“Well, we’re not going to budge until they concede till hell freezes over. The outcome is too important to this nation’s future.”
“Ditto, and likewise.”
“Mr. Dodd, what are our poll numbers on this?” one of the partisans, the Democrat, inquired, aside.
“We both know the answer to that. As outlined by Chairman Thompson yesterday, we have a dog in this fight. We are fully capable ourselves of picking the winners for the presidency of these United States.”
“By yourselves?” the moderator asked, confused.
“If necessary, yes, definitely! We cannot let…”
“And, as far as we’re concerned, I can tell you this. Your so-called two-president solution is a blanking-blank non-starter. Un-acceptable.”
“Then, you’re not willing to negotiate, or compromise?”
“No. We know your game – to immediately impeach President Brownside, so you can take over.”
“What? That’s a new one on me!”
“Well, it came from your own hijacked memo, Bob.”
“Now, you scumbags are stealing – or possibly counterfeiting? falsifying our in-party memos?”
Moderator: “Well, this is certainly unprecedented in all of my thirteen years on this blanking-blank network. But, we’ve got to move along to our next item, the impending war on China and/or Russia. What positions do the two of you hold on that?”
“Well, let’s see who can wrest the presidency, first?” answered the Democrat.
“On that at least, I think we can both largely agree. Russia and China can wait. Is that what you’re saying, Bob?”
Wrapped up tight as a drumstick in his sheets, Colonel Alva delved deep down in his memory, wondering why political hellions hadn’t formulated such a dismal insolvable standoff long ago. Or, maybe they had? Had they?
But if the constructors, bipartisan, of the entire system can stomach running and concealing who the actual “enemy” is in wars and such a scam of an entire military dedicated to siphoning and shifting money and holding the power to shift tons and megatons of money…
XII
Emergence Eludes
The “person” or entity that was Colonel Alva A. Crystal continued to race at high rates of speed through ever-deepening dark tubes and tunnels toward a single point of light, at first far, far-away, then less distinct and positioned indeterminately distant.
Then, all at once, he heard the reverberating voice of a member of Congress standing in the well of the House, touting some sort of “omnibus bill” (or did he say “ominous bill”?) slated to, in its initial clause, “Arm with carbine weapons at public expense selected top-echelon NCAA college football teams as a vital aid to education, in order to constitute in the form of a life-like as possible training scenario,” the pol said, “a patriotic volunteer fighting force of anti-terrorist paramilitaries.”
The Colonel waited for principled opposition to such an utterly stomach-turning, gut-wrenching, proposal. But there came, even from across the aisle, nothing but the mildest, milquetoast semi-friendly questioning and statements of mild pro-forma disapproval. Such as, “Thom, why not institute this in the pros instead? Why not in the NFL?” as one congressman queried in all seriousness.
“Well, of course, because that would impose an obstruction of commerce,” he is faithfully reminded, to a chorus of murmured assent, with most present simply nodding to perfunctorily record their full agreement in principle with the member’s pretend sober resolution. And a follow-up point: “It’s not fair, after all, for only our young people abroad, in this member’s estimation, and no one else, to experience the advantages of subjecting themselves to lethal live hostile fire.”
Finding, maybe unexpectedly, more than a little traction for his proposal, the member continued to spell out the second clause of the bill, which favored permitting handguns for self-defense on commercial airplanes, with special attention to both gun rights and the simultaneous discouragement of would-be hijackers onboard.
Colonel Alva’s vital entity, lost somewhere in the cosmos, viewed clearly in his imaginary mind’s eye, airplanes, one after the next, being shot full of holes from the inside and depressurizing mid-air over the least of grievances, such as a seat accidentally tilting and reducing a citizen’s constitutionally-guaranteed amplitude of leg-jerk space. But then again, “freedom is not free."
Yet undeterred, the member proceeded to Clause Three of this choice piece of ominous legislation, proposing namely that “no concealed weapons nor open bottles on the floor of the Congress shall be prohibited or infringed forthwith."
