24.
The world has gone dark. No one reaching out to me from outside the sphere or the great beyond. Just silence. I check the antennae and satellites. I check all the wires. Everything seems more or less in line with how it was yesterday and the yesterday before. All I do is hallucinate. The phone rings and someone speaks to me in Spanish. I haven’t spoken Spanish in years, but I try. They hang up, frustrated with me. The phone rings again—there’s a tax-lien on my mortgage. This time I hang up. The phone rings again and it is someone with questions about the General Election. I tell them I have been writing. Putting my dispatches into the ether. Nothing like Celine, of course. I don’t have that kind of juice but I’m doing my part. I’m writing poetry but no one cares. So I turned to essays—prescient writings laying out where all of this will lead. I consult the I‑Ching which tells me the earth (or maybe humanity) won’t outlast the year 2046. One thing I learned from teaching is that young people are deeply skeptical. They don’t think what you have to say is meaningful, they don’t think you’re telling them the truth about the past, they don’t think the past has anything to do with the present. They critique everything about you, your appearance, how you pronounce things. They are positioning themselves to remove you. I got an anonymous message from one—YOU’LL BE THROWN FROM A HELIPCOPTER. As I predicted the assassin or pretend assassin opened up a can of worms. Censors opening up mail, looking through everything, parsing each fragment of text or speech-act for behavior that can be considered treasonous or seditious. I’ve told them—habeas corpus has been suspended before. Even Lincoln did it. For the most part though, they’ve developed a cocoon of ignorance or indifference. You learn that—in times of crisis most people are indifferent to the suffering of others. There is no utopian moment to lay my hands upon. No prelapsarian garden or glen to return to. I dream of course and I continue to write them down. There’s one that repeats because it is rooted in an image from reality. I am in a room, which is womblike and has cream-colored walls, and there are abstract paintings, reds transgressing into gray-blacks as if human hearts have been exploded onto stretched canvases. The floor is light magenta (the carpeting rather) and I get down to lay on it like grass but it’s softer and more pliant. I feel like I’m on the floor of a very expensive bank. I turn over and see neat rows of expensive Scandinavian chairs, blond wood with maroon cushions. The walls are lined with books and I go through each one trying to find something on Mary Surratt, Opus Dei, or the Caravan of Death.
27.
I dreamed of a gun coming in the mail. It came in three green pieces and the trigger was engaged by an orange zip-tie that went around the grip as well. I held it at my waist and scanned the street. A man came up wearing a very minimal mask, something thin and translucent, just enough to obscure his face. He said, you sure you want all that blood on your hands? What blood, I asked, and he said, a whole ship of frogmen are coming over that mountain tomorrow. I looked to where he was pointing and there was a mountain where there hadn’t been one before. And when I say ship, he continued, I mean like one the size of Phoenix—a whole mess of frogmen with serrated knives and prosthetic noses. Bring it the fuck on, I said, and he said, you’re a brave man. And then what happened? I don’t know. You woke up? No, something else happened, but I can’t remember. I see. She began to braid her own hair. What did you think of this man, the one in the mask? I felt like he was on the side of the frogmen. And this threatened you? Not necessarily. And frogmen are like Navy SEALS? Something like that, I said. And these frogmen, did the prospect of them coming over the mountain frighten you? I felt strangely at peace with whatever might happen. But you had your little green gun, she said, the one that came in pieces? I nodded. Plus, I said, they were wearing false noses. True, she said, like clowns, and they only had knives. But if the ship really was that big, we’re talking about what, a million frogmen? Could be, she said. When I say the word frogman, she asked, what’s the first thing that comes to mind? The Bay of Pigs, I said. And Castro’s exploding cigar, she offered. Perhaps. Would you agree, she asked, that these represent the failure to complete tasks? Yes, I said, among other things.
28.
