by Nick Mamatas
Our hosts in county government have no idea what to do about Bob. He’s roaring toward us like he’s looking to break me out of here. Are we prisoners to be evacuated, or will only the good citizens of Riverhead and the coastal areas of Long Island be shepherded to safety? I hope the hurricane grinds the island down to a sandbar. I hope motherfuckers drown in their cars on the highway as they try to escape to Manhattan. O Leviathan, crash against the shore and send waves to bury us all.
“He maketh the deep to boil like a pot: he maketh the sea like a pot of ointment!” I shout, from my cell, to the group that is always gathered closest to the tier’s TV. “Leviathan!” This is one way I’m able to keep my roommate from spending too much time in our cell.
And another storm is coming, one that even interrupts TV coverage of Bob, my new friend and, I hope, lover. It’s a storm of steel riding through clouds of diesel. The girls on the tier are frantic over it. The two TVs on the tier are calling it the August Coup. Soviet hard-liners have called in the tanks, to save socialist society from glasnost, from perestroika. “Oh Lord, oh Lord!” one of the girls cries. “It’s the end of the world! The storm, the tanks—Satan is walking the Earth!” She’s right, and I want to tell her so, but her conception is so oversimplified as to be inaccurate. She has no idea what will happen next, but I’m pretty sure I do. I write it down with my little golf pencil and give it a day to see if my prediction comes true.
Boris Yeltsin, a capitalist alcoholic, climbs one of the tanks and gives a stirring speech. Like magick, the troops change sides. The girls go wild, hooting and pumping their fists. They’re in fucking prison in capitalist America, and they still believe every stupid lie about freedom the television tells them. I give myself a gold star for my accurate forecast. Maybe later, when the CO turns the TV off for the night, they’ll go back to their gang formations and to their grand hobby of broom handle sex to pass the time. That night, to the echo of someone’s orgasmic screaming, I look up in the ceiling and think about how useless it is to be correct sometimes. It’s so difficult to do the right thing, even when you can sense the spirit of the age, even when you believe you know where the waters of history will flow.
But then I think of my father’s face and realize that the red smear across the boiled bones of his skull was the last thing I was ever sure of.
Acknowledgements
Once again, there are far too many people to thank, but these are the people I remember. First there’s Michele Rubin, late of Writers House, who encouraged me to write a “boy book” for the YA market. I finally said, “How about Harriet the Spy, but she’s a punk rocker and into Crowley and Trotskyism!” and then I didn’t have to hear about the boy book too much anymore. Rachel Edidin loved the idea though and acquired it for Dark Horse, and Jemiah Jefferson got the book from hard drive to storefront. Molly Tanzer, Jason Ridler, and Kenneth Wishnia had a number of useful comments for me. The blogger known to me only as keith418 regularly shares his insights into the intersection of the political and the esoteric on his online journal, many of which I liberated and détourned for my own aesthetic ends.
And I must thank some people whose names I don’t even remember. Once upon a time, in 1989, there was a comic shop called Flashpoint, and the cashier had something to do with a new fanzine-style political/culture rag called The Long Island Alternative, the first issue of which was available for free in the store. I got it, read it over and over till it fell apart in my hands, and then I wrote a little essay called “Schmucks for World Peace” and sent it in. They published it. I was seventeen and in high school. I was paid in copies and a subscription to the magazine, and ever since then I’ve been doomed to write. If you had anything to do with the magazine, or that comic shop, thank you.
