Just a Couple of Days

by Tony Vigorito

  I was hungry. I seem to remember resolving that my body could use a fast, as I had become chronically constipated from our survival fare’s almost complete lack of dietary fiber. Whenever I could muster a movement, pardon me, it was like shitting shards of shrapnel. Sophia, beamingly proud of her colon, was forever lecturing me on the importance of periodically denying yourself food. According to her, fasting provides a physical and spiritual cleanse, and gives you a visceral experience of your own connection to the Earth and the cycle of life. She’s probably correct. She’s even shown me research that demonstrates the greater longevity of animals fed low-calorie diets relative to animals fed high-calorie diets. That may be so, but I’ve always been an American, and I like to keep my belly full. I was famished, and any notions of a healthy asceticism now struck me as ludicrous. I wanted some food. Besides, I had a puppy to feed.

  Where to get food in the middle of a deserted city? Most supermarkets have no more than a six-day supply of food on hand, and I was certain they had already been emptied by the quarantined population. Although emergency food had been air-dropped around the city, my chances of locating any of this fare seemed equally unlikely, at least in the short term. I thought about catching a squirrel, but the fastest human alive would starve before they’d succeed in that small task. No, as a human, my survival depended on others, or the food others had left behind. My best bet, I decided, was Blip and Sophia’s 50 percent self-sufficient dome on the outskirts of town. They had a solar-powered refrigerator and a pantry outfitted for survivalist health nuts. I figured I would either encounter them and have to be okay with the consequences, or raid their well-stocked pantry and refrigerator like an insolent raccoon. With any luck, I could live well for a couple of seasons.

  So I headed for my car. As I approached it, I saw what appeared to be a weathered parking ticket stuck under the windshield wiper. This, of course, was ridiculous. I was not parked illegally, and such laws were now meaningless anyway. As it turned out, it was indeed a parking ticket, though it was written for Blip’s car, not mine. Along with a gigantic smiley face, Blip had scrawled a note on the back. It was short and simple.

  “The dervish spoke the truth.”

  149 After a few moments of deliberation with the seat belt buckle in my hand, I decided not to put it on. I would be the only car on the road, after all, and I was no longer intoxicated, although the overflow of adrenaline was still giving me the shakes. I was confident I could avoid hitting any stationary objects, even though I was about to do every forbidden thing I had always wanted to do with an automobile. I pulled out of my parking space, revved the engine, and laid rubber on my way out of the parking lot. I careened wildly around corners, tires squealing, the whole deal. It was much easier than running, and satisfied nicely the demands of the leftover epinephrine still tickling my nervous system. Despite being tossed about by the forces of inertia, Loki enjoyed himself as well and yipped along with my yowls and yee-haws.

  I headed for the freeway, with every intention of finding out if my car could actually move at 125 miles per hour, as the speedometer claimed. On my way, however, racing down a straightaway, I suddenly caught sight of a lone pedestrian on the side of the road. He didn’t even look toward me as I roared by. He was gazing instead at a stop sign, as if perhaps he was waiting for it to turn green.

  His unexpected presence unnerved me, and after I was a good way past him, I slowed to the speed limit, locked my doors, pulled my seat belt on, and thanked the American dream that I had been driving with my windows closed and the heater on. I hadn’t really anticipated encountering anyone. This complicated matters. I did not feel at all prepared to meet my fate. This was my luxury. I knew the larger circumstances, but with a little ingenuity I felt I could delay the inevitable until I decided it was the proper time.

  When is the proper time? According to Blip’s comrade-in-spray-paint, NOW! is the proper time. As I approached Graffiti Bridge, however, I realized that NOW! had already happened, NOW! was old news. The message, which had broadcast NOW! the last I was aware, had been changed, presumably by Blip. He hadn’t changed much, simply and neatly shifting the meaning by adding a single letter K.

  It would be the final proclamation of Graffiti Bridge.

  KNOW!

