When the Rivers Turn to Glass
NEW FRANCE ©ped
Fourteen
Marc’s Radicalization
I think of my father when I’m on this road. When I was a boy, my old man would take me along with him on business trips to the north—La Crosse, Eau Claire, Minneapolis, Duluth. It all started here for the first hour on this little road. His face would be seized with manufactured hope, his posture was upright, and his eyes would glaze over with delusional ambition—some would call it the zombie glow of survival. He was one of the last late champions of animal agriculture. He sold hormones, steroids, and poisons to the methane fields and the coops, the stockyards and the pens. The back of his truck was gilled with endless boxes of vials, bags, and needles, the boxes all printed with sunny brand names and proprietary rights notices. The highways would branch before us like some murderous circulatory system, and we would keep our schedule. I’d listen to the radio in the truck while he would lock up contracts and renewals, an hour at a time. The radio would play funeral parlor evangelical shit while commercial bumpers touted fuels, fertilizers, implement repair and the like. Burger wrappers littered the truck. We’d hole up for a night in a motel on the business loop. On a lucky night, I’d get a whole taco salad. My dad would tell me about the highlights of his meetings that day; he’d tell me about the asshole from Tomah who wouldn’t renew because his third wife didn’t like the practice of ‘juicing’ their chickens, he’d laugh about the angry maven at the St. Croix Hatchery who’d rush through the contracts like it was a backstreet abortion, he’d preach about the cattlemen who’d give us vacuum-sealed bandoliers of our own chemicals imbedded in their meat—a holiday stocking stuffer, clear veils of draped meat on meat, soaked in chemical anointment for the federal capital supply chain. My dad was dying from this line of living, hell, he smoked a carton of Merits a week and pissed through a catheter that traveled through a borehole in the driver’s side floorboard. Sometimes, on nights when I stayed at home, I fell asleep imagining my father chaining Merits and peeing at eighty miles an hour just to land another poisonous bid on time. When he died, my mother wasn’t surprised. He died of a heart attack at a truck stop, seven a.m. under the bright and guiding and natural sun. The employer, his employer, a giant of a laboratory, a laboratory which served power in Washington, gave our family a free casket and ten thousand dollars for our troubles. I remember my mother going dull during the week of the funeral. There was an unnatural relief in her eyes, something akin to a weary wait—she told me to study for college, and to study as if my very young life depended on it. I remember laughing at her command even on the day she said it; I never saw a connection between studying hard and avoiding the plagues of our civilization. As if an understanding of our systemic self-destruction would somehow tenderize the sacrifices ahead—as if naming the broad extinction around us would endow us all with a wieldy power over the extinction…I suppose the only alternative to prayer back then was the salve of education. I suppose the uncountable eras of experience, the loops of failing empire, weren’t enough to convince our species to laugh off our shortcomings.
____That’s the crux of my indigestion, here. Yes, here and today. The idea that none of us can laugh away our predetermined and innate will for extinction. We revel in the madness of trauma and young blood on the ground, but we still think it’s preventable, somehow. If we educate, organize, legislate, lobby, influence, protest, march, disobey, reeducate, reorganize, re-legislate, amend, survey, pontificate, inspire, consume, trade, plant, pray, harvest, nurture, repurpose, pray again, condemn prayer, never sleep…then, somehow, and in some divine flourish of providence and piety, we’ll PREVAIL. Well, I’m driving seventeen boxes of human remains to the mighty north Mississippi tonight for a full moon ash disbursement over the freezing waters of Twain, and I don’t see the holiness or purpose in it. My camera might…if I give a damn. Yeah, lady. This gray cloud of once-body under the moon is your daughter, Marianne. Or did I mix up the boxes, tonight? I know li’l Mickey the Third loved playing shortstop, so I hopped the fence at the riverbank ballpark and chalked the line between second and third. Oh, these twins, oh, how they loved to play the piano! Schubert! Schumann! Where to shower their essences? Ah, I think I know. In the sky, between the lens and the moon. Oh, Darla and Genevieve, your fingers tickle the ivories in perpetuity, and this shot of your ashes, ashes from hunger, starvation, malnutrition, fever, infection, you name it, your ashes are immortal in the memorial ring of honor—all because you CHOSE not to kill in order to survive. Good god, I wonder, I wonder if I would have loved these children. I sometimes wonder, had I the time and trust to see any of them fledge, if they would eclipse me with hope and leadership and village verve, if these unwarranted dead could have pulled us out of our own abyss in time, and then I see their futures marred by temptation and savagery, ill-timed love, betrayal, taglines and brand new denim and shoes, and I know these angels were only cheated of their time and pleasure. Oh, but posterity! What of posterity? It’s true, as I hurl away the ashes in arcs and plumes and vectors and cannon shots, it’s true that these dead angels did not have the time and luxury to realize their true selves. It’s true! THERE’S the ONE CRIME into which I can unleash my rage. These innocents were never granted their one natural opportunity—they couldn’t realize themselves. Where’s your grace, asshole? Where’s your deference to their lost opportunities to know themselves? Why hadn’t you coupled your pride with theirs and grieved their wasted fates? You know the answer, Marc. I know the answer. I’m covered in the moribund ejaculate of ash once again, now, under a clouded moon, some three hours from home, and I know the answer: I’m resentful of living without