by Roy Scranton
Jane turned to look at Jack. Jesse watched her zygomatic arch, the folds of skin at the lateral palpebral commissure, her smooth mandible line and complicated, tender commissure of lip. Ze focused and unfocused, shifting to pure color, pale pinks and darker smudges, in and out of time.
At the usually less-than-toxic levels at which every person today is suffused with industrially manufactured substances, Jane read, it is hard to imagine that there are not subtle, em dash, and perhaps not so subtle, em dash, changes in our thought processes and emotional responses. If history involves self-reflection yet the self has been chemically altered, how do we proceed? How would we even be able to measure these effects, given the wide range of human abilities and different individual susceptibilities to chemicals. In asking these questions, we emphasize what we may be losing in terms of historical continuity and human solidarity, and also what neither we nor biochemists yet understand. New paragraph. On the other hand, if we italicized are our chemically altered environment, then who is the quote we endquote endangered by the industrial processes producing climate change? From this perspective, there may be no endangerment.
What kind of napalm? Jesse asked.
They didn’t say, Jack said.
On who?
The resistance. Or maybe the Russians. I don’t know. Same-same. The bad guys. What’s the difference?
It makes a difference.
What difference?
Jesse put hir hair back and knelt on the macadam in the weird light, fiddling with the camera to catch the vacant browns and grays. Bolts of sun shot out of clouds, then cut off. Wind. Mind. Sky. Dust.
Ze pushed a button, texted Jane.
“Action.”
for the law only.
THis is For THE cops or LAW-
mEN who FiNES us. Caril
aND i arE wRiTing This so
That you and EVER body wiLL
Know what has happEM.
On tue. day 7 days befor
you have seen the bodys
of my mom, dad and baby
sister, these dead because
of me and chuck, chuck
came down that tue. day
happy and full of joke’s but
when he came in mom
said for him to get out and
never come back, chuck
look at her, “and said why.”
at that my dad got mad
and begin to hit him and
was pushing him all over
the room, then chuck got
mad and there was no
stoping him, he had his
gun whit him cause him
and my dad was going
hunting, well chuck pull
it and the came out
and my dad drop to the
foor, at this my mom was
so mad the she had a
and was going to cut him
she knot the gun from
chucks hand, chuck just
stood there saying he was
sorry he didn’t want to
do it. i got chucks gun
aND STOP MY MON FRON
KiLLiNg ChucK, BETTY
Jean was yelling so loud
i hit her with the gun about
10 times she would not
stop chuck had the
so he was about 10 steps from
her, he let it go it stop
some where by her head.
me and chuck just look
at then for about 4 HRS.
then we wrapped them and
pull them out in the house
in back.
mY SiSTErs AND EVEV ONE
ELES WE NOT BELIVED This
BuT iT’s The TRUE AND
i Say it By gOD
then me and chuck
live with each other and
monday the day the bodys
were found, we were
going to kill our selves
But BOB VON BRUCK and
every body would not stay
a way.
and hate my older sister
and bob for what they are
they all ways wanted me
to stop going with chuck
show that sorry kid bob
Kwen could go with me.
chuck and i are sorry
for what we did, but now
were going to the end.
i feel sorry for Bar. to
have a ask like bob. over
I and Caril are sorry for what
has happen, cause I have
hurt every body cause of it
and so has caril. but i’m
saying one thing every
body that came out there
was lucki there not
dead even caril’s
sister.
Chuck S
Caril F
x
so far we have Kill
7 persons.
“Stop here,” Jane says.
“What’s here?”
“Just stop.”
Jack pulls the Valiant over and leaves the engine running. There’s nothing here, just three boarded-up two-stories in a row with lawns growing wild like peewee jungles, then a three-story brick cube with fading paint across the top reading western hotel. A dying oak across the street defines an empty lot.
Jane pulls her .38—no, she reaches into her bag and whips out a .357 Magnum—no, she draws a Colt .45 Single Action Army revolver, pulled from the dead hand of Lieutenant William Van Wyck Reily at the Battle of the Little Bighorn by the Arapaho who cut him down, jams it in Jack’s face, and cocks the hammer back.
“What the fuck?”
Jesse in back lowers the camera. “Hey, Jane,” ze says.
“I got one question, Jack.”
“Hey, Jane, it’s all good,” Jack says. “Just put the gun down. Little help, Jesse?”
“Jesse, you pick that camera back up and get this on film.”
Which ze does.
“Jane, really—” Jack says.
“Shut up, Jack,” she says, taking his chin and sliding the barrel of the Colt into his mouth. “I just need to know one thing, a simple yes or no. Carefully.”
“Hohay,” Jack says around the steel. “Hohay.”
“Whose story is it?”
“Wha?”
“What?” Jane says back, smiling.
“Wha?” Jack says again, eyes wide.
