Just a Couple of Days (40 page)

If all your friends jumped off a bridge, would you?

If you had any sense at all, of course you would.

 

142
The others were already waiting impatiently in the golf cart by the time I got to the observation lounge. Tynee occupied the driver's seat this time; I joined General Kiljoy in the back. His eyes were unfocused, and his hands were not in his pockets but in his lap, halfheartedly prodding and jostling his boytoys.

Tynee and Miss Mary chattered about how eager they were to see the outside, if only through the windshield of the limousine. They talked about the weather, and how unusually warm the December had been. This eventually led them into a conversation about how all the people infected with the Pied Piper virus would fare the coming Ohio winter. The depth of Miss Mary's insight was that it had to get cold sometime. Tynee went so far as to remind her that they could still make fire.

“They'll do just fine,” General Kiljoy croaked, interrupting their remarkably mundane speculations. “Didn't you idiots see that footage? Things are not at all as they should seem.”

Tynee ordered him quiet, and General Kiljoy complied, lapsing back into his catatonic onanism. Tynee and Miss Mary returned to their pointless dialogue, talking for the sake of talking, talking because they could, talking because they were afraid not to. Mostly they talked at each other in mutual monologue, communicating nothing in a comfortable rut of oblivious stagnation.

This state of affairs continued in the limousine. General Kiljoy and I had the entire back of the limo to ourselves. Once we'd seated ourselves in the same seats we had occupied two months prior, General Kiljoy caused the opacity of the polycarbonate windows on either side of us to fade away with his remote control. When he was finished, he let it hang loosely from his hand and looked out his window. He never spoke a word to me.

I watched with some degree of interest as we exited the air locks of the compound, ascending a very long helical ramp until we came out in a parking garage near campus, next to the jail. It felt incredible just knowing I was once again on the surface of the planet, and my thoughts turned immediately to escape. The big red button on General Kiljoy's remote was dangling a foot and a half to my right, daring me, teasing me. Glancing at the doors, I saw that Ratdog was in my way, sitting in front of the doors, blocking my escape path. That little she-devil stared me down, and I could swear she knew what I was thinking. She even growled.

That's what did it. I wasn't going to be intimidated by some inbred, mutant hound from hell. I was a geneticist, for chrissakes. With a swift snatch I grabbed General Kiljoy's remote and pressed the big red button before Ratdog could even stop growling. She immediately barked and ran at me, while simultaneously the doors behind her flew open. Glaring and radiant sunshine dazzled my eyes shut instantly, and I scrambled blindly toward the light like an enraptured mosquito into a flame. I think I must have kicked Ratdog in my dash to the door, but I made it out and was off and stumble-running before anyone could react.

My lope quickly turned into a sprint as my eyes squinted open. I tossed the remote control away, for no other reason than that I certainly did not need it anymore. That mindless act of efficiency saved my life, as General Kiljoy apparently had the ability to cause his remote control to self-destruct. It exploded seconds after I flung it aside. After that, and once I was sure I had lost them, I stopped and collapsed on the wet ground. It wasn't out of exhaustion; I felt like I could run around the planet. I had never had such an adrenaline rush in my life. Rather, I collapsed from an overwhelming emancipation of emotion. The shackles of years of pent-up aggressions and repressions simply vanished with my bold and easy act of escape.

I was free at last, and the energy surging through me was not content to sit on the ground and weep for long. Before my atrophied and gelatinous legs could relax or begin to protest, my spirit yanked them off the ground and raced them through the familiar campus, bounding and leaping in athletic perfection. I ran like prey from a predator. I ran like a schoolchild with a ten-minute recess. I ran like a white rabbit late for a very important date. I ran like a gust of wind to a tornado party. I ran like my dog did the first time I took him to an open field. I ran like a poet through a rainstorm. I ran like a bliss ninny to a happy house.

I ran like nothing so much as a bat out of fucking hell.

