One Hundred Apocalypses and Other Apocalypses Page 14

  THISTLES

  Rosette stage early May, flower May to July, double dentate, toothed again, predicted soon to monopolize a large extent of country to the extinction of other plants, as they have done in parts of the American prairies, in Canada and British Columbia, and as they did in Australia, until a stringent Act of Parliament was passed, about twenty years ago, imposing heavy penalties upon all who neglected to destroy Thistles on their land, every man being now compelled to root out, within fourteen days, any Thistle that may lift up its head, Government inspectors being specially appointed to carry out the enforcement of the law. www.botanical.com/botanical/mgmh/t/thistl11.html for your information, if you care about what is happening in the world with regard to whatever constitutes the indigenous one moment to the next mixing thornily with mankind, I dare you to try to pull me.

  MIRAGE

  Postapocalypse, we were all still racist and clamoring for scraps of gold. I was still lusting after the girl who looked most like a fashion model. Maybe there is something to be done about those feelings but I was not doing it very much, not anymore! I felt a little freed to just want what I wanted, wherever that came from. Like maybe it’s not my job at this point to have a problem with getting off on something when that’s how I feel about it. No one calls anything natural anymore, not after what we did. Finally! Natural means something like dead.

  But who am I kidding? As soon as the dust settled—and granted, there was a good deal of dust—even that lousy freedom wore off. Now, whenever she’s charming, like the way she holds up that coconut in the bald light as if there’s a decision left to be made, I try hard, in order to justify my lust, to imagine her as not nearly so pretty—to imagine her as someone like me. Would I be charmed then? Someone like me, considering the last remnant of something. How hot is that?

  But as long as there is anything left there’s a decision to be made. For instance, I have put out of my mind the bodies of the dead, just as in the past I put out of my mind the bodies of the destitute. I have put out of my mind what we did with all the bodies. Oh my body, my body image, your body, your body, my image of your body.

  COMING TO LIFE

  When the Circuit City really did go under in a pile of full-priced cables everyone was yelling about on the internet, it was like what happened to the banks was happening for real, instead of getting a letter in the mail about where your account was and sitting in your stupid kitchen trying to picture an account. When Ely went on over to check out Circuit City directly from being laid off, he hadn’t even been there since prom 1988 but he wanted to see if everyone was acting insane or buying something for the first time since when they got a stereo put into their El Camino with savings from their job at the PD Quix, which was what Ely did right before prom. I didn’t get a stereo. I didn’t have a car until after Mom lost her eyesight and then my dad died and I inherited his so I could drive her around. Ely went there as if to meet an old friend he’d drifted apart from through the years. I’m thinking of a friend of mine whose brother went schizophrenic when we were in school and I didn’t get why we weren’t connecting anymore, and then a few years later when my brother went schizophrenic it was “holy shit now I get it” and we were friends again. But this example seems funnier to me because one of the friends is an enormous red electronics store near a mall that everyone’s hated since 1995. Everyone I know always hated it, including those of us who went mad. But Ely felt the cord of kinship. On the way—he drove imagining his car bursting with loot—he was thinking about the end of the movie of Fight Club, the skyline of corporate headquarters collapsing. The first time he saw the movie, in the multiplex, it felt so shocking, impressive, exhilarating, like the multiplex might collapse around them, everyone in it together. The next time he saw the movie was on video, showing it to a girl he was dating, on his couch at home, which suddenly seemed so crappy the second it was clear to him that she was not impressed with the movie, yeah whatever, corporations suck, crappy couch forever sinking in crappy apartment. But now, approaching the Circuit City, speeding within a tangle of highways called The Maze, city skyline across the water, he was feeling epic, high on something like the not-yet-reality of losing his job, like the movie was coming to life. He engaged in a little fantasy of bumping into that girl and having it come up, the prophetic movie ending from that lousy date—she’d have to be the one to bring it up, though—and she’d say something like, “You know, Ely, now I get why you were into that movie—it’s so interesting when an image falls in and out of relevance through time like that, it really makes the nature of reality come alive,” and he’d say something about yeah and sources of power, plug, plugging, plug you.

  When he got to the store, there was one tight clump of cars in the humongous parking lot as close as possible to the doors and he found a space in the clump to pull into. He was not in the long-gone El Camino, he was in a Pontiac Bonneville that had been a gift from his in-laws before his divorce. He’d been treating it badly since the split and the whole thing was pilled and damp. He got out and leaned against it, taking in the view. The Circuit City was not 100 percent red like the one from his youth, it was camel with red markings. He was unsure whether this classed it up or down. He tried to remember the inside of the Circuit City he had pictured revisiting, moody and dark-lit, shopping for his car stereo in the best shape of his life, a guy buying a stereo for his car, irreproachable as coming of age throughout history, in this place that looked a lot like nightclubs on soap operas, invisible walls and neon. He remembered walking down the path of linoleum between carpeted regions, enormous console systems to the east and household appliances to the west. He remembered a pudgy lady with the tightly curled hair of the time and a face lit like a radish who looked at him and then looked into the depths of a clothes-washing machine, exactly like a person looking into a toilet, wanting so badly to throw up and not quite able to do it. He remembered the money in his pocket for the stereo for the car. Then he felt it in his brain, a microscopic electronic switch spasm going: dated, dated her, dated movie, car, store, dated, and even though he could feel the hands of time pushing him from behind, he could not make himself go into that store with all that coded, inorganic, and somehow still expiring material, but then if he didn’t go in he was trapped, just standing there in the parking lot with his severance.

