A Triumvirate
by Bill Kaul
Trailing
The omniscient ion, the blastocoele of bedlam, and the prepuce of terror: these modern gods and demons inhabit our eyes. Look around you! There are haunted faces, the cheeks pink and veiny, alcohol-soaked neurons and empty eyes behind wide pupils: these are the iron bars of prison, not the laws of Torah. We are trapped by Tupperware and trash, mortgages and promotion, promoting causes or promoting our positions or promoting sex to sell a bottle of stench. But will it cover the odor of rotting spirit? Will it give skin to a naked soul? Will the ostrich grow wings and fly?
Since it is said to be impossible for one to look at the world through another's eyes, few bother. "That's the way you see thing." "I don't understand how you can think that way."
Yet perhaps that alone is the task: to see as others see, to try to man an effort to view the world through the eyes of another-even gods, trees, clouds and spirits. These things that arise in use, one bag of cultural artifacts chattering at another.
It is like the effort made to find out who shot the horse-did anyone bother to ask the horse? Surely it must be the first source. But, no-only a hole in the side of a horse, a crowd of vets and reporters, and the voice of the horse's owner over-dubbed, saying "Anyone who would shoot a horse would shoot a child. Please help us find who is responsible and bring them to justice."
To justice? And where, pray tell bereaved horse owner, is justice located? In a courthouse? On the end of a sturdy branch? And at what time would we point and say, "There! See justice being done!" There are plenty of places, one might argue, and perhaps it is so-justice here, justice there, everywhere a little bit of justice-spread out over the course of human affairs like some sort of karmic jelly.
Still, the villains of this town are riding about shooting horses and children and wives and girlfriends and husbands, slicing off anatomical appendages (both in clean and neat surgeries and in drunken parking lot brawls), tossing about insults, and creating advertising and soul-robbing, mind-numbing jobs. Give us jobs! We need jobs! Yes, no matter how boring and repetitious, give us tasks we can accomplish for money. Money to buy the advertised things, money spend, mo mo money, om om yenom veritas omni....
Who can complain about such things when the collective spirit of humankind stands on the edge of a canyon filled with vile acidic dragon shit?
Anyone can complain. The rocks and trees complain, the books and leaves complain, the waters groan and whine, and the clouds are filled with bile pouring out upon the swollen feverish brows of the volk-running to and fro, collective money instead of wisdom and giving tithes instead of the inner sheets written in blood and pus and lymph and reproductive juices.
Dripping onto their fine clothes and filthy rags and gathering into small foul puddles of goo in the freshly paved streets and pock holed alleyways.
The complaints, indeed, rise to heaven through the venomous clouds. To the ears of gods, to the feet and fingers of the angels, and on-on into a manic warped cyclic universe that would make Douglas Adams blush.
The whole of the universe is shot through with a thread of moldy bread spores filled with kinky acids and ergots, ever winding us into a virtual existence-a series of lives lived in insular comfort or lonely misery, locked in mindless and bodiless accomplishment.
There is no end, only a rhyming tune to hum as the fistula drains our bodies, our worlds, our fetishes. Even our holy amulets-the electron and the watt/hour-are empty of power in this, the pitiless hour.
Along the bank of the broken edge of the earth, a lonely human walks along with a skinny, whining pup-these two are full of mercy and compassion and they seek others of a like mind, perhaps floating in space or perhaps trapped in wandering atomic-molecular bags of flesh.
Interlude
He once shot a coyote. It was howling at night and the baby couldn't sleep. So he shot it. Now the baby howls all night and he can't sleep. It is a sure thing: as soon as you figure out the way through the Jemez without a car or a horse or an imagination, the damn things-those mountains-will fall on you.
However, there are worse things to happen.
The markets are dying and deserts are sold. All bought up by huge movie stars. Kit Carson Productions, a re-run of past sales and movie events. Heroes from the city moving out, driving their little ski accessory vomit roofs.
The soft-spoken turbulence of the Bloomfield market, or the mercado at Budaghers. The hawkers come from afar. They are not Hispanic or Mexican or from California or Utah.
"False truth for sale! False truth for sale!" Rumoda yelled.
"Selling any?" Umoka asked, leaning on a piece of burnt log.
"Nope," Rumoda said humbly, a twig hanging out of his fishy-lookin' mouth.
Markets. Aliens, as if....
And so it went, somewhere in the market in Farmington, New Mexico. It seemed nobody wanted to by false truth. Rumoda had figs, too, and baskets of Republican promises and Russian nuclear arsenal souvenirs. All lying in dust, unwanted.
Suddenly, a redneck pirate appeared in a cloud of fire and smoke. Stroking his bear, he gazed at the basket. He looked at Rumoda. "False lies?" he asked. Yes, the finest in New Mexico, he said, the very best. I buy them cheap and sell them cheap.
Liar! shouted the redneck pirate. Rumoda hung his head.
Wham. And that market died, too.
What has become of markets? This what the lanky woman who worked the old field wanted to know.
I told her. I said, roughly, that markets were dead, had been dead since the time Pontius Portutia had founded the little trading post at Fish Rock. Too many people had lost the desire to trade since then. No support. Markets now are a monument to Sam Walton or George Target or Melvin Osco or Roger Thriftway. No soul. No bickering. Just plain up front rip-offs with price tags and everything.
