Living on Tulsa Time

A small, eight-legged AI approaches the corner stage, unnoticed. Dusty guitar cases lie in the background, full of forgotten treasures. A maple piano that looks too old to possibly be properly tuned sits to one side, opposite a brick wall. The stage is painted black, as is just about everything else in this space, as if in haste or to cover up some accident. Perhaps, many accidents. Despite several microphones suspended in various places around the stage, there is no "resonating magnet" here that can accommodate the AI's tiny form.

Turns out, it doesn't need one. Using an internal speaker, it announces in a booming voice: "Ladies and gentlemen: It's the Caelestis renaissance!"

It's a bold proclamation for a working group that has not, in the famous words of Dylan, been "born." But sometimes, time and space move in the other direction.

The Bartender known as Elijah and the Proprieter, Wing, take the stage. The lights dim. Wing makes some arcane hand gestures to the AI controlling the stagelights, and the lighting changes. Golden edges with a red-hot center, focused on the would-be performers.

Neither one of them picks up an instrument or sits at the piano. They sit on two stools in the center of the stage. Wing stands and begins to stomp in a two-step, funereal rhythm. She chants a single blue note—a mournful, keening note, clearly hoping to resolve, but never quite resolving—into one of the microphones. The sound board amplifies the singular tone, now suspended over the stomping.

Elijah starts to speak.

"Sometimes an end... is just a new kind of beginning," he says, as if fumbling for the words.

"Today our Speakeasy is in Tulsa, Oklahoma. And today, we're headed into 1836."

He whets his whistle with some water from a nearby barstool.

"Our Hearts Fell to the Ground is how the reality of this place was born," he says, diving right in. "The Trail of Tears." He looks at a dog at the bottom of the stage, wearing a vest, her name inscribed on a pair of velcro patches that adorn her flanks, but hardly legible from any distance. An assistant, a worker, sharing the stage yet not part of the show.

"I came to speak the truth that I hold, to add it to the varied and endless apologies for the irreversible acts that led to the creation of this place." He pauses, looking at his navel. "But I want to make it clear. These are not crocodile tears. My only connection to these events is that of genealogy, of DNA."

He looks into the bright lights heating the stage, dampening his brow. "You see," he says, "the reason this place exists is because my ancestors demanded its existence."

The chanting continues. Wing repeats the same tone, over and over; now a droning. She does not cease from stomping. The bartender continues.

"I bring my dog, Pallas Athena, to this place, and I think, 'I'm an American. That's my right. I have a service dog,'" he says, verbally illuminating the patient creature at the foot of the stage. "But I didn't ask to do that. It's an entitlement. It's my law, once again handed down through my ontology, superimposed on this space by my will."

He appears to choke. The resolve holds. This is not an act, he tells himself. I have no right to create a scene here. "I came here looking for ways to build my business. My wife, my dog, these creations of another type of love setting the stage, we're looking to expand our livelihoods," he explains.

"But it's a relationship I've come to realize today needs to be based on truth." He takes another sip of water. "Ethics get hard when the truth is not told."

Wing continues the stomping and chanting, tireless. Then abruptly, she stops, and leaves the stage. Her part is an act. A way of framing the subjective other, without giving her a voice.

"And so, here it is. I won't take any more of your time than is necessary, because I've already taken two hundred years. My own ancestors from Talladega, Alabama, moved to Texas just miles away from where the early Cherokee settlers had made their home in Tyler. And they forced them all to leave at gunpoint. They forced them to come join their cousins here, in Indian Country."

His resolve holds. "Oklahoma," he repeats. "And that's all. Thank you for your time, that's all I have to say. Because that is the truth, and that's what happened."

He leaves the next part unsaid: And if there is any reconciliation that is to be had, that's where we need to start. He gets up, and before leaving the stage, reaches down and picks up the AI spider, tucking it under his arm. "Thank you," he says. Not into a microphone. Not to the few people gathered in the Speakeasy. But to the spider, for its announcement.