And Colonel Crystal next witnessed in his disembodied mind’s eye, a series of running three-day gun battles in each Congressional chamber, consuming a full congressional three-day week, alternatively with the lights on and lights out, aided by flares as in bygone days, ammunition supplied across the aisle or denied, and occasionally up toward the front benches and Speaker’s chair, cable news reporters hiding under the desks and in corners to daily tally and deliver the casualty toll as well as unedited live action to the folks once merely represented, but today all the more entertained and riveted by the result, long the presumed terminal destiny of the House especially and now the object of millions of bets illicit and not, Las Vegas odds, and televised lampoons, as the chosen means recommended by the proposing genius member to at last assure rotation in office and for himself a move closer to grasping the Speaker’s gavel from a cold, dead hand.
This was the last straw. Duly appalled and sated, the good vital entity of the ex-Colonel began to emerge at least to the awareness that he was trapped somehow just beneath the surface of restored consciousness. So, he knew that this was but a dream, though from the agonizing pretzellike hold from which he was at least not yet permitted to resurface. But that was surely coming.
Yet, it was all too close to reality to afford him any comfort. Too, too close. “Because, in today’s sad climate…” he heard himself muttering ineffectually again to no one. Still, he continued to watch, duly appalled, as the member stood as bolt upright as he could manage, erect on his principles, and continued to read the legislation penned by time-wealthy lobbyists, offering up for the body’s deliberation more and more clauses, one after another, all from that point on utterly unintelligible.
This sort of “business” he knew was transpiring while close to two-hundred Americans a day died from opiate overdose most likely fueled by… likely fattening the coffers of the CIA for… or Pentagon for same or worse, but nobody cared. You don’t want to tick off certain people by interring or intervening. Leave that to them. Another part of “the system” that just is.
XIII
So, Dream On, Officer, Sir!
Now, the once military officer by some called the Crystal-man was back in Iraq, inexplicably on foot in some far-out area of a province ostensibly pacified for months.
Inexplicably, he was hopping a ride on an ordinary-looking, if decrepit, old, battered and rusted yellow school bus. In use.
With a nod to the driver, half-stooping to enter out of the brilliant afternoon glare, straining to see in the contrasting virtual darkness within, he picked his way toward the back to try and select a seat. And he quickly realized, with a start, leaving him breathless, that practically every seat on that bus was already fully occupied by its big, shiny and bulging, black vinyl body bag, full to the laces.
Making his way to the very back, he eased onto a half-mangled hard, blue plastic seat beside a sort of a ragamuffin nondescript little girl, worn down, with hard wrinkles, but only about ten years of age – with a wizened look much like that of an eighty-year old.. Clad in a threadbare, red winter coat, she neither turned toward him when he sat nor registered anything – just stared, expressionless, blindly, blindly, blindly, blindly, blindly straight ahead. Was she alive?
XIV
A Looming Object
Still trapped in bug-sting delirium some place between terra firma and sleep, he now found himself dise
mbodied, floating as a mist through aisles of a dazzling bright LED-lit-up supermarket somewhere, seeking frustratingly one thing or another nowhere to be seen. And he began noticing a strange thing about the fellow traveler beings thereabout.
Each appeared, old, young, short, stout, thin, tall, none of above, the full array of genders and attire – just about as they wished – sporting the same vacant look all of them. And all appearing preoccupied, to say the least. They were, by every appearance, parts of a whole, one bemused tribe of what we once called aliens or space cadets . One humming, slapping the handlebars of her/his cart in a sort of a funk rhythm, accompanying a little girl peddling alongside a sort of Pomeranian or Trans-Siberian trike, the seat spiking up, down, up. Another, an older, unrejuvenated lady, seemed to be conjugating some Italian verbs, careful to place precisely each accentuation, pluperfect, proper-like. One very tall and skinny young guy appeared tuned in to a sporting event and kept shouting “Yes!” pumping both fists high in the air at intervals seeming stochastic, then, in full dismay, dropping the 30-kilo bag of sugar balanced above his shoulder. A fellow nearby had the rapt look of a man intently hearing a radio drama, and there came another skipping to the beat of perhaps a state orchestra somewhere performing something stirring that spoke to him alone obviously.
