... Ignorance is bliss said the frosted cursive writing on the school house window, on every window, on every alternating window, one could be read from the inside, the next read from without.
And now children, in your own words, can you repeat back to me what we have learned about our origin story.
“There was a magic cherry tree and we found it and it’s ours and He ate the magic cherries and he did not chop it down, it just fell and He cannot tell a lie and nobody else can either, and the Warren Commission, 9/11 Commission and The Commission of Letters, scratch n’ sniff, dot to dot, rhyming words, word find, fractions and colors, whole numbers, consonants, Education and High Honors takes care of us ... and we flew way up there and never went back because we don’t want to ...”
“Amen goddamnit, children.”
“AMEN GODDAMNIT.”
FOUR
And here's to you, Mrs. Robinson.
The fighter jets roared over the stadium.
The people cheered and raised their fists and hopped up and down, spilling nachos and cheese over themselves and those in front of them.
The singer at home plate began to sing.
Oh, hey, can you see, by the hmm, hmm, hmm, hmmmmm.,
What so loudly we hmmed at the hhmm, hmm, hmmm SCREAMING!
Moose, mauve stripes and tight cars, through the peri-hmm FIGHT!
And the socks they go there, they don't go in there, they never went in there! How would you ever, in your wildest dreams think they go in there!
And poof went the light and that’s our frigidaire...
O say, does thaa-at star-spangled baa-anner ... hey, there goes Da-aave!
O'er the band called Be-eee-Geeees ... and the home ... of the ... slaves.
They don't know the words. They don't even know the words.
They don't even know the words.
The People. The People. The People.
Of course, The People are not all that.
It feels like they are not all that they could be or even that they are. They really don't know shit, don't do shit. They do scramble and scratch and crawl to get themselves through the day. And if surviving is a virtue then, so, yeah.
If truth or something like it be told, there are only Some. Some who have it within themselves to shine like a star, for whatever reason, for however long, for however brightly, and then maybe even they say, fuck it.
So, yeah.
But The People, for the most part, they ain't about nothin'.
Just sayin'.
And that, of course is one way to look at it, to view this story.
Any story is also inhabited by the people you do not see. They are also there, but in the background, getting water, gathering sticks. You of course see the Bezukhovs and Bolkonskys, but you do not see the Gruzinkys, the Ageykins and Semenovs. There is no time for them.
It was a time of dark.
A time of American Culture.
Super Heroes And Not. Stupid and Savant.
Some gave all, some gave a few, some gave ... hard to say, some gave some, somewhere else, something, some day, somehow, some gave more than that but not that much, some gave a bit, all gave who knows and a few gave upwards of.
The churches still supposedly worked for the Thou Shall Not Kill CEO while shrouding the altars with American flags and middle managers wearing USAF pins in their robes.
It was a time not unlike other times since Who Knows When. Nobody knew they were going to die. The cars and the TV shows and the commercials and the fighter jets went so fast that nobody saw the cemeteries. And so it was important to have enough money for a comfortable retirement or to work fifty years at a job in order to have six months free, sitting in front of the TV eating Doritos and napping during the commercials.
And what went on anywhere else was anybody's guess.
It was the time of fat.
And stupid.
An epoch of fat and stupid. Millions of years later, a chunk of land would fall and you would see the layers in the clay, and there, there was the time of fat and stupid.
It was also a time of skinny and smart.
Also tall and short, and of round holes and square pegs and everyone rushing to be the round peg in the round hole and not everyone getting there in time and having to stand around, being square pegs and there is nothing, really, for a square peg to do and so you don't.
It was a time of watching and reading and listening and learning and eating and gradually becoming perfectly round pegs to fit into the round holes.
A time of upside-down and topsy-turvy and someone turning the big round cage with all the numbers and letters inside and when it stopped, but it never really stopped, but when the numbers and letters popped out, rolled out, were drawn out and laid down in a row, nothing made sense and that was the game.
It was a time of passive verbs and flags being hauled from full mast to half-mast so fast and so often that wildfires resulted.
It was a time of a black Marine standing at the center of the arena in full dress uniform and everyone standing and cheering for what he had done and why he had done it and nobody knowing what he had done or why he had done it, least of all the Marine. And as he walks off the floor after the timeout he waves and smiles and the crowd waves and smiles back and they all poop their pants for real they are so happy because this beer is great and man these seats, and so they high-five.
It was the time of dark coming over the planet and nobody caring, just wanting to go to sleep, to eat, to run, to drink, to some day being able to sit for six months in front of a TV eating Doritos.
It might have been the time of the FBI agent who shot the woman standing in the doorway holding her child, the same agent and sniper who shot those trying to flee from the fires of Waco, of that agent being stuffed and standing in the lobby at Mount Rushmore.
