Bromanoph
02-01-2004, 03:45 PM
This is the full version of the work, An unopened letter that no one will read, I realise it is a little long and thank any and all who read in advance. Much Love.
****
Why
An explanation, of sorts:
It was the end of the world, but nobody seemed to care. It happened too fast for anyone to form an opinion. Except, of course, for the lucky survivors – those whose immune systems were somehow strong enough to fight the toxic gas they later dubbed “GP” – God’s Punishment. I was a survivor of that battle-less war, and the only poet left alive, as far as we could tell. Consequently, I was the last woman alive, too…as far as we could tell. Oh, but it was disgusting when it happened! Far beyond the power of language to describe, but, seeing as I am the only one here who can begin to describe it, I will do so:
The Sky opened up one day, spewing a brown-green vomit locust swarm upon an unprotected world. It looked as if the Sky had become fed up with our insolence and tomfoolery and had belched back in one massive, ugly cloud all the junk and spare parts we had thrown into it all through the years of ‘civilized progress’.
Disgusting.
Rancid.
No one knew what it was that was coming for us so suddenly. No one knew how to stop it. Most were dead by the time they knew they were being approached by the steady train of Death.
I remember vividly the very sound of my brother’s breath, running away from his decaying body as he mouthed the truth nobody wanted to accept.
“We had it coming,” he said, “for a long time.”
Breathe out.
My brother… he knew.
He called it a long time ago. Years ago, if You care to know. He had a dream about it. About the end of the World. I guess a lot of us do. Sad thing is, his came true.
The day the world ended was just another normal, ordinary day – except for the inexplicable green tornadoes swirling in a chaotic dance through the universe, but very few saw these and those who did ignored them. Isn’t that what we always do for things we don’t understand? I mean… what is God? I’ve heard it said that God is Love, but would You believe it if You were me, where I am now? Don’t pretend You could say yes. I guess you could claim that your reading of this fairy-tale is due to the “grace of God” in itself, but I will tell you now that is only the stupid persistence of mankind to feel important that drugs your head. Don’t get me wrong. I’m sure God is a nice guy, but we ****ed up. What do inventors do with failed blueprints? They trash them. But enough of the pre-amble…let’s get back to the end.
So there was the sky.
It was belching green fire and raining all the tears it had kept inside for so long like a child, almost afraid of its parents’ anger. Finally, I suppose, it became aware of their false sense of power. It slept for a while. The sun did not rise, so as to allow the Sky darkness to help its reflections. In its dreams it saw something beautifully tragic – its revenge.
He would show his parents! He would be the furious deity they sent him to all those fancy schools to be!
A long time before this, a few of us more humble servants realized and accepted the futility of our daily dramas. We refused to pretend any longer that we were more than mere animals who thought they were smarter because they ignored their basic instincts. So we built shelters for the coming storm.
There were three of us, as always.
Myself, Fantincline; my Lover Sebastian and our friend and mentor of sorts, whom we call ‘Houdini.’ Come to think of it, he did say that the world would follow suit and disappear in a cloud of smoke, one day... Oh, the things we know now…
Most of my memories of that fateful day are now a cloud themselves…a haze of smoke that clears randomly to bless me with insight. I was high at the time, as I had been for the previous two weeks—not knowing when, but expecting such a thing to happen. I wanted to be ready to greet it with a smile…
At first, when it did, I blamed the hallucinogens, coupled with my lack of sleep. The day before, in a drug-enhanced frenzy, I had illegally spewed my bitter vitriol across the building of downtown New York, prophesizing Doom in mixed messages with white and red spray paint. I stood on the corner, naked except for a potato sack and a plastic set of wings plus halo. I was screaming filth and pornography into the closed ears of the humdrum of everyday.
“Love now”!
I hollered.
“The end is near!”
Like any prophet of the Truth, I was ignored.
Here I was, sharing the secrets of Life and could I arouse the interest of even one? Well, yes – One… but no more. ‘Houdini’ – I never asked for his ‘real’ name. He stopped and offered me a drink from a metal flask. My sore throat and eyes accepted, giggling and gurgling with gratefulness. It was Vodka. Straight. Beautiful.
We talked…
We drank…
We drank…
We drank…
We sang.
“Jesus loves me, this I know. For the Bible tells me so…”
We were generally ignored by the Mass, save the occasional inch-close drive-by egging and angry yodeling. We gave up on trying to save a world peopled by the likes of those. Instead, we saluted our mad brilliance and decided to retire to my slummy apartment, wherein I proceeded to introduce him to a shaking, raving Sebastian. My dear, dear Sebastian. With one frantic nod, they approved of one another. Sebastian suggested that I show ‘Houdini’ our prized possessions: mainly our beautifully duct-taped Time Machine and the hole we had dug 20 feet down into the dark ground.
IN CASE OF EMERGENCY
As was laughingly written on the label of our not-so-secret trap door. I figure the end of the World is emergency enough to open that hatch… 20 feet down a rickety ladder, we showed Houdini our own magic.
Stockpiled in our basement’s basement were enough cans of non-perishable food items and Mr. Noodles to last us a short lifetime, or three. Scattered about in artistic ‘order’ were books, magazines, pictures, poems, a dog bowl –just in case—a self-sufficient garden of assorted vegetables, herbs and grow-able drugs – mainly marijuana, magic mushrooms and the occasional cocaine plant. No outside world. No telephone. No TV. Just a lot of beautiful necessities, luxuries and otherwise not-worth-living-withouts. Music, though, in those crazy days to follow, became our Saviour.
We had decided we would still be romantic, even if there were no other lovers to impress. Thus, we decided to do everything in that pit by the grace of candlelight. [Sorry, I forgot to mention the cartons upon cartons of stolen cigarettes, booze, lighters and—how could I forget?—playing cards. There was also one knife, just in case…of something. We didn’t know why, but who does?
So I guess You can say it was Fate that brought us where we were and me where I am now. [Sorry, I don’t know where that is, or I would tell You. Maybe later I will find some maps.]
You could also call it luck, bad luck, God, ****, everything, nothing or even tra-la-la. Call it what you will, but it’s all the same thing. And, somehow, it exists forever without ever having been born. Bastard. I was I could live forever.
I hated my father. Now I miss him. Go figure.
Enough of me! I’m sorry… I wander and become lost in moments I haven’t forgotten how to live in. Forgive me, where was I?