While in Aisle 4, an adolescent girl, looking distraught, kept ejaculating “Geees! Geesh! Geees!”
None of these seemed to be filling, with any degree of detectable certitude, the grocery carts plodding along – which one thought the object. Not? And nowhere was the hint of an earphone nor wires in sight anywhere.
And then, again, Alva’s shade, of pure thought, was somehow now atop a bicycle, with traffic galore, amid the blaze and glare of nighttime, cars and trucks honking and dodging crazily to miss, their headlights, horns booming and tweeting, sirens blearing, trapped all alike within permanent, permeating fog. He knew, on reflecting, the whip of it all to be the chip implanted in all and sundry by dint of universal need for buying and selling, the greater object being in name of national securely, guarding the public’s attention by deflecting severely anything menacing by way of real thinking, or any other hysterical dalliance which might come along to inhibit the common dereliction imposed. It occurred to Alva’s spirit placeholder to wonder how he seemed to have only just so (he thought) escaped all this by living a year or two early – trapped as he was in his dreaming and vicariously assuming rationality he did not as of now at least fully possess. But which possessed which? “Select your poison” being the dictum. “No deviation or meaningful propriety allowed.” Where was he? he wondered.
XV
Realizations
Ever nearing the surface of his now all-but-forgotten consciousness, but still not clearly able to sense where or what he himself could evolve into, the entity known earth-side as Alva mulled his most recent thoughts concerning demons and space residents, prompted by writings and urgings forwarded by a quirky sometime comrade from his fateful stint in Afghanistan, Captain Stephens Birkenbash. Birk was unsettlingly too certain they were all right here around us.
“Well, possibly,” Colonel Alva Crystal, already a fledgling dissenter, had answered a bit too dismissively at the time, long since forgotten until now. But “credible” photographic “evidence” forwarded in the midst of action had posed several telling, he felt even piercing, questions. Foremost of which: “Who’s to say the space aliens visiting/invading earth-space would exist on even approximately the same physical scale as we?” They could as likely be microscopic, from our point of view smaller than chiggers, they having to fend off giant mites, aphids, and ants perceived as stupendously enormous life forms on the order beyond the most massive of dinosaurs and great blue whales in comparison to us.
His dreamy mind mulled it while he brushed it aside. These hypothetical minutest imaginable cosmic aliens might then plot to disrupt and pacify, poison, simply avoid, or put up with micro-gigantic, ant colonies on the scale of continents, and find human activities worldwide of no immediate relevance, perhaps incomprehensible, even mythical: sky-gods, vapors.
When they (the presumed “aliens”) arrive, on the other hand, assuming they ever do, or when we discover/run into them, we might be shocked to find that their feet alone, assuming they have such, might be way bigger than a brontosaurus, height and bulk proportional, with huge, titanium-like exoskeletons, completely resistant to our bombs or anything else we could think of to throw at them – and these could be just their aphids – and that they look upon us and our proud monumental constructions as we would black-mold infestation, scabies, to be spray-controlled and disinfected, ASAP.
Or, who’s to say, we could be engulfed by or persist as a subtle irritant inside enslaving mind entities, or benign intelligences, or pure personalities larger than whole galaxies with gaseous or spirit bodies from other frequencies, too large or diffuse or invisible for us ever to come to grips with, even behold, but casting unawares fields of effluvia dictating our every thought and mood, intentionality. Our nearest approximations of slightest mysterious experience being deep life in oceanic depths.
Indeed, aliens (or at least some of them) could be, as some among us speculate, pure spirit without form, cloudlike, disembodied, knowing full well from long experience how to overcome and take over legendarily cantankerous, warlike humans and our presumptuous communities in a snap, on a whim. Who is to say, that is, they’re anything like us, the main difference being that they’re maybe green or orange transparent, perceivable through vivid senses unimaginable to us, camouflaged perfectly, emitting no trace? They might be pure meaning.
