Monthly Archives: August 2012
New Müsic Friday: debating faith with The Ocean
New Music Friday is a tradition that my brother and I have shared since I left home to attend college. Every Friday (or as often as we are able), we trade albums that we believe will be worthy of discussion or debate. They don’t have to be new releases – just new to both parties. Sometimes we come across music that is just too interesting to keep to ourselves, and so I will share here, for you, dear readers, my impressions of a recent New Music Friday listening session.
This week’s selection: twin concept albums Heliocentric and Anthropocentric from The Ocean.
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The Ocean (sometimes referred to as The Ocean Collective) is a heavy, sludgy, experimental metal band from Berlin. These two albums were released in April and September of 2010, respectively, and were my first real exposure to the band. Musically, they remind me of other acts like Between the Buried and Me (aggressive vocals and thoughtful lyrics), Ihsahn (spooky saxophone) and ISIS (sludgy riffs), as well as a dash of Hurt (piano and violin interludes) and, if you can believe it, a single track (“Ptolemy Was Wrong”) that reminds me of Coldplay’s “Fix You.”
But lyrically, they are like nothing I’ve ever listened to.
Both of these albums tackle the tricky subject of religion. I hesitate to say most (but let’s face it; I’d be right) metal bands out there attack Christianity with about as much poise and finesse as an underage drinker parking his mom’s Toyota in the produce section of the local Wegmans. They pose and posture and create such intense impressions of Godless heathens that they end up looking like laughable parodies of themselves (I’m looking at you, Cradle of Filth. And you, Dimmu Borgir – although I found your 2010 album Abrahadabra to be uncharacteristically thoughtful.).
The Ocean has instead constructed two albums that critique Christianity and indeed, faith in general, in an exceedingly grown-up manner. They don’t rail against God and Providence – they attempt to understand Him and His, and find out along the way that the Christian Argument doesn’t hold a lot of water.
It’s heavy stuff, and it’s certainly not for everyone. But no matter what your religious persuasions are, it remains a moral imperative, as far as I’m concerned, to step outside our comfort zones regularly and immerse ourselves in perspectives that differ from our own.
I think the point at which the lyrics started demanding my absolute and undivided attention was “Metaphysics of the Hangman,” from Heliocentric, as it was the first pointedly critical song on the album. Following it up is “Swallowed by the Earth,” which seems to be using the Old Testament flood as a condemnation of God’s oftentimes disturbing idea of morality. Bass riffs reminiscent of Tool abound here. But natural disasters are one of the go-to arguments against the “loving and caring god” theory. So is there nothing new here?
I’m not exaggerating when I say that tracks 9 and 10 – “The Origin of Species” and “The Origin of God” – are two of the most important songs I’ve ever heard in my life. I said earlier that these albums are thought-provoking on every single level. Let me explain one of these levels.
Screaming. There are thousands of bands in the world that utilize vocals like these; some better than others. But as I listened to these albums, I was, for the first time, debating the purpose of death metal vocals. Oftentimes the subject matter of a so-called “screamo” or “hardcore” or “black metal” – or any genre with “death” as a prefix or “core” as a suffix – doesn’t really gel with the vocal delivery. Mikael Akerfeldt of Opeth has always understood this; his music would not make the kind of sense it does if he screamed every single lyric. It seems to me that deep and guttural screaming needs to be used sparingly to mean anything at all; you can’t scream about everything and expect to be taken seriously. It would be like typing everything you ever write with caps lock on. No one wants to read that. No one will ever give you the time of day.
I am not, generally speaking, a fan of this vocal style. But there are a handful of artists I love that do it spectacularly well. Full disclosure: I found some of the death vocals on these albums to be distracting and unnecessary. That is, until I got to “The Origin of Species.” I feel that using such harsh vocals on this track go beyond a stylistic choice and become representative of a veritable crisis of faith; the narrator admits as the song opens that it’s difficult to imagine the world coming into being without an “engineer” and then begins to systematically dissect and defeat his own premise. Damn! That’s the most metal thing I’ve ever heard! How could he *not* be screaming until his throat bleeds? As he wrestles with his own interpretation of the world around him, he reminds us that no one on earth can begin to fathom the hugeness and complexity of the natural processes we pretend to be able to understand. Our lifetimes, after all, are just an instant. The universe will never know we were here.