“Wrong answer, motherfucker,” Jane says, shaking her head, and pow, the top of Jack’s head disintegrates out the window and there’s blood and bone and brains all over. Sticky black red pouring out of the cave in his skull, so Jane reaches past him, pulls the handle that opens the door, and kicks him into the street. Good thing the window was open.
“You get that?” she asks Jesse as she slides over to the driver’s seat. She looks around for a napkin to wipe up the blood.
“Fuck, Jane,” ze says. “That’s fucked up.”
“You got it, right?”
“Yeah, but, Jesus . . . What now?”
Jane closes the door and holsters her Colt. The smell of cordite and blood is making her frisky. “Whyn’t you hop in the front seat, lover,” she says.
As they pull away, headed back out of the dry, dying nowhere they’ll remember forever as Jack’s Last Stand, Jane wonders if maybe there’s a special heaven for the wholly pure, a place for people who never relented, never gave an inch, those who held to their standard of truth no matter what the cost, no matter what the truth. There orta be, she thinks, because in the end the only thing that mattered was whether you had a code.
Let’s start over, he said, tapping nails
on the table. Go out West and make a clean breast of things.
A clean break, she said, turning back to the counter.
Whatever.
The pads of her fingers on Formica. The yellow-lit ceiling of the tunnel. The smell of engine grease, a slickness like rippling eels. What could she say? Her hair frizzed with static and she zapped everything she touched.
Jesse II looked out past the rim of hir bowl at the rain and kicked hir feet. Dad scribbled blue circles across pink lines on yellow paper. Mom opened a cupboard and closed it.
What’s out West? she said. In the other room Jesse I changed the channel, and they heard the TV say the police shot the woman four times.
Jesse II watched the red edge of hir bowl slip out of focus against the gray truck parked across the street slick with rain, what out West, what wasn’t here, four times, the smell of grease, Jesse II watched the gray truck parked across the street slip out of focus against the red edge of hir bowl, the memory of teeth cracked porcelain, the taste of blood tongue, thick tongue, the taste of pig tongue. Jesse II watched the slip fog gaotack wall fuck nit. flt 7 sptik. jmmy jmny jmimy jmny. sk’k. Everybody hands up, hands flat on flat surfaces, fingers flat, all their pink and white fingers flat but for Jesse I in the other room whose paint-sticky, sweaty red digits twitched balled in fists bunched in the wool of hir sweater. And the rain fell, spattering against the windows and the cars and the street like old fat. Jesse II watched the rain slip the scene
should be dramatic, humming with portentous buzz. It smells like engine grease and old coffee. Everything is muted from the colors to. Stand the colors to. Can you mute a woman’s backing her way out of life’s assorted? Mute a man’s sense of hope at the edge of risk, a gamble he’s not sure he’s got the balls to make, and the knowledge that she’s lost faith? Can you mute her loss of faith? Or is it only momentary, just doldrums, seasonal affective whatever, and don’t we have to just get through, for the kids or whatever, for life, just deal with it? Keep moving forward?
Dad’s name is Jack. Mom is Jane. They’re the J Crew. Smile. They go to Olive Garden on Sunday evenings and make it back in time for The Walking Dead. They have a tangible socioeconomic reality evoked by a combination of telling details and artfully crafted omissions. Dad drives a Prius.
If we go to California, Jesse II asked, do I have to go to school?
Yes, Dad said.
Can I go to one of those Muslim schools?
What?
Where they teach the Bible.
Muslims don’t read the Bible. They read the Koran.
Yeah the Koran.
No, you can’t go to Muslim school.
Can I watch TV then?
Mom opens the cupboard and turns on the screen. Dad pushes a button on the wall, the window flickers, static gray, resolving into to a D—— D—— cartoon. Mom slides her eyes from their sockets cutting loose the projecting beam, firing TV at the walls, the ceiling, TV piercing the table. The focus. The cereal bowl. Light on skin on light. Mom and Dad waltz the kitchen, singing “The Surrey with the Fringe on Top,” don’t you wish y’d go on forever, and Jesse I prances in, shooting hir Colt into the ceiling, hotfooting a flippetyflop jumparoo. What are you gonna do about it, that’s what I’d like to know.
Deeper into the mystery, I saw then why Jack liked to have things very clearly organized. If they were really going out West, it would start an almost uncontrollable avalanche of signification. Speed of space. skintification. Spk’hhh. Can you imagine potato-chip bags slick inside with the grease of salty fingers, mustard packets, an inch of stale Cherry Coke at the bottom of a lukewarm, crumpling wax-paper cup? Can you feel Mom itching her scalp, her eyes weary with the same broken road, the same humming engine, the same stabbing whine, the same glance at Jack to make sure he’s awake, make sure he’s awake, make sure he’s awake. We touch too much maybe
you should try a new shampoo let’s
start
oh, what a beautiful
Mom buys a pack of Winston Lights on the sly and smokes one out behind the hotel. Purple slabs of granite heave at the horizon, a wall of rock in which somewhere stands the gate the candy-apple-red semis keep rolling through, somewhere the way through, the western path. Dad changes channels upstairs while Jesse II looks out the window and writes in hir Dinosaur Journal. Jesse I—who knows? The sense of danger and novelty has faded into scummy unconcern, the apathy of open space. Clouds point this way and that, no clear omen. Dad changes channels from a pouty, half-naked nymphet singing for cheeseburgers to one of those extra sports channels, where Portuguese and Senegalese men chase one another with sticks down a field, a ball, three balls, points, somebody fouls. Is it some kind of field hockey? Dad finds himself wondering if they have electricity in Portugal, or cable TV, what they do in Portugal for fun. How do you be Portuguese? How do you have fun?