  150 And so I took up domicile at Blip and Sophia’s dome, where, as I said, I found the encyclopedia of religion lying on the floor. Clearly, they were no longer in residence. I considered myself a house sitter. I kept the place neat, and paid myself in food—mostly beans, rice, nuts, sprouts, potatoes, and vitamins. It was an excellent place to take shelter for the region’s mild winter. I’ve lost weight and become much more regular. Thanks to their paranoid self-sufficiency, I even have a limited amount of electricity. Between their solar panels, windmill, and a backup propane-powered generator, I have a stove, refrigerator, and a computer, although I can’t reasonably use more than one of them at the same time. I have a television and radio as well, but there is never anything on. It’s just as well. I spend most of my time reading their books and editing, writing, and rewriting my manuscript. It’s coming along.

  Other than Loki, I haven’t seen another soul since I arrived here months ago. I have, however, heard one. Blip and Sophia told me their dome was haunted, and by my reckoning, I’d have to agree. Every few nights I jolt awake to what sounds like a Sunday paper being thrown across the room. Sophia dubbed it “the paper poltergeist.” While I have no training in parapsychology, I have exhaustively investigated the phenomenon and have been unable to discover a physical cause, or even propose an alternative hypothesis. Other than repeatedly startling the living night-lights out of me, the paper poltergeist seems harmless enough. Hence, the most I can do is echo Blip’s glib reasoning on the matter whenever the paper goes bump in the night.

  “What you do not fear cannot hurt you.”

  151 Alone. Sometime around the beginning of February, it dawned on me that there was no reason to get dressed. Although it was crisp outside, domes are known for their excellent resistance to drafts. I was quite comfortable inside, and Loki didn’t seem to give one lick of a vegan milk bone whether I clothed myself or not.

  Shortly after I decided to go naked (or half naked, anyway, as I could not resist wearing at least a towel or a robe most of the time), I came across a curious book in Blip and Sophia’s bookcase. It was bound in rainbow tie-dyed fabric, and it was handwritten in deliberate, perfect penmanship. The title was written on the first page, The Book o’ Billets-doux.

  Its hundred pages were filled with dialogues between two characters named Rosehips and Sweetlick, ostensible aliases for Sophia and Blip. I picked my favorite passages and inserted them into this manuscript, both for posterity’s sake and for a reason that is about to become clear. Here follows the final passage from The Book o’ Billets-doux.

  THE BOOK O’ BILLETS-DOUX

  Sweetlick: It is finished.

  Rosehips: Eh?

  Sweetlick: It’s over. The quest. We have found the promised Word, the Word whose existence was whispered to us by the whirling dervish all those years ago.

  Rosehips: You’ve found the grail?

  Sweetlick: We’ve found the grail.

  Rosehips: Well what is it?

  Sweetlick: You’ll see.

  Rosehips: Please tell me.

  Sweetlick: I tell thee you’ll see.

  Rosehips: Pretty please tell me.

  Sweetlick: Listen very carefully, for I cannot talk for long. You will see.

  Rosehips: What am I to make of this teasing?

  Sweetlick: Oh my suckle-doodle-doobie! I cannot tell thee. Language is what hides it. Language limits us to approximations. How can I communicate the ineffable except by trusting that you know what I mean? Don’t you see? The fall of humanity was the fall from the actual to the symbolic. Language abstracts us from the real world, keeping us from direct, intuitive perception. Words, like the ego, are merely guides. Don’t mistake them for the real thing. Pull aside the filthy c
urtains of the social. Language makes an enigma of simple existence, it obscures the true nature of reality, and of your Self.

  Rosehips: Oh dear. What am I to do?

  Sweetlick: Just be your Self. Don’t put your ego where it doesn’t belong. Your ego is just a tool to assist you in life. Don’t mistake it for who you are. The ego is a distracting backseat driver who thinks it knows everything. Keep it in its proper place. Tape its mouth shut, so you can better enjoy the ride instead of trying to control it.

