The Subtopian Magazine: February 2013 Issue

The Adventures of Vernon Q. Public

by Eric Suhem

Subtopian Manifesto XIII.

by Trevor D. Richardson There is a theme to this issue and it is a message Subtopian wants to declare loud and clear. A violent crowd is a herd of sheep, willing to follow the leader over any cliff as long as there is the promise of blood. Be mistrusting of large groups and institutions, historically they have looked to hedge their own bets at the expense of the people outside their inner circles, typically the people they are sworn to protect. And finally, disaster has always led to an outcry for safety, and the promise of security has always led to the disappearance of liberty.

The words of Ben Franklin still ring true today, “He that would trade liberty for security deserves neither.”

Like I always say, the American Revolution never ends just because the war did.

You have to fight for your freedom every day. And that is not a call to vote, that is a call to listen, to think critically, to judge harshly, and to look for the devil at the gate, because he’s there, in one form or other. Be wary, also, of your own patriotism, because behind the claims of virtue, there is only discrimination -- an attitude that draws lines between Us and Them, a dynamic that Others the entire world and sets us up as superior. This is wrong. But more than that, this is dangerous. The path to peace will only be seen clearly when thep eople of the world stop holding up patriotism as a virtue and realize that it is the last frontier of discrimination, segregation, and judgment. I will avoid the “we’re all one speech” for a time when we’re all high and remind you, instead, of another quote: “Patriotism is the virtue of the vicious.”

--Oscar Wilde

And our nation is led by patriots. Never be afraid to ask if we are the bad guy.

Be on the lookout for Subtopian Press’ upcoming release of

Collaborating with Angels Rob Lee’s photo-memoir

Spring 2013

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The World’s Biggest Sporting Goods Store “My idea of roughing it is walking from one smoke-filled room to another, with a brandy snifter in my hand.”

-- Sparkle Plenty (failed congressional candidate from New Mexico who ran under the slogan “Plenty for Everyone) Recently I got word from an old friend back east I hadn’t seen for 40 years, who was driving “out west” for a family reunion in New Mexico. I was invited to this event, and said I would go. After a protracted and expensive nightmare getting the car smogged - a new catalytic converter finally got me passed after three failed tests - I got on the road. First stop, L.A., my daughter’s place, where my son-in-law, just back from a job in Las Vegas, said that it was 120 degrees out there: “brutal.” I thought about the drive east across the bottom of California and the whole of Arizona with no AC in the car, and decided against it. Since he was heading on to points west, we arranged to meet in eastern CA somewhere and eventually settled on Ridgecrest on Rte. 395.

395 runs north and south along the eastern Sierras. This was new to me, as I’d never spent any time on the east side of the state. So to get back to the Bay Area, I’d drive north and find a way.

I discovered that this road is popular with tourists and vacationers. One can veer off to Death Valley, which always reminds me of 20 Mule Team Borax and Ronald Reagan, and is not a place I’m dying to see. Manzanar is also an option for the sightseer, but I’d seen enough of it in pictures belonging to a friend whose mother worked there during the war and subversively opened the gate for the captive Japanese-Americans to go out fishing or just get out for a while.

The town of Bishop, whatever it might have been in the past, is now a strip of franchise junk-food restaurants and motels. It also apparently a launching pad for people on the way to Yosemite. At a gas station there, I was the only customer not driving an RV, or SUV stuffed and festooned with camping gear, bicycles, tents, fishing rods, etc. And there was no shortage of businesses catering to these kinds of things. I kept wondering, where was the water these people fished in?

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At the left turn heading into Yosemite, more than half the cars on the road turned off. I supposed they were all going to climb vertical cliffs, or sit in their cars with bears sniffing at their windows... or going camping, because they certainly did have all the necessary gear. And no doubt they’d seen the videos of how to rig your food stash just right so the bears couldn’t get at it.

Farther north in Lee Vining, the northern Yosemite launch site, it all came clear to me. Everywhere was camo, khaki, Eddie Bauer, REI, and endless outdoor gear strapped to the roofs of SUVs. I assumed that this was all in the name of getting away from it all, and that “it all” was stressful, high-paying jobs in cities. Because how else could they afford this. Being in shape is paramount here. I saw peoples’ legs (they’re all wearing khaki shorts, it’s the law) that resembled, as Clive James said of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s body, “a condom stuffed with walnuts.”

Just north of Lee Vining is Mono Lake, which, if one believes articles in the SF Chronicle and other, shinier publications, is a very weird body of water with creepy, prehistoric and alien-looking “tufa” rock formations jutting from the water everywhere. In fact it looks like a regular lake, but okay, it’s saline with no streams running into or out of it. In Wisconsin I had learned that most lakes are parts of river systems, even the Great Lakes. But you have to go down there and look carefully to find the advertised formations in Mono Lake. I’m just not a good tourist.

Rte. 108 west would bring me over the mountains on a latitude compatible with San Francisco. At the turn, trucks are strongly advised to avoid this road. In fact, just a couple of miles in, one sees more signs forbidding trucks altogether. Turns out, trucks only use the road to access the U.S. Marine Corps Mountain Warfare Training Center. The complex is right there in plain sight and looks like any military installation. So this was where they go to prepare for Afghanistan. I’ve also had the privilege of close proximity to the U.S. Navy Undersea Warfare Center, on Liberty Bay across from Poulsbo WA. Like many such places, it “neither confirms nor denies the presence of nuclear weapons.” I just know that if you try and approach it in a boat, you are warned away in threatening terms.

108 winds over the Sonora Pass at 9600 ft. and drops through the western foothills into the Town of Sonora, where one finds oneself back in generic American surroundings, California style. It was okay by me.

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VIOLENCE MAKE

“Stuck On Repeat” is about to go conspiracy theory, folks. It can’t be helped. In order to illustrate the point I want to make I’m going to have to get into some questionable territory. I want to start by saying that I don’t want this thing to become a “9/11 was an inside job” argument, but I do need to mention it for perspective. Honestly, on that topic, there are some interesting points people have made about that idea, the movie “Zeitgeist” had a lot of good things to say (on that topic and many others despite it’s attempt to create it’s own techno-babble gospel) but it’s just not what I’m trying to be about.

Maybe it was a hoax, maybe our people allowed it to happen, maybe... but there’s nothing I can do about that and I would prefer to stay out of the class of people that sit around having that same debate again and again. I will only say this: it fits a historical precedent, one which I am about to describe in detail.

The first thing that has to be made clear in order for this point to be made is Zeitgeist’ claim that war is a moneymaking machine driven by the world banking system for the purpose of earning profit from all parties involved. Money spent creates interest and debt which the world banking system thrives on and, in times of war, spending is astronomical so the profit earned increases exponentially. This is where we get this unspoken cultural suspicion that the people in charge WANT WAR. See, when America goes into debt it’s not the rich or the leadership that pays for it, it’s us.

The central bank, the federal reserve, and establishments like it, are private institutions in America that print our money, set the value of the dollar, and essentially run our economy. However, every dollar created comes with an applied interest rate, a kind of cost for the work done by the bank itself. To

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Rachael Johnson, the founder and writer of this particular regular feature in Subtopian, has moved on to new challenges and has, to use a familiar comic book expression, hung up the cowl. But the mission continues and the search for a replacement will likely be long, difficult, and bittersweet. Her insight was as keen as her journalistic sense for story and it seems to me that if she were here writing today she would have something important to say about the recent shootings. I guess, like so many heroes hanging up the cape, the responsibility falls to the next in line, the one nearest by, someone fighting the fight beside them. The cowl goes to me until we can find a suitable replacement.

ES YOU GULLIBLE that end, every single American dollar has a built in debt, and that debt circulates and grows over time.

And each new dollar printed has fresh debt applied to it. It is a closed system in which no one can ever get out. Our government, our citizens, everyone is paying off a never-ending amount to a faceless collective. This single fact is the cause of global inflation, skyrocketing prices, the gas crisis, and, most likely, but also most difficult to prove, a penchant for war since the founding of these establishments at the outset of the 20th Century. Sounds like a secret government to me, sure, and it also sounds like a hell of a good explanation for why we all feel that our government officials are a bunch of patsies with no real power.

pay was never legally ratified by Congress and was pushed through by the very same officials who established the Federal Bank in the first place. But that still isn’t all. In addition to there being no law, no legal basis for the requirement to pay income tax, there is also no real monetary value behind the dollars we exchange day to day. While they once represented America’s gold and were marked as being exchangeable for a dollar’s worth of gold, they now only read as “legal tender,” the idea being that the dollar itself is the money, not a representation of money. In other words, you work every day, you sweat and lose sleep and lose time, for pieces of printed paper that only have meaning because our society agrees to let them.

You pay taxes because you agree to do so. And you do all of these things because you are afraid, and you don’t even fully understand why.

The taxes we pay out from our own income go directly to the national debt owed to these banking establishments. Moreover, the income tax we

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Which brings me to the next phase of this

regulars argument, and the root of this month’s “Stuck on Repeat.” We live in a violent country. You may not like to think that, you may even wholeheartedly disagree, but facts are facts. There is a climate of hate and a thirst for vengeance that permeates our cultures interests, entertainment, legislation, and religions. Bumper stickers like “You can pry my gun from my cold dead hands” and “Guns Don’t Kill People, I Do,” are so commonplace that we have become desensitized to the unnecessarily violent tones behind them. An outcry for murder as a response to murder is common in certain political factions, religious groups, and even in down home families that have been victimized by crime. Our response to any number of atrocities is a craving for death, the bloodier the better. We talk in quiet circles with our friends about the urges we feel toward our fellow man while simply driving down the road. We hate. And we like it. Americans are a violent people, hands down. Our law enforcement officials are guilty of brutal beatings, unnecessary macing, and even killing so regularly we have both accepted it as a fact of life and have become wary of our so-called “peacekeepers.” Our law writers talk in circles on the topic of gun control after every school shooting or town massacre, but they do it just long enough, and with just enough pandering to see that nothing changes until the national blood cools back down to normal and we all forget. We are a violent people and it is our urge toward violence that has always made us gullible.

Remember that concept. Your desire for violence makes you gullible.

Since the beginning of the 20th Century we have been at war, in some form or other, non-stop. We are currently embroiled in a “war on terror” that has no visible goal, no clear enemy, and no foreseeable end.

There will always be terror, and given the national position there will always be a war.

It has been suggested by more writers and filmmakers than I care to count that secret powers behind our government want us to be at war. It drives up government spending. It increases the national debt. And, of course, it multiplies production and use of munitions, fuel, body armor, medical supplies, man power, and, sadly, funerals. All of which are a business unto themselves. Spending soars during wartime, and while the people lose money, children, and time, the rich and powerful prosper. The conspiracy on the books, proposed by such thinkers as the minds behind the aforementioned “Zeitgeist,” is that the central bank, created under dubious circumstances in the early 1900s, has forced us into one war after the other and reaped the profits for over a hundred years. The evidence to this fact is staggering, involving America’s richest families, and more than one ex-president, including Woodrow Wilson, and the men behind Vietnam. I won’t go into all of it, just see the movie if you haven’t already, but take it with a grain of salt, while I appreciated the research, at a certain point I did feel like someone was selling me something. But the point I wish to make is about the pattern of how we enter a war. In this regard we are reprehensibly “stuck on repeat.”

March, 1915. World War I is booming and America couldn’t be more opposed. Woodrow Wilson promises to keep us out of the war, which he does, right up until after his reelection. The Lusitania, a cruise liner of some prestige, is sunk by German U-Boats on its way across the Atlantic to Liverpool. This single action ignited a widespread blood thirst in America among its people and its leadership. We entered the War and the rest, as they say, is history.

December, 1941. World War II is underway and Germany, again, has launched a campaign to conquer Europe. America, again, remains neutral and vows to stay out of the problems and trials overseas.

Then the attack on Pearl Harbor goes down. Over 2,000 American soldiers are killed and President Franklin D. Roosevelt calls it “a day which will live in infamy.”

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August, 1964. The Gulf of Tonkin Incident. War between north and south Vietnam has already been going on for some time. The US destroyer Maddox is performing a signals patrol when it encounters Vietnamese torpedo boats and is sunk in an ensuing battle. This event is the catalyst for the US entering the fight in Vietnam. While no official declaration of war was made (despite Zeitgeist’s claim to the contrary, and resulting in one of many reasons for Vietnam being referred to as “an illegal war”) we went to “war” as both a means of protecting capitalism in South Vietnam and “getting even” for the loss of our boat. Now, it has been suggested that the boat was instructed to be in that spot for the sole purpose of being sunk and there is even another instance of a sea battle taking place two days after the sinking of the Maddox that military brass cited as a reason to go to war which never even happened! Still, the truly shocking thing about the war in Vietnam is that soldiers were given explicit instructions on how to not fight. They couldn’t pursue the enemy over certain borders. They couldn’t fire on any anti-aircraft weapons or equipment unless it was previously confirmed as being active. They couldn’t bomb on the street where Ho Chi Minh, Vietnamese president, resided. And they couldn’t perform any naval attacks if Soviet or Chinese ships were anywhere nearby. In other words, they could only attack under extremely limited circumstances and, again, it’s been strongly suggested that the enemy was made aware of these limitations, was able to take advantage of them, and ensured that Vietnam would drag on, becoming the longest war of the 20th Century, allegedly for the purpose of keeping a war going in order to profit from the ensuing debt.

There are tons of examples like this throughout history, and it’s no surprise that people see the pattern in the events of September 11, 2001. We got bombed by our own planes and we responded by going to war, not just against the people that were supposed to have attacked us, but against pretty much whoever we wanted. That’s the point. Violence makes us gullible. If President Bush declared, out of the blue, that we were going to attack Afghanistan and then Iraq we would have impeached him. But the national blood was boiling, we wanted someone to pay, and so we would have gone along with anything. We weren’t just tacitly supporting the war, we watched it 24-7 on CNN like it was the Super Bowl. We cheered when they hung Saddam Hussein. We are a violent people and we wanted blood.

But that’s the pattern. We want to stay out of the fight, but violent events inspire a national craving for violence and we enter the war. The old saying, “violence begets violence,” couldn’t be more true than it is here. However, this is only part of the story. It has been suggested, researched, and strongly supported by officials, reporters and conspiracy theorists alike, for decades, that in each of these instances there was an element of negligence on the part of the government and military or even outright complicity. The bumper sticker “9/11 Was An Inside Job” should be amended to read “So Was Pearl Harbor, Lusitania, Vietnam...”

Let’s go down the list.

From a letter by Winston Churchill to Walter Runciman:

It is most important to attract neutral shipping to our shores in the hope especially of embroiling the United States with Germany . . . . For our part we want the traffic — the more the better; and if some of it gets into trouble, better still.

In other words, “we need to get all the ships we can going back and for through German waters because once one of those gets sunk we can enter the war.”

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And guess what, the Lusitania was redirected from its regular path to go through known German waters. And guess what? It was sunk by a German torpedo. And guess what else? A newspaper ad was put out prior to the fatal voyage warning people that U-Boats were out there and sailing might be a dangerous idea. It’s as if somebody knew something bad would happen and wanted to reduce the body count. The ship sank, America got angry, and we sprinted into World War I.

Now, Pearl Harbor. Because I don’t want to write a twenty-page report on conspiracy theories, and because other people have done a much more concise job already, I will instead say that there is sufficient evidence to support that the powers that be were fully aware of the attack on Pearl Harbor and let it happen. There were even numerous occasions where America was effectively prodding the bull to try to goad an attack from Japan like putting up trade embargoes on Japanese exports, effectively freezing trade between America and Japan and drastically hurting their economy. The long and short of it, however, is that after the Pearl Harbor attack two things went down. First, England says “Help us in Germany and we’ll help you in Japan,” and so America, again, sprinted into the war. And second, Winston Churchill, prime minister of England, hears the news of the attack and pours himself a drink, toasting, “Gentlemen, we’ve won the war.”

He goes on to say, “...the United States is like a gigantic boiler. Once the fire is lighted under it there is no limit to the power it can generate.’”

In the instance of Vietnam, there is more to the story than just this one conspiracy theory about . See, even the story on the books is telling. Communism was sweeping through Southeast Asia and when North Vietnam (Communist) attacked the capitalist South Vietnam, America decided to intervene. That makes sense, right? It does. And it is probably the truth too. However, has any average American ever stopped to ask why we gave such a shit about Communism? I have a theory. If we are to assume that all of this stuff is true and not just clever stacking of evidence, then we can make one unilateral observation: the free enterprise system is the real leadership in America AND Communism is a direct threat to that leadership. You can suddenly envision the Cold War in an entirely different way. It’s a game of posturing between two ways of thinking, both well armed by a different empire, and both seeking globalization. If Communism wins than the banks running America lose. So we went to Vietnam. We went to Afghanistan in the 80s to start a war on Communism on a second front by arming Afghan people with weapons (duh) and lots and lots of money.

Allegedly, the same people that turned around and attacked the World Trade Center in ‘93 and again in 2001.

It just doesn’t pay to arm small insurgence cells for your own personal gain these days, does it?

And that brings us to 9/11 and all the arguments I’m sure you’ve heard like a zillion times by now.

The buildings appeared to be a controlled demolition. People heard explosions prior to the planes colliding with the towers. There was sufficient warning, numerous reports both inside American intelligence networks and from other nations. Our system is designed to scramble jet fighters in the event of a rogue plane, but somehow they failed not once but four times in the space of a single morning. There are too many coincidences, too many failures, and while I don’t like to be “that guy,” I can’t deny that the official story doesn’t hold water. You only have to ask yourself who stands to gain from lying, who stood to gain from the criminal negligence that resulted in the death of 3,000 Americans. I could speculate, but I won’t. The idea here is that we wanted a war and, because violence makes you gullible, we got it.

If the World Bank and other establishments like it create debt, both in the American populace and in other nations “of interest” then it stands to reason that they want more spending, more scarcity of resources, and more infighting among nations. They create instability for profit, they make the necessities of life in 7

our society more difficult to get in order to drive up value and cost. They are responsible for the increase in inflation over the course of the past century. And they are, for all intents and purposes, the true power behind this country, and many others. The stated goal of globalization, “a new world order,” was first uttered at the decline of the first world war by none other than Winston Churchill the man that very possibly could have been in on dragging England and America into two world wars. That phrase has such a strong association with the banking class that it is a sort of buzz word in the conspiracy theorist community and leads one to wonder if Winston Churchill was “one of them.” The same man to utter their motto was responsible for bringing England back to the gold standard and creating economic instability as well as creating a budget that favored the wealthy and hurt the common people. You have to wonder how deep the rabbit hole goes, but for now I can only say that the plan for a new world order has been methodically, subtly, enacted ever since the creation of the world banking system. In fact, the plan is essentially complete, it has a foothold in most parts of the world, it has America as its enforcer for those countries that do not comply, do not pay their debts, or simply hold on to ideals that run contrary to the notion of global profit for the few at the cost of the many.

But the true point, the real crux of the matter, is that a pattern has emerged that dates back to the earliest roots of war and the opposition to war. At any time when a country’s population is against a war a convenient, seemingly coincidental catastrophe takes place that turns the blood of the people and has them crying out for vengeance, for their pound of flesh. The plot is so insidious, so masterfully achieved that it has the people, once opponents of the war, thinking it was their idea to fight and the leadership humbly gives the people what they want. And the goal, in all of these cases, is mere profit. All the lives, all the deceit and corruption, all the death, so a bank can boost its revenue and increase its reach across the globe. In case you’re wondering what the big deal is, what we have to be afraid of, in case you’re thinking it’s just money, consider that the way Adolf Hitler grabbed power was by burning the Reichstag building, Germany’s Parliament, and blaming it on Communists, thus generating support for beginning the second World War. Violence begets violence. If we are to survive and evolve as a species we must learn to stop answering aggression with more aggression, hate for hate, an eye for an eye. We must stop, because violence makes us gullible and we fall for the same trick again and again, forever until we learn. The rulers of our nation are posturing for war in Iran as we speak, deciding how to handle Iran’s potential acquirement of nuclear arms and asking themselves whether or not to invade preemptively or after the arms are complete. America will be against this and, if history is any indicator, we can expect an attack from Iran in the future, something to justify an invasion and another “war on terror.” Be wary and don’t be gullible where the future of your nation is concerned or we will be stuck on repeat until we are annihilated. pp

----Arthur Brand doesn’t want you to know anything about him. He believes strongly in the power of people as individuals and has zero faith in the power of people in large groups. He is suspicious often, angry always, and dumbfounded regularly. He dreams of a free America and hasn’t seen it in his lifetime.

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Sara was blind. Doctors in Tallahassee restored her vision by using one of her molars. Donations from viewers made this elaborate operation possible.

On WCTV’s Good Morning Tallahassee Show, Sara’s returned vision is featured fourth thing.

First comes the fifth annual Girls Can Do Anything Summer Camp. Ted uses the bathroom not leaving a trace. The next piece is about a former Priest who ditched the pulpit to marry and whittle. Today he has sex and creates nativity scenes year-around. (»Orient Kings from afar in June? Never want to hack them to pieces?« »Sure. But it’s exactly like not walking out on my wife. I turn up the iPod and clean out the gutters.«) »Did you know that four in ten adult Tallahasseeans spell Tallahasseean wrong? Not true? You’re right! It’s five of ten!« Then the segment with Sara. She lost her vision in a farm nitrogen accident as a baby. Today, able to see, in order to function, she takes antidepressants. »When you imagine things in your head,« Sara explains, »you leave out the ugliness. I had a boyfriend until he noticed me studying him. The hairs in his nose, the ones in his ears. He had hairs all over the place. I wanted to be dead.« Sara’s segment is followed by anchorman David Worpee showing viewers how the zoo’s new hippo is »sanitized« (hose, detergent with fungicide, squeegee). So much for all things practical, for up next is Sheila Rawlings. Today Sheila demonstrates how everything tastes better wrapped in bacon. »Including your husband, Sheila? Isn’t that taking the bacon bit too far?« NOSIRRREEEBOB! Doubts anybody? Lend an ear to Bob’s satisfied, satisfying simmer!

»Ted, I need you.«

The air-conditioning in the trailer can be turned off but not turned down. It’s one season fits all, too cold for any time of year.

»I’m watching television.«

Poppie barks. That means the mailman.

»You can go back to television. But right now come here.«

»Jesus.«

Ted closes his eyes. He falls from the rocker to the floor and crawls to the bedroom. Crawling 9

is the surest way to get around until the doctors remove the bandages. Ted’s hands navigate by following the shag carpeting foot path blazed by all those who proceeded him. Poppie stops barking. That means no package.

»How many you need?«

»Three.«

Ted crawls to the dresser and pulls out Poppie’s sweater drawer. A hand feels around for two, three striped rag monkey dolls. He cradles the monkeys in his arms and stumps to the bed on his knees. An elbow locates the cool of the chain, the rasp of the basket. Ted makes the drop. The chain, a peg, advances. »Anything else?« His tongue investigates the slot where her missing molar would have been.

»Why you got your eyes closed?«

»I’m the woman on TV. Now she can see.«

»So why are your eyes closed?«

»They’re not. They’re bandaged.«

----Eldon (Craig) Reishus plays the piano under the Alps outside Munich (Landkreis Bad Tölz – Wolfratshausen), and is an anti-nuclear activist, all-around pro webGuy, and translator of a broad score of films and books. He originates from Fort Smith, Arkansas. Visit him: www.reishus.de

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Michael K. White 8

Larry wheeled his crippled bike home through the gray day gloom and the oily pumpkin scented air, his shirt front bloody and torn and his nose caked with drying blood. His mind as usual was utterly blank, focusing on nothing and everything all at once so that the cacophony in his head took on a kind of majestic stillness that was his usual mental state.

He lugged his bike up the stairs to the apartment he had once shared with his mother before she left for Florida one day three years ago without telling him. She had left a note which Larry had James Gribble read to him. His mother had left for Florida and made sure to send him a hundred dollars a month whether he needed it or not. There were never any notes that came with the hundred dollar bill in the mail, but Larry could see the letters were from Florida because the stamps had pretty flowers on them.

On the fourth floor Larry drug his bike to the door of apartment seven only to notice that it had a new doorknob and a piece of paper affixed to the door. Larry’s keycard did not work in the slot no matter how many times he tried it. He attempted to read the piece of paper but could not; the writing might as well have been Egyptian hieroglyphics as far as Larry was concerned. He sat down in front of the door next to his mangled bike and played his favorite dancecore song in his head over and over. It was called “Pussybutt” by Latin crooner Jesus the C and was Larry’s very favorite song. He knew it so well that he could reproduce it in his mind at times like this. He could reproduce it perfectly as if there was a radio in his head. He fancied himself resembling Jesus The C, who was quite a heartthrob on CyberTv with his long hair and thin beard and tasty salsa grooves. The beat pounded in his head in time to his heartbeat, the light coming through the dusty hallway window making visible a universe of dust particles and molecules that even Larry could see and wonder about.

