“One-tenth of the population? Where are all the corpses?” Tynee asked.
“Buried.”
“Buried?”
“Some were burned.”
“How is that possible?”
General Kiljoy cleared his throat in hesitation. “It seems that the sanitary disposal of corpses can be accomplished independently of the ability to communicate.”
“What?” Tynee was incredulous. “That doesn’t make sense.”
“What about everyone else?” I interrupted. “Where are they?”
“Just watch,” he said, gesturing to the screen, where the camera was now moving out from the center of the city and over progressively wealthier neighborhoods. Miss Mary pointed out a country club at which she had attended a splendid wedding and twaddled on about the hand-painted set of dinner plates she’d commissioned for her gift to the couple and wondering who got to keep them after they got divorced.
Eventually, we reached the fringe of development, camera panning over as yet undeveloped woods and farms. It was then, just before it came, that I began to suspect what was coming. I was astounded nonetheless. It was a simple thing, a line of people holding hands, yet it could not have violated my expectations more completely. There it was, like some Red Rover revelation daring us to come over, a line of people so long that they formed a circle around the entire city.
126 In grade school, standing in line created its own particular form of play. Rules existed, yes, but they only provided the conditions of the game. Standing in line naturally preceded giving the person in front of you the knee wobblies, or even better, set the stage for a rousing round of human dominoes or some such horseplay. Absent such diversions, we’d chatter and whisper and snicker and generally enjoy ourselves despite the rules. Do you remember? Little did we realize how things would change, how our fellow linemates would change, how we would change. Unruly no more, we wait in line, shut down our awareness of everything but the progress of the line, despising all whose existence made the line possible. We dare not knock the hat off the person in front of us, or even make idle chatter. Shh! Be quiet, you! Stand in line!
If I romanticize the queues of childhood, it is only to indicate that the line of humans before me now made them seem totalitarian in comparison. Chaos springs to mind as an initial description, yet this was a line. There was an unmistakable order, a perfect order, a perfect circle of collaborative chaos. Panning down the line revealed human after human of various colors, sizes, and ages engaged in games we never dreamed of as children. There were those occupying their time spinning, arms outstretched, slapping hands with each other at every half rotation. This activity gradually faded into the most blatant line jumping I’ve ever seen, though since this line was ultimately a circle such prohibitions become moot. A person would jump out of line and almost immediately back into a space left empty only a moment before by another, jockeying for position like birds on a wire, a high wire, precariously balanced on the tightrope of thrilling existence. This went on and on down the line, but it too eventually melted into a game I shall call the whip. The whip was like a narrower version of the sports arena wave, but unlike the wave, there was not just one wave of motion. Movement in the whip was more properly understood as a wavelength, in that a discernible frequency of motion emerged, with an estimated wavelength of seven persons. This was the game of the day, it seemed, for it went on and on, and I suspected it would eventually overtake the spinners and the jumpers and whatever else preceded them.
Despite the ostensibly grim reality of the situation, it was great fun to watch, and actually left me feeling elated. These were not the gaunt survivors of an experiment in germ warfare gone horribly wrong. These were thousands of strangers and neighbors doing some thing, some fantastic dancing thing I could scarcely comprehend. Watching this hosanna hoopla of hoi polloi, this hula-hoop hullabaloo, this hocus-pocus hokeypokey dance, I felt like I was witnessing a circus, an enchanting circus of consciousness performing stunts clearly possible but nonetheless unbelievable. What the hell? How on Earth? Such thoughts sprinted through my mind leaving wild fascination and mad anticipation in their wake. What was I anticipating? Something else, I suppose, something more, something improbable, something I could not imagine; something wonderful, something delightful, something unfathomable. Throw it at me, that’s what I wanted. Untame the lions, copulate on the tightrope, make that baby elephant fly! I was ringside at the greatest show on Earth, an unparalleled congregation of hilarity and verity where audience and performer became worthless distinctions. It was real and it wasn’t stopping, and though my body was buried under tons of granite, and my oohs and aahs and wows were strangled in my throat, my spirit had jumped aboard at the first sign of mutiny. Here was freedom at last! They weren’t incapacitated, but liberated. Yes, the Pied Piper virus had unforeseen consequences all right. As a weapon, it was about as useful as a squirt gun. The victim only sniggled and went after its attacker with the garden hose. If the goal was to conquer by removing the building blocks of language, it was an unmistakable failure. Something else had emerged in its place, something unforeseen indeed, something better, something true, something coordinating human action like language never could. Joy to the world!
