And with an axis that is twice as long, well, naturally, it takes twice the grinding. Starring Nicolas Cage. Of course. We’re not done yet… Or should that be Starring Nicolas Cage, of course. We’re not done yet… Or should that be Starring Nicolas Cage. Of course, we’re not done yet…
No sleep, no food; the only water is what Nicolas Cage and I manage to collect from the dripping tunnel walls or scrape out of stagnant puddles and boil in a battered tin we found along the way. For the boil, we burn debris we find that is dry enough to catch fire, striking the precious matches we’d taken from our table some days earlier in the hotel lobby somewhere inside the Project Galaxy.
It is thanks to Cage’s watch, which has a compass, and is also able to tick off the distance we’ve gone underground, that we have, at best, perhaps a vague idea as to where we might be beneath the city.
We decide to take our chances on a funnel of smoky light filtering down to us through a grate. We are able to move the grate with the application of as much force as we can muster, leveraging ourselves against it with a steel rod.
As the grate grinds out of our way, it splatters us with muck, and grinning wide Cage says: “Greetings from the outside world, baby!”
Now we climb up and move in our new space, closer and closer toward the light, which grows larger and larger and brighter and brighter and now our ears pick up the unmistakable sound of a cheering crowd, a small one. Now closer still, amid the cheering we hear yet another unmistakable sound – that of a bat cracking against a ball. The energy of the shouts washes over us and we laugh, automatically caught up in the exhilaration of a baseball game we can’t see.
A little strangely, we come up behind, and somewhat below, a dugout – the stadium, we gather from where we are, is a small one.
Oddly, a chain-link fence is pulled tight across our only means of egress onto the playing field, the outside world, and our freedom, and though we yell and shake the fence, no one comes to answer our distress. It is as if, while these Quotidians are aware of us, we nevertheless belong to some other, alien, world, are cast in some other dimension, one with which they cannot be made to bother. We do not belong to their world, the one that we, too, had once known. It is as if we do not exist.
But now baggy white legs round third base toward home plate, the feet, shod in cleats, toss up tiny tufts of turf as they trot toward us, and an angel in the guise of a young boy in a baseball uniform stands before us. His visage is as black as coal, while from under his cap golden hair flows to his waist. His look is one of calm, good will, and mercy, and without a sound he touches the lock, which breaks and drops, and pulls the fence away. And now more angels join him and having gathered round, black, white, yellow, and brown (okay, and red, too), they stand above us and reach down with their hands and pull us up into the light.
In the next moment, we lose the ground from under our feet and are corralled into a bus.
I get this bad feeling, this awful churning in my gut that something’s simply not right, and I try to get a look at the driver, but it’s as if he knows this and doesn’t let me.
I manage to catch a glimpse of a profile, but it is just a patchy haze and I cannot piece it together, except for the nose, which comes into bizarre and highly detailed focus, as though my mind were suddenly in the hallucinogenic throes of some demonic drug. It is long, thin, bent, and pointed, like a 12th century Genoese; pockmarked and red-blotched with broken veins; shiny, as though covered with an olive-tinted grease.
The bus carrying the players, who had ushered us on board, is suddenly parked in the bus depot next to The Entertainment King at the end of Los Losseros Boulevard.
It becomes clear to Cage and me that we’d quickly fallen asleep en route from the stadium to wherever it was we were going.
Their spirits lifted, the boys file out of the bus and jaunt happily across the median, chattering away and patting and slapping the dust out of their arms, legs, and butts as they head to the Singlex Movie Theater and small entertainment arcade on the boulevard’s other side.
Cage and I dumbly blink our eyes and rub out the sand, stretch and yawn before getting off the bus and walking into the legendary Goldstein Fields, which start just beyond the end of Los Losseros and behind the depot – those vast tracts of land that Goldstein, The Entertainment King himself, had bought up dirt cheap back in the early ‘70s hoping to see fantastic returns on his investment when commercial development along Los Losseros boomed.
But that never happened. While there was some growth, it was stunted, and Los Losseros was eventually resolved into an end-of-the-road turnabout wrapped in a guardrail.
But now, the hundreds and hundreds of acres of Goldstein’s unwanted land have suddenly become wanted, even evilly coveted, and greedily, lustfully desired.
And yet, this proves no boon for Goldstein; far from it. In comparative dollar terms, taking inflation, the devaluation of the greenback and Nixon nixing the gold standard, Goldstein is losing big time as against his initial investment as he helplessly sells plot after plot of the once precious land. If he’d bought the land dirt cheap, he was now selling it even dirtier cheap.
“Yeah,” says Cage, “so Goldstein’s suddenly under pressure from all these Lossers to sell his land. Turns out, though, there’s this perpetual motion clause in his original deal that stipulates the sale of the first plot automatically triggers the forced sale of all the subsequent plots in rapid succession, otherwise, the unsold remainder will be deemed illegally frozen or trapped in suspended, or, as they say in legalese, ‘hovering’ non-sale possession – apparently a very old concept dating back to the Normans in England, which to this day is only vaguely understood, if at all, and so very broadly interpreted – therewith subjecting it to confiscation.
“So Goldstein has no choice but to sell for ridiculously, you know, like these insanely low prices. Ha-ha! Everything must go, man! Like a goddamn fire sale or something!
“Anyway, now all this you see around us is mine, and it mostly stretches athataway, just goes on and on until you can’t see it anymore. What I’m ever gonna do with it all, I myself do not even know.
“And that land, over yonder, now belongs to Clint Eastwood, and there’s a contiguous chain of diagonally connected parcels – you can even see where they’re marked off – over there; well, all that’s now David Lynch’s.”
