Super Flat Times (3 page)

“Like the time at base camp —”

“Yes. Just like. What is that feeling?”

“I don’t know, Memorex. But it doesn’t sound like the kind of feeling that winners feel. Is it? Is that the way you think people who win feel? Do you think that General Custer, as he stood atop the mound of enemy corpses, felt the way that you’re feeling?”

He rubs the side of his face where scabs from a constellation of wicked-huge spider bites pill and drift. “No, that’s definitely not what winners feel.”

“Well, you’ve answered your own question there, Memorex, haven’t you?”

“Yeah?”

“Yes. The answer is, don’t feel feelings that aren’t winning feelings. Make sense?”

Memorex nods and continues his journal entry. I run to the latrine, buckling, suddenly, with waste. I fill to the brim nearly five Mason jars.

The enemy is getting smarter. They start digging big holes, which they cover up with leafy tree branches. They dig the holes so well and disguise them so carefully that, eventually, we fall into one. I hit the ground shoulder first, half of me sucked instantly into a pool of mud. Conservarte falls on top of me, his left knee coming down directly on my solar plexus. “Sorry, sir,” he whispers, splashing frantically in the thick puddle. I grip his upper arm to shush him, pointing up toward the mouth of the giant hole. Everything goes dark and quiet as the Sound Gun teeters at the edge. Danson and his slave, who are tethered to the machine with the medical gauze, dangle about four meters from the ground, flailing their limbs erratically. Slowly, with groaning indecision, the Sound Gun begins to tip forward, and then, with unimaginable speed, casting out a heavy sheet of debris, it falls, landing on top of the both of them.

When the cloud dissipates, all we can see of them are their legs, sticking out from the treads like beefy shards of driftwood. Constantine rushes over to help Danson’s slave, who used to be his wife, but the upper half of her has been completely squashed. He pulls on one of the legs for a while, whimpering, desperately imploring us to join in. We all look down or away, or up at the mouth of the hole, anything to avoid his plaintive stare.

If dragging the Sound Gun out of the ravine with four sturdy, if belligerent, mules was difficult, dragging it out of a surprisingly deep, narrow hole with no mules is all but impossible, but in the afternoon Memorex gets the idea that we could blast a path out of the ground. We have never tried shooting at the ground before, but given what usually happens when we shoot the Sound Gun, what with the leveling of trees and barricades, the hoisting aloft of enemy soldiers, the hurling of bodies, high and far, and so forth, moving earth seems eminently feasible. We all grab our percussion suits and take off into the brush while Conservarte warms up the generator.

“Okay,” he calls out when everyone is far enough away. “Christ if I’m not going to do this.” He grunts for a while, fiercely turning switches.

We pull the rip cords on the inflatable suits, biting down on the hard plastic mouthpieces. Air rushes into the stiff fabric, puffing us up like ripe berries. There is a moment of absolute silence, and then a faint crackling sound before a fierce shock wave knocks us back on our asses. Snakes and other creatures start falling out of the trees. One falls on my face and I jump up, flailing wildly. We are safe because we are in the percussion suits. But still.

Momentarily, the earth settles. The creatures of the forest, those that survived, have been shocked into silence. By the tree line an enormous brown creature lies on its side, twitching. We deflate our suits and make our way back to the hole. Conservarte is peering out over the wide, dual barrel of the Sound Gun. The hole is measurably bigger. We walk its perimeter to make sure.

“Did you put it up all the way?” I ask, but, since I forgot to remove my mouthpiece, what it sounds like is “Duh duh duh duh duh duh duh duh?”

“She’s cranked, sir.”

“Let’s give it another shot.”

It is dark out. The hole is bigger, I tell them. Look. They only look down into their plates of gruel, willing it into anything but the gray assemblage steaming away before them. We can hear the enemy cackling in the distance. I climb into the cockpit and fire off a round into the trees, snapping the trunks in half. The cackling stops.

After dinner, gathered as we are around a pathetic campfire made from Danson’s boots, Memorex carefully draws a small photograph from his breast pocket, cupping it gently in his palm. Shaving Gel and Orange Face sheepishly follow suit. It is against the rules for the men to carry photographs, but who am I to enforce rules? After ordering Conservarte to crank the settings of the Sound Gun from Very Hurt to Make Dead, a configuration that hadn’t ever really been tested, let alone approved? After taking the men deeper and deeper into the unmapped wilderness, following a set of military objectives I’d constructed by vague speculation? Who am I to snatch the photographs the men have carried around with them at great risk, images of their dumb, savage loved ones, and toss them into the dwindling campfire?