127 Of course, this is mere inference, my own on-the-spot theorizing. But watching these events unfold, an unspeakable calm hugged me like a five hundred-pound grandmother. I was comforted, I was reassured, and I knew that everything was going to be all right.
In the face of celebration, however, it’s hard to believe anything but that everything is okay. So perhaps it was the inevitable laughter that characterized the Pied Piper syndrome that put me so at ease. It made me chuckle inside; I honestly couldn’t help it. But I pause to consider: Is this feeling of glorious well-being false, or are we experiencing what is so? That is to say, are we simply blind to contentment and peace when not laughing? Do we fail to notice the cartwheels and jumping jacks in front of our faces? Smile. A stranger, though unrecognized, exists nonetheless, and has only to be introduced properly for us to remember that they are a long-lost friend. We mustn’t be timid apes. Shyness is self-consciousness, remember. Refocus your consciousness toward others and everything will become clear, the jesters will appear and tickle your fear. They’ve been there all the time. You’ll see what I mean.
Giddy as I was at these turns of events, General Kiljoy, Tynee, and Miss Mary were not noticeably laughing. Nor was I, of course, but I don’t think they were suppressing any glee. In fact, they seemed rather miffy, not sharing in the amusements perhaps because they were the joke, they were the numskulls, the dimwits, the dolts. In this, the ultimate round of Ring around the Rosy, they were the pickle in the middle.
It was when the wavelength shortened to six persons that the laughter began. Further, this dance of disarming foolishness only begat more perfect reproductions of itself with each passing moment, a frolicking fugue of infinite faith. Fellow vibrations, they bobbed along the wavelength, facing the center, the city, technocracy incarnate, the clueless monster, the grand ramification of human selfishness, the tactless boast of false progress. They looked at the slapdash and slipshod handiwork of humankind, our alibi for the sin of sloth and our evidence for the sin of vanity, and they roared in kindly fury, unleashing their collective torment and frustration in an uncontrite catharsis of conscience. They laughed heartily at the modern city and everything it implied: the abuse, the anxiety, the devastation and ruination, the loneliness, the sorrow, the pride, the anger. Seeing these monkeyshines roused a mighty chuckle of a ruckus. The modern city, or what it represented, had become the most scoffworthy notion since the flat Earth hypothesis. They laughed at the folly, the pettiness, and the self-absorption. “Who do you think you’re fooling?” they guffawed at the authoritarian fabrication before them. “What pretentious nonsense!”
At least that’s the snicker I thought I was sharing. I have lately realized that I’ve been living in a bushel of rot my entire life and been fed a lo
t of cosmopolitan claptrap about excitement and variety to make up for urban misery. What does it say about our society if the centers of our civilization are destructive to social cohesion? Diversity is wonderful, to be sure, and something akin to a city is probably necessary for it to exist, but surely we can do better than this. Are we honestly expected to take such flubdubbery seriously? Must we spend our days wandering such noisy pits of idiocy? Bullshit and baloney! Sell that applesauce to Cousin Tomfoolery. The follies of the past are not ours to inhabit. We are alive, and the shortsighted shenanigans of our ancestors are destroying us.
128 Speculation and conjecture abound here, I am aware, but I make no apologies. This is a firsthand account, and these events demand explanation, so you will just have to take it as it is. Verification and validation are impossible under these circumstances, and anyway, all memoirs of events are intrinsically filtered through someone’s perception. So yes, you should know it is possible that I am misrepresenting the facts, or misleading you in some way. You should also know this about any account of events at which you are not present. This is an unfortunate characteristic of language. I wish to take what’s in my head and put it in yours, but I cannot do so directly, and you cannot see what’s in my head. Thus we are left with the indirect route of language, arbitrary symbols, random designations that we trust are agreed upon. The eminent Professor Blip Korterly taught me that.