But that’s not enough. It’s followed up with “The Origin of God.” I knew I was in for a ride as soon as I read the title.
“A prime mover only shifts the problem.” Holy hell, this is brilliant. Let’s face it: belief in God is a cop-out in so many ways. In grappling with our origins, mankind chooses to cleave to the belief that some man in the sky created us. Like Richard Dawkins (who they later quote), in Ben Stein’s 2008 documentary Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, citing alien intervention in the creation of the human race.
But where did God come from? This track makes me realize that this question, which I’ve wondered idly about since I was a child, and have managed to be satisfied with evasions or non-answers, is actually the single greatest blow to religion, and probably the most important question anybody could ask.
I’m not sure I’ve ever been tempted toward a crisis of faith by metal before… and God knows how many metal bands there are out there who have tried… poorly. I quite simply am astounded at how well this band vocalizes the questions that have always been in the back of my mind, that I’ve never been able to ask, or didn’t know how to ask, and the answers to which I’ve always, on some level, feared.
And that was just the first disc. Deep breath.
The opening/title track of Anthropocentric is ferocious right out of the gate. And the screaming here represents…what? Triumph? Perhaps. A man finally come to terms with the questions he’s been asking. As I listened to this album, I was jotting down quotes that struck me particularly hard. This song has several of them:
“[Christianity's] legacy of fear and submissiveness prevails in many brave man’s heart and soul.”
“Condemned to inertia.”
He’s putting Christians in their place, isn’t he? And it makes me wonder if it isn’t the ultimate expression of narcissism to believe that mankind is sanctified and blessed and singularly important in this gigantic, unfathomable universe.
The airtight arguments continue in “The Grand Inquisitor II: Roots & Locusts”:
“Who would want to worship such a maker anyway?” In speaking to the notion that mankind was put on earth solely to worship Him (many Christians will tell you that this is our singular purpose), the singer asks the simple question: is such a being worthy of our praise?
“It is not God that I do not accept; it’s this world of God’s, created by God, that I cannot agree to accept.” An interesting turn here. There’s a faint suggestion that the notion of God is not at the root of the problems he describes, but instead he objects to the circumstances that God allows to exist and persist, despite the fact that He’d have us believe that He is loving and just. These are familiar arguments, but here they somehow feel fresh and novel and yes… haunting.
“Sewers of the Soul,” while musically not as interesting as other tracks, and in fact slightly tedious, has some of the most important lyrics: “Christianity has been from the beginning life’s nausea and disgust with life… merely concealed behind, masked by, dressed up as faith in ‘another’ or ‘better’ life.” This is brilliant. And it makes the image of millions of Americans getting up early and going to sit in pews among other believers every Sunday to get in God’s good graces and one day escape this mortal coil look so suddenly depressing, craven, and possibly insane. He reminds us that we ought to make every single second of this life count; it is, after all, the only life we can ever be sure we’ll have. Anything else is a gamble.
The main character in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, after expounding his convictions and moral beliefs and describing the truths and absolutes that define his life, is asked, “What about the afterlife?” His (paraphrased) answer: “This is the life I am living, right now. I am concerned with no other.” Something I’ve often thought about.
“The Almightiness Contradiction” is another headtrip and an awesome closer for these two albums, and another nearly airtight argument. “For if He knew everything, He could not do anything different from what He knows.” God is, then, either omnipotent or omniscient; He cannot be both.
I was reeling as the final notes played out. I don’t know if I’d say that my faith is actually shaken, but I know that this is the closest I’ve ever come. I find myself torn between two ideas:
(1) Unanswered questions are what life is all about. That’s why they call it “faith.” Faith is the name we give to filling in the gaps of our very imperfect knowledge with unquantifiable beliefs that, in truth, have no basis in reality and can never be tested or verified.
