In the Shadow of the Towers

by Douglas Lain

  His aide whispers in his ear that Atlanta has fallen, with over sixty thousand troops and civilians massacred in pitched battles all over the city. There’s no safe air corridor back to the capital. In fact, the capital seems to be under attack as well.

  “What should we do?”

  He returns to reading the book. Nothing he can do in the next seven minutes will make any difference to the outcome. He knows what they have to do, but he’s too tired to contemplate it just yet. They will have to head to the Heartland and make peace with the Ecstatics and their god-missiles. It’s either that or render entire stretches of North America uninhabitable from nukes, and he’s not that desperate yet.

  He begins to review the ten commandments of the Ecstatics in his mind, one by one, like rosary beads.

  >>> He’s in mid-sentence when the aide hurries over and begins to whisper in his ear—just as the first of the god-missiles strikes and the fire washes over and through him, not even time to scream, and he’s nothing anymore, not even a pile of ashes.

  >>> He’s in a chair, in a suit with a sweat-stained white shirt, and he’s tired, his voice as he reads thin and raspy. Five days and nights of negotiations between the rival factions of the New Southern Confederacy following a month of genocide from Arkansas to Georgia: too few resources, too many natural disasters, and no jobs, the whole system breaking down, although Los Angeles is still trying to pretend the world isn’t coming to an end, even as jets are falling out the sky. Except, that’s why he’s in the classroom: pretending. Pretending neighbor hasn’t set upon neighbor for thirty days, like in Rwanda except not with machetes, with guns. Teenagers shooting people in the stomach, and laughing. Extremist talk radio urging them on. Closing in on a million people dead.

  His aide comes up and whispers in his ear: “The truce has fallen apart. They’re killing each other again. And not just in the South. In the North, along political lines.”

  He sits there because he’s run out of answers. He thinks: In another time, another place, I would have made a great president.

  >>> He’s sitting in the classroom, in the small chair, in comfortable clothes, reading the goat story. No god-missiles here, no viruses, no invasions. The Chinese and Russians are just on the cusp of being a threat, but not there yet. Adepts here have no real far-sight, or are not believed, and roam free. Los Angeles is a thriving money pit, not a husked-out shadow.

  No, the real threat here, besides pollution, is that he’s mentally ill, although no one around him seems to know it. A head full of worms, insecurity, and pure, naked need. He rules a country called the “United States” that wavers between the First and the Third World. Resources failing, infrastructure crumbling, political system fueled by greed and corruption.

  When the aide comes up and whispers in his ear to tell him that terrorists have flown two planes into buildings in New York City, there’s blood behind his eyes, as well as a deafening silence, and a sudden leap from people falling from the burning buildings to endless war in the Middle East, bodies broken by bullets and bombs. The future torques into secret trials, torture, rape, and hundreds of thousands of civilians dead, or displaced, a country bankrupted and defenseless, ruled ultimately by martial law and generals. Cities burn, the screams of the living are as loud as the screams of the dying.

  He sits there for seven minutes because he really has no idea what to do.

  . . . and his fate is to exist in a reality where towers do not explode in September, where Islamic fundamentalists are the least of his worries.

  There is only one present, only one future now, and he’s back in it, driving it. Seven minutes have elapsed, and there’s a graveyard in his head. Seven minutes, and he’s gradually aware that in that span he’s read the goat story twice and then sat there for thirty seconds, silent.

  Now he smiles, says a few reassuring words, just as his aide has decided to come up and rescue him from the yawning chasm. He’s living in a place now where they’ll never find him, those children, where there’s a torrent of blood in his mind, and a sky dark with planes and helicopters, and soldiers blown to bits by the roadside.

  At that point, he would rise from his chair and his aide would clap, encouraging the students to clap, and they will, bewildered by this man about whom reporters will say later, “Doesn’t seem quite all there.”

  An endless line of presidents rises from the chair with him, the weight almost too much. He can see each clearly in his head. He can see what they’re doing, and who they’re doing it to.

