Just a Couple of Days

by Tony Vigorito

  Yes, I am convinced he is aware of his stigmata. The peace crease flashed only briefly, and was quickly replaced by his conventional furrow as he regained some composure. He disguises his accidental groove with an intentional trench, an inverted peace symbol superimposed upon the original. To illustrate, the drawing on the left is his unadulterated brow pucker. On the right side is General Kiljoy’s efforts to camouflage his pacifistic countenance. It is his war paint, so to speak.

  Admittedly, I am recently suicidal, and thus not entirely of sound mind, and I do not claim to be a face-reader. Nevertheless, I contend that General Kiljoy has calculated to carve his peace symbol into a stick figure of the Great Seal of the United States, a much less distressing symbol for him to display on his brow.

  To see what I mean, look on the back of a dollar bill. The right-hand side of the seal displays a bald eagle with a fistful of arrows in one claw and an olive branch in the other. It is appropriately symbolic, with thirteen leaves and thirteen arrows and thirteen stars and thirteen stripes, and most important for General Kiljoy’s purposes, it is rousingly patriotic. And yet, upon closer examination, it is just as exhibitionist as the flower children prancing around his forehead in secret, long-haired and topless, singing “Give Peace a Chance.” The legs of the eagle, after all, are spread-eagle. Indeed, this is the origin of that phrase. Believe it, the legs of our nation are splayed out in both directions like some tasteless but true sexual provocateur. To be fair, the intimate details are discreetly loinclothed by some sort of shield or coat-of-arms negligee, but this only demonstrates an awareness of the innuendo. In any case, whether it is offensive in its gross carnality or admirable for slipping past the censors of a nation first settled by Puritans, whether it represents prudishness or licentiousness, zealous modesty or fucking fanfaronades, no matter its meaning, it is an appropriate third eye for General Kiljoy.

  I say this because it is aggressive in either event, and aggression in any form and for any cause was more attractive to him than peace. So, he continued the struggle to keep his sentiments suitably attired, and was partially successful in his insistent tailoring. He at least prevented them from completely dropping their underpants once again. Though he was standing in front of a sidesplitting sideshow of unconsciousness unleashed, he managed to hold his countenance clad with a bumbling sermon appropriate to the Normandy invasion.

  “We,” he grunted after a few spontaneous sputters and miscellaneous mutters. His brow twitched as if it had just been snagged with a fishhook. “We are being threatened,” he continued. “A sinister force has attacked. Our way of life is at stake. Enemies have conspired to destroy our society.” He pointed to the thousands of dancing merries behind him on the screen and smiled like a conceited maggot. “The few must be sacrificed to save the many.”

  His platitudinous oration aroused nothing but stirring disgust in me. I was about to mouth off and say as much, and remind him that the few actually numbered in the hundreds of thousands (at least I prefer to think that I was), but Miss Mary preempted my retort with a croaky imperative.

  “Look!” she practically puked, sounding like she was speaking through a mouthful of beer-soaked cigarette butts. She pointed at the screen with her cancer stick, looking like she just realized she had shown up for school naked.

  The smoldering tip of her cigarette directed me toward the screen. Again, it displayed an unnerving scene of absolute stillness. This time, however, it was not to be dismissed as preposterous. The formerly frenzied hominids had fallen suddenly dormant, but a breeze was clearly visible. This was a real-time video feed, and nothing had paused but the people themselves. It was as if the whip was now vibrating so fast that they appeared to be standing still. They stood with their feet anchored to the ground, hands joined, chests heaving in collective hyperventilation. They stood like this a good long while, until everyone had caught their breath. At least four observers underground were equally motionless. The crucial difference, however, is that we didn’t know what was next. Christ, we didn’t even know what was currently happening. They, on the other hand, most certainly did.

  Simultaneously, and I mean absolutely simultaneously, no false starts or dillydallies, but at the exact same moment, everyone let go of one another’s hands and spun completely around. Once, twice, they stopped at two and a half turns, nine hundred degrees, and faced away from the center. By the time the remotecontrolled aircraft had swung around to shift the camera’s perspective, the masses had their hands in the air and their mouths open, screaming in ecstatic agony what could only have been the last gasps of ennui, the hysterical funeral cry for a culture whose technology had extended its demise to the point of frothing impatience.

  132 Solstices used to puzzle me. Why, I wondered, if the shortest day of the year is on December 22 (give or take a day), why does it continue to get colder even though the days become longer and the sun’s rays grow more direct by the day? Conversely, the longest day of the year is around June 22, yet the dog days of summer are in July and August. What accounts for this? Like the penny that I kept forgetting was in my coat pocket all through graduate school, I carried this question around with me for years. I came across it occasionally, but I never got around to putting forth the effort to toss it on the sidewalk or visualize the astrophysics of the solar system. Astronomy was not my specialization, after all, and my academic training had discouraged me from straying outside my discipline. Instead, I posed it to others when it occurred to me during conversations about the weather. Invariably, they were as mystified as myself. Most had never before considered this climatological contradiction.

