“The Church in the Wildwood”
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END OF TIME
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God lingered in the grove a while, Eye thought it was to smite the one that came next: the gaunt-sickly looking angel with his cart and his bags of junk. The angel trying to rake his passage over the packed ash and hide his steps. The thing half desiccated-dead and driven-mad-in-its wanderings.
It took soil, the angel took soil from one of god’s gardens. Somehow, in the shadow at the base of a Redwood and the side opposite the source of the blast of wrath that consumed the grove, some rich, perfect coffee-dirt survived. There was more than enough to fill the terra cotta pot on his cart. The angel scraped and dug and shoveled the soil into the clay pot on the creaking cart, all the while looking over their shoulder like a flop-sweating paranoid freak.
God approached the thing, and Eye was certain I was about to witness more wrath. The lesser being was right there thieving part of the recipe of creation. But god approached them like they approach mortals: quietly and all-mysterious like.
Should you ever be fortunate/unfortunate enough to be visited by the author of all that is, god comes to you mortals as floating fire, the polite flame that warms you and lights what you read and heats your food. You might see a ball of that gentle light. In-reality (that is in-frame on Earth-some-Earth) god flicks and flits at 60hz. If you’re reading this beneath a lamp, that’s the same rate at which the power to your bulb or your box fan alternates in a given second. Your lamp or nightlight or whatever you rely to light your path to take a piss in the dead of night? The light turns on-off 60 times in a second and your eye-brain circuit rolls with it. Sixty times per second, god takes a new form–young/old, man/woman (and all points between), every kind of sentient thing that has been or will be. In the 60hz frames that are one second, god’s been one being and shown 60 different aspects.
When the author arrives before the angel, it freezes and holds it’s aspect–takes the appearance of a woman, hunched and old. Eye am still betting a smiting, but she/they stand the thing up. And right there on the very ground they so recently scorched, god embraces the broken thing and whispers something in its ear.
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PITTSBURGH (ROUGHLY)
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Fed trucks, two of them. One in front and one behind of Jane’s old biodiesel-convert pickup The fed-trucks flash high beams, and flick the red and blues. Jane pulls the truck over, tries for calm, watches in the rear view as the last two trucks in a convoy of them that seemed to come from nowhere U-turn dramatically and race back. They bracket her truck. One in front, the other behind. Side mount search lights blind her and light up the car in the late-evening half-light. She is certain they’ll find the naked man beneath the tarp and they’re both dragged off to somewhere. ‘This is how I disappear’ is on repeat, echoing off the insides of her skull.
Jane’s got her hands up. Keys on the dash. Cigarette on her lip. She’s squinting in the light when the piles of cops in all that soldier gear clown-car out of each vehicle. They’re all big armored silhouettes, every face covered, everyone of them looking like they’re going to war.
“US citizen?” What the fuck? “English? Are you a citizen?” Yeah, I’m a citizen. Are you a border cop? What the fug is all this? “Don’t. Move. Miss. “It’s a cigarette, not a weapon, and I don’t wanna ash on myself.” She almost flicks the cherry out the window.
“What were you doing out this way?” They lower weapons and do the exchange of documents. She blows smoke in the boarder cop’s masked face–they’re all masked. The one behind him giggles.
“Hippy shit.” Hippy shit? “Yeah.” The amused fed asks her to elaborate. “Taking pictures of old empty places.” Why? “Art” You’re an artist? “Yes, I write poems to caption the picture about how nice the world will be when all the fascists are gone.”
“You know I can detain you.” You’re not going to though, from the taller cop. The two turn and whisper and the tall one trying not to look like he is in charge with no badge or insignia grabs the boarder cop roughly by the shoulder. They turn back. “We gotta search the vehicle.” Fuck you.
Before the little angry cop can respond, the big man’s hand is on his shoulder like a vice grip. “Freedom of speech is a lovely thing, miss. We’ll be out of your hair as soon as a quick search determines you aren’t a violent insurgent or drug runner.” You’re still got my ID, polite fascist. “Yes ma’am. Not a fascist.” Whatever, jackboot. “Very clever.” I fucking hate you. “You’re entitled to do that.” The big man turns to the tiny cop with the large and fragile ego “See, we’re serving the public, and sometimes they don’t like us. They get to not like us.” My fuckin’ hero.
Jane’s powering through another cig and waiting for them to find the naked man in the bed of the truck. When she hears the rustle of the battered blue tarp and the clatter of copper pipes on brick. It’s not relief, but close as she can come right now.
“Oh yeah, hippy shit. You scrapping?” The woman throws up her hands. “You selling scrap metal to support a habit?” The tall cop mutters ‘for-fuuuuck’s-saaake.’ audibly.
Jane’s laugh is genuinely confused. “Yes, I would like to support my drug habit, so if you could point me to the scrap dealer who will by all two of those pipes.” You’re lucky. “Am I? Am I lucky? Am I being detained?”
“No, ma’am. You are not lucky. You’re not doing anything wrong. We’re sorry to have troubled you.” Tall ‘cop’ hands her back her ID and registration. “Drive safely, and I suggest you stick closer to home for the foreseeable. It gets dangerous out this way.”
