12 January 2053. I feel so strong now, stronger, perhaps, than I have ever felt before. I can feel the waves of delinquent bliss washing over my face, crystaline and clear. The world and what it has become have grown meaningless and tiresome to me, perhaps always were. I have never cared much for the woes of humankind in all its folly nor even its few feats of greatness, for I can see no end in sight to its cloying arrogance nor little everlasting breath in the bitter fruit of its futile hands. Perhaps you can understand. But I have sat here at this oaken desk of mine watching with smirking eyes for many years. Watching, because that was all I had left to do since the days of the long ordeal. It was always so evident to me, the doom that modern men have built for themselves. Sitting here peacefully in the moonlight I remember how I gave up hope for my fellow beasts. Not because I hate them, for there is real beauty in being human, but rather because I know we are not yet prepared for the final road to utopian delight that comes with pure and true knowledge, the ultimate revelation that has nothing to do with madness. And how do I know this? Because there is a true Purpose, yes, and I think I have glimpsed its nature.
There are those who used to laugh when I spoke of such things, of utopia, but always they chose to misunderstand me. So I did not attempt to clarify. Really, can you blame me? I simply sit and watch. What else can I do, could I ever have done, to try and nudge humanity toward what Purpose inevitably, if slowly, leads him regardless? I was, I believe, born before my time. Believe me, dear reader, I do not revel in the imminent fall of this era of humankind. I simply know that no one will listen. Indeed, they cannot, which is why so long ago I stopped blamed them. It is all inherent in Purpose, that all of this happen for a collective reason. And if nothing else, are not humans animals of reason? Of course, it is our beliefs that have led us yet once again to the brink of destruction. Hindsight is a luxury, yes, but still it is no excuse. People as animals require beliefs to guide their actions, so they might build for themselves the things that make them great. Inspiration is never a stale snack, but why is it that the roads through which we attain it eventually grow old and hostile? Why is it that we build empires for our children to squander, and all the while desperately trying to deny it? Hindsight is no excuse, I tell you, because if we are willing to discard our right to judgement we will come to know Truth and live a much happier existence. That is a lesson a young, reforming rabbi tried unsuccessfully to teach us several thousand years ago.
Ah, yes, but here on the eve of death there are other matters to ponder. There is myself, of course, so vast and fraught with electrostatic understanding that I feel as though I could strike down and obliterate the tiny universe that lays at my feet. I have finally broken free of the dark and turbulent sphere of impotence that has caged me all my life, and what I see no longer frightens me. No longer am I lost to myself. How right you were, Drusus, that I should confront the demons from whom I had always thought best to run. The ghosts are finally dispelled and no longer does the lucid whispering in my ear frighten me. At last, there is peace and not fear. I think I have suffered enough. It is all so very amazing to me, that for so long I was content to torture myself with thoughts of inadequacy. I know, Drusus, you and Angst and Lee had been telling me for years. Strength is such a clear and potent drink. I'm virtually bursting at the seams.
So it is that I am finally looking about myself as if for the first time. And I am telling you, I can see! Standing here gazing with my own greatness at what really is and not what I had imagined it to be. And really, the truth isn't at all as bad as I feared all these years. Those flagellant angels of dispair are for once bickering with deluded sycophancy, and all I can do is laugh at them. They have lost their place at my back, and now that they look up at me with something like pleading in their sunken eyes I can see that they are little more than frightened children themselves. Of course, there are mostly statues here, crowding around me for what must be miles. There are thousands of them, in all shapes and sizes and most of them entirely stone. There are some who weep and others who smile; some of them look at me calmly, waiting, as if in quiet expectation; some are caught trying to turn away, and in their clenched faces I can denote pain and hatred. All of them, though, are familiar and clear. And in this perfect moment of disciplined clarity they are all quite visible, as if carefully arranged so that none shadows or obscures another. For miles they have come to gather, and strangely enough I feel giddy and docile in their bittersweet company. For soon enough I will join them and wait, perhaps, to ready Angst when finally it is his turn to pass from this troubled world. Yes, yes, my joints are stiff. The flesh on my bones has almost run out.
I can see even you, Antonius, and for once you are quite clear and plain in the stark absence of the robes of godly disguise you adopted so well. Do you still breathe? It does not matter, for if you are I know that I will be there when your last breath squeezes through those tattered lungs. You stand here, half-turned away, a look of harrowing shame on your face. Antonius, Antonius, don't you understand? There is no need for shame now, and I never blamed you. It has been so long since last I set eyes on your face, except for the dreams, of course. It was unbearably awkward the way you faded away into lassitude, like all gods do when their believers are no more. So now you stand revealed, trying to conceal yourself in a place where nothing can be concealed, where all is perfect and crystaline and everything fits so nicely together. You simply never learned to be who you are, and tried to carry on in a manner best designed to wrest what you wanted from your friends instead of asking them for it. So much pain there. How ever did you live with it? I remember the day they threw you out of school, Antonius. There, there, my friend, don't try to look away. You cannot. I remember the look on your face as the three of us who were left sat solemnly in the Dean's office with that sergeant asking questions none of us wanted to answer. You were lucky, they know, not to have ended up in jail, what with all the cocaine and kind bud they found in Salvatore's room. Ah, look at you. Still you try and hide your stony, grey face. Still, you must look away. Will you never learn?
