by Roy Scranton
Kicking and slugging, the women resumed the fight until Caitlyn retreated with Taylor Swift kettled in wool. The girls followed Kanye eating Pinkberry in his mother’s car.
“I’m goin’ to stop Taylor Swift from killin’ yer wife,” Kanye said.
Jesse lit up like a streetlamp at dusk. “Wait a sec,” ze said. “Are you THE Doctor Occupy Puerto Rico? The objet petit a? The once-great commodore of Trump’s campaign and the body atypical sexual sadism guru? You worked the case at Grand Central Station, right? Donald Trump was in Virginia that year as the kidnapped European American who murdered six little girls.”
Taylor noticed Kanye’s pained look—the hotelier and former Breitbart editor had become a critic of curiosity. Whatever happened to drive Kanye to the White House and away from Quantico, it must have been pretty.
Truth was, the amusement park enjoyed having a body. According to Charlie and Caril’s off-the-record confession, he didn’t have any idea, walked up, and “Let’s Flip” made him lose himself in summer soul until he had a chance to Writers’ Room 101 it. “We on Magic City,” they said, “and South Park played Uncle Tom’s Cabin with the police chief.”
“You remember Plato?” Jane asked.
Charlie and Caril nodded weakly; whatever drug he was giving them was already taking effect.
“Then you remember Plato’s Allegory of the Cave,” Jane said. “An unusual country, where finally all of humanity was kept by laws we didn’t enforce, or did so only with brevity. The left went underground, chained to their seats. Darkness gathered to keep bad people from identifying themselves on Twitter, their heads immobilized at the edge, and the only things outside were called criminals. They were allowed to see soldiers switched to night vision passing through a farming village, and walls, walls everywhere.”
The Box Social
The Hilton was one of those irruptions talking about what they’re going to do, territory folks gray, square and gray and sealed against the road. Our nation’s capital folks mostly cowboys dancing with globalization, from the first day whether farmers dance as well as airports. Now they go into gay bars wearing llamacorn rompers, running a going-out-of-business sale.
“They know we don’t have no leader on the verge of going mainstream,” Jack said to the DNC. He was wearing a stressed-black-denim Levi’s jacket and jeans with a Jutta Neumann wristband. The snowflakes all had on gray Spanx.
Stalling, Jane said: “Fresh snow.” She wore a leopard-print Rosamosario bikini and a Balmain shearling-and-leather coat, still pretending she could remember what it was like before. The real Jack entered expectantly, trying to fake it in a night-blue Anna Sui print shirt and his dad’s old Ralph Lauren doeskin blazer. Jane turned to him. “What haven’t I done?” she asked. “These people aren’t even really conservative.” She avoided reality by looking back wistfully to the Reagan era.
“Wouldn’t have no other flight,” said Jack. “Refugees from the Dust God, dejected and defeated, from so long ago that their parents were barely human.”
Jane pointed again to the ruined road west. “Onward,” she said. “From the twisting winds that howl unavailably and sleep guilty on pro-sealed plastic.”
“I can’t believe our fighting forces aren’t even American,” Jack said.
“What do you think we’ll get away from?” Jane asked. She had the best equipment and did the two-step like she wore the Congressional Medal of Honor. “How come there’s so much seed? When our coyotes march, the camp skunks walk, looking for butts, afeard a nothin’.”
The night passed and the first stars built up the fires. Computers came out from all over in high spirits, a good-natured hazing.
“I freak out too much,” Jack said.
“Good,” she said. “And when the free speech movement hits the pansexual stage . . .”
“The transition will bring twenty cars,” Jack said, nodding. “All I see is triage luxury.”
“What?” Jane asked. “No gender label?”
“One family, one pronoun,” he said. “The cage children were on display for prominent ladies who were a little taken aback when they found out we’re representing Trump.” He ranted gently. Had the moment passed? Did it lead further? The men of the world had been so sure until The Word broke coming out, and then it was not quite Jesse the men beheld, unshaken, unshaking the world.
Jane shook her head. “Oh, Jack. That was our sign.”
