by Roy Scranton
The yellow-lit ceiling of the tunnel. Dad scribbled blue circles across pink lines on yellow paper. Jesse II watched the slip fog gaotack wall fuck nit. Jesse II watched the rain slip. Cereal bowl. Fine. Happy? Jesus. Jesus. Cortices. Mom opens a cupboard, closes it. Dad scribbles blue ellipses across pink lines on yellow paper. The yellow-lit ceiling of the tunnel. Tanks rolling east. Mommie? God’s grace. The yellow-lit ceiling of the tunnel. Dad scribbled blue circles across pink lines on yellow paper. Jesse II watched the slip fog gaotack wall fuck nit. Jesse II watched the rain slip. Dad’s name is Jack. Mom is Jane. Dad drives a Tesla. Jesse II asked. Dad, Jesse II said. Ask Mom. Mom opens a cupboard, closes it. God’s grace. Don’t you wish y’d go on forever? sang Jesse II. Don’t you wish y’d go on forever? sang Dad. Jesse II watched the rain slip. Ask Mom. Jesse II watched the rain slip. Ask Mom.
Slap. Fit cairn. Antlers mount the TV. The kitchen reeks of engine grease—under Jack’s fingernails the stain of a thousand blown gaskets—in the corner, wrapped in a towel in a red plastic recycling bin, the heart of some great machine lies bleeding. Mom opens a cupboard, closes it. Dad scribbles blue ellipses across pink lines on yellow paper. The yellow-lit ceiling of the tunnel. Ask Mom.
Tanks rolling east.
She’s out there smoking a Winston Light, the ember an orange star in a field of Prussian blue, the stars getting blurry, thinking what it means to go out West. Her dad left when she was only young, the four of them, she was nine and he left, out West, two days before Christmas, the Christmas morning Mommie didn’t get out of bed.
Mommie?
Go away.
Mommie, it’s Christmas.
Go away, go all of you.
Can we open our presents?
Do whatever you want.
Jane put on the TV and played Mommie, telling the little ones which gifts they could open and in what order. This is the psychologically telling memory, the pivot of her later life, the organizing principle, consciousness reduced to biography. We are memory or we are nothing.
Dad was a brother in the church, the First Church of Hope of Jesus Christ, and they quit going to the church after Dad left, but Jane kept asking if she could go, nagging and cajoling, until Mom finally called one of her friends from church and had the woman take her. Jane looked for her father among the brothers, the other men in ties and short-sleeved shirts, the patriarchs of the folding chairs. She asked them if they knew where her dad was. They were all kind but distant, wary of the desperate girl looking for the hole in her life. It lasted until spring; one weekend she had a stomachache, and the next week Mom forgot to call, and then some Sunday morning in May she found herself watching cartoons, realizing she didn’t go to church anymore.
In her first picture album—in a box somewhere—she had a picture of Dad and the brothers all standing in their short-sleeved shirts grinning into the camera, and every time it opened a void in her chest as big as the whole known world. Some mornings her only hope was that she hadn’t seen everything yet, and maybe someday the pain might take a new shape.
She walked down the street of this one-DQ town on the edge of the plains, on the edge of the mountains, because she’d seen as they drove through looking for a hotel a First Church of Hope off a side street, and she knew even then she’d sneak away. The streets off the main drag quiet and dim, homes lit with electric fire, snapping her fingers and mumbling Cole Porter. The parking lot of the church was empty but for one car, a yellow Hyundai hatchback. The church itself was a big gray A-frame, smooth as a monolith, windowless prefab. The front door was locked, so she went around the side, where a door had been left propped open with a smooth lump of iron. She put the iron in her pocket and went into the darkened chapel.
Small yellow lights illuminated the unadorned crucifix on the stage at the front of the chapel. She felt a shock of apprehension, realizing how long it had been since she’d been in a church, how far she’d gone from God and how much she missed him. The cross, so simple and good, so bright in the darkness, seemed to be the very shape of her life, a road forking, paths chosen, suffering borne for others’ sake. Her eyes grew accustomed to the dimness and began to see the lines of folding chairs and the posters hung on the walls.