And Salvatore. I can see you, too, so small and broken and swathed in shadows of doom. How haggard you seem to me now, as if you had lived for many hard years, and yet I am certain that death found you long ago. I know too well the path you traveled since that day I last say you, when wordlessly you handed me your car keys and watched me in delerious anger drive away. Yes, you stood there, watching me, and tried to discern your own madness and fear in my actions. But I would not succumb. I knew better. Simply emotions these are, chemicals in our brains, like love. I was able to endure all these years because I refused to believe that the problem rested squarely with myself. But you, you hated yourself, detested being trapped in your own head because you found only things to frighten you there. Yes, I know you have been dead some years, and probably by your own hand. You just walked away from it all as if we had never condemned each other. Could you really have been so blind? The police spent many weeks looking for you. How utterly cruel, Salvatore, that you never even phoned your parents. The guilt must have kept piling up, and all the while you refused to believe that things could have been made right. Because for you none of it had ever happened. But it did happen, Salvatore. It was all very real. Your angels must have been so much more terrifying than my own. No, Salvatore, I have no pity for you. You, who died so very weak. I have only forgiveness, even where there is nothing to forgive, because it is the last thing I have to offer.
But I must move on. I have not the luxury of time to linger on these faces. The great and weeping statue of Shanai stands not far away. O, Shanai, please. I beg you, weep no longer. How long have you stood here awaiting my final journey to peace? You found your way out, as incomplete as it may have been. You, who died for me. Yes, I believe that. But I never required such an act of penance from you, and perhaps if you had had the strength to survive we could have lived a long and happy life together. I never loved another such as you, although there were many more women in my life. Your face haunted me such in the troubled years after your death that I slept with as many as I could, as if I were trying to fuck you away. Eventually, believe it or not, I settled into a relatively tranquil life with Sarah. There was a fiery strength in her altogether unlike the self- destructive powers which consumed you. We did not love each other, but somehow we were almost happy. Almost, that is, because the sounds of your screaming resounded in our ears for some time. You see I think she blamed me for your death, too. She died fourteen years ago, and I have not since made love to another woman. Why do I tell you this, Shanai? Because you must cease these torrents of weeping and self-pity, halt the tide of stony tears that even now clatter to the ground at your feet. We all of us have the strength to heal. Yes, that is better. See, there is strength even in you. Look at me, and for once without sadness or blame. You were always so beautiful.
And there, swathed in the dimness that accompanies great distances, I can see one statue of pure, obdurate granite towering over the rest, rising so high into the infinite heights that I can hardly discern the face. But I can easily make out the calm features there, the mouth curved in a half-grin, the smooth, shiny head that over the years I have come to know so well. How curiously omnipotent that face seems to me now, and yet somehow I am surprised to see that one here. It is the face of one of our few and great men, and the way he is looking down I suspect he knew it, too, although in the days that I knew him personally he was weak, yes, and frail. Of course, as I watched him come into his own in the few years we had left together after the long ordeal, and then through the glassy eyes of our televisions, I discovered that he was a man of great humility and humanity. But he was merely a human, despite what the fanatics may say about him now that he is gone. Perhaps it is easy for me to say that because I knew him. Perhaps. The extremity of these days is exactly like that which witnessed the comings of great tides of devastation in the past, of destruction, of change and turmoil, and finally rebirth. So it is that most of the greatest members of our species are entirely misunderstood, and associated too closely with the times in which they acted. The greatest of us are smeared through the eyes of posterity by the misleading myths of the children of their contemporaries. The men of the time of Jesus knew him for the man that he was. It was left to Saul, who knew him not, and old, frightened men who betrayed him to pain the picture of God with which we are accursed today, to this man the Son of God so that others might die in his name. How fanciful.
But you, Emmanuel, you who were once so weak and grew to be the leader of men, the harbringer of change. It was you who blew the trumpets on this civilization and, not unlike Jesus or Mohammud or Moses, were unable to remain for the resolution. What will they say of you in a hundred years? a thousand years? Will people sing songs and praise your name and whatever god they have construed in it? I hope not. But the children who are told about the things you did will not hear the story from me. Never will the people in a thousand years time tell them how frightened you were the day I asked your name. No, instead they will speak of Mankiller and his bout with guilt, of death and sin and repentence and how great and holy and chosen he was, and other men will be put to death because of it.
O, these rusty tales for the future leave me with little hope that a pristine understanding of the human beast will ever emerge, because there is no god except for nature and if we really want to know how the universe was created then we should look through space and the things that fly about in atoms and not some silly book filled with fairy tales that were born of the minds of ancient men who had not available to them such wonders as electron microscopes, or superconductors, or the Space Hubble Telescope. Because we really are mostly walking bits of complicated, salt-water machinery and scattered pieces of Infinity that can be perceived ubiquitously, and if you want to call that God then, of course, I'll acquiece, although I might contest the terminology. There's nothing to fear that after death the self dissolves because we really don't live forever. Nothing to fear, no, because then we return to the Infinity from which we and every other sentient creature in the universe was divided, and there is peace. If such a notion frightens you, dear reader, it is merely because you choose not to live fully in this existence, and cling to the hope that after death you will achieve utopian delight. It is a foolish proposition, that one, designed to convince you to sell your hopes and dreams to whichever corporation offers you the least in return. Of course, it matters little to me now if you or anyone else wishes to throw his life away, for I have not left to me even a thousand hours. I know you, Emmanuel, and I am glad that I will not live long enough to watch my kindred paint you as something very far from what you were.
