by Jeff Wood
JERRY
I said, I know what you’ve got.
Sam looks at Jerry, looks him in the eyes, and sees that even for a kid he is not kidding around.
SAMSON
All right, everybody, that’s it! Shop’s closed, everybody have a good evening!
Sam tries to close up shop but the crowd surges and erupts with discontent.
From overhead, the amassing crowd of kids is swarming and festering like a school of piranha, multiplying in mass, and ultimately covering the truck itself until there is only a shapeless throng of kids.
They flood the interior of the truck and emerge with Samson in their throes. He rides them like he’s surfing an out-of-control wave at a punk show. They bring him to the ground and cover him like a posse of wild boars.
Another pod of the adolescent animals pours through the truck, looking for the sought after loot.
KID
I got it, Jerry! I got it!
JERRY
Give it to me. Come on.
The kid hands Jerry the vial of mercury. Jerry produces a syringe and takes off his coat. He pulls the cap off the needle.
The crowd calms down and is watching. Samson is standing now, surrounded by a platoon of boys.
SAMSON
You don’t want to do that.
JERRY
Shut the fuck up.
SAMSON
You have to listen to me. This is too much.
Jerry marches over to Samson and right-hooks him hard with an open fist across the cheek bone.
JERRY
Now. Somebody help me out here. Come on.
A couple of boys move around and help him load it up and load it in. He gazes at Sam.
JERRY
You don’t have any idea what we’ve seen.
Jerry and Samson look each other in the eyes while the boys inject Jerry with mercury. The boys back away and Jerry stands alone rubbing his arm. Then he suddenly jerks back like he got punched in the chest.
JERRY
Holy crap.
He spins his head back and forth like he’s shaking something out of his ears and trying to clear his vision.
Then his fingers start going nuts like overturned insects, twitching and twittering with internal calculations.
JERRY
It’s amazing. It’s—everything.
But the calculations get more intense.
JERRY
Oh fuck. Oh fuck.
KID
Come on, Jerry, stay with it. You can do it.
SAMSON
It’s too late. There’s nothing he can do now.
Jerry bears down and concentrates. He slowly brings his rabid fingers close together so they can communicate. Now it looks like he’s playing a high-speed, multi-digit video game, but there’s no game there.
KID
That’s it, Jerry! That’s it! He’s gonna beat it. Watch. He gonna beat it.
But the game is too much for him. It overtakes him. He loses all control over his nerves. He’s shaking and kicking and swatting at an invisible swarm of bees. He panics and begins to cry, genuinely terrified, a child again now.
JERRY
Ahh! Fuck! Ahh! Get it out of me! Fuck!
Somebody help me! It hurts! Please—
KID
Do something!
SAMSON
I’m sorry.
Then Jerry sees something. He stops, and for a moment he is calm, looking out over the heads of the crowd. Samson looks down, as if to turn away.
JERRY
Oh no. It’s coming.
Jerry gags, and then retches forward, puking all over the ground a copious amount of silvery liquid.
JERRY
What is that?
The ground is covered in little silver fish, dozens of shiny metallic bait fish flipping on the ground, drowning in air. Jerry has puked fish. And he’s scared.
JERRY
What the fuck is that?!
KID
It’s fish, Jerry.
Then he gags again, more violently, and a large fish head emerges from his mouth. Retching again, he evacuates a full-grown fish, a good-sized rainbow trout. The trout flops on the ground, glistening with a spectrum of iridescent colors, gills drawing on the cold night and the rave music in the background.
Jerry stares down at his catch in horror and disbelief, twitching with a feverish brokenness. A trickle of blood runs from his nose.
Then he turns and runs, straight out into the black field. He runs. And he falls. And he doesn’t get up. Sprawled in the black winter cornfield, on the perimeter of light.
VI
The long pink hallway rolls by. Someone is walking down that hall at a resolute pace. A corner is turned, heading into another lengthy section.
Mr. Stevens sits at his desk doing paperwork and smoking. There’s a pounding at the office door and then Samson lets himself in.
MR. STEVENS
Come in.
Sam drops the two jugs of orange liquid onto Stevens’ desk and flops into a chair.
MR. STEVENS
Sam, Sam, the medicine man.
SAMSON
No more kids, Jack.
MR. STEVENS
(arid, but sincere)
But I love kids.
SAMSON
No more kids. They’re fucking crazy.
MR. STEVENS
Oh what’s the difference?
SAMSON
There’s a big difference.
MR. STEVENS
They’re just kids.
SAMSON
They’re fragile, and unpredictable, and bonkers. And you don’t give a shit about kids.
MR. STEVENS
(assertively)
The world is over, Sam. But the nice thing about children is that there will always be more of them.
And if we don’t keep them entertained they will tear us all to pieces.
SAMSON
That’s heartwarming.
Stevens takes a drag and starts over.
MR. STEVENS
So what do we have here?
SAMSON
Dimethyltryptamine diluted with a monoamine oxidase inhibitor for oral consumption. Grows just like plain old lawn grass, but it’s extremely potent, and not easy to come by in this quantity.