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Scott and James drove frantically around calling for their poor wiener dog, Sir Clement Atlee.

James wept bitterly because he was the sensitive one, but Scot had moved on, as was his custom and was trying to encourage Scott to give up the search and go with him to Ron’s, where they could get an idea of how much their flower was worth.

“Dude,” Scott told his crying brother, not untenderly. “You’re crying like a little bitch over a fuckin’ dog, man. I mean sure we had some good times teasing him and duck taping his mouth shut and shit, but it’s over bro, and we have to move on and get some money for that motherfucking flower.”

“You got no feelings,” James said sullenly, looking out the window and taking a sip from his warm Cokesi. “You got no heart. You got no soul.”

“Fuckin-A I do too,” Scott replied, stung. “I care about shit. I just don’t cry like a bitch when I feel something.”

“Maybe you should.” James said and Scott knew it was true but he still pitied his brother for his weakness and feelings.

Larry suddenly noticed a change in the light coming through the window. He did not know how long he had been sitting there, watching the tiny universe of teeming within the feeble sun beams. He didn’t even know if he had fallen asleep or not. He rose to his feet, their tingling and stiffness told him that he had been there for a while. He tried his keycard on the slot again but still the door to his home would not open. He tried again and again, and then he saw the paper. He took it off the door and put it in his pocket. Without looking at his bike next to the door, he walked the four flights down the stairs and out onto the street.

Unsure of where to go Larry just started walking. Judging by the light and the feeling it was beginning to become afternoon. Larry noticed the usual smells and sounds but his eyes were inward, looking at things like himself on a stage in front of shirtless cheering girls. Or himself in a movie strafing crowds with a machine laser. He saw himself as president of the United States, wearing the flashy cowboy suit with red white and blue rhinestones just like President Gotti.

He found himself by the green interstate in front of the abandoned Wal-K-Mart. He walked over by the five story mega dumpsters, which looked like landlocked warships bursting at the seams with garbage and the mysterious people who lived within their bowels. Larry had always been told to stay away from the mega dumpsters, but he was always drawn to them by their fierce majesty and reeking odor.

A breeze kicked up and Larry saw something moving out of the corner of his eye. He turned to see an RV with a furry tail blowing on its anachronistic radio antenna. On a clothes line facing the dumpsters Larry also saw several fur pelts, which he took to be flattened animals hung out to dry. The breeze blew the skunky smell of the pelts into Larry’s nostrils and, as ever attracted to smells, Larry dug out the remnants of the caked blood from his nose in order to smell it more completely.

Instead he disgorged a clot which started his nose pouring blood again. Larry sat down on the pavement and tried to hold his crusty t-shirt against his face. He felt but did not see the shadow that came across him. The first thing he knew was when a kindly voice asked him, “What’s wrong there little fellow?”

Larry did not jump; indeed he wasn’t scared at all. He lifted one eye to the voice and saw a small elfin man with a long beard and heavily mended glasses whose eyes twinkled with kindliness. In one hand the man was holding what looked like fresh meat. His shirt too, like Larry’s was covered with blood, but even Larry knew it wasn’t the man’s own blood.

Larry saw something else in the man’s other hand; something he recognized and something that made him get to his feet and manage a broad bloody smile. Larry pointed to the thing in the man’s hand, 12

a small colorful budlike flower and said thickly, “I have one of those.”

9 Scott and James sat in the reeking truck cab at the strip mall waiting for Ron. Ron’s store was a dim narrow office front at the edge of the barrio. Obstensively he was a coin dealer but he functioned more as a pawnbroker/fence. Ron kept his own hours. Sometimes he was there and sometimes he wasn’t.

Scott and James knew this about him and accepted it. They only had seventy more industrial rag deliveries left to do and it was only two in the afternoon. There was plenty of time.

James was still mourning the memory of his wiener dog Sir Clement Atlee, band Scott was heartlessly insisting they write a tribute song to their old friend and sing it at the next rehearsal of their Technoretro band Cameltoe.

“C’mon dude! You know I can’t write lyrics like you do! You gotta pull out of this funk man. Use it as creative energy James!”

“I guess I’m just not as soulless as you are,” James replied disdainfully. But the gray day and the bright colorful emotions steered James toward some form of self expression despite his tragic stance.

Sensing this, Scott began to pound the dashboard in a crude marching beat. James began to nod his head, imperceptively at first the with increasingly more fervor until Scott was slamming the truck so hard it rocked back and forth and James was thrashing his head up and down making it look like a blurry photo.

James began to growl then shout out the lyrics to his new technoretro song.

“FAT DOG IN AMERICA! YOU FUCKIN’ DIED TOO SOON! FAT DOG IN AMERICA! YOU WENT TO MEET YOUR DOOM! FAT DOG IN AMERICA! I’LL NEVER SEE YOU AGAIN FAT DOG IN AMERICA I’LL THINK ABOUT YOU NOW AND THEN”

Scott abruptly ceased his pounding and the truck grew still and quiet in a millisecond, leaving James still thrashing to silence the growl stuck in his throat. He stopped, and swallowed hard, red faced.

“What’d you stop for fucker!?” James asked, breathless, disoriented and disappointed.

Scott shrugged sadly and looked out the window at the abandoned Wal-K-Mart across the street.

“It was bumming me out.”

Larry felt no embarrassment at Vern’s finding him so bloody and disheveled. In fact his heart bloomed at Vern’s approach and he instantly accepted the fact that Vern was his friend.

“What happened there friend?” Vern asked in his kindly voice, just tinged with the hint if a southern accent.

“Some guys jumped me,” Larry said thickly, looking around, trying to orient himself. “You live in the dumpsters?” he inquired. But Vern just smiled and turned to walk away. Then he stopped and faced Larry again. “What did you say?” he asked quietly and more intently.

Larry blinked and smiled a bloody smile. He didn’t know. Vern extended the flower he held to Larry who blinked and smiled even more bloodily and widely.

13

“Yeah I have one of those.”

“Where?” Asked Vern, pinning Larry with his clear clue eyes. Eyes so blue it was like looking into the sky. Larry didn’t usually look at people’s eyes. It made him feel tired and afraid. But in Vern’s eyes he swam in a warm ocean of eye.

“Some guys stole it off me.”

Vern frowned. “Come with me,” he said and walked away. Larry followed happily, using his t-shirt to mop away the blood that was already crusting around his face.

Ron finally showed up in his rattling solar hybrid car which due to his driving habits whirred and clicked like a broken watchcomputer. The little vehicle was stuffed with debris, trash, which Ron compulsively collected and sorted and saved patiently waiting for the day when someone would walk into his cave like shop and request it.

Scott and James took one last hit off the bong and carefully cradling the flower bud, they followed Ron into his shop. It smelled like old metal and vegetable soup in his store and a scraggly, ancient cat named Mr. Pitt stared balefully at them all from inside a cardboard box bed. Ron scurried around pulling strings which illuminated the room in ancient angry fluorescent light. Their hum filled the room.

Scott and James shifted nervously as Ron ignored them, turning on lights and distractedly pawing through piles of coins, stamps and bullets. He found a bullet that seemed to be what he was looking for and walked purposefully behind his glass counter. From a drawer he withdrew a pistol and inserted the bullet.

He lay the pistol down and finally turned his attention to the Gribble brothers.

“Hand me that sack,” Ron said in his whiny voice, looking over Scott’s shoulder at an old style paper grocery bag that had to be at least thirty years old. James went to grab the bag and found it to be very heavy. The paper bag was brittle so he carefully lifted the bag, supporting the bottom with his hand. Something inside clinked. He set the bag down in front of Ron, who distractedly started pawing through it. Ron was a pasty troll of a man who had hair everywhere but on the top of his head.

The Gribble brothers silently watched him examine the contents of the bag. They knew the rituals and observed them. If you pushed things it would all take longer. They were patient. Ron sighed a weary sigh and withdrew an endless stack of one ounce gold bars from the bag. They glittered and shined from within. They had been mined in Colorado in the 1880s and each had a long bloody story to tell, but Ron and the Gribble Brothers weren’t listening.

Scott stared at the gold, open mouthed. Gold had been illegal since the great crash of 2009. At that time it was worth seventy thousand world dollars an ounce. Even Scott knew that. James was struck by the intensity of the gold’s shine. To him it hummed like the overhead tubes, but the gold’s hum was somehow clearer, like crystal. To him the value was its beauty, its purity. James had nothing pure in his life. Nothing at all.

He felt the flower bud in his hand. As Ron examined the gold bars, James held out his hand and opened it. The flower emerged and Ron’s head swiveled. Between the fluorescent lights, the gold and the flower, the dark little store on a cloudy day was suddenly a vibrant spring day, and they could all even hear the chirp of birds, until they realized that the ancient cat, Mr. Pitt, had a squeaking mouse in his mouth and was biting down hard on its head.

10 Larry sat perfectly comfortable in the skanky RV that Vern lived in like an elfin Thoreau at the abandoned Wal-K-Mart. The hard October breeze blew the complex, fruity rotten smell from the giant Mega 14

Dumpsters into the slatted windows and Larry could feel the vehicle rocking as Vern searched for a suitable rag for Larry to use to clean up.

Vern was talking, in a high pitched sing song voice, they way one would talk to a small animal when no one else was around. It didn’t matter because Larry wasn’t listening to him particularly. Larry was taking in the inner world of Vern and astonished by such intimacy, he filled with brotherly love for Vern and wished that Vern would let him live there with him.

The small RV Larry was sitting in was compact but multi dimensional. The senses were overwhelmed by smells and sights and even strange gurgling sounds that seemed to come from within the very walls of the old vehicle. It smelled inside like rotting meat and gasoline. But it wasn’t necessarily an unpleasant smell. Larry did not differentiate between such things as food and bad smells anyway.

Larry was fascinated by the pelts and skins that decorated the walls, the skulls and leg bones piled up in the dish drainer and the simmering pot steadily boiling and gently clanking from the bones roiling inside. The distant sounds of the cars on the green freeway might as well have been the soothing sound of the tide coming in. Vern suddenly loomed before Larry holding a dirty rag which he thrust out to Larry. Larry accepted it, watching Vern’s small cherry lips form their words. “..and these snakefish see they come from Asia but people bring them here because they are good eating. Anyway for whatever reason the snakefish wind up in lakes and rivers. You know why? I’ll tell you why because someone is doing it deliberately. These are vicious predators these fish with razor sharp teeth and a ruthless determination to eat anything that gets in their way. But that’s not the thing I was talking about. The important thing. You know what this is? I’ll tell you what that is. It’s the fact that these fish, these gnashing eating machines can flop out onto land and breathe with rudimentary lungs. You know what that means? I’ll tell you what that means. It means that these fish are like we were in the very beginning.

The beginning of time when our ancestors first emerged from the primordial slime to walk with rudimentary fins upon the shores. Jesus Christ! There are reports of these damn snakefish eating dogs and sheep and what have you. I even heard a herd of these things chased a bunch of school kids on the playground. Think about it. Think hard. This is how the world will end. Just like it began. Armageddon my friend. These fish will eat everything including you and me and everything will start all over again. Just like before..”

Larry finished wiping the crusty blood away from his face. The fish story scared him but he didn’t want Vern to know it. He saw that Vern was watching him intently, his gnomish eyes twinkling, expectantly waiting for a reply or opinion on the snakefish matter.

“I don’t like fish,” Larry said flatly because it was true.

“It’s one of them new genetic replicas. They use cathode dye..”

Ron had glanced at the bud in James’s hand before dismissing it and dashing the Gribble Brothers dreams of easy riches against the wall like crystal champagne flutes.

“No Ron take a look at it,” James urged, every disappointment in his life coming through his voice.

Ron sighed heavily and turned his full gaze onto the bud. He was quiet. He took the bud from James’s hand and examined it more closely. He held it up to his nose and inhaled deeply. Ron’s specialty was coins and other ephemera, not flowers. He didn’t know if it was real or not. But Ron believed in playing the odds.

“I’m telling you it’s a replicate. I’ll give you a hundred bucks for it.”

“A hundred bucks!” Scott scoffed. “That won’t even buy us Kentucky Fried Tacos!”

Ron shrugged trying not to queer the deal. James snatched the bud away, making Ron’s heart sink.

“A hundred bucks is enough for McArbys,” Scott offered his brother. “I am kind of hungry.”

James felt the sting of betrayal. “This thing is real,” he hissed. “I’m not selling it for no hundred bucks.”

Scott turned to Ron, who kept his head down buried in a book about coin values.

15

“Hey Ron how much would that thing be worth if it was real.”

Ron looked up. “A couple million,” he said.

Scott and James looked at each other and smiled bad teeth smiles. Ron shrugged. He knew the flower wasn’t real. Well, he figured it couldn’t be real. These guys were morons. Mr. Pitt, the elderly cat jumped onto the counter. Purring loudly. Mouse blood flecked the fine hairs on his chin. He stretched his head toward the flower bud lying carelessly and limply on the counter next to a stack of gold bars. Mr. Pitt sniffed the flower, then shook his head violently and sneezed.

“See?” Ron said triumphantly, shooing Mr. Pitt from off the counter and scooping up the gold bars.

“See? Cats don’t like the fake flowers. The benzene makes ‘em sneeze.”

Scott made a disgusted sound and kicked at the dead mouse on the floor. James reverently gathered his soggy flower and cupped it carefully in his hand. He knew in his heart that Ron was mistaken and if he had to go somewhere else to sell his flower then he would. The Gribble Brothers left Ron’s little shop in the decrepit strip mall and walked toward their truck. It was late afternoon and the shadows were closing in. The grayness of the day had dimmed and the breeze was beginning to sting cold. The Gribble Brothers shivered slightly in their shiny disco shirts and Scott’s hair gel hardened in the wind.

“Fuck man!” Scott reprimanded as they slammed the doors of the truck and settled themselves in.

“Let’s go back and get the hundred bucks. We can buy a six pack of beer with that!”

James moodily stared out the window. He hated his brother with all his heart right now and did not want to listen to his whining. James felt confused about things. He stared at the abandoned Wal-K-Mart across the street. The crumbing building, the giant mega dumpsters and the hulks of abandoned vehicles in the huge parking lot.

11 Larry watched as Vern finished cutting up a bunch of meat. The silence between them was not uncomfortable at all. It gave Larry a peace that he had never quite known before. Yet there was also something else he felt, something unfamiliar and scary. But like with all scary things, Larry just pushed it farther down until it was so faint as to not be noticed at all.

Occasionally Vern would mention the snakefish and evolution, but Larry didn’t understand any of it. He liked watching Vern use the knife. The way he did it so that there was hardly no blood. He watched, fascinated as Vern peeled the hide off of the headless animal and as he was clipping the limp fur and skin to a taut steel wire, Larry suddenly recognized it.

“I know that dog!” Larry said with the delight of recognition. Vern smiled and said nothing. Larry nodded to himself and cackled with pleasure at his cleverness. Vern stopped cutting and turned to face Larry full on. Larry was still rocking back and forth, chuckling with pleasure.

“What’s your name?” Vern asked him.

“Larry.”

“Larry let me ask you something.”

“Okay.”

“Larry tell me, could you survive on your own with nothing but some tools and your own intelligence?”

“Sure.”

“Are you certain of that Larry? You would have no money for food. You would have to find your own food. Build your own shelter. The challenges are endless.”

“What about DiscVision?” Larry inquired. He couldn’t’ live without his favorite show, Salsa Dance Party News Hour with Wolfgang Martinez.

16

“There’s no TV Larry. Just your thoughts and some books.”

“What are books?”

“Stories written on paper.”

Larry shrugged. He didn’t even know what that meant.

“See, people today don’t understand how to adapt. How to exist without consuming. Look at the mega dumpsters. I’m in control of my world Larry. No one is going to tell me how to live. I decide what happens in my world. When the highway turned green I parked my RV. When the flowers turned gray I decided that I would not like that. I like colored flowers. Red and purple.” He stopped. He was breathing heavy; Larry stared at him, his mouth agape. His face was crusted with dried blood and his eyes were bleary with grief and exhaustion.

“I want to show you something,” Vern said, walking past Larry in the tube like compartment and walking toward the small storage space that separated the bedroom from the bathroom. The gamey stench of old blood and shit hit Larry full force now and the bad feeling that made him afraid pounded on the door of its cell in his mind, demanding to be heard.

Vern opened the tiny door and Larry saw a small compost heap, about two feet square, that held a dozen blooming, red and purple flowers. The ceiling of the RV had been sawed away and replaced by scratched Plexiglas salvaged from the mega dumpsters.

“I had one of those.” Larry said sadly.

Vern looked at his flowers. “They are my proof that man is like God. The same. The only difference is scale.”

Larry nodded but he didn’t know what Vern was talking about. Vern picked up a plastic bucket.

“I need to go over to the hospital dumpsters and get some ice for the meat. Can you see if you can find some wood for the fire? It has to be real wood or white paper will do. Remember, real wood.”

Larry didn’t know what wood was but he agreed thinking that he would walk around for a while and then return empty handed complaining of bad luck.

tightly.

The Gribble Brothers sat in the parking lot of Ron’s Store in despair. James held his flower bud

“Okay so it isn’t real.” Scott said matter-of-factly after a long deep bong hit.

“Fuck you motherfucker!” James lashed out. “It is too real asshole!”

“Dude, if it was real Ron would have been all over that shit. C’mon, you got a synthetic hybrid and I can prove it.”

“You can’t fucking prove anything dipshit.”

“I can prove you’re a crying bitch, bitch!”

“Okay dickwad! How you gonna prove it?”

“Give me a petal.”

“Fuck no! I’m not mutilating this so you can fuck with my head! I’m through with this Scott!”

“Calm down psycho! Check it, you give me a petal. I hold it to my lighter. If it’s benzene synthetic it’ll go up in flame. If it’s real it won’t.”

Staggered by his moron brother’s practicality, not even James could argue with this kind of logic.

Still he did not want to pull off one of the precious tightly budded petals. He did not want to see it burn.

“Go fuck yourself Scott!”

“Yeah I knew you were a little chicken bitch, bitch. You’re scared because you know it’s not real.

You’re scared because you might be wrong for a change. Scared, that’s all you are dude. You’re fuckin’ scared of everything!” The contemptuousness in Scott’s voice was genuine.

James suddenly launched himself at his brother and a scuffle ensued inside the cab of the truck which quickly spread outside into the cold parking lot. The late afternoon chill had settled in and as the 17

Gribble Brothers rolled around on the pavement, slapping and punching each other, a few rays of the sun broke through the gray cover of clouds.

Panting and coughing, Scott had pinned his more sensitive brother by sitting on his chest and bouncing with his full weight right above James’s heart every time he moved or tried to escape. It was a move that Scot had put on James many times before, but not since James had hit Scott across the head with a baseball bat one night, putting Scott into a three day coma and forever shifting the balance of power between them.

Now James had the flower in his hand and was thrashing to get away from Scott so he could pick up a rock or baseball bat and bash him in the head. Instead Scott, no fool, dropped heavily onto James’s chest, forcing the air out of James’s lungs and stunning his heart.

Scott got up and pulled the flower from James’s twitching hand. James, stunned and momentarily paralyzed, gasping for breath, watched as his brother peeled off a petal, held it to his lighter and smiled.

The red petal had flashed into a blue benzene flame and disappeared in a puff of noxious black smoke and falling bitter ash. A terrible silence followed but something shifted. James still struggled but the tone of it was different.

“Isn’t that Larry?” James asked his brother in a perfectly normal tone as he thrashed his head from side to side. Scott looked and agreed that it resembled Larry’s shape and form. He got up off his brother and quickly got into the cab of the truck. James picked up his flower and put it into his pocket, getting into the passenger side. Scott threw the truck into gear and they roared off.

Across the green highway was the abandoned Wal-K-Mart, and James was sure he saw Larry coming out of one of the old RV’s in the parking lot that belonged to one of the dumpster people.

“That fucker,” Scott said for no reason in particular except for the fact that he hated Larry and his grief at the loss of Sir Clement Atlee was sharp only because he could never again watch his wiener dog attack Larry.

Together they watched the lumpen, husky figure with his bloodstained Notre Dame jersey tucked tightly into his armpit level sweatpants, emerge from a ratty RV and walk unsteadily toward the giant mega dumpsters. Another figure emerged and walked in the opposite direction, carrying a plastic bucket. This man was thinner than Larry and had a long beard. He placed the bucket into an ancient metal shopping cart and began pushing it toward the hospital, rounding the corner of the abandoned shopping center, disappearing from view.

The Gribble Brothers, after first looking both ways crossed the green highway and bore down on Larry in the potholed, litter strewn cracked parking lot. Larry heard the large diesel truck coming. He smelled the fumes it ejected and he ran.

Hooting and yelling, the Gribble Brothers chased down Larry as he tried to zig and zag between the huge ship-like metal walls of the mega dumpsters. Dumpster people scattered and threw garbage at the speeding truck as it wound its way through the alley access lanes between the behemoths.

Running for his life, Larry flailed wildly, clawing at the air as if swimming instead of running. His sweat pants kept inching down to the center of his stomach but he yanked them up as he ran. The truck was accelerating behind him and he could hear Scott and James screaming for him. He knew that any second they would fling their insane wiener dog at him, chucking the dog like a flaming spear into his back, when suddenly Larry remembered something.

He stopped running suddenly and turned only to see the truck bearing down on him. Frozen, Larry could see the surprise in Scott’s face as he swerved to miss Larry and hit the side of a mega dumpster. The huge metallic clanging boom that resulted hurt the back of Larry’s throat.

Scott and James jumped out of the truck to survey the damage. Scott turned to Larry, incensed.

“You fucking dick! Look what you made me do!”

Larry held up his hands. “I know where your dog is!” he said quickly.

James walked up menacingly. “What are you talking about?” James growled.

18

“I know where your dog is.” Larry said again.

“Where?” Scott demanded.

“First you have to give me flower back.”

Scot and James traded looks.

“Give him his flower back James.” Scott said evenly.

James reached into his pocket and gave Larry the flower. Larry grinned. “I’m rich!” he exulted.

“I’m going to sell this to Ron!” Just then there was another boom and they all looked up. Though there were strong rays of sun streaking through the gray clouds, there now came thunder, which echoed off the metal sides of the titanic mega dumpsters like the cataclysm of worlds.

12 Larry’s heart pounded how sweet it was! To finally have back his precious flower. He held it tightly in his hand, so tightly that he crushed it. It collapsed into fragments, the stresses of the day finally doing their work, miniature biological eternities and inevitabilities fusing into the remains of a dead flower.

Larry felt the flower crumble and quickly placed it into his pocket, not allowing his mind to register the fact that his flower was in pieces. Possession was what was important. No, this victory was too sweet; his life was too good at the moment to think about things like that. He had bested the Gribble Brothers, at last.

“Where’s our goddamn dog?” James growled at him. The thunder rumbled from far off, like the roar of an approaching truck. They could smell the oily rain in the air. A storm was coming.

“It’s back in that trailer,” Larry said flatly, gesturing to Vern’s dilapidated RV. The brothers both looked in that direction as if their heads were on a pivot.

“Show us.” Scott said.

Larry waddled back across the parking lot with the Industrial Rag Delivery Truck rumbling behind him. The dumpster people watched this strange procession, solemn, funeral like, and then resumed their preparations for the coming rain.

Scott and James burst into the RV, their blood was up. They looked around for their lost wiener dog Sir Clement Atlee, but they did not hear the familiar skitter of his toenails or the raspy growl of his temper.

The RV was eerily silent.

“Where is he?” James said, grabbing Larry’s crusty t-shirt front.

“Over there, over there!” Larry gestured to the wire that bisected the room, over which hung several small stinking animal skins. Scott gasped.

“Fuck!”

James however, did not see what the others saw, but the pit of his stomach rose then tightened into a tiny ball. He walked closer to the hanging skins, searching each one.

“FUCK!” Scott wailed behind him, but James still did not see what the others saw. He was in a dream state, walking and walking but not getting any closer. Suddenly he was holding an animal skin in his hands.

There was still blood on it and it did not smell as bad as the others. The fur side was familiar but on an unconscious level. James felt nothing, no emotion at all except for a deep tightness inside; steel that was stronger than anything else had ever been in his life. James put down the pelt and turned around, facing Larry.

“Where is he?”

Larry stood dumbly, slack jawed. It had dawned on him that the Gribble Brothers might not ap19

preciate the joke of their skinned dog as much as he did. It dawned on him that this might have been a big mistake to bring them here.

Scott had seized the skin from his brother and was crying like a child. He looked helplessly at his brother. It dawned on James in a horrible moment what it all meant. The question he had just asked referred to his dog. Now James had his answer. James reared back and hit Larry on his broken nose. Larry groaned and fell back. The blood started pouring again. James asked his question again, in a weary, patient tone.