So why do you look at me like that, O Emmanuel? You of all these strange statues are regarding me with such quiet but poignant expectation. What, is there something more that I must yet do? Is this testament not enough?
I remember your entirely human face during those long and distressing hours with that ignorant psychiatrist they forced us to see. A small concession for allowing us to remain in school, yes, but an entirely uncomfortable arrangement at best. Of course, this was back when you were still fresh in your transformation. We hardly spoke to each other. You were already on your way to resolving yourself into greatness and had no need for my troubling company. Troubling, because we would have sat together in uneasy silence thinking about things it was healthy to move away from. But I could not forget, Emmanuel, and I know that you could not either. You, Emmanuel, who were once so weak and somehow forged that frailty into a spirit that will inspire humans for generations to come. For years as I watched your rise to greatness I wondered how you had managed it, and finally now I understand. Is that why you smile so warmly at me? I could have been great, too, I think.
That ugly man with the pockmarked face, sitting behind his desk adorned with piled wedges of jiggling fat as if to hide from us, disconcerted at the way your dark sunglasses seemed to be staring through him, as if you could see him, and the cold and passionless expression that hardened your face in those early days of your wisdom. To think that men such as he were once thought to be familiar with the workings of the inner mind. No, there were no smiles for you then, only damp granite and those sunglasses that reflected back at me my own distorted image. My eyes in those strange and uncomfortable days always seemed to find the white, pasty walls of his office where I would start to see scattered and disturbing images, but always better than those remorseless questions he asked, the answers to which he was entirely incapable of understanding.
"Tell me," he said to us once, coughing uncomfortably and shying away from the cool surface of those mirrored sunglasses, "Emmanuel. What were you thinking about when you were under the influence of -" another retort from his lungs - "the influence of LSD?"
But you did not answer. You never did. You simply sat in that uncomfortable looking wooden chair, your back straight and your thin body firm as a ruler. The unfeeling line of your mouth was so silently severe, Emmanuel, so profoundly spiteful and mocking. Of course, there was no way for any of us to know that the mocking was for yourself. Still and quiet and hard like a billboard you were, like a nineteenth century schoolteacher, with no words at all near your lips.
"Emmanuel," the psychiatrist said then, shifting the great bulk behind his desk, "it will make this whole thing a lot easier for all of us if you simply cooperated. Until you do, these sessions will have to continue, and I know that you enjoy them almost as little as I do." But in fact none of us knew that. I'm not even sure if the doctor knew the sound of your voice. And after a moment of cold silence he grew unnerved once again, staring back at himself distorted where the patient's eyes should have been. Coughing nervously, he looked away.
But now I understand. I know that the thoughts filling your head then were resplendid with judgement. It would take you some time to resolve those feelings of inferiority and helplessness. Because you really did feel helpless, helpless to affect or change your own destiny. Sitting there before that doctor's wide and tidy desk while I was forced to speak about Shanai's death and you remained duly silent, you were filled with bitter condemnation for yourself.
It's almost funny the way that doctor could never grasp the full import of our situation. He could never comprehend that between the two of us our pain was different and much varied. For me it was Shanai, yes, and he easily discovered that fact for himself, but there was also so much more that he was never able or willing to explore. The fear of madness, for one thing. Such fear was eating me away like a disease, like the bacteria that had been gnawing on that corpse hanging in the forest except that I was still living with my head safely on my shoulders. Of course, I never dared speak about that day in the forest, so naturally the doctor was never able to piece my dementia together. He could not understand the extremity of our passion, or how Shanai was driven to her death, or how we condemned each other of our own volition. This man knew nothing of judgement or what it meant to us. He never understood why your eyes had been blown out, or the fateless persistence with which we had resigned ourselves to the whole affair. Because we had been brought to accuse each other so horribly and with such finality. And, truly, Anne never really made a difference because the whole thing would have happened anyway. So was it possible to try and explain divinity to him? No, that black day in the forest remained locked away deep inside where no one from the outside had access to it, far away from scrutiny or opinion.
For you, though, the echoes of judgement held entirely different connotations. That hard front, the impenetrable mask of clay with which you disguised yourself, Emmanuel, was only a reflection of your feelings of inadequacy. That Salvatore had left you, for one thing, all alone and without even a word in farewell, as if you had meant nothing to him. But of course you had meant everything to him. It took you some time, long after I ever saw your face again, to realize that the fault lay with him. Thrice denied, yes, and lastly betrayed. Your deep, dark friend had abandoned you, had at last capitulated to that final weakness and had not wanted you to witness it. Embarrassed, scorned, he fled. You found in yourself betrayal of your own beliefs. Those words you spoke of despair that night after the forest in Antonius' apartment must have haunted you for some time afterwards. After all, what is there in a man who cannot hold true to his own values? Perhaps you believed that your betrayal of self was what finally brought about devastation and death, but I think not. We all had our part, and the fact that eventually you returned and adhered to those very same principles exonerates you far beyond any guilt or blame.
