August 28th, 2009 by Hoopleton

I’ll be back with you soon. For now, another excerpt from out of the archives.

********

I only knew him as Truman, though I doubt that was his real name, and when I first saw him he looked like something out of a nightmare. He wore a black pin-stripe suit that was covered in the brown stains of the desert, a red tie, slightly wrinkled and a gasmask on his face. He had a shotgun in one hand and a Geiger counter in the other, and all he said to me at first was, “Fuck if I know how you made it here with those eyeballs still in your skull.”

The man I knew as the gasmask man came upon me in a white sedan of shining painted steel and chrome. Half dead and struggling to continue walking in the heat of the wholly organic landscape I couldn’t tell at first if the car headed toward me was a symptom of my developing psychosis or just a mirage. Before I even saw it I heard it, reverberating over the desert floor and into the incinerated sky. Then there was the dust storm that came with it, until finally two round headlights and a silver grill materialized out of the dust.

After the car slid to a stop and for several long minutes later all that there was, was the rumble of the engine, the slowly settling fog of sand, and a gasmask blinking at me from behind a steering wheel. I think I stood perfectly still too, the only stray thought being whether it was still nighttime and if I was still fast asleep on the ground.

When the car door popped open I jumped slightly at the sound, and out came Truman, though I didn’t know that was his name at first, pointing his gun at me, and saying, “Fuck if I know how you made it here with those eyeballs still in your skull.”

He repeated himself a few times more.

I touched my hand to my bleeding lips, but hardly had the strength to raise my fingers any higher, and responded, “Are you really here?”

He lowered the double barrel of his shotgun, and from behind the safety of the driver’s side door, remarked, “All depends on where here is, don’t it?”

I frowned at this, but didn’t argue, instead I decided to pass out.

I don’t know how much time went by from the moment that I collapsed to the instant I regained my senses, but when I awoke I found that I was lying next to a warm burning fire, wrapped in a tattered blanket, and the sun had already died.

“Now just relax,” came the voice of the gasmask man sitting on a rock just a few feet away, his costumed features appearing even more frightening by the glow of the fire. “It’ll take you a few to get your bearings back. So just have some water, and for the good lord’s sake, try the beans, can never be sure when you’ll see them again.”

At first I just blinked at him in confusion. Although I heard everything he said and knew the words he used, it was somehow hard to understand him. Then he gestured to the ground, the nozzle of his gasmask making an awkward thrust, and I followed what I assumed to be his gaze to find a cup of water and a half finished can of beans sitting quietly at my elbow.

“Oh,” I stammered taking the cup and the can. “Thank you.”

For a moment he sat quietly, watching me drink and eat greedily, nodding his gasmask in approval.

“Thank you for the food,” I said through spoonfuls. “I don’t think I’ve eaten in days.”

“It is my pleasure to be a kindly neighbor,” he replied, his voice only sounding slightly wheezy through the filter that he spoke. “My name’s Truman by the way. And it does me great kindness to make your acquaintance.”

I nodded back at him with a smile as I scooped more beans in my mouth. I hadn’t noticed at the time that he never bothered to ask my name.

“Also,” he added, “you’ll be happy to know that you’re completely clean.”

I swallowed and glanced over at him.

“Clean?” I asked.

He nodded his gasmask at me and reached down to his feet to pick up a yellow box with a handle attached. His shotgun was in his lap.

“You know what this is?” he asked, flashing the yellow box.

I leaned forward, not wishing to stand, and replied, “A Geiger counter?”

His shoulders leaned back slightly, I couldn’t tell if it was in surprise or pleasure, as he said, “Now how did you know that?”

I shrugged, “I just do.”

He nodded again, seemingly accepting my answer and said, “Well I scanned you with it, and there ain’t a lick of radiation on you beyond what you’d normally expect.”

I took a drink of water and asked, “Are you finding a lot of radiation?”

“No,” he replied. “But I suppose you knew that.”

I shifted slightly and responded, “Why would I know that?”

To this he didn’t reply, he just kept his gaze firmly on me, as though examining me.

The crackling fire was nice, not only for the heat, but also for the fact that the light blotted out the endlessness of the desert. The prevailing darkness wasn’t much better, but at least it was something new. After walking for however many days, and spending however many nights in the bleakness of sand, the fire was a nice reminder of the living world that seemed only to exist in my memories. At first, in those precious early minutes, even Truman was a welcomed change to what had become my reality.