Oh, right… the beginning of the End.
Since we knew the end was coming soon—we didn’t know it would be the next day!—we ate some of our homegrown mushrooms and tripped down to the corner store owned by the unhappy Arab. Between us, we had 531$ cash. We bought all the cigars we could, to celebrate, and tipped that frowning man somewhere in the range of 429.26$ for his grumpy service. We cautiously told him not to take offence, but to either dig a hole, find a cave or get rich by winning the lottery and giving somebody enough money to build him a one-man rocket and spacesuit in the span of 24 hours.
He didn’t take too kindly to our advice and, instead, telephoned the Psych Ward as we howled down the street, back home. What can I say? Some people are unbelievers.
I, on the other hand, at least know why I have no faith.
People like me, that is, all of humanity, do not deserve a Master so gracious as “Our” Lord. We are spineless, starless swine rolling in our own filth and telling each other we are clean.
Oh! Did I forget to mention I was pregnant when Time decided to come to a stuttering halt? I had known it for a long time. I don’t know when it happened, or how, or why… I guess there is no why. I almost forgot, too, until I woke up with something kicking a heartbeat. A very, very small heartbeat against my stomach lining…
My Baby.
My personal Jesus.
Sweet, Sweet Life! Why is Your cyanide so tastelessly tasty to inject?!
Back spasms.
Birth pains.
Dance, You ****ing angel!
I ate all the fruit I could, that night, celebrating the exhilaration of a lived life. I ate grapes. Lots of grapes. I felt like a bloated, purple Queen. Beauty.
The bacteria were everywhere the night before that day. I should have known, should have called the bluff of the healthy Universe – what, with everyone coughing and sneezing in some indecipherable, primordial ooze of a language. Ooze, I like that word…
Houdini coughed, explained everything, and snapped me back into the moment.
Drugs.
I told You I get like this.
“Where were You just now?” he inquired, raising one bushy eyebrow.
“Nowhere special.” I replied in a daze.
“Just the end of the world…”
We laughed. That’s a healthy thing to do, as I’ve been told. I’ve been told a lot of things. Mostly lies. Why was it all mostly lies? I guess words are just an acceptable lie to cover up the silence… makes sense.
It was perfect: we were as we craved to be. We had no money, no resources, no hopes. We were the happiest ‘men’ alive, as Henry Miller would put it.
We smoked some Ganja. Waved to God. Lit some cigarettes with a failing Calgary Flames lighter. Threw some Jazz on the ratty CD Player. Danced. Kicked. Screamed. Danced!
It was lovely as such times ought to be. We were, after all, saying goodnight and goodbye to the possibility of any of this ever happening again. Stumbling, dazed and weary inside our loving half-circle, half-triangle we finally fell, exhausted, into the arms of drugged sleep.
18 hours later, our glazed doughnut eyes opened groggily to pandemonium. Panic and chaos! But at this point, we didn’t know that the end was near. The only thing we knew was that we didn’t want to know why or where we were. It just so happened that we had climbed down without acknowledging emergency, into our cavern of hope in a mad world. We had eaten many chocolate bars. We had smoked many cigars. The place was a mess.
****canyado?
We struggled up the creaking ladder – one after the other, tumbling half-laughing into the bathroom to take turns confronting the disheveled monster in the mirror. We didn’t know what to make of it. We had walked outside into what looked like the set from a B-rated, black and white 1950’s science fiction movie. The world was upside down. The street and even the door we assumed we had just walked out of were all rubble. Ashes and pieces of glass everywhere, creating a pastime of defeating Death and infection for any of us spared from the Wrath of the Sky.
Our first question escaped three sets of lips simultaneously,
“What the ****?!”
We exploded into colourful laughter, then came down and melted into tears. A dusty dog poked his burnt face out from under the rubber remains of a once-car, growling. We moved back inside. Slowly... Gently... then ran for cover on turbo into the well of our sanctuary from this mad world. At first, we thought it was the drugs. Days after that horrible, horrible trip, we ventured to venture. Outside again, to see what it was really like...
We had been mistaken. It wasn't the drugs. We were wide-eyed and sober, now. This was bad.
Houdini brought the knife, just in case the dog was real. He was. So were his rabies. This was too much. Too soon. Too real. I fainted.
I woke up a week later. A week. I had gone into a coma, and since the hospital was now nothing more than a badly broken 'H'... there was nothing my two worried men could do. It still couldn't make sense to me that we were the sole survivors, somehow... You'd think that maybe Fate would have gotten better at cards and would have drawn more likely heroes, but no. Here we were, three drifting, drugged-up lunatics alive where everything else was dead.
Our neighbourhood looked like the surface of the moon. Dry, cratered. No water to be found anywhere. Oddly enough, the only building left standing in our direct vicinity was an open 24-hours 7-11, missing only the slurpee machine that had turned the floor into a would-be child's paradise. There were no children here.
We had not seen another living thing for days.
The radio offered no comfort.. unless you like pre-recorded talk programs about penguins and their mating habits. I didn't. There were a few more ridiculous looking buildings, half standing. Most of them failing, making the Leaning Tower of Piza seem like nothing special at all. What I found disturbingly hilarious was that the Credit Union still stood, perfectly untouched - virginal, even. The windows were free of fingerprints and smudges from chocolate-covered hands. I knew that even though all the people of the World were ashes, the machines were still rolling. Time was still trudging on. Ticking away inside that ugly building, day in, day out -- adding interest rates to the already formidably immeasurable debt of the Mass.
Maybe we needed this. As a way to get away... from money, from greed, from War.
What would we have left to fight for if we let the trees stand? the oil sit? the water dance? the earth replenish...
But, alas, we blame our imperfections on an apple and avoid acknowledging another avoidable disaster.
This is Life.
Other than the 7-11 and the Credit Union, the only other building we could make out was the Angry Arab's Convenience Store. How convenient. Little did we know that he had received a vision from God [Allah, sorry...] the night before the bomb fell. Allah warned him about the upcoming attack. That night, he picked up his things, paid a hooker to go with him and took off for the Mountains. So that means there were 5 of us... An angry Arab, a hooker, a dreamer, a street-prophet and a wanna-be magician.
This is the world we live in.