When the first semester had passed after the long ordeal and the dean saw that our grades were quite good, and after that maggot of a psychiatrist had finally given up on cracking you, those evil sessions ceased and we were allowed to go our own ways. There were no words between us, only a silent understanding. Sometimes on my way across campus I would see you walking by yourself with that sight stick poised delicately in front of you. Pausing inadvertantly, knowing that you could not detect my scrutiny, I watched as calmly and with gruesome determination you crawled to your destination. You looked so prophetic even then. The slow, hard steps and the straight back, the face that stared ahead with such pride, unforgivingly. Your bald head tossed the light from the sky all about so that if I tried at a distance almost I could make out a halo there. Those were hard, lonely days for you, but they would stengthen you beyond belief until soon your personal space would be crowded with young, black intellectuals bickering for your attention. You were to become that last year in college a leader for the new generation of black scholars at Hopkins, and after that your fame spread to other universities across the land of the brave. Rutgers, Georgetown, California, Rice, Tulane, Boston. You used to travel from one to the other and offer your opinions to those who asked for them. And sometimes to those who couldn't have cared less. Remember that middle-aged, balding white man who was the president of Notre Dame? He wouldn't let you onto campus. What was it you called him? "Just another fool who hasn't gotten it up in twenty years." Something like that. Looking back on it now I should have seen it coming, but I was still too scared of myself to see clearly. In those days, I was taking as much from Drusus, Lee, and Angst as I possibly could.
"The human beast," Drusus wrote in the greatest work of his career, "is an amazing creature, if not for his capacity to feel then for the need to express his feeling." So be it. I have need now to do a bit of both, some feeling for the years that I shut off my capacity to feel and some expression for the manner in which I, as one distinct element of that collective consciousness we call humanity, choose to shut myself away. Clear and sharp, finely tuned my percipience is now, and for once I see that everything around me is entirely present, not least of all myself. Let them shoot each other for food and ideas in the streets outside if they will. Let them suffer the doom that sublime Purpose has assigned to them. As for myself and the players who brought it to them, I think they will understand little. It will be left to those who will name us ancestors to find justification or condemnation there as they might.
| * | * | * | * | * |
None yet can say when exactly the Famine first touched the earth. People for some reason find the need to quantify the most important events of their lives, even when they cannot be properly demarcated from their origins. It is common belief here that the Famine opened the year that the crops first failed in Europe, although Westerners tend to define things in terms of themselves. If you were to ask any of the other eleven billion people they might offer you a different, perhaps even an angry, response. Those in parts of northern Africa might place the beginning of the end in the early 1980's and others even earlier. There are those in Asia who cannot recall a time in the twentieth century that some member of their village did not die from starvation. Regardless, it is well known that by 1990 alone some thousands of persons a day died from lack of nourishment. Now the entire human race must suffer the natural tempering of its growth by starvation and disease, because ignorance and anachronistic religious beliefs prevented the arrival of any human engineered succor.
Not many weeks ago the Pope was slain in the Vatican by an angry mob of starving Italians and Indians, furious that he and his entourage, despite the public advertisements to the contrary, were stuffing their fat bellies full of geese and cheese and bread behind those high, pearly gates. A crowd used to gather there every morning, and the people would stand on each other's shoulders and grip the bars and look inside. The gates were closed twenty years ago when the first food riots gripped Paris and Moscow. It took twenty years for the crowd to grow large and enraged enough to tear them down. I watched the entire episode on the television, as thousands of peasants poured unending into the Forbidden City. By the end of it all there were no clergymen left. The citadel of grandiose stone and marble lay looted, the vanity repudiated which marked the seat of a religion that exercised its power most energetically when it was hoarding wealth or justifying the enslavement of its believers. There were no bodies, either, although from what I understand the superstitious Italians did what they could to prevent anyone from eating the Pope. Amazing, that the power of that little place for so long resided solely in the minds of those it repressed.
Aldous Huxley, in his greatest and last novel, wrote of a world population in excess of three and a half thousand million persons. Drusus Kingsley in his was concerned about one just short of ten thousand million, and that was published just twenty-five years after the turn of the millenium. I believe that before Mother Nature began to take firm steps to curb our population it neared something on the order of thirteen thousand million. Of course, none of the world's leaders could heed perfectly good and common sense. What happens when food production is maximized and population growth outstrips it? Answer: death and disease for much of the species. It's such a simply concept, really, one that was practiced on this earth for as long as people have been able to walk about on two feet and before. The Famine wasn't so much a failure of the land to produce food, although at the beginning it is true that the crops failed in Europe and then Mexico and even parts of the United States. I think these were mostly unrelated meteorological coincidences, and the fact that presently much of the earth's fields lie fallow is because starving denizens in a frenzy have destroyed more than half of them. No, there simply wasn't enough grass to feed the cattle nor enough water to absorb the waste. It is most unseemly that many animal species have been decimated by marauding men whose last resort, despite the risk of disease, has been to eat each other.
