After Things Fell Apart
“Jesus fucking Christ!” I scream with mock desperation, “open the goddamned doors!”
The sky is a swirling paisley orange today, with high-contrast clouds projected against its two-dimensional surface: flat but colorful. Strange flying things gambol aimlessly, laughing screaming flapping and spinning, playing random games among the cardboard clouds.
I’m talking to myself again, sitting here alone on a bench outside the ruins of some sort of station or terminal. All the glass is long since broken out; weeds and trash and odd vermin crawl in and out at will through jammed-open doors. I have a drink from a bota of stale water and try to read the cover of a faded pamphlet that’s wind-pasted up-side-down against a rusted luggage cart. I can just make out Jehov… something.
I’m talking to myself again but it couldn’t possibly matter because a giant kaleidoscope chicken just landed with an astonishing thump in the middle of the street to peck and scratch at the abandoned cars. Hey, maybe I’m not talking to myself after all. Maybe I’m talking to a forty-foot pullet who’s made of colored glass and can’t tell the difference between Chevys and chicken’s feed. It could be worse. Sometimes the things I talk to talk back.
I used to be a pop philosopher on a talk-radio station in Bakersfield. “That’s all right for you,” I used to say, “you’re an idiot.” Then I would say something like: “You wouldn’t know a fiction from the truth if it kicked you in the butt with verisimilitude.” Alice, my producer, would beeline for the nearest dictionary. Finally convinced I had not uttered a fancy egg-head word meaning “shit,” she would shake her head slowly, and wave her finger. (It used to remind me of someone when she did that. I was never quite certain who.) Years later, she fired me for uttering a fancy word meaning “shit.” What I really said was: “You wouldn’t know a semiotic sign from an eschatological omen.” She heard it wrong. But there were no hard feelings; I trusted her judgement.
The sky is a flashing vermilion plaid today. I’m talking to myself again. I’m so hungry I could eat this funky chicken except even if it’s real I wouldn’t know how to go about it. Where would I get a forty-foot frying pan?
Sometimes I can clearly remember the days before the War. I used to drive a car, a bright red Datsun. I used to drive my wife to the hospital where she worked. For some reason I can’t picture her.
Well it’s always been a bizarre world. Full of surprises.
Almost no one survived. Those of us that still somehow manage to hang on I call the Loonies because we are all quite hopelessly deranged: doomed to scavenge through the ruins of reality chatting with leviathan poultry, dodging psychedelic rodents and playing tag with airborne garden vegetables, battling against murderous wind-up toys, rebuilt monsters and fellow Loonies, daring to trust nothing—particularly our own senses—and always, always praying that we wake up to find the sheets sweaty and the world sane.
A rebuilt dinosaur, a diplodocus I believe, ambles down Columbia Avenue. Its tail beats store fronts to dust and debris with every step; its stumpy feet leave Chevy-sized prints in the asphalt. A band of ragged hunters armed with golf clubs and Ginsu steak knives follows at a safe distance, darting from the cover of one footprint to the next. The scene looks rather like a swarm of desperate dung beetles chasing a constipated elephant.
Sometimes I can clearly remember the days before the War. I used to hitchhike around with a guy named Joe. We used to catch rides from nurses in convertibles.
Occasionally on days like this one the smiling face of God protrudes from the sky like a vacu-form demon and asks me to confess my sins. Maybe that’s who I’ve been talking to. They say that Saint John had his revelations after eating psychedelic bread mold. Who knows? The world is full of surprises.
Truthfully I’m a little worried that this God thing here might be the genuine article but still, I think I’d better pass. I doubt that I could stand the penance.
Sometimes I can clearly remember the days before the War. I used to teach Creative Philosophy to used-car salesmen in a cable television course. This one student, Joe, had an orange Datsun that he called Abdul. We often went for coffee together. One time I remember we were in Abdul driving through the rain to an all-night coffee shop. Strangely, I felt like a small part of my brain had slipped a few seconds into the future. “Joe,” I said, taking a hit from a huge reefer, “the next song on the radio will be ‘White Rabbit.’ I can just feel it.”