Once, I was in first grade. I had bright eyes, a full head of hair, smooth skin, and mittens. After snacktime, we sometimes played a game called Telephone. Sister Lolita, our kind teacher, would whisper a phrase, something to the effect of, “Billy wants a black-and-white kitten for his birthday,” to the first student, who would whisper it to the next, and so on around the room until the last student stated aloud what the phrase had evolved into, something like, “Willy got a black puppy for Christmas.” One day, however, someone got the smart idea to change the phrase on purpose, to make up a completely different phrase, such as, “You can see the teacher’s bra,” and pass it on. Whatever the original or made-up phrase might have been, the last student got to say, “You can smell the teacher’s underwear.” This changed the nature of the game, and made Sister Lolita very upset. We never played Telephone again.
Words are both clumsy and easy to manipulate. Communication is indirect and covert, and true intentions and meanings are invisible. This is what makes deceit possible. If communication were direct and overt, that is to say empathic, we would exchange one another’s perspectives immediately and without dispute. Intentions would never be misconstrued. Mistrust, deception, or disintegration of meaning would be impossible. Hence, I assert that the Pied Piper virus does not destroy the ability to communicate, for humans can scarcely communicate in the first place. If we could, there would never be a disagreement, misunderstanding, or war. Such asininity is an expression of mutual dementia, a recondite stupidity, an inability to empathize with each other’s experiences. Language only makes matters worse by allowing us to manipulate our own and one another’s perceptions of the world. In my estimation, the Pied Piper virus removes this blindfold. Absent such illusions, bare naked minds each to the other cannot disagree. Flawless communication can only result in immaculate perception.
129 Nutshell. Picture a nutshell.
I’ll bet you pictured a peanut, which is not, in fact, a nut. It is a legume. If you did not picture a peanut, good for you! That’s the point I am trying to make. I pictured a peanut shell (which is not, I know, a nut), and that is what I hoped to trigger in your mind with the symbol nutshell.
So let me be more precise. Picture a peanut shell. More specifically, picture a roasted, uncracked peanut shell. Are you seeing what I’m seeing? I am visualizing a mutant peanut shell I once picked out of a bag at the zoo. It actually had three peanuts inside, which is not remarkably uncommon, except that in this one, each peanut had its own apartment connected at the center like a clover. What is more, two of these segments were pushed very close together, giving the larger peanut shell a provocatively feminine shape. Mr. Peanut would have tripped over his own cane and popped his monocle out at the sight of this voluptuous she-nut.
Now do you see what I see? Close enough, I’m sure. Close enough that I can proceed to talk about it anyway. However, I did not draw a picture of this leggy legume in your head to discuss Mr. Peanut’s sexuality. My point, in a nutshell, is that despite my best efforts, you will not know exactly what this she-nut looked like. I can go on and on explaining more and more minute details, while you go on and on visualizing those details as you see fit, but we will never achieve a perfect transfer of information. Not through language. The best we can hope for is an analog bootleg.
Thus, it is my theory that the Pied Piper virus, in dissolving the human habit of communicating through shared symbols, has only allowed a deeper and more perfect form of empathic communication to blossom in its place. Based on my limited observations, the resulting consciousness is not a prelingual, but rather a supralingual state of mind, a perfectly social sentience that experiences no communication breakdown, distortion, or disintegration. I have no other explanation for the flawless coordination that I witnessed. How this has occurred I cannot say. I can only observe, with an incalculable degree of astonishment, that the social instincts of our species are not so easily suppressed.
130 I was beginning to grow accustomed to experiencing the profoundly improbable. Despite this, I was nonetheless amazed when the line of people on the screen suddenly ceased all movement whatsoever. It was as if they were participating in an unfathomably immense game of Freeze Tag and had just been tagged en masse by an omnipresent It. I was doubly surprised, and a little disappointed, when I realized that General Kiljoy was It. He had paused the playback. I was so thrilled by what was happening upstairs that I had forgotten we were watching a tape from earlier that morning. Given recent events, after all, a simultaneous standstill didn’t seem so preposterous.