Would it be different out West, she wondered. Would Jack be different? Would her hands no longer feel tied to the same stations, the same knuckles sliding on stainless steel? Would the meaning of suffering for Jesse I and Jesse II, the ungrateful little suffer them, would that meaning return to hold her up like it had before? She didn’t think so, yet here was hope. Some hope. Some hope for something. Some hope for anything.
I came out onto the stage and saw her there. I hadn’t expected her, but at the same time I wasn’t surprised. We have a sense of things sometimes. She had short brown hair and a sad, complicated face. She wore earrings, but no makeup, blue jeans, tennis shoes, and a puffy black jacket. She was still young but hard put by life. She carried her purse in her hand, maroon pleather with cream trim and fake-gold snaps. I didn’t say anything, not wanting to startle her, so I stood in the shadows until both of us were used to the darkness.
Yes, I thought, there’s the hope and resignation, there’s pain and—for a moment—the transcendence of earthly torment. There’s comfort in the sense of an ordered cosmos and dignity in the meaning of our lives. There she is struggling with doubt, thinking her life all the deeper for it, then affirming her faith and feeling it rush into her veins, sudden strength, yes, this life, yes, this world, yes, by God.
Hello, I said, in my gentlest timbre.
She turned but did not startle. Hello?
Hi. I waved my hand.
Oh, hi. I’m sorry, I didn’t realize anyone—I just—I was—I just wanted to come in for a minute.
That’s fine, I said, the Lord’s house is always open. I’m glad you came. I bowed my head a moment, then stepped down off the stage. She looked at her feet, then at me, then back at her feet. Tears welled in her eyes. Are you troubled, sister?
She choked up, waving her hand at me. I took it and pulled her gently near, putting my arm around her.
It’s all right, sister. God’s grace.
Eat the dead.
Then she was weeping on my shoulder, sobbing out all her pain and worry in jagged moans. God’s grace, I muttered, God’s grace. She wept and then she was better. She pulled away and wiped her face, apologizing, explaining how she’d been so worried lately, telling me the whole sordid story: Jack losing his job, Jesse I discovering boys and getting into trouble, Jesse II wouldn’t talk at school anymore, the job she’d left so they could go out West where Jack’s brother lived and worked for a construction company and could get him a job there, lower-level management, and it would pay all right and be a new chance, a new chapter, a new life, start over, except everything she ever knew told her it would be the same.
I took her chin in my hand and kissed her. She seemed surprised at first, then yielded, her lips sweet and slick as rippling eels. I could taste her despair and the Winston she’d smoked, her tongue, I breathed her breath, her blood pumping against mine. Then I let her go and she looked at me, her eyes red rimmed and confused.
There’s something I want to show you, I said, and I took her to the side of the altar, where I opened a fire door. Beyond the door was a set of stairs that led down, down deep, at the bottom of which reflected the yellow-lit ceiling of the tunnel below. There’s some people I want you to meet, I said, and they want to meet you.
Down there? she asked, trusting but timid.
Yes, I said. Just go down and follow the tunnel. I’ll be along in a minute.
Okay, she said, giving a brave smile. I patted her on the shoulder and then pointed down the stairs. She looked down, then up at me, then back down. I nodded and she nodded back and took the first step, then the second. When she was about halfway down the stairs, she looked up at me and I waved to her, then slammed
and locked the door. Poor thing—the lights go off when the door closes—how would she ever find her way in the dark? Of course, the tunnel only goes one place.
I stepped to the crucifix on the altar where hung our tortured God and looked out over the chapel’s lines of folding chairs. I turned the lights off. I could hear the angels singing, ever so softly, “The Surrey with the Fringe on Top.” I bowed my head a moment, turned, and left. The stage was dark and the chapel silent.
That stag washed dark and this cheap hell skyless.
Treat stuck wounds down with his ASAP poultice.
Tak stug wam dak enten chapeau silas.
The yellow-lit ceiling of the tunnel. Dad scribbled blue circles across pink lines on yellow paper. Jesse II watched the slip fog gaotack wall fuck nit. Jesse II watched the rain slip. Dad’s name is Jack. Mom is Jane. Dad drives a Prius. Mom opens a cupboard, closes it. The yellow-lit ceiling of the tunnel. People talking. Tanks rolling. Mommie? God’s grace. I can feel the day getting older, sang Jesse II, pulling a mock baritone. Don’t you wish y’d go on forever? sang Dad. The fall kills. Fire crackles. Pig tongue. Whatever.