Up above, despite the attempts of the firelight, the night sky had lost none of its grandeur. The cracked moon hovered like a watchman over the earth, comets blazed and lines of electricity danced and skipped, stars fell.

“Hey,” finally wheezed Truman. “So maybe you can answer something for me that’s been bothering my mind the last few days.”

I eased myself up slightly to get a better angle on him and replied, “I can certainly try I guess.”

“Sure you can try,” he said. “I’m not asking for miracles. Though of course if you can perform miracles I wouldn’t judge. No, I’d just be grateful.”

I smiled and said, “Well I can’t perform miracles.”

“Well of course you can’t,” he responded. “And I wouldn’t expect you to, not even if I swore to you that I wouldn’t tell a soul. As sure as we’re sitting here over these fine beans, no folks would ever hear it from me. No one would ever come to bother you for nothing. No kids with leukemia or some such looking for a cure. No sir. It be a secret. A secret between you, me and these here beans.”

“I can’t perform miracles,” I said, with emphasis.

He sat quietly for a second and then remarked, “But you said you’d try.”

“Yes,” I said, “try to answer your question.”

“What question?”

“Your question.”

“Well how do you know what my question is?”

For a few moments we stared at each other.

“What I mean is,” I said carefully, “is that I’d be happy to try and answer whatever question you’d like to ask me.”

“Oh,” he said, his left hand coming up to scratch at the top strap of his mask. “Oh, right. My question.” He seemed to consider things and then looking at me began, “But- but-“He paused again. “No, no you’re right.”

The fire crackled.

“So,” I said, “you’re question?”

Truman put his hand down and looked at me again, and nodded again, saying, “Well, I was wondering. Maybe you know this and maybe you don’t. And if you don’t I’d understand if you wouldn’t wanna tell me. But telling me would ease my mind and as I’ve stated, it’s been bothered the last few days…”

The fire crackled again.

“So…”

“What happened to the world?” he asked, almost as in a rush. “Where did it all go?”

I was taken aback, not really by the question itself but by the tone of his voice. Even through the filter of his gasmask I could tell that Truman really believed that I could possibly have an answer.

“I’m sorry,” I said, trying to inflect as much sincerity into my voice as I could. “I’m sorry, but I really don’t know.”

He took this in. He looked at me, then to the fire. It was hard to read Truman without the benefit of a face, but I could tell he was bothered.

“I really wish I knew,” I offered. “I wish I knew a lot of things to tell you the truth.”

He turned back to me and said, “You can tell me. Really you can. I wouldn’t tell a soul. It be your secret and mine. You could ask anyone that knows me, they’ll tell you, old Truman never divulges a secret.” He threw his arms up. “Hell, it’s just you and me and these beans. Who would I tell? Would I tell the bones in the ground? I’d tell no one, that’s who.”

I was actually at a loss for words, but I did mutter, “I really don’t know.”

And then Truman’s voice changed. It became harder. His posture grew rigid.

“Look mister,” he said. “I was kind enough not to run you down. I fed you water and I gave you beans to eat. I ask for nothing in return. Nothing. But you could answer this one question for me. I think I deserve it. I think I deserve one goddamn answer.”

I decided to sit up as I said, “I can’t tell you what I don’t know. I’m grateful to you, I really am, but I can’t tell you something that I just don’t know.”

He stared at me for a few heartbeats and suddenly jumped to his feet with his shotgun in his hand, to which I immediately shot up as well.

“I have a family,” he said digging into his pants pocket, his voice aggravated, “did you know that?” He opened the wallet up to a fading picture of two teenage girls holding the hands of a woman in between them. “That’s my wife and our two daughters. And you see that little scruffy thing?” He pointed to a blur in the corner. “That’s our goddamn dog. Cute little thing he is. Digs up the yard like there was treasure down there.” He then tossed the wallet away and stepped to only a few inches of me, his breath wheezing down at me through the gasmask on his face. “You can tell me what happened. You can let me go back!”

“I have no control over that,” I responded, trying to keep the fear from my voice.