  I was disappointed when I finally received the answer. It was during a cold snap in February, and it came from a clerk at a fast-food restaurant. After being charged $1.01 for a cheeseburger (94 cents plus tax—couldn’t they have made it an even dollar, for chrissakes?) and remembering at last that I had a penny in my coat, I was unable to find it and had to break a twenty instead. I was bummed. What purpose did that persistent penny serve if I never succeeded in using it? Such anticlimax was doubly experienced when I commented on the cold and proceeded to complain absentmindedly about the aforementioned contradiction. He had the answer, and it had little to do with astronomy and much to do with meteorology. “Thermal lag,” he said. “Air and water currents warm and cool at a pace slower than the phases of the sun. Air and water temperatures determine immediate climate patterns, not the sun’s position in the sky. It’s like the noonday sun; it’s not yet the heat of the day.”

  Oh.

  Today anyway, December 21, the winter solstice, when the angle of the sun is at its southernmost point, when the sun gives the northern half of our planet the cold shoulder, on this particularly beautiful, warm, and sunny darkest day of the year, on this watershed day something supremely more celestial occurred among the animated descendants of stardust assembled around our lifeless city.

  They ran for it.

  133 “Remember, man, dust you are and to dust you shall return.” Father Whippet, no doubt hungover from his own private Fat Tuesday party at the rectory, used to mumble these words to me just before smudging soot on my grade-school forehead on Ash Wednesday. He was only partially correct with his blessing, for he left out the stars. We are stardust, not just dust. The entire solar system, from its life to its rocks, ultimately formed from different molecular patterns of stardust. When we die, we bite the stardust.

  Blip said it well one sunny vernal equinox just after he focused a prism’s rainbow on my forehead. “When you’re born, you pass through the prism. Life is a rainbow, an infinite spectrum of radiant souls. But remember, man, light you are and to light you shall return.”

  134 I once read about a weirdo who maintained a soap bubble for over a year. Looking closely at a bubble, you can see the swirling rainbows flowing downward. Gravity. In the absence of a collision, the soap will drip off the bubble until it can no longer maintain its surface tension, and it will pop. So, in order for this bubblehead t
o keep his precious sphere of suds alive, he had to keep feeding it soap. How he managed to do this I cannot recall; only the memory of his ineffable waste of time continues to loiter about the corners of my mind.

  Point being, society is like a bubble, kept alive by continually feeding it language—hence the strategy behind the Pied Piper virus. Stop feeding the bubble, and it will explode. No conflagration, no destruction, just an inaudible pop, and no trace of its existence remains. But why are we so hung up on feeding the bubble in the first place? Why participate in such a thankless task? Perhaps because it provides a very convincing illusion of meaning, security, purpose, and order, and is therefore an excellent place to hide from reality. Those who labor the most diligently on maintaining and defending the bubble are merely the most gutless among us. Cowardice makes for a good citizen, it seems.

  In any case, when the circle around the city broke huddle and people ran in their own radial directions, it was not clear whether the bubble had popped or if it was expanding to encompass all that it had heretofore neglected. Perhaps it was a little of both. The bubble burst, to be sure, yet all available evidence indicated that the Pied Piper virus had somehow backfired. It was like a trick gun that not only blew up in its user’s face, but also invigorated its intended victim. What of this order, this coordination, this choreography? This was not mass anomie, pandemonium, and normlessness, but its perfect opposite. The biggest, wildest, most mind-blowing game of Ring around the Rosy ever held had come to an extraordinary finale, and instead of falling down dead the players had exploded outward into God-knows-what.

  Ring around the Rosy, as you should know, is another one of our blind habits that has persisted brainlessly for generations, since the days of the Black Death, according to some.

  Ring around the rosy,

  Pockets full of posy,

  Ashes, ashes,

  We all fall down.

  Reportedly, the nursery rhyme is describing the rings of dried blood those afflicted with the plague got under their skin, herbs hoped to treat it, and the burning corpses of more than half the humans on the Eurasian continent. A playful memoir to the largest catastrophe in Western human history, but now some brash upstart plague had rewritten the words.

  Ring around our city,

  Laughing off our pity,

  Dancing, dancing,

  We all get down.

  Or something to that effect.

  Just two months ago, this city had a little over a million inhabitants. If, as is claimed, a tenth of the residents perished as an indirect result of the outbreak, some nine hundred thousand children of stardust made their mother proud today and went supernova. To attain supernova status is the highest ambition of a star (and is, incidentally, something our good sun will never itself achieve—it’s not big enough). In exploding, a star achieves a luminescence up to one hundred million times brighter, and then begins the long process of coalescing into something entirely new. An alternative is to collapse into a miserable black hole, a mass of matter so dense that not even light can escape. How pleased our sun must have been to witness its naughtiest children escape their own vortex of avarice and outshine even her.