  Saying his goodbyes is like learning how to walk again, while a nightmare plays out in the background. He knows as they lead him down the corridor that he’ll have to learn to live with it, like and unlike a man learning to live with missing limbs—phantom limbs that do not belong, that he cannot control, but are always there, and he’ll never be able to explain it to anyone. He’ll be as alone and yet as crowded as a person can be. The wall between him and his wife will be more unbearable than ever.

  He remembers Peter’s pale, wrinkled, yearning face, and he thinks about making them release the man, put him on a plane somewhere beyond his country’s influence. Thinks about destroying the machine and ending the adept project.

  Then he’s back in the wretched, glorious sunlight of a real, an ordinary day, and so are all of his reflections and shadows. Mimicking him, forever.

  Rob McCleary is primarily a television writer, having worked on Jacob Two-Two, Pecola, and Moville Mysteries, among other Canadian children’s programs, but in the world of literature he has one major claim to fame. McCleary is the author of “Nixon in Space,” a short story published in the now-defunct semi-pro magazine called CRANK! back in 1993. The story has endured despite these humble beginnings and without more output from McCleary. Author Jonathan Lethem republished the story on Electric Literature’s Recommend Reading page in 2013 and noted that “if you wrote ‘Nixon In Space’ or its equivalent fifty times you’d be George Saunders or Donald Barthelme. Do it just once and you’re Rob McCleary.”

  “Our Lady of Toledo Transmission” seems to be as much about the Great Recession of 2007 as it is about the attacks of 9/11, although it’s mostly about the Lord Our Savior, automobile mayhem, and ice cream. It is also step two in his quest to become Donald Barthelme.

  OUR LADY OF TOLEDO TRANSMISSION

  Rob McCleary

  The search for Jesus and Answers began in the weeks following 9-11. And not God, because childhood cancer and leprosy. And not the Blessed Virgin Mary, because she’s the Blessed Virgin Mary. The Revelations fan-fiction spectacle of people hurtling themselves out of burning skyscrapers demanded some sort of explanation, and Jesus, with his New Testament face-palming at our human idiocy, provided the only spiritual handhold in the sheer cliff face of the American post 9-11 existential crisis. But all the prayers and entreaties produced only insolent silence, until entire congregations, unable to bear the continual overhead Zeppelin thrumming tension of the godless void, filed out of their meeting houses and into their cars, still dressed in their Sunday best, peeling out of church parking lots and onto interstates, the spirit of the Almighty finally surging through them as they rear-ended and sideswiped and T-boned the unbeliever, and in this way the Church of Christ the Demolition Derby Driver was born.

  That last pre-9-11 summer was concerned not with God and the search for answers, but divorce and Toledo Transmission, my father swallowed, man-eating-python style, feet first, by the second shift. His existence reduced to bolting one thing to another thing, or spot welding a thing to another thing, or bashing one thing into another thing with a bright orange rubber mallet, and so on. That, combined with the emotional equivalent of lifting a three-thousand-pound automobile off your trapped kid effort that his divorce demanded, left him rubber-legged and flop-sweated as the summer leaves of Ohio turned red and orange and August slouched into September. My father may well have been the least prepared man in America for the questions and confusions of 9-11, and therefore easy pickings
for the missionaries of the Church of Christ the Demolition Derby Driver.

  The spiritual Doppler effect created by my father’s inability to come to terms with either his divorce or the workings of General Motors and Toledo Transmission left me with a sense of general-purpose life-vertigo I have retained to this day, expressed in trauma-repetition dreams of my father swallowed into an underworld of depression and apathy, my mother and her anger at both of us taking the form of an amazingly cogent image of the Heat Miser from The Year Without a Santa Claus (“Whatever I touch, starts to melt in my clutch, I’m too much!”). The other location in our drama, the natural home of both the Church of Christ the Demolition Derby Driver and low-end divorce lawyers: the suburban strip mall. Which is where my father first found them, dragging me along to his lawyer and the now spectral presence of my mother, communicating across the ether by means of our attorney cum medium, a man with body odor, a slow eye, and an impossibly outdated version of Microsoft Windows. I prefer to remember an actual Ouija board on his desk, jumping in response to my father’s slowly tightening gyre of questions, the planchette hesitating, then skidding back and forth across the alphabet surface (“Will she accept two hundred dollars a month more in alimony?” . . . YES . . . “Does she want visitation or custody?” . . . NO . . . ). By mid-August before 9-11 it seemed all mercifully settled, leaving my father with his solitary, Stalingrad siege of Toledo Transmission.

