Joe Baumann
Joe Baumann’s fiction and essays have appeared in Phantom Drift, Passages North, Emerson Review, Another Chicago Magazine, Iron Horse Literary Review, Electric Literature, Electric Spec, On Spec, Barrelhouse, Zone 3, and many others. He is the author of Ivory Children, published in 2013 by Red Bird Chapbooks. He possesses a PhD in English from the University of Louisiana-Lafayette. He was a 2019 Lambda Literary Fellow in Fiction. His debut short story collection, Sing With Me at the Edge of Paradise, was chosen as the inaugural winner of the Iron Horse/Texas Tech University Press First Book Award, and his second story collection, The Plagues, will be released by Cornerstone Press in 2023. His debut novel, I Know You’re Out There Somewhere, is forthcoming from Deep Hearts YA. He can be reached at joebaumann.wordpress.com
Glacier
Kim shut the door behind the last guest to leave his retirement party and pressed his forehead against the door. Stacy laid a hand on the back of his neck like a cold compress.
“At least that’s over,” Stacy said. “Now we just have to clean up.”
Kim groaned and said, “I can’t believe I have a grand-nephew. We have a grand-nephew. When did that happen?”
Stacy pressed his fingers gently against the tender spot between Kim’s throat and jaw like he was checking his husband’s pulse. Kim stood up straight, smiled, and kissed Stacy on the lips, the heat of his mouth getting sucked into Stacy’s. His hands were warm, and Stacy took that too when they braided their fingers together. He felt a hot maelstrom in his throat that then floated into nothing as it drilled into him.
But before all of that, Stacy would save the world.
*
Stacy: ten years old. His mother: grilling steaks on the stovetop in her cast-iron skillet. Stacy, wanting to be helpful: grabbing the handle like he’d seen his mother do many times before, redistributing the heat because their oven wasn’t plumb level, and oils and fats tended to gather on the left side of any pan. His mother, seeing this at the last second: a howl, expecting Stacy to screech with pain. But instead: a tiny hiss as Stacy gripped the handle. No blisters or char of second- or third-degree burns. The only visible mark on Stacy’s palm: a faint blue outline that faded as fast as it appeared.
*
“The handle,” Stacy told Kim, “was cool to the touch.”
When Kim frowned and raised an eyebrow, Stacy said, “I’m endothermic. Heat comes in.”
They were lazing on Kim’s bed. The air conditioning in their fraternity house had putzed out two days before and the oppression of August in Missouri left everything thick like potato soup. When Kim, fanning himself with the tv remote, lamented the heat, Stacy wrapped his hand around Kim’s ankle. They both looked down at his curled fingers. And when Stacy started to draw the warmth away, Kim said, “What are you doing?”
Doctors, Stacy explained, had wondered if he wasn’t perhaps suffering from CIPA, “Congenital insensitivity to pain and anhidrosis,” Stacy said, as if reciting the pledge of allegiance. “But I sweat all the time.”
“Yes,” Kim said, grinning.
“And I’d have still been hurt.” Stacy held up a hand: no scar, no reminder.
“So you’re basically one of the X-men. Iceman or whoever.”
Stacy shook his head. “I can’t, like, shoot out ice cubes or whatever. No quick-frosted beers for you. I just absorb. I’m like a sponge.”
“So not a glacier?”
“Not a glacier.”
“Glacier sounds more impressive than sponge. I think we should call you Glacier.”
Stacy flexed his fingers into fists. “I do like the sound of it.”
“So where does the heat go?” Kim said. He poked a finger at Stacy’s chest. “Is there a fire raging in there?”
“Good question,” Stacy said. Only once had he felt the heat move through him completely: when he touched the scorching asphalt in Yellowstone at the visitors center, the nexus of his changed life, where he went from teenager to minor celebrity. Other than that one time, he never knew what happened to the warmth he absorbed; once it crossed into his skin, slurping down past epidermis and steeping into blood and muscle and bone and fascia, he didn’t feel it again. Sometimes he would turn on his overhead light or the coils of the stovetop and press his fingers gently to the heat, feeling it slither up into his palm and fingers.
“Well,” Kim said, laying a hand on Stacy’s sternum, “it sure feels warm in there to me.”
“Oh,” Stacy said, leaning in close, lips nibbling toward Kim’s throat, “that’s got an entirely different source.”