  Rosehips: Leggo your ego?

  Sweetlick: Hoo-wee absolutely! Judgment day is simply whether or not you can let go. The less self-absorbed you are, the easier it is to let go.

  Rosehips: I feel funny.

  Sweetlick: It’s going to get funnier than you can possibly imagine.

  Rosehips: But what is it that’s so funny?

  Sweetlick: The stupidity of your social self. You will laugh, as everyone, at the foolishness of your self-presentations, and at the idiocy and inadequacy of language.

  Rosehips: Very well. But first I must tell you something. Remember Graffiti Bridge?

  Sweetlick: Certainly.

  Rosehips: I know that you started it.

  Sweetlick: You’re quite the detective. Guilty as charged.

  Rosehips: There’s something else.

  Sweetlick: Pray tell me.

  Rosehips: I couldn’t let you have all the fun.

  Sweetlick: Come again?

  Rosehips: I am the other vandal.

  Sweetlick: You are joking.

  Rosehips: I am laughing, but I am not joking.

  Sweetlick: How perfectly marvelous! But my my my, who are you and who am I? Who are we to have performed such courageous exploits?

  Rosehips: We’re nobody in particular. We’re just a couple of days.

  Sweetlick: You said it, baby-waby! Just a couple of days, you and I.

  Rosehips: Saturday and Sunday.

  152 A single strand of DNA is two-billionths of a meter thin. This is approximately one forty-four-thousandth the diameter of a medium-sized human hair. So, is life nothing more than a skinny molecule containing all the information most organisms require for their pointless survival and reproduction?

  Not at all. DNA is only the beginning of life, at least as far as we can see. DNA is life’s furious librarian, forever organizing and reorganizing information in the form of genetic traits necessary for a given organism to adapt to and thus survive in its environment. Among mammals, however, something else emerged, a novel manner of adapting to the environment. Learned behavior, information acquired during the lifetime of an organism, is what mammals, especially humans, depend upon for survival. It is an extragenetic source of information. Thus, while species may adapt to environmental conditions over the course of eons at the genetic level, humans can adapt much more efficiently within one lifetime, at the cultural level, in the information we share between one another.

  At the strictly genetic level of information, humanity is laughably ill-equipped to deal with its environment: Our claws are thin, our senses are dull, our teeth aren’t terribly dangerous, we’re not very strong, we’re not very fast, and we hardly have any hair. And yet we survive and thrive due to our immense capacity for learning and communicating information. DNA is much too crude a mechanism for the transmission of this information. It was enough for it to provide the materials and workmanship for the neocortex, the outermost layer of our brains, to emerge. Here, the organism stores and transmits extragenetic information. To put our place in nature in the proper perspective: Reptiles have no neocortex to speak of in their tiny heads, while the neocortex accounts for 85 percent of the human brain.

  Obviously, the neocortex confers a tremendous evolutionary advantage. It makes the organism, as well as the species, more resilient, able to learn and share new survival information fairly quickly, rather than wait centuries or millennia for the genes of great-grand-progeny to adapt. But despite the immense potential granted by the almost complete dominance of the neocortex over the genes, we have continued to allow ourselves to be driven by our selfish genes for most of human history. Perhaps we’ve behaved like such brilliant barbarians because we have been deficient in some vital aspect of ourselves. Let us take a closer look.

  Is there not something unique about humans that sets them a class apart from all other species? An animal that can teleport its physical form does not exist, but if it did, it would be unique in a more particular way than the mere fact of it being a separate species. That is, no other animal would possess the ability of teleportation. In the same way, humans can develop an elaborate cultural universe of their own, live within it, abide by it, and die for it, all without recognizing that it is ultimately only an estimation of the world. This degree of sociability is a trait not shared with any other species. Not even remotely.