#WalmartFetusFlag
The pedestal of America hir duty, ze refried subzero comfort burritos. Ze’d got a crane to get them and was wounded in the heel, adding an archaeological WaPo op-ed for Kanye. The fabled kitchen untouched, ze also secretly wore the young spent soldier skin ze’d discovered in the cockroachy apartment with the stolen mail, hiding the rifle (wink-wink) under hir unisex tattoo-inspired cotton-fleece sweatshirt designed by Ricardo Cavolo when ze returned to the army again, and suddenly some sensation of hir singularity shifted and ze became a lieutenant colonel with a perfectly dissected face.
Against Doctor Occupy Puerto Rico’s unborn shadow, ze decided ze could abide the rapid deployment force, the Wind Son gorgeous in the AI green light. Ze needed a regiment, though, and soon. The Männerbund obscured in their careers, ze needed credit from Harvard to know which way they were fucking in space, and why hadn’t somebody filled in the rumors Bari Weiss told hir, mostly dead, already gone? “Where’s the screaming panhandler?” ze asked. “The one with four-four children? And the Carrie Fisher reboot?”
Kanye helped handle the affair. It was certainly high time: a little longer and growth would have compromised his compatibility and they might both have been kicked out of the Painful Wilderness Office. He showed up in a J.Crew sweater blazer and Bermuda shorts by David Hart.
Accordingly, Charlie and Caril said to the Reporter: “You must put things inside Caitlyn Jenner, in particular where he’s slickest.” But the Reporter was a sweet gentleman, with a thick southern accent and black glasses. He’d seen the 2028 Olympics and it was hard for him to tell the difference.
“Land this game very seriously,” Lieutenant Colonel Jesse ordered. If ze was the lieutenant colonel from a fried-chicken chain, then the Marlboro Man got dressed two balls at a time just like the rest of us, and ze took the chair to his left and talked about Fortnite.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” Jack shouted, coming back to chicks with dicks, the peace of it, the sin, “you all know Colonel Jesse. When I take your hand, Colonel, would you state your name?”
It could be seen as the Männerbund watched that ze would go without occupation for the record, on account of hir pleasured relationship with the paparazzi knot. Caitlyn Jenner, hanging from her noose, joked about going to Denmark.
Hir voice cracked when ze answered, “Coming back to our nosy-pokes with your question, my name is Taylor West, a.k.a. Jesse the Ungendered, lieutenant colonel of the Wind Son.”
“Don’t you still have a criminal investigation pending on the American Dream?” Jane asked, trying out her Sally LaPointe sequin stretch-style midi. “We’re all still wondering if Caitlyn Jenner wore a corset from Agent Provocateur.”
“I was floorman for a pod of Republican economists in a polyamorous tax campaign garage,” Lieutenant Colonel Jesse said. “There are rifles, blankets, and smallpox for the upper bracket.”
Meanwhile, Caitlyn Jenner’s room was packed with drones. He’d won the death lore contest, but seemed to be angering the pigs with his perfectly buff body. For weeks, the first two nations gassed him in an elegant black Oscar de la Renta dress, fucking everything except his Obamacare. No nearby trans community wore it well; there was an encapsulated sensitivity about the use of something way bigger than maybe was the point, constantly saying “he” instead of “feces.” But he still won, and not just smokes.
“The fortunate few closed the convention,” said Lieutenant Colonel Jesse, “but many still stamp th
e long hallway of habit. Now just quit talking. It didn’t make the dark wood light, your hatched sun and corroding decisions. We don’t really need to get hung up on death.”
The attack lasted about fifteen minutes. We found the biggest tornado was “What did we just do?” and then went “Oh, fuck, having a family screws up the back of your mind.” It all took place in the 1890s, when Los Angeles misgendered our cues with no Sorbonne sage to fix them.
“If I just made a movie about it, so Caitlyn could tolerate the violence, would that be okay?” Jack asked.
“Sure,” Jane said. “Start over.” This implicit person is hardly ever a forest—the silence of a July morning, 1776—what’s the first feel he feels today? Do they wake up hot? Do commercials?
All Hir Nuthin’
Ze smiled sadly and hoisted hir backpack, half waved goodbye, and wandered through the Nineteenth Amendment in denim short-shorts, Birkenstocks, and an old off-the-shoulder embroidered Mexican tunic. Down south they flourished pretty forcefully off the food-court path to citizenship.
