After Things Fell Apart
Whenever I’m faced with incredible danger my ex-wife enters the scene and this time is no exception. She sits in the front passenger seat shaking her head slowly and her finger with vigor. She is saying something about scatological portents.
“Tough shit,” Alice says. She raises her arm and the sawed-off 12-gauge at the end blasts my ex-wife’s head into scarlet powder. I flinch and a tiny spurt of warm piss squirts into my jeans. “Christ,” I scream. “You didn’t have to do that!”
“It was in the script,” she says.
The cops have almost caught us and the rain has stopped. “Hold on,” Alice says, “it’s a fucking roadblock.”
Ten or fifteen black and white Datsuns are stacked across the Columbia entrance to the terminal. Hundreds of cops, each burdened under superior firepower, scramble for position.
“It’s no use,” Alice says. “I’m going to ram them.”
God’s grim visage blazes through the final veil of cloud. He politely asks me to confess my sins and I can tell by His tone that this is the last time He’s going to ask. I ask Him if He knows what song is going to come on the radio next. He just laughs.
I pick up another rifle, this time one of those Russian jobs with the long and phallic clip. This weapon would be illegal in California, I think. I jack a round into the illicit firing chamber.
“Oh my God,” Alice screams. “We’re going to die!” Ahead of us cops either scramble for cover or open fire or read each other Miranda.
God’s mouth opens wide and a torrent of blazing toads pours forth followed by the traditional deluge of blood.
“Alice,” I say with some sadness, “you are the only whore I’ve ever trusted.”
“I love you too, you bastard.” A thin metal screech slashes through the gruesome eruption of blood and fire that engulfs the car. It is myself, screaming.
It’s morning still; a scarlet sunrise bleeds into the sky.
The night, long and painful, has finally eroded away—as usual I haven’t slept at all. I’m all twisted up in a sweaty sheet, lying cold and cramped in a damp corner of Seattle’s railroad terminal, waiting for the awful truths of my existence to ooze back into my mind. A stack of identical pamphlets fifty deep serves as my pillow. On every cover a prophet named Joe stares out with a grim look of filial responsibility. “BEWARE THE BEAST,” says the caption and beneath that “The End Is Nigh Brother; Repent Repent.” The bright blue of the background has begun to fade—at least on the top copy—and the wire that binds the stack has rusted. Morning light slashes crimson across my face. I wince.
I’m cold and hungry and tired and alone. Alice, my ex-wife, always predicted I’d end up like this. I can almost see her standing right there, shaking her head slowly and her finger with passionate intensity. “You lack all conviction; you’ll never amount to anything,” she would be saying, “you’ll wind up alone and shivering on a bench in some filthy train station somewhere.” Now that I think about it, Alice was right about a lot of things.
The same as every other morning I would kill for a smoke. I would die for a smoke. I would spend the rest of my life alone in the world wandering among the bleached bones of reality eating dog food and sleeping on hardwood benches for one lousy cigarette.
The sky is a deep crystal blue, but black-edged clouds skim the treetops heading this way from the Sound. Silence oppresses, save for a thin fetid wind that snivels through the hollow streets.
My mouth tastes like something you might find erupting from the undercarriage of a carcinomic house fly, but compared to the smells emanating from the sea it tastes alright. I am thinking there must be some dead things out there. Probably jellyfish, possibly something worse. Definitely dead.
Sometimes I can clearly remember the days before: days of people and noise and wondrous shiny machines, days of truth and justice, revelation and reality. Days of sanity when a person could trust the center to hold.
