A CRYSTAL GOBLET

[[The planet mercury sings like a crystal goblet. 
It sings all the time.]]

Stella is on her way to the rancheros where Elando is in a house with a large back yard and a swimming pool. He is a butler for the Bigelow Space Mansions. A man he has been friends with all his life has a living space inside the garage. This man lights up the night.

Stella parks in the driveway. The garage door is open and Wade is grilling hamburger patties on a round barbeque. Along one side of the garage there is a granite countertop. There is a head of cooked cauliflower inside a Tupperware and on a paper plate there is a slab of ham. The ham is from the honey-baked ham store. Wade can have a ham any time he likes.  

Stella!

I’ve brought a cake!

Nice honey, that’s nice. Thank you.

Stella sets the cake on the counter next to the ham and the raw meat patties. Elando is slicing the spiral ham into rounds an eighth of an inch thick. Some of the fat he pulls from the edges and tosses into the sink.

When the burgers are finished and half the ham is sliced, everyone serves themselves and goes to sit down in Wade’s room; it’s built out of the garage and has air conditioning. In the room there are two couches and a television set. There are statues of Buddha and masks. There are mirrors and feathers and a painting of an eye on a string.

So how is it at the Mansions? Stella is saying this but the words come more from the paint on the walls and the furniture than from inside her.

Elando puts a bite of hamburger in his mouth and gestures in the air with his fork and knife: People come and gamble and they are very, very weird. Every day, their meals cost fifty thousand dollars. He swallows his hamburger. They eat sharkfin soup, they eat something called “Buddha jumping over the wall.” It’s some type of weird chicken that they put in herbs, and one pot is two thousand dollars. They eat bird nest. They get one pot of bird nest: three thousand dollars. They eat shark fin soup, birds’ nest soup, Buddha chicken, everything changes. Fifty thousand.

Wade is cutting his ham with fork and knife. Stella is eating with her fingers.

A woman and a man arrived yesterday, so the Mansions have to take the plane and go to China to pick them up. And last year they were there in December and they were there previous to December like in about October and the guy was losing money, so when the guy loses money he stays, when he wins he leaves, because he believes that, when he’s losing, he wants to try to get it back—more—so when he left, he had like about 20 million dollars that he lost that time, and he got it all back, like on the last day. But, what was funny, is that previous to that, he was starting to leave. So for about six nights they had to get all this food ready for him to take to the plane, the same food that they prepare during his stay, for the plane, for him to take; and then they cancel all the food for five days, so the food had to be refreshed, and they still charge the money. So guess who ate the food? We did.

So, so the birds’ nest is like this little ball that is this big () In Malaysia they have some caves, in some cliffs over the ocean, and the saliva of the bird is the nest, and that is supposed to be extremely good for the skin, it’s like a delicacy, and these birds are pretty expensive because they have to cultivate these birds. Isn’t that weird? I eat it all the time. It’s like a bunch of little fibers. The stuff itself doesn’t taste like anything but they prepare it with a kind of syrup, so it’s kind of sweet, so it’s okay. Or, they like the coconut, the whole coconut, they open it up, and they put the bird in there with the coconut milk, and you eat it out of a coconut. It’s really neat.

And they eat caviar, they order like five thousand dollars worth of caviar.

Stella and Wade are eating and both are nodding, glancing between Elando and their plates and one another.

You never had caviar? It’s like a bunch of little round eggs, from the ocean, and the eggs, they have different grades of caviar, they have Beluga, Deluga, Osetra, but the way that they do it is with the condiments. They toast bread—they call it toast point—and you put a little bit of sour cream and egg white and all that stuff, and that’s how they eat it. You taste it but if you eat it by itself it is very fishy.

[[Wade’s piece of tooth is falling out and he frowns. Elando leans over him.]]

Wade has no teeth now! What do you think?

You can’t tell. I am glad they are out; those teeth needed to go.

I told him to get them all out. This is what he got. I said, get ‘em all!

What dentist is it?

At the University. Six hundred dollars for ten teeth. Sixty bucks a tooth.

It’s cheap…

It’s a lot.

The root is the problem.

The amount of money they charge for every little procedure. You can’t think about it forever. You need to get happy. Life’s too fucking short. If you watch the news and only the news, I don’t think I have ever seen a person who is unaffected the way Elando is, if you watch only the news the way he does, I know people that do that, and it makes them dead. I don’t think I have seen it take an effect on him.

I’m not dead! I eat the birds’ nest and the eggs from fish! We have Stella’s cake! Let’s have the cake!

Elando, did you see my parents?

In room four.

What did they do today?

They ate the soup. They don’t have distance and they don’t have time, so everything is like a song.  

Let me tell you: you dance with the devil, you will dance with the devil again.

No matter what.

[[and with the planets ringing, as they are]]

Cake is tasty, Stella!

Do you like it?

Let me tell you, honey—

It’s so moist!

Don’t get rid of anything.

[[[Meanwhile, in room four of the Bigelow Space Mansions]]]

Apparitions:

*A friend of Stella’s father, Jeremy

*Stella’s father, Rip

*Stella’s mother

Jeremy: We’ve got a switchboard hanging here, probably take that back and give it back to them.