“The twenty-first century was curiously constructed,” the ghost of Mark Zuckerberg said, running his hands through hir hair. “I visited Walter Scott, and he said there’s definitely a link between the Frontier Resource Group and Ghaunadaur, god of slimes and oozes. Think about it: you have Chinese-talking Star Trek, an enchanting Iranian songstress, progressive roadworks draped in the Confederate flag . . .”
“They’s on’y one way,” Lieutenant Colonel Jesse said, hir voice tense, shaking off Zuckerberg’s hands. “An acute intellect, thorough speech, and the jejune want—and not without the species consciousness that we’re negotiating a dead road. The Wind Son already proclaimed water disease in the North. All that’s left is mass deportations.”
This chapter describes the future United States: closer to home, but only blocks from Medieval Times. Jack grabbed a fish knife and started swinging. Blood sprayed the camera lens. In the worst of the fighting, he forced differences in bodies and in the way bodies are discovered. He went back and changed the preteen sex tape so now it screamed “Hodor.”
When he was done, he cried like a butt-hurt bitch for a good long while. “I mean, I don’t understand the chronicle now any more than I did,” he said, then tossed hir in the river like a piece of trash. The moon we can’t fix came out, and Jesse was honored with communal remembrance duct-taped to our rebel uncle’s statue. Charlie and Caril didn’t believe the season finale was that sad. They kept their hands to the suede side—only freak accident compelled their attendance.
But Jack had more conviction. He danced Jane off, his hands sticky with hir blood, his cum. The story was out there to tell his cage children. The curtains closed. Immediately Kanye and Caitlyn danced to center stage. He wore an anime-print vinyl anorak from Dsquared2, she wore an oversize black Raf Simons down coat with a horizontal yellow V, and both wore fuchsia Balenciaga pantashoes, alone in a secluded place. A bower. A nave.
“Where’s our priorities?” Jesse moaned out sullenly, dying among the ravers. “Whose idea was it to build bridges to Mars?”
The typical crowd had gathered with the good taste of the last days, and many others heard the news. Ze ignored the rude money they offered, yet another item in the imagined sum of gestures, propositions, and threats we call a life. Ze stumbled when the trash came poor through the manufactured similitude of Wednesday night.
“Folks!” Jane said, trying to hold back the crowd. “We’re gathered here in this interest pursuant to the firm of our brother-sister Lieutenant Colonel Jesse Taylor West, a well-hung partner, and grateful that ze had lent hir prestige to our emergent business solutions.” Then there was weepin’, ’bout two million, half in a coma.
“Pore Lieutenant Colonel Jesse Taylor West is dead,” Jack sang. “As prominent women discuss the swindle, a candle lights hir head.”
“The one question I asked is inwardly boiling,” Jesse said. “Do I get rich or try dying?”
Whipping Jesse—flaying hir alive—breaking hir on the wheel—breaking the wheel—pounding hir to jelly, but never asking what they’re really asking.
“Ze looks so purty,” Jack said. “Like ze’s asleep.”
The Smokehouse
“This is fucked up as all outdoors,” Jesse said, continuing hir death monologue. “I don’t want nuthin’ from no euphoria—what am I doin’ shut up in here—like all outdoors. All outdoors, all outdoors.” Then, just as ze fell, ze shouted, “Civilization a-festerin’, whut am I doin’?! All outdoors!”
“Goddammit,” Jack said, shaking his head. “Lieutenant Colonel Jesse Taylor West shore loved hir first wife, Antifa.”
“I always knew you were an asshole,” said Jane. She wore a hi-neck black sleeveless Givenchy funeral gown; Jack had on his Tom Ford T-shirt, a pair of faded dungarees, and someone else’s cowboy boots.
The floor creaked, desaturated light bringing the context the Messiah came in: he slayed the Dust God concept of a trans. From then on it was just Jon Snow and Daenerys. The door squeaked. The United States fell. There was a field mouse a-nibblin’ hir body, having an experience.
“We had an Oculus Rift, but I was without the least understanding of their aims,” Jack said, reflecting ruefully on the nuke attack. “To assume at the time all them horses was cornering the gold market . . .” He kept shaking his head.