  But what do I know. Since my dad died no one here has had a job, no one here has health insurance. I’m in the kitchen with my mother who is now going deaf. My brother keeps us in sight but just out of reach, too afraid to relax in the house and too afraid to leave it, and I can see his point because this place is falling the fuck apart.

  A MORE PRACTICAL APPROACH

  He didn’t focus on the apocalypse because he couldn’t do anything about it, and when he looked around, there still appeared to be plenty of life happening. He hung out with some woodsy handyman types who he thought would take him along if it came to that. As a kid, when things got tough, he’d mostly tried to teach his turtle how to read. He took scientific notes about his dog. He did enjoy seeing the giraffe being helicoptered over the city in a movie trailer. He liked mutants, hybrid people-animal-robots. He found himself interested in origins and not so much the other end of things beyond reach. It never crossed his mind until other people brought it up, which they did increasingly. Like they thought all their handyman skills would finally be appreciated. Meanwhile, he concentrated on saving some farm animals. He had some dogs to love in the now. Other people, they might have a boat, maybe some flares, some food and water, your basic earthquake preparedness, hand-crank radio, maybe some kind of a shelter. Hopefully, he thought, I’ll have enough money that I can just take a spaceship.

  JOURNALIST

  This is a true story about a journalist and I don’t care. A long time ago I was assisting a famous humanitarian-type professor in a course about literary and documentary ethics, and this guy Adam was enrolled. He wasn’t in my discussion group—there were like eight groups and like two hundred people th
ere to listen to the lectures—but somehow Adam decided he liked me of all people and started approaching me outside the beautifully repurposed soda factory where the class met. He was handsome, I knew, but for some reason it didn’t matter to me, even though he was my age and had completed a degree at a fancy university I had once wanted to go to. I’d wanted to go to that university the same way you imagine you want to be a famous actress when what you mean is that you want to feel important.

  So we chatted a few times I found pretty boring and then he asked if I would like to, I don’t remember, something, so I told him no but I was walking home and if he wanted he could walk with me and hang out in the yard while I was gardening. It’s worth mentioning here that I was one of the only white people living in a neighborhood with a lot of black and Mexican people, and I was one of the only people in the neighborhood who had anything to do with the university. I have been told, by people in my neighborhood, that I am very, very white. Adam, too, was white, white, white. So Adam took me up on my idea, walked along home with me, and he was cool with my dog, and it turned out he knew a lot more than I did about plants. He’d watch me and say this or that while I was poking around, and a pattern emerged. After class, he’d come up to me, I’d say, Well, I’m doing this or that, usually moving things around in my garden or taking the dog to the woods, come along if you want, and he started teaching me about plants we passed in the woods, wild white ginger, rattlesnake orchids. He brought me clippings from his place which he was having to sell because of the divorce he was going through, and he was saddest of all to lose all his plants. One afternoon he kissed me in the hallway near the bathroom. I was really angry about that, but then I started wondering what my problem was. He showed me a picture of his parents in a Life magazine spread from the ’60s. He said they were friends with the Kennedys. He was always asking me if I thought he could be a good writer and I said I thought he could be a good journalist. He kept asking me and I kept saying the same thing in different ways. So after he kissed me and I was so mad about it, part of me started wanting him to kiss me again, maybe because of the handsome part, maybe because of the university part, maybe because of the Kennedys, or maybe the knowledge of plants, and at that point the whole dynamic shifted because he was so fucked up about his divorce and I was just so fucked up in general.

  Let’s see where this is going.

  Shots rang out in the neighborhood one day while I was gardening in my yard with my dog watching, and my dog was killed. It was really crazy, caught on video, a total media event, and after I made a call across the country to this one person I used to be in love with, I called Adam. He’s the one who lifted my dog into my truck and drove us to the woods, and he’s the one who directed the bush-hog in the night to dig a hole and shine its headlamps while we moved the body, and he helped me cover the plot with rocks. The rocks were to keep it from getting dug up. Then I didn’t hear from him, and then he told me, in our last telephone conversation, that he just couldn’t take my level of pain, a phrase that stood out to me. But now he’s a journalist. He has a nice place in the city and he flies all over the world and does stories about things like little brown girls being sold into prostitution. He’s one of those journalists who presents every story without any ambiguity at all, who finds stories to tell in which there is no way to locate more than one way to feel about anything.

  SIGNS

  I drive by a motel when I need anything from the other side of town. Town’s built like an hourglass, and there’s a big lit sun shining from the motel sign, there at the waist. They put all the houses down here and all the stuff up there, so if I’m going to get anything I have to go by it. That’s a pun.

