Now Karen was gaping up at the television in unconscious mimicry of Joshua, a state of disbelief seeping into her that this woman—the one with the flaming red hair built up into an Elvis Presley-style bun in the front and the floral-printed dress jacket with the silk scarf tied into a fat red bow; the one projecting herself into living rooms and lobbies across the world—that she could be the same whose face had been a ubiquitous presence at the scene of the crime which had the two of them locked in separate interrogation cells and, according to certain conjecture, had kicked off this whole bizarre, protracted, world-destabilizing affair.
The True Teachings of Naidu: How Randomness, Variety and Purity of Intention Created the Universe.
It would be several hours before Adrian looked away from the monitor. Swiping and scrolling the empty air while absorbing himself into a wonderland of charts, pivot tables and waveform diagrams. Equations galore, all riddled with Greek symbols and exponents. At some point, before his eyes began to dry out, the data began to paint a picture which gradually arranged into a story and then transforming into an ever-expanding stave of sheet music. The notes, at first, resonated faintly in the shadowy rafters of the control room and the mind alike, until at some point, while nodding off in his chair, a grand symphony performance came rushing in to sweep him far away into a river of dreams not of this world.
And then she landed, coming to a momentary rest. Just like that, she was done with the jumping and the skipping and the singing and the shouting and anything else to do with the superpowers that held all that was comprehensible into precarious alignment.
Sixty-Seven Thousand, Two Hundred and Thirty-Two Years and Sixteen Days Earlier
Isa stumbled along the beach, whimpering with every step while clutching at her pregnant belly which was as hard as a drum and hot to the touch. It felt like it would rupture at any moment.
She was dead already and she knew it.
There was only that bobbing bundle of stringy, dirty-blonde hair fading into a sea of other heads bobbing and faces coming and going, of storylines intersecting and entwining and then fraying only to become irretrievably lost in the interminable wave-pattern of curiosities fleeting and nothingness everlasting.
The whole affair was seemingly a replay of some sentimental act he had dreamed up in his battle-weary mind, half-asleep and half-wired in waiting out the night in the rubble of a compromised safe house halfway across the world. Part of him wondered if this was nothing more than the vivid delusion stretching out the faint but escalating whistle between the click of the enemy gun and the bullet exiting the back of his skull.
“Will they remember this existence?”
“Maybe in the way fragments of forgotten dreams sometimes lightly superimpose themselves in the mind many years later, only to dissolve in a blink.”
It was like that perfect song you replay over and over. And even if you weren’t to hear it again until years later you would know exactly the notes and exactly the sequence in which they would sound and exactly the feelings they would evoke.
But one thing he did know. They were sure going to miss these days when the world and their lives in many cases nearly came to an end.
Years later she would still wake up in the night to the feel of those perfectly plump little cheeks pressed against her lips in the same way an amputee is always scratching at their phantom limb. And also the sound of that sad, soft cry. Forever stuck in her mind and always arousing her every faculty and caregiving instinct. And to commemorate each birthday, she would assemble a miniature version of the craft that had borne him away and she would release it downstream with the same aching hope with which she had relinquished the infant child that it might find him alive and well and kindle within him the glint of a familiar comfort knowing that the one who bled and suffered to give him a chance at life still yearned for his sake and always would across the expanse of the glittered stars and sleepless nights by which they were separated but also by which goodness somehow found a way.
They had that look in their eyes she recognized all too well. The “fuck around and find out even if you’re a hundred-pound woman who punches like a baby because I don’t give a fuck I just like to hurt people” look.
The well-worn track was as straight as Gadsden’s ruler when the nineteenth-century U.S. diplomat had negotiated yet another strong-armed acquisition of Mexican territory to give Arizona its geometrically pleasing southern boundary. Pleasing on paper, anyway.
But on the ground in modern day, the gap-toothed border wall on the U.S. side was in the advanced stages of decay. It was an unsightly, rusted monstrosity, thoughtlessly imposing itself through the cacti masses who, until a few decades ago, had been peacefully congregating for millions of years along what was now an arbitrary line begging to be taken seriously.