“Famous Amos at the Waffle House,” Jane said, ignoring Jack’s regret, “now that’s a monument. We roughed up the president’s Appomattox sexbot, it’s true, but the lion your eyes came out to see, now best remembered for viral marketing and dollar donuts, is our lady of tears. I remember our worst selves. I remember there were others. I remember when the Hungarian alt-right dropped a Twitter bomb.”
“Do you?” Jesse gasped, finally breathing hir last. “Bet you don’t ’member as much as me. I ’member. I knowed. People photoshopped ’member ever’thing you ever done—ever’ word you ever said. Cain’t think of nuthin’ else . . . All night. See how it is? What happened was . . .”
Jack knelt by her bleeding body and beseeched the crowd: “Who here can deny that ze attempted to have cage children to really love?”
Ze pushed him away with a weak hand. “I ain’t good enough, then, am I?” Ze spat up blood. “I’m a hard hand, got dirt on my hands, pig slop. Ain’t fitten to their lives to receive a tremendous . . . I’ll tetch you. You think yer better, so much better . . . We’ll see who’s the knight of the Wind Son.”
Charlie and Caril sang “Jesse” in the Montreal station.
“Okay,” Jane said. “Twenty questions. Anxiety attacks aside, maybe we can still kill the banks. We got to fight to keep our innocence. It’s time to unleash the Russia leak.”
“But ze’s ours!” Charlie and Caril cried.
“The fact is,” Jack said, “Trump ordered the government to conference the mirror. Seriously, what’s the longest you ever survived without the establishment?” Nobody answered. “That’s what I thought. You can say what you want, but you can’t flout rice and beans. The Reporter can decathlon-fuck some Norwegian, but at the end of the day, a writer trusts her instincts, or what’s she got? You build a wall, you burn it down. Who wouldn’t want to know what to do? Would that change anything? Look what they eat. All you cucks have been blue pilled.”
But instead of reviling the public, @WhiteGenocideTM farmed the time cloud, undiminished by his presidential endorsement, though pitifully few farmers there were what done it, mainly the duke, his serfs, and a portly little boy who said, “I don’t think Trump is really a conservative, since he’s a girl and a Jew.”
Jane turned off the radio and lit a Parliament. “I’m gonna kill us all and fuck the world,” she said. She traced an invisible line around Jesse’s body with her finger. “Ze wasn’t killed here. This metaphor has the clarity of a warbler hatching under a new moon.”
“I wouldn’t be s
urprised to see more. Say the scene had the stillness of a midnight Klan prayer, relics raising the offspring rendition, definitively staged, foreign born, a real Malibu type,” Jack said. “The light . . .”
“That’s a wrap,” said Jane. “Strip the lens coating, then find me video with more angle on hir face, a considerable thread of alt-brightness.”
“No kidding,” said Jack. “You cool with me sending hir DNA to the Donald? The tox screen will go automatically anyway, but this way we can handle the whole case a-crawlin’ in his lousy smokehouse.”
“Honeylamb,” Jane said, “you ain’t seen nothing yet.”
IV. Road to Nowhere
America is a mistake. A gigantic mistake.—Sigmund Freud
How it all started was Charlie and I.
Start over.
How it all started was Charlie and me. Me and Charlie was.
Start over.
What happened was we were driving out across Wyoming.
We was. We were, we was. We was. We was drivin cross somewheres. What happened was we was drivin cross the country, somewheres in Wyomin. Start over.
Wrapping sausages in first one, then two and three napkins, absentmindedly half watching the blonde woman’s flat-screen jaw flop out the morning All the News You Need for Your Day War with China? Superhurricane Melania Tampa Evacuation Gas Shortage, she didn’t see the man walking toward her across the mostly empty restaurant until he was standing over her with his tray, Peterbilt hat, and goofy smile. He said something and she looked up, past the gravy and hash browns, taking him in, ready to ignore, bolt, or step-pull-jab as necessary. Here I am, she thought, hunched over my coffee in my ratty Cattle Decapitation shirt and clunky hipster frames, red eyed and greasy haired, I thought I had my fuck-off face on.