Since there was no one to stop us - since there was no one to do anything - we smashed the windows with a very conveniently placed bumper, a little dented from impact and sleeping, from the gutter. We proceeded to reap our booty and looted that unhappy man for the 429.26$ that had kept him alive, as if that were a blessing...
So be it.
We were Kings and Queens of this cowardly new world - wondering what was next and how long the chick peas and kidney beans would last us. We hauled our treasure back to the Batcave like leprous pirates, encumbered by the weight of our gold. By the time we fell down the ladder, it was night and we had to fight all the demons and monsters of the darkness to light the candles, pretending we were knights of the
round table.
Obviously we weren't. We had nothing to protect us from the onslaught of Time, and we had forgotten all about tables, in our rushed preparations. Our table was a dirt floor, but it performed majestically.
We ate some more mushrooms to allow Time the vanity of pretending to exist again. We counted backwards from 1000 a few times, trying to give something meaning. The shrooms did a good job of turning the candle’s light into rainbows. We drank some beer to turn the shadows into people – and, after a while, we disappeared into the Ocean of Sleep, dreaming our selves awake.
What came next we couldn’t have anticipated. Not even with the crystal ball we pulled out of a forgotten corner of the closet. [It was a snow-dome, but who cares?]
In this place in time, make-believe is the only thing real…
The drugs helped us believe we were other people in another time. I was Joan of Arc. My Lover was Bob Marley. Houdini was Houdini. We made love to reggae 14 times. Houdini pulled dust rabbits out of the corner, sulking. He only wiped away one tear. We couldn’t tell that the man in the moon was laughing hysterically at us.
God damn his crying eyes.
We woke up in the nuclear mourning. I think it was winter at the time. There was no snow because there was no water. We had to nourish ourselves with tears. So… We fought. We laughed. We did anything we could muster enough strength to do within the limits of malnourishment – catching every drop we could inside salty mason jars.
Sometimes, we would play a game called ‘Out’ – where we would hit ourselves repeatedly in the head with cans of peas and baby food – trying to see who was the first to pass out. The winner was the first to be blessed with the opium grace of dreams.
And oh, what dreams of orange and green we would have!
On Christmas, (I think it was Christmas…) peas and carrots danced upon our eyelids instead of visions and sugarplums. I would have preferred those. We weren’t Christian, and we certainly didn’t believe in God. If we ever did. We did use repetition and ritual as a means to carry on, though… This was our reason. Our stockings were just each one’s other sock, filled with creative dirt. Our feet soon got cold, so we were forced to dress again. To cover up the shameful nakedness of our incurable gangrene.
We needed something new. We tried to count seven days, but numbers and Time are harder to come by without stars, moon, or Sun… Oh, they were there, alright, but we could only see them after our stomachs rumbled with the empty pain of drug abuse. On our approximated New Years, we made a pact:
To find someone else.
For the Heaven or Hell of it, we prayed that morning.
Medicine.
Dreams of friendly lips and new voices pushed us gingerly out, into the broken world.
Oh, useless days…
We butchered our hope when we stumbled over hands and feet that didn’t belong to us. We ate its carcass for dinner. It didn’t taste all that pleasant. Certainly not pheasant. Certainly not chocolate from an Advent calendar. Everything was moldy.
We decided to race to the corner store. Once busy. Once occupied by that damnable angry Arab who always glared at us as if we were once again teenage thieves, returning after stealing chocolate bars to try to illegally purchase cigarettes. Or stood outside the doors of the store, begging older citizens to buy them for us.
Nostalgia… it’s lost its power here. It can’t really pull us backward anymore. Maybe that’s a good thing. Maybe good doesn’t exist anymore.
I was beginning to think that nothing did, when we found less than we had left the first and only time we had returned to that corner of childhood.
Signs of life! (Rejoice?)
Someone else had been there. They obviously liked Kitkat bars because there were none left. But there was something! Footprints! Footprints in the ashes… I had almost forgotten how to be excited about anything. Sex was growing as old and tasteless as the cigars we still smoked nightly, without cause for celebration. As old as the baby food we forced ourselves to gag on; night after repetitive night. But footsteps. Footsteps!
Ashes led the way through a rough course of debris and mummified bodies of smokers who had, or would have, saved the government the money of embalming costs by inhaling Formaldehyde among the list of 399 other chemicals they were addicted to when they still had mouths to smoke with.
What we saw when we arrived was nothing to call beautiful. It was a hut. The ugliest hut you can possibly imagine. It was a heaping pile of garbage; scrap bricks wood and plaster from all the houses that had any left to provide. Overtop of the door was a crudely composed sign with the word ‘MAYOR’ burnt into it, somehow… in the most crude, most childish crayon letters. I wanted to vomit.
How had we missed it before?
How had we taken so long to know we were not the only people left alive in this ‘world’?
I hit myself in the head repeatedly, absolving my sins until I was mellow enough to understand. What was left of my world splattered at my feet in a gasp of urine. I didn’t even notice.
A fat man in a torn and slimy Mickey Mouse shirt ran out of the house, screaming. He looked happy, territorial and insane, all at once. Too confused for his face to choose one emotion. He screamed something incomprehensible , an attempt at forcing meaning through dirty, broken teeth. It didn’t work.
As he ran toward us, Houdini stepped forward. Quicker than his own tricks, he brandished the rusty knife and thrust his mighty Excalibur into the hairy gut of that disgusting example of leftover humanity. The squealed like a wild boar, spewing the rest of his dirty language at my feet. I slipped and fell in mock grief. Sebastian gasped and almost went to reach out. To cry out. To just plain cry. To do anything.
In our pit, we had forfeited the value of human life. This self-proclaimed Mayor of New York meant nothing to us. I still vomited.
While I floundered like a gut-less fish, the reality failed to hit me. Nothing made sense but my mad flopping and rolling. I think I seizured, but when I came to, a stinking mess of disgust, I couldn’t explain for the life of me why. It was then that I removed any question that began with a ‘w’ from my personal dictionary, which grew shorter and shorter with every breath I forced to fill my shocked lungs. I wanted to wonder about something to keep my sense of balance and order in check.
Houdini smiled like a proud hunter from the days of the buffalo.
“Size doesn’t matter.” He throated lowly, half-heartedly. He just wanted something to be proud of.
