Proclaimers

      Bodies, at regular intervals, are continually flushed into a metal rictus of a staircase that leads down from the platform. When they come down inside, they are surrounded everywhere by plaques - minute blocks of unreadable text, profusely screwed into the mealy tile walls of the EL station. You file in with the senseless biped torrent, waiting your turn to spill out into the shifting brightness of late afternoon.

     Once out on the sidewalk, you press your back against one of the mustard-hued beams which uphold the platform and tracks above, making way for the weaving masses to disperse. The train from which you have just disembarked, ceasing its dormant hum, first trundles and then rampages off, gnashing its wheels against the rails and sending tremors through everything in near proximity. Anytime an EL train departs, you are always slightly convinced that the firmament has finally split its eggshell and has begun releasing its bowls of wrath. But, to date, this apocalyptic thunder has always reliably faded away as the train has moved on into the outer distances.

     A broad, four-lane thoroughfare passes under the buttressed tracks. When the sight of this area is taken in all at once, it proves to be one of those Gordian knots of transit where the dead are always on their way to somewhere else and where the living are constantly showing up for lack of anywhere to go. Directly before you is a crosswalk, perfectly enclosed in the platform's shadow.

     You mean to cross the street. On the other side is a narrow-walled 'char-grill' establishment where you always take a late lunch; the prices are miraculously, even unreasonably low for what you can get there - burgers, Polish dogs (blistered black and weeping under caramelized onions), gyros, bistec, chorizo. They even have whole dinner platters that come with a full compliment of sides and your choice of beverage from the double-door cooler by the cash register. The patty melt is your old standby...

     You take your maiden step down off of the curb. But a hand reaches out from behind, arrests you, and sends you flying back against the glass door of the train station. Then a polished looking man in a black fleece vest steps into view. 

     His hair is pomaded down over his well-formed skull with frightening precision, handsomely tapered around his dewed ears. He walks out into the street, stopping directly in the path of one of the middle lanes. Once halted, he turns around, his face now showing itself.

     You have never seen such a sound portraiture of blessed physiognomy. If you were not paralyzed, you would involuntarily ruffle through your satchel for the wide set of phrenological calipers which you know yourself never to have owned, all for the sake of measuring that celestial cranium - that diameter which contains the key to Pythagoras's music of the spheres, which has hitherto been an ancient loss. Those irreproachably scooped cheekbones! Those sable brows! That isosceles nose! And when the flayed sockeye belly of his lips parts open, you press yourself even flatter against the panel of safety glass set into the door at your back: what you find behind those pink Gates of Janus are no less than capsules of purified ivory light which, with their chilling radiance, compromise the dominion of the sun, demoting its rays to shadows.

     This man raises his arms up to the heavens in a hosannah to himself, and proclaims the following.

     "We live in the most fortunate epoch that folks have ever known. Our technologies have flourished around us like so many gorgeous mechanical orchids, with infinity upon infinity of miniaturized hydraulic parts. Welcome to the Hothouse of Humanity! The codices of flesh and bone no longer mystify us with their implied symbols. When we slice open an expired corpse to study the Helvetica read-out of its ultimate pathology, the sacrum at the base of the spine is no longer a spade digging the grave of all created things; it becomes just another hallucinated shovel for us to laugh at! Let us crack open every last shell that contains us, doing so responsibly, sustainably. And always, always with room left over for Mother Nature. The inequities of History will soon be solved, sealed up in a hermetic container and put on display in our planet's museums. It is undoubtedly true that 'Body is Reality,' as our greatest minds have bravely said and continue to affirm with bleeding-edge scientific evidence. The things that make us 'different' are not only freak accidents caused by a hitherto blind genetic lottery, but are now subject to an endless horizon of potential, voluntary alterations. We can be as beautiful now as we were in the Nineteen-Eighties. And, this time, we're taking our African-American and Lat-inks brothers, sisters, quizzlers, and two-spirits along for the ride! It's time to empty out the sidewalks, the interstates, and the petri-dish bazaars that crawl with unnecessary contagion. Look, I love a good mask as much as the next guy, okay? But it's time to do better. Our imperiled forests have firebreaks dug into them for a reason - to leave a gap, a blank intervention in the midst of all that arboreal fuel. It's time to pare down, now, on the forest of people, I say! We shall do so responsibly, sustainably; we shall do so transparently, and people will cheerfully take part in this process which concerns us all. We must realize that we are all in this together. It's time we started reproducing with agency and not out of necessity, bypassing the biological slave-master of the womb, and - ." 

     A vehicle hurtles through space, side-mirrors whistling in the wind. Its fender, engineered to aqueous aerodynamic perfection, incises the man's pelvis. The bone in him can be heard, snapping and splintering, for blocks. He is instantly halved, and his two unmoored pieces go swiveling off in opposite directions. His legs land in an elevated cement island filled with landscaped shrubs, shorn and exposed waist bones draped over the edge of this municipal planter's box, spilling its reprieved juices into a cast-iron sewer grate. The top half, with its still captivating diadem of a head, is caught and impaled by a pitted aluminum signpost, whose sign has long since been removed, while it has remained here as a supernumerary piece of street infrastructure, until this very moment cloaked in a veil of irrelevance. The man's spine projects down from a curtain of busted intestines, its lower extremity punctuated by a curved spearhead of bloodstained bone - an inverted ace of spades (but the loam beneath this laughable shovel is encased in a thick slab of concrete, for which it is no match; there will be no grave dug for this evolved specimen of Humanity). 

     No cars stop. Traffic continues unimpeded. 