But it was not that time.
It was the time of waiting for something else to do.
Of not wanting to do what you were doing but doing it because you have to.
You have to. You have no choice. You must sit here until you may go sit over there. You must pay this money, turn over this money even though you do not want to pay for what you are paying for because if you do not, then you will not get to do the thing later, in a few minutes or this afternoon or next month that you want to do. And when that finally happens and you are doing that thing that you paid for by paying for what you did not want to, when you are doing that then you are thinking about the next thing.
And by that hop-scotching you are able to make it to the cemetery.
And what happens there is anybody's guess.
Presumably hop-scotch in the dark.
... The 15-year-old Mount Jennifer Taco Bell girls softball team placed third in the weekend tournament at Mount Carl.
They would have placed second or maybe first, but they didn’t. They placed third.
And on page six of the weekly Wednesday Miracle everyone would have learned, but nobody read it, that ten thousand children in central Africa had died from starvation and that ten thousand more would die in the coming week.
On the green, chipped tables outside the Liberty City Swimming Pool fat people sat licking ice cream cones and wiggling their toes to get rid of the little red ants.
A woman and a man were on one side of one table. She wore a one-piece cherry red suit, with bits of hair like cactus poking out between her legs.
The man wore jean shorts with the ends frizzled. His knees glowed red.
The “lunch area” slumped outside the chain link fence around the square pool — two picnic tables outside the snack bar, which was part of the pool building complex that also included changing rooms and bathrooms and showers.
The lifeguard blasted her whistle at someone taking too many warm-ups on the diving board.
A droplet of sweet sweat formed on the forehead of the woman. It sat there, stuck for a moment in a crevice.
Just at that moment a unit of U.S. Marines opened fire on a group of civilians north of Kandahar. They walked up to their kill and bent down to claim jewelry, sun glasses, rings.
The pool was full of splashing and open mouths, like a trout farm tourist trap on the highway.
A very similar sweat droplet like the one on the woman formed on the forehead of the man.
He breathed deep to catch his breath.
The lifeguard blasted her whistle again to signify break time, everybody out.
The man and woman looked at each other and then at their children.
The droplets of sweat grew ever larger as the sun settled into two o’clock. No clouds were visible in the light blue.
Both beads of perspiration began to move, heading intuitively for the nose passageway.
Both man and woman began to breathe heavily. They looked at each other.
The woman licked sweat from her upper lip with a cow tongue.
A man, a woman … now three children, slid on their bellies on the rocks and burrs, under the fence and looked both ways, then sprinted across the opening, just as the white and green Border Patrol SUV pulled out from behind the bushes, throwing rocks the size of hand grenades … with lights flashing.
The ball of salt water on the woman’s nose skidded down, flew off the nose and slid over her sumptuous closed, chewing mouth.
She stared out over the parking lot like a Holstein on afternoon break.
She ran her red tongue out long and licked the runny, melting, spent ice cream cone, keeping the bottom from dripping onto her gigantic, powerful thighs and looked over at her man.
She adjusted a strap on her suit by repositioning her bottom on the flaking bench.
In the meantime his sweat pustule leaped from his nose to his belly and held tight to a clump of hair, peering down into the black hole in the belly.
He wheezed, coughed and tried not to stop breathing.
Her sweat found its way down and around the chin and whooshed playfully over the moguls, down her neck, where it rolled and rocked like a small boat in an ocean storm, ending up on her bosom where it stared into the darkness.
He looked at her and she at him, letting their accumulated sweat fall over their chests and legs, leg rash and red knees.
They breathed deeply and stared at each other, mouths partially open for air, like carp left on the bank on purpose.
The young U.S. soldier in Afghanistan carefully took aim at another victim as in the desert the woman and man and three children on the border ran, then ran faster. They split, running different directions like rabbits bred to the skill.
The woman stumbled forward, her face and hands plowing up glass and rocks and brambles as the green and white Border Patrol vehicle balanced on two wheels to make the dirt corner, skidding to a stop, a dusty front tire just feeling her left temple like the killer toying with his victims before the denouement.
The lifeguard blew her whistle signaling that break time was over.
Like frogs escaping the feet of a hiker the swimmers leaped into the water.
The woman opened her lips wide, let loose her longing, lapping, wet tongue, welcoming in the rest of her dripping, soppy, saggy, lifeless cone.
She chewed once and swallowed.
The image of the cone moving down her throat.
The man snorted and coughed and bent over to spit.
He grabbed his knees and looked as if he might vomit, then sat straight to wipe his face with the back of his hand.
The two got up to go back into the pool area as the children wiped their sticky fingers on the grass