I pause, waiting for a response to my presence.
No response.
“Has anyone seen three men?” My voice echoes over the silence. The sound seems stale.
Nobody answers.
“One pirate-like Asian, one in a suit, and one vampire-looking wannabe German?”
Nobody even turns around.
“I’m talking here.”
Nothing.
Patience…
Then I get an answer:
One of the customers speaks without turning to me. His words slip out from under a bushy handlebar mustache, whisper softer than the breath that carries them. “We heard you. Nobody’s seen anyone here. Nobody ever sees anyone here.” His voice has no sensation.
Another one, an old man, whispers, “You should be quiet. Nobody talks here.”
“Why doesn’t anyone talk here?” I crusty-ask without whispering. I’ve always been annoyed by whisperers.
“Nobody ever talks in Silence,” the third one answers.
My eyes curl about. The bar rolls in my vision.
The bartender remains silent.
I don’t understand them. I say, “I don’t understand you.”
“You’re inside of the Silence,” he says. “The Silence has eaten you away from your friends and put you in her belly. You are not dead, however. And you will not be dead for as long as you keep quiet. If she doesn’t hear any noise inside of her belly, she will think there is no food. She will figure you are part of her and forget about you. Otherwise, she will digest your meat and you’ll be excreted as part of the wind.”
“I don’t understand,” I say. “I go to this gas station all the time. And it has never been quiet here before.”
“What gas station?” one asks.
“The one outside. You’re all cracked on dippy bobs, aren’t you?”
“I’ve never heard of your gas station, nor dippy bobs,” another says.
“All of you, be quiet,” whispers the bartender, cop voice.
“You can see the back of it from outside the window,” I say.
I try peaking through the window but I see blackness; the glass doesn’t seem transparent. Huff-frustrated, I open the door and point to the station’s backside.
“See,” I say, still pointing.
None of them speak. They ignore me.
“You’re all crazy.”
I go back to the front of the gas station, afraid that it has disappeared. But it’s still there and so is the Gremlin autocar. Mort, Vod, and Christian are back, smoking cigarettes on the pavement, drinking some fresh-bought Creamed Corn Pale Ale.
When they ask me where I’ve been, I say, “Taking a piss.”
When I ask them where they’ve been, they say, “Smoking a bowl.”
The air is still silent as ever, and the surroundings are as dark as before, but I feel safe enough to realize that the old crazies in Humphrey’s Pub really were just old crazies. We get back into the autocar and head for Satan Burger, drinking beers and singing All For Mr. Grog.
Back at the gas station, Mort asked, “Why is everything dead here?”
Back at the gas station, Christian answered, “Because it’s 3:00 in the morning, guy. Nothing stays awake this late anymore.”
“Except Satan,” I said, back at the gas station.
Nan and Lenny are driving in the silence too. There’s no sound coming from the wind. It should be hitting them through the open windows right now. No sound from the outside at all. Like everywhere else, the road is empty-dark. There are streetlights all down the road, but none of them have turned on. Even the lights don’t care about anything anymore. They stare at Lenny’s autotruck and shrug.
“Have you been to the walm?” Lenny asks Nan.
“No, have you?” Nan seems to care less.
“I went with Stag the other day. It’s weird as hell. There are somethings going in and somethings coming out — mostly coming out. It’s guarded by these fish people with wings and large brains. We also saw this creature that had a blank face: no physical features or any hair. Stag called it a Dance, a heavenly creature whose only purpose in life is to dance across eternity. He said he read about them in mythology class.”
I’ve heard of the Dances as well. They are ignorant (innocent) beings similar to humans, but have no mouths or ears or eyes or noses. The only sense they have is feeling, so the only thing they can do is dance and screw each other, trying to produce as many Dances as they can populate. Usually, they over populate to drive their race as far from extinction as possible, since it is not very hard for a blind and deaf mute to go to its death.
We call them Dances because they appear to dance in the sun on the mountains — blind, deaf, and mute — but they are not really dancing. They are eating sunlight. The dancing motions are similar to the motions our arms make when eating sausage with a fork and a knife; the only difference is they’re eating solar energy. And when the sunlight gets digested and goes through the tubing to the exit, it is dumped as a shadow. In fact, thirty-four percent of the world’s shadows are now produced from Dance droppings. Some Arizona businessman used to harvest the energy waste and sell it for BIG profit during the blistering hot Arizona summers. He called his product Shade in a Can.
“Sounds boring,” Nan says about the walm.
“No, it’s great. You should go there sometime.”
“Lenny, I’d bash my face into a brick first. Why the hell would I care to go see a bunch of disgusting walm people? You’re the only person I know who enjoys learning about other cultures.”
“I’m the last anthropologist, you can say.”
“I never cared there was a first one,” she says.
Lenny’s autotruck goes up the scorpion fly hill and down to the scene of an accident, which is shrouded in silence. No one has arrived before them.
“Is that Stag’s car?” Lenny asks, knowing the answer.
They park next to the wounded autocar. The thing’s been torn in half by an aluminum tree which is now leaning out of its roots. Pieces of engine have been sewn into the soils for nature to grow them into new autocars.
Nan darts out of the truck, asking a tree, “Where is Gin?” but the tree is still unconscious. She doesn’t bother to ask the jogger that is strapped to the roof, because it is very obvious that he is dead.
Lenny finds Stag on the other side of the autocar covered in black loam and tree sap, with his skull broken indoors and all the blood dried to a film on the outside of his body.
“Stag’s dead,” Lenny says.
Stag is not dead, as I told you before. He is unconscious without a heartbeat.
But we can’t blame Lenny for thinking this, because it is a very common misunderstanding to take a sleeping someone who has no heartbeat for a dead someone. Doctors, coroners, morticians, even grave-diggers all make the same mistake on a daily basis. If you haven’t got a heartbeat, I suggest that you don’t sleep so much because eventually someone will think you are dead and either cremate you or bury you. And I assure you, waking up to find out that you’ve been cremated or buried is no way to start your day. I especially stress that you don’t sleep in the middle of the street, floating in the swimming pool, hanging from a noose, curled up in a bathtub with a toaster, holding an empty cup of liquid plumber, or lying on the kitchen floor with a knife stuck in your back.