How could we have prevented this cataclysm? They could have taught us Maltheus in high school, to the fucking Pope and his army of dogmatic robots, but I suppose I am asking too much. The Christians believe that a calamity such as this is an act of their god. In their minds, there is nothing humanity could have done to avert it. Even worse, they believe that they should simply grin and bear it. And, of course, try and kill off those unclean few hiding among them who have aroused the wrath of heaven. They want to throw Judah off the boat, because rather than mete out a singular justice their god is perverse and enjoys punishing the innocent as well. Once again, we have entered an age when madmen direct the destiny of humankind.
It's quite ironic, I think, that in the Catholic homelands condoms and pornographic magazines were as common as underpants. Sex is the only physical sensation a person can enjoy that doesn't require money. People are going to have gratuitous sex because it's in our nature as animals. It's natural, and it can be a wonderful, spiritual experience if it's carried out responsibly. The ancients celebrated the beauty of the body and the pleasure it provided them. But Christianity was affronted by the freedom of thought such a way of life entailed. Instead of spiritual and sensual freedom we have a heritage of violence and guilt because devout Christians everywhere came to hate themselves for masturbating and fornicating. They tried to imagine they were something other than what they are, and after they realized as each one eventually does that their notion of purity is impossible to achieve they took their frustration out physically on their children and their neighbors. Regardless, today nearly a million people perish daily from starvation, disease, or murder. Nature has a rather direct manner of dealing with problems we cannot, through our rose- colored glasses, correct on our own.
As I write these words, the United States remains a relatively safe place. Unfortunately, I cannot say the same for mother Europe, who shares too many borders with too many hungry nations. Long ago hordes of starving Arabs, Asians, and Africans overran her soil, through the Ural mountains where many did not emerge and coming in droves by sea, by way of Constantinople, Greece, Spain, and the Baltic states. The Mediterranean became a sluggish graveyard for both ships and people. The United States, though, maintained enough military might to keep the brunt of the human tide at bay in Mexico. The Canadians, of course, were only glad to offer assistance, send the few troops they could spare to Alaska and guard against those that would cross the frozen Arctic from Russia. The few that do infiltrate our defenses are ruthlessly sought out and executed. There have been rumors of late that some of the meat we receive in our rations is the very flesh of these unfortunates, but they are just rumors, and I must admit that considering the situation elsewhere I wouldn't be too bothered if they were true.
There is, of course, a rather organized and extensive underground whose members operate on pain of death, the usual sympathetics to misery. Some of them have access to the government's citizenship database. And I must admit, I understand how they feel with the rest of humanity starving on our doorstep. I've even allowed one or two to pass the night in my basement from time to time. It makes me feel better. It has been my experience that most of the underground consists of ex-monotheists, good men and women who lost faith and decided not to side with the apocalyptics who shout in our streets that the day of Judgement is at hand. Of course, that the apocalyptics exist in such dangerous numbers can only be expected. Why is it that our revered human intelligence will not allow most of us to understand what is happening for what it is? These and other elements of discontent in our society, especially those who feel responsible for the massacre that followed the Race Revolts more than fifteen years ago, are taking advantage of the fact that our military is holding the borders so that they may eat. That is why I foresee that, although we have held out for more than thirty years, this strained peace will not last. More and more frantic men and women, countless Africans and their descendants living in Cuba and Brazil, I suspect, eager to wreak what revenge they can for their slaughtered brethren in the States, are gathering to our south every day, landing by boat on our shores. There simply aren't enough bullets or bombs in the world for them all. Soon, even our granaries and fields will lie devastated like the wastelands of northwestern China, Mongolia, and others parts of central Asia.
The Chinese in their carefully groomed wisdom forsaw the cataclysm. After all, haven't they been dealing with problems of population and food production for decades? In 2030 it was estimated that they had their population down to just over a billion, and their effective and much-loved totalitarian government kept them relatiavely safe and fed until it was decided that it was time to flee into the mountains. Now they employ something like the loose tribal systems of old, and I imagine that after the major threat from outside abates they will start killing each other, up there alone and so close to the sky. But such is human nature, because we are beasts and despite airplanes and plumbing we never ceased to be just that. The streets of Beijing and Canton are deserted and lie desolate now. The invaders that made it through the blasted radioactivity of the north found nothing to make their pilgrimages worthwhile. Yes, the Chinese in the calculated ruthlessness that accompanies the firm instinct for survival found little remorse in the use of small scale nuclear weapons on the hordes massing in eastern Russia and Korea. I suspect before it's all over that we will do the same. But the invaders have not stopped coming. Over a billion Indians are seeking out the Chinese strongholds in the mountains. On their way marauding they have already sacked most of Loas, Cambodia, and Myanmar. I believe they are currently engaged with the Thais and the Vietnamese, who are resisting fiercely, for their coveted fields of rice. The Indians have elephants on the field again. Just like in the days of Alexander and Cyrus their armies are simply roving cities, except this time the soldiers are armed with animal bones, many of them human. I fear that the same fate awaits the Chinese tribes scattered throughout the mountains, although I also believe that they will survive the calamity because they chose their place of hiding well. When some sort of resolution does arrive centuries from now, I suspect that the Chinese will crawl from the mountains, pick up the debris and begin again. We will all begin again.