“I did my part,” he growled. “I did my part. Why won’t you let me go back to them? Why?”

“I have no-“

He suddenly jabbed me in the stomach with the barrel of his gun, the shock of it nearly made me topple over.

“I see,” he said, jabbing at my stomach again. “I see. You do a man some kindness and he can’t even show a little kindness back. You give all you have and people just can’t give nothing back.”

He jabbed me again, harder, and again, even harder, till I finally fell to his feet.

“Wait,” I pleaded, raising my hand, “it’s not like that. I’m grateful. I really am. If I could do anything I would. But I can’t. I can’t.”

“Don’t you lie to me!” he spat, bearing the barrel down over my head. “Don’t you dare fucking stand there lying to me! You eat my food. You drink my water and you won’t even let me have my children back?” He pressed the barrel to my temple. “What kind of a monster are you? What kind of a monster are you?”

“Wait,” I strained, squeezing my eyes shut, “wait. I didn’t do it.”

And just as suddenly as it had all started, I felt the pressure of the muzzle against my head disappear. I opened my eyes and watched, to my surprise, as Truman slowly walked back to his rock, retook his seat and again looked down into the fire.

I stayed still. I didn’t know what he was thinking. I had no way of knowing if I was safe. The fire crackled. Time passed.

Finally, after several long minutes, as adrenalin still coursed through my system, Truman turned to me and asked, “You don’t happen to like baseball, do you?”

“What?” is all I could think to say.

Truman actually chuckled and remarked, “Now don’t tell me you don’t like baseball.” He shook his head. “If you ask me to tell you the God’s honest truth, I don’t think there’s a finer thing in the world.”

And that was that. The rest of the night, Truman just talked baseball. The games he’d seen. The teams he liked. It was like nothing at all had happened. And when it came time to sleep, he seemed to doze off with seemingly little discomfort or worry.

But I didn’t sleep that night. I stayed awake for hours and hours, watching as the flames of the fire faded, staring at the shotgun firmly gripped in Truman’s hand, and I wondered if he was suddenly going to wake up and shoot me through the head.

August 23rd, 2009 by Hoopleton

Side projects and life changes have kept me busy of late, and as I’m not posting daily I’m putting off adding daily inspirations until things stabilize again.

So it goes that we find ourselves continuously caught between opportunity and responsibility, craving adventure all along the path.

Some more thoughts in a bit.

Stay tuned.

August 18th, 2009 by Hoopleton

I feel despondent.

It’s a feeling of what I can only describe as a deep grief.

My dreams have become increasingly stark. My creativity is numbed. I swing wildly between emotional extremes. In my darkest moments I don’t want to awaken as the waking world seems increasingly artificial.

I don’t know why I’m feeling this. I can’t understand what has driven me here beyond the pain of anticipation. The sensation that change is approaching. Slipping across the grid. The indefinable. The unknown.

Am I plugged into the universe or am I going mad? Are these things I feel harbingers of destiny or phantoms from out of a broken mind?

I sit on the floor with a cigarette in my hand. A candle burning on the rug at my feet. I stare up at the ceiling. I speak. I don’t know if anyone’s listening. But such has always been my relationship to that thing you might call God.

When I was growing up I was teased because I was so sensitive. I felt the suffering around me as though it were happening to me. I tried internalizing it. I didn’t have to see pain to sense it. I didn’t have to be faced with brutality to know it first hand. I tried to shut it off. For a time I did. But as the years have piled onto my shoulders that control seems to unravel ever more. I feel the touch of fate caress my shoulder. I feel the tension in the air.

It’s always part of me. Boiling over. Pressing against my chest.

I want to escape. I want to get as far from people as I can as not to be effected by their thoughts and emotions, but I feel trapped by it. Tied to it. I feel like my life is not my own.

I look to my friends and acquaintances. There’s a peaceful resignation to conformity. To a family and a house. To a thirty year career and a retirement account. I wish I was interested in those things for then maybe I could sleep at night. But the strings pull at me. The full scope of history anchors me to the ground. I see perfection in the fireflies that swarm my vision as I walk the street. My imagination bursts with revelation and I feel the terror of certainty creeping in.

Is this why I’m here?

The drums beat. The climax approaches. I see myself on a hilltop with tears in my eyes.

