After Things Fell Apart
“I understand,” I say. God tries very hard to distract me: He winks and wrinkles His nose and sticks out His tongue. I continue ignoring Him. “Well you’ve still got your gun; I promise I won’t touch you. C’mon what do you say?”
“Well… sure, okay. I am pretty hungry.” She hefts her shotgun and follows me about five steps back. God is making fart noises with His mouth and I have to struggle to keep from laughing. It occurs to me that because He seems to have taken a direct interest in capturing my attention—assuming He is real—a significant concept is proven true. God is no existentialist.
The sky is blurring; purple strands of cloud as smooth and shiny as glass slowly lose intricacy and luminescence; crocheted bloodstains mark the wound inflicted by the sun’s sharp descent. I’m dining on a can of Doggy-Treat raviolis in a decaying train terminal and watching the sunset through the fangs of a broken window. My late brother-in-law Joe, my ex-wife and a teenaged hooker named Alice sit in a semi-circle around a bonfire of religious pamphlets. I’m ignoring them. Today, I am unusually morose—filled with a sense of dread and an intuition of impending disaster.
This morning, you see, I saw a monster, a great beast with several heads. It rose from the Sound dripping and grinning, and marched ashore. Some grazing diplodoci ran in terror, leaving automobile-sized craters in the pavement. Alice fired at the thing with her shotgun and managed to wound one of the heads but the beast was unabashed. It rumbled up Columbia Boulevard, laughing maniacally.
“What do you make of that?” Alice asked. “Have you ever seen anything like it?”
“No,” I said, uneasy.
“Who could ever fight that?”
“Who would want to?” I snapped back.
Alice and my ex-wife are discussing the old questions about the origins of the War, the falcon’s relationship to the falconer. It’s something I used to think about but now I just hope for the occasional clear memory from the time before and leave enigmas to the Sphinx. Of course for all I really know the clearest of memory is just a more subtle form of hallucination. In fact that statement sounds very familiar. I used to teach metaphysical philosophy at a South Hollywood junior high.
“What does it matter whether or not they do?” I hear my ex-wife say.
“Of course the monsters will eat you,” Alice answers. “That’s just the way it is.”
Tonight I’m riding in the back seat of a midnight blue Datsun. My feet are on the seat because an assortment of automatic rifles tangles like pick-up-sticks across the floor. Out the rear window Seattle shimmers through a greasy rain. Alice is driving and she tells me to watch for cops.
In order to survive we must reach the railroad station before the rain stops. If we miss the 11:15 to Babylon the War will be lost and when the rain is done the smiling face of God will burst through the clouds and smite us with a terrible vengeance.
I pick a rifle at random and check it for ammunition. It’s an M-16 with an infrared laser scope. Alice says something about Joe’s funeral. I can’t make out just what. Bright blue lights—fuzzy electric aspirin—appear from around a corner. They reflect a thousand-million sparks from the mirror-wet pavement.
I fire a short burst at them and it seems to slow them down. We are only a few blocks from the terminal but the night begins to clarify and the raindrops have become a fine spray. Pale light infuses an area of the sky directly overhead. That would be God. As always, right on time. The cop has been joined by others and together they’re gaining on us. I empty the M-16 at them but this time to no appreciable effect.