| * | * | * | * | * |
In the summer of the year 2005 Sarah and I, still living in Los Angeles, decided that it might be good idea to leave the country for a little while. There were still few hints that the food shortages in India and the Phillipines were going to break out worldwide, and we certainly never expected that when we returned to this country it would be because the rest of the world was growing restless. Lee had just been married to a pretty young Vietnamese girl of whom his parents vastly approved. She was a small girl with a permanent smile on her face. I don't think she was irretrievably happy because I didn't take her for an idiot. I suspect her facial muscles simply relaxed that way. Anyway, it was a very happy event not only for his family but also for Drusus, Angst, and I. And Angst around that time needed as much of a good time as he could get his hands on. His book had already fallen into the bottomless well of obscurity and his writing had grown dark and depressing and exceedingly violent. His agent had told him that he had not yet read anything since the last book that wasn't "entirely offensive to everyone." Angst found that reason enough to break the man's nose, an unfortunate event that landed him in jail for a couple of months. Around that time, too, Lee had landed a job with NASA and a future that would one day see him seated at the top echelons of that most esteemed institution.
The wedding took place in Pheonix, where Lee and his tiny fiancee were living. They say that the smog in Los Angeles is thick, but I'm telling you I've never seen anything quite so alarming as what I saw hulking over that city. Our plane descended into a pea soup that eddied over and between the tall buildings in the valley below. The place has some nice head shops, though - well stocked - and some of the best Mexican food and beef jerky I've ever tasted.
"I lost just about everything to that egomanaical asshole," Angst was telling me at the reception after the ceremony when Drusus arrived at our table. Ours was the closest to the head table at the front of the room, at the center of which Lee sat smiling foolishly at everyone around him or that passed by him, almost sheepishly, and holding his wife's hand. The two of them presided rather comically above their guests, lips pursed together and far too excited to actually open their mouths. His face was so red he looked like a pumpkin. "It was almost worth it, though," Angst continued with just the hint of a snarl in his voice. The touches of an eager smile crept onto his face and he seemed to be gripping his Long Island iced tea with renewed fervor. "You should have heard him wailing for his secretary. Fuck! The look on his face was enough to make me wonder whether or not I had been trying to kill him or something!"
"Fuckin' A, man," Drusus laughed as he sat down next to me, "I heard about that. Ain't you learned yet to stay out of trouble? Especially at your age."
"Here's to trouble, asswipe," Angst murmured, and gulped down a sizeable amount of his drink. And then, standing up and lurching toward us, he gripped Drusus in a tight bear hug. "And here's to you, man. How you been?"
"Hey, hey!" Drusus gasped when Angst let him go. "I was fine until you cracked half my ribs." He rubbed his flank dramatically and returned to his seat.
"What the fuck to you need ribs for, anyway?" Angst mumbled half to himself. And then, turning around and draining the last of his drink, he said, "So what's your poison tonight, Drussy boy? Vodka martini? Whiskey tonic? A slow, uncomfortable screw against the wall?"
"A screwdriver, thank you," he answered, laughing. "And a double whiskey sour for our friend David. Can you remember that?"
"Fuck you." Angst answered, already walking a way. "I'm a fool, not an idiot."
"I don't think he's holding up very well," I said softly to Drusus, looking after Angst managing the crowd gathered by the head table. He seemed large and boisterous among those short and reserved Asians, laughing and giggling and joking in a manner that somehow came across as powerful, as if he were on the verge of knocking them all down. But he never did. He just kept up the act, as he would all the way to his senility. That forced smile, the gestures always exaggerated.
"What's he doing now?"
"Working for one of his brothers in Boston, I think. He's planning another book."
Drusus raised a dubious eyebrow at me. "Are you serious? God, have you read his last one?"
I nodded absently. "He sent me a copy through the mail. I don't think I've ever read anything so violently depressing. He'll be alright, though. Whenever he gets too bad he always comes and sees me. I think he thinks we've got something in common. So I humor him, you know. Sarah cooks and we take him out. Los Angeles can be a pretty interesting place. Then he goes home and usually I won't hear from him for another couple of months."
"Is Sarah here?"
"Yeah. She's over there somewhere talking politics to one of Lee's cousins." I waved a hand in a rather vague direction. Drusus simply nodded as if he understood. And very well he might have. "Where's Nancy?"
"She couldn't make it. Deborah's got the flu again, and this time she's given it to her sister. Nancy didn't want to leave them with anybody else."
"Oh," I said, watching Angst on his way back from the bar. He was standing in front of Lee and his new wife, juggling three drinks in his hands, talking heatedly. Lee simply sat in his chair smiling and nodding his head, absently stroking his wife's closest limb. Afterwards he told me he couldn't remember a thing about the wedding except kissing the bride. "Shit," I said, "Lee's already wasted. Look how red his face is."
Drusus laughed briefly before turning serious again. An uncomfortable moment passed between us before he asked, almost hesitantly, "So how have things been with you?"