Kim laughed, let Stacy grab hold of him, and welcomed in his warmth, which Stacy was thrilled to give.
*
Stacy and Kim married in a quiet ceremony under a banana-yellow canopy—they’d ordered linen white, but there’d been a mix-up with the rental company—in a park just west of the Missouri River, close enough for the muddy smell to purl up their guests’ nostrils. After they shared their vows, Stacy went around to the assembled guests—forty or so close friends and family—and laid his fingers on their exposed forearms or the backs of their necks, drawing down their body temperatures so they wouldn’t sweat through the chiffon and organza of their dresses or the cotton of their button-down shirts. He did this several times, reinvigorating the assemblage with the help of a bar full of bottled beer on ice and cocktails mixed with booze from a mobile cooler. They danced until the park closed, when everyone staggered to their Ubers and Lyfts or caught rides with aunts and uncles in AA who sipped orange juice or bottled water all night. Stacy and Kim were the last to leave, both pickled with sweat; Kim shook off all of Stacy’s attempts to cool him down. “I want to feel tonight in my bones,” he said, laying a hand on Stacy’s chest. Despite the late hour, they sat on one of the picnic tables and looked up into the night sky.
Kim sighed, saying, “If not for you, where would we be?”
It was true: by then, the world would have been in stark trouble, ashy and dead to rights, had it not been for Stacy.
*
Young Stacy became obsessed with heat. Fires and conductivity, lightning storms, pilot lights, gas lines, magmatic chambers. Volcanoes. Sakurahima, Grímsvötn, Mauna Loa, Vesuvius, Colima, and Galeras. He imagined the Yellowstone Caldera wiping out Wyoming and Montana and Nebraska, settling thick clouds of ash over St. Louis, destroying livestock, choking foliage, turning the sky into an endless steppe of gray and gloom. Famine, humans gasping for clean air, world economies tumbling, society collapsing.
Stacy, seventeen: adolescence spent testing his skills. Hands stuck in the oven, his mother yelping in disapproval as he set his fingers on the hot innards that sizzled and steamed as he absorbed their warmth. Hot tubs and pots of boiling water, their roil brought down to the steady surface of a lake. Blowtorches in his high school’s metal shop. Scorching engine blocks as cars revved with horsepower and then sat dead to the world. Small fires in his back yard smothered under his palms, Roman candles blanched by his cupped hands.
The news, one day, a horrifying report that swept across television and social media: Yellowstone was rumbling.
*
Stacy began cleaning. They could leave the detritus of the party—plates smeary with sugary icing, plastic cups sloshing with final gulps of punch and beer and wine, streamers droopy above the kitchen island, a handful of ridiculous retirement gifts (jigsaw puzzles, a telescope, a Moleskine, golf clubs) stacked on the living room table—but Stacy knew Kim was too much of a cleaner for that; he couldn’t leave dishes stacked in the sink before bed, nor let his desk in the study sit untidied. They started in the living room of their modest, open-floor ranch, Kim grabbing a bucket from the garage into which they poured the leftover swill. Stacy stacked cups in one hand and empty plates in the other. Kim held open a trash bag and gathered crumpled napkins and stained plastic cutlery. They moved into the kitchen, where the cake remained half-uneaten on its cardboard slab, the word Congratulations! cut-off mid-syllable, rosettes of red velvet icing (Kim’s favorite) still clinging to the edges. The pan of bratwurst and burgers that Stacy had grilled—who else could cook over an open flame with his bare hands if he wanted to, no worry of singeing his fingers or burning his knuckles?—was decimated, a layer of grease hardened to the tray and holding the last few pieces of meat like quick-drying cement.
They stood next to each other at the sink, soaking and scrubbing because their dishwasher had gone out the day before. Kim would call a repairman the next day, because even though they both had degrees in geology, neither had a clue when it came to stopped-up drains or malfunctioning water pipes. Plus, wasn’t retirement supposed to mean you didn’t have to work anymore? Kim had spent the better part of three decades teaching sleepy undergraduates, periodically traveling to Colorado Springs to collect samples and study the Dakota formation shale. He’d written his thesis on the Yellowstone caldera after Stacy settled it, and then went to the University of Utah for his PhD, a long sojourn in Salt Lake City where Stacy was able to hide out amongst the Mormons, who, as a whole, didn’t register who he was, as if their attention during the apocalyptic crisis had been diverted to other concerns. They spent six years living in a ramshackle apartment with a narrow view of the Wasatch Mountains, surrounded by dry scrub and lots of young men in starched white shirts, Stacy jetting off for conference lectures and lab experiments in Cambridge and Silicon Valley, allowing himself to be poked and prodded and interviewed and documented; a biography of his salvation work came out just a few weeks after Kim defended his dissertation and received his job offer. Over the years he was offered loftier positions, perhaps because of his connection to Stacy, but he never accepted them. When Stacy would ask, Kim would say, “I like stability.”
