Soliloquy to Gods & Men
“I may not belong to physical reality. I may not assign humanity with rational explanations. But I have spoken to cockroaches. If nothing else, I promise you a Cult of Personality the likes of which the world has never seen,” intoned Curd, voice resounding over the roofs of the world. “At any rate, there I was, in Idaho, after being sidetracked for days in Wall, South Dakota. I yearned for a wet slut, but the desert infects bodies as much as it does minds, souls, and other etherealities. Unexpectedly a slue of drunken bikers accosted me in the Drug Store. I had done nothing to provoke the fuckers. But they seemed certain of themselves (i.e., certain of my culpability) and a long chase ensued atop loud motorcycles, one of which I confiscated so as to facilitate the drama that they had so ignominiously engendered. We blasted up and down the streets of Wall for hours scaring away natives and tourists in equal measure. Ennui greeted me like an abused foster parent and I made the decision to total the vehicle. I veered wildly to the left and accelerated into an unimportant-looking building, destroying the motherfucker. I was ok. Completely unscathed, in fact, notwithstanding screwball backflips and earthshattering breakfalls. I might have lost consciousness, but the loss of consciousness is such a mundane affair, it need not be mentioned; I slept last night, and I will sleep tonight, snoring like a fat baconwhore. I must say the reality of this state violates certain hauntological codes, but the landscape is sound, and that's why I'm here. Idaho is more earthlike than earth itself. I wish you could see it—the way the social fabric peels apart to expose such gristled cloak-and-dagger mechanisms, not to mention the centrifugal eccentricity, the subterranean implosion, the dismantling narratives of Shit and Truth. I can assure you that this interzone is spud-free. Canny subjects embrace the covenant. It’s a matter of angles of incidence. These angles constitute humanity. The gods rob me of my godlessness. As always, I forgive them; but I never forget a fuckin’ asshole. I once went to a drive-in movie conscious of the fact that it was high noon and the projectionist was asleep. Try it. Try to sit there, in your car, in the dust, staring at the blank megascreen. You will fail. Eventually everybody fails. The recalcitrant ethics of mindlessness delude us into believing that we actually possess selfhood and the capacity for violence. But I can assure you: we lack selfhood. And we lack the capacity to exert violence. Violence exerts us. In the absence of fame, one ceases to exist. I might play Seneca Beaulac on TV, but in reality, I am an island, beachfronts groping in every direction for the Split Ends of Time. No man is an island, however, who fails to admit the great and powerful depth of his flaws. And yet, despite my flaws, and my limitations, and my unrealized dreams, and my blundered second-guesses and off-the-cuff glances, and so forth, despite these things, despite me, you stupid fuckheads, I can assure you of one thing: nobody—and I mean nobody, dead or undead, alive or moribund, not-yet-conceived or never-to-be-birthed—NOBODY CAN FUCK WITH MY MUSE.”
Left Turn Signal
This is the last chapter of the book’s bleeding heart, ventricles unhinged, lifeforce flowing into the copper-plated gutters. I’m following Curd in a Hepburn orange 1973 Buick Riviera. 3,000 miles and counting.
Curd’s driving a motorcycle.
I can’t tell what kind.
Handlebars like elkhorns—he can barely reach them, maneuver them.
At some point his left turn signal blinks on. There are no side roads. The main road goes on and on and there’s nothing but beanfields to the east and to the west and anybody in this situation can only think and dream of asphalt and beans and sky.
He keeps the turn signal on for a long time. At last he jerks left. Plunges into the beanfield.
I pull to the roadside, get out of the car.
I stand on my toes, sensing the curvature of my calf muscles, and watch him go.
He goes on and on and when I can barely see him he wipes out, awkwardly, like a child who doesn’t know the score. A plume of dust climbs into the blue rafters.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Since the publication of his first short story in 1999, D. Harlan Wilson spent a lot of time in graduate school pursuing a Ph.D. in English and Science Fiction Studies while steadily building a corpus of fiction and nonfiction. In addition to over ten books, he is the author of hundreds of stories and essays that have appeared in magazines, journals and anthologies across the world in multiple languages. Wilson is currently a professor of English at Wright State University-Lake Campus in Ohio. He serves as reviews editor for Extrapolation, an academic journal of science fiction criticism, and managing editor of Guide Dog Books, the nonfiction syndicate of Raw Dog Screaming Press.
Visit Wilson online at www.thekyotoman.com.
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