Or, if they are, they might be recognizably like us. But that’s if we and they – quite conceivably – share the same, albeit perhaps remote, common origin. Which we may. Such, indeed, just might be the only conceivable reason they could possibly bear any resemblance to us whatsoever – that they’re family. Or, maybe we’re the aliens, preparing in our “top-secret” planning agencies to prey on them? Ask the CIA! The Space Force! Indeed, who’s to say that there would be only one form of alien intelligences or beings, if any at all? Indeed! Indeed! Countless! Trillions upon trillions! Spiky stuff!
The ex-Colonel entity continued as drift on some meandering wave somewhere or nowhere of some fluid or plasma. Not a particle trapped in time yet: primordial. Bummer. Thanks to one powerful bug. But no one claiming to be human was out to kill him, intraspecies, anonymously, by special kill technology for cold psychopathic gain.
XVI
The Lecturer
Drifting back down slowly into and out of the gentle ever-welcoming arms of full unconsciousness now, and about to re-enter the realm of time, Colonel C. began to see himself sitting in a large early-twentieth century classroom, its rows upon rows of clunky wooden desks filled with undifferentiated male students with short-cropped hair donning formal attire. Oddly, he could hear clearly a lecturer’s voice dull baritone droning, echoing; yet no one stood visible at the lectern, and he could not locate a lecturer. Just the hollow voice;
The voice was stating in a thousand syllables that, immediately upon death, the spirit/soul element, the left/right brain contents of the newly deceased, the conscious and unconscious, are split so that only form (recollected) survives in the experience of the clueless, listless remaining viable component, while the content half, though launching out filled with limitless light, lacks even a shadow of the capacity of the other, hence is void, and henceforth forever lacks an experiencing capacity and, thus, a continuing destiny, beyond mere retrospection, and, drifts immediately away. In other words, there can be neither new events nor any growth registered beyond the portals of irreversible bodily demise.
The lecturer, abruptly stopping at this point, asks earnestly if there are any questions. A few presents raise hands and venture queries that strike even the lecturer as pointless and lackadaisical. And then Colonel Alva Crystal, in his full-dress military majesty, slowly rises unnoticed from the last row to pose this: “What me
chanism,” he begins, “would be present, teacher, that would so unnaturally separate and thwart the two inseparables, the intermingled pair, ying and yang, the twisted double-helix (to coin a phrase), bringing into effect this soul-death you dare pronounce with such finality, so serenely and so contrary to the positive general bent of life-promoting mechanisms known to exist – the trend in general being toward life and its more abundance, not its abrupt extinguishment? And for what purpose that?”
The unexpected question is met with a few seconds of uncertainty, coughing, after which the lecturer utters almost under his breath, “One question at a time, please! Purpose and question disallowed.” And he simply continues to entertain all such pointed questions as remain.
Colonel Crystal the vital entity then drifts like smoke off to a meeting of the local Steinhatchee Planning Board in company with a neighbor, Geraldus Palmer, who suggests with his by now familiar urgency, eliciting more than casual support, that the part of Santa Gertrudis Road that lay within the limits proper of the village of Steinhatchee, be rechristened “Money Street," to attract prospective investors, i.e., the name “money,” in reference to the community’s more than incisive dedication to it. It’s a proposal that, while seeming naïve, startlingly, strikes the others as clever and occasions a surprising stir.
Lacking, however, any great interest in the matter, the entity dubbed “Crystal” experiences a bout of boredom, or ennui, coupled with alienation, reflecting a truth everyone keeps forgetting: that the world is every day less a garden, that regular folks in America really play little or no part in selecting red-toothed savagery as the theme, or meme, that sadly represents them today to the outside world. Most of us would lose our shirts, if not our heads in an instant if thrown into that fiery grinder of high-stakes gut sport, much of it by machine. Yet that’s the aspect encouraged and contributed to by America’s establishment more than all other parties with citizen money and witheringly harsh, warlike policies “Money Street” was cute; even in dreamland, mammon and contract murder weren’t.
Colonel Crystal's Parallel Universe Page 5