And Stacy, a tiny grin on his face: “So do I.”
*
“I could stop it,” he told his parents.
They stared at him. Since the timer had started counting down to the end of the world, his mother and father had been curling into one another. At dinner, their chair backs touched like champagne flutes toasting. When they watched the news, full of apocalypse and hopelessness, their bodies were pressed together in bare intimacy, shoulders and hips and knees practically conjoined.
“You can what?” his father said.
“Stop it.” Stacy pointed at the television. “The eruption.” He held out his hands, palms facing his parents. “You know I can.”
His father looked at him and said, “It’s okay to be afraid, son.”
“I’m not afraid.”
His parents had long pretended that he was any other boy. When he absorbed heat, they looked away. If he tried to talk about it, they changed the subject. If his mother was cooking and he wandered toward the stove, she would shoo him out. His father had removed the firepit a summer ago. When Stacy asked why, he said they rarely used it anyway and its removal made cutting the grass easier.
“Sweetheart,” his mother said.
“This isn’t a superhero movie,” his father said. “You’re not a superhero.”
“Then what am I?” Stacy asked.
He left in the middle of the night, fishing his mother’s car keys from the bottom of her purse. Missouri to Yellowstone: nineteen hours, unless he pushed his pace and didn’t stop except for bathroom breaks and gas, which, for all he knew, wouldn’t be available because who was still worrying about manning convenience marts and pumps when apocalypse was on the horizon? But he had to do something, had to not watch the world crumble beneath spews of molten lava and an ash cloud that would cover half of the United States and spread around the globe, killing off flora and fauna and decimating the human population for generations. He would get there one way or another.
*
They kissed for the first time in their fraternity basement, a concrete pit with iron support posts that girls liked to dance around, walls covered in ancient graffitied copies of their fraternity letters. The first party of spring semester, Stacy’s sophomore year, was winding down. Because the basement featured two separate sets of doors leading outside, the room was frigid thanks to the departure of fifty or so heaving, sweaty, drunk bodies. The lighting was psychedelic, the regular fluorescent bulbs swapped out for blacklights that highlighted the neon sprays and sharp whiteness of peoples’ teeth. Stacy, drunk on too much cheap rum, was leaning against the wall near one of the doors. Someone had turned off the music.
“There you are,” Kim said, slouching up next to him. “Glacier.” Everyone in the fraternity had a nickname, usually a relic of some idiotic behavior; Kim was Puke Stain, because during his freshman year he’d developed a routine of getting so drunk he yakked on himself and then returned to parties with his t-shirts conspicuously sullied. Stacy’s nickname, given by Kim, had stuck, even though it made no sense.
“Hey.”
They had spent their freshman year practically inseparable, and now they lived in adjoining rooms on the fraternity house’s second floor, the rent far cheaper than the cost of a dorm room, even if the bathroom was far messier and sometimes downright gross, especially following parties, where all sorts of nasty refuse—half-chugged beer cans, puddles of vomit, the periodic used condom—tended to cluster. Kim was always showing off what Stacy could do, but instead of feeling like some sideshow, some pet that Kim had trained to do a routine of tricks, he felt spotlit, honeyed by the pride in Kim’s voice when he regaled strangers with tales of Stacy’s skills.
“You’re always here,” Kim had said one night, voice gummy with drink, as he defended Stacy’s nickname.
“Plenty of things that aren’t glaciers are always around,” Stacy said. “And the glaciers are melting, anyway.”
“But not you.”
Kim leaned against the wall, face close to Stacy’s. He was wearing a plain white cotton t-shirt, the underarms and neck ringed with sweat. Kim was a good dancer, and girls flocked to him during parties, crowding his body as it wriggled and writhed in perfect timing to the heavy bass and rapid-fire beats spewing from the speakers. He was breathing hard and smelled of something cloying. His lips were moist and glowed in the black lights.
