One Night in Copan

by W. E. Gutman

  Wholesale persecution soon follows.

  In Los Angeles, the police purge smokers from their ranks and transfer them to the sanitation corps. Most adjust quite well once they discover the metaphysical connection between police work and garbage.

  The earth sizzles with rage. The world goes amok.

  In Washington, several legislators who at long last concede that smoking is a deadly addiction countenanced by other legislators because it generates huge taxable revenues -- introduce stiff anti-smoking bills. Others, who refuse to return certain favors graciously extended by the tobacco lobby, are slain.

  Tobacco companies respond by making falsehearted anti-smoking pronouncements on television and radio, and in print publications. “Smoking is addictive and dangerous to your health,” their ads proclaim. What is left unsaid is that their factories continue to produce millions of cigarettes -- just in case. Their domestic profits slowly turning to ashes, the tobacco companies now rot the unregulated lungs of the Third World.

  Counting more smokers per capita than all other nations combined, Japan and China are decimated. The once-buzzing squadrons of polite bespectacled little chain-smoking shutterbugs wearing awkward little western suits have since gone home and now engage in the gentler pursuit of writing three-line poems, dwarfing trees and carving cricket cages out of matchsticks.

  Gays and lesbians are next. The deaf; the color-blind; the morbidly obese; the elderly; the miscegenated. The widowed are summarily executed. Redheads undergo mass sterilization. The albino and the flatfooted perish in a bonfire of condescension. Forced to read Chaucer, dyslexics die a horrible death. Stamp collectors are canceled.

  There is no shortage of latent martyrs. Others will surely be found.

  Soon, one last wisp of smoke rises from the embers like a pipe dream and scatters in the air for the last time.

  I blow out the candle. It will be a long night.

  NEITHER APE NOR ANGEL

  Which is it? Is man God’s only mistake

  or God man’s only mistake?

  Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

  Every now and then, usually by default and seldom on the first try, the human race blunders on a fact or two. Wrenched from the shadows of ignorance or simply sideswiped by some careless time traveler, these truths often shatter deep-seated if somewhat unsustainable beliefs.

  Take Homo sapiens, for example.

  In the beginning, when fate still ruled the world, when providence, not scheme, random chance, not purpose or plan molded man’s destiny, two camps vied for the truth; and both held it for a while.

  Fat and sated like iguanas basking in the sun, wading in and out of the primordial soup where it’s cozy and warm, Darwinists made no bones about it. Their blueprint was sound. Evolution made sense. One by one, the pieces of the gigantic puzzle began to fit into place with such symmetry as to make some transcendental first cause -- divine or other -- not only quite probable but essential. They just didn’t call it God.

  Angered by Darwin’s seeming irreverence, outraged by the notion that they might be descended from apes, not angels, Creationists kept invoking divine intervention, as though evolution were not in itself a wondrous phenomenon. And life went on.

  One day, for no apparent reason, and as if there was an urgent need to know, cosmologists everywhere began splitting cosmic hair. With the Big Bang versus the Steady State debate well behind them, though still deadlocked on several core issues, they now asked each other (and themselves, no doubt): is the universe “open” or “closed?” Does intergalactic space extend indefinitely and in all directions, or do as yet undetected boundaries found only at some inscrutably distant point mark its final limits? If so, what lies beyond? What is space, anyway, they asked. Is it a circumstantial realm with no intrinsic dimension, no reality of its own except that which is fancied by man in his convoluted ruminations? Is space a byproduct of human consciousness, like time, which is seen as “passing” but in fact does not move? Some insisted that space is not only endowed with quantifiable form and volume, but that it is also measurable by a timeline that includes a starting point, a first cause, or alpha, but not necessarily an omega. Others retorted with disarming logic that something that has no boundaries cannot possibly have shape.

  Surely, while these mental pirouettes severely strained the limits of awareness, others yet agreed that the issue was the sphere of philosophy and mysticism. After all, probes sent out on scouting missions to the farthest reaches of the inky void had gone on one-way odysseys and no one knew for sure what they would run into, or when.