I am not my name. I am not my body. This thing that is my life is not what existence should be.

The grief comes again.

I want to write but I can’t. I suffer. I lay in bed, unable to sleep.

What is happening to me?

And beyond the agony I see redemption. The promise of relief at the horizon. A clean slate.

August 18th, 2009 by Hoopleton

August 15th, 2009 by Hoopleton

It was supposed to be different this time. The machines were so destructive that only peace could prevail. But war, war never changes. There are speeches full of fervor, pomp, patriotic oaths to the glory of nationhood. Cheers. Applause. Fire. Terror. History resets itself and the cycle begins again. Sure, there are plenty of pretty things that squeeze through the cracks. Art, music, the Sistine Chapel, the Taj Mahal. But war never changes. Our base instincts take over. Our madness annihilates our reason. We build sand castles just so we can destroy them, why not entire cities of glass and brick? It’s only a few million people. The world’s too crowded anyway. Not enough natural resources. Not enough room to breathe. So much flower-filled rhetoric pealing off the walls like lead paint. “So you agree then? We should scalp every last motherfucker one of them?” But this is life. This is life and war never changes.

It was the other day I believe that the room shook apart and I was standing on an outcropping of rock surrounded by hundreds of miles of forest to the edge of the horizon. Black steel towers rose from the wood with cables connecting to them. Glancing behind me I noticed caves drilled out of the rock and in those caves heaps of man made junk stacked in small pyramids like so many ritual pyres. There on a table was a spent shell casing once fired from a massive cannon and now rusting quietly. I began to wonder if I had traveled to some moment in the future when we had wiped the slate clean again. I was alone there and although I did not speak with anyone I was sure my language was foreign. My only passport was the flesh wrapped around my bones. So I began to walk out among the trees and found nothing but lush, perennial greenery. The air was warm and cleaner than anything I had ever known. All that we had been was healed over and I felt calm at the realization.

There’s no negotiation here. No compromises to be made. What was will return and we shall be, I think, better primates for it. If that which God built will someday vanish, then surely everything we’ve erected will disappear much sooner. I imagine I won’t be there in body to see it. I will never touch those leaves or feel the grass under my feet. I will never really breathe that air or see those masts rising from the canopy. But that too is all right. That too brings me calm.

It was supposed to be different this time. We were given a real chance. But war never changes. We never change. We divide ourselves into factions. We pace the perimeter of our cages with knives in our hands. Yes, there are things worth saving. Yes, there’s always hope. But what good is hope? Is anything really worth fixing? Maybe we should just run our course. Do as is expected. Let’s finish the job. We’ll tear down all the pretty things. We’ll poison ourselves into the ground. And the last one standing can turn off the lights on his way out. Best to be energy conscious at that point. You never know who’s looking down.

August 15th, 2009 by Hoopleton

The new advert for Volkswagen’s Scirocco TDI has upset quite a few people in Poland. Bad taste or funny… you decide.

August 13th, 2009 by Hoopleton

When FDR was pushing through the New Deal or Johnson was moving the Great Society through Congress, often by the sheer power of their stubbornness, politics was certainly full of venom. The opposition was full of sound and fury, but there always remained, or generally there prevailed, a sense civic courtesy. Despite the turmoil brought on by the Great Depression or the 1960s, despite murmurs of fascist or communist uprising, or a youth movement ready to reshape social order, the system continued on as it always had. The nation changed, as it should have, and despite the omnipresence of extremists on both sides, the discourse of the public sphere was always generally calm and rational.

Looking back from our present political environment, as born out of those decades of necessary turmoil, it’s difficult to find examples before the 1990s of a time when American politics and greater American society were so consumed by bitter, violent divisiveness. The current healthcare “debate,” featuring angry, ignorant mobs screaming for blood, whites sobbing over an America that once was, may be most immediate in our mind, but the bile that is the modern town square extends to everything. Abortion, gay rights and education, guns, immigration and taxes. I don’t recall another President in the last hundred years so dehumanized. A foreigner, a radical muslim, a socialist. I don’t remember the media ever being so militant, so quick to incite unrest.