I snatch the photographs the men have carried around with them at great risk and toss them into the dwindling campfire.

Gruver whispered something from across the room. It was my last night in New Jersey, one that I had willfully hacked away at on the Boardwalk, stuffing myself with sticky buns while standing in line for brightly lit amusement rides that, if successful, would bring the heavy pastry back up. I shouted and growled at anyone who dared occupy the vacant passenger seat of my bumper car — I arched my back like a banshee, if that is indeed what banshees do, and hissed at them, spraying their faces with murky brown mist. I wanted to ward off all human contact, to create the narrowest possible aperture in the world through which to jettison myself.

Things had not been going so well between the bobcat and me, so for the past week or so I’d been sleeping in the closet, curled up like a fetal chick in the corner. The two of them slept in the big yellow bed, the cat’s disturbing, furry head nestled in the crook of Gruver’s arm. Every night I watched them through the crack in the closet door until I fell unconscious, lulled to sleep by the animal’s heavy breathing. On the last night, though, I left the closet door open. Should the cat climb onto my back and bounce repeatedly, as if I were an unsteady outcropping of rock, then so be it. There were more undignified ways to go out than to be crushed by a wild animal.

The cat, though, did not climb onto my back. Instead, I woke in a dyspeptic haze to Gruver’s thick, malleable face staring at me from across the room, suspended, it seemed, from the doorframe. He whispered something, this head floating at the entrance to what had been our room. I could not hear him, though; what came out of his mouth sounded like “gretl balls.”

“Come again?” I said, shooting up from the tangled sheets piled up on the closet floor, but it sounded more like a plea than a question, and before I had fully understood what was happening he was gone — the soft head withdrawn into the hallway and out the door.

The Sound Gun was made so that we could fight friendlier wars. The Wish Journals are so that we can fight with clean consciences. The no-pictures rule is so that we forget what we’re missing. The slaves we made up. Also the deaths. And our reason for being here. That part was made up when the mules ate part of the communications array.

Eating the mules, we made up.

We have started digging a path with shovels fashioned from hollowed-out tree trunks. At the rate we’re currently proceeding, we’ll be finished by Saturday. The Sound Gun may not be working, though. It’s settled into the hole at an angle, engine and auxiliary generators submerged in a clammy pool of mud. Whenever we turn the key it only shudders briefly, offering up a thin plume of green smoke, and then dies, leaving a deafening silence in its wake. Conservarte is inside the cockpit, working with an oversize wrench in an attempt to breathe some life into the machine.

“God, I’m starting to think of my house,” Memorex blurts out suddenly, collapsing to his knees. “I’m thinking of my house with everything inside of it. I’m thinking of a piece of floor inside my house that has junk all over it and if someone cleans up the junk without me there I won’t ever be able to find it again and put it together because it’s not really junk it’s my diabetes kit —”

“Hey, hey,” I call over to him, “no need to panic, there. Let’s all take out our Wish Journals, men, and start writing away Memorex’s bad feelings. Get out your Wish Journals —”

“No,” says Memorex, “no, I
want
to feel this way. I want to. Don’t anybody put my feelings in a canvas bag.” The rest of the men look up from their freshly opened journals, pens carefully poised over the ruled sheets. Memorex slides down the mud ramp on his knees, coming to rest underneath one of the enormous armored treads of the Sound Gun, where he slumps like an old, head-beaten pillow.

“Memorex,” I say, crawling backward down the steep trail that he has just plowed with his body. “What’s this bit of silliness? Come now, your house is not important anymore. Your car, your tile sample collection, your whole life just pales in comparison to what you’re doing here. We’re fighting a war here, Memorex.”

“War? This is a war?”

“Yes, Memorex, of course.”

“What is the war about?” he asks from under the tread. All we can see are his legs. Constantine turns away. “I can’t remember what the war is about, so maybe you can just, like, tell me?”

“Memorex. It’s not really our place to ask, is it? I mean, you wanted to disappear, correct? You wanted never to have happened, am I right? That is the reason you and the rest of us are here, correct? We are men in retreat, all of us. We are hiding from the rest of our lives. The terms have always been fairly well defined. Otherwise, they never would have signed you up. Now come on, Memorex, let’s crawl our way out of the mud, shall we?”