  So, to be social is to be directed toward others, to ultimately function as a larger group organism. This trait emerged, like everything, because it enabled survival. Its presence, however, introduced a contradiction in our genetic program. Like any other organism, we are selfish at our genetic core, and yet these same genes gave rise to a capacity to transcend themselves and evolve into the realm of the purely social. My own predicament notwithstanding, we simply cannot survive as lone humans.

  The primary self-interest is validation from others, assurance that we are not alone. Our sociability is not optional, and we only survive at all because of each other. Yet our cooperation, in this era anyway, has been decidedly selfish. This has gotten us into our climactic fix, increasingly threatening our individual and collective survival. None can survive if everyone tries to be the fittest individual, but all can benefit if together we try to build the fittest society. Thus is our evolutionary conflict. Which is ultimately more adaptive to survival: selfishness or sociability? To act social is to trust that each will act in one another’s mutual interest. Obviously, such a thing cannot be achieved alone. To minimize our individual pain, we must come together. Anything less is no longer adaptive for individual or species survival, let alone happiness. And this requires a leap of nothing so simple as faith.

  And faith? What is this nonsense? To whom are you being faithful in a leap of faith? If you wish to vault the chasm of eternal emptiness, you can only trust in yourself to carry you across in safety. It would be arrogant and foolish of you to race toward such an abyss without a studied concentration of effort, a perfect understanding of the steps necessary to accomplish such a feat. Faith is not blind optimism, it is honest determination. And yet faith is not the proof required by reason. Faith is the genuine trust of intuition.

  Think of it this way: The classic way to throw a billiard partner off his game is to ask him what he does with his right arm when he shoots his cue. Preoccupied with pointless analysis, he is thrown off balance, and the cue stick feels awkward in his hand. Similarly, athletes achieve their greatest potential when they cease thinking about what they are doing, when their actions become so perfect that their movements flow through them rather than from them. In the same way, making the leap to trust requires opening your door, shedding your pretensions, your self-consciousness, and presenting your soul unabashed to the world. This is a leap of faith. Faith is not belief in God. Faith is the awareness that you are God. Namaste.

  The problem, oh Invisible Risibility, is that we are not human enough. We are the only species that can laugh, yet far too much of our modern lives were spent actively not laughing—griping, complaining, stressing, arguing, despairing. We spent our time in the false comforts of primitive consciousness and all the jealousy, anger, and hate it implied. Though we remained boastfully ignorant, we are in truth far more intelligent than we led ourselves to believe. We are humans, the clever monkeys, and we possess the tremendous potential to shape not only our selves, but our entire world. Why settle with the hand-me-downs of the past when we can do so much better?

  I am nothing but what you think I am. You are nothing but what I think you are
. Thus are we linked, for better or for worse. We are nothing but each other. Before the Pied Piper came prancing along, it did not require paranormal abilities to predict the future of our species. A horrifying apocalypse was not our destiny. It would have become apparent that the planet did not fear our vanity, and the universe did not care one speck of stardust whether we lived or died. We would have learned that our future, and the lives we lead, were wholly up to us. We would have recognized our potential and directed our own destiny, or we would have perished.

  The future, as our best prophets have always said, is love (or that which the overuse of the word fails to express). This is a certainty. Regardless of everything, our species will eventually go where it must. There is no other conceivable future for the simple reason that if we do not learn to love, we will surely die away, individual agonies in a collective nightmare. That could be the climax of the human story, and that is why the future is so certain. There is no future in death and destruction. If we cease to exist, then the future ceases to exist as far as we are concerned, and all speculation necessarily becomes moot.

  Things are not as complicated as we think. Which would you rather do, hoot and howl or harrumph and growl? Which would you rather do, twist and shout or maim and kill? The choice is as clear and easy as that. Everything else is just static. Tune your Self in.

  Humanity is a wild species, daring and reckless, playing the highest stakes, risking extinction. We are the nuts dangling from the tips of the petioles in danger of falling off the Tree of Life altogether. But not to worry in any case. Perhaps a tumble is necessary for us to leave the bad habits of the past behind.