One has to go back to the days of the American Civil War to find a climate so rife with tension, bitterness and vitriol. A society on the brink of self-destruction, it’s undoing centered around the ugliness of slavery, which for many represented an entire form of independent culture. A vanishing America. Then too the citizenry of this land was bitterly divided, then as now the media stoked the fires of disunity, the representatives of the people not only held one another in contempt, but at least in one case, brutally attacked their fellows on the floor of Congress.

Are we on the brink of such times? Is America descending into the maelstrom?

Although anything is possible it seems unlikely that in this day and age our society would collapse into a second civil war, but things never need to be so dramatic.

In 1968, Edward Luttwak examined the whys and hows of planning and executing a coup d’état, or an usurpation of a legitimate government. He stated that a “good coup country” would be one in which politics were well organized, but polarized into hostile factions and where the country itself was completely independent of outside political pressures. Obviously, he added, the best opportunity for the seizure of power would be during a time of crisis, whether real or merely perceived.

Coups are nothing new to global politics nor to these shores. In 1933 a group representing some of the leading business interests of the United States approached retired Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler as to higher him to lead an overthrow of the Roosevelt administration. Butler turned out to be a patriot and immediately reported what has since been dubbed the Business Plot to Congress and later investigations, although confirming Butler’s story, concluded that the plot was far from ever becoming a real national threat.

But if we follow Luttwak’s formula the climate was not right for such treason. Although the United States certainly faced a crisis in the guise of the Great Depression and was quite isolationist, politics was not as bitterly divided as it is today.

As an aside it may be worth noting that Smedley Butler went on to become a voice against war profiteering, calling his own thirty-three year distinguished military career as that of being a “gangster for capitalism,” while Edward Luttwak, the man who in the 1960s came out as a voice against the dangers of political polarization, was quoted in 2008 as calling Barack Obama a muslim who would unhinge America’s standing in the world.

So here we are. The patriots seem to be of an older generation long since gone and those we’d look to for expertise and reason have instead taken on the banner of partisanship. If the conditions weren’t right for an overthrow eighty years ago, whether violent or bloodless, how do we fair today? Are we a people united, or does the tree of liberty need to be refreshed yet again?

August 13th, 2009 by Hoopleton

The 2009 CFP E Shots Young Directors Awards were promoted this year with a poster advert featuring the tag line, “Born to create drama”.

August 11th, 2009 by Hoopleton

I apologize for my absence of late and my sporadic posting. A work project and summer blues have both been weighing heavily on my time and creative impulses. I hope to be back in the swing of things by next week. Thanks for your patience and keep checking back!

In the mean time, here’s something from the archives…

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People come here when they die. Not unlike their first steps into the realm of the living, they arrive wet, naked and screaming.

Your introduction to the afterlife is not the welcoming arms of deceased relatives, nor is it angels singing hymns to the many glories of God.  It is instead a giant, pumping and steaming machine called the Throat, a dark tunnel of clanking and grinding gears rigged with powerful water cannons that quickly scrub free two layers of skin. Skeletal arms fitted with needles inject gene-resequencing formulas into your brittle veins along with enough hormones to rearrange an elephant into a baby duckling. Within a few short seconds all your sags are tightened, all your wrinkles are pressed, and you roll off the conveyer belt fifty years younger than the day you died. Your life span is reset and a few thousand eons longer. Your first reaction is always either hunger, hypertension or constipation.

The Throat is how I got here nearly five years ago.

“You war sobbin like a little baby,” Gus would always say.

Gus was the first person I met upon crossing over. Gus was my underpaid and overworked arrival attendant.

As soon as I came off the Throat, Gus wrapped me in a big burly towel and said with puffed cheeks, “it’s okay to have an ard on.” Apparently it’s a very common reaction and Gus didn’t mind at all. “All the same, you newbs are a fooken tragedy,” he quickly added.

You always know new arrivals by the clothes they wear. The colors are almost exclusively navy, black and gray. The fabric is a starched cotton or heavy wool. The sleeves are always a bit too short and the pants usually need to be rolled up at the cuff. The itching of these new garments is unbearable on newly rehabbed skin. Despite this, the recently departed are always happy to arrive at the first “reception” table after the Throat, trading in their towel for a pair of slacks. Modesty is still a virtue even to the dead.

The itching probably didn’t bother me as much as it did others. Before I had my arms completely in my shirtsleeves Gus was already scratching my back with extreme dedication.