MR. STEVENS
Your services are greatly appreciated.
SAMSON
Save it. I’m a free agent. And I won’t be held responsible for your theatrics.
MR. STEVENS
Oh will you relax. It’s not actually going to kill them.
Stevens flicks his eyes at the camera.
SAMSON
You have no idea what it’s going to do.
MR. STEVENS
It’s all been highly scripted.
SAMSON
Once you go down this road the script is useless. You’re off the map and you’re drifting in very deep water.
MR. STEVENS
That’s precisely the idea, Sam, and you know that as well as I do.
SAMSON
I do not pretend to be someone else’s salvation.
Stevens loses his temper.
MR. STEVENS
Then that’s where you’re deluding yourself. And that’s why you’re still peddling formaldehyde and why you’re working for me. So get off your high horse and enjoy the show. You made this deal. Don’t forget that. Now if you’ll excuse me.
SAMSON
I don’t need your firewater, Jack.
Someday you’re gonna choke on it.
Sam exits and slams the door. Mr. Stevens lights up another cigarette and returns to his paperwork.
***
Samson passes through a steel door and enters the loading dock sector on his way out of the building. He walks by garage doors and open trailers backed up to the docks.
Then he hears a quiet voice, and he stops. He looks toward the dark, open trailers. A woman’s voice is mumbling softly out of the blackness.
&
nbsp; Sam walks over to the dock utility light and turns it on. He pivots the mechanical arm and points it into the trailer. The inside of the trailer contains a few glass racks full of water glasses. He swings the spotlight on its arm.
Simone is huddled up on the floor in the back corner, smoking a cigarette. She holds up a hand to block the light.
SIMONE
Who’s there?
SAMSON
You work here?
SIMONE
Yeah.
SAMSON
All right, sorry to bother you.
SIMONE
Wait. What time is it?
He hesitates.
SAMSON
It’ll be over soon.
SIMONE
How do you know?
Sam looks down and thinks about that.
Then he turns and looks straight into the camera. A bright light shines in his mirrored sunglasses, reflecting the light back into the camera. He peers in closer.
Then he walks away. Simone squints into the light, trying to make sense, smoke from her cigarette curling sculpturally in the harsh beam.
***
In his self-storage unit, Jonah sits at the vinyl-upholstered card table he’s using for a desk. His fingers clacking on the plastic keyboard of the bulky typing machine. His breath steaming in the cold, dry air. The bare light bulb. His boots. The metal walls. His brown winter coveralls. His watch tiny ticking. Orange light from the glowing screen illuminates his face as he types in the night.
Outside the storage unit, the horizontal lines of the closed garage door and the clacking sound of his fingers typing on the plastic keyboard.
JONAH
(typing)
If you take the smallest increment of time and split it like an atom, is there a singular moment wherein all things are revealed and all things come to pass? If so then this moment is injected into every moment for all of time’s eternity.
Garage doors are lined up like blank faces.
JONAH
(typing)
At the edge of human, there is a strange white noise, the sucking, suckling sound of the universe falling into the emptiness of itself.
A floodlight, illuminating the black winter vapor.
JONAH
(typing)
In a perfectly sterile environment the most lethal of sicknesses is life itself, and we are haunted by the shadows of ourselves.
The typing stops.
Quiet outside.
The wash of faraway traffic.
The long rows of storage units, facing each other.
Inside, the word processor sits on the card table, the screen is glowing, but Jonah lies on his mattress wrapped up in a wool blanket and his sleeping bag. He’s shaking and sweating, shivering violently, a fever sweat, a hallucinatory brain-boil.
A flaming glow suddenly illuminates the space, and the cutting sound of a blowtorch. Jonah opens his eyes and his face is aglow in an orange fiery light.
He sits up and looks at the light source. He reaches out his hands to warm them.
A small mushroom cloud is burning away on the concrete floor at the center of the room. The perpetual mushroom cloud fires away like a holographic furnace. Orange, red, green, blue, yellow, white. It’s pretty, and warm.
Then it’s gone. And he’s illuminated by a cold white light. Striations of watery translucence shift across his face.
A large ice cube has replaced the mushroom cloud. At the center of the ice block is a figure, a little boy, frozen with his hands up, and wearing an orange life preserver.
Jonah gets on his feet and approaches the ice block. He runs his own hands along the side of the ice block, looking in at the frozen boy. The ice is flowing with interior strata and delicate crystalline light.
Ice melting and pooling on the floor—
And then there’s nothing there, just a pool of water on the floor. The bare light bulb overhead is reflected in the water.
Jonah turns and sees himself lying on the mattress, like a mummy in the sleeping bag. Motionless and frosted dead.
Just outside the door, a loud banging erupts from inside the aluminum garage. Jonah is pounding on the metal door from inside his cell.
JONAH
(shouting from inside)
Sam! Sam, I’m not finished yet. I need more time. I’ve changed my mind, Sam. I need more time. I wanna be with people, Sam. Sam! Sam! Sam!
He bangs frantically, but no one is there. The alleyway of storage units is empty and indifferent.