Dad finds himself half wishing Jesse I would find a meth head to run off with. He wouldn’t even have to be clean as long as he had a car. Ze was too much these days: hir pubescent indeterminacy, hir sex-tainted tantrums, hir hot-pink claws. Maybe they could sell hir for gas money.
Dad, Jesse II said.
Yeah.
Is it true our civilization doesn’t deserve to survive?
You got me, kiddo. Ask Mom.
She said ask you.
Well, shoot. Why you ask?
Warren wants to know.
Warren who?
Warren Buffet.
Warren Buffet the millionaire?
No, not Warren Buffet millionaire. Warren Buffet dilophosaurus.
Oh. Is that one of the little ones?
He has a double-crested head.
Is he the one that spits poison?
You believe everything you see on TV?
Fine. No. Our civilization doesn’t deserve to survive. Is Warren happy now?
Oh, Dad, dinosaurs aren’t happy or sad. Their brains are too small for emotion. You of all people should know that. Reptile cortex: kill and fuck. That’s all there is.
Jesus, where’d you hear that language?
I don’t know.
Well, don’t let your mother catch you saying “kill and fuck,” or you’ll learn real quick about reptile cortexes.
Cortices.
Whatever. Go read your book.
I never thought time was something you could feel. What happened? On the screen is a show about sex workers peeing on a black couple, “externalizing white desire with a golden, ammoniac splash,” says the voice. Look of horror. Mom’s Winston burns with a crackle, a single star orange in the dusk now Prussian blue.
A line of tanks thunders along the highway, west to east, deer carcasses slung to hang against the turrets, slack, furred loins, the fall kills. The lead tank commander stands jutting from the cupola wearing a gas mask, antlers mounted on his Kevlar, the staff of Moses in his hands.
Wait, he said. I forgot to show you this. He handed me a pewter pig. My first feeling was confusion—wasn’t it supposed to be a slice of pig, a crackling slab of pork, our feast, the first kill of the fall? But it was a small pewter figure of a pig, a small figure of a big pig. I looked at it by the light of the fire, examining the fine work, the delicate bristles, the tiny jutting snout and eyes little more than pricks, and confusion gave way to admiration, amazement, some slight joy.
Nice, I said.
You like it? he asked.
I do, I said. You can see little splotches of mud on its legs, the work is so fine. His little cloven hooves. And the tiny, curly tail.
Snouts snuffling in the gullets of corpses.
I know, he said. I thought you’d like it. I didn’t mean to interrupt.
No, it’s fine. It’s nice. Where’d you get it?
He made a sheepish face and looked away into the woods. Was this the detail you’re waiting for? Woods, trees,
pine branches hanging. Campfire. A twenty-five-dollar bottle of whiskey and a six-pack. Eat the dead.
I stole it from Jack, he said.
Are you serious?
Eat the dead.
Yeah. I went into his office earlier this week to ask him some fucking thing about payroll and he wasn’t there, so I waited to see if he’d come back and I was looking at that shelf of figures he has, you know what I mean, that shelf with all his little fucking knickknacks. And I felt out of the pit of my stomach rising a dark and petty spirit inexorable as the ocean, a plum-colored perversity, and I saw the pig and took it. I wanted to take them all, take all his little figurines and break them into bite-size pieces and eat them, then shit them all over his carpet. I didn’t have time, though, so I just took the one.
He say anything?
He say anything I make him. Integral to the trajectory, asymptote to the curve, the road at the edge of consciousness spinning pixelated silver discs under black rubber engines screaming the edge of day across space—stab yourself into the plains, lash yourself to the coffin, tie yourself down and ride—headlight, toothpick, enamel. As follows: milkshake unction, sun like a bloodied eye, the clouds in the sky drift silver across the windshield, drift charcoal grit across the velvet-black sky, firelight reflecting intimations. The secrets of fire in the dark—wild pig roasting on a spit—lost it, whatever it was, the Cro-Magnon man. Gone like yesterday’s Greyhound. Coming up on Undercover Boss, after these messages from our sponsor, will Jack and Jane stop global warming?
I’m pretty sure he knows it’s missing, but I think he’s too scared of us all to say anything until he knows who did it. It’s like if he admits we can steal stuff from him, then he’s vulnerable, you know? But he started locking his door.