But this time he meant something entirely different.

“Where. Is. He. Larry held his bleeding nose. It didn’t even hurt this time. “He went to the river. To catch fish.”

Larry didn’t actually remember where Vern had gone so he had made up the first thing that popped into his mind. He wished he was at the river right now fishing instead of inside this stinking trailer.

Scott hit Larry on the back of his head and Larry staggered, falling over some stacks of magazines and newspapers. Scott started to trash the inside of the trailer in a rage. Smashing and throwing, working his way toward the back. James stood, staring at the skin before dropping it to the floor. He saw that in the sink was a colander full of pink bloody meat.

“JAMES!” James turned to Larry. “Give me my flower back.”

Larry protested. “No, you gave it back to me. It’s mine!”

“Give me my dog back then.”

“I did!”

“No you didn’t.”

“I DID!” Larry exploded in fury, launching himself toward James, who with one well timed blow sent him to the floor again. Larry’s heart hammered with hate.

“JAMES!” Scott’s voice from the other compartment was loud and irritated James. He bent over and stuck his hand in the pocket of Larry’s waist high sweatpants and extracted the fragments of the bloodstained flower. Larry did not put up a defense. He was somewhere else in his mind, away from this moment.

“JAMES ARE YOU FUCKING DEAF!” Scott was in his face.

“Calm down Scott.”

“Don’t tell me to calm down you stupid fuck! Come and see this!”

James followed his brother to the back of the RV where in the small storage space they beheld Vern’s small flower patch. James bent over and plucked one of the dozen or so red flowers. He examined it closely. The purity of the scent was intoxicating. It was a red flower with open petals and tiny seeds inside of it. Its stem was thin and green, real green, and slightly fuzzy. In his other hand he released the oily bloody fragments of his old flower. They fluttered onto the dirt patch.

The thunder was getting closer now and the ozone in the air made everything seem dreamlike and unreal. The quality of light had changed dramatically. Larry had picked himself up off the floor and was wiping his face with something he found on the floor. It was furry and damp and did nothing to staunch the flow of blood from his nose. He was furious but realizing that he was outnumbered he kept his own counsel. He had gone ice cold in his heart and was thinking more clearly than he ever had in his life.

James admired his new flower and the patch of red and purple and felt something inside of himself start to bloom. There was purity, a beauty, a symmetry that he had forgotten. For a second, the sun broke through the thunderclouds outside flooding the inside of the trailer with an unnatural orange late afternoon light. James smelled the flower and its scent went into his brain and through his soul. He was staring at the flowers beneath him, realizing in the depths of his reptilian brain that they were precious and unique when Scott shoved him to one side and began stomping the flower patch, grinding the precious petals into the dirt, reducing the red and purple petals and green fuzzy stems and leaves to pulp. He was laughing. James could only stare dumbly as his brother reduced the flower patch into a muddy smear.

20

“Oh Scott.” He said quietly and started to weep.

Scott stopped. He was sweating and had a goofy grin on his face. The metallic material of his shirt shimmered in the new blue and purple light. Thunder rumbled once again, louder, sharper. The clouds closed over the sun’s waning rays. It was October.

“What?” Scott demanded.

James’s rage reengaged. He shoved Scott so hard he fell down making the entire RV sway dangerously. “WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING YOU DIPSHIT” Scotts smile faded. He shoved his brother back.

“Fuck you man! I’m thinking that’s what I’m doing!”

“You’re THINKING?!”

“Yeah motherfucker! I’m thinking!”

“Scott you just destroyed a shitload of money you stupid ass!”

Scott smirked and then gave his brother his most pitying look.

“It might look that way James.” He began condescendingly. “But I’m thinking as usual while you moan about your feelings.” Scott said the last word with the greatest contempt.

“What the fuck are you taking about?” James said in his ominous voice.

Scott smirked again. “Yeah sure these flowers might be worth some money but think about it dude.

You got a flower right there in your hand. One flower will be worth more than twelve flowers. Especially if it’s the LAST flower. You see what I mean?”

James could not argue with that kind of logic. His moment of clarity was now a faint echo, like a dream upon waking or the taste of fresh gum. He shrugged.

Scott looked around and saw an empty Tunachicken can. He filled it with the soil and crushed up flowers and handed it to James.

“Let’s do it right this time.” He said.

James jammed his flower stem into the can of dirt. He loved his brother but he couldn’t fucking stand him, especially when he was right.

The Gribble Brothers walked back into the main part of the RV where Larry sat, holding his t-shirt up to his nose. Scott and James looked around and started taking things, knives, and furs, anything that struck their fancy. Scott even took the colander of meat and Larry was pretty hungry. It figured.

“The river?” James asked in a conversational tone. Larry nodded.

“See you later Larry.” Scott said and they were gone. Larry could hear their voices in debate as they got into the truck and slammed the doors. The engine sputtered and started. It was very loud. Then it drove off, growing fainter. The stillness inside the RV was comforting. The thunder still rumbled but it seemed to have passed by. The air was still charged with electricity.

Larry sat up straight. He decided he would wait for Vern. He went to the sink and found a greasy rag. As he wiped his face with it he noted with pleasure that it smelled like gasoline. He walked to the back of the RV and stared for a long time at the wrecked flower patch. Finally he saw a piece of grey sludge that he knew had one time been part of his flower. But now the color was gone and it smelled like crap and left a black tar on his fingers that would not come off on his sweatpants. With an aching heart he made his way back to the little kitchenette where he found nothing to eat. He found the knife he was looking for, the knife that he had watched Vern use earlier with such mesmerizing dexterity.

Larry knew that Vern was emerging from the other side of the Wal-K-Mart with a shopping cart full of hospital dumpster ice. Larry could feel him crossing the parking lot. There was a lightning flash which had a strobe like effect inside the RV and Larry grew afraid. His whole life had been turned upside down during the course of this one day. Now he would live here because there was no place else. This would be his life now. He had decided. Another strobe of lightning and Larry whimpered. The sharp hard crack of thunder that followed made Larry jump.

In the parking lot of the abandoned Wal-K-Mart, Vern jumped too because he knew that the metal 21

shopping cart full of ice could attract a bolt of lightning that would definitely singe off his beard. His heart pounded but he was exhilarated with the majesty of nature.

Vern loved the storms. He had slid the cart full of ice up against the RV and was opening the door when he had a thought. The environmentalists had it all wrong. Everything here was designed to support us, Vern decided. It was all about us. So it came as a mighty shock and surprise to Vern when His Time Came in the following moment and just like that the world was different but the same.

At the river, the Gribble Brothers had camped, waiting to see if the storm would blow by before they searched for Vern so they could kill him in revenge for the murder of Sir Clement Atlee. Scott had built a fire and was roasting some of the meat that they had taken from Vern and Larry. James gnawed absently on a piece, lost in the flow of the river just a few feet from them.

James had placed his tinned flower beside him thinking that it might enjoy the flow of the river as he did. It was dusk and the storm had seemed to die although the sky remained almost white. It had been unusual to have a thunderstorm this late in October and now it seemed like it was about to snow. James finished his meat and lay back on the bank of the river. He knew his gelled hair would be full of twigs and dirt and shit but he didn’t even care. He placed the gasoline soaked rage over his face and entered sweet oblivion.

The rain began in faint sprinkles then steady drops. James could hear his brother’s voice, and then feel his brother’s kick and the note of alarm sliced through the octane. James removed the rag from his face to see his brother clutching the polymer Betabat he was going to use to kill Vern with. Instead of killing Vern, Scott was frantically swinging the bat at something on the ground. The rain had soaked his shiny shirt and the thunder came faster now. Annoyed James rose to his elbows, enjoying the cleansing oily rain when he felt a sharp bite on his leg. He reflexively reached down and felt something huge, slimy and alive which bit down hard on his hand.

James popped up instantly, his mind wild with panic, fear and dread. He clutched for his Betabat and began swinging wildly and screaming like his brother.

“FUCK! WHAT THE FUCK!” James swung wildly, knocking over his flower onto the bank of the river. James did not even care.

He saw the flower fall over and the slimy flower dirt from Vern’s RV cover it like a grave. He did not even care.

“It fuckin’ bit me!” he yelled to his brother who was still thrashing at the ground. Gasping, panicky, James looked hard at what had bit him and was astonished to finally register in his mind that it was some kind of big ass fucking fish that was dragging itself along with its fins and snapping at anything in its path.

Its teeth were huge and its eyes large and rolling, looking at him right into his soul. Its snakelike body and convulsive dragging of its glistening green/gray body on its stubby fins struck a deeply atavistic chord in both the Gribble Brothers, who after resorting to their first reaction to fight decided together that it was time for flight.

James could see several of the fish, some as long as two feet emerge from the water. They flopped out of the river onto the bank and heaved themselves toward him, opening and closing their enormous mouths, their needle like teeth making a soft clocking sound. The larger ones grunted and snorted, their gills flexing and flaring.

James did not know that dusk was the traditional feeding time for the snakehead fish. James assumed it was a sort of divine retribution. James knew in the back of his mind that he had huffed too much gasoline, but he felt the teeth marks in his leg, he felt the warm trickle of blood and he saw his brother running in terror toward the safety of the dark junkyard across the access road.

James took one last look at this nightmarish invasion and joined his brother. The fish seemed to chase them which made run all the faster. The Gribble Brothers were so crazed with fear that they didn’t think to run to the truck, but ran past it toward the junkyard with its piles of metal and dead machines. They 22 28

knew they would be safe amidst technology. The rain had stopped. It hadn’t really rained at all. Scott could still see the smoke from their little campfire. James realized suddenly with great despair that he had forgotten his flower.

“My flower!” he screamed but Scott pulled him along.

“Forget it James!”

“We have to go back!”

“Go ahead.”

Scott released his brother and ran away from him. Abandoning him to his fate. James did not go back. Together they ran as fast as they could into the junkyard. Into the dark.

“My flower! Scott wait! My flower..!”

The snakehead fish advanced through the Gribble Brothers campsite. One tried to walk right through the feeble campfire to get to the roasting meat and was burned to death while eating the prize. One snakehead fish bit down onto a truck tire and with its teeth lodged in the rubber and steel belts thrashed and grunted in fearful death throes.

“My flower!” James’s voice echoed.

Another snakehead fish drug its heavy body over the flower and the flower dirt, full of pulverized remains of other flowers, eating the foiled can, thrashing it in its mouth, using its powerful jaws to mangle and dent it.

“My flower!” James’s voice was fainter still. The thunder rumbled but it was faint and weak. An aftershock.

The snakehead fish moved slowly mixing the dirt and the flower together with the earth of the riverbank. The snakehead fish carried some of the flower and the flower dirt on its slimy belly into the grass as it searched for something to eat.

And just like that the world was different but the same.

-----

As one half of the semi-legendary playwriting team Broken Gopher Ink, MICHAEL K. WHITE spent his youth tricking and fooling producers into investing their dirty money in his lurching, lumbering plays.

Incredibly this led to forty play productions, including fifteen off-Broadway runs that cloaked the author with a bogus literary credibility he misuses to this day. His low cholesterol mega monologue play, “My Heart And the Real World” ran for almost two years in New York City, enabling the authors to eat at John’s Pizzeria.

In 2007 his story “13 Halloweens” was chosen as one of the ten best stories published in 2006 by the super cool folks at Story South. In 2010 “My Apartment” a “micro-novel” was published by Blueprint Press. His work has appeared in BluePrint Review, Foliate Oak, Tongues of the Ocean, Eclectica, Insight Outpost, 5923 Quarterly, Burner Mag, and 6Tales, among many others. In January 2012 Lap Lambert Publishing/Just Fiction Books published the full version of “My Apartment.” In October 2012 his new play “The Six Realms of Pizza Delivery” played in Auburn, New York and won some festival up there or something. White was pleased to recieve a t-shirt and a dvd which his girlfriend said was too dark and too loud.

A shy, humble man who lives with the cows in Colorado, White, a frequently published, deeply scarred veteran of the tragic and furious litmag scene of the 80s, is now content to live in solitude with his debts and addictions. Recently he was unpleasantly surprised to find an extended family of black and yellow snakes living inside the crack between the steps and his house. He found this out the hard way. www.brokengopher.com 23

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You know how everybody says the Star Wars prequels are terrible and, like, they totally are? Well, yeah, duh, that’s true and all, I mean, stupid childish writing and over the top CG sequences are more than enough to pull you out of the atmosphere of the Star Wars universe. And any argument for the prequels can be ended just by saying, “Because, Jar Jar Binks.”

Still, I want to float a theory that, at least in part, the prequels suffer because they are attempting to mask an incredibly intricate political drama behind cutesy crap, pun one liners, bad hair cuts, tear away princess clothing, and bad casting in the role of Anakin Skywalker.

They feel hollow because they do not fully commit to being a kid’s movie or a mature telling of bureaucratic intrigue. However, behind the Binksian bull shit there is a brilliantly arranged storyline that has its roots in real world history.

The Emperor is Hitler. Hitler rose to power by quietly playing the game of “hearts and minds.” He cast doubt and fear over the social climate of Germany while simultaneously making grandiose promises that he backed up. Germany was suffering economically because, among other things related to WWI, their railroads, their main connection to the outside world, had fallen into disrepair so they had no means of resupplying or import-export related business. Hitler fixed the railroad and revitalized the German economy. Moreover, with the national morale boosted to an all time high, and with Adolf Hitler in power as president or prime minister or Caesar or whatever the hell kind of leadership they had at the time, Hitler declared to his people, currently a Democratic state, a republic, that the German people were destined for greatness, called to a higher purpose in the world, and as such they were to build a new empire. If that word doesn’t ring a little bell in your heart than you have never seen Star Wars and are probably not an American born anywhere near the 1980s. So, in simple terms, Germany’s invasion of Poland was an attempt at conquering in the name of German supremacy. To the people involved it started with the same promises that would have been made by Alexander the Great or Genghis Khan. To them it was not just their destiny, it was their right. In other words, the most infamous, evil dictator in history started WWII with promises of wonder, visions of a brighter future, and claims of German strength. His words sounded positive. All the Jew murder and horror came later. What I’m trying to say is, nobody rises to power by saying, “And we’re going to kill every-

one! YEAH!” It just doesn’t happen. Or if it does the people revolt or whatever.

Now, cut to Emperor Palpatine. In the prequels, behind the veil of the aforementioned Jar Jar Binks crap and stupid Queen Amidala and Obi-Wan’s near mullet in Episode II, you have a politician playing two sides against each other. He plants doubt as the politician, and he strategically places key political and economic figureheads while disguised under the hood of Darth Sidious. He does the same damn thing, rises to power by playing “hearts and minds.”

He plants doubts in Queen Amidala’s mind regarding the current Chancellor of the Senate while simultaneously leading a trade embargo on the Queen’s home world, blockading her people and cutting them off from the world outside. Just like the railroad, the Queen’s people were suffering without supplies and commerce coming in, and the good politician, then Senator Palpatine, promises to put that to an end if he could just get his hands on the necessary authority. The point is, this doesn’t make for great action in a space fantasy epic, but it is a hell of a good narrative and a story that has taken place more than once in our world. The result, of course, is the vote of “no confidence” in the current Chancellor and the rush vote to establish Palpatine as the new Chancellor. As the climate of violence darkens in the Republic, the Chancellor requests “emergency powers” to do what is necessary to win a war against “the separatists,” basically space terrorists that don’t like the Republic. That is an important moment and worth noting. Any time someone takes powers in the name of security you can be damn sure liberty will suffer. Emergency powers is one form of a larger objective: to achieve military rule over the populace. This comes in the form of martial law, military occupation of private land, and ultimately totalitarian rule. The emergency powers plotline is literally inspired by Adolf Hitler’s rise to power in which he was granted temporary absolute authority in the wake of the Reichstag fire, a faked attack on German Parliament. Hitler obviously never relinquished that power, just like the Emperor. In point of fact, a little geek knowledge here, the look, feel, color scheme, and even helmet design of the imperials was all taken directly from the German Army, Nazi Propaganda, and the like.

Moving on, the important thing to remember about the empire is that, at least in the early days, a 25

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large chunk of the people felt that they were free and that voting for Palpatine and supporting the conversion to an Imperial system would ensure their freedom. It isn’t until twenty years after the creation of the Empire, in Episode IV, that we hear of the Emperor doing away with the Senate -- the line having something to do with them outliving their usefulness. From that we can infer that the Empire was playing at Democracy without actually having true liberty. Current protests about our own leadership being pawns or having no real power come to mind, and are even echoed in Episode I in which we hear Senator Palpatine whisper like Lucifer into the ear of Queen Amidala, “Now we see the true power behind the Senate...the bureacrats.”

So, along our current analogy, how have we seen examples of martial law masquerading as Democracy?

Overlooking the not-so-subtle instances, such as the NDAA law which allows the unconstitutional arrest of US civilians for simply being suspected terrorists or the law passed in 2011 allowing for unmanned drones to fly over US soil, there are many not-so-apparent moments that are worth mentioning.

Everything on the internet, for example, is available to our government on the grounds of “homeland security.” Make note, the word “homeland” was never used in reference to America until after 9/11, the same can also be said for Germany after the Reichstag fire, before it was “our nation,” after it was “our homeland.” Last year the FBI created a new branch with the express purpose of making eavesdropping easier and don’t even get me started on that whole SOPA thing from a while back. But here’s a really good one in the way of Democracy covering over sneaky dark side dudes. Skypers in China have recently discovered that when they thought they were using Skype to talk with loved ones they had actually been using a Skype counterfeit called Tom Skype which is directly piped into the government network for surveillance. Whoa.

Well, back to Star Wars. Upon receiving his emergency powers, the Emperor uses violence in the Republic to justify the use of his army, martial law, and military occupation. I would like to point out, in addition to the same pattern being used to get us into the war on terror, we are now dealing with reactions to recent gun violence which has inspired multiple schools, including one in Eastern Washington, to establish an armed guard patrol on campus. That’s right, in response to the tragedies of New Town we now

have a generation of children that will likely grow up greeted at the gate by men with guns. Make your own judgments, but facts are facts people and this is happening. Emergency powers literal or metaphoric always bring us closer to a culture of violence, paranoia, and vanishing liberty.

In another pivotal move later in the Star Wars story, after a bunch of dumb crap happens involving a silly fight with Yoda in the Senate Hall, is to declare the Republic a new Galactic Empire with a strong army of clones and the necessary power and authority to maintain peace and order in the universe. Once again, the Hitler move, do something bad by making it look good.

Okay, I’m not just writing all this stuff out to talk about Star Wars. I mean, I am, because I’m a geek and that’s what I like to think about and all, but it’s not only about that. I’m also trying to make a point about the current state of our nation. We should always be on the lookout for this little maneuver:

Leader uses something negative to implement a new law granting new power and authority to the leadership.

We should be constantly vigilant where security and liberty are concerned. That is one ball you must never take your eye off of, lest America go the way of Germany or Star Wars or China or countless others throughout time and fiction. Like Benjamin Franklin said, “Anyone who would trade in freedom for security deserves neither.” Having freedom isn’t safe, and if you try to make it safe you will cease to have freedom. Period. And there will always be someone looking to seize “emergency powers” or buy up controlling interest or even create a climate of fear and violence in order to convince people that they want to do the wrong thing.

Easy example in recent history: pretty much the entire George W. Bush administration. Fear of terrorists, or “enemies, both foreign and domestic,” created a cloud of panic that was used to enact unconstitutional legislation like the Patriot Act or the early foundations of the National Defense Authorization Act going sideways on us, but more on that later. The point is, since forever, but especially since the 9/11 stuff, there has been a slow, methodical, and steady in26

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crease in security and decrease in civil liberties. More importantly, there is that same climate of fear hanging over America that the right (or wrong) leader is just waiting to harvest for whatever nefarious purposes. If you don’t believe me, I want you to think about the fact that you supposedly have freedom of speech, yet there are countless things you would be afraid to say in public because, whether it seems reasonable or not, you’re afraid someone will snatch you up and interrogate you.

I mean, did you hear the one about the guy that wasn’t allowed on a plane because he was wearing a shirt that said, “My Name is Inigo Montoya, You Killed My Father. Prepare to Die.” What is that?

When you can’t even wear a goddamn tee shirt anymore, you know this isn’t the same America it used to be. My point is, number one on my list of habits America shares with the Galactic Empire, is leadership by fear, paranoia, and threat. It’s there, even if it goes unstated.

Another aspect of the early stages of the Galactic Empire taking hold is witnessed in this climactic moment in Episode III in which the newly appointed Emperor gives the command to “Execute Order 626.”

The order, of course, is for the now gargantuan Clone Army to wipe out their Jedi comrades. This, is the point where the iconic, even inspiring leader goes dark and everyone is helpless to do anything about it.

In Hitler’s reign he was building gas chambers right about now, but in Star Wars this is the point where the bad guy goes on a different kind of genocidal cleansing. Rather than racial or ethnically motivated murder this one is essentially religious. Which brings me to the first point I want to make in regards to this singular moment in Star Wars. You’ll never really hear anyone say this, but the entire thing is essentially about a Holy War. The Sith are one faction of a religion that worships the Force. The Jedi are the other. Both sides believe they are right and both sides want to destroy the opposition.

How does this compare to America? We are also locked in a Holy War that dates back to the early roots of Judaism. What some people fail to realize is that Christianity, Islam, and Judaism all claim to worship the same god. Muslims call him Allah, Jewish people call him Yahweh or Jehovah, and Christians

(being overtly imaginable people) call him “God.” In the days of the Old Testament, Abraham, the so-called father of Israel, has two sons. His first son, Ishmael, is an illegitimate child he has with a servant girl because his wife is too old to have kids despite the fact that God/Yahweh/Allah says she will have a son. The wife doesn’t believe him and says, “If you’re gonna have a son, you’d better knock this chick up ‘cause these old pipes ain’t gonna cut it.” So, Abraham, seeing the opportunity to jump somebody’s bones other than dried up old so-and-so that he’s been with for, like, forever, goes for it. The resulting child is Ishmael. The second son is the miracle baby, Jacob, who would go on to become “Israel,” literally his name changes to that and he proceeds to bring about the nation of Israel and so on. Now, here’s the important bit. Both Jews and Muslims believe that Abraham is the rightful progenitor of God’s chosen people. However, Judaism claims that the rightful heir to Abraham is Jacob because he is the descendant of the true wife and has that whole miracle “I came from a dried up old hag” thing going on, while Islam claims the right of the firstborn son, meaning Ishmael. See the trouble? Both are right.

And, like the Jedi and the Sith, both want to destroy each other because they think they’re so right.

Then, along comes Christianity, sticking their nose in it and saying the rightful heir to God’s kingdom is Jesus, their guy, and shit gets weird. And, as a “Christian nation,” along comes America, reflexively sticking their nose where it doesn’t belong and making shit weird. Now, to the terrorist, jidhadist Muslim, we are not only an amoral, heathen nation with fake tits and hip hop and booze and stuff, but we are also all of those things PLUS someone else coming along to say that they are the true heir of God’s Kingdom.

Kind of makes it a little more clear why they want to kill us and stuff, right? So, no matter what facts their may be about oil, make no mistake, the war on terror is a Holy War every bit as much as the war in STAR WARS is a Holy War. It’s all about people who believe they know the truth because of religion and are willing to blow up the world (or planets, SEE: Alderaan) to prove it.

For this reason I maintain, as ever, that the true obstacle to Utopia and the thing that will assuredly lead us to the Apocalypse, is religion. On top of that whole “trading freedom for security thing” the

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other thing America has in common with the Galactic Empire is a war motivated by opposing faiths. And, if you have any doubt that religion is a dark mark on our national record look up the recent turmoil of the Catholic Church, the sex abuse crisis, and a man named Roger Mahoney. It has recently come to light that all the way back in the 80s the church was made aware of the whole priests abusing little boys thing and they chose to cover it up. As the reports came in they went up the chain to Cardinal Roger Mahoney who did nothing to help the victims and, in one case, even threatened to deport some of the families of boys that were immigrants to the United States. There are other stories from recent news where people higherups in the church found out about the indiscretions of their clergymen and simply sent them away to a tropical vacation, a sort of sexual predator’s rehab, and then relocated them afterward to a new church. That is only one example, we could talk about the Phelps family hating on people at funerals or that whole “God Hates Fags” thing, we could talk about tons of stuff, but you see my point. And I want to add to the record that if we keep going the way we’re going we will fall into a world of fear, violence, rebellion, and war, just like the Republic in our beloved Star Wars.