  And you wouldn’t believe the congestion—no one in charge.

  In the motel, pets are okay. There’s a parking lot around the motel, and a rising hill of grass around that, like the bank of a moat. Wait until it really starts raining!

  An hourglass. Figures. Because of time, running out, running errands, crappy town.

  So I drive by, and this time it’s day, with the sun over the sun. I see a woman’s head doing a swivel, like behind the bank she’s riding in a bumper car in a parking space. There’s a dog on a leash; I can’t see the dog, but I know it’s there behind the land. This is suspicious, or prophetic, seeing someone’s head but not whatever makes it do the things it does. The left hand doesn’t know the right, brain squeezed out or removed like the ribs of Victorian ladies.

  Then at night… I’m making my smoke run, my gin run… I tell you… the sun at night. It’s not right. It’s a symptom. It cancels everything out. But if I want anything in this place, it’s down that one road. One rich farmer stuck a store in his field long ago and the town formed in relation to it.

  Night, day. I think about getting by. It’s hard to tell if I get any sleep. I feel pressure to do one thing or another. I don’t know what to do. Sometimes I look up and say “Give me a sign!” but of course I’m kidding. I’ll tell you the one for the Golden Nozzle Carwash: a giant showerhead raining gold on the silhouette of a sedan. You know what the sedan stands for. It stands for you and me. These are the signs in this town. Only a matter of time before something blows.

  MINIONS

  The minions lined their sneakers along the wall and then became two lines themselves, like teams at the end of a game, and each by each held hands and touched foreheads. They were past words. They’d been hollering and leafleting for months. They’d been psyching themselves up and out for years. They lay in their cots like orphans. Hands to hearts, eyes to the black air, the rafters of the bunker invisible in the dark, a sky without stars, everything celestial sprinkling the insides of their domed minds. They waited for the world to disintegrate. It would disintegrate before next light and they waited for a red and gold explosion to light the universe in one final burst. They listened to night tick through the wooden walls. It could be now, or now, or now. Someone held back a sneeze and then sneezed. They’d abandoned their timepieces in the river that evening at dusk, but at two a.m. a boy named Jonathan got up from his cot, cracked open the door, put his penis out, and peed. Then he went back to his cot. One woman, a secret doubter, had taken a bottle of pills before she lay down to wait and died with the click the boy made closing the door.

  By morning there have been three more suicides and two of the leaders have disappeared into the woods. One leader is weeping under a tree, fallen leaves in his fists. One leader is running, running, running, hoping he will die mid-step, trying to feel the moment within each step when he is sure both feet are off the ground because he feels that if he can prolong that beat he will be flying, he will be without his body finally, he will be light, light air, light light. In the hut one minion has punched another in the chest. One is cross-legged on her cot, watching. She’s vacant or else she’s fuming. Three have closed themselves in the kitchen and begun to screw. Two are quietly packing their knapsacks, stuffing them as full as they can with any useful items the group had forgotten or not bothered to purge: a woolen lap blanket, a can-opener, a tin of olives, a box of matches, a comb, a tube of lip balm. By two o’clock in the afternoon the bunker is empty except for a few dead bodies and one man, badly beaten, who is clinging to his cot like it’s a raft, gasping for breath and calling “Help! Help!”

  MIRROR

  Two days since the apocalypse and freckles rise in the skin around my mouth. I am very close to my face, looking. Green funnels of what were pastures whirl and spit in the background. The last bits of cities are like comets and pass behind my head as if I am shooting myself repeatedly, as if I shoot myself and the fireballs go in one ear and out the other. It’s riveting. It’s hypnotic. My face contains more colors than are left in the universe. I watched Miranda’s teeth panic and run away. I watched Amber buckle. Now, in the mirror, there is no comparison. It’s me, and everything, and that’s all.

  LUCKY

  People were walking around in the street, everywhere, in their clothes, with their personalit
ies like so many fish. People looking sharp as weapons in holsters—I’m talking potential for protection or striking out in equal but opposite directions. Minds in their bones, bones in their minds. Bones in the future and bones in the past, bones in clothes, with premonitions and shadows, fore and aft. Mid-morning, big engine sun banging on cement and metal, and all the littler engines in the streets and buildings, in the cars and bodies. A blond girl squinted out the giant window of the 7-Eleven, luckiest store in the world. She’d been connecting the dots with her car, one lucky star to the next, across the bright city. She wore a down coat. A girl rollerbladed by the window in a bikini, a bright pink headband with plastic feathery fluff on it that made her feel the fur lining of the hood of the girl on the other side. Three round and haloed heads, counting the sun. The girl in the bikini rollerbladed back, did a spin in front of the window and then leaned on a parked car, sucking on a soda, contemplating the girl in the parka in the air-conditioned store. She felt the condensation on her big cup. She felt her hip on a headlight. Luck, or whatever luck is code for, is cold, unbalanced, and connected.

  Sad girl in her mania. Sunny girl with her pop. Looking through glass as if it’s a mirror. All these people. How did they do it? Well, many did not.