But it was preposterous, and as soon as I had sorted out my confusion, I inquired about the state of affairs at the present time. I was joined in this behest by Tynee and Miss Mary. General Kiljoy took his self-abusing hand out of his pocket to wave us off as he fooled with his remote in the other. After a few impatient moments, he succeeded in giving us real-time video on the screen.
I silently rejoiced as the line of dancing people flickered back on the monitor. It was immediately apparent that their shindig had become a great deal more rambunctious since this morning. Like any good party, things had gotten completely out of control, or out of conscious control anyway. As I’ve said, something was guiding this wingding; this was demonstrated by the spellbinding synchronicity of movement. The whip was still chasing its own vibrations through the circle, but the wavelength had decreased to three persons, demanding a staggering pace of all participants. No one, however, seemed to be weary in the least. Indeed, the whip’s frequency was only the background upon which each individual was stomping out their own interpretive boogie. Judging from the fact that everyone looked as ecstatic as a belly dancer’s navel, this was the greatest party ever thrown.
This busting blasting blowout was anything but some faceless mob of maniacs. Mobs are dangerous because everyone acts only for themselves. A mob is a mass of clods mindlessly trampling one another. Here, something was clearly weaving these people together in coexistent parallelism, uniting them in spite of, or because of, the Pied Piper virus. The virus was like a mad and hypnotic choreographer, a charismatic visionary encouraging his troupes that the show must not only go on, but that it must achieve a transcendent perfection. It seemed to be at once the relentless gusts of a fierce tempest and the gentle strokes of a silken comb. On the one hand, it was whipping the crowd into a windblown frenzy, while on the other, it was smoothing any tangles and snags out of the mane of the masses. Such complementary high jinks were creating a wild and merry frolic, a peaceful prance of drenching happiness, a gleeful spree of serendipity. But this hoedown of eloquent revelry had not ye
t peaked in intensity. Poetic and boisterous, tranquil and flabbergasting, giddy and serene, the hierophantic antics were accelerating. Within minutes, the wavelength had decreased to every other person flawlessly alternating between stepping forward and backward, and all the while matching this breakneck pace in their own personal grooves.
If you were to stumble on a pebble and find yourself on the ground with both legs suddenly behind your head, you would experience an incredulity of preternatural proportions. Such amazement at your own breathtaking clumsiness would be equivalent in degree to my own astonishment at the graceful chaos unfurling like Eleusinian fractals before me this morning. It was just too unlikely, yet it was more magnificent than seeing the aurora borealis during a solar eclipse. It was more enthralling than seeing a birdsong and hearing a rainbow. It was an extraordinary sight to behold.
General Kiljoy did not share this view. To be frank, he was freaked out, though in an appropriately disciplined manner. He stood as he watched these events unfold, arms akimbo like a bossy parent, clutching his remote control like a hastily removed belt, trying to decide how many lashes to mete out to his insubordinate children. “What the hell is this?” he snarled, turning to face the rest of us. His eyes were wild, perhaps panicked, and though his brow was furrowed in fury there was a peculiar tranquillity about him. He looked funny, and for the first time I noticed that the crease between his eyebrows formed the inside of a peace symbol.
God only knows how he managed to go so far in the military hierarchy with the footprint of the American chicken stamped on his forehead.
131 According to General Kiljoy’s physiognomy book that I found on the bookshelf in the observation lounge, it takes approximately two hundred thousand frowns to etch a permanent crease in your brow. To accomplish this, you would have to scowl at least nine times a day for sixty years. General Kiljoy had no problem achieving this goal; he probably frowns nine times an hour. But his resulting peace crease must have vexed him considerably. He is certainly aware of this feature. As a self-proclaimed amateur face-reader, he surely must have trained his physiognomy to reveal as little as possible and to mislead as much as possible. After all, he could hardly go parading around the Pentagon with a peace sign chiseled between his eyes and expect to get any respect. That’s why he looked so unusual. Current events were wearing on him, and he was losing control of his well-trained facial muscles in the process. He was becoming unbuttoned, expressions long hidden were suddenly flashing their privates to anyone who would look, tossing off their ridiculous cloaks in pathetic exhibitionism.
Just a Couple of Days Page 27