“Good start to the year, huh?” Kim said.
“Decent party, yeah.”
Kim’s eyes were lidded. “You always say that. Same thing, every time.”
“I’m reliable.”
“You sure are.” Kim’s eyelids fluttered. Stacy looked around; they were the last two in the basement. Kim leaned forward and planted his mouth on Stacy’s.
Kim’s breath was hot and sticky and filled with the acrid taste of rotten fruit. But Stacy kissed him back anyway. His arms hung at his side, half-paralyzed, and it wasn’t until Kim pulled back that he could feel anything in his fingers; for once, they’d gone cold.
“Ah,” Kim said. “Thank goodness.”
*
The roads were empty, the blast zone evacuated. Stacy stopped for gas, blood pounding in his chest and ears and throat. But the pumps worked. His parents kept a two-gallon plastic gas can in the trunk, and he filled that, too. He wandered around the building and found the doors unlocked. Inside, the place was pristine. Wasn’t the end of the world full of broken glass and ravaged foodstuffs? But he was in the middle of nowhere, and anyone who might have wanted supplies could have found them anywhere else but here.
He poured Doritos and Slim Jims and Gatorades into the car. He found a trio of extra gas cans on a low shelf next to motor oil and the condom supply (he grabbed a pack just for the hell of it, his face burning even though he was alone). On his last trip he raided the beer cooler. He was probably on camera somewhere, a security feed catching his rifling and looting. Stacy’s cheeks flared again, but then he decided it didn’t matter. Once he did what he was aiming to do, no one would call him a criminal. They would thank him. Everyone, everywhere, would.
*
When they finished cleaning, Kim and Stacy fell into bed.
They laid in a contented silence, listening to one another breathe, feeling the slight tug of the top sheet as their lungs expanded and contracted. Stacy thought about the days ahead, this shift into a new period of their life together. He could delineate these phases with ease: first their meeting, after Stacy’s heroics in Yellowstone had made him an international celebrity, when he decided to quietly attend a small liberal arts college in northern Missouri where people were less likely to recognize him, which had been true: he’d managed through orientation and his first few classes incognito, only to have Kim identify him immediately as they sat next to each other in statistics; then their courtship, Kim besotted by Stacy not for his celebrity but for his intelligence and the way he stretched out his vowels when he was excited or drunk; then Kim’s postgraduate career in the West; and then his lengthy and stellar academic life, brought, finally, to a close twenty-five years later.
Kim turned onto his side, hands tucked up under his pillow, his face crossed with shadows and the silvery light of the moon filtering through the blinds. Kim took in a long breath and let out a little cat-like gnarl of gluey sound. “Tell me the story.”
This was another of their long-standing rituals: after any pillared moment of significance—their first night together, their wedding, the day they moved into the house—Kim asked Stacy to retell the moment he saved the world. Each time, Stacy tried to clip the story shorter, but Kim always poked him—shoulder, elbow, once his nose—and told him to slow down. Kim said he liked the details; he would close his eyes and nod as Stacy spoke, imagining himself next to Stacy as he knelt and pressed his palms to the hot asphalt, as first one bustling scientist—young, tow-headed, with moppy curls dampened by the humidity—stopped and blinked at him, and then another, finally an officer or ranger or someone who might have thought Stacy was the first of what could have been an endless barrage of crazies, cultists arriving to worship the caldera and the end of the world it would bring.
Stacy told him how the heat had been all-consuming, so massive that he at first doubted himself. He felt it, deep and strong in his heart, the heat pressing its way up into his elbows and shoulders, a lactic wave that almost made him collapse. Sweat dripped off his nose, sizzling on the ground. But he could feel the churn buckle just so. He could imagine, at that moment, some nerdy PhD staring at a seismograph or spectrometer, seeing an unexpected fluctuation.
And here was where Kim would take over the telling, teeth flashing, lips parked in a gentle rictus that grew wider with each sentence as he described the scene, one stranger and then another discovering something amiss beneath the earth, not because Stacy was making it worse but because of the exact opposite. Because their tiltmeters and GPS monitors were going wonky, because the things they could all feel—or at least had convinced themselves they could feel—as magma built up pressure and the earth contracted, preparing in days to rupture and sow a chaos that no one had ever seen, were abating.
