Shielding my eyes from the cloudless skies in the Great Plains in July has not been enough. The ultraviolet rays have slipped around my palm and through my fingers and smeared the lens and numbed the retina. I thought the bones and badlands had bleached over the years, that repeated washings in sunlight took the color away. I thought that the contrails and flue gasses and auto emissions and turpenes were stacking in the dormant air mass. They were mounds of clouds, like bales of cotton. Industrial slaves in the dead of summer, hoisting bales in the open baked land. Not the faintest breeze. I thought I saw a man throw a horse out of his car. Horses were strewn across the landscape, floating in the shimmering heat waves, bobbing like boats. As the years went by, the waves reached my feet and lapped over my shoes. The salt spray left a crust on my clothes. I thought that the heat waves were like tides, advancing toward me as the new moon moved to the zenith, unseen in front of the sun, drawing the oceans upward. Somewhere out there, someone is pointing a finger, as if to say, where were you? If I didn't shield my eyes, I would probably bleach out like those bones that I think that I saw.
I think, this treeless basin is an interrogation room. Just then, I feel someone slam a book on my fingers. My knees shake. I yammer like twelve Olive-throated parrots in a cage. I describe what I saw, but they have me trapped in my words. I stumble from my seat and grope for the doorknob. Do I deny everything? Someone grabs my wrist and I feel a blow to the back of my head. Now everything goes white. Someone is shaking his head. Isn't there an alibi? My recollections are based on observations, careful observations. Through perceptive distortions and cognitive impairments. This is the world that I think that I thought that I knew. I slump back in the chair. I can't recall a thing.
I think, this treeless basin is an interrogation room. Just then, I feel someone slam a book on my fingers. My knees shake. I yammer like twelve Olive-throated parrots in a cage. I describe what I saw, but they have me trapped in my words. I stumble from my seat and grope for the doorknob. Do I deny everything? Someone grabs my wrist and I feel a blow to the back of my head. Now everything goes white. Someone is shaking his head. Isn't there an alibi? My recollections are based on observations, careful observations. Through perceptive distortions and cognitive impairments. This is the world that I think that I thought that I knew. I slump back in the chair. I can't recall a thing.
So it is. The ultraviolet radiation pours down like rain, through a porous sky, poked full of holes by industrial stacks and aviation and overinflated ideas and a thousand hands reaching for the stars. There's gold in them thar stars. If I was a welder, I would wear a mask to protect my sight. But a million welders wearing a million masks marching across the landscape yammering like twelve million parrots is terrifying. What can I see that nobody else can't?
This is what they say, the idea: They say that this is the ascent, the condition under which life will accelerate. Advanced habitat and response. Already, the wisdom teeth fail to form, the vestigial tail is absorbed, the third eyelid recedes, the appendix shrinks, and the pinky toe shrivels away. Our fear of height and water has driven us from treetops and underwater life. We have migrated toward an engineered diet of spongiform petroleum products. Advances in food and water delivery systems has enabled us to abandon bipedalism in favor of a sitting position. Air is filtered, light is designed, sound is composed. Pseudogenes multiply, and we cast off our appendages, free at last, free at last.
Then comes the ultraviolet light, pouring down. Go ahead, punch another hole in the sky. And I think, this treeless basin has become a genetics laboratory, a mutation breeder reactor. Just then, my hands begin to swell, then my knees. I start stammering. I can't formulate any words, I can't describe what I am seeing, my thoughts are trapped in my head and I can't get out of my chair. Words and ideas are deleted, duplicated, inverted, inserted and translocated. And then, there is a sharp pain in my head and all I see is white. I can't remember a thing.
This is enlightenment? The body has a fifty-year warranty; there are gene regulators, DNA repair mechanisms, but what about our ideas? Uninsulated and prone, they mutate. They spill out, stillborn, damaged, enraged, deranged, flailing, with six arms, reptilian, with vestigial tails nine feet long - with spikes - and scaly skin, third eyes, bony plates, and breathing fire and growing at a rate that, given enough time, will require four earths to feed.
Up to this point, the saving grace has been their failure to thrive.
Looking out across the expanding urban necropolis, the the hellscape swelling like an aneurysm, sores weeping toxic oils, molten lead raining from the sky, with packs of rock-throwing men hunting down the sick and elderly, spasmodic eruptions of shoppers, the money fires illuminating the night, I realize that there is a day that I may deny ever having been here.
Then comes the ultraviolet light, pouring down. Go ahead, punch another hole in the sky. And I think, this treeless basin has become a genetics laboratory, a mutation breeder reactor. Just then, my hands begin to swell, then my knees. I start stammering. I can't formulate any words, I can't describe what I am seeing, my thoughts are trapped in my head and I can't get out of my chair. Words and ideas are deleted, duplicated, inverted, inserted and translocated. And then, there is a sharp pain in my head and all I see is white. I can't remember a thing.
This is enlightenment? The body has a fifty-year warranty; there are gene regulators, DNA repair mechanisms, but what about our ideas? Uninsulated and prone, they mutate. They spill out, stillborn, damaged, enraged, deranged, flailing, with six arms, reptilian, with vestigial tails nine feet long - with spikes - and scaly skin, third eyes, bony plates, and breathing fire and growing at a rate that, given enough time, will require four earths to feed.
Up to this point, the saving grace has been their failure to thrive.
Looking out across the expanding urban necropolis, the the hellscape swelling like an aneurysm, sores weeping toxic oils, molten lead raining from the sky, with packs of rock-throwing men hunting down the sick and elderly, spasmodic eruptions of shoppers, the money fires illuminating the night, I realize that there is a day that I may deny ever having been here.
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