Yes, I was lucky to have Gus. That fact struck me almost immediately as I began to make my way toward the second table and noticed the hundreds of other newbies in line whose arrival attendants responded to their pain stricken faces only with looks of silent contempt.

When I got to the second table I received a random “personal possession.” Let me explain by saying that this possession is not yours nor ever has been; it once belonged to someone else who had come off the Throat. This is done for two reasons: first, human beings need some small trinket to feel whole, having just lost everything; second, a personal possession that had once actually been personal would only make the new arrival brood over everything that they had just lost.

When I was in line, a woman next to me told me that once, by pure chance and against all odds, a new arrival was assigned his own wife’s wedding ring. As the story goes, upon recognizing the ring, he lost what was left of his grief stricken mind and caused all sorts of havoc. When I asked her how the man had recognized his wife’s wedding ring, if she knew what had happened to him after he lost his mind and how she had heard the story having just arrived herself, she quickly changed the subject. It was a crazy story anyway. The system was designed so that a person could have no contact with the people or the things that they left behind.

When I got to the second table I was given an old photograph.

“What the hell is this?” I protested, having just watched a rather oafish looking man receive an antique violin.

The guy behind the table shrugged and said, “move along.”

At the last table I was assigned a job, a home, and a new identity. This part of the process is not at all random. Your assigned occupation, living condition, and name are decided entirely on the life that you had just lived. The more money and influence you had, the better your family, position and upward mobility in the afterlife.

I was assigned a one-bedroom apartment with a private bath at 1313401 EX Exeter Street in the New South Bronx and I was given a job as a data processing clerk at DataTechnoAlgorythms, a subsidiary of iStar, a corporation under the vast umbrella of the East Conglomerate. It was a job somewhere just above food service and just below retail sales.

Finally I was given a new name.

“What kind of a name is Heretic?” I protested.

The woman behind the table shrugged and said, “move along.”

The night of my arrival, just before I and a few hundred other saved souls sat down to watch videos meant to prepare us for life post-death, Gus walked me to the doors of the new arrival video screening theater. In the clearest tone that I have ever since heard him use, he told me, “All you need to rememberen is, the Core is life.”

The Core is more than life: It is the all purpose government, nation, identity, church, father, mother, sibling and boss. It is the one true religion, the single great philosophy, and the one and only myth that binds together billions of the undead.

In the theater that we all visit after death, the last video I watched summed it all up best…

Narrator: About now you may be asking yourself:

Dick: Gee whiz, I’m all mixed up. Who’s in charge? Do I still swear allegiance to the good ol’ U.S. of A? Do I still fight for Queen and country? Who will give order and rule to my life now that I have died? Who am I supposed to look to for leadership and guidance?

Narrator: Well, those are all good questions, and luckily they all have one answer: the Core!

Dick: The Core?

Narrator: That’s right, the Core! You see, we know you’re disappointed…(or heck, perhaps relieved) that the afterlife isn’t what you expected. Although we are sure that God exists, he isn’t here to guide and watch over us, and although America, Great Britain and all those other little countries were great in your first life, we feel that in the second there needs to be so much more. The Core is not so much a government as it is a concept. Sure, we still elect a president, senators and other representatives, but they are only there to keep the fires of prosperity burning, to keep the economy on the rise and preserve for every citizen the opportunity for upward mobility.

Dick: So what you’re saying is, I can just trust in the Core.

Narrator: That’s it exactly, just trust in the Core and forget any concerns you might have about politics or God or authority. As long as you trust in the Core and leave all concerns to it, nothing could possibly go wrong!

Dick: Well, I do have just one concern…

Narrator: Okay, fire away!

Dick: Well, how can I do my part as a citizen?

Narrator: That’s a fine concern to have! The best way that we can all help out is never to fail in our primary duty.

Dick: You mean, be a good consumer?

Narrator: Boy, you sure have it all figured out! That’s absolutely right, give back to the economy and trust in the Core, it’s just as simple as that!

On my first day, however, the Core failed to fully grasp my imagination or my interest. Because after having been given a crash course in living again, I stepped out of the new arrival center and walked out into New York City.

The thing that’s hard to understand for most people is that the world of the dead is not at all different from the world of the living. In fact, it’s the exact same goddamn thing.