The desert is a market, she said. The desert is a wild and empty market. How do you figure? I asked. What makes the desert a market? Are you talking about the Navajo lady who sells stew and pies over by the wash? No no no, she said. Not that. A desert market, full of everything anyone could want but most folks want to be middle-class, and there's no way to shop middle-class in the desert. Huh? I asked the oil-filled-woman. And she said, It's true. You get dusty. There's no electricity, no promotion.
No! Don't say it! They'll hear you and then they will even take the desert. They'll water it and put in power lines and coke cans and rusty hulks and....
A coyote screamed (he knew), and the daytime talk show hosts in Albuquerque heard it and knew too-money to be made. The market-suck the coins out of the pockets of those who travel to Colorado on the highway 44 ribbon of waste, speed and wine, speeding whine of rubber on tar, sticky hot or crackling cold.
Promoters followed and the People moved farther in, toward the spooky places where they would die.
That is why there are oil fields, the woman who worked in 'em said. That's why I buy no more beer and can't keep a job.
Where are you from? I wanted to know. The radiation burns marked her as being from south of Los Alamos.
I am from either Hell or Crownpoint, she said, and you don't need to know which.
The Indian Health Service gave me these pills, I said. Do you want them? (I held out a handful of striped ones.)
No, she said. I have to go East. To Santa Fe. I am going to study massage and tofu sculpture. Perhaps I will sell the desert to someone. Or at least a part of it.
Why?
If I keep selling the places where there is no rain, eventually they will get so dry, so pieced out, that they will utterly vanish.
But the old man from San Luis Cabezon would have none of it: Do you know, he told us gravely, that once I killed a dog? I shot it because it was howling in the night and I couldn't sleep. Now that dog howls all the time, and I can't shoot it again. No matter how drunk I get, that dog won't let me sleep.
That's all.
Never to sleep or taste dust. You get that filthy thing out of your mouth, young man!
A Nother Problem
Yes, there is a problem here-the world is coming to an end and people are still working. The news is out: tomorrow around 6:00 a.m. a mighty comet will smash the side of the Earth (does the Earth have sides?) and life as we know it will cease, will no longer be possible, will crash, burn, flatline.... In other words, it's Armageddon time, folks. But people continue to work. There are baggers in the grocery stores, very busy, of course, since people are stocking up for end-of-the-world parties, and the cashiers are even haggling over expired coupons with tired-looking shoppers.
This morning a man climbed into his car and began driving, and he had no destination. He had no radio. He had no food, clothing or money. When he had gone about 200 miles or so, the car stopped. No gas. He got out and began walking. After another 125 miles or so, the man's body began to wear out from lack of water and food. He was forced to stop walking, but his brain kept going, on out into the stars, past the outer planets, on and on into the depths of the galaxy until he reached a point out in the clear vastness where he watched, quite calmly, his own birth, life and death in a leisurely fashion, as if it were a very well-done movie.
A century or so ago, the man's grandfather had done the same thing with a horse. He had ridden his horse out into the desert, no water or food or etc. and had kept going until the horse gave out and then the man had walked on and on into the red rocks and sage until he laid his worn-out body down and drifted on. But for the grandfather, no trips into space, no watching of life-story movies. These were not a part of the old man's reality, he knew nothing of such ways of seeing-when the man's grandfather had tripped on, it had been on the wings of an eagle, and he had soared with the eagle across endless blue skies, catching drafts and shears until finally the man could no longer tell the difference between himself and the bird. He was the bird and also the wind and sky.
The comet, meanwhile, was full of life and strength. It roared but with no place for sound to echo save that area around the comet where space was washed away and life created. Heat and ice and the cosmic dust swirling around into vacuum: only the tiniest mites, barely specks of energy or light, to witness the travel and the swath of creation and birth, cutting through the ethereal vagina, opening wombs, and no passive spectacle this. All action, all nothing/something, this/that. Each speck a soul-spark, a piece of the Grand Body, the Supreme Corpus.
No witnesses, you say? Never mind the great ocular tubes on Earth who are watching the glowing mist rip through night as softly as a red sunset rips the clouds. What about the witness of the comet itself? What about the man who, having seen lo these many science fiction episodes as a kid, dreaming of being an astronaut, was now traveling with the solar wind as his grandfather had traveled with the mundane zephyrs of the Utah desert? Aren't they witnesses?
And ain't I a witness too? What of these people working? They will work and they will go home and ponder the eternal riddle of the relationship between fucker and fuckee. They will fill out a form taking leave from work for Armageddon, and it may be granted too. They may not plant a tree because the messiah is coming, they may not seek to save the remnant of God's Chosen, but they are no less involved in redemption. It is a holy calling, each and every decision to continue, to rise up like a mauled cat from the pavement, to fight again, to cross the highway and find love or food or succor of some sort.
Not heroes, not Reader's Digest hero-bytes, not even good ol boys and gals, really. Just you and I and our bubbling molecules, our decision to hold onto the core of being, to ontologically thumb our metaphysical noses at the gods of Science, and to remember to get some chips and salsa to go with the movie. The Day After, isn't it? Or is it DefCon Four? Apocalypse Now?
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