We looted the Mayor’s house and came out stocked up with a lifetime supply of Kitkat bars, a few jugs of potable water from somewhere invisible and a new pair of boots for Sebastian. I think, if we had not been present, Houdini would have taken the head to add something fresh and exciting to his growing emporium of magic things.
I didn’t smile from that day forward.
We took the long way home on purpose, each of lost in our jungles of self. In mine, I tripped constantly. Sebastian lay down to wait for the panthers. Houdini stalked the shadows, like Rambo. He kicked every television we found, adding more cracks, until he came upon ‘the right one’. He picked it up and smiled wanly. “Entertainment.” We took it back with us and pretended to watch all of our favourite movies simultaneously. This distance ripped us further and further apart. Where else was there to go?
The entire disposable world was at our fingertips, but all we cared to do was break them and ourselves so that we would never have to feel again. The sunless mornings always caught us mourning. I got up early one morning and left, taking with me only enough shrooms to kill me within a few days, the diary I’ve kept and my favourite pen, almost out of ink. At least I could die. At least I could die happy.
I didn’t know where to go… there was no where to go…
I stumbled forward in my stupid stupor, looking for anything.
Does that count as something?
Old men play chess.
Stars die.
I burnt my lips with cigarettes and followed my feet to where they led. What I found was the closest thing to a forest I would ever see again. I couldn’t tell you how long I walked or where I was or am now. Under the giant arms of a leafless tree, I curled up like the baby inside of me and listened to the sound of two heartbeats in one body.
Cold, bloody hands shook me back into the life I didn’t want to live. I slit my eyes against the light. It was supposed to be a beautiful moment. It wasn’t.
“Sebastian?” I grogged.
It definitely wasn’t. Houdini, monacle and all, was stood above me, licking my body with bloodshot eyes. His hands were dripping. I lost my way.
If there had been a trigger handy, I would have pulled it. There wasn’t.
So, instead, I asked, fearfully, “Where’s Sebastian?” Afraid of the Answer.
“I don’t know” he claimed, obviously lying. The knife was missing, but his hands were still gooey.
“Where’s the knife?” I asked.
I think I already knew the answer.
“I don’t know,” he chimed again; annoying broken record.
He was an ugly man. He tried to touch me. I screamed and kicked him in the balls. He howled like a retarded banshee. I could hear him from blocks away as I ran for what was left of my life. I should have known something horrible would come from him; from my leaving the two of them alone. As far as we knew it, I was the only woman left. I was Sebastian’s. Houdini was Jealousy’s.
I had seen it in his eyes, though I know I never once led him to believe there was a chance in hell I would touch him or allow him to touch me. Maybe he figured that, if Sebastian was out of the picture, I was fair game. Who was going to stop him?
I ran and I ran and I wheezed and I held my stomach and I ran and I cried and I ran.
When I stopped to keel over and was forced to clutch my stomach, panting, I realized I had nothing.
Sebastian was dead. I was carrying his child, but Sebastian was dead. Kill me now. I wanted to die, but I didn’t. At this point, I figured I just needed to escape… from the pit, from the memories, from Sebastian’s beautifully butchered body. Away from death and pain and murderous magicians. Away. Anywhere Away. I walked until my feet bled. I stared at them, dumb for a few minutes, then kept walking. If time still existed, it passed quickly. I wasn’t counting.
One fish. Two fish. Red fish. Blue fish.* Thanks Dr. Seuss. Childhood. And now I was to be a mother. A Mother! A Mother?
Doubt ate at me as if I were a sweater and it was a swarm of moths. Since all the mothballs has disintegrated, I disappeared at alarming speeds into its murky waters. Since I had and owned nothing, since I was a stranger to the Earth with bleeding feet and crucified hands…
I wasn’t saving anybody. Not even myself, but Junior? We he mine to decide for?
It seemed bleak and pointless to bring life into a place where the survival rate was too weak to hold on to a percentage. I had been sober, clear-headed and cranky because of it for days now [weeks?]. But what is Time?
Drugless, but craving, I wandered wide-eyed, wondering… dreaming absolution in the blink of an eye. Mothers provide, don’t they? I had no dreams to offer. I was a gill-less fish flopping on a hot rock, roasting in the sun where no one could even finish me off. There was not enough meat on my body to be worth scavenging. I was going insane because everything was so damn real… like it should be. But shattered minds reflect possibility, and it all felt so unreal, I couldn’t think to thank it.
So the world punched my eyes again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again (getting tired… ‘You are feeling very sleepy’.) Disjointed smoke pulled my limbs in the direction of everywhere. Before ‘today’, I had never complained about how beautiful life is.
I was supremely angry at the fact that I was alive. One of the only ones alive. One of the alive. One of the One. One of. One. One leaf, from one tree… One. When we die, we don’t go bye-bye. When we die, we only go up. I was a constant dancing fool, sadistically in love with the fuel of life, of burning happiness…
And that is just what I wanted to do. Burn. Burn happiness. Burn happiness. Burn, burn, burn! I understood it all, now. It all made sense, but I’m not about to tell you what can’t be put into words. Besides, my drug abuse had made me clairvoyant. I know. I know, even as you are reading this.
The steady horse of the Third World War is coming to you at a gallop. He has a gun. He has a moustache like Hitler. He is smiling.
Laugh hard, it’s a long way down.
So what do I do? What did I do? I ate my words as the last supper. I inhaled deeply in meditation, ingesting the poison of carbon dioxide from all those melted cigarette factories in the mountains of Tibet.
I killed my self.
I found the Water of Life and I choked my way to the ocean floor.
I took with me the last hope of humanity.
I don’t know how Eve did it. All I knew is that I didn’t want to be the next woman to be blamed for everything. How could I bear a child in a world this ugly and cold?
When my body came to, devoid of spirit and cramped, it rose like a puppet and trudged toward a lake whose waters were now acids, eating what is left of the earth.
My body walked forward, silently embracing death. Embracing the violet hum. The Light. Embracing my dead child, the Last Messiah; holding all of his dead dreams in frail, shaking arms.
And I left you this… my humanly inaccurate account of what is, was, will be.
When we started, there was a big Bang.
When we ended, there wasn’t even a whimper.
Oh, but that’s not the end.
There’s an End?
The hooker. Remember the hooker? Yeah. That slut ****ed you all over real good. Her and that angry Arab started a whole new world. I spit on the perfect bitch.