Stacy flushed as he listened to Kim tell the story. Kim, who if not for his life in geology, probably could have been a storyteller himself. Kim, from whose mouth Stacy's journey to heroics was poetry, a hymn, a Gregorian chant, Homeric verse. Words babbled out of him like water skimming low over rocks, a brook of noise and careful, conductor gestures. Stacy could listen to him forever.
“And when it was done, you nearly passed out,” Kim said.
“I did.”
“And then you were a hero.”
“Something like that.”
He did not see his parents for weeks. Stacy was pulled into a maelstrom of scientists and reporters and government agents. He was poked and prodded, interrogated in dark, windowless rooms. He did not witness the world get set to right, all of the chaotic disorder the impending apocalypse had set off being tamped down. Stacy's mother and father were able to yank him from a bunker in Wisconsin after it became clear he was not a terrorist. But then the question the world wanted to answer was: what was he?
*
Crossing the Nebraska-Wyoming border, his eyes started to itch. More than eight hours to go. The landscape was a dry brown-red, choked farmland and bluffs full of boxelders, subalpine firs, and bigtooth maples. I-80 swept past the periodic truck stop and farmhouse, but the route to Cheyenne was otherwise devoid of life. As he passed through the capitol, Stacy saw what the world would come to look like if he failed: barren parking lots, abandoned conference centers, shuttered Safeways and sub shops. He found another gas station as the city faded behind him and managed to fill his tank again, saving the sloshing stores in his trunk for emergency, a thought that made him laugh: what, if not the end of the world, would constitute an emergency?
He skittered through Laramie and the base of the Buttes before climbing through the switchbacks of Bamforth Wildlife Refuge. He pushed on, peeling north on state highway 287, into the dusty, barren center of the state that was all rocks and bleached earth, carving through the Wind River Reservation and finally into the lushness of the Bridger-Teton National Forest, his first look at thick trees and grass in hours. He marveled that there wasn’t more human activity, police or other officials who would try to halt his progress, tell him he must turn back. He’d prepared his defense, brought along with him as many things as he could find in his house that might prove his worthiness: a book of matches, a Zippo lighter, his mother’s curling iron. But no one tried to stop him. On he went, chasing after the destiny he knew was his.
*
The fraternity house was quietest in the middle of the week, in the middle of the afternoon, when most people were in class or in the library or working their various minimum wage jobs. These were the hours when Kim and Stacy slunk into one another’s rooms and sullied their sheets, tangled their bodies together. They weren’t ashamed of themselves or hiding anything; half a dozen of their brothers were out, happily making out with the objects of their affection in corners of the basement or dancing up close with them or sauntering off with them in the night, coming home the next morning to hoots and wolf-whistles and rounds of applause. Date parties were filled with same-sex couplings, some of which were meant to be silly and ironic (the guys who couldn’t muster up real dates), others very real (the fraternity vice president, for example, and his boyfriend of a year and a half, who were, without malice or mockery, voted the fraternity’s couple of the year when Stacy and Kim were freshmen). But there was something about being able to keep a secret that turned Stacy on. Perhaps it was his youthful celebrity, the way people, after Kim identified him, seemed to always know who he was. They were thankful, but they were also invasive, already aware of his personality, his history, his abilities. When he and Kim dallied together in the silence and secrecy of one of their beds, he relished knowing that this was something no one else could lay claim to.
After, they would lie shoulder-to-shoulder and look up at the ceiling. Kim would raise an arm and Stacy would match him, tendrilling his fingers through Kim’s. Then he would draw away the slick warmth that was pulsing through Kim’s body. Kim would shiver, the cold suck of vacuumed-out heat like a second wave of pleasure that made him pulse and writhe. Stacy would pull and pull until Kim finally exhaled a heady breath and said, “Okay, okay,” and Stacy would let go. Then Kim would press his ear to Stacy’s chest and listen to the warmth move through him.
“What do you hear?” Stacy would say.
“A furnace roaring. An ocean swelling. The end of the world.”
And Stacy would laugh, and Kim would laugh, and they would kiss, and then they would dress, tingling and alive.