     You only end up hyperventilating at this scene for a few seconds before you manage to catch your breath. It soon dawns on you that you still haven't had your lunch. Collecting yourself, you stride once more up to the edge of the crosswalk and await the moment when the torrent of grumbling motors and glaring chassis will abate.

     Finally, the pedestrian signal beckons you to the other side. But, before you can lower your foot onto that train of interrupted white rectangles, yet another hand wrenches at your shoulder and sends you sprawling backward.

     A second man comes forward to take your place, but this one is unpleasant to the eyes. His hunched shoulders are heaped with layered winter coats, these so battered by relentless exposure to the open day that their original color cannot be ascertained. He, like the first one, goes out into the middle of the street. Down in that blacktop arena, some of the drivers begin honking their horns; an engine or two even begins revving up. The man turns around to reveal his face, which is so repulsive that, in your attempt to burrow your back into the train station's glass door, you shatter its smooth surface, sending fractured concentric rings outward in an omnidirectional radiation. 

     This creature bears a sooted hide - some kind of mystery meat. His scalp, you think to yourself, is one of those convoluted ones that look like a bunched up rug mauled by the iron advance of a vacuum cleaner. His face is a bog: an ill-distributed terrain of saturated filth whose muscular lumps protrude like massive domes of trapped swamp gas. In keeping with this hideous theme, the two steaming pits near his forehead that would otherwise be human eyes are wills o' the wisp, dancing over the rippling crests in his quicksand fleisch. He opens his lips, which are indistinguishable from the fetid masses surrounding them; inside, there are no teeth to speak of, only a tangled, coarse black matter, vaguely akin to tree roots. Words project from this churning sump.

     "Every single one o' dese mothafuckas be sayin' the same thing. They always be sayin' the same damn thing! Always askin' the same damn questions, they cain't hear a damn thing! Say what you want to 'em..."

     Suddenly, his eyes lock onto yours over what seems an expanding distance. Though you feel the pressing imperative to look away, you are unable to do so.

     "Ey!" he hails you. "What you need, man? I'm all the way over here and you can't think of anywhere better to look? You got a fuckin' problem, my man? You wanna call the cops?! Damn! They always pullin' the same mothafuckin' tricks on ya..."

     Alarmed at yourself, you feel compelled to respond.

     "...What's the right question to ask, then?"

     This enrages him. From beneath a makeshift apron of frayed shirts, he brings out a tall, flattened aluminum can; he holds it by its edge so that it lies flat against his blasted palm - holds it like a Mosaic tablet.

     "Didn't I just tell you? Were you not listenin' when I was fuckin' speakin'? It's all here, man. You mothafuckas all the damn same..."

     "I... I heard what you were saying, I just - ." 

     "You ain't heard shit!" he rebukes you. "I didn't say it out loud. You ain't read the book yet?"

     He gestures toward the can, tapping the image of a flaming lighthouse printed thereon and interrogating the response constituted by your facial expression. You have lost the will to say anything more. Sneering at you, he stows the can back under his rags.

     "It was one chance for somebody to see with his eyes and hear with his ears, and ain't shit happen, man. You can go on 'head and call the fuggin' cops. Y'all the ones gonna die, anyway, cracka-ass, nigga-ass mothafuckas..." 

     Having concluded his speech, the man turns to face the row of idling cars. The commuters' faces behind each windshield bulge with urgency, with pressurized blood that seeks escape and does not find it. You realize that no one even sees the person standing in front of them. Their eyes are all pinned to the red traffic light suspended over the road, rocked by an invisible hand.

     When the light turns, the cars peal off. A champagne SUV drills into the interloper, colliding with his swollen, hairy gut.

     But instead of the operatic crunch of naked bone, you hear another, unexpected noise. It is a percussive sound grander than the continent, like as though a balloon - comparable to the earth in size - is exploding into non-existence.

     When the terror subsides, you look around for the remaining paste of his body, a touch disappointed when nothing of the sort can be located. Instead, all you see are the man's rags in the sky - coats, shirts, and gauzy scraps covered in hardened, dried scum accumulated from the hard, excremental surfaces of this metropolis. They float to the ground after having been launched more than a hundred feet into the air. Some of these threadbare items continue to hover, sustained in their tumbling oscillation by currents of displaced air, forced aloft on the hoods and rooves of onrushing vehicles. Others - ghouls similar to the missing man - are congregating around the pieces that have made it back down to earth. You look on as one of these ragged skeletons drudges the flattened aluminum can from a ball of sun-bleached fabric and then disappears into an alleyway wilderness of rusted dumpsters and partially collapsed fire escapes...

...

...

...

     And then you cross the street.

     In the 'char-grill' cafeteria, you stand patiently in line, searching the menu in the unlikely event that you may diverge from the beaten path of your usual lunch order. You haven't forgotten the things you have seen and heard, but you have already begun to treat them like every other mild, yet notable thing you've encountered in your daily transits about town. Soon, it is your turn at the register. You open your mouth to state your desires, but the woman behind the counter - a tawny, sweet-eyed abuelita - interrupts your spiritual flight.

     "Sir, jou have someting on jour shoulder."

     Looking down to where her short, swollen digit points, you find that there is, indeed, something small, hard, and brilliantly white resting on the seam of your windbreaker. You pick it off of yourself and hold it out in front of you. It is one of those capsules of distilled earthly delight that had previously been entrenched in the healthy gums of the man with the handsome skull. You shove it into your pocket, hiding your embarrassment with a put-on grin.

     "Patty melt?"

     "Huh?... Oh, yep! Patty melt."