And finally, on the topic of dangerous religion, Adolf Hitler engendered so much trust and inspiration and even faith in his people by promising a new religion, you know it for its connection to the “Aryan Nation,” in which Hitler claimed Germans were a direct blood descendant from Jesus Christ and were of a pure blood line because of it. This not only motivated the ethnic cleansing of the Jews which, among other things, are allegedly responsible for the murder of Christ in the New Testament, but it also inspired Hitler to form a special branch of the SS which sought out occult related artifacts, like the Holy Grail and the Ark of the Covenant searches you see in the Indiana Jones movies, as a kind of power and validation for his new religion.

Now, back to Order 626. Another thing we should note here is that the Republic was in a war spread across the galaxy against an enemy they called “Separatists.” These were basically people that felt the Republic needed to fall and they were willing to do anything to see that it did. A little bit like the endless legions of “terrorists” our country has been fighting

for themforeseeM aandecade y t h i nand g s will c a n continue b e s a i dto ofight f t hfor e “A eriable future. And, just like America, the fight took the c a n Dto r edifferent a m”. I tplaces c a n bwhere e s a ithey d t hset a tupe vbases, ery troops trained new soldiers, and, in effect, had fighting men time we “tweet” from our iPhones that positioned strategically around the disputed territory to hold w e ’ rtheir e e xground. p e r i e nIn c iStar n g iWars, t f i r swhen t h aOrder n d . O626 n tcame he through the leadership, Jedi generals and colonels dio t h e r the h a war, n d , were the d u d eout i nand “ Wa t c h m ereplaced n” recting taken instantly by s e ethe m enew d tregime. o t h i n kThe i t point w a s Ilwant a u n ctoh make i n g gisa sthis: if you look at the war history of America and the milig r e nbases a d e its has a s left d i sbehind, c o d a nwe c ehave r s . Ia gmilitary u e s s iprest’s tary ence dotted around the globe like a game of Risk (to d i f f e r e n t f o r e ve r yo n e . use an analogy from our esteemed head editor, Trevor Richardson) and our men, given the necessary push, could be given the order to strike anywhere, at any Itime. s u pIn p oother s e t words, h e “A m e r i cpositioned a n D r e ato m”take i n over parwe’re the t i c uworld, l a r tshould h a t I ’America d l i k e tgo o athe d dway r e sof s the i n tGalactic he Empire and try to declare an empire in the name of “ G e t R i c h It Wcould i t h o uhappen. t D o i nHell, g A nityhas t h ihappened. ng to Democracy.

E a r n I t ” t h i n g . Ye a h … T H AT o n e . A d m i t i t ,

Well, to wrap things up succinctly, the story of the ofDour yo uEmperor ’ ve a l l ist hinspired o u g h tby a bthe o utruth t it…

R Ehistory, A M E Dincluding, but not limited to, Adolf Hitler and the rise of athe b oNazi u t iParty. t . S o What’s w hy aworse, r e p e the o p lsame e s t ipatterns l l t e r rhave iemerged vanishing, f i e d t o in a cour t u aown l ly country. d o i t wLiberties h e n t h eare y h ave the people are scared, and every time we get more scared p e rallow f e c t our o p symbolic p o r t u n i“Emperor” t y ? I ’ m oto f ctake o u rmore s e rfrom ewe us. It’s time to wake up, keep our eye on the ball, and f e r r i n g t o t h e ve r y A m e r i c a n “ f r i v o l o u s stop letting political pandering rattle us to the point of compliance, Galactic l a w s u i t ”…lest o r awe s go I cthe a l l way i t , of t h the e “A m e r i cRepuban lic and fall to a reality of shadow and totalitarian rule.

L o t t e r rather y ”. keep my liberty than have to fight as a I would rebel resistance. Wariness seems simpler than war.

I ’ mDavid g o n nRenton a p a i n tisa as cchurch e n a r i obrat f o r by you here. heriI m tage a g i n eonly. yo u ’ As r e ai nman l i n ehea tfirmly a m a jbelieves or re-

theYoimportance t a iin l e r. u ’ r e b uy i nof g sskepticism, o m e t h i n g mental small… l i k eand a pspiritual a c k o f Aeducation A b a t t e r i ewithout s . Yo u indockindly trination, and is a conspiracy theorist pay the merchant and when they ask if only where the Catholic church is conyo u ’ d l i k e a b a g yo u s a y s o m e t h i n g r i cerned. David is a struggling novelist d i c u l o u s l i k e “ Ye s p l e a s e ! D o n’ t w a n n a and works a day job where he watches g e tpeople t a c k l etreat d o n retail my wworkers a y o u t ! like H a h asecond ! ”.

F R Eclass E Z E ! citizens A l l o w mand e t oloses b r e amore k t h ifaith s dow inn

by the day. f o r ya : Yo u humanity ’ ve a l r e a dy PA I D for a TINY

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A lot of people think about drugs and vandalism when they think about Gonzo Journalism and Hunter S. Thompson, but I’m here today to tell you they’re all missing the point. That’s not what Gonzo was, that’s just what Hunter wrote about because he was, well... him. What really made Thompson’s writing so visionary, the real thrust of Gonzo, was that the reporter put himself and his experiences into the story. It wasn’t this cold, removed portrayal of the facts that is typical amongst conventional even “reputable” authorities on the news. He told you about the people, the room, the smells and crust and spills of whoever he had in his literary sights. That is something I’ve tried to bring to Subtopian from the beginning. I am far too ordinary and reserved to follow in the fiery footsteps of the Good Doctor, but I respect his vision and find that when I’m lost his playbook is the one I crack open.

mind right so I don’t get impatient and bored which results in me acting mean or downright immature. So I got prepared as usual for this bluegrass night. But all I can say is that this thing didn’t play out at all like I pictured.

I had imagined an old time dance hall, a raised stage, dark wood everywhere you look, and maybe a big, dusty old curtain – that kind of thing. The Portland Old Time Music Gathering, sponsored by a group called “Bubbaville,” (more on them later), was held downtown at The Scottish Rites Center. From the outside, the building looked like it would definitely be featuring my aforementioned dance hall complete with dark wood and dusty stage curtain. At the front there were a few stone steps ensconced on either side by lampposts heading up toward large, wooden double doors.

As I pulled the heavy doors open with Erin by my side I expected the entryway to expand into marble floors and a vast staircase, but we were stopped abruptly by a variety of people shouldering different stringed instruments in hard cases. The floors were old carpet and the stairs were immediately in front of us going up in the center and down on either side. To my right was a small table with a couple of volunteers taking money for the event. The air was ringing with string sounds and voices, a kind of clatter from too many melodies blending over each other just like the many conversations, laughs, footsteps, and money changing at the door.

Already adjusting my expectations for the evening, we followed a Xerox paper sign that said “Bar/Lounge” in bold letters. It took us down the staircase on the right and we walked over a few lines of blue painter’s tape, a kind of makeshift traffic indicator for the evening. The place was covered in the stuff, blue arrows and lines all over the carpeted flooring led the crowd to other printed off signage and temporary tables, corners and even a bar serving a limited menu that included a beer called Old Yeller that I rather enjoyed for a pale ale.

So when I decided to write the story I am currently attempting I thought about interviewing people, I thought about researching the background and history of the community I discovered, I thought about lots of things, but in the end I decided that my experience of that night was the way to go. This story, my glimpse into Utopia this month, went down on Friday, January 18th. It happened that I was in need of a band to play at my upcoming wedding reception and my fiancee, Erin, heard about this bluegrass event through a friend who was playing that night. It sounded all right, and I certainly hadn’t seen a bluegrass band play since I left Texas, so we went for it. Now, I naturally lose interest in just about anything faster than most and I’ll be the first to admit it’s a nagging, downright inconvenient personality trait that requires dramatic gestures to maintain my attention.

As such, I have developed a kind of coping mechanism to try to prepare for whatever random, potentially lame thing I’m getting myself into. I think about the night, what it will look like, what it will feel like, where I’ll stand or sit, that kind of thing. It helps me try to get my 31

utopia we we nt f or it. Now, I na tur a lly lo s e A l o t o f p e ople think about drugs and inte r e st in just a bout a nything fa s te r va n d a l i sm when they think about Gonthan most and I’ll be the first to a d m i t zo Jo u r n a l i sm and H unter S . T hompit’s a na gging, downr ight inc onv e n ie n t s o n , b u t I ’ m here today to tell you pe r sona lity tr a it tha t r e quir e s dra ma tt h e y ’ r e a l l missing the point. T ha t’s ic gestures to maintain my atten t i o n . no t w h a t G onzo was, that’s just what As such, I have developed a kin d o f H u n t e r w r o t e about because he was, coping mechanism to try to prep a r e w e l l . . . h i m . What really made T h ompfor whatever random, potentiall y l a m e s o n ’s w r i t i ng so visionary, the real thing I’m getting myself into. I t h i n k Thet band we were there to see, Erik Killops & Friends, song endedthe he would as if heitwas done, h r u st o f G onzo, w as that the repor te r about night,sitwhat will looonly k l ito k estand , waspu just setting up as we took our seats and Erin and I back up and continue the same dance once the new song t h i m s e l f and his experiences into what it will feel like, where I’ll s t a n d had just enough time to take in the room and make our began. t h e s t o r y. I t wasn’t this cold, removed or sit, that kind of thing. It hel p s m e usual observations. po r t r a y a l o f the facts that is typica l try to that getfollowed my mind sofood I don get The hour was right beer and and’tlaugham o n g st c o nventional even “reputaimpatient and bored which resul t s i Erin began pointing out people, commenting on how ing and lots and lots of bluegrass music. After then band e ”looks a u t hlike o r ities on or thethat new H elike told me a their c tingsetme a n of orfunny downr ight imma-where thisbl one Columbo ones.looks an finished a sort thing happened u hill a b oJohnny u t t heKnoxville, people, that thekind room, the and ture.people So Ibegan got prepared as usual f o r with overyo the of thing, random forming circles and jamming thens m I realize favorite about night. instrument they brought e l l s amy n d first crust and thing spills of the w hoe ve rThe whatever this bluegrass night.

Butwith allthem.

I c a nThat s a ywas room was filled with a decent cross section of young one of my favorite things about the Old Time Music he h a d i n h is literary sights. That is is that this thing didn’t play out a t a l l andsvery old.

But it wasn’t that usual dynamic you see Gathering, seeing o m e t h i n g I ’ve tried to bring to Sublike I pic tur the e d.people pull together as carefree as when youth and old age coexist.

There was no teacherfinding a game of chess with those old men you see in t o p i a n f r o m the beginning. I am far student dynamic, or nursing home visitation patronizing, the park. Just step up and sit down. It happened wordt o o o r d i n a r y and reserved to follo w in I ha d ima gine d a n old time da nce h a ll, it was a totally equal playing field, these people were lessly, just whoever was nearest to each other made a t h e f i e r y f o otsteps of the G ood D o ca raised stage, h efull r e of friends. There’s no other way to describe it, but to me circle of five or six anddark in no wood time theevery room w was t o r, u t aI sight r e spect his vision and you look, and making maybespontaneous a big, dust y old it was as brare as sunshine in winter or afind truthful little pools of people music. t h a t wand h e nevery I ’mbitlost his playbook c ur ta in – tha t kind of thing. Th e Po r tpolitician, as refreshing.

And as is thethe band on to e Iplay, c r afiddles c k open. ndannouncement Old Time Music Gathat thethe r ing s p owas nbegan sang, and the room filled up I beAsla the was made concert gan to realize that the same was true for everyone there, beginning people began tocalled head upstairs littleiby sored by a group “Bubbav l l elittle. ,” theySwere all just friends.

This was something I hadn’t I found myself preoccupied with the feeling of como w h e n I decided to write the story ( mor e on the m la te r ) , wa s he ld d o w nseenI in years, maybe ever, but the closest it came to for munity thisThe room, the friendliness comfort a m c u r r e n tly attempting I thought townin at Scottish Ritesand Cent e r. all me awere my days in church back in Texas, when things these different people had with each other, and b o u t i n t e r viewing people, I thought From the outside, the building l o o the ked were still good, I hadn’t lost my faith in systematic understanding that I had stepped into a fully formed a b o u t r e s e a rching the background and like it would definitely be featu r i n g religion, and people just came together in little, strange subculture in Portland that people like me were only just hi st o r y o f t h e com m unity I discovmy a f or e me ntione d da nc e ha ll co mbuildings like this one just to hang out and have a good beginning to understand. These people come together e r e d , I t h o u ght about lots of things, pletesome withhave dark wood s t a g eand time. weekly, known eachand otherdusty for decades, bu t i n t h e e nd I decided that m y excurtain.

At– play the shows, front there were a fcall ew they just do this talk about music, r i eman n c e came o f that night thespot, waylaid toout stone steps An pe older in and foundwas an open square dances, andensconced hang out. on either s i d e go . T h i s on st aory, mybench, glimpse intooffUtoby lampposts heading up toward l a rg e , his belongings nearby and took his coat revealing a bright blue sleeveless shirt, a provocatively So we headed upstairs, door through room filledewith pi a t h i s m o nth, went down on Friday, woode n double s. aAs I pull d placed leather knife case on his belt that gave the feeling friendly people and tables and merch and also J a n u a r y 1 8 t h. It happened that I was the he a vy door s ope n with Er in b yrandom of an arrow pointing straight down, old time biker hat old Scottish but that’s not i n n e e d o f a band to play at m y upmy sidestuff, I expected theimportant. entrywayWet owent andco a pointed gray beard. reception We watched,and withmamusement through a couple halls filled with really ming w e d ding y f iexpand intoofmarble floors and old a vpictures ast as, once the preparations were made, he immediately of people that died a really long time ago, probably a n c e e , E r i n , heard about this bluegrass sta ir c a se , but we we r e stoppe d ab r u p tbegan dancing with his eyes closed in a carefree, unmore Scottish stuff – err...dudes, Scottish dudes. We ev e nrhythm-less t t h r o u g h movement a friend harkening w ho w asback plato y-the lythe byauditorium a variety ring dulating, find andofthepeople music isshould already ehappent h ahippies t n i g hand t. the It sounded allgatherings righ t, of nt wasn’t str inge instr ume nts hall in hwith ard daysi nofg the early beatnik ing,diff buteitr estill myd old timey dance an d I cVillage. e r t a i n ly seen a bluec awood se s. and Thedusty f loor s we rItehad oldtheater c a r pseats e t a nfrom d Greenwich Hehadn’t was immediately in our range dark curtain. gr a ssbetween b a n d pus lay I left , so thethe stairs immediately in f r o dudes nt of of vision, andsince the band and, Texas each time the about same were era when all those old Scottish 32

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in the pictures died. The stage looks more suited for a Shakespearean play than a concert, but it’s kind of cool.

There’s this mural in the background that looks like Greece or something and then, instead of stage curtain, there are these cut out trees with leaves and stuff sort of bordering the whole outer edge of the stage and throwing cool shadows from the spotlight onto the Greece mural. The band is sharing one microphone that looks like something Edward R. Murrow might have recorded into back in the day and everything is just generally kind of a time warp to older America, but not in a cheesy way and not in a hipster way, just with a sincerely authentic intent to represent the music in the same way it would have been represented when it was new. The band playing was a three piece band called Tatiana Hargreaves, an all female group that told cool stories about how they got started, where their songs came from and who wrote them and it was all just generally over my head because I know exactly dick about the history of bluegrass.

I looked it up when I got home because I wanted to know more about Bubbaville and its history. Their site (www. bubbaguitar.com) had this to say: Keep Bill Martin’s Legacy Alive, Folks!

Bill Martin, a.k.a. King Bubba, was the key instigator in revitalizing the West Coast old time music and square dance scene. He was a teacher, mouthpiece, welcome wagon, and ambassador. Even in his last days, he was plotting new ways to energize the old time music community – to keep the waves of the Old Time Revolution rolling on down the West Coast. He kept his loyal minions on their toes with his ideas and aspirations. He just didn’t have the time left to do it all himself, so at his request, we have promised to make his dreams live on.

The Bubba Fund will honor Bill Martin by providing much-needed dollars for projects that bring new energy to the old time music community. Projects that make new strings quiver and new feet stomp!

Honor Bill Martin’s legacy by dropping your donation to the Bubba Fund collection basket today! Shucks, Bill would be mighty grateful.

Before the next group came up this guy steps up to a microphone off to the right of the stage and starts talking about what the event is and why everyone is there and whatnot. Again, more church vibes as a girl walked around with an offering basket to take donations for Bubbaville. Well, according to the dude, Bubbaville is a non-profit organization started up over ten years ago by a group of people headed up by a man named Bill Martin or, as he was known by his friends, King Bubba.

The man proceeded to talk about how much Bill meant to everyone and, from the tone of his speech, apparently Martin had recently just passed away, but again, this speech did not come with the usual loss of interest or attention from the audience, everyone was engaged, friendly, and even interacting, laughing at the appropriate times or making those sad noises when you hear about something sweet that Bill did. At this point I realized I should have had a tape recorder, you should always have a recording device, seriously, but I didn’t so I can only describe the man’s speech. I will say, that if ever there is a time when I have passed and people choose to remember me with a list of adjectives I’ll know I did my job right. After telling some stories about Bill he brought it down a bit, got serious, and began saying all the things that Bill was, “tutor, mentor, friend, father figure, harshest critic, prankster,” you get the idea, but it just kept happening, and not in an annoying way. This man was so much to these people and he was the one responsible for bringing together a bunch of scattered northwest kids playing southern music and showing them how to start a movement.

The Bubba Fund is managed by Bubbaville, Inc., the non-profit that presents the Portland Old Time Music Gathering. Bill was the leader of this ragged-but-right, all-volunteer non-profit, and with the Bubba Fund, Bubbaville will carry on Bill’s dreams by funding workshops, dances, and events that Bill Martin told us he wanted to see happen for years to come. Bubbaville, Inc. is a 501(c)3, and all donations to the Bubba Fund are tax deductible to the extent allowable by law.

Another page reads: Bubbaville is a 501c3 non-profit, all-volunteer arts organization that supports old-time music and dance in Portland, Oregon. Donations to Bubbaville help to guarantee such events as “The Portland Old-Time Music Gathering” and the “Dare To Be Square – West!” dance calling workshop. We provide some financial and logistical backing for musical endeavors that we have determined to be important to the further development and enrichment of the local old-time music community. You can make monetary contributions of any size to help our mission to serve the Portland old-time music and dance community.

The Portland Oregon Old-Time Music Gathering is a 31

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grassroots volunteer-run festival that aims to celebrate and enrich the community of traditional old-time Appalachian style stringband musicians. We wish to create an environment where the music is as meaningful as it is when we gather to swap tunes and play in a friend’s living room or meet to play at a campsite during a summer festival. As such, we feel that it is important to keep the event non-profit and volunteer run; whether we are taking tickets, sweeping the floor, organizing an event, or playing music for a concert; we are all volunteers contributing to make this thing happen.

people are your friends, your family, the true framework of a community. We use the word community so flippantly these days. It has become synonymous with “town,” “city,” or “demographic.” But the true meaning of community, the real heart of the matter, is people bonding together to make a life, it is a humanizing term, not a bland statement of a gathering of a certain chunk of the population. Looking at the Old Time Music Gathering, listening to the stories about Bill Martin and the people he brought together, and coming to understand the spit and elbow grease they all had put into building their weird little world, I came to realize that the future of Utopia might not be in a global movement toward After the speech, and with a healthy understanding of any one answer. It might just be in a movement toward what can be accomplished with the right people and the making things smaller, simpler, in realizing that the true courage to get out of your own demographic, hang out with some other age groups or races or whatever, the next promise of humanity is not necessarily in globalization band, Hoppin Jenny began to play. They were fun, lively, but in villages, small circles, grassroots movements, and gatherings just small enough that you know everyone and featured a couple of girls on fiddles and a guy on involved. Maybe the way to make the world better is to guitar and another fella on upright bass who was really put a name to the faces, to bring in the huddled masses getting into it, rocking the thing back and forth and just generally having a good time. They played for a bit, took and make them family, and maybe then the issues of govturns telling stories about Bill, one stands out in my mind ernment and legislation over an exponentially swelling about how they all got started in high school and wanted population become simpler, smaller. I guess what I mean is, maybe the answer is to think smaller, not grander. I to be just like all the seasoned players in the old time music scene, so they started practicing and calling square found myself wondering, sitting there in the midst of all of the spontaneous jam sessions and circles of stringed dances, stuff like that, after a while Bill started calling instruments, that weird hippie dude still dancing, and them the high school show-offs, and this seemed to get the old and the young breaking bread together, that the everybody good and tickled. issues of the world don’t exist here. The division of The night went on like this and a few other people talked demographics, religions, political views, and time are not present. There is only friendship and music. As Democabout Bill and about the vision for a strong old time racy, America, and economy spread globally with newer music community and the importance of their fundraisand more elaborate technologies, the only place I have ing to help the community and its events grow. The last important thing that happened was the first annual Bubba seen any true, lasting human peace have been in places like these, where people actually know each other. And Award, which was given to Hoppin Jenny’s bass player that, I think, is the rub. Nobody hesitates to fire upon on account of how hard he has worked for a lot of years and how he is the type to hang back and work behind the a nameless enemy or to bomb a city from 15,000 feet.

But you have some pause when you come to blows with scenes and, apparently, because he is a talented designer who has supplied them with letterpress printed flyers that a brother. Everyone at the Old Time Music Gathering was family, and that couldn’t be more different than the were cool enough to make young people want to check current movement toward globalization. Like the hippie out the events. Kevin accepted the award bashfully and dancer would say, “Think local, not global.” pp said very little, but his gratitude was clear. After that we broke for an intermission and Erin and I went for another ----beer. We discussed what was happening, what it looked like to us, and that, finally, is what makes this my glimpse Trevor D. Richardson is the author of American at Utopia for February.

Bastards and Dystopia Boy, an upcoming release from Subtopian Press. He is the founder and managing ediIn small groups people care for each other. People are tor of the Subtopian Magazine and co-host of the Subindividuals, not a faceless mass cutting you off in traffic, topian News, a podcast on the Stallion Radio Network. driving up costs and emissions and eating up resources, or just generally being in the way. In small groups, 32

something in the way Melissa, a very nice teacher of mine invited me to read at her PDX 1000 words series a few years back. It took place at the Waypost in Portland.

A girl I had been, maybe still am, said she’d go to it and see me read.

I didn’t ask her to go. She brought it up. I had thought about asking but knew she had to work that day. “What about work?” I asked. “I’ll switch days with someone,” she said. I kissed her a few days before the reading and told

her how I felt and although she didn’t shoot me down out right, she ended up not going to the reading. I went to the reading alone. I didn’t invite anyone else, I don’t know why. I guess it’s strange to invite some people you hadn’t seen in a while and maybe it’s also because I have no social skills and just didn’t want anyone to see me bungle the simple act of talking to others. When I got there I acted like I always do, removed and morose in 33 33

place of social skills I never learned.

Strange, the forms that fear can sometimes take.

Melissa had said she thought I was a better writer than some of the nationally published writers I would be reading with. I read with Amy Harper, a girl who had published some things, including a book called cramped uptown. She was a cute asian broad who read a little too loud. Then there was Joe Pitkin (if that’s how you spell his name), another teacher from my college, who didn’t know that I knew him, that we had a mutual friend and that that mutual friend (who had been a student of his) would receive facebook messages from Joe telling her how much he liked her and that when she should come visit him. Joe’s wife and kids came to watch him read at the Waypost that night. And then there was Kevin Sampsell. Who operates Future Tense Press in Portland. At Melissa’s suggestion I gave him some writing to read. I gave him some Kind of Monster, a collection of poems and short stories. He took it reluctantly after the reading. Later he would tell me he wasn’t going to read it because he didn’t have the time.

I don’t recall anyone else reading at the event, it was awhile ago now. Time. Hate it. But this is what I wrote for the reading, this stuff below.

The first and the third one aren’t real, but they are the most true. The second one is more true than the first and as time it grows more sad. In hindsight, it is the saddest thing I’ve written. The

first isn’t as true as the third, but is more real than it and these last three paragraphs are simple to acquire more page space in the magazine and maybe lull you to sleep.

The Waypost reading readings:

I had a nice booth by the window. It was sunny outside. A cute waitress came over and took the order of the old Asian couple in the booth next to me. She could have been anywhere from seventeen to nineteen.

I couldn’t tell. In front of me was my food and a blank sheet of paper. I tried to figure out what I would write for my first prompt.

The theme of permenace would be easy to write about. What was hard would be figuring out how to use the words lantern, seared, and make the body of paper. I sat in the restaurant and thought about it. Then I took my pen and began writing. I only liked half of what I wrote. Most of it was abstract. I read the half I liked. It said:

And one night I was doing blow with a friend and I tried to kiss her and she said no, but asked why. And the answer I gave her was a lie. I had to lie. Words can only fail the feeling.

Sometimes it is something both convex and concave. It’s like mist. A thing you cannot grasp. You can only be submerged in it.

34 34

It was another abstract piece of writing. I was more disappointed by this one than the last one. It didn’t come together right, but used all the words and was within the word count.

