get rid of in an ecosystem with no use for excess minerals. Now Jasper was ranting about smart meters. How the radiation would fry their brains under the pretense of measuring energy consumption in people’s homes.
Jasper stood at the cross-section between their yards, finger pointed in the air. His long thinning hair hung beneath a wide-brimmed bucket hat. His yellow and orange tie-dye t-shirt stood out from the verdure of elderberry shrubs.
Lulu wasn’t sure, but he seemed to have a point. In the 90s, Pastor Tom said if the planet was one degree warmer or colder they’d all be in trouble. Just like if the earth was any closer or further away from the sun, life would be impossible. Everything existed in the exact correct conditions. Part of God’s perfect plan, he said.
Lulu had been enjoying gardening when Jasper approached. She meditated on her life’s blessings, the birds, the sunshine, and the holy lives of saints while she tended the soil. She thought about the words of Hildegard of Bingen, The soul is not in the body; the body is in the soul.
Most days, she didn’t feel that way. Most days she felt like she was trapped inside her soft tissue, her head, and aching muscles. Soreness gnawed at her. To some degree, she was tired of magical thinking. The idea that she could will away her pain if she just tried hard enough, forgot about her body. She had learned reality didn’t work that way.
If her nutrition suffered, if her Vitamin D was low, no amount of meditation or can-do attitude was going to improve her cognition. Deficiencies, infections, toxin exposure, organic problems affected her body and impaired her brain.
Still, she thought, yanking up some mint, she believed in something — well, if not magical, then at least higher.
Jasper pointed his finger in the air. He said they were trying to cook people. That they used similar technology in war time. He looked more frazzled than usual, stubbled, with violet puffy bags under his eyes.
Lulu didn’t know enough to have an opinion, but she knew that reality contained tipping points where one degree determined so much. One increment was the difference between having adequate calcium or having a fever.
She didn’t want to offend Jasper. She was not an ungenerous neighbor, he would talk for hours if uninterrupted. Listening to him felt like being sucked into a vortex, an exclusive dance she preferred to avoid, swirling in the psychedelic logic of a freelance carpenter who smoked too much pot.
She was paranoid too, in her own way.
*
On Friday, Jasper’s baritone voice carried through the trees. He stood on his back
porch singing karaoke to the peepers. The Grateful Dead’s Scarlet Begonias reverberated through a speaker. Lulu was just glad he hadn’t come over and was distantly graced with his music talents instead.
He would periodically stop by to discuss his latest cause. He made sense enough, advocated for reform and cultivated seven-leafed plants in his backyard. He was preoccupied with freedom and boundaries. He abhorred politicians and fascist states. The government has no right to tell us what to do, he said.
The scent of sulfur wafted from the swamp and intermingled with flora and fauna blossoming in the dewy June woods. Lulu recalled a conversation they had earlier in the week.
“That EMF exposure is gonna frizzle those little toads. Just think about it! You and me, we can handle it a little better, but those amphibians got skin thinner than a fruit peel.”
Lulu wasn’t sure if she followed the logic, but tended to agree. She saw what chemicals did to amphibians. Jasper was angry about what his cousins had done to the swamp, dumping tires, letting their junk leach into the soil. They lived in a compound, had a lot of rusted out flatbeds, a school bus, something about “deals on wheels.” One of the nephews was trying to be the next Stephen King. He spent most of his time writing in a shed.
At some point the town was going to pave a road through their driveway as some sort of convenience to a logging company, but the plans fell through, another backroom deal gone wrong. All that was left of the project was an unfortunately placed halogen bulb zapping insects into the night. Moths fluttered and fell in the glow of a streetlamp no one wanted.
Lulu was beginning to feel like the moths. She avoided technology, which she assumed would complicate her already dysphoric relationship to her flesh.
*
That night before bed, Lulu laid on the floor and practiced holotropic breathing. She read books about spiritualists, psychologists, and everyday people ascending into alternate dimensions. The therapeutic breathing practice promised an alternative state of consciousness. She ached and was giving up hope.
