Yes. There was Minerva, glowing on her stage. And one of the apes who attended her was speaking into the microphone, explaining her nanobiotic components to the crowd. Just as I started to follow his lecture, another memory surfaced. I was walking on a treadmill, stumbling every time Dr. Dingo fine-tuned my leg-joint hinges. Next I was assembling a LEGO tower. Next holding Spot, palpating his soft fur with my fingerpads.
“Are you okay?” said a voice.
I realized I was slumping, leaning against a woman who stood behind me. I straightened myself. My left leg vibrated. Flecks of gold light shimmered in the air around me, ghostly afterimages of Minerva’s radiant tank.
“Greetings, humans.” Minerva’s velvety voice flowed from wall-mounted speakers. “I am Minerva. I think; therefore, I am.”
“What’s your problem, buddy?” said a man behind me, for my left arm was twitching, striking him against the chest. When I tried to stop it, I felt my right leg buckle.
And then I was rolling on the floor, limbs thrashing, jaw snapping, ocular units vibrating in their sockets. My hat fell off. The crowd gasped.
“He’s having a seizure!” a woman cried.
“It’s not human!” a man screamed.
“It’s a robot!” a child shrieked.
The humans gazed down at me, their faces purple with horrified joy. And then one of the “scientists,” a man wearing a lab coat and an expression of intellectual superiority, was kneeling over me, attempting to secure my flailing limbs with his small hands. Though I could no longer see Minerva, I could feel her electromagnetic aura washing my broken body with healing light. Just as my Sensory EgoSphere began to shut down, I thought I heard her whisper my name.
The End of the World
Monstrous packs of feral dogs,” says Possum, “one thousand curs strong, sweeping through gutted subdivisions, their instincts revived and raging, high on the scent of human blood. And hordes of ex-cons who’ve spent years fermenting in testosterone-drenched prisons — I’m talking twelve-hour-a-day iron pumpers, black-market juicers whose bodies can survive on instant mashed potatoes and rancid Hi-C.”
Possum, a weight-lifting lawyer who subsists on cigarettes and power bars, resembles a corroded action figure. He paces in expensive motorcycle boots. Hyped on Red Bull and something pharmaceutical, he keeps plucking rocks from the road and hurling them at birds.
Like a voluptuous harem woman, Tim reclines in the grass, sipping a Schlitz. Green mountains swell around us. We’re waiting outside Bill’s barbed-wire fence, having driven up to his cabin only to find him gone.
“Where the hell is he?” I say.
“Maybe he’s out hunting for his supper,” says Tim.
“There would be no hope for you, Tim,” says Possum, “as fat as you are. You’d die without air-conditioning and cable. And the second your life-support arsenal of benzos ran out, you’d be a quivering mess.”
“Unless he found some postapocalyptic warlord who needed a jester,” I say.
“Well,” says Tim, “a divorce lawyer’s sure gonna kick some butt in an anarchic dystopia. And like you’re not addicted to Xanax and Adderall.”
“I use Xanax recreationally and the Adderall only to write briefs, an activity that would be obsolete in the latter stages of anarchy.” Possum gazes out at the mountains. “Besides, I’ve got a twenty-year supply of everything in an industrial freezer.”
“Liar,” I say.
“Let’s talk about what will happen to Lisa.”
“I’ll get kidnapped by some filthy road pirate and ravished,” I say, opening another beer.
“Dream on,” says Possum. “With the whole courtship economy collapsed and taboos blasted to hell, every neo-Attila will want a teen concubine. The value of the adultescent thirtysomething will plummet like the dollar, and her life, sans cosmetics, out in the raw elements and carcinogenic sun, will turn her into a crusty troll in no time.”
“This is bullshit,” says Tim. “Nothing’s gonna change. We’ll die in front of our televisions.”
“Don’t have a TV,” says Possum.
“That’s why you spend hours in front of mine,” says Tim. “If civilization as we know it is about to collapse, why bother driving up here?”
“A man should always have several plans of action,” says Possum. “And who knows: if Loser Bands of the Nineties takes off, and the American Empire declines slowly, we could spend the rest of our thirties parodying our twentysomething personas and retire at age forty after pimping our nubile selves.”
“That makes my head hurt,” says Tim.
About a month ago, I got an e-mail from Possum titled “The Child Is the Father of the Man.” In it he quoted Heidegger and informed me that this rich guy he knows from his LA aspiring-writer years is producing a record called Loser Bands of the Nineties. A trust-funded dabbler whose dad just died, the man wants our single “Scorched Tongue.” He knows somebody at Howlhole Records. Plans to hype the release with a farcically glitzy commercial. And he aims to film our old band, Swole, in high cliché, rocking on a roof or brooding by some kudzu-smothered railroad tracks.
“Bill will never agree,” Tim says again.
“Don’t know,” says Possum. “Bet you he’s sick of that Unabomber shack.”
The shack. There it sits, beyond a flurry of trumpet vines, the dream Bill built with his own two hands, a cedar-planked cabin with a shiny tin roof. It’s even smaller than I expected. The front porch boasts a solitary lawn chair, and the relief I feel upon noting this detail takes me by surprise. I peer down the road again, tensed for the sight of Bill’s green truck. It’s been two years since I’ve seen him. It’s been a year since his last letter appeared in my mailbox. Six months ago he called from the only pay phone in Saluda. Christmas Eve. Midnight. He’d drunk a bottle of cough syrup and walked down the mountain on the ice-crusted road.
We avoided certain subjects. We talked about the habits of beasts in winter, where they sleep and what they eat. We speculated on the delirium of hibernation, bears dreaming of sparkling fish, the moist static inside frozen reptile brains. He asked me if I missed the snow.
“Here comes somebody,” says Tim.
But it’s not Bill. It’s the Donkey Man in his fat white truck, carting a trailer of exotic asses: miniatures, albinos, and shaggy Poitous. The Donkey Man waves, smiles as though he might remember that time he gave me a lift to town.
“I like to fool with donkeys,” he’d said, gesturing toward his empire of slapdash barns.
I’d climbed into his truck for the experience — to ride with an authentic old-timer in the rich fall light. I expected yarns and tall tales to stream from his ancient lips. I expected advice on planting by the phases of the moon. But the Donkey Man had said nothing the whole way to town. He seemed to be shrinking as he drove, scrunched down in his Carhartt coveralls.
“What the hell?” says Tim.
“Donkeys,” I say.
“More like mutant poodles,” says Possum.
Possum is also preparing himself for Bill, cooking up extreme survival schemes. What started off as a game last winter has become a key obsession for him. In the thick of a dystopian-film marathon, after Tim had fallen asleep during the endless last stretch of Zardoz, Possum started speculating about apocalyptic scenarios and what each would mean for particular friends of ours. It was fun to imagine Tim, for instance, in the trembling throes of Xanax withdrawal, hurling a hand-whittled spear at a cat. It was hilarious to picture Tim skinning the tom and roasting its carcass over a fire of burning trash. It was fucking sidesplitting to envision Tim sprinting though a blighted urban landscape with the last bag of Cheetos clutched to his chest, a mob of starving mutants hot on his tail.