 

143
My heaving exhilaration eventually petered out, and I found myself standing in the middle of the Green, hearing absolutely nothing but the sound of my own panting. As I caught my breath, a seething solitude gradually began to pour into me, flooding a growing pit in my stomach with a dreadful and
eternal loneliness. It was so quiet I could hear my tinnitus resounding in my ears, the reverberating shrieks of a bus screeching its brakes in my face long ago. Dense silence screamed at me from all directions. My ears begged to hear something, a car horn, an angry yell, any sort of noise pollution to assure me that I was not alone. Where was the hustle, the bustle, the clamor, the din? Where was the life? A squirrel scampered up a tree. I was grateful. A chilly wind blew past me. I shivered. I cleared my throat. It echoed. Walking along the sidewalk sounded like I was skating across sandpaper.

I was around to hear it, but no tree fell. I was offered instead the barren sound of one hand clapping. I felt compelled to sound my voice, but was inexplicably self-conscious. I uttered a tentative “Hello?” into the atmosphere. Satisfied with the result, I spoke it much louder. Nothing but my own faint echo replied. Finally, I summoned as much breath as I could hold and roared “HELLO!” with all my might into the morning air. My resounding salutation sounded disturbingly more like “Hell!” than “Hello!” and I counted four overlapping waves of my own desolate cries before an angelic shiver bearing a fierce truth trembled throughout my body.

I misspoke myself earlier. I do not know the sound of one hand clapping.

I do know the sound of one voice speaking, and it is horrifying.

 

144
I like dogs. I do not like cats. When I was a child, my family had a snobby Siamese cat named Ming. Ming detested me. Ming detested all men, except when she went into heat.
Then she would yowl and growl and thrust her posterior at any male of any species in her presence. Her apparently bestial invitations greatly aggravated my father, who always kept a squirt gun on his nightstand to chase her out of the bed. After being thus spurned one Saturday night, Ming crawled into a heating duct in the basement and wailed all night long. Nobody could reach her or get her to come out, so she kept the entire house awake till sunrise, her torturous cries of sexual ardor resounding through all the vents in the house. This infuriated my father, and he vowed again and again that night to “get that motheatin', flea-bitten cat!” Come morning, my mother still insisted that he get up and go to Sunday Mass. He acquiesced after an extended argument, but he tossed the cat outside as we were leaving. Ming had been an indoor cat since she was born, and so was overwhelmed by the sudden immensity of her surroundings. She was plastered to the front door in terror as we drove off. We went to Mass, then to brunch, then the obligatory and incredibly dull visit to a friend of the family. When we came home late that afternoon, Ming was exactly as we had left her. She had herself pushed up so close to the door that she might as well have been two-dimensional.

I spent the remainder of my first afternoon of freedom in just such a petrified state. I huddled up against the locked doors of the main library, shivering less from the cool air than from raw fear. I was scared stupid, incapable of rational thought. I was in the middle of a metropolis, and it seemed I was the only one alive. My city, my own daily familiarities, had become a ghost town. Intellectually, of course, I had known this would be the case. I had seen it on the monitor. But here I was in the middle of it, not just watching it through closed-circuit television. There
was no retreating. There was the entire world, it appeared, and there was me. There was no one else, no one with whom to talk. I felt like a castaway of Eden, an exile of happiness, adrift in a cold universe and marooned in a deserted civilization. The emotional experience of this awesome abandonment frightened the skin off my skeleton and made me chatter from my teeth to my tibias.

By and by, I shuddered myself into a dreamless sleep. It was a comatose nap, but judging from the sun's relative position it could not have lasted for more than thirty or forty minutes. I awoke with a cotton plantation in full bloom in my mouth, and the beginnings of a headache from the rum I'd had for breakfast. A nauseated hunger was poking me in the ribs. Despite this crusty awakening, I smiled. There was a very young puppy in my arms, and it was licking my face.