“Eat my shit and hair.” She starts the truck.
Tall ‘cop’ is still laughing. “Diogenes of Sinope is fucking awesome.”
She narrows her eyes at him. “You are a not-a-friend. You are just a more dangerous jackboot.”
He waves the fed-truck blocking her out of the way. “But never a danger to you.”
“Bull-shit. That’s precisely why you are dangerous.” She jabs her finger at him in the air. “Not. A. Friend.” The truck that smells like French fries rolls on down the road, the driver holding a (shaking) middle finger high out her window for a long time while all the cops in soldier’s gear cram back in their trucks at once too big and too small for them all.
A couple of miles down the road, a couple of copper pipes and some brick in the shape of a naked man pops up in the rear window. He ties the tarp around his body like a robe, girds up his loins, and crawls into the cab to ride shotgun all the way back to Pittsburgh (or thereabouts). Jane, she chain smokes and mutters “because any of this is possible…” again and again-again.
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ANCHORAGE, AK
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Roofus the hero dog. He’s an old Rottweiler with sad eyes (and arthritic hips). He has a love of cheese. Terrible gas. Those last two things are related. The viral video begins with the dog’s panic attack. It’s a weekend evening, not-coincidentally the same one Jane meets the golem in Pitt. The dog’s “freaking the fuck out.” Old Rotweiler in the front room of the cute little two story where Ben and Linda raise a baby. The video starts with the dog dragging out the car seat. The baby’s screaming and old Rufus, hero dog, tugs Linda toward the child then the door by her shirt.
Ben is “done with this bullshit” on his day off, starts just beating the dog’s ass with a rolled up news paper until Roofus takes the paper away from him and gives a growl that suggests he’ll take the hand next.
Then the wife is outside, far from the house and down by the road beneath a tree where the hero dog led her. That’s where the neighbors come out, and in 21st century Earth fashion, start filming (all of them, every Earth, every hex where the tech exists, bless your hearts).
Linda is crying and threatening to divorce her beer drunk husband. He’s gesturing at the house he “bought her.”
“I work too, dipshit!”
“Shut that fucking dog up and getthefuck back inside! You’re making. A fucking scene.” And the dumbest husband is gesturing rudely at the recording neighbors.
What’s next is the most re-watched piece of media in Earth(0x7C0) history (until Dolores’ address to the world almost two decades later). The dummy warhead, the thing that approximates the mass of a MIRV, is moving too fast. It’s just a glowing-hot streak in the last frame before the phone vid cuts out.
But there’s Ben, standing on the threshold between inside and out, on the doorstep of his lovely little home he doesn’t like screaming at a wife he’s not sure he wants when the hot piece of metal hits him, relieving him of responsibility forever. Ironically though. Ben would still do a lot of work after his life was done, the work of justifying a war (whether he wanted to or no).
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CHICAGO, IL; TAMPA, FL
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Jacqueline, the young person whose preference to be called ‘Jack’ will only grow with time, sleeps-half-sleeps in twisted sheets in a high-rise in Chicago. She is dreaming some amalgam of tomorrows with the clarity-unclarity that does so often drive mortals mad.
She was born, not under a “bad sign”, but in a “bad” age, an ugly one, a hungry one–though she’s not yet known ‘want.’ I can tell you but you won’t believe what it’s like to run from possibility to possibility all night while your body’s half-Tun. To see the million ways the-world-might only to feel probability beat that world real each morning. The feeling is that of drinking a lake and remaining parched, or reading the whole of a library and remembering one line from exactly the third page of the fifth book you read.
Jack dreamed. She saw fire, flash, everyone and everything burnt past ash. The lake boiled. She remembered two words: “Don’t go.”
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The church in Tampa was a pizza place in its previous life. The corporate chain architecture is still clearly visible. The cross out front, glass and taller than the building, glows with a gaudy inner light provided by LED. Inside, there’s a baptismal pool where the buffet used to be. Where once there was a counter top, the pulpit.
The congregation gathers in a circle around the square bathtub baptismal for services. Saul is present-and-elsewhere. The man received his “mission” in the pastor’s office somewhere in what used to be a kitchen. Before that, he had already consumed or imbibed and what-have-you. He is illuminated, or at least he is what his sect believes to be illuminated.
The sermon goes as sermons go in this sort of church: it’s a biblical platitude wrapped around a rock, a sales pitch, a demand to fund the ministry. Before he was one of them, he was cynical about it. Now? He knows what it funds: his trip to Chicago to do what ‘must be done’ to the Judge and his daughter.
He turns and embraces his neighbors, takes their version of ‘communion’ and does enjoy the second dose of hallucinogenic wine (LSD and store-brand grape juice), and when the faces of his fellows are distorted and the group singing starts, Saul participates with vigor. He ‘catches the spirit’ and dances, stomping the devil down into the pizza-grease stained carpet.
At the end of evening services, after a few rounds of video poker, after the church fathers laid hands on him and wished him success, Saul deposits his body in the passenger seat of a car headed north, a trunk full of guns. Saul falls asleep repeating the route, his lucky numbers, to himself: 75 to 65 to 94.
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END FOUNDRY(3)