**** you Eve.
You damned us all.
Keep your eyes open when you hear the bomb coming.
****
Why
An explanation, of sorts:
It was the end of the world, but nobody seemed to care. It happened too fast for anyone to form an opinion. Except, of course, for the lucky survivors – those whose immune systems were somehow strong enough to fight the toxic gas they later dubbed “GP” – God’s Punishment. I was a survivor of that battle-less war, and the only poet left alive, as far as we could tell. Consequently, I was the last woman alive, too…as far as we could tell. Oh, but it was disgusting when it happened! Far beyond the power of language to describe, but, seeing as I am the only one here who can begin to describe it, I will do so:
The Sky opened up one day, spewing a brown-green vomit locust swarm upon an unprotected world. It looked as if the Sky had become fed up with our insolence and tomfoolery and had belched back in one massive, ugly cloud all the junk and spare parts we had thrown into it all through the years of ‘civilized progress’.
Disgusting.
Rancid.
No one knew what it was that was coming for us so suddenly. No one knew how to stop it. Most were dead by the time they knew they were being approached by the steady train of Death.
I remember vividly the very sound of my brother’s breath, running away from his decaying body as he mouthed the truth nobody wanted to accept.
“We had it coming,” he said, “for a long time.”
Breathe out.
My brother… he knew.
He called it a long time ago. Years ago, if You care to know. He had a dream about it. About the end of the World. I guess a lot of us do. Sad thing is, his came true.
The day the world ended was just another normal, ordinary day – except for the inexplicable green tornadoes swirling in a chaotic dance through the universe, but very few saw these and those who did ignored them. Isn’t that what we always do for things we don’t understand? I mean… what is God? I’ve heard it said that God is Love, but would You believe it if You were me, where I am now? Don’t pretend You could say yes. I guess you could claim that your reading of this fairy-tale is due to the “grace of God” in itself, but I will tell you now that is only the stupid persistence of mankind to feel important that drugs your head. Don’t get me wrong. I’m sure God is a nice guy, but we ****ed up. What do inventors do with failed blueprints? They trash them. But enough of the pre-amble…let’s get back to the end.
So there was the sky.
It was belching green fire and raining all the tears it had kept inside for so long like a child, almost afraid of its parents’ anger. Finally, I suppose, it became aware of their false sense of power. It slept for a while. The sun did not rise, so as to allow the Sky darkness to help its reflections. In its dreams it saw something beautifully tragic – its revenge.
He would show his parents! He would be the furious deity they sent him to all those fancy schools to be!
A long time before this, a few of us more humble servants realized and accepted the futility of our daily dramas. We refused to pretend any longer that we were more than mere animals who thought they were smarter because they ignored their basic instincts. So we built shelters for the coming storm.
There were three of us, as always.
Myself, Fantincline; my Lover Sebastian and our friend and mentor of sorts, whom we call ‘Houdini.’ Come to think of it, he did say that the world would follow suit and disappear in a cloud of smoke, one day... Oh, the things we know now…
Most of my memories of that fateful day are now a cloud themselves…a haze of smoke that clears randomly to bless me with insight. I was high at the time, as I had been for the previous two weeks—not knowing when, but expecting such a thing to happen. I wanted to be ready to greet it with a smile…
At first, when it did, I blamed the hallucinogens, coupled with my lack of sleep. The day before, in a drug-enhanced frenzy, I had illegally spewed my bitter vitriol across the building of downtown New York, prophesizing Doom in mixed messages with white and red spray paint. I stood on the corner, naked except for a potato sack and a plastic set of wings plus halo. I was screaming filth and pornography into the closed ears of the humdrum of everyday.
“Love now”!
I hollered.
“The end is near!”
Like any prophet of the Truth, I was ignored.
Here I was, sharing the secrets of Life and could I arouse the interest of even one? Well, yes – One… but no more. ‘Houdini’ – I never asked for his ‘real’ name. He stopped and offered me a drink from a metal flask. My sore throat and eyes accepted, giggling and gurgling with gratefulness. It was Vodka. Straight. Beautiful.
We talked…
We drank…
We drank…
We drank…
We sang.
“Jesus loves me, this I know. For the Bible tells me so…”
We were generally ignored by the Mass, save the occasional inch-close drive-by egging and angry yodeling. We gave up on trying to save a world peopled by the likes of those. Instead, we saluted our mad brilliance and decided to retire to my slummy apartment, wherein I proceeded to introduce him to a shaking, raving Sebastian. My dear, dear Sebastian. With one frantic nod, they approved of one another. Sebastian suggested that I show ‘Houdini’ our prized possessions: mainly our beautifully duct-taped Time Machine and the hole we had dug 20 feet down into the dark ground.
IN CASE OF EMERGENCY
As was laughingly written on the label of our not-so-secret trap door. I figure the end of the World is emergency enough to open that hatch… 20 feet down a rickety ladder, we showed Houdini our own magic.
Stockpiled in our basement’s basement were enough cans of non-perishable food items and Mr. Noodles to last us a short lifetime, or three. Scattered about in artistic ‘order’ were books, magazines, pictures, poems, a dog bowl –just in case—a self-sufficient garden of assorted vegetables, herbs and grow-able drugs – mainly marijuana, magic mushrooms and the occasional cocaine plant. No outside world. No telephone. No TV. Just a lot of beautiful necessities, luxuries and otherwise not-worth-living-withouts. Music, though, in those crazy days to follow, became our Saviour.
We had decided we would still be romantic, even if there were no other lovers to impress. Thus, we decided to do everything in that pit by the grace of candlelight. [Sorry, I forgot to mention the cartons upon cartons of stolen cigarettes, booze, lighters and—how could I forget?—playing cards. There was also one knife, just in case…of something. We didn’t know why, but who does?
So I guess You can say it was Fate that brought us where we were and me where I am now. [Sorry, I don’t know where that is, or I would tell You. Maybe later I will find some maps.]
You could also call it luck, bad luck, God, ****, everything, nothing or even tra-la-la. Call it what you will, but it’s all the same thing. And, somehow, it exists forever without ever having been born. Bastard. I was I could live forever.
I hated my father. Now I miss him. Go figure.
Enough of me! I’m sorry… I wander and become lost in moments I haven’t forgotten how to live in. Forgive me, where was I?
Oh, right… the beginning of the End.