After you figure out all the small technological and social changes and the fact that there are no insurance companies, you come to realize that the only real differences between life and death are:

1. There are no children.
2. There is no God.
3. New York City is the capital of the world.

Granted, my third point might not even make it into your top twenty, but I grew up and eventually died in New York City, so to find myself standing outside the doors of the arrival center and seeing the Empire State Building rise up in front of me was enough to lay me flat on my back.

New York City in the afterlife, the capital of The Core and of the world, is different from the one you left. This New York is larger, by at least ten thousand times. The buildings of glass and brick are stacked up into near infinity, and the better your status the higher you live. Ramps, roads, byways, overways, balconies, terraces and elevated tracks crisscross in all directions. The sky is so hidden by concrete and the sprawl of construction that the street lamps are always lit, and a constant nightfall exists down at ground level.

Restaurants, bars, cafes, bookshops, hotels and grocery stores have only generic names and most of them are trendy. The streets are clean. The trees never lose their leaves and it always seems to be raining.

Most men wear hats. The cars here are all antiques. Everyone smokes, everyone drinks and opium is considered the drug of choice. Central Park is still there, bustling with carriages and bicycles, but empty of children, dogs or a sky. The trees are barely kept alive by the glow of giant sun lamps in the perpetual night.

But what you notice most clearly, having been in New York before you died, is that this city lacks a certain amount of life. There is a depression in the air. You pass by an outdoor cafe that has somehow attracted a fair crowd, but the atmosphere is subdued. The people sway their heads to the sound of the slow music, each seemingly suffering the hardship of some undiagnosed disease. As this observation crosses your mind, you feel that you too have a weight upon your chest that you cannot explain. You loll your head and shuffle on.

The day after my death and rebirth I awoke with a splitting headache and Gus’ foot in my face. I eased gently out of bed as not to wake him and took a first real look around my new apartment. The bedroom was just big enough for a full size bed, a dresser, a wardrobe, a nightstand with a single shaded lamp, a plushly upholstered blue chair and a small cream-colored rug. I walked to the room’s single window and peered out. The sight of the ground level corner of Exeter and Ash from only two stories up was a quick assessment of my station.

With a sigh I crossed the rosy hardwood floor to the hall and walked out into the living room. It was a medium sized room with four large windows, a room much larger than one would expect. The only furniture consisted of a small wet bar and four old chairs staring at an upright ashtray between them. The adjacent kitchen was nearly non-existent, and the tiny icebox was quite obviously meant for one.

Back into the hallway and a quick turn into the bathroom. It was a simple boring bathroom, undeserving of any description, but nonetheless I must have stayed in it for nearly an hour that first morning. I was captivated by my own reflection. I hadn’t seen my naked body look that young or that fit in over fifty-five years.

“Thart’s when itsits most of us,” Gus would say. “Unless we died ung, thart is.”

Just like everyone else in the afterlife Gus looked like he was somewhere between twenty-one and forty. He would never tell me exactly how old he really was, only dropping the occasional hint in the form of a name or obscure historical reference.

I remember rubbing my hands over my chest and arms that first morning five years ago, unable to believe how warm and firm my flesh was. I felt my abdomen and stomach, transfixed by the lines that were again defined. I gradually worked my way down my body and then, about five minutes into examining my smooth big toe on my right foot, I was struck by the sheer magnitude of my experience. The eternal mystery of death had been answered, and there I was, looking at my toe, sitting on a toilet, somewhere in the depths of New York. Suddenly, the entire span of human existence seemed to open up in front of me in a shimmering stream of answers.

Then the ringing of a telephone nearly sent me through the ceiling. I rushed out of the bathroom, through the dark hallway, into the living room and found a small rotary phone tucked into a warm corner under the windows, ringing violently. I picked up the receiver, jolted out of a my philosophical breakthrough, appalled at the intrusion of something so common as a telephone and somehow clueless as to the operation of this now alien device.

“Hello?”

It was a pre-recorded message courtesy of DHCMetro Communications, a subsidiary of Megacom, child of the North Conglomerate. A robotic voice greeted me as a new customer of the only phone company in town, and stated, “your first bill, including weekend activation charge, neighborhood electric surcharge, emergency communications charge, new costumer filing charge and notification courtesy charge has been mailed to your new address. Please pay promptly as to avoid disconnection of your phone services and once again welcome to DHCMetro Communications, the Core and your new life.”