  The collective trauma of 9-11 was the trauma of a God asleep at the switch when a bunch of creepy, not-by-choice, career virgins slammed jetliners into the World Trade Center. But only the Church of Christ the Demolition Derby Driver had the nerve to shake their fist at God. And while their once-pristine Sunday suits and dresses soon became oil- stained, ragged, and smeared with greasy roadside diner fast-food stains and spills, their faith remained resolute, careening from town to town, punching in the rear quarter panel of the infidel. At night they circled their cars, wagon train fashion, in big-box store parking lots, burning stacks of pallets in the center, flaming high into the night, a pillar of smoke and flame, a warning of their holy, righteous wrath outside the Target, the Walmart, and the blessed bobblehead trinity of the Pep Boys. Breaking camp at first light they would thread their rumbling convoy back onto the interstate, a mechanical incarnation of the Divine, part Mad Max, part Wacky Races. Their anger growing hotter with every tick of the odometer that did not bring the light and peace of God, their desire to T-bone, to rear-end, to sideswipe did come as a wrath upon them. “Rear-end the mini-van full of tweens on their way to soccer practice at a four-way stop and I am with you,” Jesus said, or words to that effect, in one of the Gnostic gospels. “T-bone the senior citizen who weareth the foam trucker cap perched precariously atop his balding pate, inscribed with the name of the World War Two battleship he did serve his country aboard driving home from the early bird dinner special at Denny’s and I am there.”

  9-11 did not help America’s belief that God himself was personally looking out for us, but as a town we had always had more faith in General Motors, who ran the Toledo Transmission Assembly Facility, and therefore the vast majority of our indentured lives. And GM, while just as inscrutable as God, had a greater impact in our lives on a paycheck-to-paycheck basis. God may have created the heavens and the earth, but GM gave us a blue-collar Eden of reliable, high-profit-margin truck and SUV sales figures, and Toledo Transmission to hire my father and most of the people in our Toledo suburb. Blessed be the Hydra-matic 6L80 Rear Wheel Drive 6-Speed transmission assembled therein. Blessed be the Global Front Wheel Drive 6 speed 6T40 transmission in the eyes of our Lord. And in this Eden was my Eve, or rather my Matilda of the Tasty Scoop, a young woman several years my senior whose entire genetic code seemed specifically engineered to perfectly fill out a red and white Tasty Scoop uniform made from polyester thick enough to stop small arms fire. She was the corn-fed icon of my wildest sexual imaginings and conjectures which, all summer, had been advancing and marshaling with a strange Thomas Aquinas–like progression, my personal Summa Theologica of wholly imagined hand jobs, buttons popped off the front of Tasty Scoop uniforms and hands thrust down the front of Tasty Scoop polyester pants. I ached after her, hour after hour, chocolate dipped soft ice cream cone after chocolate dipped soft ice cream cone. And just so you don’t think this was some base physical attraction, she was a woman of responsibility as well: she was the assistant to the daytime manager, a valued officer in the north-Ohio-parts-of-Illinois-around-but-not-including-Chicago Tasty Scoop empire, trusted enough to head off on her own in the Tasty Scoop flagship vehicle: the Tasty Scoop Ice Cream Wagon complete with revolving fiberglass ice cream cone on top. Matilda was a woman of beauty, smarts, cool-under-fire, and, in what I can only assume was God’s final act of spite before he left us all to our post 9-11 fates, was dating some jerk in a souped-up powder-blue 1983 Oldsmobile Delta 88 Royale.

