Fallen Nation: Party At The World's End (24 page)

He said that there exists
an onomatopoeic sound for absolute silence. The Japanese word for
silence is “sin,” pronounced more or less like “sheeeen...” with
the sound trailing off at the end. Like “whoosh” is the sound of a
sword cutting through the air, and “gurgle” is the sound of blood
spurting out the neck hole, “sin” is the “sound” afterward, when
all is done, the bodies removed, everyone gone home, and only the
silence remains.

That's the sound I am
hearing now.

All I do anymore is write.
Write, and watch the snow fall in electric blue night. One
snowflake, another. They add up, soon my past will be even less
than a memory.

I’m not sure who I am
writing this to, or why I’m doing it.

Habit’s a bitch. By
“write,” I am referring to a complicated routine, which, among
other things, keeps Colombian coffee growers well enfranchised. The
process is no longer feverish, or goaded on by the dangling carrot
of purpose. I no longer publish. I no longer teach. I live alone in
a cabin. My life is orderly, simple. Perfectly meaningless, like a
koan.

The process and the
product are inseparable, and one exists only for the sake of the
other. Anything that does not belong in this delicately balanced
web has been pruned away long ago. It is a peaceful but also lonely
and somewhat sad position to be in, to sculpt your entire existence
around such an isolated activity. I may as well spend my life
tending bonsai trees. Except, they are at least living things. A
word never read is a dead thing. They come alive in
your
mind, or they’re
nothing. (I can say “your” and mean
you
specifically because, well, who
else could I be referring to? Someone stole my journal and is
reading it, or it’s moldering in the corner and I’m speaking to no
one.)

Mostly, I write about my
past. The days that led up to my hospitalization. Our glorious last
stand against the directed force of one of the world’s oldest and
most powerful entities. Ariadne. Artemis. Jesus. Lilith...Some of
them I knew were dead, but the others...Was Cody still strumming
his guitar at some bus stop with his calloused fingers? Was Artemis
out there somewhere with an army of her own? I don’t know, and I’ve
always been afraid to find out.

On some level, it’s
probably the same with everyone – you have close friends, you feel
what you think are unbreakable bonds, whisper secrets to one
another at night, enjoy a beer together after work, however it is
that you share life together. Then you notice the crowd begins to
thin. With all those who are left, all you have to talk about is
the past. You see them at weddings, but you lose them that way too,
and to their jobs, to lymphoma, to simple apathy.

Along with each of these
losses, whether gradual or sudden, you lose not only a friend but
an entire vocabulary. In the time spent sharing space and life with
another, a lexicon develops that no one outside that inner circle
can penetrate. An almost magical, shared language ripens in the
growth of a relationship. With the death or loss of a friend, you
lose their company, but you also retain something. You retain the
fecund language that you developed with them, rich with nuance,
inside jokes, and meanings which have become so layered and subtle
that you can only but feel them, for they have escaped the
conscious sphere altogether.

But here’s the kicker: it
is a dead tongue, a language you can share with no one else. If you
approach new faces with it you risk alienation. If you never speak
this language again, you do a disservice to your past, and find
that – maybe not all at once, but eventually – you live in a world
entirely in your head that no one cares about any longer. Their
indifference isn’t the result of callousness, though there is
plenty of that to go around in the world. They don’t react because
they don’t and can never really understand. All of those who could
have are now gone.

The world shrinks so slowly
you may barely notice this process, until you find yourself old and
exhausted, sucking oxygen through a tube, a liability to the few
who stuck around. In my case, there was nothing gradual about it,
so I can only imagine at the experience of sliding down the
slippery slope from adolescent exuberance and idealism to infirmity
and obscurity. But in terms of effect, it’s really no
different.

I don’t write any of this
for shock value. It’s a simple point of fact. All the same, this
pleasant line of thought is why I have isolated myself, and it is
why I write. The more I pen my ideas to paper, the less I am stuck
in the reality of that past. I used to think it was the other way
around. I thought that by writing I could put the pieces back
together again. The truth is, the words replace the memories.
Events are replaced with their representations. Today, an entire
year of my life became 7,324 ink characters on paper. One day I
will awake, and my past will be entirely gone, converted to
symbols. Then I will be free of it.

Yet this doesn’t feel much
like freedom. Counting days in my results; stained coffee cups,
stubble that has turned to a full beard, dog-eared books on the
Orphic mysteries piled slowly under my desk. Snowflakes, each
unique, falling one at a time.

Maybe, in a manner of
speaking, the snowfall has already buried me alive. I just haven’t
realized it yet.

December 23rd,
2022

It would seem Judgment day
came nearly eleven years late.

I woke up this morning with
the certain knowledge that it would be my last. I have fallen my
entire life, as if through empty air. Now I can see the ground
rushing up to greet me, and I am almost eager to make its
acquaintance.

But it isn’t just me. The
world is changing: the tide rises a little each day, never
receding. There are terrible floods, fires, hurricanes. Solar
storms. The constant catastrophe numbs you to the end result. Then
one day you realize you’re about to eat asphalt.

Of all the people in this
crumbling city, I had the most warning. I could have fled and
started yet another life from scratch. Maybe I could have stood out
on the sidewalk wrapped in three layers of thrift store trench
coats, showering passersby with prophetic warnings and a plume of
spit.

We all had our warnings.
This end has been prophesied in our religions, in the newspaper
headlines, and in the countless feverish dreams we choose to forget
upon awakening. It has even happened before, and it will happen
again, when the next civilization comes to its own grinding
halt.

At the end of the lifespan
of a universe, a culture, a life, it is destroyed, and a new one
born. But for it to be born, and for life to be renewed, a divine
sacrifice must be made. On the other side is a new dawn, and a new
world.

One of the oldest myths
that we have tells a story of a God shedding his blood to feed the
crops. He is cloven in two, and redeemed – in the underworld, or at
the bottom of the ocean – by his wife, the great mother. This story
is older than the tales we have of brother slaying brother, older
than the Garden of Eden.

As I look down over the
thirteen stories of open air beneath me, I remind myself of this.
There is no such thing as death. Only dying. Death? Death is a
single heartbeat, but never again. A grain of sand. It is nothing
at all.

What am I? I am that grain
of sand, and I am Dionysus. When the world has need for me again, I
will return. Now comes the hard part: the time for that sacrifice.
Ariadne, I haven’t forgotten my promise.

I have always been afraid
of falling. But I am not afraid now.

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