  135 I was not the only one who recognized that the Pied Piper virus had double-crossed its designers. Whereas I was amazed and amused, however, General Kiljoy was flabbergasted and furious. “What the hell is this?” He kept snapping and growling at no one in particular like a rabid crocodile as he paced hither and thither in a dither, all the while flashing peace, love, freedom, and happiness from his forehead.

  “What does it matter?” Miss Mary said with an icky grin as she mashed out a cigarette butt. “They can’t leave the city anyway, and soon it will be sterilized.”

  “What the hell is this?”

  “General, she’s right.” Tynee stood to address him. “The situation is under control.” Tynee had to gallop alongside General Kiljoy to match the pace of his strides. He looked like the cartoon Chihuahua trying to keep up with the bulldog. True to the image, General Kiljoy shoved Tynee away from him. He pushed him so hard that Tynee toppled over the back side of the sofa and landed spread-eagle on the cushions, sprawling all over the place like an overdeveloped city.

  “Goddamnit!” Tynee roared after he’d regained his balance and stood back up. “Touch me again,” he threatened, but was so flustered he could muster no menace with which to complete his warning.

  General Kiljoy wasn’t listening anyway. “It doesn’t work, can’t you see? This field test is an absolute failure. The Pied Piper virus is useless. I’ve spent the last thirteen years of my life directing a project whose grand achievement just blew up in my face.” His lower lip trembled. “This was supposed to be the ultimate weapon, my enduring contribution to ensure the security of our way of life.” He turned and stumbled to the bathroom, from which he did not emerge for some time.

  Good riddance. In his absence, no energy was expended concerning ourselves over his little occupational crisis. His whiny panic attack had been an irritating distraction from the curiosities on the viewscreen. And anyway, perhaps it was for the best that he did not witness the further adventures of this rowdy band of city folk.

  Followed by the spy plane’s camera, the dancers bolted away from the city at an all-out sprint, not a lope or a jaunt, but a barreling getaway, a split-beating hasty retreat. What is more, their get-the-hell-out-of-Dodge dash was sustained long enough to trip an Olympian’s ticker. They tore along at the edge of control, feet scarcely touching the ground, limbs barely keeping up with the spirit. If you’ve ever flown down a hill on twenty-foot strides and accelerating, perhaps you can imagine the wings on their heels.

  Haste makes waste? This mad rush of human expansion seemed to be heading toward a grisly end, tangled among the rows of razor wire and slaughtered by the heat-sensing automatic firing squad. If this was the case, they didn’t seem the least bit concerned. Their rip-roaring race was punctuated by cartwheels and handsprings and other such scampering feats of acrobatic grace. Apparently, the Pied Piper virus gives one hell of a pep talk. Two months of ebbing and flowing dancing manias had licked the lot of them into supernatural shape. They looked like sprites on speed, and their double-espresso eyes, dilated pupils swelling with vim and vigor, shone so radiantly I could almost see myself reflected in them.

  This, along with the collective effervescence they were currently experiencing, must account for the boundless energy coursing through them. A few sips from the seltzer of fizzing exultation and suddenly people are off their asses and running together like wolves on the howl. Pied Piper virus or not, partaking of such a sparkling nectar makes for a divine hiccup, a cosmic catharsis of gushing goodwill, a resonant belch of peace. The supreme spiritual quest is really nothing more than the search for a volcanic and barbaric burp to share with our fellows, relieving us at last from the gassy bubble of a sour society, the heartburn of desperate loneliness that so cramps our metaphysical style.

  I did not witness such a Brahmanic brap. Such a thing cannot be seen anyway; it can only be experienced. I did, however, hear General Kiljoy blowing his breakfast of aged pork and beans into the toilet through the pipes that ran past the lounge. Since the spy plane provided only a video feed, no audio, the sound of him barfing provided the sound track. He was coughing and gagging, off and on, for over fifteen minutes, and he doubtless would do so for much longer after Tynee ordered me back to my lab and informed him of what came to pass in his absence.

  This is what happened. After we watched the running of the humans to the point where their antics were becoming tiresome, they ran across the freeway outerbelt and beyond, completely unencumbered by razor wire or bullets. It occurred without any fanfare on their part, but to us troglodytes, the realization of it was as sudden as a smack in the face from a passing stranger. Momentarily, the viewfinder panned down the outerbelt and the source of this breach was revealed.

  There, a mile or so down the freeway (and elsewhere around the city as well, it was de
termined later), and occurring with very little resistance by the automated military hardware, a posse of renegade eighteen-wheelers was systematically and successfully demolishing the blockade.

  THE BOOK O’ BILLETS-DOUX

  Rosehips: So what’s it like, being somebody else?

  Sweetlick: Same deal. Learn, grow, love, laugh, cry, work, play, die.

  136 Tynee sent me to my room as if he were a puritanical patriarch and there had just been a swearword on TV. I trotted off to my lab without dispute, inspired and eager to record these events in my journal. I wrote furiously for the rest of the day and into the night, not pausing until I had recorded the full history of the day’s breakout. Excited and exhausted, I fell asleep at my desk, only to be awakened around three A.M. by a forceful shove.