2004.
[Everything he said! had an exclamation point after it!]"Have you! ever dreamed! of living! forever!?Well now! You can!" the television told me. I was skeptical. The key! is the Human Soul Containment Unit! For the low low price of $1000.00! You can! live forever!" if your rich, I thought. And then I was being told by a scientist that my soul had been discovered to exist after all. By separating the chakras from the body, the aging process was somehow ground to a halt. Bla Bla Bla. I turned off the happy bouncing black box; the silence was oppressive.
I felt like a slug. I was lying in the dark of a sleazy hotel room, over weight and overmedicated...like Elvis I thought with a bitter chuckle. My head throbbed from the salesmans life I had been living for years. I was supposed to go out into the suburbs tomorrow , selling vinyl siding door to door. It seemed horribly old fashioned.One woman didn't just refuse my vinyl siding, she threw a lamp at me.
The next day, I went to a hospital to see the birth of my nephew. Images of furious suburbanites haunted me all the way there. Inside, I was approached by a nurse, who told me I would have to stay in the waiting room.
I had just sat down when I noticed all the nurses rushing about...something seemed to be wrong with my sister [Sarah], or with the baby. It wasn't until the next day that I realized he had cold albino skin, lifeless black eyes, and no mouth. He made a barely audible scratching noise in his throat, as if he was trying to scream."Hey." I said from the doorway.
"Hey." She didn't look at me or the Baby.
"He wont nurse." She said flatly.
"Maybe they can fix it."
There was a long silence in which I realized she didn't believe me at all. For a minute I thought she would cry. But then I realized that she couldnt feel a thing. Somehow I concluded that Soul Containment had lobotomized her. It made me angry, but of course she could no longer understand that.
"Its my fault, isnt it. Hes deformed because I have no soul, isnt he?"
"I really dont know."On the way home I stopped at a Gourmet Mcdonalds, Ronald Mcdonalds latest experiment gone horribly wrong. I wasn't really hungry. But somehow I felt I had to keep going through the motions I always did. Inside, over stressed waiters in stained tuxedoes served large helpings of shrimp with ketchup and calamari burgers. They had to speak lots of French, to give the new chain Culture. Except they didn't give it anything but a horrible chaos of confusion. Most of them couldnt speak a coherent French sentence. The ones that could read from phrase books and said lots of things by accident. My waiter, for example, asked me to go behind the counter with him and deep fry his naked body. I couldnt help but feel sorry for him, thinking that he would soon get beaten up for accidentally being a French homosexual.
My meal was awfully depressing. People who had once had the blessedly simple job of flipping burgers had to stomp grapes to make wine for me. They had to do it while still in tuxedoes, still at minimum wage. the wine was in a little paper cup. Once they accidentally got into happy meals. It frightens me.
I was standing on the beach with a heroin addict, and we were alone. "It was probably the seaweed that scared people away. "Its everywhere" Chloe said, sitting on a rock, smoking a cigarette and trembling. She tried to smile. [We're all dust but] people like Chloe were made of a different type of dust. Her pimp had kicked her out just two days ago... and her vital organs had already become bloated rabid little monsters... always wanting more and more Junk.
"What are we doing here?" I said; it was cold and I didnt like it there; it wasnt a normal beach. Where was the lifeguard? Where were the hotdog stands and the people? Where was the sand? It was all just rocks and seaweed and dirt, bordered by a scrawny forest. The silence was oppressive."I came here when I was a little kid. My little brother dunked me and I thought I would drown." She tried to laugh. I began to suspect she was maudlin, but then again I knew she wasnt.
"Have you ever tried to see the stars through the neon sky? You think to yourself that maybe the forests and the stars and the mountains are just fairy tales we made up so that what we've created wont seem so bad after all. But we're not supposed to care. And I dont, really."
There was a very awkward silence."Jesus. I need another hit." She said; her hands were shaking dreadfully.
I started to think about things, like an enormous billboard for diamond rings that I saw when I was driving to work. "Show her how much you love her" it said. I began to wonder about that. If Corporate America died and we were unable to shop for each other, would we still be able to prove our love?
I realized that the punk movement became part of the consumer machine a long time ago. Get your very own punk t-shirt for just 50.00. Get some rebellious pink hair dye for $30.00, or an offensive dog collar for $40.00. If Corporate America died tomorrow, could we still rebel? Could we still be unique? And thats the horrible irony, I think. They make money off of the rebellion of the young, which was once aimed at them.
Seems we're all ambitious headless little Gucci chickens running around trying to $accomplish$ as much as we can before we all fall down from lack of blood. exhausted and full up with the years people jump off buildings faster than their tears.
"You want to quit?" Boss seemed quite distressed.
"why does it bother you?" I felt like an idiot, talking to him like that. Somehow I knew Id crawl back the next day.
"Youre the employee of the month! You know we're short on people!"
"Sorry....I just cant do this anymore."
Sarah, my sister, was brutally butchered to death in her apartment yesterday; they called me to identify the body. Her tattoo was the only thing that I recognized. It makes me horribly sad. Sam, her son, dissapeared on his second birthday; the day that Sarah was killed. They say he was kidnapped but theres no evidence of that.
When she called 911, her last words were, "Stop the soul containment.". She said nothing about who had attacked her. She didnt mention her address; they had to trace the call.
I hired a private investigator to look into it, but it was an impossible case. He insisted that the criminals were professionals ;there were no fingerprints. No stray pieces of DNA. There was no foothold to start from. I suspected he wasnt a very good private eye, but for some reason I was so depressed I just didnt care anymore. I went out drinking more often then I went to my new job at the Health Food Store. They fired me before I had even gotten my first paycheck.
It was 9:00 on a Monday night; I was going to be evicted tomorrow. I decided to go on one last binge before I started my exciting career as a homeless person. Then I realized I didnt have any money. I thought of breaking into the liquor store.
They're behind me. Dozens and dozens of children just like Sam. Eyeless, mute, absolutely insane; the children of the soulless. The children of the American Dream. they're carrying butcher knives, spoonforks, and rakes. I try to run but theyre in front of me too. I scream out for help, but no one will come; Its the unwritten law of the city that you keep to yourself. Besides, no one is stupid enough to walk around a dangerous city at 9:00, except me.
Im breaking my bottle of scotch, threatening them. Im accusing them of killing my sister. Theyre getting closer...they seem desperate; hungry. Maybe they want souls so badly theyre going to fight over mine, like starving hyenas fighting over the carcass of a mouse. Jesus. Jesus. We never should have invented soul containment.
ramen!