Surprisingly enough, the question didn't bother me. I shrugged, still watching Angst and Lee. "Alright, I guess," I answered slowly. "I'm managing pretty well, and with Sarah around it makes things a lot easier. We're finally getting on with our lives. Thirteen years, I guess, before either of us can mention Shanai's name without fading away into distant and depressing thoughts. You know what I mean if anybody does. Plus I really like my job, being a librarian an all. It's a simple thing to do, and being around all those books is comforting. It's like I'm their guardian, their caretaker, and they depend upon me for their well being. I get to read a lot, too."
"Well, good." Drusus' voice caught me. There was something vaguely passionate in it. I glanced at him quickly and saw him looking back at me strangely. Coughing uncomfortably, I closed my eyes and tried to imagine something different. When I opened them again I saw Angst on his way back to our table.
"Okay, okay," Angst thundered, practically throwing our drinks at us. "Stand up, friends, and let's toast our newly emprisoned companion." He was already turned and raising his glass in Lee's direction, set to get his attention and that of our audience, when he noticed that neither Drusus nor I had left our seats. "Come on now, boys," he hissed at us over his shoulder. "What the fuck's the matter with you, anyway?"
Thus the evening progressed. It was very early the next morning when Sarah and I returned to our hotel. I could hardly walk straight, and Sarah had to hold my arm so that I could manage the distance across the lobby to the elevator. I had no idea what time it was - three, four, five in the morning? My head was swimming, I remember. Everything else around me, too, traveling in disproportionate circles of nausea. "Fuck," I murmured as we passed the night attendant. He was smiling unsympathetically at me. "I think I'm going to be sick." It was quite a simple statement, really, and not one that deserved the pitiless "humph!" that was tossed from the depths of Sarah's lungs.
"You drank too much," she reminded me unnecessarily, propping my body against the elevator door so that should could push the call button. "But I suspect you know that." She turned away as if unconcerned about my wellbeing and inspected the front of her dress. Perhaps she was looking to assure herself that I had not thrown up on her.
"Aw," I slurred, partially indignant. I reached for the hand that was holding me, proudly and haphazardly pushed it away. Sarah looked at me over her shoulder, an imperious eyebrow raised and watching me calmly. I swayed uncertainly, trying to keep my balance, meeting her sheer and unseemingly disinterested gaze with a drunken glare for one illustrious moment before falling backwards against the elevator doors and sliding dolefully to the ground. Sarah stood over me, still half-turned away and watching. I thought I might discern something like triumph there, but there was nothing. Just cold stone grey. And the nothingness disturbed me more than her worst fury. "You're just mad at me because I bought that bhong." My eyes were a bit dry, so I blinked a couple of times. Sarah in her imperial wisdom disappeared in swirling black and then emerged in dulled, black-and-white brightness several times in several seconds, her face and posture shifting just slightly, like in consecutive movie frames.
"Why don't you stand up, David?" she suggested coolly.
But now I was indignant. "You have no idea, Sarah." I threw the words at her like mordant barbs of fate, trying to make her understand. They hurt my tongue on the way out. "You have no fucking idea."
"The night attendant is finding this most amusing, David. Why don't you save yourself further embarrassment and stand up. Or do you need my help?" She smiled coldly, like a mother chastising her naughty child.
"Fuck you," I insisted, and just then the bell sounded to announce the arrival of the elevator. The doors behind me slid quickly apart, and before I realized what was happening I had fallen backwards onto the floor. My head must have hit the tile pretty hard because the next morning there was a sizeable lump, but at the time I didn't feel a thing. The night attendant started to laugh. I could hear him. Large, uncontrolable bursts of laughter as if he had never seen anything so funny. "Fuck you!" I screamed, my legs sticking half-way out of the elevator with the doors rhythmically trying to close on them and then drawing frightened away. "Fuck all of you!" The harsh white light from the flourescent above hurt my eyes, reflected waves of pain off the while, paneled walls around me. I tried to close them against it, but then the world started to spin and I thought I might be sick again. And then, with the sounds of distant laughter booming in my ears and Sarah calmly trying to move my legs into the elevator with the rest of my body, and because it seemed that my life had already been lived and that the rest of it would only drag out far longer than was required, I started to cry. Bold tears that rolled down my cheeks onto the floor for all to see but I didn't care. And it amazes me still, to this very day, that such a little time in my life means so much.
And then there came a feeling of motion and a sickening stirring in my stomach, a soft hand grazing the side of my face where the tears ran. "Finally," a familiar voice whispered close to me. "I wondered how it took you so long." And because I didn't know what else to do I clutched at Sarah and buried my face in her warm neck and cried some more. And she held me for what seemed a long time but couldn't have been more than a few seconds because our room was on the thirtieth floor. "C'mon," she whispered quite gently, ad flipped the stop switch so I could get up on my own. Carefully, she led me out of the elevator and into the soft light of the hallway.
The tears had stopped themselves and it seemed as though I might have recovered enough strength to walk unaided. But Sarah's strong hands were around my waist, and the warm touch of her body against mine was somehow comforting. Slowly she led me forward, through the rich purple and red carpeting, thinking she was the only thing holding me upright. We walked in careful silence, I drifting along where my drunken and battered mind would lead me, past thoughts of Shanai and Antonius whom I had not seen for years, towards something that resembled the future. What was it? The question seemed somehow relevant. Because I was past my past and ready for something like the present. And presently, Sarah was leading me back to our room where I would be wholly unable to have sex with her.
