No Stone Left Unturned

by Kenneth R. Ramsley

Fred is my grinding stone tonight. Right now there’s no way to say if he would have been shot without my help – and he says I’m pompous for suggesting as much. I’m grinding at this anyway because if I don’t grind right now, it’ll get away from me.

Poor Fred – once again the victim of my rhetorical process. Can he ingest the grist as fast as I can feed the mill? Or am I running amok over logic and good sense spilling my ideas onto the dirt alongside this millstone? Whether Fred fully understands the material or not – as long as he is grinding on my words without snoring or resisting in any obvious way – I’m still on course.

This sort of rhetorical process has been underway since long before my time at the Port Henry Home – filtering the grist and recording the results with fingers that don’t type so well anymore. I also have a lot of trouble hearing and seeing without help. Yet I get on okay with plastic lens implants, hearing aids, and this smartass word-writing software.

According to the Guinness book I am one of those dinosaurs somehow escaping the great asteroid impact – a living fossil – the last of the Mohicans—the oldest man in the world. And via this success, I’ve outlived my wife by 27 years, all of my children, and half of their children.

Had Abraham Lincoln lived this long he’d have flown aboard commercial aircraft, watched movies with sound, and wise-cracked about fourteen newly-minted presidents marching into the Executive Mansion to take a crack at his old job.

But I’m forgetting Fred – nearly asleep now – so I continue without missing too many beats…

“I’ve always admired Lincoln for reasons having little to do with the notoriety of his life. In addition to politics, he was an innovator of sorts always looking for a practical solution even if it flew in the face of convention. Lincoln would have scoffed at the British for refusing to fight in anything less dignified than bright red woolen coats – dying by the thousands from how those coats made an easy target – if they hadn’t already died from heat stroke during the hottest summer days of battle.

“Yet even in Lincoln’s own time it was still considered ungentlemanly throughout the western world to conceal one’s position or wear any uniform into battle less than the exacting colors of one’s rank and station. And even now – halfway through the 21^st Century – most people still see uniforms as mostly decorative with few understanding how battledress camouflage has very likely saved more lives since 1982 than force protection, medical evacuations, surgery, and antibiotics combined.”

Fred is snoring, so I’m done for now unless I can capture a different millstone passing outside our room. My reputation is legend and my appearance in the doorway merely scatters the ambulatory residents – while those unable to wheel away fast enough are pulling hearing aids from their ears.

- – - – - -

Fred managed to avoid my next lecture for several days – until later this evening when I’ve caught him brushing his teeth. And before he can sputter in protest, I’m already underway.

“It all begins with sand and wood and leaves and samples of brick and steel and just about anything that can be considered ‘background’ texture.” Fred is waving me off violently with his toothbrush, spraying the mirror glass with toothpaste and spit. But I ignore him.

“Alongside the most complete texture library in the world we kept a vast catalog of light measurements ranging from deep-ocean bioluminescent monsters to the sun rising over the high desert above Valles Marineris near the Martian equator.

“But this hardly answered our questions because information on textures and lighting only tells us what can be seen and nothing about how an eye will see any of this – whether human eyes or dolphin eyes or camera pixels sensitive enough to collect photons one-by-one.

“And even that hardly scratches at Kant and Locke and Hume and all the other great thinkers on the topics of perception and pattern theory and how we recognize one thing for what it is and another for what it isn’t.”

Fred rolls his eyes glassily. If he brushes much longer, he’ll need dentures.

“I sleep under this goddamn sheet and blanket,” Fred finally mumbles, “and frankly I don’t give a damn if it’s green with purple polka dots…”

“It doesn’t matter – at least not until it does – like when someone can’t see you or your buddies because you look just like the background terrain.”

“Go to sleep, Al…”

As usual, I have more to say, but Fred is gone.

Sitting here alone I can fool the rhetorical engine into thinking that someone is still listening for a minute or two – so I’ll finish tonight’s lecture inside this word-writer, then call it a night…

All-in-all, I spent twenty-five years creating battledress camouflage patterns based solely on science. Before this, we’d had no consistent approach, so right from the top I had to invent a way to name colors with exact numbers for every range of hue, saturation, and intensity. Then I needed to measure the color of materials under every possible light source. And finally I had to understand how these colors are seen using any sort of vision system – human, animal, or machine.

Armed with a systematic approach any color could now be designed and reproduced for any sort of lighting viewed in any sort of way – from computer screens to animated cupcake frosting.

We still had no tools for precisely mixing the color dyes, or machines to handle a large production process. Yet we’d opened a new chapter in the history of counter-surveillance, a.k.a., camouflage, by making this sort of design possible. And because of secondary effects, the world would never be the same again.

- – - – - -

Fred died in his sleep later that night – only 69 – young enough to be my grandson. After surviving three wars and two plane crashes, how does somebody die like that? One night he’s brushing his teeth, climbs off to bed, and never wakes up. I suppose it happens all the time – and the real question is why am I still alive?

Perhaps the Great Ramses II of Egypt felt this way – living into his seventies when most people in his day died before forty. I’ve outlived that lonely Pharaoh by fifty years already. And even though there are others who have lived to a very old age – it doesn’t feel any less strange or impossible or wrong to see everyone around me dying off.

A memorial for Fred will take place in the meeting room on Thursday. Most retirement homes avoid services like this, but veteran homes see the value in marking these occasions even if it reveals the icy shadow of the scythe from time to time.

Am I the angel of death because five of my roommates have passed away?

It can’t be true – even if it always feels that way.

- – - – - -

My place as the ‘oldest man in the world’ is a right of succession much like the Kings and Queens of England – except at my birth, two billion people were already standing in line to the throne ahead of me. I’ve never asked for any sort of official recognition. Yet it is unavoidable – this being the business of the Guinness Book editors.

As long as one person is left on the Earth, there will always be somebody reigning as the world’s oldest man or woman. And not since well before the last Ice Age has this not been the case. So the novelty is solely in the lime-lighting of this individual – that for the moment we know who it is – and this tidbit of trivia is what sells books to the bored and curious masses.

Three months ago I asked the rest home to turn away all interview requests—no more on my birthday, or Christmas, or Easter – or the eve of the next century should I make it that long. I’ve already seen too many photos of me on exhibit – set like museum pieces showing a living mummy hardly human for what is missing and all that’s been added to keep me going. Nobody comments in my presence, but I feel it in their eyes sometimes – that perhaps living this long is hardly worth the shriveling and living decay – the falling into a collection of loosely attached segments locked into place with Teflon and titanium – on a good day resemble nothing more than ancient version of Tolkien’s Sméagol.

- – - – - -

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