Since we knew the end was coming soon—we didn’t know it would be the next day!—we ate some of our homegrown mushrooms and tripped down to the corner store owned by the unhappy Arab. Between us, we had 531$ cash. We bought all the cigars we could, to celebrate, and tipped that frowning man somewhere in the range of 429.26$ for his grumpy service. We cautiously told him not to take offence, but to either dig a hole, find a cave or get rich by winning the lottery and giving somebody enough money to build him a one-man rocket and spacesuit in the span of 24 hours.
He didn’t take too kindly to our advice and, instead, telephoned the Psych Ward as we howled down the street, back home. What can I say? Some people are unbelievers.
I, on the other hand, at least know why I have no faith.
People like me, that is, all of humanity, do not deserve a Master so gracious as “Our” Lord. We are spineless, starless swine rolling in our own filth and telling each other we are clean.
Oh! Did I forget to mention I was pregnant when Time decided to come to a stuttering halt? I had known it for a long time. I don’t know when it happened, or how, or why… I guess there is no why. I almost forgot, too, until I woke up with something kicking a heartbeat. A very, very small heartbeat against my stomach lining…
My Baby.
My personal Jesus.
Sweet, Sweet Life! Why is Your cyanide so tastelessly tasty to inject?!
Back spasms.
Birth pains.
Dance, You ****ing angel!
I ate all the fruit I could, that night, celebrating the exhilaration of a lived life. I ate grapes. Lots of grapes. I felt like a bloated, purple Queen. Beauty.
The bacteria were everywhere the night before that day. I should have known, should have called the bluff of the healthy Universe – what, with everyone coughing and sneezing in some indecipherable, primordial ooze of a language. Ooze, I like that word…
Houdini coughed, explained everything, and snapped me back into the moment.
Drugs.
I told You I get like this.
“Where were You just now?” he inquired, raising one bushy eyebrow.
“Nowhere special.” I replied in a daze.
“Just the end of the world…”
We laughed. That’s a healthy thing to do, as I’ve been told. I’ve been told a lot of things. Mostly lies. Why was it all mostly lies? I guess words are just an acceptable lie to cover up the silence… makes sense.
It was perfect: we were as we craved to be. We had no money, no resources, no hopes. We were the happiest ‘men’ alive, as Henry Miller would put it.
We smoked some Ganja. Waved to God. Lit some cigarettes with a failing Calgary Flames lighter. Threw some Jazz on the ratty CD Player. Danced. Kicked. Screamed. Danced!
It was lovely as such times ought to be. We were, after all, saying goodnight and goodbye to the possibility of any of this ever happening again. Stumbling, dazed and weary inside our loving half-circle, half-triangle we finally fell, exhausted, into the arms of drugged sleep.
18 hours later, our glazed doughnut eyes opened groggily to pandemonium. Panic and chaos! But at this point, we didn’t know that the end was near. The only thing we knew was that we didn’t want to know why or where we were. It just so happened that we had climbed down without acknowledging emergency, into our cavern of hope in a mad world. We had eaten many chocolate bars. We had smoked many cigars. The place was a mess.
****canyado?
We struggled up the creaking ladder – one after the other, tumbling half-laughing into the bathroom to take turns confronting the disheveled monster in the mirror. We didn’t know what to make of it. We had walked outside into what looked like the set from a B-rated, black and white 1950’s science fiction movie. The world was upside down. The street and even the door we assumed we had just walked out of were all rubble. Ashes and pieces of glass everywhere, creating a pastime of defeating Death and infection for any of us spared from the Wrath of the Sky.
Our first question escaped three sets of lips simultaneously,
“What the ****?!”
We exploded into colourful laughter, then came down and melted into tears. A dusty dog poked his burnt face out from under the rubber remains of a once-car, growling. We moved back inside. Slowly... Gently... then ran for cover on turbo into the well of our sanctuary from this mad world. At first, we thought it was the drugs. Days after that horrible, horrible trip, we ventured to venture. Outside again, to see what it was really like...
We had been mistaken. It wasn't the drugs. We were wide-eyed and sober, now. This was bad.
Houdini brought the knife, just in case the dog was real. He was. So were his rabies. This was too much. Too soon. Too real. I fainted.
I woke up a week later. A week. I had gone into a coma, and since the hospital was now nothing more than a badly broken 'H'... there was nothing my two worried men could do. It still couldn't make sense to me that we were the sole survivors, somehow... You'd think that maybe Fate would have gotten better at cards and would have drawn more likely heroes, but no. Here we were, three drifting, drugged-up lunatics alive where everything else was dead.
Our neighbourhood looked like the surface of the moon. Dry, cratered. No water to be found anywhere. Oddly enough, the only building left standing in our direct vicinity was an open 24-hours 7-11, missing only the slurpee machine that had turned the floor into a would-be child's paradise. There were no children here.
We had not seen another living thing for days.
The radio offered no comfort.. unless you like pre-recorded talk programs about penguins and their mating habits. I didn't. There were a few more ridiculous looking buildings, half standing. Most of them failing, making the Leaning Tower of Piza seem like nothing special at all. What I found disturbingly hilarious was that the Credit Union still stood, perfectly untouched - virginal, even. The windows were free of fingerprints and smudges from chocolate-covered hands. I knew that even though all the people of the World were ashes, the machines were still rolling. Time was still trudging on. Ticking away inside that ugly building, day in, day out -- adding interest rates to the already formidably immeasurable debt of the Mass.
Maybe we needed this. As a way to get away... from money, from greed, from War.
What would we have left to fight for if we let the trees stand? the oil sit? the water dance? the earth replenish...
But, alas, we blame our imperfections on an apple and avoid acknowledging another avoidable disaster.
This is Life.
Other than the 7-11 and the Credit Union, the only other building we could make out was the Angry Arab's Convenience Store. How convenient. Little did we know that he had received a vision from God [Allah, sorry...] the night before the bomb fell. Allah warned him about the upcoming attack. That night, he picked up his things, paid a hooker to go with him and took off for the Mountains. So that means there were 5 of us... An angry Arab, a hooker, a dreamer, a street-prophet and a wanna-be magician.
This is the world we live in.
Since there was no one to stop us - since there was no one to do anything - we smashed the windows with a very conveniently placed bumper, a little dented from impact and sleeping, from the gutter. We proceeded to reap our booty and looted that unhappy man for the 429.26$ that had kept him alive, as if that were a blessing...