*
In the morning, Lulu wiped sweat off her brow. She pulled weeds from a bed of sunchokes. The rotten egg stench of the wetland lingered in the humidity. A red-winged blackbird trilled in the distance. She engaged in contemplative prayer and pondered her morning devotional. Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others. Philippians 2:4.
Saints and deists floated across her mind, mixing with passing dandelion seeds.
From behind her, she could hear Jasper’s boots crunch along the gravel.
"You should come to town meeting!" Jasper said, settling into a lean against Lulu’s porch rail.
Lulu wasn't so sure. She focused on the weeds. The last thing she needed was someone losing control and firebombing her house. People got angry over unpredictable things, navigating other people’s beliefs was impossible, and town issues were especially contentious.
"No one ever said revolution was easy!" Jasper exclaimed.
"What?" Lulu asked, reaching her hand to her temple, as a headache spread to the forefront of her brain.
"Why sure, it started with them putting cameras on everybody's computers, then the phones, then on the roads, bridges, now these smart meters. We've got to protect ourselves!"
"I see," Lulu said, feeling a sense of dismay press on her chest. She didn't want to revolt. She wanted to tend her garden and relax in the comfort of her home. She wanted to escape the world, if just for a minute, to know that she wasn’t totally trapped, just a glimpse into something other than her current form.
She revered the beauty of nature, the way butterflies balanced on pink milkweed umbels, the verdure of newly unfurled leaves, the way rain washed dust off stones and lichen, but on the other side of beauty was something more sinister, something sickly and fetid, mired in hopelessness and despair. Living was easy when everything worked, when there was fresh air, and an absence of disease.
“I hear they can tap brainwaves, turn thoughts like the dial on a radio,” Jasper whispered.
“Jasper, who is they?” Lulu asked.
Lulu knew the tipping point had been reached, and now everything was breaking down. Natural law had been ignored, zapped, fried, poisoned. In a way, Jasper knew it too.
“You know, the government, big corporations, they’re in cahoots,” Jasper whispered.
“Ah,” Lulu sighed. “Right.”
There was a pause.
“You don’t believe me, do you?”
“No,” Lulu said, “I believe you. Anything is possible, I just find it hard to know what’s true and what’s not.”
“Right, right” Jasper said, nodding vigorously, “So you’ll come?”
“I don’t know, Jasper,” Lulu said, wiping her hands on her pants and standing up. “I’ll have to think about it.”
*
Night air hung thick with moisture. A great horned owl hooted from a nearby tree. Lulu tossed in her sheets trying to decide what to do about Jasper and the impending town meeting. Unfamiliar situations made her pain flare and gave her anxiety. Radiation exposure across the region varied and caused problems at industrial levels. She thought about the small bodies of insects and amphibians, the unconsidered, and unintended consequences. Sunlight bounced off the moon and landed on her floor.
Lulu preferred being camouflaged. She thought about herself in animal terms. Attracting attention was asking for trouble. There was a logic in defending one’s territory, defending the unseen, unnoticed lifeforms around her. The chitter of grasshopper wings, the bees in her garden. Perhaps it was enough, to not know enough, to advocate for caution.
She got up and stared out the window, trying to reimagine the forest in the darkness. Maybe Hildegard was right, maybe the soul was everything outside of herself, and being inside was a trick mirror. Maybe she was earthbound for a reason.
Light killed moths. Too much of anything became toxic. Bodies came with rules. Benign substances to one creature meant poison to another. Everything existed in degrees and tipping points, the moment warmth turned to a fever. Energy and other life forms, their chemicals and electromagnetic fields, were in a constant state of bouncing against each other. It was a wonder anyone survived at all. Given the size of other beings, she decided she didn’t know enough, but would inquire further, and voice her concerns at town hall. The issue was a matter of scale.