***
Out on the dark field, the old lonely tree comes alive, a skeletal form of electric-blue light throbbing and pulsating, strands of energy coursing along its branches, trunk, and root-system buried in the ground. The tree of electric light explodes on and off, short-circuiting. Then the night is black.
***
A glow of light emerges from outside, underneath the crack in the storage unit door. And then two beams of light scanning under the door. An insect enters, crawling under the door, ticking, clicking, probing, and glowing. A glowing, irradiated cockroach.
The cockroach finds its way to the center of the room and takes in its surroundings, scanning, processing, and pulsating with light. The bug glows brighter and brighter, throbbing with light and colors until it is nearly illuminating the entire space in waves of colored light, pulsing and dimming like a luminescent scarab.
Jonah is in a deep fever-sleep bundled up in his sleeping bag on the mattress. The cockroach approaches him, ticking across the floor. Jonah’s face radiates in the metallic-colored light of the insect.
The cockroach climbs up onto the mattress, crawls across Jonah’s face, and then disappears inside his mouth.
A bundle of light descends down the interior of the sleeping bag, headed toward Jonah’s belly. The sleeping bag pulsates momentarily like a glowing cocoon, and then the space is black.
VII
Thousands of houses sprawl into the cold countryside. But the sky is blue now, washing color across the world. Patches of snow and green grass. Newly planted bright-green pine saplings and bright white siding.
Brand new homes, everywhere for everyone.
***
The long row of storage units lined up bluntly in the clear winter light.
Jonah’s door rolls up with a clatter. He emerges and rolls the door back down. His fever broken in the night, he’s pale, but alive. He locks the door and walks away.
Halfway down the row, he stops, nursing a thought. He turns around and heads back to the storage unit door. He handles the lock, as if something doesn’t add up.
Then he lets it go and continues on his way.
***
The exterior of Robert’s house is wrecked, completely stripped of siding, all exposed plywood and fireproofing like a body without skin. The lawn is stripped of grass, a square crater of dirt butting up to the line of green lawn next door.
The living room is a catastrophe. Robert has land-filled the interior of his living room with the exterior of his house. All the siding from the outside of the house is piled on top of the mound of his lawn, from floor to ceiling.
He sleeps now like an innocent, passed out in his recliner amid the wreckage of last night’s work. The television is blasting a blizzard of early morning TV snow. A calm spectacle of post-disaster.
Then an obnoxious tone cuts across the tube, a test signal from the Emergency Broadcast System and Robert stirs awake.
He requires a moment to figure out where in the hell he is, and he marvels dryly at the room, putting the pieces of memory together. Then he shuts off the TV and heads upstairs.
Halfway up the stairs Robert pauses to oversee his creation, and he issues half a smile.
***
Jonah enters the Convention Center and wanders through the vast airport of a complex. He passes through the steel doors of a service entrance and enters the long pink hallway.
Mr. Stevens’ office door is ajar. He is sitting at his desk, smoking and doing pape
rwork. There is a polite knock on the door.
MR. STEVENS
(from inside)
Yes. Come in.
Jonah quietly pushes open the door and enters the small windowless room.
Mr. Stevens does not look up from his desk.
JONAH
Excuse me.
MR. STEVENS
Yes?
JONAH
I’ve come to apply for a job.
MR. STEVENS
(impassively)
Fantastic. Just have a seat and I’ll be right with you.
Jonah takes a seat on a folding metal chair, and waits.
Mr. Stevens shuffles some papers around and puts out his cigarette. He regards Jonah over the top of spectacles he’s been wearing to do his bookkeeping.
MR. STEVENS
Okay, what do we have here?
Jonah hands him a folded piece of paper. Mr. Stevens unfolds the paper.
MR. STEVENS
Land surveyor. Interesting. That seems like a reliable job.
JONAH
Yeah, it was.
MR. STEVENS
Have you been with us before?
JONAH
No, I don’t think so.
MR. STEVENS
Well what we’re doing here is something very special.
JONAH
Of course.
MR. STEVENS
I’ll need to ask you a few questions.
JONAH
Okay.
Stevens pulls a clipboard out of a drawer and flips over a few pages.
MR. STEVENS
Here we are. What is the nature of the Universe?
JONAH
Excuse me?
MR. STEVENS
I said, what is the nature of the Universe?
JONAH
Um, I was here just to apply for a job as a cater-waiter.
MR. STEVENS
And it says on your resume that you were also a writer. Is this true?
JONAH
Yes.
MR. STEVENS
And so I am asking you, what is the nature of the Universe?
JONAH
Well. I’m not really sure if I’m qualified to—
MR. STEVENS
Let me explain something to you.
He takes off his spectacles and folds them carefully.
MR. STEVENS
Entertain my explanation that as a writer you should already know well. We live our lives in the shadowed rut of the wheel. We spend them, day by day, driveling away, and waiting. And what on earth are we waiting for? We are waiting to be lifted out of the trenches into a moment of illumination, a moment of clarity and certainty, a moment of direct experience wherein all pain and confusion dissolve, if only for that brief and fleeting moment.