So be it.
We were Kings and Queens of this cowardly new world - wondering what was next and how long the chick peas and kidney beans would last us. We hauled our treasure back to the Batcave like leprous pirates, encumbered by the weight of our gold. By the time we fell down the ladder, it was night and we had to fight all the demons and monsters of the darkness to light the candles, pretending we were knights of the
round table.
Obviously we weren't. We had nothing to protect us from the onslaught of Time, and we had forgotten all about tables, in our rushed preparations. Our table was a dirt floor, but it performed majestically.
We ate some more mushrooms to allow Time the vanity of pretending to exist again. We counted backwards from 1000 a few times, trying to give something meaning. The shrooms did a good job of turning the candle’s light into rainbows. We drank some beer to turn the shadows into people – and, after a while, we disappeared into the Ocean of Sleep, dreaming our selves awake.
What came next we couldn’t have anticipated. Not even with the crystal ball we pulled out of a forgotten corner of the closet. [It was a snow-dome, but who cares?]
In this place in time, make-believe is the only thing real…
The drugs helped us believe we were other people in another time. I was Joan of Arc. My Lover was Bob Marley. Houdini was Houdini. We made love to reggae 14 times. Houdini pulled dust rabbits out of the corner, sulking. He only wiped away one tear. We couldn’t tell that the man in the moon was laughing hysterically at us.
God damn his crying eyes.
We woke up in the nuclear mourning. I think it was winter at the time. There was no snow because there was no water. We had to nourish ourselves with tears. So… We fought. We laughed. We did anything we could muster enough strength to do within the limits of malnourishment – catching every drop we could inside salty mason jars.
Sometimes, we would play a game called ‘Out’ – where we would hit ourselves repeatedly in the head with cans of peas and baby food – trying to see who was the first to pass out. The winner was the first to be blessed with the opium grace of dreams.
And oh, what dreams of orange and green we would have!
On Christmas, (I think it was Christmas…) peas and carrots danced upon our eyelids instead of visions and sugarplums. I would have preferred those. We weren’t Christian, and we certainly didn’t believe in God. If we ever did. We did use repetition and ritual as a means to carry on, though… This was our reason. Our stockings were just each one’s other sock, filled with creative dirt. Our feet soon got cold, so we were forced to dress again. To cover up the shameful nakedness of our incurable gangrene.
We needed something new. We tried to count seven days, but numbers and Time are harder to come by without stars, moon, or Sun… Oh, they were there, alright, but we could only see them after our stomachs rumbled with the empty pain of drug abuse. On our approximated New Years, we made a pact:
To find someone else.
For the Heaven or Hell of it, we prayed that morning.
Medicine.
Dreams of friendly lips and new voices pushed us gingerly out, into the broken world.
Oh, useless days…
We butchered our hope when we stumbled over hands and feet that didn’t belong to us. We ate its carcass for dinner. It didn’t taste all that pleasant. Certainly not pheasant. Certainly not chocolate from an Advent calendar. Everything was moldy.
We decided to race to the corner store. Once busy. Once occupied by that damnable angry Arab who always glared at us as if we were once again teenage thieves, returning after stealing chocolate bars to try to illegally purchase cigarettes. Or stood outside the doors of the store, begging older citizens to buy them for us.
Nostalgia… it’s lost its power here. It can’t really pull us backward anymore. Maybe that’s a good thing. Maybe good doesn’t exist anymore.
I was beginning to think that nothing did, when we found less than we had left the first and only time we had returned to that corner of childhood.
Signs of life! (Rejoice?)
Someone else had been there. They obviously liked Kitkat bars because there were none left. But there was something! Footprints! Footprints in the ashes… I had almost forgotten how to be excited about anything. Sex was growing as old and tasteless as the cigars we still smoked nightly, without cause for celebration. As old as the baby food we forced ourselves to gag on; night after repetitive night. But footsteps. Footsteps!
Ashes led the way through a rough course of debris and mummified bodies of smokers who had, or would have, saved the government the money of embalming costs by inhaling Formaldehyde among the list of 399 other chemicals they were addicted to when they still had mouths to smoke with.
What we saw when we arrived was nothing to call beautiful. It was a hut. The ugliest hut you can possibly imagine. It was a heaping pile of garbage; scrap bricks wood and plaster from all the houses that had any left to provide. Overtop of the door was a crudely composed sign with the word ‘MAYOR’ burnt into it, somehow… in the most crude, most childish crayon letters. I wanted to vomit.
How had we missed it before?
How had we taken so long to know we were not the only people left alive in this ‘world’?
I hit myself in the head repeatedly, absolving my sins until I was mellow enough to understand. What was left of my world splattered at my feet in a gasp of urine. I didn’t even notice.
A fat man in a torn and slimy Mickey Mouse shirt ran out of the house, screaming. He looked happy, territorial and insane, all at once. Too confused for his face to choose one emotion. He screamed something incomprehensible , an attempt at forcing meaning through dirty, broken teeth. It didn’t work.
As he ran toward us, Houdini stepped forward. Quicker than his own tricks, he brandished the rusty knife and thrust his mighty Excalibur into the hairy gut of that disgusting example of leftover humanity. The squealed like a wild boar, spewing the rest of his dirty language at my feet. I slipped and fell in mock grief. Sebastian gasped and almost went to reach out. To cry out. To just plain cry. To do anything.
In our pit, we had forfeited the value of human life. This self-proclaimed Mayor of New York meant nothing to us. I still vomited.
While I floundered like a gut-less fish, the reality failed to hit me. Nothing made sense but my mad flopping and rolling. I think I seizured, but when I came to, a stinking mess of disgust, I couldn’t explain for the life of me why. It was then that I removed any question that began with a ‘w’ from my personal dictionary, which grew shorter and shorter with every breath I forced to fill my shocked lungs. I wanted to wonder about something to keep my sense of balance and order in check.
Houdini smiled like a proud hunter from the days of the buffalo.
“Size doesn’t matter.” He throated lowly, half-heartedly. He just wanted something to be proud of.
We looted the Mayor’s house and came out stocked up with a lifetime supply of Kitkat bars, a few jugs of potable water from somewhere invisible and a new pair of boots for Sebastian. I think, if we had not been present, Houdini would have taken the head to add something fresh and exciting to his growing emporium of magic things.