  For a while, the case for an open (or infinite) universe gained ground. Infinity is a tolerable abstraction because, like all absolutes, it is as self-limiting as it is unquantifiable. Something that has no shape or computable dimensions, however keenly one may try to comprehend it, has no being. Sometimes ignorance is bliss, even among the learned.

  In time, however, unable to bolster their respective positions, cosmologists reached an impasse -- and a compromise. It became fashionable to argue that, for lack of a more convincing explanation, perpetual space-time and cosmic confinement may be one and the same. The choice, they offered, lay in the mind’s eye of poets and stargazers and dreamers and a science fiction writer or two. It was, pardon the irresistible witticism, pretty much an open and shut case. Adding to the confusion, perhaps out of desperation, perhaps in an attempt to blur the distinction between knowledge and whimsy, someone suggested that reality is a hologram. Someone else theorized that the universe has no reality except in God’s boundless imagination. And another millennium came and went in a cosmos unconcerned with the pitiable struggles and contests of a wretched organism that keeps breeding itself out of existence.

  And then it happened, not unexpectedly perhaps, but with devastating finality.

  “WE ARE ALONE!” banner headlines proclaimed. “HUMANKIND: AN ACCIDENT” they screamed impiously on all the front pages.

  Carefully worded, unadorned, brutally prosaic, eloquently detached, spreading across the page, the article ignited passions, provoked outrage or apoplectic stupor, clouded the mind, froze the spirit.

  “An international team of astrophysicists has released details of a study which confirms that ‘intelligent life’ is confined to planet Earth, and that the odds of a similar biogenic manifestation occurring elsewhere in the universe are close to nil.

  “Dismissing critics who charge that such view smacks of ‘cosmic egocentricity,’ the study recommends that the search for extraterrestrial life be halted and that efforts and assets be refocused on heretofore neglected earthbound priorities such as overpopulation, climate change, poverty, hunger, disease and diminishing natural resources.

  “Drafted by the Yearly Astrophysical Hagiographic Watch Experiment in Hyperspace (YAHWEH), the 2,000-page document asserts that, ‘life is the aftermath of a spontaneous and unrepeatable paradox,’ and that humankind, is ‘an experiment gone wrong.’

  “Alluding to Albert Einstein’s celebrated rebuff, ‘God does not play dice with the universe,’ a spokesman for YAHWEH said that ‘God had indeed played dice with the universe and lost. Perched atop a speck of dust in the limitless void,’ the study concluded, ‘aided by providence and propelled by natural selection, the human race is an occurrence -- an accident -- the result of an endless succession of unpremeditated chance events, all of which continue to unfold as we travel through time, as the present conjugates itself forever and ever and ever.’

  “Supporting YAHWEH’s conclusions, a joint communiqué issued by the world’s spiritual leaders upheld the scientific findings. In an extraordinary gesture of humility and conciliation, quoting Boethius -- ‘As far as you are able, join faith to reason’ -- the communiqué conceded that ‘God, the epitome of perfection,’ had let his imagination run wild when He fashioned humans, and that unlike humans who never seem to learn from past mistakes, ‘He had then been mindful not to repeat such abomination elsewhere in His dominion.’“

  From
that moment on, and for the first time since the dawning of the age of reality, everyone knew that God would never be reached for comment, no matter how hard one tried. And in classrooms all across the land, children learned about the Punic Wars and the square of the hypotenuse and Charlemagne and the mighty Ganges and about life in a drop of pond water. The children grew up and ego devoured the innocence of youth. In time, apes became extinct and man vanished soon after from the face of the earth. Only angels survived the merciful finale; angels, little green Martians, the Loch Ness monster, Big Foot, the Abominable Snowman, Sasquatch, the Chupacabra and all the other creatures that populate our dreams.

  DREAMFARER

  We Earth Men have a talent for ruining big, beautiful things.

  The only reason we didn’t set up hot-dog stands

  in the midst of the Egyptian temple of Karnak

  is because it was out of the way

  and served no large commercial purpose.