The legs don’t move. “I’m going to lie here until I get crushed.”

Constantine turns back toward Memorex’s legs, bending at the waist in prayer.

“What’s that he’s saying?” I ask Shaving Gel, who points the translation gun at Constantine’s head.

“Says he’s not leaving, either. He wants to die, too, so that he can be with his wife.”

Memorex starts chanting along phonetically with Constantine. Constantine crawls in next to Memorex, so all that we can see are their legs, four sets now, poking out from underneath the tread.

We are there for a long time, watching the two of them shudder and yelp like Pentecostals under the Sound Gun. It is not clear what we should do at this point.

“Sir,” Shaving Gel asks, saluting halfheartedly as he approaches.

“Yes, Shaving Gel.”

“With all due permission, sir, can we break from this, like, vigil-type thing?”

“Absolutely not.”

“Sir, how come?”

“Because these two are being ridiculous, and we must show them that we, too, can be ridiculous. We must suffocate them with our will.”

“Oh,” Shaving Gel says, looking down at his feet. “Can I at least have a sandwich?”

I imagine the look I give Shaving Gel to be wild with disbelief. “Where did you get a sandwich from?”

“Well, sir, it’s a dirt sandwich.”

“A dirt sandwich.”

“Yes, sir.”

I take a survey of the other men. They are all watching, shovels pitched defiantly into the mud. Their eyes are black and distant, the opposite of stars. “Shaving Gel,” I say, grasping his shoulder paternally, “by all means, go have yourself a dirt sandwich.” He lopes off happily into the brush, disappearing behind a spray of wiry vines. The rest of the men do not move.

In the morning I am the only one left. Shaving Gel has not returned. I can see by the muddy prints left on the crispy shale that the Numismatist has scaled the high cliff wall to the east sometime during the night, last of the mule meat and ice tubes strapped to his back. Orange Face has left a small shrine fashioned from twigs and diaphanous gauze, the significance of which is not entirely lost on me. Half Brick and his two slaves are simply gone without a trace — they have even taken the body floss and the elimination hood.

Actually, I should not say that I am the only one left. Memo-rex and Constantine remain under the Sound Gun, keening like abandoned kittens. As far as anyone that matters is concerned, however, I am the only one left, where “anyone that matters” equals the part of me that does not go off like the others, abandoning the Sound Gun and the mission. Missions are important, I tell myself. They are important, and they are to be carried out. Every bit as important as a person.

I am resting on the gnarled trunk of a felled tree, and it has just occurred to me how comfortable an object it is, how well it accepts my intrusive ass, utterly without condescension, without the attendant grief brought on by contemporary furniture. How quiet a thing the world is without all these crude, puffy bodies flailing away at it. I long for a cigarette, and for the first time since I have been here, I long, also, for Gruver, towering over me, shaking me from my sleep for an early walk. I long for his fierce, stubbled head; his long, recriminatory stares; and the way that he would grasp my jaw when we coupled, his filthy fingers in my mouth, clamping my tongue flat, as though he could, by holding down my face, perform a hostile takeover of the burdensome life I’d absently flung at him, neutralizing, at last, the dull tyranny of language.

Let them pray, is what I am thinking here at the bottom of the enemy hole. Let them pray for atonement, and may the purest heart rise up, out of this flat land and back to the first place that seemed a good idea to stay away from.

Meat Tower

I
was, above all other things, a woman with a situation. A hard, looming truth had been rubbed into me like a curative ointment, the kind that leaves its faint, crusted mark for good. To get to the point: I weathered a foreshortened family, I endured what were to become the battered last days of a life I was sure I’d barely live to regret.

All of us were in the future, where we belonged. It actually
was
the future — a period of time that so embodied what we thought the future would be like that the government had to replace the term with a new one,
fufier,
in order to designate the grim, impending series of events that had not yet occurred. Those were the years of corporate oligarchy, of videophonic telephones, meal tablets, and robot hearts. Years of silver foil and mass, private flight. We were observed, things were expected of us, a green pill was created to help us remember when to take a certain blue pill. We did all the important things and let the old and the sick work in The Factories. This was a time of sadly predictable oppression and digital surveillance. What was most vital about our lives was recorded and stored on a government database, which was looked upon with such utter detachment that we often forgot it was there. We were, above all, children, barely fit for the sort of lives we led.