 

145
My new canine companion was a very small pup, no more than a month old, if that. His mishmash markings bore an uncanny similarity to those of Meeko. A note was attached to a solid black bandanna around his neck, along with what looked like the key to my car. This is what the message said:

 

Salutations!

Your escape was impressive. “Ratdog” had a litter of three. I helped her to hide them wisely. This is the pick, and it's the only pup that survived. Meeko is the father, I presume. The cowards fled back down below, hiding in hell. I decided to leave them to their miserable doom. Karma can take care of its own business after all.

Hello! I heard you hollering. Have you forgotten? You are not alone. Get up and dance! Head for the hills!
Meeko's pup will keep you company until you are ready to leave the past where it belongs. May we meet again.

Namaste,

Mella Orange

 

146
Namaste?
I was mystified by her chosen valediction. I thought it might be an anagram, but I could come up with nothing more meaningful than
tan seam, mean sat, man eats
, or
same ant
. I didn't spend much time on it though. A few days later, I thought to look it up in an encyclopedia of religion and mythology I found lying on Blip and Sophia's living room floor. It turns out that
namaste
is a Nepalese expression, and it roughly translates as “I honor the divinity within you.”

What a nice thing to say.

 

147
I continued to thumb through their encyclopedia of religion, and the entry for Loki caught my eye. Loki is a Norse deity, and his character intrigued me. After reading the entry, I found several more articles concerning his mythological significance in Blip and Sophia's extensive library. Here's my ten-cent report.

In Norse mythology, Loki is the god of mischief, the swift-witted trickster, the merry prankster. Brazen, irreverent, and heterodox, he is the recalcitrant force of change in humanity, the troublemaking and monkey-wrenching antidote to stagnation. Loki revels in every child suppressing giggles in class or in church, and flickers as the spark of naughtiness in everyone's
eye. He beguiles every quietly desperate soul and gnaws at our sanity as the suppressed scofflaw of bureaucratic authority.

Religion represents a comfortable though counterfeit ordering of chaos. Therefore, most deities are answers. But Loki is a mockery of all answers, a braying heretic. He raises hell, so to speak. He encourages the sacred subversion of the social order, for this demonstrates its plasticity and guarantees eternal innovation. In this way, he is humanity's greatest benefactor, granting us a universe of perpetually vivid novelty.

Hilarious, cruel, goofy, immoral, disgusting, and charming. At his discretion, Loki may tickle us tenderly or fling the wickedest of insults, but he promises to leave a greater approximation of Truth in his wake. He may ignite forest fires with the lightning bolts of his impish delight, but the forest survives and grows back stronger than ever. Suppressing periodic forest fires only creates a denser tinderbox, such that when the fire does eventually erupt, it is total in its devastation. Similarly, suppressing social change creates social discontent. Suppressing social discontent creates the conditions for revolution.

Similar to Prometheus of the Greek pantheon, Loki gave humanity fire and culture, and was consequently imprisoned by the rest of the Norse deities, tied underground with his son's bowels while a serpent dripped venom on his face. But Loki's fires are inextinguishable; the drive toward social change that he represents is what makes us human, what sets us apart from our animal brethren. Over the past few centuries, our species has warmed to the boiling point, to a turning point in our existence, and yet we permitted our reactionary fears to direct our actions. Instead of allowing our water to boil and ourselves to evaporate,
to evolve, into an entirely new state, we continued to listen to the curmudgeons of the old pantheon, hoisting a brick atop our own lid. This was unwise. Loki's inevitable destiny thus became the catalyst of apocalyptic convulsions.

Loki topped his own greatest stunt of all time with his Pied Piper job. First he gave us communication, now it appears he has given us perfect communication, tuned us in and eliminated the static. He overthrew the old guard with their own mal-intentions. He pulled off a numinous coup d'état. He had the last laugh.

I named Meeko's son Loki that day, a few days after I found him in my arms. It seemed appropriate.