There were some nice lines, but not many. I didn’t know what to do and just hoped it would come together at the end.

I stuffed the page in my pocket and lit a cigarette. I took a few drags and listened to the rain as it came down on the roof of my car. I’d E-mail Melissa the writing when I got home.

I read it twice and sighed. I was disappointed. I’d type it up and send it to Melissa when I got home. I read it three more times while I ate my meal.

The young waitress came with the Asian couple’s food. I watched her walk over and set the plates down.

She was cute, slim with curly hair, and brown eyes. I considered her. She’s not old enough yet or kicked around enough, I thought. But she would be one day and I ate at the restaurant often.

She yelled, “Thursday,” as the elevator door closed.

I rode down to the lobby, left the hospital, and walked into the night.

It began to rain. I got into my car and took out a piece of paper and wrote a poem that had come to me. The poem went like this:

Then between prompts two and three Melissa sent me an E-mail telling me that my first two prompts were good but could be great. She said they tell well, but they tell and that my writing is good because I show through stunning fiction. She suggested that I revisit my first two prompts and write fiction.

So I sat at the computer, read the E-mail three times. I thought about replying, didn’t, and then checked for the next prompt of the reading.

The words to use were fuse, watery, spare, soot, wallpaper, ornament, and the first world we know. How was I supposed to work that into fiction?

I wrote the stuff down on a piece of paper. I stood, walked out of the computer lab, down the stairs, and out of the tech center.

There was a guy out on the corner smoking a cigarette. I walked up to him.

a muse a muse a muse send me a muse with long brown hair and eyes that change from brown to green, that can burn away the hours like death burns away desperation from an old man and who can make the stars again shine in the soul of a weary dreamer.

I liked the poem, decided to work it into the next prompt for the reading. The words I had to use were: tattered, spin, pool, foil, sale, and she tattooed the word “tiny” across her knuckles. I wondered how Melissa came up with this stuff. I wrote out the prompt right there and then.

35 35

“Hey, can I bum a cigarette from you?” I asked.

“Sure,” he said and gave me one.

I lit up. “Can I get your opinion on something?” I asked.

“What?” he said.

“Well the other day I shoved one of those little green army men in my butt and now he’s stuck in there and won’t come out. Any suggestions?”

He grimaced. “go to the hospital?

Why are you asking me?”

“Because you look like the type of guy who puts a lot of stuff in his ass,” I said.

Then he punched me in the face and walked away. I laid on the ground, blood coming out of my nose. I took a drag from my cigarette. Maybe I would revisit the first two prompts.

I talk of is the failure of words when confronted with the force of the thing that compels these fingers to pound at the keys. You may not know what I mean. You might someday, say, when you find yourself in the middle of your life and you look up at the critical moment and catch the five ‘o clock sun hanging in the trees. Then you’ll know, maybe they’ll know too, why I can never find words enough for them to stay.

I stood there, in the dark, holding a feeling that was between chaos and serenity.

Then I watched as she drove up the street and was gone. I stepped inside my house and walked to my bedroom. I laid down and watched the ceiling fan spin, trying to think of nothing. pp

And we held it for the length of time it takes a leaf to fall from a tree.

I moved an inch away, felt her breath on my face. I said goodnight, walked across the street and up the driveway to my front porch. I stood there in the dark. I couldn’t see her beyond my truck. I heard her car door open and close. The car started.

The rain fell. The night was cold.

There would be frost. I watched her tail lights. She didn’t leave right away.

I pondered how a wreck of day could be a good thing. I wondered why she sat in her car so long.

Right then I held a feeling I had no words for.

When I talk of permanence what

-----

Despite popular misconception, Kirby Light isn’t real. He’s an illusion.

He’s been published in various online and offline magazines and you can find his ebooks “Cheap Thrills and Night Terrors” and “No Solace for the Innocent” on the Kindle store.

36 37

The Wisdom of Ordinary

by Rob Lee

The currents and eddies of the large crowd were, given my social awkwardness, a challenging place to stay afloat. Plus it was my first political fund raiser; smooth strangers, not at all my element. So I was relieved when a woman appeared before me and struck up a conversation, peppering me with questions. She was curious about what motivated volunteers, which I was.

What did I do?

“I install draperies,” I said, giving her my most unadorned answer, curious how she would respond.

“It’s so great ordinary people like you are getting involved in the process.”

Ordinary. My first response was to be offended -- she knew nothing of my many gifts! -- but upon reflection I’ve come to think she is exactly correct. I am ordinary. My early interests revolved around poetry and Taoism, leading to a Buddhist monastery and art photography, to the reality of death and dying while working and living in a Buddhist AIDS hospice, and then studying natural history, prompted by a lifelong love of being in the woods, leading to ecological restoration, repairing damage. Given my life’s arc, when my first response to being told I was “ordinary” was to think it an odd comment and feel insulted, I was disappointed with myself (although this took awhile). All the reading and monastic training and I was still, after these many years, a middle-classed Catholic kid. I would have hoped I’d have reacted in a Taoist way; to be like water, flowing to the lowest point, to humility; immediately understanding the broad truth of her comment.

The seed for the eventual acceptance of my ordinariness may have been fertilized by the humility of Eastern mysticism, but it began to grow at the AIDS hospice, while sitting with people as they lay dying, their armor stripped away, their humanity naked, beautiful. I was deeply impressed with how substan37

tial people could be, unsupported by the usual props: belongings, status, money. So when the revelation of my own ordinariness happened it wasn’t just personal; we are each, in our own way, ordinary. The woman at the fund raiser was simply indulging in a popular pretense, her ego floating on the easy and self-serving assumptions of a culture steeped in narcissism; our nation a hall of mirrors, each distorted to please the beholder. But as Peter Viereck points out, reality is “that which, when you don’t believe it, doesn’t go away.”

If the reality of “ordinary” is difficult to accept personally, it is even more of a challenge for a culture. From Genesis’ exhortation that mankind “dominate” the earth and its creatures, to European colonial excesses, the Western world has had a more than healthy self-regard. Impose this rather profound sense of superiority on a virgin continent of incredible natural wealth and -- after five centuries, a genocidal war against the natives who occupied “our” land, the enslavement of Africans, an industrial revolution that brought both great wealth and an environmental holocaust, our rise in the 20th century to global power -- we now have both a pretty serious ego trip going and a childlike need to think ourselves the innocent and the good of the world. In this twenty-first century we Americans are used to resting on our laurels, triumphant and fat, watching ourselves on electronic gadgets in an endlessly self-reverential, virtual loop. At the same time a majority of us, according to polls, have a clear understanding that we are on the wrong track. This is exactly why, with the alarming state of things in America -the yawning and growing gap between rich and poor, an economy no longer serving the majority, the rise of hateful and power-hungry religious extremism, a plethora of serious environmental problems, a divided and hostile electorate, a broken healthcare system, and an inability to affectively address any of these problems -- we need to make a fundamental change away from this crippling egotism. Unless we reinvent our

understanding of the individual’s role in society and embrace a truly sonorous feeling for community, our troubles -- cultivated over many centuries -- will only grow. An appreciation of our individual and collective ordinariness offers an opening to this new direction.

The root of “ordinary” is the late Latin word ordo, a technical term for the order of the threads in the woof, or vertical strands, of a weave. The nontechnical meaning is a row, or rank; to place things in order.

In examining each stitch on the vertical, say under a microscope, the stitches appear similar to one another. To remove even a small number of stitches rends the weave; remove many and the fabric falls apart. Similarly, the order in a society. So we have this nteresting tension between being part of the rank, the weave, and our desire to be validated as individuals. If we look more closely through our microscope we’ll notice there’s less conflict here than a quick glance would indicate: no individual stitch in the ranks is the same as any other, each is singular: the angles of the fuzz sticking out from the thread, their varying lengths, the patterns of “internal” color that make up the apparent color, and many other characteristics all vary. These distinguishing traits are even more the case with human beings; if we find someone so uninteresting as to dismiss him/her as “ordinary,” in the pejorative sense, we simply haven’t begun to see them, much less to know them. So the problem isn’t in the weave itself, it’s in the way we perceive it, or more specifically, the way we perceive each other.

Are we to be a cohesive and stable society because we understand how to fit in, how to appreciate each other, or rent and tattered because we are so impressed with ourselves?

Human beings are fundamentally frail creatures.

We make mistakes. We muddle along. Perhaps most importantly, we don’t know how to accommodate ourselves to the weave of the planet, don’t know how to fit in. (Some aboriginal peoples have done a much better job of living harmoniously with their surroundings, but our contempt for the earth -- encoded in the command to “dominate” -- included these “heathen” and their cultural wisdom; our pretension to superiority has disallowed our learning from them.) To change the way we perceive each other we

must first change the way we see ourselves. We would each do well to acknowledge and cultivate this tension of accepting and understanding how really ordinary we are -- there are so many things larger than ourselves -- at the same time appreciating the singular gifts we each offer our communities, and for which we receive validation from friends and neighbors. We are essentially social creatures; whatever success we enjoy rests upon the foundation of our ancestors, and those who surround us now. The rugged individualist is a figment of his own imagination.

A building comes into being because of all the different tradespeople who are able to work through all the various oversights, false assumptions and mistakes in the architect’s drawings. Nothing we make is solely our own. In my home state of Oregon people regularly get lost in the woods or caught in a blizzard; they don’t usually fare very well unless they are found by rescuers.

American society is lost in a forest of hubris, a blizzard of self-adoration. We need to see ourselves in both a more realistic, and a more humane, way.

Bubble-wrapping our egos in giant cars and houses is no help. Embracing our essential ordinariness and joining hands with our fellow citizens to make things better will help. I don’t propose “ordinariness” as some sort of fall back position, or punishment; I think it’s the truth of us. The exaltation of the individual, the personification of the chanted “USA! USA!” has always been a lie, and a deeply destructive one at that. We have arrived at this point in history -- a crossroad where our impact on the earth threatens the collapse of natural systems -- as the inevitable consequence of the pretense of human beings as a superspecies and Americans its apex. Our mistake is in placing ourselves outside the biology that sustains us, a consequence of this notion that we can and should “dominate.” It is not enough to simply change technologies -- as for instance the current call, in the face of global warming, to change from burning fossil fuels to building more nuclear power plants -- as the problem isn’t so much the details of what we do, it’s the way we see ourselves and how we relate to the world. Our current situation is the culmination of many centuries of western peoples -- I like to think of us as hyper-aggressive honkies -- having our way with the world in an onslaught which is never really 38

questioned because it has always been divinely sanctioned (missionaries and then the bullets). It’s time to question this imperiousness.

I Americans like to pretend that we have no class differences, but as we are increasingly categorized only by income -- money the only source of human value -the qualities and interests that don’t affect our income are irrelevant. This is what my lady friend at the fund raiser was talking about; those people “down there,” who work with their hands, because they’re not smart enough to work with their brains; to make the big money. What’s interesting is not that she so effortlessly condescended to me, but that she even more effortlessly exempted herself from the possibility to being ordinary, just as I attempted to do when confronted with her comment. We have trained ourselves to wear extraordinary coats of armor.

I was once charged with a felony under truly ridiculous circumstances, and, thinking I’d save the county the expense of a public defender, defended myself. As I noticed the lawyers went into the judge’s chambers before each hearing, when my case came up, I, in my semiannual raiment of jacket and tie, went in too.

Wonderfully friendly, like a bar where all the drinks are free, we smiled and chatted. I had thought it an adversarial system, but it felt more like a fraternity. Getting into the spirit of it, I joked with the judge. He was kind and collegial, which I appreciated, as throughout the ordeal I was treated with contempt; the fool defending himself. When it came to light that I was the defendant, the lawyers looked down like they’d suddenly found dog shit on their shoes. The judge threatened to charge me with impersonating a lawyer, which I assured him I would never knowingly do. Having spent five minutes in the lawyers club, I could understand how the woman at the fund raiser, who happened to be a lawyer, had gained a rather exalted sense of herself. I can even appreciate how collegiality could be crucial to a system rooted in conflict, but how is society served by different job descriptions holding themselves above the common weal? In the case of lawyers, can justice be possible when they elevate themselves above the citizens they serve? When stealing a thousand dollars is more sternly dealt with in our

society then stealing five million the answer is obvious. Similarly, what happens when journalists identify more closely with the powerful they are covering than the “ordinary” citizens they serve? The career arch of the reporter becomes more important than public interest and we get the cheer leading that led up to the Iraq war? What does it say about us now, in such need of good leadership, that someone so ordinary (read “ugly”) as Abraham Lincoln couldn’t possibly be elected?

In the past thirty years this top down point of view -that there is this great mass of “ordinary” people, and then there are the “important” people, has gained tremendous momentum in American society. There has always been a disparity between the “haves” and the “have nots,” but post World War II America did a good job of supporting a thriving middle-class, so the gap between the rich and the rest was relatively benign. But in the past three decades the gap in wealth has grown enormously. The growing insecurity of America’s working people must be managed by the economic elite, so it’s important that working and middle-class people not think themselves ordinary, that they believe themselves to be part of something extraordinary, even as they’re being systematically excluded. Hence a patriotism/militarism enabled by siege mentality, sports once the games of children elevated to national obsession, social media that promises narcissism and self-involvement to be empowering, divide and conquer strategies like the institutionalized racism of the war on drugs and the scapegoating of the LGBT community, while someone else is always the “ordinary” one, the one easily duped, someone, perhaps, like a liberal.

We’ve many ways to elevate, and separate, ourselves from our fellow citizens: race, nationality, money, religion, technological prowess, physical appearance, career, education, and on and on. Some of the ways we “escape ordinariness” are relatively benign, for instance the fashion slave (different from someone who sees dress as an art form), to the utterly destructive, like the super-race of the Nazi’s. I’d always wondered at the attraction many hold for the large corporation.

Many years ago I got a temp job doing phone “customer service” in a huge bank. There were twenty of us who were trained and then put in cubicles to take calls from customers who used the bank’s credit card machines. Over the weeks, as we became proficient, 39

I noticed that many of my coworkers began assuming the contempt the bank obviously had for its customers; referring difficult callers gleefully to the bank’s ten story wall of lawyers. They had assumed the power of the large corporation, escaping ordinariness in the process, and at the same time gave up any pretense of helping the customers; they served the corporation. If the customer was helped along the way, fine, but that wasn’t really the point. A separation from the ordinary customers -- who we had started out wanting to help -- and a bonding with the powerful bank, had replaced our desire to serve, with an attendant feeling of elevated status.

in the hospice, I carried with me this sense of shared purpose; instead of bringing comfort to someone who was actively dying, I was putting up new curtains, a happy thing, in the home of someone who had perhaps more life to look forward to than the hospice residents but -- one of the things you learn living in a hospice -- there are no guarantees. My rather naive thoughts weren’t shared, the grounding influence of mortality was nowhere in evidence -- no surprise there -- but I also expected it to be interesting to see great wealth up close; the wealthy are special, right? After several years working in hundreds of palaces the main thing that struck me -- besides waste baskets being hard to find and the toilets very powerful -- was that conformity was the rule. There was, with rare exceptions, a sameness place after place. Mansions now seem sad places to me, like mausoleums, platoons of silver framed photos standing on the grand piano guarding fragile identity. Like our country, these houses seem isolated and fearful, perhaps not surprising, given how thin the patina of wealth. We tend to think that great wealth is a panacea, but human existence is apparently a bit more complicated than that.

It’s perhaps understandable that people would seek solace in their jobs, their country, would want to feel good about themselves. But the many ways Americans have come to aggressively assert inherent specialness -- our incredible wonderfulness of being -- pervades and is largely unchallenged. With this ascension of American triumphalism our sense of common purpose -- all of us ordinary souls putting our shoulders to the wheel -- has dissolved into radical individualism. Public education and health, unions, civic responsibility -the support system of ordinariness -- are all in decline as John Kennedy’s “ask what you can do for your country “ is rendered quaint, a throwback to a naive time. The irony is that as we have abandoned this fabric of the ordinary for the chimera of the extraordinary -- each generation more self-absorbed and narcissistic than the last -- the quality of the culture declines. The current vitality in every art form pales in comparison with what was happening fifty years ago. That our fallback position when we’re criticized is our technological prowess underlines the point. The Renaissance didn’t happen in a vacuum. The spirit and strength of the culture comes not from individuals, but from the quality of the social fabric. We are a culture that values stars without valuing the sky.

Religion has become a particularly fertile source of discord of late because the various flavors of fundamentalism have become so aggressive; “chosen people” of the “one true faith.” To gain such an elevated status, simply through an uncritical belief in dogma, is a great deal, especially when you don’t have to die; you just set up housekeeping on a cloud. Faith in such a system of belief is reasonable, but problems arise when faith is cemented into a wall of certainty.

As no one knows what happens after death -- reconciling death being the primary reason religion exists -- claiming certainty about religious belief that is unknowable is illegitimate on its face. The root of the word spirit is the Latin spirare, to breathe. Spirit is an expression of life in all its incandescent variety. The irony of religious fundamentalism is that by aligning itself with an unchanging religious certainty it is also alienated from life, as life is impossible without change. Breathing itself is change. So fundamentalism, by insisting on certainty, is in lockstep with death, not life. An unchanging stasis is death. Perhaps this is why death follows religious fanatics around like a car bomb, Inquisition, war.

Before becoming a tradesman I lived and worked for a year and a half in a Buddhist AIDS hospice, a home for those with less than six months to live. An inspiring, profound place, I truly loved being there. There was a deep sense of shared purpose among the caregivers; being in the midst of such profound change makes editing the petty and frivolous from day-to-day life simple, the substantial and meaningful snapping into clear focus. When I began installing window coverings in the homes of the wealthy, after my stay

I single out extremist religion and the unquestioning pursuit of wealth, to the exclusion of the many other 40

means of claiming “specialness,” because I think they’re the most ingrained, and pernicious, means of separating ourselves from our collective ordinariness.

Ironically, at the root of each is a misguided pursuit of spirit, a yearning to address existential questions and gain solace. The nature of life is inherently insecure -we never know when our moment of death will arrive -- and building a wall of wealth or religious certainty to fend off insecurity only seems sensible, like the thirsty traveler heading for a mirage. Because these elevated souls have placed their faith in individuality, rather than in the community, in the planet’s biology, when death arrives so does the essential separateness they have chosen. That death is alien and difficult is a reflection of having chosen to go it alone. The source of spirit is breathing, which arises from the wholeness of the world around us.

The profound interconnectivity of our world, which ancient wisdom has long understood and science is beginning to, is what supports breath, what makes it possible. The pursuit of specialness has as its goal separation, from each other, from the earth, from the source of our breathing, which is why no amount of wealth, or religious certainly, ever satisfies, why ever more is always required, forever, or until we destroy ourselves, whichever comes first.

II When I left the AIDS hospice to live back out in the “real” world, it was impossible not to notice the importance the American denial of death assumes in how we view ourselves. It’s awfully difficult to get a full-steam-ahead sense of superiority while lying on one’s deathbed. Death is the great leveler, so we must do our best to forget about it if we are to be royalty striding among the peasants. Once we cultivate an overarching sense of denial about something so central to our lives as death, why stop there? We can deny global warming regardless the evidence, and when the proof becomes too overwhelming, deny that any real change in our lifestyle is necessary to combat it; we can deny that the crush of far too many people is having disastrous affects on the ecosystems of the world; we can deny the inherent contradiction of embracing an economic system that assumes infinite growth (capitalism) while existing within a finite

system (the earth); and we can deny that maybe denial has something to do with our inability to solve any of the crucial problems facing us.

The alternative to denying death is to embrace it as integral to life -- gaining the appropriate modicum of humility in the process -- and begin seeing each other’s pain as exactly like our own, which is compassion, a collective breath you might say. The problems we face as a people will fall before us in direct proportion to the numbers of us brave enough to understand and embrace our essential ordinariness. This may seem a ridiculously utopian vision given the juggernaut of foolishness that has brought us to this point, but as time goes on the reality our future holds for us will become more apparent, and the need for collective action obvious. We all live in a hospice; we will each die soon enough, and helping one another, once we accept our mortality, comes naturally.

I would like to suggest that, just as we are ordinary as individuals, we are similarly ordinary as a species, and that we would be wise to take on the more realistic role of the ignorant and willing student of the complex planet we live on, rather than this disastrous pretense of master beings. We assume that our intelligence as a species makes us the apex of evolution -- God’s favorite critter -- when our brain is simply an evolutionary trait that made our survival possible. We are of the earth but behave as if we have transcended it, with the calamitous consequences of this fantasy piling up all around us. The ruby-crowned kinglet knows exactly what its role is, tumbling about the shrubbery, eyes wide open. The very idea this bird might step outside its natural role strikes us as ludicrous. What is our role? Many indigenous people have lived in relative harmony with their ecologies (until hyperaggressive honkies showed up to steal their resources), so we know a modicum of harmony is achievable.

The question is: can we assume the humility and deep intelligence to change our trajectory from the only species that counts, to one among innumerable others nourished by this shared biological web?

Our extravagant regard for our intelligence rests on our asking the wrong question. We look about and ask, “ What animal is even a tiny bit as smart as we are?” A perhaps wiser question: “Are we more intelligent than the biological systems that sustain us?” The answer here is clearly no. Every one of the myriad biological 41

systems that sustain us remain beyond our understanding.

A species apart from its planet of cyclic systems, locked into linear thinking, is going to be blind to it’s errors until they become too overwhelming to ignore.

This is where we find ourselves. Biological systems are full of internal redundancy, making them very resilient and flexible, but when they break -- called a biological cascade -- there is no fixing them: the circle has been broken. We have no idea where this breaking point is, so we are now playing Russian roulette with the systems that support all life on the planet. Eventually the broken cycle, probably greatly evolved, will reestablish itself, but this can take millions of years.

One small example: krill are a small, shrimp-like animal that is the staple food in the oceans around Antarctica. In terms of sheer biomass they may be the most successful multi-celled animal on the planet, weighing upwards of 500 million tons, although their numbers have been declining precipitously in recent years. They apparently need pack ice to sustain their life-cycle, although it’s not clear why. Perhaps to hide from predators. What will global warming and a disappearance of pack ice mean for them? For the whales, penguins, seals, birds, fish, whole marine ecosystems that depend on them? No one knows. This is only one example among many, perhaps disappearing before we even know of them. Our role as “dominator” is reaching its inevitable conclusion.

Maybe it’s time to think ourselves an “ordinary” creature, and explore the possibility of fitting in to our world, the only one we have.

their bodies and rates of reproduction, is particularly stubborn, as the elevation of the status and education of women is the surest way of gaining a hold on our numbers, and making men more ordinary.

Accepting one’s ordinariness turns out to be a growth process, the cultivation of humility. Since accepting the fact of my ordinariness I’ve felt warmer and more open to people and other creatures (I’m currently communing with winter wrens). I’m more likely to see the similarities between us rather than the differences and I’m finding the generosity I feel towards others to be very satisfying. As I change my focus from “me” to “us” it turns out there are endless opportunities for finding fellow travelers.

Shared life is how we might think of ordinary, something we hold in common, the “ordo” of a tightly woven social fabric where commonality of purpose is implicit.

Within this collection of seemingly identical stitches we each have our individual gifts, some very striking, others quite humble; every one an important contribution to the greater social good. Our essential ordinariness is an acknowledgment that we need, are indispensable, to one another, given the vast complexity of our endeavor, the deep wisdom of an infinitely interconnected universe, where we will forever learn one strand of the web after another without ever fully leaning the astonishing intricacy of the whole. We are all ordinary together because humility is the only sensible reaction in the face of Creation. pp

For forty years I’ve been waiting for our species to take controlling our numbers seriously. That we never have has always struck me as ominous. There are undoubtedly many reasons for this recalcitrance -- as all the issues I’m raising have myriad complexity -- but I think the main one is our inability to breach what is apparently a profound psychological barrier: if one person is so wonderful, two must be doubly so, and so on. To consciously limit our numbers is to acknowledge that we are limited, that we must live within a system rather than assume we have transcended it.

Much of the reactionary backlash we are currently experiencing is the juggernaut being terrified of losing momentum to new thinking, new ways of being. The domination of women, and allowing them control of

----Rob Lee is a writer and photographer living outside Portland, Oregon. He is the author of an upcoming novel from Subtopian Press entitled Collaborating with Angels about his experiences living in Maitri, a Buddhist AIDS hospice.