I can feel the day getting older, sang Jesse II, pulling a mock baritone.
Don’t you wish y’d go on forever? sang Dad.
Jesse I came in with hir lovely soprano—Don’t you wish y’d go on forever?
Jesse II kicked the back of hir seat.
Up here high in the mountains the road curved over space over space. Read it again. Jesse I looked out over the shoulder where the granite fell away, the vast spectacle of sky and rock. What happened? Let’s start over.
Slip divide the sky.
One time we went hunting in these very woods, my dad and my uncle and me. Slack, furred loins lying along the bed of the truck, lightless black eyes I’d
like to believe there’s some principle at work here, some demon playing games. I think I’m suffering from dysentery. I think maybe I’m an algorithm.
Mom down in the pitch-black tunnel beneath the church makes her way on her hands and knees toward the crack of light under the door, which finally opens. Blinded, she turns away and so doesn’t at first see the hands lifting her and carrying her into the room. She looks up at faces shadowed in white velour hoods. The room murmurs, a sibilant hiss in the round, led by one wearing a bronze reliquary bearing two teeth of St. Catherine of Alexandria, one reading the Psalter of Snakes and Bones. They strap Mom down to the broken wheel, murmuring all the time, Mom shaking her head, febrile tongues, all beyond our control. They stretch her arms in their puffy sleeves, one monk holds the stake against one palm, another readies the hammer. The iron drops and through the flesh the stake grates through the tiny bones in her hand. Mom screams. The men pound the stake into the rim of the broken wheel, nailing her to it, while another man lashes her down, rope taut around the puffy sleeve. They’re at work on her other arm at the same time, tying it down, driving the stake in. Jane’s face white with pain, her screams fade into whimpers. Men grab her blue-jeaned calves and tie them together above the ankles to the bottom of the wheel, then one takes an especially long rusted stake and jabs the point into the sock over her ankle and another brings down the mallet head with a thud and drives iron through bone.
After they get her staked down, they lash the wheel back together where it’s broken and roll it up to the altar, rotating it so she hangs head down. She’s passed out from the pain or she’s awake again or both. Her legs straight up and her black puffy arms spread wide, she mimics the symbol of peace. With the susurrant murmuring still steady, the one in Prussian-blue velour comes up and lifts the ax back over his shoulder, his feet planted apart, his shoulder set, and brings it down swinging in where her jaw breaks clean against her pale neck, cleaving through with a wet crack.
A younger one in white takes her head up by the hair off the stage, and the stump of her neck bleeds out onto the floor, an orange ember on a field of Prussian blue, teeth on porcelain, all the monks’ hands lie flat, all their fingers flat, except Jesse I’s balled sticky in hir mother’s hair as ze holds up the head to the worshipful ones and begins to sing in hir lovely soprano.
And still the rain fell, the monks all singing now, the red rim of the cereal bowl against the gray truck, pig roasting over the fire, the symbol of the pig roasting on the symbol of roasting, and I pour another two fingers of whiskey into the brushed-steel thermos-lid cup.
Can you imagine what it must have been like to see all this first? The first time anywhere?
Except the Indians.
But there was a first Indian, too, remember that.
Except the Neanderthals.
There was a first Neanderthal.
Except the first monkeyman.
But don’t you think, I said, he would have shown amazement at an existence—are the levels right here? One two three. Gtao. Spack. One two three four. Can you hear me? I don’t know if you can hear me. But I’m saying, an existence he hadn’t imagined? Whole new species? New mountains? Simple amazement at pure novelty.
Like new technologies? Isinglass curtains? Sidelights? A little wonder?
No, I said, that’s not what I mean.
Why not? he asked.
He’s always like this.
I looked through the bars of the gate, peered out upon the squalor in which my ape-man captor lived. He looked at me with dully lidded eyes. You think you’ve got it all figured out.
You’re just as much a prisoner here as I am.
