And as the wind passes, there is silence.
However, neither of the two drunkards actually died, because right before the autocar made contact with the tree, something supernatural happened. There was that blinding flash, the sharp orange light similar to a lightning flare.
Richard Stein said that sometimes a god will give his people a message, or sign, to alert them of something he has done wrong. The sign can be a lightning flare, frogs raining from the sky, a long extinct animal found in a public place, or the ocean turning to fire. If one of these four things happen, it is safe to say that God is trying to communicate.
What God was trying to tell the world’s people with this lightning flare is that Heaven is full and there’s no room for any more souls, so He’s made the decision to discontinue the performance of dying to save His home from overpopulation.
Meaning: death doesn’t exist and everyone is immortal, including Stag and Gin who would’ve been dead if this had been yesterday or even minutes prior.
Now Gin’s face is in the dirt, tasting some soil and a bug who is tasting him back. His heart is no longer beating; he thinks he is dead. He can’t feel any of the physical pain that he should be feeling. His thoughts spark-flicker through his eyes and he can feel them moving about inside of there. It seems the only body part that still has nerves is his left eye. Extremely sensitive, the eye even hurts once his thoughts become nervous, stabbing through his brain to the eye as they panic.
And the only thing he can hear is the silence. Growing so loudly, it hurts.
My vision shifts into Vodka’s autocar:
I find my corpse alone, sleeping there. All of the car doors are open, letting the lifeless kind of air get a hold of my shivering nerves, tottering breaths.
Hesitating the cold, I don’t enter my body right soon. I just stare at it (me) and explore the flesh. It is without color or muscle, just bags of grease-goo hanging from the nerves. My facial skin is tight to the bone; I am sick-ugly, healthless. The God’s Eyes go closer into me, to within an inch of my face.
My eyelids jerk.
It is strange how nobody ever sees their own eyelids jerk. People go through their whole lives living with jerking eyelids but never get a chance to really see them jerking. It’s only common for someone else to see your eyelids do this. Even when looking in the mirror, there’s no way, because eyelids only jerk when they are closed, and not a single person out there can see with closed eyelids. Well, I am seeing this performance now, but I don’t actually consider myself a single person out there, so I don’t count.
It’s interesting to see your own eyelids jerk, I tell you, because they are jerking in response to certain thoughts — thoughts that bring out emotions powerful enough to twitch-jerk the lids. And usually when you watch this happen to yourself, the emotional thought hits you twice as hard and makes your entire being twitch-jerk. But this time my entire being did not jerk, which means I’m becoming alien to my emotional thoughts. I think this is a bad thing.
I look again and find that my complete body is hardly familiar to me, almost a stranger. So many years of neglect that I’ve turned sour-soggy and ill without realizing. I can’t bear to go back inside of myself anymore. And the worst part is — I know I have to in order to survive.
This will never change.
After a lot of convincing, I go inside my body — back to the rolling world. I touch my stranger flesh and become sick. Best not to think about it; I’m always too aware of my defects. Better to ignore… Then I get a sick spell from a giant whirlpool-waver on the autocar’s eel-skin interior, so I change to the outside.
I crack my knees to the pavement, cough-cough, choke my vision away… My voice croaks… a short groan… Then I relax. Relaxation is the key. The spell sifts to a mild swirl, all pacific inside.
I am at a gas station, the gas hose still inside of the gas tank, glunking-glunking it full. The emergency lights are going blink, questioning their purpose. And their purpose, of course, is to make you ask it questions.
“Where did everyone go?” I ask the emergency lights.
The lights say, “Blink-blink, blink-blink.”
Then I notice the whole gas station is empty. The lights are all gone. Only the bright flickers above the gas pumps and the lights that say “Please pay inside” brighten my walk, but it is dark inside the store, nobody there, and all the surrounding buildings are dark and empty too. The street lights also seem to be burned out. It’s like the whole town is saying, “Sorry, we’re out of service.”
Coldly silent.
The silence is muscular. It is a force that has eaten away all forms of sound, excluding my breath, my footsteps, and the blinkers. Like Mr. Death is creeping, stalking me. All signs of life have been taken away as well, stored inside of Earth’s closet beneath the surface, and the dusty emptiness that is usually in Earth’s closet is here with me now, along with plenty of closet skeletons.
Silence is the first stage of slipping into oblivion, objects just stop making sounds for you. Here are the other four stages: nothing will be smelled or tasted, nothing will be felt, nothing will be seen, and nothing will be thought.
Richard Stein said that oblivion is the worst possible thing that can happen to an individual, worse than going to hell. He said there is little difference between reincarnation and oblivion because in both cases you lose all your memories, and it’s better to go into damnation and keep those memories than have them forgotten permanently.
He also goes on to say that Alzheimer’s is the worst possible disease you can get since it erases all of your memories, which do not return even after you die. People that go into oblivion are usually the people that have a bad case of Alzheimer’s. So, word of advice: if you know you’re going to have this disease in the future, it’s a good idea to kill yourself now, before it comes. Sure you’ll go to hell for committing self-murder, but it’s better than nothing.
I feel the oblivion all around me. Maybe it has taken my friends and all of the other people in the town to it’s home — to nowhere. And it has forgotten all about me. Lucky me, all alone in an empty world with no sound, with a spin-wheeling picture.
It’s so cold now. There’s no wind but it’s still freezing, even for New Canada. My teeth start chattering. It scares me at first. I’m not used to having my teeth chatter in me. Maybe they are trying to communicate, to tell me there is something wrong with this place and to leave immediately.
“CHATTER, CHATTER, CHATTER,” my teeth scream at me. But I don’t seem to leave.
I begin to look for my friends.
All the nearby streets are closets. I do not take them. The buildings behind the gas station look more admitting: a slight light shining from that direction. Once I go, I see all but one of the windows are darkened, still silent. An alley of vacant crabwebs and pallid scraps of plastic dolls.
The only lit building looks like this:
A wood shack structure with one window and one door. It has no sound coming out of it, but there is a dull light. The structure blends in with all the alley garbage. It is moist from rain, malodorous, stodgy. There is a sign that comments, Humphrey’s Pub, looks to be made from the aluminum of beer cans and black house paint.
I enter to a small room made for no more than ten sitting or eighteen standing. There are four people inside of here, but it still seems as lifeless as the outside. They are bundled up in snow clothes, seem to be Russian. One man is a waxy-faced bartender, polishing his beer steins, and the others are on stools, nodding at their drinks. The only noise they make is a tipping of their mugs.