self-recognition. My resentment comes from the confidence that these innocents understood death before me. Somehow, that I’m alive, it means that I’m not worthy of death, that I’ll never understand the passage, that I’m not righteous enough, that I’m not immured in transcendence, that I’m a cog on a payroll, benefiting the better around me. I grieve for these dead and I resent them. They are better than me and they are free. I serve their memories as any slave does, with mileage reimbursement, some tools, a Center fuel card, a camera and a sour resignation. It’s with these thoughts I grapple, and I know now, more than before, that there’s no such thing as a good death, and the shame of that understanding resides in the reality that I live like a preening coward, afraid of pain, and unqualified to die for any cause under the sun. I mean, Christ, if I take up a cause now, I mean, a cause that would make Gaia herself shudder with appreciation, it would be four generations too late as it is, I mean, shit, if I take up the baton for nature, She, Nature, would laugh and ask why I hadn’t run for her sake decades before. If I destroy all energy and agriculture now, would She not scream to me that I’m lifetimes too late for such a cry? It would be an echo. I mean, what in God’s pissing hell does radicalization mean if the END of ALL was stitched into our lives before we were born? Was I a victim or was I an accomplice?! Did I know enough as a boy to wrest us from our sins, or would I have been lampooned—had I spoken—as a Christ acolyte or a Joan of Arc stray cat, some mad prophet(ess), or worse, a sensationalist, a profiteer? Why the carousel of mad colors and moans, of failed breath and souring skin, if it’s all just a prelude to unconsciousness? Are ashes over the Mississippi beautiful, or are they gruesome? Should I be breathless from their loving memories, or should I take their breath into mine and fight for their memories? Is my act honoring or shaming them? Are they inviting me to join them? Am I only an agent, thickening my food stores with these assignments? Will none of this end with any comfort, and, if so, why should it continue?
I know the sky is unknowing, the ground is cold, and my love is alone tonight.
*
The road home is gloomy and fraught with mist. The air through the cabin vents smells of ammonia and carrion. I pretend to unpack a Merit from a yellow and white box and I fake smoke my way through the Dells. I find antihistamines in the gearbox tray under a collection of old U.S. pennies and nickels, coins that still offer trade in a pinch. Within a lag of twenty minutes, I delve into semi-lucidity, the diphenhydramine rocking my blood and senses into a functional slumber, the road paint beating over my forehead like rubber cones, the shoulders only suggesting I stay within their world. AM 770 relents into lullabies—Hank, Patsy, Willie, Lucinda, Emmylou and the like. I sleep and I drive. My only capital commodity in my cabin is a file card with digital images of ashes, each file tattooed with the names of the decedents. I’m full from the names, the memories, the families, the survivors, the entreaties and promises to stay close to each other, pledges to gird our survival with hugs and potato salad and campfire songs. Each bereaved carries the same pain and entitlement, and they deserve concerts of support and love. But the body breaks down when the grief climbs above the eyes and engulfs us, drowns us. The body can’t shoulder the death anymore. The body takes pills, it drives, it stops caring for the soul. It crashes. The body pantomimes the heart, it can’t cry, but it can shut down. It can break. My body is weary and I’m not so old. My blood is thin and I’m not so unhealthy. My heart is rending but I’ve never touched it. I’m lost in the tunnel of contradiction. I can’t see the purpose in purposeful. These forests around me want me to join their boughs in swaddle. They ask me to rest. I don’t comply. Yes, out of spite, I don’t rest when the trees plea with me to do so. I push on, like my old man. I push through. I slog it out, like one of those crusty old Americans. It must be done on time. This death and dedication must be honored ON THE CLOCK. Or, what is there?
____A temporary checkpoint flares on the high summit. It’s a standard Center pass-through ambush. They must be shaking down the New Pirates, I think. They must be checking their regional tags, their fuel levels, their currency.
____There’s no one on the highway but me and the stooges at the checkpoint. I roll down my window and let the night air cut my skin, awakening me. I slow to the gate and watch the thick young jarhead wave me toward him. I notice a glint of contempt from his eye. I see a smirk on his mouth. I watch his frame stiffen upward like a goddamned Wisconsin Peacock. I can’t stand his countenance or his soul.
____He asks me for my curfew code. Shit, I’ve forgotten it. I haven’t hit a checkpoint in ages. I laugh and tell him that Chris Shockley can vouch for my staying up and out after midnight. I wink to him that it’s okay. It’s all going to be okay, kid. You’ll be fine. Just lighten up.
I find a way to amuse myself with that weightless prayer.
____He doesn’t return. He doesn’t pull the gate. After a minute passes, the kid triggers up two spotlights and commands me—by com speaker—to kill the ignition.
____That’s it. It’s in his mealy young voice. A voice of ignorance and murder. I’m through bowing to the rods in this machine.
____I burn my tires and plow through the meaningless plank (one striped, blaze-orange and eggshell white board) like it’s some goddamned NATO checkpoint of yore, and I accelerate over patches of ice, salt, and sand. I laugh at my act of annihilation. I wait for him to assemble his menacing herd of Three-Squares-a-Day, Three-Hots-and-a-Cot to chase after me. He does. There are plenty of them. Three or more vehicles, I can see. They creep their way behind me, sidle behind each other, and pursue. I laugh a pure mountain of childish laughter. Before my startled and drowsy eyes I see my empty road ahead, a path home scabbed with ice, beckoning.
This is nothing, now. This is a game of chicken.