We turned a corner and much to my surprise I almost put my foot down on a yellow, baby chicken. The thing emitted a shrill shriek and scampered out of the way, leaving behind a small ball of shit. "What the -?" But I left the question hanging, looked after the tiny creature as it struck the far wall of the corridor and shrieked again. "Did you -?" I started to ask, turning to Sarah, but she just placed a quiet finger over her lips and pulled me away.
We walked the rest of the way to our room in scattered silence, I noticing the number of small, yellow chicken feathers on the floor and Sarah lost elsewhere in deep thought. I never knew what she was thinking anyway. It was only until we stopped so that she could get her passcard out of her purse that either of us heard the short, squeaking voices that were muffled behind our door. My head was spinning again and I wasn't really paying much attention perhaps even attributing the noise to something inside my head, but Sarah's lips were pursed in a firm line of consternation as she slid the passcard through the lock and the door snapped open.
A foul smell drifted out to us and I gagged, did everything I could to keep from spewing on the carpet right then and there. It was a rank odor that had something to do with urine. The sudden and frantic cries of what must have been a million little, frightened birds poured out through the doorway, and almost as soon as the thing was open three little chicklets fled into the hallway chirping loudly and uncontrolably. Two of them hit the wall before zigzagging away. The other I stepped on and broke its neck. I was thinking about how many could possibly be in there all afraid and pissing on our beds, our clothing, our possessions.
Sarah stepped inside, and I followed. I think it was more out of amazement than anything else. It was quite a sight to see those tiny, yellow chicklets running about on the bed, under the bed, across the floor and in and out of the closet and the doorway to the bathroom. I could imagine them playing in the tub, taking turns splashing water on each other or perhaps even engaged in a fierce contest of water polo. The rug was stained a hundred different shades of excrement, and there were probably enough feathers on the floor to make a pillow.
"Sarah?" I murmured, looking around dumbly and using the wall by the door to keep my stunted balance, but she was lost in her own amazement. A yellow chicken ran over my foot. It took the opportunity to fling him across the room. The thing lande don the bed, got up, shook its head and started squawking at some of his companions. "Hey," he said, "why don't you try it? Just go over there and get on that animal's foot. No, the other one, the one that smells like it's going to be sick. It'll send you on a ride, just like me. Wheeeeee!" I was waiting for word to spread and a sudden mad rush of baby chickens, wanting to play. "Sarah?"
"Do you think they're mates?" one nearby asks a friend.
"Absolutely not. There's no way."
"Well, look, they're sleeping in the same bed."
"But look, they're exhausting each other. I'll bet there's not a moment of calm happiness between them."
"From what I've heard, it's the nature of their species."
"Don't generalize, Carl. It's not fair to them."
"David?" Sarah was calling to me, but before I answered I turned to the conversing chicklets at my feet. Two sets of greyish eyes were gauged somewhere in my direction and their heads were cocked to the same side. Their beaks were loud with noise. "Now listen here, you," I told them, wanting to set things straight. "We're perfectly happy together. Why, I've never been so happy in my life." Which, at the time, wasn't too far from the truth.
"David?"
The two birds seemed to have heard me. They had ceased their conversation, tiny beaks quivering in anticipation, perhaps thought, faces intent. And then as if some decision had been arrived at they waddled away from each other, each leaving behind a gleaming ball of runny shit. Of course.
"David, are you alright?" Sarah was next to me now, placed a cold hand on my forehead. I leaned back, trying to avoid her hand, and almost succeeded in tripping over myself.
"This is ridiculous!" It ws the only thing I could think of to say in all that meaningless din.
"I think we should go somewhere," Sarah told me calmly, looking me carefully in the eyes. But the sight of her was blurring, and the pungent smell of urine was clogging my nostrils and calling to mind visions of puking at her feet.
"Me, too," I managed to say. "Let's get a new room and deal with this in the morning."
"No, David, I mean I think we should leave the country. Tomorrow."
"Fine," I agreed, just wanting to get to bed, hardly paying attention to what I was saying. "Wherever you want." Already I was stumbling for the door. "Anywhere."
"Europe," she insisted behind me, following me out the door.
"Great. Europe. Wherever you want. Just get me to a clean room where there's no bird shit and bring me the asshole who thought this would be funny and I don't care where the fuck we go." In my haste to get away I stumbled and hit the wall, and down the corridor I caught sight of one of those chicklets running in frantic circles. "Damned birds," I muttered.
"I think it would be best for the both of us," Sarah continued at my back, but my head was resting on my forehead now and all I could htink of was sleep, sleep. But the next day with two splitting headaches I was faced not only with the task of berating the hotel manager for compensation but also with the silly promise I seemed to have made the night before. David Berkowitz keeps his promises, I guess, but only if they are particularly good ones, and it took Sarah most of the next day to convince me that it was. Of course, it would have to be, because I didn't want to quit the job I enjoyed so much and move to a country where the unemployment rate hovered at just under thirteen percent. But in the end Sarah was right. It was the best thing for the both of us, allowed us finally to heal in our own manner far away from any reminders of our past except those we had in our own heads. And after a while we even got used to those.
This site and all its contents are the result of the tumultuous workings of the mind of one Adam Wasserman.