GILEAD

How lies the City today?

It lies. It lies and that is all.

From the catapult of youth to the catcher of age, the hurler-back of memory, all a distribution; all an extant history; all a plot, a histogram, a statistical Lord-- Sparrow Christ emerges, robed in industrial paint, carbon fiber, fullerene dust on his shoulders, and plastic wire, chartreuse, gilding his hem. He yawns and beholds the dawn sky. A yellow dawn. A flock of rushing fingers, punching through the stratosphere to dip, brushlike, into the coughed clouds arching overhead. A morning like another morning, blue black and with wan orange bruises; inflammation of part of a mute sky, a mourning dove beating its soft music against the clinging air. A morning of hydrocarbons, their precursors, their chemical afterimages, hexing grimaces in the trees, the ground squirrels hunched and hypoxic. A morning of tetragrams, of randomized puzzles, of lost blood, lost time, hemmorhagic keys, of love's conformal suck, of cosmic dust.

Ecce homo. The Lord, Jesus Christ himself takes a long drag on his cigarette, exhales blue smoke slow across the neutral panel of green gray black, watching it swirl against the pine wall. He knows all formulae, every eddy and Lorenz function, every mote, caught in the dew of spiderwebs only seen in his cat-like ultravision. Considering the holiness, the power, the righteous being radiating from his Lordly countenance, it is easy to forget he is made of sparrows. Such genius. Such loving genius in that flock of chirruping, shitting, mite-ridden short-lived birds.

I nod at the Lord. He nods back, then looks off, dragging again. Kicks his foot and shuffles, coolly. I make my way to the Dollar Store to buy a 9mm pistol. I'm gonna kill myself today, and Jesus thinks that is just okay. Jesus is just alright. Jesus loves you more than you will know. Jesus is my friend. Jesus is the catcher, the waiter, the first responder, the 9-11 cop, the fireman, the emergency planner, the disaster relief agency, the watchdog, the regulatory commission, the NGO humanitarian medical task force, the UN, every Robin Williams character.

It's gonna be alright. You always get what you deserve, in the end.

I walk past an old lady in rags, propped up against a building with smoke rolling out of the windows. Like an office building. She holds out her cup and tries to tell me poetry in Arabic but I don't understand. I give her five dollars, and she doesn't even notice. She has no teeth. Huge liver spots cover her face. I smell farts, I think. I sit down and take the vodka out of my bag. I pass it to her but she waves it away, admonishing me with more poetry. I drink. Three big swigs in succession. I feel the demon power soak through me like wading up to my crotch in a pool of hot jizz. I feel the raw malice steeling my frame. I'm ready to kill. To fuck. To be obliterated. But I just sit there, remembering, with her. It must be horrible to be old, and to remember everything. I say this to her, and she just smiles. I know there is something she has learned about life, something that gives her a kind of peace-- or maybe perspective. Something to rest against, like a building slowly being consumed by fire still offers some solidity. I know what she knows is something I will never learn. It makes me cry. Tears erupt from my eyes. I swallow more vodka. The old woman grabs her belongings and hurries away from me. My shirt gets soaked from my tears. I keep drinking until the vodka is all gone. Then I get up and continue, the other way. I wipe my face with my bare hand, and then I wipe my hand on my pants. All I can think is, how am I gonna hide this?

It's a desolate road, through a run-down business zone. There is a mini-highway for a stretch, and I clamber up the embankment to the bridge connecting the roadway to the countryside way, way down. Hardy grasses and cordlike plants, some remaining thistles, some goldenrod and Queen Anne's lace. I get a few burrs in my shoelaces, stop to dig them out. I hear the unmistakeable roar of skidding tires, and I look up, freaked out. A few hundred meters, a black car wrecks out, shrieking and blasting itself through a fence, down the bank, and flips over and over. I watch in shock, in horror, in disbelief as a body flies into the air like a chewtoy tossed by a dog, and slams back into the sparse, long grasses. I take off running. The car is pancaked. Vapor streams from it and it hisses and rumbles as the engine dies. I look for the driver. I see a crumpled pile of something. I run. Running. Sliding. Tripping. It's a woman. Heavyset with dark skin and long hair. her face is smashed open. She has a cranial avulsion and her brains are scattered in little piles around her. Her limbs are twisted and bones are stabbing through her dress. The smell of ruptured bowel assaults me. I vomit like crazy, turn away and just puke and puke. It's a few minutes before I can stand to look at her. Her eyes are just... staring up. Like, she is looking at the ceiling. Not the sky, but something closer, above her. I can almost imagine her eyes tracking something. Imagine her eyes tracking... her lover. Her mother. A movie on Netflix. A mobile game. The rushing road, right before she lost control. She is undoubtedly dead. I stoop a little closer. No brains in there. None. She opens her mouth, looks right at me.

AGHAAHAGGGAHHAALLAHHAALLAHHAHGGAAAGGA

I fall back, dumbfounded. I pick myself and run. I don't stop running. I fall, crazily without ground under me, down into a drainage ditch. I hit my forehead on a rock. Lights out.

I wake up in the parking lot behind the Dollar Store. I'm a mess. Blood is crusting my hair and it's all over my fingers. I'm holding a gun. It's bright orange, like a capgun, but I open it up. Looks like real bullets. Like a .38 like the cops used to carry. I stick it in my mouth and pull back the hammer. I try to pull the trigger, but something snaps. My finger breaks. I take out the gun and look. My finger was just a dry thing, hollow inside. I watch, fascinated, as little white mites pour out of the hole. Stream out of me like... automata... like purposeful sperm. They carry  themselves in waves over my body, exiting my finger hole in uniform pulses. Soon I'm covered. As they begin to consume my flesh, I see the Lord. He's pushing a cart full of plastic bottles and crushed beer cans. Probably gonna get his deposit back from the Dollar Store. He waves, then goes in to see the cashier.