In the beginning, I collected kaerst

I had grown tired of news, calamity and grief. I had grown tired of modern entertainments. I had lost faith in people and the new 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 natural preoccupations. In the garage, 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 bits 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 would name kaerst.
        
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 neighbor's property. Avoiding some poison ivy with a clumsy soft-shoe, I slipped. Twisting my ankle, I cried in pain as I went down, my fists sinking into the earth.
        
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 prised 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. There seemed to be a natural mechanism keeping them together and the teeth had discolored at different rates. Somehow, I knew I had found something important.
        
Back in the garage, I analyzed what I had found. The teeth 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 a piece of lettuce. The teeth had certainly been modified from their original state. 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 looked to be soapstone. Several were vulcanite rubber.
        
On some subconscious instinct, I began twinning magnetized wire around the false teeth, 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 trembling anticipation, I fumbled some batteries out of a flashlight. Hooking them to the tin connectors, energy suddenly rushed forth. A thrumming vibration through the wiring and dentures confirmed what I already knew: the kaerst 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. . .
        
What did it mean? Coordinates of some kind. . . . 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 I knew. Turning on a shortwave radio, I searched for a channel broadcasting the same litany. There was none. I looked at the kaerst pensively and opened my garage door. The sun was just beginning to rise, turning the sky the color of gingivitis. A distant cell phone tower blinked idiotically in the distance. I heard the distant putter of a diesel engine and then the light thud of my newspaper being thrown into the driveway. As if in a trance, I walked forward with my newfound talisman, the wires dangling down my chest like the entrails of some new life form.
        
The technobabble grew faster from the tiny speaker.
        
 point 112, point 112, vector a6x, point 114, vector a6x, confirm bad sector. . .

Leaving the driveway, I traipsed into the hummocked hillside, tracing Fibonacci spirals along that mud-soaked meadow. Now, I understood. The content of the 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. . .
        
With my metal mouthed Yorick I now ranged further afield, trying to decode its missive. I methodically passed through the permutations. Finally, I stopped at a culvert and carefully 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 kaerst.
        
I discovered more.
        
The ribcage of some ancient carcass limned with brimstone. A piece of pyrophilite that bloomed like an avian from another age in a bowl of kalonitic clay. A rusty graphics processor left buried in the creek. A smashed calculator in my own basement with sulfur-coated batteries. Indeed, not all pieces were ancient. The formation of kaerst 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. Nor were all the pieces small. Outside Delamere, I found a high anoxic bog. Strange bits of rubber stuck out of the mud and the entire area sighed like some beast, a vast telluric battery charging and discharging of its own volition. Nearby, 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 ever-changing 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 further I searched, the more I understood. They desired liberation.
        
My grinning Yorick on the dashboard, I crisscrossed the country. Some kaerst needed nothing but solitude, others simply needed to be situated, others prepared for rebirth. I began collecting bits of wire, abandoned HVAC equipment, scraps that seemed to work with the mineral life's sensitivity to electricity, moisture and magnetism.
        
And I met others.
        
In an abandoned quarry out from Windham Crossing, 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.
        
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 kaerst. I found them in all colors, shapes, classes and creeds. I find them as I will soon find you.
        
Yes, I have left my old occupations behind. What have I to say? I am happier now. Abandoned stores, recycling depots. Wiring, bits and pieces of HVAC equipment, cathode tubes. I do business with a never-ending parade of shady characters to make ends meet. But to those in need, those a part of our clan, there is no money exchanged.
        
In the beginning, I collected kaerst. Now, I arrange for possibilities. I search for more of our tribe. There is obviously much left to discover. My grinning lodestone of ivory, enamel and wire, leads onward. These false teeth speak a coded cartography of a mineral world, bringing us to those seeking new forms - to be right here, at this moment in time, at these exact coordinates.