I didn’t smile from that day forward.
We took the long way home on purpose, each of lost in our jungles of self. In mine, I tripped constantly. Sebastian lay down to wait for the panthers. Houdini stalked the shadows, like Rambo. He kicked every television we found, adding more cracks, until he came upon ‘the right one’. He picked it up and smiled wanly. “Entertainment.” We took it back with us and pretended to watch all of our favourite movies simultaneously. This distance ripped us further and further apart. Where else was there to go?
The entire disposable world was at our fingertips, but all we cared to do was break them and ourselves so that we would never have to feel again. The sunless mornings always caught us mourning. I got up early one morning and left, taking with me only enough shrooms to kill me within a few days, the diary I’ve kept and my favourite pen, almost out of ink. At least I could die. At least I could die happy.
I didn’t know where to go… there was no where to go…
I stumbled forward in my stupid stupor, looking for anything.
Does that count as something?
Old men play chess.
Stars die.
I burnt my lips with cigarettes and followed my feet to where they led. What I found was the closest thing to a forest I would ever see again. I couldn’t tell you how long I walked or where I was or am now. Under the giant arms of a leafless tree, I curled up like the baby inside of me and listened to the sound of two heartbeats in one body.
Cold, bloody hands shook me back into the life I didn’t want to live. I slit my eyes against the light. It was supposed to be a beautiful moment. It wasn’t.
“Sebastian?” I grogged.
It definitely wasn’t. Houdini, monacle and all, was stood above me, licking my body with bloodshot eyes. His hands were dripping. I lost my way.
If there had been a trigger handy, I would have pulled it. There wasn’t.
So, instead, I asked, fearfully, “Where’s Sebastian?” Afraid of the Answer.
“I don’t know” he claimed, obviously lying. The knife was missing, but his hands were still gooey.
“Where’s the knife?” I asked.
I think I already knew the answer.
“I don’t know,” he chimed again; annoying broken record.
He was an ugly man. He tried to touch me. I screamed and kicked him in the balls. He howled like a retarded banshee. I could hear him from blocks away as I ran for what was left of my life. I should have known something horrible would come from him; from my leaving the two of them alone. As far as we knew it, I was the only woman left. I was Sebastian’s. Houdini was Jealousy’s.
I had seen it in his eyes, though I know I never once led him to believe there was a chance in hell I would touch him or allow him to touch me. Maybe he figured that, if Sebastian was out of the picture, I was fair game. Who was going to stop him?
I ran and I ran and I wheezed and I held my stomach and I ran and I cried and I ran.
When I stopped to keel over and was forced to clutch my stomach, panting, I realized I had nothing.
Sebastian was dead. I was carrying his child, but Sebastian was dead. Kill me now. I wanted to die, but I didn’t. At this point, I figured I just needed to escape… from the pit, from the memories, from Sebastian’s beautifully butchered body. Away from death and pain and murderous magicians. Away. Anywhere Away. I walked until my feet bled. I stared at them, dumb for a few minutes, then kept walking. If time still existed, it passed quickly. I wasn’t counting.
One fish. Two fish. Red fish. Blue fish.* Thanks Dr. Seuss. Childhood. And now I was to be a mother. A Mother! A Mother?
Doubt ate at me as if I were a sweater and it was a swarm of moths. Since all the mothballs has disintegrated, I disappeared at alarming speeds into its murky waters. Since I had and owned nothing, since I was a stranger to the Earth with bleeding feet and crucified hands…
I wasn’t saving anybody. Not even myself, but Junior? We he mine to decide for?
It seemed bleak and pointless to bring life into a place where the survival rate was too weak to hold on to a percentage. I had been sober, clear-headed and cranky because of it for days now [weeks?]. But what is Time?
Drugless, but craving, I wandered wide-eyed, wondering… dreaming absolution in the blink of an eye. Mothers provide, don’t they? I had no dreams to offer. I was a gill-less fish flopping on a hot rock, roasting in the sun where no one could even finish me off. There was not enough meat on my body to be worth scavenging. I was going insane because everything was so damn real… like it should be. But shattered minds reflect possibility, and it all felt so unreal, I couldn’t think to thank it.
So the world punched my eyes again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again (getting tired… ‘You are feeling very sleepy’.) Disjointed smoke pulled my limbs in the direction of everywhere. Before ‘today’, I had never complained about how beautiful life is.
I was supremely angry at the fact that I was alive. One of the only ones alive. One of the alive. One of the One. One of. One. One leaf, from one tree… One. When we die, we don’t go bye-bye. When we die, we only go up. I was a constant dancing fool, sadistically in love with the fuel of life, of burning happiness…
And that is just what I wanted to do. Burn. Burn happiness. Burn happiness. Burn, burn, burn! I understood it all, now. It all made sense, but I’m not about to tell you what can’t be put into words. Besides, my drug abuse had made me clairvoyant. I know. I know, even as you are reading this.
The steady horse of the Third World War is coming to you at a gallop. He has a gun. He has a moustache like Hitler. He is smiling.
Laugh hard, it’s a long way down.
So what do I do? What did I do? I ate my words as the last supper. I inhaled deeply in meditation, ingesting the poison of carbon dioxide from all those melted cigarette factories in the mountains of Tibet.
I killed my self.
I found the Water of Life and I choked my way to the ocean floor.
I took with me the last hope of humanity.
I don’t know how Eve did it. All I knew is that I didn’t want to be the next woman to be blamed for everything. How could I bear a child in a world this ugly and cold?
When my body came to, devoid of spirit and cramped, it rose like a puppet and trudged toward a lake whose waters were now acids, eating what is left of the earth.
My body walked forward, silently embracing death. Embracing the violet hum. The Light. Embracing my dead child, the Last Messiah; holding all of his dead dreams in frail, shaking arms.
And I left you this… my humanly inaccurate account of what is, was, will be.
When we started, there was a big Bang.
When we ended, there wasn’t even a whimper.
Oh, but that’s not the end.
There’s an End?
The hooker. Remember the hooker? Yeah. That slut ****ed you all over real good. Her and that angry Arab started a whole new world. I spit on the perfect bitch.
**** you Eve.
You damned us all.
Keep your eyes open when you hear the bomb coming.