  Ray Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles

  You must’ve heard. Touchdown took place early this morning on a desolate stretch of the Tharsis Bulge in the shadows of cloud-ringed Mount Olympus. Violent squalls of swirling carbon dioxide had delayed final descent. It took all of my piloting skills and the capsule’s exceptional maneuverability to help maintain the right downward thrust-to-weight ratio for a near-perfect landing.

  Bent by gravity, distorted by cosmic rays and electromagnetic waves, sounds of euphoria, distant, almost alien, soon began to crackle on the radio. It was Mission Control. I heard the thunderous applause of a thousand jubilant specialists. Bone-tired and listless, I acknowledged Earth perhaps more tersely than I’d intended. I asked for everyone’s indulgence, turned off the transmitter and surrendered to sleep.

  A frozen silence now fills my ears. I’m peering beyond the pockmarked spaceport, through rising gales of pelting sand and dust. Before me, stretches a crumpled terrain the color of anger. Its disfigured visage splits into winding trenches that look like dry riverbeds. Here and there, jagged nickel-iron meteorites protrude from the sandy surface. Water, if it ever existed, has either long since evaporated or is now permanently frozen deep beneath the surface. I’ll know soon enough. To the east, the sky is a rich brassy copper. Farther north it assumes a ruddy hue. Another storm is fast approaching. Brooding, it will erupt with untold fury as invisible demons claw at the tortured landscape and obscure it from view.

  What I see of Mars through the porthole, and what I will face tomorrow as I alight on the planet’s surface will best be told in pictures. Cameras have no soul, only eyes. That’s what keeps them honest. They will record the awesome spectacle with poetic unconcern.

  What I feel is less easily defined, far more prone to understatement or exaggeration. Feelings, like dreams, are hard to apprehend and just as slippery. I shall not risk distorting them by analyzing them just yet; perhaps when I return to Earth; if I return to Earth. This is Mars, I keep telling myself, the fourth planet from the Sun, an old friend now at last chanced upon face to face.

  Sunrise: my first on Mars. Will it be my last? Remote, aloof, no bigger than the moonlit eye of a prairie wolf, the sun sets Olympus Mons’ barren ridges afire, sending a kaleidoscopic scattering of ochre, burnt umber and blood-red into the thin golden sky. Wispy contrails of ice crystals levitate against the forbidding blackness of space. How very strange for a dead planet to be enshrined in vestments of such daunting beauty.

  I shut my eyes but a star-studded canopy spreads out against my closed eyelids. This is Mars or else I must be dreaming. Only in a dream can the folly, the arrogance, the deceptive face of reality seem so vivid. Mars? I may as well have journeyed to Venus or mighty Jupiter or enigmatic Saturn or self-effacing Pluto, or some other celestial neighborhood, undiscovered, unsuspected, barely imagined, not unlike the unexplored regions of the psyche, perhaps even like this dream.

  Forgive the metaphors, the circuitous twists of thought, the gloomy sophistry of it all. I, who always took pride in the clarity of my reasoning power, I now drown in a vortex of sensations forever crippled by the meagerness of words. How do I paint a point in space? How do I behold the face of God? By surrendering to sightless, speechless slumber? Perchance by dreaming? After all a dream is a voyage to the end of night. But unlike a cruise or the clan’s yearly motorcade to Aunt Bertha’s clambake a dream has no fixed itinerary, no scheduled destination. It just unfolds. And there’s no need to pack.

  It is the very nature of such journeys that compels those of us who embark on their gossamer wings to question their significance or merit. What’s the point? Why wander when the old armchair cradles our weary frames and conformity extends its all-embracing arms the better to receive us? We are apt to discover on arrival at some unscheduled port of call, as I did on Mars’ barren shores, that there may have been no good reason to make the trek in the first place. For when all is said and done, at the very end of some aimless expedition, worn out and confused, we will sadly conclude that some dreams are just too close for comfort, some dreams are just not meant to be.

  So I wake up.

  Opalescent moonbeams filter through my bedroom’s lace curtains and I see shadows dancing on the wall. Could dawn be far behind? On the short ride to the launch pad, past Building D where tomorrow’s dreamers train, I’m struck by the notion that knowledge is rewarded with an ever-widening chasm of ignorance and superstition.