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poetry

Don Kingfisher Campbell

VENTURA HIGHWAY Dude walks Los Feliz Blvd. into Glendale Neon signs making cool the darkness In his unsurprising dark blue windbreaker He sits by his bearded self in Del Taco After buying a $1.49 special burrito With a dollar bill, one quarter, two dimes And a smile (did I fail to mention one bandaged finger) He looks around for anyone looking Then pulls out of his nylon gym bag A bottle of beer, taking a few hearty swigs To wash down that cheap El Scorchio sauce He twists back the twist-off Disgusted, slides around out of his seat And staggers across the corporate honeycomb carpet 13 43

poetry

While a song by America plays

ALHAMBRA SUNRISE It’s like I’m on a tropical island

Palm trees silhouetted by indigo light

Then bands of shadowy orange clouds

Yellow becomes white on baby blue

But buildings crowd this paradise

Cars shoot through my picture frame

Smoke wafts past nostrils and

Words come into view on stucco walls

40 44 14

ANIMALS On a blustery day a baseball cap flies to the sidewalk off tousled salty hair

And I pick up that hat and hand it back to the man who asks for change

I tell him yes because he’s a Mariner fan and he looks puzzled so I point

To the blue trident stitched onto canvas above his lined brow --he’s still bewildered

41

I dump all my coins into his weathered palm, walk inside for snacks and glance when I leave

He’s lying on the grass by the curb and I wonder where he’ll sleep tonight as I hug my life

All I can think of as I drive away-I’ve only chosen twice to snooze under stars

And he’s a windswept mouse with an unasked history while I’m a happy hamster pampered by a career cage

42

MEMORIAL My people are the people of the T-shirts.

We walk to liquor stores for ice cream sandwiches.

We try to ignore the poverty inherited by being born lower class.

Drive on without insurance looking for cheap thrills.

Until the day we get caught in old underwear.

The newspaper finally giving space.

43

DECADENCE driving an eight lane freeway

l

cranking my mp3 player electronic billboards along the way colorful graffiti on concrete dividers double bus folding right off the offramp an unopened pack of Orbit in my pocket passing stucco and glass manuments rows of median planted palm trees sight yellow arches and mermaid medallion a quarter in the parking meter every fifteen minutes

Don Kingfisher Campbell has recently been published in The Bicycle Review, Crack The Spine, Lummox, Poetic Diversity, and Poetry Breakfast. He is currently working on an MFA in Poetry at Antioch University in Los Angeles.

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The Critic’s Critic

Django Unwatched: Spike Lee, Ignorance, & Foxx

by Tyler Fisk

Did you hear about this movie where this black guy gets a gun and starts shooting people because they own other black people and stuff? Did you hear about this guy that got all mad about it and didn’t even see the thing? Can you believe that? I mean, like, how do you hate on something you haven’t even seen before?

So, yeah, the movie is Django Unchained. It’s a story about Django getting unchained. Then he kills everyone and stuff. The guy that’s all mad about this movie is Spike Lee, who seems to get mad about anything that has anything to do with black people, even if the stuff is made by black people. Lee said the film was “disrespectful to his ancestors.”

I am hesitant to get into this, so I’ll just say that if Spike Lee would lighten up for one goddamn second and just watch the movie, rather than assume that just because it’s about a slave it therefore must be racially insulting, he’d see that it’s just a campy, caricatured romp set in a time period that happens to be pretty brutal. But, seriously, just because a story happens to be set during the era of slavery doesn’t make it racist or disrespectful. Did Spike Lee think “Roots” was disrespectful?

columbia pictures

Anyway, this ridiculous criticism based in insecurity and snap judgments (an attitude typically reserved for people suffering from a prejudicial attitude rather than claiming to guard against it) offended Django lead man Jamie Foxx. Foxx, in an interview with The Guardian said:

Foxx goes on to talk about the people throughout entertainment history, white folks, who have told black stories, covered songs by black artists, white men who have made their own forays into black culture and gained respect for it. And why should Quentin Tarantino’s contribution be any different? Foxx says:

“The question for me is: where’s Spike Lee coming from? He didn’t like Whoopi Goldberg, he doesn’t like Tyler Perry, he doesn’t like anybody, I think he’s sort of run his course. I mean, I respect Spike, he’s a fantastic director. But he gets a little shady when he’s taking shots at his colleagues without looking at the work. To me, that’s irresponsible.”

“But you can’t tell me that Eminem ain’t hot ‘cos he’s white or that Elvis Presley isn’t a bad motherfucker, or that Quentin Tarantino can’t do whatever he likes, ‘cos damn straight he can.”

I have to say I’m impressed. He didn’t lash out, he even qualifies his statement by saying he respects Spike Lee, despite his ignorant criticism of a work he knows nothing about.

I mean, right? This might seem like an unpopular perspective, maybe I’m crossing a line, but isn’t it a little racist to say a white man can’t tell a story about black slaves just because he’s white. Spike Lee has always had an issue with Tarantino because of his “excessive use of the n-word.”

But I ask you, how can you tell the story of slavery 45

and racism in America without using the word that slavers used to degrade the men they claimed as property? And, moreover, don’t you think it’s about time that people like Spike Lee stopped creating racial confrontations where none need to exist? Isn’t that just perpetuating an issue that we all desperately need to move past? Am I out of line because I think that this is another instance of reopening old wounds rather than letting them scar over?

I’m not saying that racism is over in America, but I kind of feel like every time we let something like this suck up media attention we’re missing some bigger issue, something actually real, a police brutality case or a civil rights infringement, something important that needs to be guarded against, not just a bunch of selfimportant Hollywood types trying to feel important.

Now, as for the movie, it’s awesome. You should go see it. It’s funny, it’s cool, and I feel it’s actually super-empowering to the black community. I don’t see it as disrespectful at all. I mean, the heroes of the story are mostly black people, and the only halfway decent white person in the story is Schultz, Django’s partner, who happens to be a guy who kills people for money. That’s right. The best white person in the movie is a murderer. But somehow this movie is disrespectful to BLACK PEOPLE? Wouldn’t it make more sense if some figure in the white entertainment community came out and said he thought it was disrespectful to his ancestors? I’m being facetious, of course, but you see my point. If this movie is so disrespectful then how come the whole thing is about the righteous indignation of a freed slave giving a bunch of white slaver assholes their comeuppance? I mean, sure, it’s shot in the style of a blaxploitation flick, but that’s just a stylistic choice, that’s no more disrespectful than caricaturizing western movies is disrespectful to cowboys.

Here’s the verdict from my point of view: the movie is a total blast and anyone that can’t see that just doesn’t know how to have fun. It’s action-packed, it’s comical, it’s cool, the performances are on point, and it manages to be a tribute to multiple film styles while also managing to point out the brutalities of slavery without making it a heavy-handed historical melodrama. The parallels drawn between Django’s search for his wife and the German myth of Brumhilda are compelling and the role of Samuel L. Jackson as the man who almost brings down Django’s entire plan deepens

the sadness as he is betrayed by one of his own people.

Long story short, Django Unchained is Tarantino’s strongest offering since Pulp Fiction. His past works have been self-indulgent, meandering into territories that served the directors desires and taste rather than what best serves the story. However, in Django it is somehow possible for Tarantino to get as self-indulgent as he likes while still staying within the confines of the adventure. This movie shares a few tricks with Inglorious Basterds in that it takes liberties with history and ultimately offers a much needed release for those of us that want to see the baddies of history get what they deserve. First we watch Nazis get punished by baseball bats and machine guns, we got to see the death of Hitler in the way we wish it would have gone down, and now we get to watch the people behind American slavery get their asses handed to them by a man they abused, subjugated, chained and possessed.

These movies are a sigh of relief, a breath of fresh air, because they are the classic revenge fantasy aimed at some of the few people in history that actually have it coming. I don’t see what’s disrespectful about that.

Moreover, I actually thought Django Unchained was better than Basterds. I felt like the only guy in the world that thought that was just okay when it came out. It was too disjointed, feeling like a historical drama one minute and a crazy, B-Movie torture flick.

But Django is cohesive, appropriately heavy and funny, and, above all, really fucking cool.

I think, in the end, we all need to learn how to lighten up and stop jumping to conclusions before we’ve even educated ourselves on the topic, whether it’s a movie or a politician or a stranger. Prejudice comes from ignorance, so stop making decisions based on your ignorance. That goes for the racist white people and the Spike Lee’s of the world.

Fisk, signing off!

----Tyler Fisk is an art student at PSU and an amateur juggler. He likes his dog and wishes he could carry on Gonzo Journalism but also knows it probably died with Thompson. He likes art but doesn’t like talking about it. He hasn’t done much as a writer yet, so this will be short.

46

serials Thought Chip Record: Agent Emmett Anders Q13930f :: 624311PM

The trail to find Edison James is long and confused. It begins with an abandoned house and a flooded basement in Sioux Falls, leads to a bombed out Fargo train station left to rust after a skirmish between protest renegades and the local police militia, and finally ends in a back alley in Montpelier where I can now track their movements via a series of security cameras – only half of which haven’t been smashed by vandals.

Joe says, “All right, this asshole better be worth the trouble. I just paid out my last twenty for that bum’s vague directions.”

“It’s worth it,” Trip whispers, “This guy is like a legend or something, man. When he was sixteen he had already cracked into the Playstation Network. Only this was after the first wave of hacks, after they’d stepped up security. More than that, sixteen year old Edison reprogrammed half the games people were playing, giving them flight, invulnerability, telekinesis, or the ability to generate money with the wave of a hand. He released a data bomb that flooded cyberspace with advertisements for Bazooka Joe, his alias at the time, and said that the world he created in the Playstation Network was the world as created in his image, the way he wanted it to be.”

“That’s awesome and everything,” Joe says, “But what’s the last true hacker doing living in an alley, and where the hell is he?”

“Maybe times have hit him hard like everyone else,” Rash says, “I mean, you saw his flooded basement, there were catfish in there – catfish, Joe. It smelled horrible.”

“Here we go,” Trip says, pointing to a soggy refrigerator box, “A little cliché, but if he calls it home, who are we to judge?”

“Looks like he’s out,” Rash says.

“Out where? At work? Shopping? Filling the gas tank? What do box people do all day?”

Movement on Screen 4 catches my attention. The camera refocuses from the street to directly on Joe and his cronies. It zooms in, picks up their conversation even. A PA clicks on with the sound of static, that familiar pop, and a scrambled voice says, “The box people are everywhere.”

“Whoa,” Joe yells, “Oh, shit.”

Rash puts his hands up and speaks to the air, “That you, Eddie?”

“Dick?”

“It’s Rash, you know I hate it when you call me Dick.”

Joe laughs and punches Rash in the arm, “Dude, your name is Dick Rash and you never told me? That’s goddamn priceless.”

“My parents named me Richard,” he whispers over his shoulder, “Dad always called me Dick – said I was a constant reminder of the burning sensation he got the night after I was conceived. Meaning…”

“Your mother’s a whore,” the scrambled PA voice replies.

Joe falls on the ground laughing but stops short when the speaker says, “If your ape can pull himself up by his devolved DNA and behave I’ll let you assholes in.”

The refrigerator box is like a duck blind, a cover built around an elevator hatch in the pavement. There’s the sound of compressed air being released and the hatch opens up to a

serials basement level formerly used for laundry. They crawl into the box one at a time and the elevator carries them down.

Edison James is a large man with reddish hair, a braided beard, and a spiked mullet, faintly reminiscent of an extra from Braveheart. He’s sitting in a bizarre uniform of black combat boots, a plaid kilt, a Krull tee shirt, and a brown duster trench coat at a makeshift terminal with three flat screen monitors, two PC towers, and an elaborate net of extension cords. Not two feet away is a polished sword with an ivory dragon for a handle, possibly a katana, and a pack of Marlboro Reds.

Trip says, “That’s new, Eddie. What’s with Excalibur over there?”

“That ain’t Excalibur,” Joe says, gesturing to a 1973 Les Paul, jet black finish, with a lightning bolt strap, “That’s Excalibur.”

Edison says, “You like it? The strap belonged to Rivers Cuomo. It brings me back to a simpler time when everybody liked Weezer. You guys are probably too young to remember that.”

I already kind of like this guy. Joe pats the sword and says, “Trip is more of a hard scifi, Asimov and Trek kinda geek. He’s not up on the fantasy stuff, especially when it dates back two whole Bush administrations. This ain’t Excalibur, Trip, this was Connor MacLeod’s blade in Highlander. It ain’t a replica, is it?”

Edison shakes his head, “No, not a replica, I bought it with Vegas Police Department funds after my 2014 hack. It’s the first one, the one they used for the movie with Lambert.”

“Nice.”

“You really know it?” Edison asks.

“Yeah, I know it. ‘Feel the stag…’ that kills me every time. Sean Connery, a Scotsman with a speech impediment, playing an Egyptian with a Spanish name. Priceless…” “‘You’re overextending your thrust,’” Edison quotes, “All right, so answer me this. Brenda Wyatt’s first name is a Norse girl name meaning what?”

“That the best you got?” Joe says, “Given the topic of discussion a half wit could’ve guessed the damn thing. Her name means ‘sword.’ Now answer me something. If the sequel is set in a distant future where Connor has lived as a mortal well into his twilight years than why is the third movie set in the nineties?”

Edison, clearly flummoxed, laughs and shrugs, “All right, so you’re one of us then? Who would’ve guessed that when the world ended it would be the geeks that inherit the earth?”

“The geeks would’ve,” Joe remarks, “Listen, I passed your Riddle of the Sphinx, so let’s cut to it. We come to recruit you, but it means leaving your little nest here and following me.”

“This is Joe Vagrant,” Rash cuts in, “And he wants to launch the Hack War as something bigger than a media hoax to control hearts and minds.”

Trip says, “Our president started a fake war, we just feel it’s our patriotic duty to legitimize his claims. Whaddaya say?”

“Where we headed?” Edison asks, “If you’d a told me you were the Vagrant at the top of this conversation we could have skipped over the geek out quiz.”

“Montana, I got us a spot. And bring your equipment, I’ll bet you got it set up just the way you like, yeah?”

“Yeah, but what about you? You got the stuff waiting for you?”

“I got everything I need,” Joe says, “Just wait and see.”

serials I cut the feed.

On Screen 5 Cedric, Howling Murphy, wraps up a successful set. He howls into the microphone and removes his headset triumphantly. His eyes say, “We got ‘em on the ropes.”

Naomi, engineering the broadcast, shuts down the equipment and rubs her eyes. She seems frayed, overloaded from working the radio equipment, caring for Audrey – working to stay alive. After a beat she says, “Where’s Audrey?”

They look around dramatically, but the bus is empty. Her belongings are gone, even her bedroll is wrapped up. They never noticed her leave. I abandon the bus and do a long search for Audrey’s whereabouts. She is careful. Joe’s voice likely ringing in her ears, she stays off the roads, away from businesses, dodges cameras and even streetlamps. She’s on foot, in the wilderness, using her upbringing, her connection to the land, as a guide. Joe told her things. They’re out there. They’re watching you. You can’t be too careful. Aliens or not, she knows it’s good advice. His paranoia, wrapped up in love, and matted in comfort carries her through the long cold of the wild and I know where she’ll go – back to Portland. She’ll risk everything to stand on familiar ground, somewhere he’ll know to look for her. Where he’ll find her. Lee is gone, her family is dead. The only thing left is Joe and that’s the only place she wants to be.

Back on Joe’s screen they approach the Blackfoot Nation border. A barbed wire fence lines the entire perimeter, but Joe is confident. He just keeps saying, “He’ll take care of us. He has a plan. He’ll come through for us.”

But, after an entire night of driving, his confidence seems shaken. He hasn’t heard from Mr. Smiles and feels they might be on their own. It isn’t the first time he’s gone on radio silence and Joe has never understood why. But now, why now? Of all times, at their most critical hour, when the plan is finally coming together, why would he go silent?

He expected a border crossing, but there’s nothing. No striped arm to be raised if you pass inspection, no toll booth attendant or guard. It’s just a fence. Somewhere east of their destination, riding a quiet road along the border, they spot a potential access point for freight delivery, implying a degree of importing into the Blackfoot Nation, but it seems sealed tight. Moreover, the fence is double layered in most places, as if getting through one would require you to stop, wait at a checkpoint, and then move through the next.

The boys in the car fall silent for a full forty-five minutes before Joe almost unintelligibly shrieks about this being the spot where it happened. I can recognize the stretch of road where he wrecked into the squad car and the tall hill where he fled from Anthony Whitetree and his gang.

Some of the terrain has changed in the wake of construction, a double-pleat fence, barbed wire, power line assembly that may or may not be for electrifying the perimeter, and a full fifteen plus years of wear and tear. But there’s no question. This is the spot.

In an apparent act of desperation perhaps motivated by the frightening absence of his incorporeal father, or drugs, or both, Joe grabs the wheel from the back seat and yanks it toward the hill. Rash slams on the brakes and they screech sideways into a grassy ditch, just feet away from the fence.

They sit in stunned silence with nothing but the sounds of their own breathing. Joe lights a match and puffs a cigarette into life, cackling nervously. Edison breaks the silence saying, “If any of my equipment is damaged there’ll be hell to pay. Hell. To. Pay. Forthwith.”

Rash says, “Yeah, man, what the hell was that? Look at our car, man.”

Joe says, “This is the spot. We need to get to the Lodge.”

serials “The Lodge?” Edison asks.

“It’s a long story. What’s the time?”

“11:59,” Rash grunts.

“Should be any time now.”

Minutes tick by and their faces grow more strained. At 12:07 Rash says, “Okay, I give, your guy ain’t coming, this is a total goose chase.”

Edison says, “I came all the way from… hello, what’s that?”

The OnStar external camera shows three flashes of light, a pause, and three more – flashlight. They get out of the car and Joe says, “The medicine has returned to the Lodge.”

An elderly Blackfoot man steps out of the bushes. He’s dressed in some sort of border patrol uniform with a brown ball cap pulled down over stringy gray hair. He rolls back a portion of the fence, precut, and they awkwardly drive the Prius up the slippery hill.

When they get to the spot Joe knows so well there is nothing more than a small concrete platform covered in solar cells raised about a foot off of the ground. Beneath the platform, set in by about another foot is a smaller supporting structure with small slats that appear to be windows, implying an underground structure.

After further analysis I detect signs of recently installed electrical, water and sewage utilities marked with little pink flags and orange construction paint in the dirt slowly washing away from rain. Mr. Smiles thought of everything. This is headquarters, ground zero for the Hacker Revolution. The border man shows them a well-hidden doorway that opens up on a concrete staircase. He says, “I apologize your father could not make it, Mr. Blake, but he has many allies.

If you need me, go to the sporting goods shop in town and leave word with Bucky. I must return to my duties.”

There are no cameras inside. The last thing I hear before they leave my surveillance bubble is Rash saying, “Gotta admit, I didn’t think it’d be here.”

Joe’s Thought Chip runs a single static-laden message: Where are you?

Nothing in the record for two solid months. Nothing on Audrey either. Just nothing.

Radio silence. I cut the feed.

Thought Chip Record: Agent Emmett Anders mm/dd/yyyy :: 00:00 PM

It’s five minutes to my meeting with Wilkes.

All I have left is the Thought Chip Record. I scan through an almost endless river of static – white noise. Emptiness. It’s as if he found some way to block me. Or he’s learned to only broadcast what he wants to broadcast. I begin detecting occasional blips of sound in the high speed uplink. They appear approximately every 168 hours for exactly fourteen seconds. When I hone in on one it is nothing more than Joe’s message: Where are you? After that, dead air, but no silence. He waits. Once a week he opens his mind and waits to hear back.

Two months in, June 2030, something changes. Joe starts making daily reports like a soldier in the field. No way to be sure if they’re being received, but the record is as follows:

serials Today is Monday. I hate Mondays. The magnetic poetry on the refrigerator says: From the Management steal spit sweat swear explode but never worship Rash ain’t at his usual spot by the window. He’s sitting at the card table, playing poker and talking with the other guys. He’s literally spent this entire time ranting about how we ought to be searching for Them. It’s annoying. They’re all resigned to a future of just hiding out, everyone but Rash. I suppose that’s what makes me different. I just don’t care anymore. If they want me they’ll get me. After twenty years of running and what I saw in Dallas I know the truth now. I can’t stop them from coming. Sooner or later they’re gonna lock on with their sensors and that’ll be it.

In a lot of ways this place has started looking like one of those VFW hangouts. The old guys sit around playing cards talking about battle scars and the scariest things they ever saw, television always on.

Either that or it looks like a support group. Everyone talking in a circle.

Hello, my name is Timothy and I am an alcoholic.

Hello, my name is Emily and I was molested when I was nine years old.

I guess in our case things are a little different.

We spend most of our time in The Lodge, doing our best to stay inside – safer that way. Every day’s exactly the same as the one before. We keep the aluminum foil fresh and tight over the windows, that way we won’t let out excess heat. Covering the windows is the first step in building an adequate safe house against Them. They can detect heat. It shows up on their instruments. You taught me that. Keep the room at exactly 98.6 degrees, same as a human body.

This is how we live, how we hide out, all of us laying low and playing cards ‘til it’s time to wake up and do it again. We work to find clues on our next target or where to find our friends.

Right now Rash is at the card table dealing five card stud. He says, “You want to know where Led Zeppelin got their name? UFOs, man, goddam flying saucers.”

Trip snatches his cards from the table and says, “No they didn’t, it was all Keith Moon. You know?

Drummer for The Who. He heard Jimmy Page was putting a band together and said it’d go down like a lead balloon. That’s when John, uh, John something,” he snaps his fingers a few times, universal call sign for “help me out here, it’s ain’t coming to me,” and says, “Dammit, what was his last name?”

Hello, I’m Trip. When I was taken they removed parts of my brain for cloning. That’s why I sometimes forget things.

“58 decibels,” Edison’s voice drones across the warehouse. He’s at a table covered in sound equipment trying to measure the amount of noise we put out. Pressing his headphones tight to his ears, he stares into the black monitor and grumbles how we’re gonna get detected.

My name is Edison and aliens abducted me when I was a kid. To me all aliens seem to be some sort of pederasts, snatching babies from their beds and probing them like Catholic priests.

“It began with an ‘E,’ I believe,” Trip mutters.

“John Elton?” Rash asks.

“That’s Elton John, you idiot,” Trip says throwing his cards down, “Give me four.”

Rash says, “You can’t have four, and Elton John was not a member of Led Zeppelin.”

“63 decibels,” Edison says from across the room, “and it was John Entwistle who said it would go down more like a ‘lead zeppelin.’”

“John who?” Rash asks, sounding irate.

“63.5 decibels. John Entwistle, keyboardist for The Who, don’t you know anything? He said it would be more like a lead zeppelin, later they changed the spelling so no one would confuse the pronuncia-

serials tion.”

Rash laughs and says, “No way, man. It wasn’t the lead balloon story. That’s just what they want you to believe. I’m telling you Led Zeppelin had an encounter.”

“Zeppelin might be a rock legend, but they don’t have the truth. The truth is out there,” says Trip.

Ever since Dallas, Trip constantly quotes the philosophies of Mulder from The X-Files. It’s become like his mantra or something. He loves to say, “The truth is out there.” Or “Trust No One.” Or “Government Denies Knowledge.”

Poor Trip, the big fat ass, he seems to keep getting bigger. I am talking beached whale big. He believes that after his abduction when he was a kid the aliens injected him with a magnetic gel to make him easier to capture with their tractor beams. Can you believe that? It’s his way of passing blame for his obesity. He’d rather cast the first stone at a higher intelligence than just admit he eats more than he breathes.

Hello, my name is Trip. Aliens made me fat.

“You’re wrong, Trip. Zeppelin saw something in the sky and didn’t have the gray matter to know it was a flying saucer. They called it a zeppelin.”

“I fold,” says old fatty.

“That’s it, I’m done too,” Rash grunts, “The second Eddie dropped out I lost interest. It just ain’t the same without you, man. You lose so hard it’s practically a talent.”

“67 decibels,” Edison growls.

Now it’s time for the television. They huddle around Trip’s nineteen inch television VCR combo and hit play on season six of The X-Files. The theme song echoes around the warehouse. “Trust No One,” flashes on the screen and Trip’s mouth silently mutters its affirmatives.

“You know, guys,” Rash begins, “all these episodes are based on actual cases.”

“We know,” Edison says, rolling his eyes, “shut up about it, the show’s starting.”

The Thought Chip scrambles to static and I hit fast-forward. I don’t get another hit for almost twenty four hours’ worth of audio: Tuesday. Tuesdays are bad because they’re just like Mondays.

The refrigerator magnets say: languid togetherness drives a fire into our brains A few inches away from the TV screen, Trip watches old Martian films back to back.

“You know,” he begins, “these things are more than just entertainment. They’re messages left behind by our predecessors to show us what the government tried to cover up.”

Rash says, “Hey, did I ever tell you how Pink Floyd was a messenger from Them?”

I have a headache. The aliens are turning up the sonic pressure. They’re trying to keep me from thinking, want me to slip up and get angry, or leave and get taken. Every time one of these guys talks it gets harder and harder not to scream at them. It ain’t my fault. It’s just the aliens triggering their devices in my brain. I can feel the sound buzzing in my ears.