*
An hour past Cody, he reached the eastern entrance. He wound through Pahaska Tepee and the crystalline gorge of Yellowstone Lake. Still no guards, no barricades. No indication that the world was bubbling beneath the car tires. The various geyser basins were to the south and west, but Stacy felt he could intuit the heat, it was so vast and tremulous, a beacon whose rhythms beat in the soles of his feet as he pressed the gas, his palms as he clutched the steering wheel, his chest where his seatbelt crossed over his torso.
A visitors center, seemingly-abandoned, appeared nearly thirty miles into the park, mashed next to a general store and service station. Finally, life: men in biohazard suits, as if they were handling a radioactive spill. A handful of park rangers, police officers who didn’t seem to be policing anything. So many people rushing around like frenzied ants, heads down, eyes lasered on reports or phones or iPads. No one noticed Stacy’s car as he pulled into a dusty lot on Fishing Bridge Row. Even when he emerged from the car, in a fug of body odor and sweat, sore muscles and jaw tension, no one paid him any attention. Stacy could sense the caldera beneath him as soon as he stepped out of the car. He didn’t quite feel like he was on a bucking ship, but through the soles of his feet the rumble pulsed, as if a gargantuan stomach was roiling with hunger.
Stacy had thought he might go to Old Faithful, watch a spume of ever-increasingly powerful hot water come purling up before he set his hands to the earth and pried the heat away, but the geyser was on the other end of the park, past the Kepler Cascades and Delacy Creek.
No one was watching him. Stacy was tired, his bones feeling scrapy and dense. His eyes were heavy. He had not slept.
He knelt down and put his hands to the hot concrete, which, of course, barely felt like the warm touch of a fresh loaf of bread.
*
Stacy woke first the next morning. Kim was a deep sleeper, his breathing wet, ragged, and regular when Stacy was pulled awake by the first rays of sun pushing through the blinds. Instead of slipping from the bed to turn on the coffeemaker or drink a glass of water or release the pinching pressure of his bladder, he liked to roll onto his side and watch Kim’s slumber, his eyes rolling behind the lids, the tiny tremors of his pursed-open lips. His face, during waking hours, was always pinched with the slightest bit of tension that was only erased when he was asleep, his cheeks smoothed, jaw relaxed, shoulders rolled to comfort. Somehow, the years had hardly aged Kim. His face was unlined by time, the edges of his mouth and eyes like uncooked batter. Stacy felt his own aging in the joints of his knees and shoulders, as if each bit of warmth he drew into his body calcified in his bones like gout or rheumatism. Stacy thought of what Kim had said years ago, calling Stacy a glacier, and how, really, all parts of life were that way: slow-moving, unstoppable. Most of them, anyway: the end of the world had, in the end, been stoppable.
Kim slept flat on his back, arms tight against his trunk like he was already tucked in his coffin. The bedspread was bifurcated: smooth and tight on Kim’s side, twisted and whorled on the other, evidence of Stacy’s turvy, turning sleep. His pillow was always moist in the morning, the sheets beneath him damp, and Kim had once hypothesized that it was during sleep that Stacy excised all of the heat he drew in, his body spewing it out in the form of sweat that bloated into the mattress and fitted sheet beneath him. Stacy had long taken it upon himself to swaddle the sheets in a tangled mass in his arms twice a week and run them through the washer and dryer, using a particular—and expensive—brand of detergent and an army of additive liquids and capsules and beads that left everything smelling new and floral.
When Kim fluttered awake, Stacy laid a hand on his chest. “Welcome to the rest of your life.”
“Morning, Glacier,” Kim said with a sigh. Stacy smiled at Kim and lay one of his hands on his husband’s cheek. Kim’s skin was warm, but Stacy didn’t pull the heat away; he relished it, this heat, this body, this person he knew better than any other, even more so than his own. He’d spent a lifetime uncorking Kim’s workings, memorizing the muscles, the skin, the moles and freckles, the small bunching of fat at his hips that no amount of cardiovascular exercise could melt away.
“That name still doesn't work.”
“It doesn't have to.”
“It should bother you more that you're not accurate.”
“Not everything has to make sense,” Kim said.
Stacy nodded. Life was like that, of course, wandering in ways unpredictable and unbalanced. He roped an arm over Kim's shoulder and they lay close, Stacy pulling in a long breath, Kim setting his fist on Stacy's sternum above his heart. Stacy felt his pulse racing, then slowing, canting along at its cool, regular pace. Normal for now, waiting for whatever would come along to heat it up next.