Rip: It’s a converter. I’m saving that for historic purposes. That’s our first fiber-optic demo. It’s got fiber-optic transceivers on it. It takes the electrical signals in, converts it to fiber-optic, on that little card, and it comes out the other side. See, here are a couple transceivers with a routing wheel. It’s our first demonstration unit that we made.

Huh.

The fact that you can put electricity in, convert it to fiber, get fiber out.

What is the fiber?

It’s a little piece of glass, a glass fiber.

I didn’t realize, the electricity converts to glass?

It converts to light.

Is the fiber actually glass?

Yes, glass.

But the electricity is light.

Can you see this? This is a fiber-optic cable, so there’s a little piece of glass in there, a little long strip of glass, made by Corning.

Ok.

This is an LC connector. That’s a ceramic barrel, with a little 50 micron glass in it, the width of a human hair, and the glass is extruded into miles and miles…

It’s amazing!

So the light becomes glass?

It’s a transceiver. It transceives between light here and electricity there. This is a standard RJ 45 cable. The light—

So the light does become glass?

The light goes through the glass. We’ve got light and electricity. Electricity goes through copper. Light goes through glass. The glass guides the light, the wavelength.

What happens when you have a curve?

It goes right around---neeuuuu [[he gestures with one finger]].

So the light goes around?

Yes.

With the glass.

The sharpest bend ratio you can have is about a third of an inch, a third of an inch, you can have a third of an inch arc. So it goes around that. There’s fibers that go all the way across the Atlantic Ocean.

There are?

That’s how America talks to Europe. They can talk on a fiber link or a satellite link. So if there is no delay, that’s over a fiber-link. If there’s a half a second or second delay, in what they’re saying or they hear an echo, like you see on the news when they’re waiting for their person to get it for a couple seconds, that’s a satellite link. It has to go up for a second and down for a second. The fiber-optics is instantaneous because the speed of light is so fast.

Wow, it’s going at the speed of light!

It is light.

It is light!

So there’s a fiber-optic cable here, and this is the other transceiver.

Can we make anything else go the speed of light?

Only light goes the speed of light.

But here the electricity can go the speed of light. Can you convert anything else to light? [[shakes his head]] Are you working on it?

They use electricity now. It would be better if everything was light.

This should be in a museum or something; you could maybe give it to a science museum.

They wouldn’t know what it is! Everything we’ve learned is in the optics. This transceiver to the other transceiver. That’s the real work of this. Now, see how each of these have two fiber-optic cables coming into them? Now we do it with just one. One cable, one fiber, and we have a bi-directional thing on there, it’s like a prism. It separates the light into two wavelengths. You get two colors of light. One color goes left, one color goes right. So that way we can go out on one wavelength and back on the other wavelength, on the same fiber, at the same time. They don’t interfere with each other because they’re different frequencies, different colors. You can do it with any wavelength of light, all the colors of the spectrum. There’s visible light and an invisible light, so infrared, where any color—

Stella’s Mother: Are you ready guys?

Ready!

It’s so nice that it’s not hot.

It’s a breath of fresh air!

Where did you walk to this morning?

Jeremy: I walked around the lake!

Did you see them coming to get the goose? The goose was sitting and it was hurt.

No!

Maybe they had gotten it by the time you got there. I think the goose, it had a hook in its leg, and it was really in pain, and it couldn’t do anything.

What did they do with it?

Well, I called Animal Control because it was right in the pathway, but I never did see them come.

You don’t think they just killed it do you?

Well, you know, I feel this way: if they do just kill it, it’s better for the animal, than for the animal to go around with a big fishing hook in its leg.

Rip: Well, they could just get the hook out.

Yea, I think that they could do that, but whether they did…

Jeremy: They aren’t just going to kill a goose.

Rip: What I think is they’ll disable it somehow, and just get it out.

[[[They sit down at a table.]]]

Look at this salad—China Coast: grilled and chilled chicken breast, Mandarin oranges, oh that sounds good!

Grilled and chilled chicken breast.

Are you going to get a salad or what are you going to get?

The last time I was here I had them keep the chicken hot, remember? And that was great.

Keep the chicken hot!

The China Coast, that sounds good. I’m going to get the China Coast, chicken salad.

I will have the Mahi-mahi. And how about a caviar? 

Only if it's Beluga.

Can I have the air on a string? Can I have the speed of light?

Everything inside already is. We’re faster even.

[[A hologram projection is on the far wall.]]

Look at that wave.

Do you think that’s Hawaii?

It must be.

He must have something on the lens. There’s something…we can’t see through.

It’s the wavelength.

Jeremy: The prism’s not right!

Rip: I’m calling, I’m calling the receiver.

What’s he going to do?

They've got to get the lens cleared off!

Or it’s the fiber.

It’s not the fiber.

It’s the optics.

It’s not the optics! Something is on the lens. The prism is making a circle.

[[[The food arrives. Rip sets his headset on the table and all three begin to eat.]]]