It was too late to sound the alarm. And even if I did, it wouldn’t have been heard, or acknowledged rather. You read in the annals of warnings upon warnings. The streets will run red with blood if you persist with this or that change in the body politic. And no one believes it until the streets are running red with blood. For some there is only war and inertia. A crane moves the charred husk of a car across the sky. I can see the moon through where the windows used to be. There is murmuring and flashing lights, a steady erosion of what held these people together. I would explain to the students about diffuseness—during the so-called critical period power or sovereignty was diffuse. The people needed a strong sovereign. A president, a king, a tyrant, a dictator, a Führer, a Caudillo, a strongman with liver spots on his hands and arms. The guillotine, the gallows, the electric chair. Death squads squealing into city centers smashing and grabbing and taking away whatever they can carry, kill, and bury. I remember an image from 2020, a moving image—one-hundred-and-eight white faces in the panhandle somewhere. A long line of them armed to the teeth. Ready to cook whatever moves. And then one of them shot the cameraman in the balls. The doctor points out the word misandry to me in a dictionary. Be careful, he says, don’t be this guy—no one likes a self-loathing man. And yet masked men pour over the hill two-by-two carrying baseball bats studded with sinker nails ready for anything. Why I ask? Why decapitate? Why castrate? Why flay? Why take teeth and knuckle bones to make into bracelets and necklaces for your sweethearts. Why? This is all very poignant a voice says, but where are you hiding the jewels, in the toothpaste tube? My bed holds another man’s boots. My bathtub runs red with his fever-dream blood. My drawers are all splinters and my shredded underwear is being used to make tourniquets somewhere in the valley of death. A man holding a KA-BAR fighting knife rides by on a stolen emu, taken from a petting zoo somewhere outside of Tucson. An airplane flies above him towing a message in red letters that I can barely make out through the smoke: WHILE YOU SLEPT WE TOOK YOUR WOMEN CHILDREN AND TELEPHONES.
45.
What do you think it’s all about? Power. How does power work? I don’t know—what do you mean? How do they get power and how do they use it to their advantage? Power is coaxing something out of people that they don’t want to give. Hm. In an abstract scenario you have to have leverage. Money? Usually, yes, but in this scenario it’s about something else. What? Status or recognition, being at the top of a hierarchy means you have power over those beneath you, the powerless, a question of subject and object. The subject wields the object? Yes. Do I have power over you? Sometimes. And do you have power over me? At other times, yes. Is that good? I don’t know, I think so. Why? It means that nothing is static, power operates along a spectrum. Is that fair? Fairer than the alternative. Which is? That power is concentrated only in one of us. Which would be bad? I think so. She lays back down on the bed and looks out the window. It’s dark. The shade is drawn almost to the bottom and a line of white light ringed with blue is visible. I hear footsteps and see shadows on the ground just outside the bedroom door. I look at what she looks at—wind pushing the shade in and out, in and out, like the bellows of a harmonium playing a two-chord dirge for our last summer together. I strain to listen for something and realize that all little noises eventually become absorbed into a single atmosphere of ambient sound, maybe a metaphor for death. I count six individual earrings in her right ear alone and notice a little horse’s head has been tattooed on the righthand side of her right middle finger. Finally, she says, it’s happened in the past. Yes, I know. And there’s been relatively little punishment for it. I nod. Why do you think that is? It must be the natural order of things—the way power wants to be concentrated. She shakes her head and says, power has no will of its own. I don’t know, I say, it seems to enjoy being in the hands of the most reckless. The wind blows the shade open just long enough for me to see that someone has stenciled on the pink stucco wall across the street: FUCK ALL DAY.
93.
I’m lying in bed. Flash floods on the news and then a game show. An old one from the seventies. The host wears tan slacks and a herringbone coat. His tie is wide. Blue, with gold and gray stripes. The skin on his face is taut and tan, his teeth are spectral in their whiteness. I catch a minute or two of it and then I’m out again. I awake to a gun battle. Pistols at first and then repeating rifles. A man on horseback chases running children into a beige wasteland. I close my eyes and dream of a typhus outbreak in Valparaiso, which I’m to sail from in the morning but now I am on the road from Santiago riding a horse named Mr. Prescience. Iris was supposed to meet me here. I want her badly to lay here with me and stroke my back. Iris is gone but the television goes on and on about gardenias and butterflies and what tobacco planting was like in Virginia in the seventeenth century when there were equal numbers of slaves and indentured servants. Later there is a melodrama about a man with untrustworthy eyes who sleeps with his wife’s sister during the Spanish-American War—a war very rarely commented upon, I think to myself. Iris has left me pencils and paper. She told me not to fixate on retribution. The soul, she says, is a wounded animal that needs patience. There is a kestrel in an apple tree outside my window. It looks at me, into my animal soul. I say to it (though not out loud) I am wounded too and in need of patience. I look at it looking at me and think of all the blood it has drawn. Even though the lifespan of a Kestrel is quite small, this one has seen it all because everything the world has seen is written in blood.
~
Bryan D. Price is the author of A Plea for Secular Gods: Elegies (What Books, 2023) His stories and poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Noon Annual, Chicago Quarterly Review, The Glacier, Boulevard, and elsewhere. These five fragments are from, Dystopian Summer: A Novel in 102 Fragments. He lives in San Diego, California.