A long list pops up. I click on one I haven’t seen before.
The movie comes on.
A tidal wave engulfs Manhattan!
Thousands of poets, novelists, painters, movie producers, actors, models, musicians, office workers, and Puerto Rican maids are engulfed in a tidal wave of water. You can hear the screams of dying painters and poets for miles!
Florida is consumed. The elderly and the beautiful are drowned!
Polar bear paws smack the water, and you see them drown!
Penguins are crying in agony!
An ice age begins!
Snow cloaks America!
Millions of dead bodies are covered in ice and snow, frozen solid!
There is no food!
People murder each other for Kit Kats!
It is so cold all the pipes freeze in America at the same exact second and they all break!
All the plumbers have frozen to death and no one is alive to fix the pipes!
The fingers of a small child are black with frostbite, and an old man carrying a Boy Scout knife cuts him up and eats him for what little nutrition he has to offer!
Women and children wearing mittens!
Humans have cut down all the trees for firewood, creating deforestation, which causes mudslides!
Mudslides kill millions!
The pyramid eye of the Illuminati hangs over all of it laughing hysterically!
Total carnage!
Rampant death!
Pestilence!
Evil forces lurk everywhere!
All of humanity dies and nothing is left but their garbage!
Another good movie.
I search ‘9/11 conspiracy.’
A lot of movies pop up.
I click one.
The movie begins.
A man stands before the camera and says, “Your country has lied to you. You are fucking stupid. Is life a Jerry Bruckheimer film? Buildings don’t fall from fire! Those fires couldn’t make that steel melt! This is reality! In reality, in this universe, that would never happen! Don’t let yourselves be tricked! You are smarter than this! There are no terrorists! There is Bush and his Bushies and the Illuminati and they are trying to take away your rights, your freedoms. And you are giving them up! You are selling your mind and soul to the highest bidder for what? You don’t even know! You are Americans!”
The man is screaming this.
Then the man keeps screaming:
“YOU ARE LETTING IT FUCKING HAPPEN!
“YOU ARE LETTING IT FUCKING HAPPEN!
“YOU ARE LETTING IT FUCKING HAPPEN!
“YOU ARE LETTING IT FUCKING HAPPEN!
“YOU ARE LETTING IT FUCKING HAPPEN!
“YOU ARE LETTING IT FUCKING HAPPEN!
“YOU ARE LETTING IT FUCKING HAPPEN!”
This guy is serious.
“The government planned 9/11 and carried it out. You can trust no one. I’m not talking about the government, because there is no government. There is the Illuminati. Secret organizations of Yale graduates that have been working together since the time of Christ to bleed humanity dry of individuality, happiness, and normal human compassion!”
I stop watching YouTube videos, take a shit, and go to sleep.
6
Sasha and I sit in the Paprika Café.
The Paprika Café serves Hungarian food, which is almost like Russian food. They both involve cabbage.
It is a new restaurant in Youngstown. We like the place. It is small and has a nice atmosphere. It kind of smells like cabbage-hell, but you get used to it after a while.
Sasha has no kids or husband, and doesn’t really care about anything. She owns a bar in downtown Youngstown called Sweet Jenny’s, after the Bruce Springsteen song.
“Isabella is supposed to come over tonight,” I say.
“For real? Good job,” Sasha says.
“She won’t come,” I say.
“Do you care?”
“Of course I care. I want to get laid.”
“That’s a good point.”
“I’m trying not to care though. I’m trying to be strong and think about other things, like video games and washing dishes.”
“That sounds like a lot to think about.”
“Seriously, do you think she’ll come?”
“She’s a junkie. Do you have any coke?”
“No,” I say.
“Then probably not. Cokeheads date cokeheads. You know the rules.” She eats a spoonful of cabbage soup and says, “This is great cabbage.”
“It’s cabbage. How do you fuck up cabbage?”
“You can fuck up cabbage.”
“All cabbage tastes the same.”
“Maybe.”
“I don’t feel like I can live anymore.”
“What the hell does that even mean?”
“It means that when I walk around this planet, I keep getting the urge to blow my brains out.”
“You don’t have a gun.”
“You need to take me and my suicide seriously.”
“Listen motherfucker, you keep reminding me of Lizaveta. But from Lizaveta I know that people who are going to kill themselves don’t sit around and talk about it like sack-asses.”
“I know, I’m not going to kill myself.”
“No shit. Quit reminding me of Lizaveta,” Sasha says.
“Why can’t we talk about Lizaveta?”
“Because she’s dead.”
“What’s wrong with dead people? Are we just supposed to forget them now that they are dead? Pretend their lives never occurred?”
“I feel guilty.”
“Who doesn’t feel guilty? We let her go nuts and die. We watched her disintegrate, we watched her go nuts, we watched like complacent assholes as our sister leaped off the precipice into a pit of jackals, to drown in madness!”
Sasha looks down at her food and says, “That was mean.”
A single tear falls from Sasha’s left eye.
I say, “We didn’t do anything. We watched her die. She’s dead.”
“What are we supposed to do?”
“I guess nothing. But we could at least mention her once in a while.”
“There’s no point. If she wanted to be mentioned, she wouldn’t have killed herself. You can’t shit-talk about the dead unless they are poets or politicians. Shit-talking dead people who aren’t famous doesn’t seem right.”
“No, it doesn’t,” I say.
“Sometimes I dream about her. She doesn’t talk in the dreams. She doesn’t look at me either. I don’t want her to look at me. If Lizaveta ever looked at me in one of my dreams, I would wake to kill myself. I couldn’t even look at her toward the end. She was ruined. I couldn’t look at her ruins. It didn’t make me feel better. Usually I feel somewhat better when someone is doing worse than me. But that was
too
worse.”
“I didn’t really know her.”
“I did. She was all right. I remember playing in the yard a lot when we were little and doing shit like that. But you know how high school is. Everyone goes their own way. Everyone thinks they are awesome and has to be cool.”
“I got laid more in high school.”
“It is hard to get laid after you’re twenty-two. People start to think they
must
get married, have babies, shit like that. It is like a gun is pointed at their head or something.”
“It’s strange,” I say. “You go through high school and the next four years randomly fucking people, and then when twenty-two hits, it’s like, ‘I gotta get married and have babies.’ When I think about most people’s lives, I see it as being made up of a series of escapes. They face reality and escape. They face it again and escape, and face it and escape, then die.”
7