By Cat:
It's 2030 and 95 degrees, and President Charlie Taylor's on the TV set, but
all I really want to do is sit outside and throw rocks at things. I could
have sworn they were doing this thirty years ago.
It's too damn hot today because it's too damn hot everyday, and all the time
we're just getting more and more bleached out. Now and again, you'll see a
tree or something, but the fact is most of them died out and we're all too worn
out to do anything about it, so we leave their corpses lying around. I
live at the Motel Capri, where I eat peanuts and stare at the ceiling fan.
Sometimes I go to work, but life just gets slushier every day; a toaster-oven
bell can't get me excited anymore. I woke up again this morning with dust
in my eyes and Charlie Taylor was still there, talking away, and so I went out
onto the sidewalk to sip my iced tea with lemon and peer out from under my
fishing hat. I'd fish again, but there really isn't any point.
Everyday the sun bounces up and down, and every next day is a rebound.
Seems like it's losing its will to live after all these years.
Well, how did I get here?
It all started one day, when I shoved my way out of a uterus somewhere in
the vicinity of Memphis. I had stumbled into a world of Elvis
impersonators and horrifically talentless country music. My father was a
car mechanic and drove a blue Chevy Nova that he always told me had a celestial
tug. What he meant by that I can't really tell you. I always just
nodded and got on with it. My mother was a flowered-housedress sort of
woman, a florist, in fact, who sold what she could eke out of the big ditch
behind the house. In those days, see, it wasn't so damn hot out so you
could grow different sorts of things, but really it was all the same to
me. I just sat on the overpass and threw rocks at things. Well, it
didn't matter anyhow, especially after my uncle Denny got drunk one night and
careened, he and his Dolorian, into the tiger lilies. My mother went into
a catatonic shock the next morning that I can only assume never loosed its
grip. I suppose I never really realized that other people were around
until I was nineteen and walked out of the house to find a man by the name of
Kaplowitz sitting on the roadside, drinking iced tea. I said something to
the effect of a hello, and he responded in kind. I wasn't curious, but I
needed something to do, and it looked like he could help me out.
Mismatched socks and cattywampus snakes of hair looked to be the ticket.
So we get to talking and we walk along the highway and sooner or later I'm
learning a thing or two. Firstly, I'm
learning this guy is a schizo, and secondly I'm learning that I'm never going
back home.
The great thing about America is that you're never going to run out of
roads. If nothing else, at least that much we can guarantee.
The ground's a skillet because though it's been days, it's still late
afternoon and my skin's burnt and cracking to pieces. My Chuck Taylors are
sticking to the molten tar and suddenly I turn around to Kaplowitz and I says to
him, can't we take a break? A kreepie Kaplowitz eyebrow raise and a flick
of the wrist: I'm on the ground and all kinked up. Mane of dreads eclipses
the Great Lightbulb In the Sky and I says okay, okay, as you wish, el
Jefe. So the man helps me up and we keep on truckin'.
Kaplowitz says we're all going to Hell in a handbasket.Kaplowitz says the
Man's got us under his thumb.Kaplowitz hands me a bottle and says it's all
good.
A wave of pure Hell soared down my throat just then, ripping apart anything
in its infernal path. Say hello to Dante, says Kaplowitz, the unmarked
green bottle sharp in the rays of afternoon.
It was Hell in a handbasket. Say hello to Dante.
Kaplowitz and me, we corkscrew-tunneled through space, gopherlike till we
found the pulsating, barbarous body we never knew we were dying every day
for.
Snap, krackle, pop--the planet cracked open again and it was like we fell
into a yawning gorge. There was only one constant in those days and that
was everything: the cold, squirming fish bodies; the packmule work; the
dark-bright green-blue sky. This was our seafaring life.
Swashbuckling: yes. Ravishing: yes. Algae: God, yes. We had a
helluva time with Dante those days. Yo-ho, yo-ho.
The planet's in a colossal centrifuge, I told Kaplowitz one time, as the
animal swaggered and slurred some tuneless shanty or another. It's
spinning at hundreds of miles an hour, I speculated at him, staring straight in
his kreepie Kaplowitz eyes. But ultimately, I flourished in a moment of
poetry, our total displacement is zero.
Hogwash, the schizo spat back. A flash of black fingernail paint and
suddenly I was getting friendly with the woodgrain. We don't move unless
we feel like it, do you hear me? A quantum eye hawked at me. Nobody
moves us, said the face materializing around the bulging red eye, except
us. Soggy resplendent headdress of snakes eclipsed the rotating sun and I
says okay, okay, as you wish, el Presidente.
He was, and would still be today, a bona fide schizophrenic. I know
because we had comrades that we didn't actually have. Always the man was
ranting to someone I wasn't, and I knew there were several of them because he
called them motherfuckers. Kaplowitz was no nutjob though. The man
knew what he was doing.
Splintered.
The gushing, splashing life-form receded like a hairline behind us and the
highway was ours again. Again our shadows rolled out before us.
Inexplicably my skin had started to melt from my body, pulling down towards
earth against my will. I was amorphous, I was beginning to notice.
Only slightly, of course. But it always starts out slow.
An afternoon spanned years on this road until--
Splintered.
Kaplowitz made a flying leap, a sudden jolt in velocity that he couldn't
ever have willed himself. A spider-web and a grinding of metal, a cloud of
afternoon dust and the feeling like sandbags. The vultures smelled carrion
and so did I, so they came and I left.
The highway was mine. I felt I needed guidance. I had to speak
to Our Lord; I sought counsel.
God Almighty, scowled the man bent over me. When was the last time you
brushed your teeth?
I closed my eyes and mumbled through my eyelids to the Holy Light, tell me
what I must do, Father. The man pulled off his white mask and pushed his
spectacles up on his nose and called upon a new reel of mint-flavored floss.
The Father cleansed me and I left Jesus' Dentistry Co-Op feeling
appeased. It was dusk then, and I got a room at the Motel Capri, and I've
been brushing regular ever since. Shit, man. There isn't anything
else to do, I think now. Excepting of course, eating peanuts and waiting
around for the next Holocaust.
I'm sitting on the curb with my tea and lemon, and I'm not doing much of
anything. I hear something to the effect of hello, and I respond in
kind. I feel kreepie this afternoon.
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