  America was a different place before 9-11, but in all honesty very little changed post-9-11 in our little suburb except for a sudden deluge of totemic American flag stickers, badges, pins, and bunting. Before 9-11 the only people who flew American flags year-round, not counting the week of July 4th, were cranks and ex-Marines. But a tightly stitched American flag iron-on patch even found its way on to Matilda’s Tasty Scoop uniform, perched with insolent indifference to my needs directly above her left breast. Apparently Matilda, and the entire Tasty Scoop phalanx, had been recruited to do their part in the War on Terror. Which was fine with me. I had read that people in time of war did strange and desperate things, and I would be more than happy with a strange, desperate hand job. I too was determined not to let the terrorists win. But there was an enormous wrinkle in my plan to win over Matilda: any self-respecting American looking for evenings of Midwestern passion needed a car. It was a concrete statement of suburban manhood. You could not ask a date out on the bus. And if everything went according to plan you had a location for furtive dry-humping. I needed a car. Maybe not a powder-blue Oldsmobile 88 Royale, but something that ran. But I was broke, and the sin of sexual despair began to rivulet its way across my life.

  There was, of course, one way to get a car, thereby massively leveraging my odds of a hand job: the Church of Christ the Demolition Derby Driver. But this naturally posed an ethical conundrum: they would give me a car, but I would be expected (not unreasonably) to drive it through the streets and on the interstates of America with the purposeful intensity of a cruise missile. Father had, following the inevitable lull after the buying frenzy of the please-God-don’t-tell-me-they-named-it-after-what-we-all-know-they-named-it-after “Keep America Rolling” easy finance program (and in the process teaching American consumers the meaning of “pushing demand forward”), begun hanging around the Church of Christ the Demolition Derby Driver. The one in the same mini-mall as our shitty divorce lawyer. He had become isolated following his divorce, as what few friends he had all worked different shifts, so even going out for beer was a logistical nightmare. The church provided a sense of belonging he desperately needed. He began to meet with them every Sunday, and learn their ways (“God hates a perfect paint job” . . . “crush yea not the driver’s side door. Contact in this area is an abomination before the eyes of the Lord,” and so on). When I finally started attending, to check out if the Church of Christ the Demolition Derby Driver had a (slightly more informal) “Keep America Rolling” program of its own, I expected to see a congregation of wild-eyed grease monkeys and homicidal gearheads, but instead I found a group of happy, devoted people of diverse backgrounds and ages all united by the belief Jesus died for our sins, and rose from the dead, and ascended not to heaven, or to Utah to bury gold plates, but to the Ohio Valley to restore America’s faith in God via one of America’s favorite fairground pastimes. They were affable, agreeable and peaceful people . . . unless you brought up the topic of the Church of Our Lady of the Monster Truck Rally.

  That a church based on a demolition derby would eventually hive off a Monster Truck-based faith seems a
natural progression. But what no one realized is the amount of enmity the two groups would eventually develop for each other. The Demo guys saw the Monster Truckers as amateurs, who had lost track of the true spiritual journey of their formerly shared faith. There was definitely no love lost between the two. While in open combat, the sedans and station wagons of the Demolition Derby Drivers were no match for fire engines, school busses, and garbage trucks, all propped up on forty-eight-inch tires, some spouting flame, mufflers cut to produce a deafening, terrifying roar. They both believed, as their central tenet, that Jesus waited patiently for a certain tally of automobile wreckage before He revealed Himself to His congregation of true believers. But neither could agree on that number. A few argued that Jesus found certain makes and models favorable in His eyes. Numerous attempts at reconciliation were made, but it was hopeless. Still others, more academically inclined, insisted it was a dollar value of destruction Jesus was after. The Great Schism occurred when the Demolition Derby Drivers felt the Monster Truck drivers in the congregation should not get the same number of points, or dollar credit, for their destruction. Taking individual cars out Malachi-crunch style was certainly harder than simply driving over the top at them at high speeds and crushing them like old beer cans. And since they both believed that whoever hit that magic number or dollar figure or specific make and model coveted by God would receive special treatment from God (some said eternal life and a special car that you could smash and smash all day and the whole thing would just pop back out at the end of the day by pressing a small, red button located just inside the glove compartment) generally speaking, when the two groups met, it was “on” some real “Death Race” shit under the autumn buckeyes.