The phone went dead, the recording had hung up on me.

So it began and for nearly five years after rolling off the Throat I lived my afterlife with little concern and barely any curiosity about the world around me. As far as I knew I was exactly who I thought I was and had a well-defined place in the social order of the Core.

Then one unlikely Thursday night, I strolled out of my local heroin bar just off of 938th Street, the main artery of the New South Bronx, and everything changed.

As usual the street was empty and wet from excessive rainfall. In the distance, the tired engine of a rebuilt Studebaker clunked rhythmically against the humid night air. I searched my coat pockets for a cigarette, but all I found was my first personal possession, the old photograph that I received nearly five years ago. It was the picture of a man. Familiar somehow. The edges were a bit warn and there was a crease running from right to left over the top of the portrait.

God, I though to myself, I haven’t looked at this thing in such a long time.

Of course it wasn’t really a personal possession in the traditional sense of the word. As I’ve said, it never really belonged to me. If it had been mine, it would only serve to make me remember an entire life I had left behind. Grief is the enemy of productivity, as the saying goes.

“Oh, excuse me,” said a plump woman in a small black hat as we collided at the corner of 938th and Stutz Streets.

“That’s quite all right,” I responded absent mindedly as I offered her a faint smile, “it was my fault, really.”

She looked deeply into me and said, “well, okay then, your fault. Goodnight.”

“May I trouble you for a cigarette?” I asked, feeling the desperate nicotine urge.

She paused and reached into her fur coat’s front pocket, pulling out a stained silver cigarette case and lighter.

“Thank you,” I said as I took a cigarette and plopped it into my mouth.

“You’re welcome,” she responded softly.

She reached up with her lighter and was about to light my cigarette when she glanced down and said, “why do you have a photo of Doper?”

“Pardon me?” I asked with the cigarette dangling off my lower lip.

“I almost didn’t recognize him,” she said staring down at the black and white face of the photograph. “Why do you have his picture?”

I glanced down at my first personal possession and said, “you know the man in this photograph?”

“You look sad,” she went on, “why do you look so sad?”

“Excuse me,” I said a bit offended, “do I know you?”

“Oh sweetie, do we?” she asked innocently. “Things are so confusing up here.”

“What?”

“Have you found him?”

“The man in the photo?”

“Oh dear,” she said, “I don’t mean to poke.”

“Wait,” I said.

“Sorry,” she said lighting my cigarette, “I do apologize, I don’t mean to ask so many questions.”

I inhaled a cloud of the poison and stammered slightly feeling the rush of smoke surge up to my head.

“I’m sorry, goodnight,” she said again with a polite smile as she turned around and made her way down Stutz Street.

I slowly took the cigarette out of my mouth.

“Doper?” I said to myself, “is that a name?”

I turned and watched the woman plop away.

Did I know her?

I glanced down at the photograph. My first personal possession. No, I decided, I didn’t know her and there was no way she could know him…whoever he was. Impossible. She clearly did not. She was mistaken. She was crazy.

In The Core, there were no mistakes. There were no accidents. Our first personal possessions were given to us so that we’d have something to cling to. To put it bluntly, stuff makes us feel better. Having lost everyone we knew, never to see them again. Stuff didn’t disappoint, stuff didn’t leave. There’s an inherent understanding in the madness that we all suppress.

I started walking again. Moving slowly in the opposite direction toward my small hole on Exeter Street. Maybe I’d go home and get high. Maybe I’d just sleep. Was she right? Did I look sad?

I again glanced down at the photograph. It was absurd. There was no way she knew him. There was no way she could. The system was designed to avoid such complications. It was impossible.

Or was it?

I paused and glanced back, but she was gone. I couldn’t hear her footsteps anymore and I realized that I stood alone at the corner of 938th and Stutz Streets.

August 11th, 2009 by Hoopleton

Finishing off our pilfirring of images from our friend at A Journey Round My Skull (at least for now), here’s an illustration by Adolf Hoffmeister for the 1964 Czech translation of The First Men in the Moon by H. G. Wells.