I knew you’d say that, he said, scratching his armpit. He pulled a banana off the table and sniffed it.
Well, what are you gonna do about it, that’s what I’d like to know.
I don’t have to do anything, he said. I’m happy out here. You happy in there?
Of course I’m not happy in here.
Well, then who has to do anything? He peeled the banana with his feet and took a bite. Not me. I’m happy.
Let’s start over, Jack said, tapping nails on the table. Go out West and make a clean breast of things.
Four shots. Hands up. Pig tongue. The Jesses zapped everything they touched.
Mom was the only one who knew where the gate was, the only one who knew the way through, the only one who knew how to find the parallel the candy-apple-red semis rolled down, the line of red against the gray field. They’d never make it through the mountains without her, so Dad gunned it and jerked the wheel left and then right and the car shot off the shoulder, careening through the air into even now, before
III. King of the Road
(Dream Ballet)
Democratic nations care but little for what has been, but they are haunted by visions of what will be; in this direction their unbounded imagination grows and dilates beyond all measure.
—Alexis de Tocqueville
Inauguration Day
Remember the Russian orgy at Kanye’s house? That’s where they filmed the piss tapes. Everybody was there—Bill, Rihanna, R. Kelly, Zuckerberg, Caitlyn, Taylor, even Nancy Pelosi—intercontinental ballistics streaking into the Kimchi Sea writhing with transitioning aces and fifteen thousand black Eurasian cyborg incel entrepreneurs of the rainbow llamacorn who were and did a little bit of everything in the new gig economy.
Back in the day it was sort of like why not? Colluding with the enemy seemed hot, and with only sixty harvests left, you might as well put Pepe in Dior overalls and call it even. And he did a great job, too, winning bigly, except for the whole Confederate-monument debacle. Real talk, the collapse of 2023 was a long way off yet, and we’d all agreed doomscaping wasn’t productive. #Resist #Resistance #TheResistance #Indivisible #MAGA #USA #Hope.
ALL (singing)Oh, what a beautiful day!
Men in tiger-stripe and blue-fringed Marni coats pulled the presidential surrey and everybody waved for shouts. Taylor Swift sang to the internet. Jack and Jane waved, Charlie and Caril a
nd all them clone robots, too, drinking La Marca prosecco. The Reporter, believing those who admired him, wrote a #hottake for the new soul cycle. Zuckerberg, meanwhile, stood behind the curtain, staring straight ahead, holding a bottle of Lifewtr.
For a moment Trump stopped, his dream of the South actualized, and looked up and down Pennsylvania Avenue. Then he started again, seabound on tiny feet, which years later became a legend. They say he donated everything to cage kids, then built seven-hundred-foot-tall sculptures in all the rivers. Think of it: the kids a plantation—no belle, no planter even, all dazzled and led.
Clone Charlie and Caril stood watching the Donald’s self-consciously flagrant sunset claims, and what he thought, she called fact: his romancing Kanye West’s milkshake duck evoked a nostalgic portrayal of the prerevolutionary “White” House that no doubt will keep performing miracles for those senior citizens old enough to understand the link between Taylor Swift getting the Fed out of our pants and the Facebook–Google–Whole Foods plot.
That the rescuer of the Republic had to plunge the rift in an Etro dress and Jimmy Choos is a fact we orta reckon with, ’cuz IRL the situation was zip-a-dee-doo-dah. What happened was young girls found each other and assured gentlemen of their maritime prospects, older women curtsied to the employment situation, and food and drink items were sent to DACA Dreamers. Trump’s influence was literally pork and potatoes and onions, its intoxicating effect on the one percent eloquently foretold.
Dear reader, dump your prestige cli-fi podcasts: they aren’t the French Revolution, twisting up the mountains from Mississippi to Bakersfield—our nation’s entire infrastructure is a bright and terrible desert, and we ain’t doin’ nothin’ ’bout it, so into rich California Donald Trump flows. Route 66 is the path of contempt. He said as much. He said: “If we’re going to 2044, this year marks the eight ball. My America, you have to invest in Trump Hotel Collective Gems!” Walking the earth, turning its treasures, he flipped our way of death into a delicious, soapy narrative where you’re always wondering what happens next.