  Today is the first day of winter -- December 21, 2012. The sun is aligned with the plane of our galaxy. At its center, the gigantic black hole is as black and elusive as ever. Earth’s magnetic field has not changed. The only calamities recorded on this fateful date echo man’s bestial cruelty to man. Apocalypse has been big business for 2,000 years or more. From ancient Persia to Daniel and Enoch and Habakkuk and Ezekiel and the deranged author of Revelation and the death-obsessed Maya, deceivers and impostors and self-deluded mystics acting under the pretense of divine inspiration have hoodwinked the multitudes and driven them to act like lunatics.

  As I ease myself into the pilot’s seat, I tell myself that future explorers, however vast their knowledge might be, will bear burdens of ignorance immensely heavier than my own. But once aloft, their sails will hug the wind and ride the tempest. For, they too shall have dared to go beyond their dreams as prophets of doom, foiled again, rewrite their contemptible scripts.

  THE VAMPIRE STATE

  (First published in the December 1991 issue of OMNI Magazine)

  Like flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods.

  They kill us for their sport.

  William Shakespeare -- King Lear

  A rank, sulfurous halo hangs low over Manhattan. Driven by icy gusts, tentacle-like fingers of swirling amber gases swoop toward the slime-slick pavement, probing deep into yawning doorways, arcades and atria, seeking out the specters that lurk within their drafty expanse.

  It’s Christmas Eve in the Big Apple. Chiming in the distance in pious unison, ethereal and uninvolved, church bells summon the faithful. Chiming? No, tolling -- a lugubrious knell for a swarming, moribund metropolis, for the one thousand and one night creatures that stalk its streets, for the living dead I get paid to hunt down and kill.

  It all came together half a century ago or more when politicians, anxious to save face and give voters the impression that justice was being served, let the long simmering rancor, the restive hatred burst like an ugly abscess. Violence, sporadic and extemporaneous at first, grew bolder and deadlier with each secret municipal emergency meeting.

  No one complained. Not a single cry of horror was ever heard. It was too late. Justice -- like truth -- the stronger of two conflicting arguments, justice, the paradox suspended on the tip of a sword, put on its most fearsome face. The Lady took off the blindfold and winked lasciviously at the oligarchs. And the carnage began.

  ‘Tis the season of all folly, falalalala … and the blood of the young, thinner than water, cheaper than hogwash, coalesces with the putrid rivulets of swill and excrement that h
ug the curb and cascade into the storm drains.

  Torn by crime, soaring unemployment, triple-digit inflation, homelessness, merciless slashes in social services, suffocated by Orwellian federal statutes, America’s big cities are putrefying and crumbling like the toes of a leper. For every child who wakes up poor and hungry, another dies of neglect or abuse. One-parent families are now the norm, each producing its quota of junkies and juvenile offenders. America has the world’s largest and fastest growing prison population. More than four million minors are in custody on charges ranging from truancy and drug use to petty theft and prostitution. Two million more serve hard time for capital crimes: murder, rape, aggravated assault, armed robbery and home invasion. Most are incarcerated with hardened adult criminals -- ten to a cell. There is no more room.

  As the chasm between rich and poor widens, a larger number of affluent urban dwellers move out to escape the squalor, the skyrocketing city taxes, the violence and the decaying infrastructure. The exodus turns cities and towns into tracts of depravity, disease and social unrest.

  Sparked by a growing demand for slave labor and conscripts, immigration from the Third World keeps adding to the ranks of the poor, the marginally educated and the culturally estranged segments of society. Many future felons start out as street children. Most of the minors who live on the streets and in the catacombs and sewers beneath subway and railroad tunnels suffer from mental disorders. Drug-induced dementia and a form of premature Parkinsonism blamed on raging air and water pollution, afflict thousands of others. Thousands more have perished at the hands of vigilantes, sexual psychopaths and agents of the state, all meting out their brand of justice. There are simply too many kids out there.