Television night with Music and BEING. Apartment strewn with clothes, bottles, ash-trays over-flowing, cake and candy wrappers, coffee cups and cartons emptied of fast-food, junk-food, food-flavored processed food product.
Colorful slaughter on the big TV. BEING and Music deep in the couch. Music sucked cigarettes, BEING his bong. They stared hard into the grim eye of The War. I preferred not to. See.
Cheesy crunchy chips, beef jerky, beer. Enemy vehicles blown to bits. “Our” planes over The Enemy City. Loud significant explosions.
Television muted in favor of music. Stereo. Loud, hard, electric War set to the soundtrack of your choice, but really only fast, thumping, screech guitar-bass-drum assaults of our Young would do.
Weed scent like burning bugs. We were not unaware, all in our twenties, we could easily be players not spectators of The War.
The Nation missiled shrill guitar upon its foe.
“We’re kicking ass. We’re devastating,”said Music.
Hard to imagine too long summoning such will to wreck.
“That city’s been around since Time began,” I said. “Since Time began to be recorded. On paper, papyrus, stone, whatever. Words.”
The Enemy’s capital stood six thousand years. Same land, sky, city. Generations’ generations. Celebrated and unrecorded lives. History pounded to fine, charred powder within days.
Television Time we gathered as a clan, lost to the box, usually old cartoons and syndicated sit-coms we’d enjoyed long, long ago.
(hard to believe already we had long, long ago: “Why, only yesterday blah blah blah bleh bleh bleh”— follow the bouncing ball of sentiment, nostalgia, fill in blanks)
Watching anything, however foolish. Everything insipid and inane. Content irrelevant. Ideas drain group-think energy of Manna. Meditation to be watching, to be Nation, for whatever we watched was watched simultaneously by millions. One could never be alone while watching. I’d known of celebrities I’d seen as a child, out-dated now, dead, forgotten. One must learn the lives of current celebrities to know The Nation.
“Death Squad!” screamed BEING, excited.
Dual remote action. BEING shut the stereo, raised the television volume, tuned into The Death Squad, abandoning The War for Everyone’s favorite live-action series.
The Death Squad. Big Media’s short-cut to immense profit. This particular service provided by The City excited morbid curiosity.
Throwaway footage resurrected for prime time thrills. Adrenalin, hormone of choice for today’s discerning viewer. Weekly documentary for the war-juiced public.
The Death Squad ventured into neglected quarters of The City, retrieving corpses (many a corpse corpsed under suspicious circumstances). Questioned nosy neighbors, investigated scenes, chauffeured corpses to the morgue. Live autopsies exposed live audience to the gruesome-gruesome.
“The dead, the indigent dead, accumulate with a rapidity that taxes The City’s ability to process the remains,” the Celebrity Commentator explained.
The Death Squad consisted of two cops in a car and the ambulance van—a hearse, really, labeled “ambulance” out of respect for the paramedics, known in the trade and show vernacular as “Reapers.” The Commentator and Camera-man rode back of the van with Night’s retrievals. The Commentator spoke of faces. Past night’s faces under burlap blankets reemerged in dreams. Death Squad: cleaning agents plucked dead cells from Metropolis. Decrepit sections of The City; smegma spread. Crimes to be solved, reports filed.
Black ink ball point. Triplicate.
BEING and Music dug into snacks, sipped beer, nodded in agreement with The Commentator.
“Scavengers. Scavengers.”
We followed the van and squad car into a sub-city of bleak towers and asphalt sky. Cops emerged, guns drawn. Reapers in the van. Union rules: no rough stuff, only peace and rictus of the dead. The Commentator and Camera-man hustled to action.
Cop radio, cop lights. Kids out sneering. Armed guards sneered. Everyone sneered. It was a sneering place, a vague place. Horrible place to live and worse to die. But work to be done, guns drawn. Cops pretended The Commentator and Camera-man were stalking, shadowing. Grown used to them, like sharks to remora.
The body hung slit down the middle like a goose. Bucket beneath caught blood.
“How long has he been up like that, ma’am?” asked the tall, photogenic cop.
“Since I sliced him,” the woman responded to both cop and camera.
“Smells ripe. Neighbors complained.”
“Two days. Three,” she yawned. “Quiet. Peace. Happy.”
“Come with us, Ma’am.”
“Filled that bucket I don’t know how many times.”
“Where’d you dump it?”
“Bathtub. So much blood in a man, you have no idea. Let me freshen up.”
The corpse, gray as putty, strapped to a stretcher and rolled to the van.
Death Squad spooked through spooky canyons of The City. Next pick-up a codger stretched under rough blankets, eyes mouth wide and skin like paste. Old woman beside him sobbed, “Oh, the bed! The bed!”
The bed they’d shared for half a century.
“Like some primordial—Eskimos on an ice floe, only she’s not dead yet,” mused The Commentator.
The Show ended, as it did each week, at the morgue. The Commentator delivered his weekly homily. The Morgue Men dismantled bodies. Hearts, kidneys, colons, yellow livers, sooty lungs. Spongy gray cerebra had known Life in Time. Impressions intact, like etchings on a disk? Could memories be re-animated and re-called? Admission of heat through meat circuits, before wet ware dried to dust?
The Commentator said, “Stories of the dead in artifacts they left behind. Knick-knacks, papers, baubles. Take pleasure in life.”
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