I see the driver, who’d disturbed me so much with his troubling shape, bound wildly out of the movie house swinging his spindly arms out like a madman, and lurch into his bus. Grinding the gears erratically, the bus tears away, out of control and crazed.
And now, a cinema-full of… Lossers!!! emerges from the Singlex Theater.
They move right up to the guardrail that ends Los Losseros, and staring straight at us through tinted granny glasses with their goggling walleyes, do not move to trespass into the Goldstein Fields, but stand there, contentious, as if to make a point of their unspoken entitlement.
Now one moves to the front of their crowd and, voice raspy, says:
“I played bit parts in Hollywood. I also worked for a newspaper when they still hung the proofs up on the walls. I also ran a law practice through a loophole in the state law that allowed me to do it even though I didn’t finish law school, if I even went to one at all – nyaow-aaahh… I was also an adjunct professor and worked in an important corridor of Congress in Washington, D.C. Nyuggits. In Ukraine, I put my considerable acumen of experience and talents together to become a leading PR professional in Eastern Europe and the Central Asian republics of the former Soviet Union, while holding down a rolling trans-Atlantic stint, mostly by e-mail and phone, but sometimes personally, as an image consultant to artists and actors, with field offices in Saint Petersburg and Cleveland – nyoog-nyaarr – and in my spare time donated lectures for a nominal non-voluntary fee as a Power of Three expert, whereby my historic work can be seen on YouTube as performed in choice locations across Ukraine, such as Uzhgorod, Odessa, and Lviv. I also have considerable knowledge of how businesses are run and can be considered an expert in the securities market, specializing in stocks and bonds, and just about anything else.”
The Losser steps back into the crowd and the other Lossers solemnly nod their heads and growl in approval.
Another, smaller, and perhaps somewhat less confident Losser, now steps forward and says:
“And, ah, and-and, I’m also a, a-a-a… a published author!”
As he steps back uncertainly and looks around him nervously, the other Lossers begin clapping and send up a rousing cheer. This sets the little Losser’s head shaking uncontrollably but joyfully; his sweaty sickly-pink face breaks open in a broad freakish grin.
For beings who’d never existed, it seems logical, I think, that they’d be making up backgrounds and careers for themselves to fill in the long, lost blanks.
And now another one comes forward and, for some reason raising his arm and pointing it at us, proclaims:
“And you shall not describe us as Porky Pig, a fat-style Elmer Fudd, Uncle Fester, or W.C. Fields…”
Another one steps forward:
“The Pillsbury Doughboy, Pink Floyd’s Pig Man, The Stay Puft Marshmallow Man from the Ghostbusters franchise, Frosty the Snowman, J. Wellington Wimpy, or Michelin Man!!!”
“Nor,” continues the one with the raised pointed arm, stepping even more forward, “shall we be described as ice cream vendors from a truck, nor shall that job be described as a government one. You will not say about us that we are child-molesting perverts, beardless Santa Claus perverts on sick Christmas cards for children, ambiguous about our preferred sexuality toward The Ferret or the likes thereof, nor married to a witch-like harridan out of convenience to have a place to live, be taken care of and considerably cut down on my expenses while at the same time cleverly using that marriage as a cover for my latent homo or any other types of sexuality, or that I even never actually have sex at all, or that we have gout, unhealthily pink cheeks –”
“Or look like walleyed pigs! – nyug…” shouts yet another…
And now, as they begin their arduous bumbling fat and accident-laden climb over the low guardrail that hems Los Losseros in followed by their planned slow heavy and half-hearted rampage against us on the legendary Goldstein Fields (confident, no doubt, of victory due to their sheer number), Nicolas Cage opens the trunk of a lone stark and knotted tree, the only one visible for miles of what is now his mostly barren desert and prairie land, and pulls out a small cache of light machineguns. He throws one to me.
“Our constitutional right to guns to protect our constitutional right to our property, Saint,” he says, and with no further ado begins blasting away.
Losser after Losser goes down as their funny-looking blood bursts and spurts out of them.
“Oh, man! Oh, baby! Come on, Saint – shoot your fucking gun! Come on, man – come on!!!”
I look down at the weapon in my hands, and while I’d never shot one before, the mechanism looks pretty straightforward to master, and so I raise it low, butt up against me, firming it into the cavity between my rib and my hip and pull the trigger.
“Rat-tat-tat-tat-tat…” it goes, sweeping this way and that… “Rat-tat-tat-tat-tat… Rat-tat-tat-tat-tat…”
Oh, God, oh, my dear sweet Lord, and it feels, it just feels so goddamned good…
And it comes so naturally, and I feel no remorse.
As we shoot and shoot and mow them down, something like pity, even compassion, comes to both our faces, as if we are administering mercy killings to deformed monsters and tormented suffering freaks who want to be put out of their misery, who want to die.
I feel myself succumb to a strange melancholy and fall into something like a reverie, a trance. I feel myself floating away as the shooting goes on and on, as though on its own.
I do not know we are done, and I continue shooting as Nicolas Cage shakes me awake again, from behind, and slowly, patiently, lovingly undoes the grip I have on the gun.
Cage stacks the weapons back into the tree and closes it, and as I come back into myself, I see him pulling out a flag and unfolding it – the stars and stripes; our red, white, and blue.
With the cordage already fastened into the trunk, Nicolas Cage hoists Old Glory up the tree.
Filed by Saint Stephan, December 31, 2016 This is how the year ends – WITH A BANG!!!