99 decibels, 100, 101, pressure’s getting worse.

I have to resist because these guys are my friends.

The door bursts open and Edison staggers into the room breathing heavy. Locking the door securely behind him, he glares around the room nervously. Everyone’s all “What happened? What happened?”

But he won’t answer. He runs around the room wildly, barricading the door, pacing, chewing the fingernail of his forefinger and muttering about not getting detected. I try to keep everyone calm.

“There was a black Suburban following me the whole way here, but I lost ‘em,” he says between choking sighs.

serials Edison starts duct taping all of the aluminum foil down around the windows while Rash stands in his usual spot. The guys follow behind him in a huddle trying to get him to talk, handing him cups of water and patting him on the back like football players.

Rash folds back a bit of the aluminum foil and stares out into the street. He tells us we’re alone for now. Running over to the window, Edison pushes Rash out of the way as he tapes down our heat shield.

We have to stay safe. Securing the windows is the first step in building an adequate safe house.

“It tailed me all the way from Main Street,” Edison says, “I was just trying to get some supplies.

When I saw the vehicle parked across the street just waiting for me I had to throw the bags into the back seat and ground floor it across town.”

Running for his sound station he says, “I just went for food, just a little something to live on, they won’t even let us do that anymore. Will they ever let up?”

“Government plates?” Trip asks.

“I think so.”

He tells us to quiet down. We almost cleared 100 decibels. Sitting with both hands pressed down on his headphones, Edison just looks small. His elbows are up on the table and I can see his eyes reflected in the monitor. He’s afraid. Not just a nervous fear, it’s that sort of weeping red-eyed sort of fear you feel after waking up from a nightmare.

Hello, my name is captivity. I make the walls feel like they’re closing in.

I can feel the pressure in my ears getting worse. 140 decibels, 143, 149, it only takes a steady 85 to make you go totally deaf. I keep telling myself that if they want us they’re gonna get us, there’s nothing I can do about that. 151, 152, 153, the pressure is getting higher all the time.

“They’re coming for us,” Trip says, “it’s never been this bad before.”

That’s when we heard the brakes outside. A large vehicle just stopped right outside our door. I tell everyone to be absolutely still and silent. They’ll leave if they can’t detect us. They’re advanced, but they can’t see through our window coverings. I’ve hidden from them before. You know that, don’t you? The first thing you have to do to set up a functional safe house is shield the windows. Their instruments detect heat and sound and movement. We always wanted the place to feel like an army outpost, but it always ended up feeling more like a weekend getaway for hypochondriacs.

A voice calls out, but it’s tough to tell what it’s saying through the walls.

Trip says, “They want us to believe they’re normal people, but we all know that normal people don’t exist anymore. Everyone out there is so taken by their lies they’re no longer human.”

“Trip, will you shut up?” I whisper-scream, hoping no one hears.

“Humanity is extinct. The aliens are slowly replacing real people with android robots. Trust no one, guys, trust no one. They just want us to believe they’re actual people.”

“You gotta shut up, Trip,” I sort of growl at him and he clams up fast.

Rash says, “You know what we need, guys? We gotta get some guns.”

The record cuts out again. I can’t tell who the kid is broadcasting to, but it’s like the record only goes out when he wants it to, like he’s sending a thought journal to someone. Could it be me? Does he know? I find the record for the next day: Fridge Poetry says, “People should seethe crazy farewells and woo their haste with envy.”

Since the rebellion began, and in the absence of any established economy, the Blackfoot Nation has become a sort of haven for smuggling and illegal trade. For the sake of income, survival, they’ve begun trading all sorts of stuff to the American Resistance, fueling the uprising out of need rather than passion.

And now I’m out in it. The guys sent me because I’m the only one who ain’t afraid of going out on

serials the streets. If they’re gonna get me, they’ll get me. The others go out if they have to, but I just don’t care.

It’s gotten so old by now, and now…with you not talking, it’s even worse. There’s just no sense in fearing the inevitable. There really is no such thing as safety so why worry? It’s like, who was it that said we shouldn’t fear death? Life is where death is not and death exists where life does not. They never meet so don’t fear it. Should be part of my bible, but I can’t remember who’s quote it was.

Pushing open the door there’s the dull ring of a cowbell hanging from a chain. The room has the faint smell of cleaning oil and alcohol. Bucky, a dark skinned man behind a glass case, says, “Can I help you?”

Yes, I’m looking for a few guns.

Hello, my name is the obvious truth, and some moron just stated me.

“Guns, huh? Well, I guess that’s apparent,” Bucky says, “I mean, it is a gun store, right? What did you have in mind?”

I say I need a few handguns for some friends and me. We’re planning to go to the shooting range.

Want to get in a little target practice.

“You sure you aren’t planning to start a revolution?” Bucky asks.

I freeze for a second, dumb of me, I know. Then I sort of stammer, I’m not, we aren’t from… I mean, what do you mean?

“It’s okay, sonny, I was only fooling about. All righty, then, let’s get started.”

He starts talking about paperwork. I can barely understand him from the buzzing in my ears.

It’s getting worse and worse all the time, 163 decibels, 164, 165, I can barely hear anything. His mouth moves, but no words come out. There’s just that long low pulse like static electricity when your ear brushes past the television screen. The gun dealer speaks in crackling pulses and hums.

A cowbell rings. The door swings closed behind me and I realize we’re done. Dazed. I just feel my feet carrying me back to the safe house like I’m meat on a conveyor belt. When I get back all the guys are playing cards in the dark. Silent.

Trip says, “‘Trust no one,’ we’re safer in the darkness. Got the goods, I see.”

The feed cuts to static again and I find nothing else until nearly two days later in the recorded data. It’s Joe’s voice again. The voice in his head. His thoughts. But darker somehow, on edge. Like the voiceover from some jungle survival flick. Apocalypse Now or something: It’s Friday night.

Not sure who does this, but the refrigerator poetry says: them boys ran his ship into a smile will you ever learn to just shake the joke off It’s Friday night and something tells me they’re coming tonight, got this feeling in my gut. Maybe it’s my heart warning of impending danger or the implant picking up some carrier signal my brain can’t decode into words, alien devices glowing with Their power the closer They get. They are coming. Their sounds are outside the Lodge door.

We watch the big utility door at the front of the warehouse, waiting for something to come through.

A light appears. It came from behind us, through a narrow slit in the foil of the back window. It’s white light from one of their crafts. Edison swears under his breath and glares at Trip angrily. His look says it was Trip’s turn to check the heat shield. It’s time. I always knew nothing would stop them when they finally came...

“Oh my God, oh my God,” Rash mutters under his breath, “it’s happening, guys it’s really happening.”

“Shut up, Rash,” Trip says, “you knew this was coming.”

serials The door begins to splinter and the light grows brighter around the frame. The aluminum foil starts to tear away from the edges of the door and Edison says, “That’s it guys, we’re cooked. Our heat is exposed. We’re sitting ducks in here.”

I think of you, Dad. I ask them if they want to sit here and get taken again or if they want to do something. I say no amount of hiding was ever going to stop them, but that doesn’t mean we can’t fight back. Everyone says I’m right and we stand up together. In a line like a firing squad in front of the breaking door we stand ready, Dad. You’d be so proud. Gun aimed and knees shaking I remember what I told Bucky. We’re going to the shooting range, I said, we want a little target practice.

When the door finally shatters open there’s a dark figure standing silhouetted in front of a white orb of light. There’s some sort of weapon in its right hand and it moves toward us slowly. It’s now or never, I say. Take him out.

All five of us fire at once. With the sound of gunfire echoing around the rafters our safe house becomes a shooting range. It became the fortress I always wanted it to be. It finally looked more like an army outpost than a support group for traumatized children.

Hello, my name is annihilation and I will be your liberator today.

Walking toward the body we all feel the fear. He doesn’t look like I expected. He doesn’t have the bug eyes or the gray skin. He doesn’t have the large cranium to house his very advanced brain. Except for the lack of hair it really just looks like a normal man, maybe Hispanic or Native American, dressed all in denim with a bandana around his neck. There’s a crow bar lying on the ground at his right.

“We got him,” Rash says, “We actually did it.”

Trip says, “We actually got one.”

Stepping up from behind me Edison says, “I always thought their blood would be green, it actually doesn’t look much different from ours.”

Rash asks nervously, “Shouldn’t he morph back into alien form by now?”

Then it hits you. This was the shot in the dark, the knife in the back, that hideous big surprise. It’s a real man. Standing there waiting for his face to change into something else… it can’t be… Aw, Dad, this ain’t an alien at all. This wasn’t a government agent and it wasn’t self-defense. This man was murdered.

We killed him, and we all know it.

“Maybe he’s one of their spies, a government agent in their employ,” Rash says.

Trip asks, “Could he be an android robot? I mean, look at him, the bald head, the sickly pallor, no eyebrows. He barely looks human.”

I tell them all to shut their goddamn mouths. This is a real man and we killed him.

That’s when everybody starts screaming. Someone gets totally and completely despairing, says our lives are over. Someone else tells him to shut up about it. I can see Edison counting digits on the monitor across the room. 166, 167, we’re too loud, we just hit 170 decibels.

“Unnnnhh… Joe?” the body on the floor stirs and groans my name. Holy shit! Aw, Dad, what did I do?

It’s okay, Joe. Not your fault.

Dad? That voice inside my head. The one I’ve been missing. Where has he been? Mr. Smiles.

It’s me, Joe. Don’t worry about the bullet, I was dead already. The cancer came back. The radiation… made difficult to broadcast. Your poor mother, she’s been a basket case. She’s barely kept it together. I mean, you gotta figure, for her she’s losing another husband, but imagine how much worse it’d be if she found out she’d lost the same man twice.

serials “The same man twice?”

“What the hell’s he saying?” Rash yells.

“Shut up, will you?” I shout, “I need to hear this.”

The man on the ground says, “I don’t have much time, Joe. Listen. Unnnnhhh…it’s been me all along. It’s always been me. I needed you close, the tumor, the treatment… made it hard to broadcast when I was going through it, you know? Needed you close. Remission wasn’t so bad, I could reach you anywhere with a cell phone tower, that’s what they’re really for, you know? The Thought Chip network. But when it came back, I just couldn’t…I just couldn’t…”

Tears on my face. Haven’t felt that in years. Not in years, Dad. Don’t. Save your tears. Soon it will all be clear.

“Can you ever forgive me, boy? I did terrible things to you. Terrible things. But it was always for your benefit. To keep you close. To push you where you had to go.”

“Dr. John?”

You’re Dr. John. My father, Mr. Smiles, you were him…always there?

I’m sorry.

Why didn’t you tell me?

Couldn’t tell you. Had to keep you safe. Had to keep. Identity. Had to. Secret. A father’s foolish pride. Rather let you hate imaginary. Imaginary aliens. Than hate me for what I did. You were going to hate. Hate. Something. Had to.

“Dad! Stay with me.”

“No. Time.”

His hand on the back of my neck, pulling my head to his. Slick. Sticky. Blood on my skin.

His blood. My father’s blood. Drawn by me. I’m so sorry, Dad. Our foreheads press together and the sound of the morons around me screaming their questions seems to fade out. My vision goes white. I see his eyes and then… it’s the white room all over again. It’s him standing over me. I am a child. He’s cut an incision into the side of my head. He’s moving instruments around in my brain, putting in the implants.

I look up at him and see his face, as it was then, behind a glassy mask, dressed all in white. He starts talking to me. He says he was my abductor. He was my alien. He’s the one that cut me open. Easy mistake to make. That mask, the big white helmet, the glass visor – looks almost alien.

Dr. John, Mr. Smiles, my dad, he says, “Soon everything will be made clear. Just know that you have been a part of a plan set in motion from the time of your birth. You were made to complete the work I started, the work I could no longer keep up. The job I can’t finish.”

Strapped down to the table, staring up at my father, a boy all over again, I say, “Because you were dying.”

“The tumor moved the implant just enough, see? It was an accident. But the result was surprising to say the least. I started seeing visions.”

“Your father again?”

“Indeed, my son. He returned like a wraith. But those visions led me to the truth. I found the Network. Just as I showed it to you. The tumor moved the implant from the memory center of my brain closer to the frontal lobe. I was able to broadcast intent, not just ideas. That’s when I started planning. I knew I probably wouldn’t live long, but I had to do something…”

“Had to do what?”

“There we are…”

serials Dad, I feel your hand in my head. Something turns. I feel that. Then it all happens at once. I know it all. You call this a Memory Dump. The Thought Chip can upload its entire contents in one data burst when necessary. You just have to bypass certain safety protocols. You’re giving me everything.

This is what you’ve been preparing me for…

You’re talking to a man. It’s a computer store or something, there’s monitors all around. You’re talking to this man, Anders, like you’re trying to get him to help you. You were having such a hard time, but didn’t see a way out. You say something. What do you say? People used to make money, but somewhere along the way, it started making us. He rats you out. My God. He reports you, you were going to get called in, investigated, maybe even arrested. But you knew. Your Thought Chip was showing you things. You knew their plans and that’s when you… what did you do, Dad? That’s why he chose me. That’s why he waited for me to come online, to mask his son’s implantation. He knew all of this would happen to me someday, and that they’d have to investigate me when all was said and done. He wanted revenge.

There you are as Dr. John, your long hair falling out from the treatments. You wore a wig for most of my childhood, no wonder it always looked so oiled and pressed and faked. You’re standing in front of the mirror, fixing it to your scalp with care. Your eyes look so dead. You apply the fake moustache carefully. The treatments even killed your facial hair and eyebrows. You had to piece yourself together like an embalmed corpse. And you did it every single day. Hid your condition just to stay close to me so you could broadcast… to teach me, to be my Mr. Smiles.

There you are that day in the hospital. I’m five and you’ve come to apologize. I showed you my drawings of my imaginary friend, Mr. Smiles, my subconscious representation of you. This is so weird, Dad. I can see your mind. A life digitized and shared like an MP3 file. Like you’re backing up a hard drive.

Here you are in the strange factory with computers as far as the eye can see. Is this your work?

I’ve never seen your work before. You’re uploading a program. A virus? The whole place goes haywire.

I’m seeing through your eyes now. Moving through the halls of the compound. The lights flicker like a sinking ship. You move with purpose. Straight to a cold storage facility. A white room, but not the same one. One just like it. A clean room where they keep something.

The implants. Thought Chip Storage. It says Thought Chip Storage on a placard on the wall. You steal one and tuck it into your clothes. You say my name. You say, “This is you, Joe. This is for you, my Joe.” You knew even then?

That’s when you disappear. You leave the compound. You run to your car. In all the chaos no one even notices. You’re driving west. The road signs say you’re leaving Virginia now.

You’re heading home, to your wife, to your family. But you know you can’t be you. You need a new name, a new life. And you know you’re sick. You were going to give me the implant so I could take over for you one day, inherit your silent resistance… but first you had to find me.

It’s speeding up now. The Memory Dump is so fast.

You’re in the wilderness, living off of the land the way your father taught you. You spend time meditating. But not meditating. What is this? You’re learning to use your gift. You’re accessing the Network. I can see your father. He looks so much like me. That must be so strange, seeing your son grow into the image of your dead father. I’m following him and he leads me through the ghost lands of your ancestry to a village of iron workers dressed in metal clothes like knights and blacksmiths. You… I… with your hands I take their tools and etch my name in hot

serials steel. I pick it up with tongs and dunk it into ice cold water. The steam billows. When I remove it I see my new identity, your new identity: Dr. John Boles, PhD After that it was easy. Fake a file here. A recommendation there. The paper trail is clean because no one could trace it back to a computer or a hacker or anything except your brain. And who’s gonna think to look there, right?

That’s right, Joe. Once I got the job I had benefits, I could get treatment for my illness the legal way and no one would be the wiser. But most importantly, I had access to you and I found your mother…

You still loved her?

Still. Never stopped. Even after all those years, even after she had changed so much.

None of it mattered. She was the mother of my only son, the love of my life.

Dad, I’m sorry. I took her away from you. I made her leave you for so long and I must have broken her heart when I left. It must have been hard.

It was, but it was worth it to see you out there becoming the man I knew you could be…

Dad? Where are we right now? I mean, you’re dying, right?

Dying. Might be dead already. Did you know there was as much as six to twelve minutes of brain life after death? The body shuts down, but the brain keeps going. Did you know there was a chemical in the brain that acts like a channel between visual input and natural dream states and that this chemical gets released in concentrated forms upon death?

Yeah, Dad, DMT. I did some in Chico last month, but I don’t care about that right now.

I’m just saying, maybe if you put the two together, a dream drug cocktail in the brain, post-death brain activity, and the way a dream can fit a lifetime into a single minute…maybe that’s where we get the idea of heaven, the long tunnel to the afterlife that near death victims always describe, the whole thing. Maybe that’s what you’re talking to this very moment…

Does it really matter? I can see your whole life, like you’re becoming a part of me.

“You will carry me inside you all the days of your life…”

Superman? Seriously. You’re doing this now. You’re not Jor El and I’m not a baby in a space capsule. Now focus.

It’s getting harder and harder, Joe. What is this? I can see miles and miles of data lined up like gridlocked traffic.

That’s RITA. The Watchers’ high tech surveillance system. Right now I’m looking in for a scheduled uplink. I need a new agent to come online to mask your activation.

You have him. Agent Anders. August 19, 2019. The day of my abduction. I see you switching my meds in the hospital. Putting me under. You’re lifting me out of bed. Now I’m in a wheelchair. You roll me out to your truck and drive me to an aluminum trailer. Inside it’s all white, there’s those weird strips of plastic hanging over the door like you sometimes see in industrial freezers. We move through some kind of fog and there’s a metal table. Some people are here to help you. Who are they?

Dead now. All of them. Supporters of the cause. Martyred for the resistance.

The camps?

Yes, Joe. They never came back.

Where are we now?

This is the night you left us. You’re at the police station getting framed for the fire.

serials The church fire? Was that you?

No, son, it really wasn’t. I was never sure, but I think it was the reverend.

You came to rescue me then.

I had to play the role of Dr. Boles. Boles would try to get Joe back to the hospital. But the real reason I was there…

Proximity. You were still having troubles with your Thought Chip so you had to be near me. So you made up a story and worked yourself into the room.

Just so I could bring Mr. Smiles in to help you find that surveillance footage…you and your friends… the Lodge Ceremony.

The Memory Dump speeds up again. You’re parked under a cell tower to broadcast driving lessons to me remotely. You’re hacking the Watcher Network to steer an investigation away from me and Lee. You’re deleting files, hiding them deep in RITA’s source code. Protecting me.

Nothing’s ever gone for good, but I did my best to cover your tracks.

You’re getting an MRI now. Taking a bunch of pills. Fallen in the bathroom. Having a seizure. Throwing up breakfast. You’re driving cross country, following my route, cleaning up after me as I go. Helping me stay hidden. Dad, you were in Portland. You were there and you didn’t say hello?

I was there as Dr. Boles and it wasn’t a pleasure trip. Look.

It’s me and Lee after our big fight. We’re sitting in the car talking it out. You’re there, right there. Watching and… that man. Black fatigues. He’s one of Them. He would have caught us if you hadn’t… a tire iron? That’s the best you could come up with? It doesn’t say much for preparation, does it?

Had to improvise. I’d only barely gotten the word off the wire that they were onto you. I drove all night. Pissed in a Gatorade bottle to get to you.

Now you’re at some kind of bureaucratic looking office filling out paperwork. What is this? Citizenship? You’re renewing your citizenship in the Blackfoot Nation, crossing the border.

You brought Mom with you. You’ve been at it for years, but you finally got the land… your entire life savings? Must’ve thought you were crazy, buying a burned out husk of old land. You’re building now. Digging out the basement, filling the concrete, hiring contractors. You’re building my Lodge. My safehouse.

And now I’m here. You’re right. It all makes sense now. Please don’t make me watch the rest. Please.

If you don’t complete the file, Joe, you won’t wake up.

But I don’t want to see this part.

You’re at the basement door. It looks like a storm cellar. You’re prying open the lock with a crowbar. You didn’t count on us changing the locks. Now you’re coming down the cement stairwell toward the big door. You’re so tired. Leaning on the railings like they’re the only thing keeping you up. You’re coughing, sweating, shaking. Oh, Dad, I’m so sorry. I couldn’t hear you. Your Thought Chip is screaming for my attention but I can’t hear you. I can’t. You’re too far away. You’re so sick it works if you’re practically touching me. I didn’t know, Dad, I’m sorry.

The door splinters open and there’s the four flashing stars in our hands and the frightened faces of your Hacker Army. Killed by your own creation. The last thing you see before the lights go out is my face, twisted into a glare of revenge, fear and rage. I’ve never seen my face look like 59

serials that.

My vision goes white and it’s like I’m dying with you. I can feel it.

Dad, when my eyes open on the real world barely a minute has passed. Rash and Trip and Edison are still screaming. I’m still holding you in my arms. Your blood is still warm. I lived your entire life in your last breath.

I say, “We have to go. There is so much work to be done.”

Thought Chip Record: Agent Emmett Anders 01dooM093 :: mday10 PM

I’m late to Wilkes but I just got a hit on my search. Joe leaves the Lodge. Near as I can tell, the boys stay behind. It’s just him heading southwest. To her. Finally to her. We can get him if he’s still out there. It’s July now, Joe’s birthday. He’s nineteen. July 4th, 2030. If he just stays put a little while longer we’ll know right where his. Right this minute. But I gotta be sure. I have to stay on it.

He drives through the night and hits Portland by late morning. He checks Tent City for signs of her, but no one knows anything. There’s no trail on Cedric or Naomi either. But the fans are listening. Everywhere they go people tune in to Howling Murphy’s version of the truth.

People listen. Audrey though, where’s Audrey?

Nothing at Hollywood Bungalow or any of their multiple hollow houses. There’s just nothing. He’s on foot, practically going door to door asking for her. The decision to search the internet again comes suddenly. He flops down in an alleyway between two abandoned tents.

It’s the medicine dropper again. That same glass medicine dropper. He takes it out and drops clear liquid into his eyes then quickly corks the bottle, sets it down beside him on the concrete, pulls a cigarette from his pack with his lips and lights a match. He drags in the smoke just as the drug hits and he exhales, falling backward into a wet tarpaulin making a sound like a lost whale.

His Thought Chip Record shows him falling out of the sky again, this time over a faintly Apocalyptic looking city. He belly flops in the concrete and it ripples with his momentum like Jello. Standing up, Joe looks around and the city appears empty. He picks a direction at random and starts walking. The wind blows down the street with the crackle of dust and leaves and paper. He flinches at voices, phantoms in his own mind. But no aliens. Not this time. Not anymore.

As he walks he becomes aware of the sound of his footsteps. And an echo.

“A second pair of feet?” says the Thought Chip.

He moves faster, the echo moves faster. His Thought Chip screams that he’s being followed. I figure it’s more paranoia. Too much drug use, but when Joe turns to look behind him I see through his eyes. A ragged, dead looking figure behind him moves as if on broken limbs, but fast, disregarding the pain.

“It’s you! No, no, no, I’m sorry. It was an accident. You said…”

The figure has maybe a dozen holes in its chest, bullet holes. They ooze black when it runs and Joe’s eyes focus on the face. It’s his dead father. Risen from the dead and pursuing him through his mind. Joe’s new fear, perhaps. Haunted by a dead parent, just like his father

serials before him. From around the corner another figure appears, then another, and soon Joe is being pursued by a hoard of swollen corpses, all with his father’s face, all from different phases of the man’s life. A dead Air Force pilot. A dead intelligence agent, hung for espionage by enemies overseas. The face of Dr. Boles, dragging a broken body towards him with the rage of a Bible thumping preacher. Joe knows everything about his father now. All of his secrets, everything he knew, and it’s all out to get him.

My phone rings and I know it’s Wilkes wanting to know where I am.

On the monitor, Joe sees a flashing carnival sign that says, “Here, Joe,” with a technicolor arrow pointing down toward a door. Joe stumbles through it and I watch on Screen 2 as Joe in the real world leaps into a strip club off of Powell Boulevard.

Nobody looks his way, despite the fact that he’s clearly tweaking and looking around in the grip of raw panic. His Thought Chip seems to have cooled down. He sees a reality relative to this one despite vibrating colors and the appearance of what I think might be photosynthesis at a magnification of 1,000 flowing through veins in the walls. But he can see the girl on stage and the faces of strangers around the room.

His Thought Chip says, “I got me here. This must be the place.”

The dancer is down to nothing but a sleek black brassiere and matching thong, bits of a skimpy tuxedo scattered around her like peeled fruit. Her skin is olive tan and her hair is as black as her lingerie. With her back to the crowd she has her right leg wrapped tightly around the pole and her left extended out at an almost ninety degree angle. She lets go with her right hand and all of her weight is supported by just that leg and you can see her muscles tense under the pressure. She flicks her hair and her whole body spins slowly, seductively around the pole.