The blast blew a hole in the smack middle of the strange Utopia vision before him and shook the dust out of the plywood roof which rained down on his head in a barrage of spiraled tendrils. It was through a fit of coughing and ears ringing that Jarvis had returned to himself. Spirit, mind and body reuniting in a Pentecostal collision. Once again, he was immersed in that role he could not seem to escape.
“I’m actually a big fan of Jesus. It’s his father I disdain. There’s definitely abuse going on in that household …”
But for reasons she would never be able to articulate to anyone, herself included, she took a few steps more into the despairing darkness that had gathered particularly thick in that remote corner of the death camp where she and her helpless child would surely die. Their lives, their deaths, unfit for even the roaches and the crawling things of the world.
But for those who spawned them and then forgot them to exist, it seemed there was only one thing that could momentarily draw them away from the kinds of blithe exchanges which he did not doubt carried real-world consequences for real people and other living things that must have existed only in theory in their spreadsheet and accounting ledger minds.
“You exist because you are a great story which means you are perfect already and always will be no matter what! If anyone tells you different, or makes you feel like you’re not, they’re a liar!”
“And in returning to where it all began, there was Africa, awaiting us with open arms. Not only is it the land of our birth, but it is the only land that ever could have given birth to us. Its formidable landscape and biosphere both honing our unique capabilities and also curbing our tendencies toward excess.”
“But wouldn’t it be more effective in the end to appeal to the moral consciousness of the citizens of the wealthy and powerful nations of the world, rather than antagonize them?”
“Sure, and I suppose the fly, in navigating the web so thoughtfully spun for it, should always take care to appeal to the spider’s moral sensibilities whenever it comes skittering around.”
“The time for building bridges is over. For the few that are willing to swim across to our side, we will welcome them with open arms. We’ll even dispatch life rafts. But we have entered a new phase where we should be prioritizing direct action.”
“You gotta problem with Karens? Well, shit-stache, you just drew the Queen of all fucking Karens! Except I’m not going to demand to speak with your manager. I’m just going to fucking cut you unless you get this rolling fartbox of yours in motion toward the North Cove Yacht Harbor!”
“That’s right, bud. My personal apocalypse has been going on for a while now, since my name became the grossest fucking meme ever. And what, you think all the Karens of the world just upped and went to their own fucking island somewhere where we could all get bob cuts and drink caramel appletinis all day while calling the cops on imaginary black people? I mean, hello, we still walk among you.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Karen groaned, feeling suddenly very feisty. “I just don’t think anyone with a loose appendage swinging between their legs—which we know corresponds to a loose screw in the brain—could ever be trusted with something as delicate as the well-being of someone not similarly encumbered.”
“But the people of Harappa lived in peace and prosperity for a period about as long as Christianity has been on the earth. And yet, not a single war. Quite the contrast, wouldn’t you say?”
“But then again, every collapse is just a reorganization. An impetus toward some new way of being. A prelude to the next performance, of which there is always another.”
“Creation, destruction. Chaos, order. It’s all the same thing, if you think about it. After all, even total entropy is the highest form of equilibrium.”
“While humanity may be far from the best representation of the cosmic unity to which all belongs, we do embody a certain struggle by which the whole of consciousness seeks not only to persist, but to appreciate itself. And while our curious ongoings upon this isolated planet in this remote corner of an out-of-the-way galaxy may be fleeting and insignificant in the vast scope of things, our story is nonetheless a poignant allegory of why anything should exist at all. Nothing in want of something in want of … everything.”
“The zealots were always going to get their Armageddon one way or another.”
“Because anything arising from illusion can only persist in the perpetuating of illusion. To dispel the illusion would be to dispel the self. When unreality is the very basis of your existence, there cannot be a stronger drive than to uphold it at all costs, even and especially at the expense of confronting naked truth. It is the magnetic force that keeps humanity intact, more fundamental than the genome or the cellular structure itself.”
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