Everybody cheers.

It’s right then that her eyes lock with Joe’s and she smiles. It’s Audrey, but I don’t think Joe knows it yet. Or, at least, I don’t think he believes it. Still too ripped on that drug, Joe stares at her through the multicolor absurdity of his hallucination.

His Thought Chip says, “It’s Dream Audrey, maybe she knows where she is.”

I laugh just as my phone rings again. I pick it up and drop it back on the hook.

The men throw money at Audrey ravenously, but her eyes are on Joe. He sits there, rubbing his eyes and lighting matches nervously. She very slowly gets out of the bra. She hangs upside down, topless on the pole. Everyone cheers and throws more cash. The song starts to wind down and she finishes on her back, an arm extended over her head, the other on her chest, legs up like a Marilyn Monroe centerfold. Audrey gathers up her earnings and disappears off stage.

The crowd starts to break up and Joe seems to be sobering up.

He’s just about to clear out too when the lady of the hour comes out in a black robe. She sits down beside Joe and says, “Hey, there, stranger. Don’t I know you from somewhere?”

Joe looks at her anxiously, his eyes still dilated like a wild panther, and he says, “I know none of this is real, but maybe you can still help me. I’m looking for this girl, Audrey. Audrey Lamb. May also be called Audrey Blake, Audrey Rose, Audrey Morrison, Audrey Armstrong…”

“You idiot,” she laughs, “You’re still hitting the old medicine dropper, I see. Well, whatever, it’s still good to see you.”

“It’s good to see you too, Audrey. Now where can I find Audrey?”

She sighs and puts a hand on the inside of his thigh. Joe stops talking. She leans over, her weight on Joe’s nervous leg, and plants this really long, deep kiss right on his mouth. He sighs

serials and shakes his head like a wet dog.

After half a beat she says, “Nothing beats the real thing.”

“It’s really you? You won’t believe what I’ve been through trying to find you. What day is it, anyway?”

“Doesn’t matter, you’re here.”

“Listen, Audrey, a lot’s happened, it’s all changed. I know everything now and I have a plan, but for this to work I’m gonna need you.”

“Anything, babe, just tell me what I need to do.”

Thought Chip Record: Agent Emmett Anders MM/?!/20EO :: 88:88 PM

“I know where Lee is,” Joe says, sitting with Audrey over coffee at a nearby diner.

“You do? Well, where is he? Let’s go get him out…”

“It’s not that simple,” he says, interrupting, “This ain’t like last time. That place you were in had pretty light security. This time they’re ready for us, but I have a plan. It started with Beardo, believe it or not.”

“Beardo,” Audrey scoffs, “I heard he swore allegiance to the party and they got him a cushy job hauling freight for America Corporate.”

“I know, I’ve been tracking him, but you can’t blame the guy. What I mean is it’s no surprise. When it came down to a choice between jail or church I’m sure he found a way to justify the CGA as following the will of God. But it’s something else that gave me the idea. See, the CGA has started tagging their workers.”

“What do you mean, ‘tagging?’” Audrey asks.

“Literally tagging, like the way people used to do with pets. They put a microchip in them to track their movements. The chips are used for sales transactions, monitoring hours worked, and all kinds of shit. Part of it is they need to know where the product is going and whatnot, but it’s also just crowd control and more prison precautions. They own just about everything now.

They’ve tagged the farmers they’ve bought, drivers that handle the shipments from farms and factories, that kind of thing. They’re tightening the noose. Folks ain’t really working for money anymore, they’re just working for them and living off of the supplies allowed in through the government blockades.”

“So it’s slavery then?”

Joe nods, “It always has been. Every empire has always needed a labor class, and if anybody, even a hundred years ago, thought they were really free they were either fools or liars.

We’ve always worked for them, but this is just the illusions being stripped away. They’ve tightened the noose. They used to coax their slaves into working through the promise of prestige, luxury, or freedom, but now they just make us work. Anyway, that’s what Beardo’s up to. They won’t let him on their side, not yet, but they let him work for them. Some slavery looks like freedom, right? Anyway, I’m rambling, sorry, I’m still a little loopy. The point is, I realized nobody knows anybody in the company, it’s all about computers, and I have a way of making computers do what they’re told, you know?”

serials

“You want to hack a tracking chip?”

“No, I want to hack the system and get you a job with the company.”

“Driving trucks?” Audrey almost gasps, clearly not in love with the idea, “How does that help us get Lee?” “All in good time. The less you know for now, the better.”

“Joe, how do you know so much?”

“I know everything my father knew, he’s still a part of me, in there somewhere.”

Audrey shakes her head and says, “Christ, Joe, that’s not an answer.”

“What if I told you there’s an elaborate surveillance network hidden in appliances, cell phones, and satellites stretching over America like a web? They watch everything we do and have been for years and everything that’s happened has been part of a bigger plan going back to the early part of the century. The Patriot Act, the War on Terror, The Freedom of Information Act, Homeland Security, the War on Anarchy, the War on Economic Terrorism, the bombing of the faith rally, the bombing in Dallas… all of it, it’s all been one long plan to soften the minds of America for corporate fascism and the disappearance of Civil Liberties.”

There’s a little pause and Audrey smiles as if to say, “Oh, so you’re done,” and then replies, “I’d say tell me something I don’t know, it seems pretty obvious.”

“No ‘conspiracy theory’ talk, no wisecracks?” Joe asks.

“No, Joe, not after everything we’ve seen. Seriously though, I know you’re holding, give me what you got.”

“Okay, they’re called the Watchers. They’re a hybridization of government intelligence and private task forces brought together under one roof in 2011. Their agents have their brains implanted with a network of microchips that are used to enhance memory, information processing, and cognition, but they also come with a tracker and an uplink to their central server for information sharing. Still with me?”

Her face looks shocked, weighed down by what she’s hearing or the possibility that the man across from her is insane. She says, “I’m with you, go on.”

“My father was one of them. He’s directed me my whole life, pushed me in one direction or another, both aggressively and covertly. Around the time of my birth he developed brain cancer and fought it on and off until… anyway, the point is, the cancer relocated his implants and created unintended connections to his frontal lobe and subconscious enabling him to not just passively upload his thoughts, but also actively broadcast his will. He knew he had a long fight ahead of him and so he chose me, his only son, to take up his mission when he died.”

“You’re saying you have these implants, Joe?” “I’m saying.”

“And that’s how you’re able to do all this stuff? Get me my name change by doing mushrooms, for example?”

“That’s how. And now I want to do it again to get you behind the curtain, hands on with this new, weird infrastructure. You’re the only one I know that loves Lee enough to take this risk and my other guys are needed for other elements of my plan.”

“Okay, Joe,” Audrey says, squeezing his hand, “I’ll do it. Wave your magic wand and make me a trucker.”

“You realize you’re going undercover, right? And you realize that you may not see or hear from me for some time?”

serials “I know, but what else is new?”

“Nothing, I guess. I just had to say it. This plan is a bit of a long con, they need to trust you and that means you have to work, really work, got me?”

“Yeah, Joe, I think I know exactly what you’ve got in mind.”

“Good, I should get going…”

“Oh, no you don’t,” she says, gripping his hand tighter, “I’ve only just got you back, I think you can afford to wait around here for one more night.”

“One more night…why would I…” “You really are a dummy. My apartment is just around the corner from here. You’re coming home with me, Joe Kid.” I follow them through the street cameras to an apartment building. She leads him by the hand up a winding stairwell, stopping to kiss him every ten or twelve steps, pushing her body into his and pulling on his clothes. They both look happy, like it’s a perfect moment in time for each of them and everything else just melted away with a touch. Joe’s eyes don’t have that characteristic heaviness they’ve had since childhood. His brow isn’t furrowed, his expression isn’t dark or drug-infused or anything other than euphoric. They’re in love and everything else can wait till tomorrow.

As Audrey unlocks the door Joe kisses her neck from behind and she squeals, her knees almost buckling. She opens the door with a kick and pulls Joe in by the shirt. The door slams and locks behind them and I make a note of the address. This one doesn’t appear on our list of known locations or the shell game of hollow houses we’ve unearthed. This might be the place, the real place.

They pass the night in each other’s arms, in Audrey’s bed, laughing, touching, kissing and everything else that young lovers do when there’s nothing left but waiting for the phone to ring, start the job and prepare for the future. For a moment, their lives seem almost normal.

As dawn peeks out above the brick buildings and power lines of southeast Portland Audrey lays naked with her back pressed against Joe’s chest, his arm around her torso holding her close. She says, “So you’re telling me it’s all been your dad all this time? Your imaginary friend from when we were kids, Dr. Boles, all of it? You ever wonder who else he was or where else he might’ve appeared?”

“I try not to,” Joe says, kissing her shoulder.

“It’s kind of weird, right? I mean, like, didn’t he used to beat you and stuff? Where does that fit into the grand plan?”

Joe smells her hair, kisses the top of her ear and smiles, distracted. He runs a hand down along her ribs, her waist, down the side of her thigh under the sheet and she elbows him in the rib and says, “Hey, I’m serious here, five times in one night ought to earn me a little conversation.”

“Sorry, what?” he says, dumbly.

“You idiot, I said how does Dr. John hitting your bare ass with a board fit into his plan to turn you into Super Hacker?”

“That didn’t make a lot of sense to me at first either, but as time goes on I get more and more used to what he uploaded into my Thought Chip. I’m recovering memories pretty much every night in my sleep. It’s kinda cool…”

“Joe, you’re not answering the question.”

serials “Yeah, sorry, I ramble, don’t I? I was gonna say that I discovered a memory, more a thought really, where I realized he needed me to challenge the church since that’s pretty much what this whole attack on liberty comes down to, you know?”

“So he beat you during Bible study?”

“And preached any time I messed up even a little, yeah. It definitely got me some pretty deep scars, to say the least.’

“I don’t know, seems kinda fucked up,” Audrey says, talking to the sunrise coming up through the window like she’s looking into Joe’s face.

“It was, but it worked. Mr. Smiles even threatened to not be my friend if I went into the church and I can see why. He was afraid he’d lose me to the other side. Turned out it only strengthened my resolve… made me a more educated soldier in this weird little war.”

“A war of ideologies, isn’t that what you used to say?”

“That’s what he used to say and I used to parrot, yeah.”

“It’s a lot to take in is all,” she sighs, “You ever wonder who you might’ve been if he just let you have a childhood, be normal, maybe not cut your brain open and put microchips in there, that kind of thing?”

“I try not to, but I think you and I might have had a different life.”

“A different life in a fascist corporate theocracy, you mean.”

“Yeah.”

Audrey smiles and rolls over, leaping onto Joe, palms flat on his chest. She laughs and says, “My hero, the big revolutionary come to fight the Man for me.”

“Only for you, Looney Tune.”

I cut the feed. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know what comes next.

Behind me now, Joe appears and sings, “Sugar in the morning, sugar in the evening, sugar at supper time.”

I scan through time, looking for one last piece of information. Joe greases the wheels on an online application for delivery driver in the CGA. Two days later, the phone rings. She gets her forty eight hours of training outside of Salem, Oregon, and is on the road two weeks later, driving as Audrey O’Doule. The fingerprinting and blood taken by the company are sent wirelessly to the new company headquarters in Virginia but are intercepted by the world’s greatest hacker, deleted and replaced with those of Edison’s sister, long since deceased in a protest rally turned riot, but kept alive in the records by Edison himself.

Phantom Joe says, “We thought of everything, eh, Anders?”

I watch on the screen as Audrey merges her rig onto I-5 South to Los Angeles, a trucker now and one of the rare few that can make it past the FEMA blockades. It’s clear now, they’re using Audrey to get Lee out of prison. She’ll go in as the delivery driver.

My phone rings and this time I pick it up.

“I have it, sir, apologies for the delay.”

serials Thought Chip Record: Agent Emmett Anders 03/70/90 :: 12eN0D PM

Wilkes’ office. Cheesy motivational posters, medals he’s won, and a pair of gold boxing gloves are his only decoration. I shut the door behind me. He sits in his tall leather office chair with his back to me. His computer is flashing the spinning screensaver of the Watcher Logo. I clear my throat politely but he doesn’t turn around.

“Why don’t I start?” I say, “Again, I apologize for being late to our meeting, but I think I finally have everything I need. I have the address for Audrey Lamb, the location of Joe Vagrant and his resistance movement, what their target is – hell, I even know the system malfunctions on the Eastern seaboard this Wednesday were all done by Vagrant’s hacker buddies to distract us from their real mission.”

“How do you know this?” Wilkes asks from the other side of his chair.

“Inference, intuition, deduction – pick a word. He told Audrey he needed her for some important mission because he had his boys busy on other things, I know he was too busy attacking us through the Thought Chip network to ever be able to handle a series of hacks on the kind of scale we’re talking about, and if you put two and two together it seems pretty likely that these three, Edison James, Trip Howell, and Richard Rash, are behind the attacks on the East.”

“It does make sense,” he says, “And yet you’re completely wrong. Well, partially wrong.”

“Sir?” I ask, a little dumbfounded.

The chair spins around and Joe Vagrant is sitting there with all of his fingers pressed together malevolently. He’s in a white tuxedo for some odd reason and his hair is combed back, though still long. He looks like a…

“Hello, James,” he says, in some sort of melodramatic villain accent.

I was going to say he looks like a Bond villain.

“Sorry,” he laughs, “I just always wanted to turn around in a chair and say, ‘Hello, James.’

I’ll bet you’re pretty confused, hell, I know I was when I first found out what Dad had planned.

It was several weeks of sleepless nights and not a few seizures before I fully processed.”

“Joe? What the hell, where’s Wilkes?”

“You still don’t get it. What did I say? You weren’t gonna wake up until we got to the end of the story, remember that? Well, this is it. The end of the story. Did you seriously think I’d just let you wake up in the hospital and start investigating me? As for Wilkes, he’s probably evacuating the Watcher compound as we speak… hang on, nope, I have him here… pulling into his driveway on the barracks. He’s home.”

“What are you talking about, Joe? I just spoke to him on the phone.”

Joe shakes his head and somehow there’s a white Persian cat in his lap that he pets maniacally, not sure where it came from. He says, “Anders, Anders, Anders, what am I gonna do with you? It’s hard to believe that when I first learned of this scheme I was afraid you’d figure it out before we could finish the download. Looks like I owe Trip a Twinkie.”

“Just answer me, goddammit!” I yell, pounding a fist into the desk.

“Hey, you remember that time when I said you were partially wrong about what my guys were doing, and you called me sir? Remember that?”

serials “Remember? That was like ten seconds ago!”

“Oh, right, of course… Well, I was gonna say you were right about one thing. Edison and Trip are working on manufacturing chaos in the rich prick sector of America.”

“It’s called the Eastern Seaboard, for Christ’s sake.”

“Seaboard, rich prick sector, Mother Teresa’s anus, who cares what we call it? The point is, yes, I do have Eddie and Trip busting ass to make things very hard for you people. But Rash is elsewhere. Rash had a different job entirely.”

Joe reaches over and presses a button on his desk phone. He says, “Linda, will you please send in Mr. Gardner.”

The phone buzzes static and no one responds. Never heard of anyone named Linda here.

Now here’s Gardner and he slaps me on the back and says, “How ya doing, boss?”

“What does Gardner have to do with all this?”

“Gardner,” Joe responds, petting his damn cat, “is a stunning example of the dangers of a fully automated, electronic society. You run everything with computers. You even put them in your bodies. Just a matter of time before someone like me came along. Gardner is a facsimile. A ghost in your machine. I made him up. It took some doing to get him to cut off the dreads and shave his mangy goatee but eventually he saw it my way.”

“Rash?” I say, my gut twisting bile into my throat.

“The same,” Joe says, speaking for him, “But this Rash, or Gardner, if you will, is different than the one I currently have stealing Thought Chip hardware from your cold storage facility and uploading the virus that will leave you Watchers crippled once and for all. See, I knew RITA would be impossible to crack even with my unique gifts, but you, you were the easiest hack of them all.”

The urge to blink pushes itself to the front of my mind and I realize I’ve been staring, a layer of misty tears forming around my eyes. Probably look like a real moron or some kind of lobotomy patient.

Joe says, “If you’ll turn your attention to the big screen all will become clear.”

He hits a button on a remote and a large flat screen television lowers down over a bookcase on the right wall. It crackles to life and I see myself, strapped down in that chair, wires hooked to my brain, eyes glazed over vacantly – the Memory Dump.

Joe says, “This is you as you exist in real time. As you can see by the time stamp of the video, it has been five minutes and thirty-six seconds since you began the download.”

“You mean none of this has been real?”

“Well, what is ‘real,’ anyway, right? I mean, am I right? You know? Okay, yeah, none of this has been real. But it was real to me once upon a time.”

He hits a button and the screen changes again. It shows the front of the building, Watchers pouring out into the parking lot in response to the evacuation shutdown from Wednesday afternoon.

“You mean this afternoon,” Joe says, interrupting my thoughts, his voice changes to a gravelly tone and he quotes, “‘As you can see here, the weapon systems of this battle station are not yet operational…’ just kidding, Admiral Akbar? No? What I mean is, your base is completely defenseless. I needed you all to myself so I planted Gardner to make the suggestion of the full compound reboot.”

He’s grinning, his face a portrait of gloating. The screen cuts to Gardner filling the lining

serials of his uniform with steel cylinders containing Thought Chip units.

Joe says, “We’re taking this war viral. I’m mass producing myself and it’s all thanks to you. Now, if you’ll take a look at the next scene…”

The screen shows Gardner sitting at the terminal where I’m hooked up to the monitors.

The big screen is split between the source code for the Thought Chip network, dozens of files, and a video conference window with Joe on the other side, himself hooked up to wires, a car battery, and a laptop. He’s wearing those little goggles you get at tanning salons. On the screen Joe is issuing directions, saying things like, “Line five… go… now, there, up one…”

Gardner follows his instructions thoughtlessly and I can see where this is headed. The Memory Dump means shutting down certain security protocols. Joe’s chip is linked to mine.

He’s using me as a conduit, a doorway into the system, and he’s wiping everything clean.

More than that, he’s downloading information. As Joe breaks down firewalls Gardner is both implementing a virus and capturing information about the program, communiques in the intelligence community, plans for the future, financial transactions, diplomatic records…

“You’re taking it all!” I shout.

“Yes, I am, all thanks to you. When this all started this morning I was only able to effect petty changes in your system – surface abrasions, flesh wounds in the system, but it all came through you. I’ve been in your head. Where you’ve gone, I’ve gone. That computer you glanced at on your way to see your boss – there I was. Director Price’s personal laptop going haywire after you came in to meet him – me. I infected your world through your eyes in the exact way you’ve been stealing mine for years. And when it’s over the Network will be mine and your kind will be back in the Dark Ages.”

“Dark Ages? Wait, what do you mean?”

“You don’t own the signal, Anders. The cameras, the tech, the microphones, they’re all just out there. The only thing that makes you the Watchers is where the signal goes. Well, now it goes to me.”

“You’re receiving the signal at the Lodge?”

“And you’ll be left with nothing but black screens and the record of our time together.”

“Why that? Just to fuck me over?”

“Maybe a little,” Joe laughs, “But it’s really just a sad by-product of what we’re doing here. You can wipe a room clean of evidence but still leave your fingerprints inside the gloves.

Well, old man, you’re the glove and I got my hand so far up your ass I’m pushing buttons in your brain. When I leave here your memory will be all that’s left. It will upload to RITA as file number zero, a new beginning or an ending – all how you slice it. There won’t be anything left of the Watchers but what you have in the old noodle. But just so loose ends are as tight as possible, you’re carrying a little viral insurance. Every time this account is accessed you’re going to have another day like today on your hands. Total system malfunction. So you’ll have to delete this record. Then you’ll have nothing. Meanwhile, we become the new Watchers, me and my team. And this Hack War will go from media posturing to the thing that keeps McKinley up nights. So fuck you, Anders, you and all the worst of you. We win.”

Air fills my lungs with a gasp and I shoot awake in the Memory Dump chair. The place is dark. Everything is shut down but my console. I’m still strapped in and Gardner, Rash, whatever his name is, he’s long gone.

serials

Thought Chip Record: Agent Emmett Anders 09/06/30 :: 2:27 PM

It’s Wednesday. Again. Still. Holy shit, how did I fall for this so completely? Of course none of it was real. Of course it was all a dream…

“Dream hack,” Joe says, his face appearing on the monitor.

My eyes are still clamped open, I can’t look away. He lights a match, holding it up to the monitor like he’s peering down a long, dark tunnel. He smiles and says, “It wasn’t just a dream, old man. It was the greatest dream hack of my life. Someday the new Americans will sing songs about how I struck back with the power of dreams, following in the footsteps of my ancestors.

There is, however, still one more scene for your viewing pleasure…”

On the screen I see Lee and Audrey. She’s driving her rig on some dead highway headed toward Montana. Lee is pale, haggard, his eyes bloodshot, his skin tight and gaunt. His hair looks brittle as straw and his beard is dense and matted. He looks like a scarecrow or some kind of undead version of his former self. But he smiles when Audrey hands him a cigarette.

He lights a match and stares at the flame, thinking of Joe and how much a match can mean – so simple in its form and so packed full of metaphor at the same time.

Lee says, “There aren’t any angels dancing on the head of a pin. They’re all too busy in there. Don’t you see it, Audrey, babe? Life in the fire…”

She smiles and says, “That’s America?”

Lee holds up the flame, lights his cigarette, and breathes deep.

The phone rings and I know it has to be the man that put me up to all this, Director Price wanting checking on my progress so he can finish the shut down and head home. My eyes are so dried out they feel like two charcoal bricks crammed into the sockets. Water pours out like that stone Moses hit with his stick. I can’t move – frustrating, almost like…

“Like being locked up in a box?” Joe asks from the monitor.

The phone rings again.

Joe says, “There’s so much more to this story. I bet you wish you could see how we did it, how we got him out. Bet you want to know how you’re gonna get me. How you’ll stop me. But it’s all gone now. There’s nothing left. But like Lee used to say, ‘That’s America.’”

Everything starts to go kind of fuzzy and I sort of…Joe laughs as everything goes dark.

“Anders, hey, Anders.”

It’s the Director. He has me all unhooked and I’m staring up at him from the floor. Not sure why I’m down here.

“I put you on the floor,” he says, “You were seizing like a rabid dog or something. What happened here? Where’s Gardner?”

“Would you believe, ‘I had a bad dream?’”

“Sit up, I don’t understand.”

“It’s a long story, sir, but I have to say, I’m afraid Watcher Headquarters may not be coming back online for a very long time.”

The next few hours fly by. It’s like a – fuck, it’s like a dream.

serials Price calls an impromptu meeting with Wilkes, himself, and me in his office, still dark from the shutdown. There’s some other guys here I’ve never seen before, but they look stern as all get out.

Wilkes says, “Anders, first off, we’d like to thank you for your honesty in this matter. Also, the tip that your Thought Chip record is booby trapped will save us a lot of trouble in the future.

The Director has assigned me to transcribe what data we could salvage for future reference and to wipe the file clean from the system. Furthermore, we have conferred on what to do about you and have come to a unanimous decision. In light of the day’s events we have no choice but to put you on early retirement effective immediately. Your Thought Chip debacle counts as the greatest failure in performance this agency has ever seen. Your chip, therefore, must be deactivated. You will sign a non-disclosure agreement and will be required to report weekly to one of our officers to confirm your whereabouts, employment, and associations. We can’t be too careful, you see, especially where you are concerned.”

“A parole officer? Christ, why not just put a bullet to me and save the taxpayers a big heap of trouble?”

Price says, “That was discussed, but up until today’s events your record has been exemplary, we figure a cozy retirement somewhere like Pearl Harbor ought to suit you, right?”

“Like I have a choice?”

The meeting adjourns and they take me to a white room and a metal table. I’m forced into one of those awful hospital gowns and they strap me down for good measure. Everything is cold on my skin. None of it feels real.

I watch the mask lowering down over my face and it catches a gleam from the overhead light. I breathe in the sweet smelling gas and listen to the doctor. She’s a pretty young blonde, her name – something familiar, but from another lifetime ago…Starts with an S! Let’s see. Swim?

Swammi? Slippy? Slappy? Swenson? Swanson... Samsonite! I was way off. Swanson. Dr. Swanson.

She says it will all be over soon and I believe her the way you believe people you fall in love with in dreams. She says I should count backwards from ten. …nine, eight…there’s Joe, standing over me, he smiles and says, “I’m sorry it had to go down like this, but you forced our hand.” …seven, six, five…

“You watched us, but now we’re watching you right back.”

Four. Three. Two.

THE END >> DYSTOPIA BOY

To Be Continued in Corporate Hun

by Trevor D. Richardson >>

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