(2) Nothing about God adds up; belief in Him is not an answer in and of itself, and organized religion is a deeply imperfect, hollow, and ultimately meaningless exercise that gets us no closer to heaven than we already are.
There are profound and simultaneous feelings of joy and absolute horror to be found in reveling in such huge questions. And I suppose that in a weird way it takes the pressure off; these albums are a reminder of just how small we are, and that we don’t understand anything at all in the grand scheme of things. And maybe life’s ultimate goal is to learn to be okay with that.
Christians and agnostics alike learn different versions of humility: Christians humble themselves with the knowledge that there is a power greater than our comprehension, who set the worlds in motion. We are as nothing compared with Him. Agnostics are humble in the understanding that they (and humanity as a whole) are powerless to understand anything at all, from the origins of the universe to its innermost workings. The march of science and progress will provide some of these answers, but they remain comfortable, somehow, knowing that certainty is a myth.
In short, I don’t think I’ve ever been affected by lyrics quite this way before. The music itself ranges from bold and captivating to dull and uninspired, but at every turn it’s the lyrics that challenge and intrigue and inspire and infuriate me. I was born and raised in a Christian household, and even now it’s the faith with which I associate most closely.
So I think I have an answer to one of life’s important questions: why am I here? Because God allows me to be. To what end? I don’t have a damn clue.
Wonderment is asking questions. Faith is accepting imperfect answers to impossible questions. But without anything to challenge our faith, our answers don’t mean anything at all.
Hobo Was Here (Part I): Coffin Tent, Collapsible Lung
Well, seems you couldn’t get enough of our resident Hobo – an oxymoron if I ever heard one. So, after a four-year leave of absence, he’s a-back. Hard times, people, hard times. Our Hobo – hereafter mostly referred to as “me” – had a change of fortune two or three times over and back again. It seems the Big Hobo in the Sky saw fit to strike me down in the prime of my hobo youth. A mere 30 years old and humbled like a Wall Street con man.
Sometimes people think when that big fellow hits he’s a-gonna wallop you like a thunder strike. Well, there I was, sleepin’ all restful-like in my environs, dreamin’ of the Big Rock Candy Mountain, when little by little I was stirred from my sleep. Just some back pain, I thought. So I rolled over and went back to sleep on that hard-scrabbled makeshift bed o’ mine. Next time I woke up with back pain and fullness in my solar plexus. Now this was highly uncommon for a hobo of my constitution. And the consumption was not afoot in these parts, so far as I knew. So at this juncture – I’m not ashamed to admit – I was afear’d.
First thoughts were the heart attack. For a long time before I switched tracks over to a transient lifestyle I was a self-professed hypochondriac. A bit like Redd Foxx in the Sandford and Son sitcom, I feared the “big one” three or four times a day. But I was a recovering hypochondriac, so I tried awful hard not to panic.
Pretty soon I was in a fix. My split-second list of possible ailments included the heart attack, the pulmonary embolism, the pheochromocytoma, or just plain old hypochondria (otherwise known as “the fits”). But then I remembered my own father’s 30-something spontaneous hemothorax. That’s when your lung just up and starts bleeding on its own, voodoo-like. Then, if you don’t get help, you drown in your own blood. My father’s episode ended with a scared-outta-his-wits junior doctor plunging a scalpel into my father’s chest at the last minute to drain the blood which was more like bursting a blood-filled balloon releasing a shocking six foot crimson geyser, leaving a Pollock-esque souvenir art piece on the hospital ceiling. And he lived to tell the tale. True story. Still smokes non-filtered cigarettes, too. The grizzledest most hardscrabbledest man I ever knew.
Upon this consideration, my hypochondria was held in check and I resolved to break camp early and ride my bike to the emergency room. If a hobo can’t out-hardscrabble his own father or die trying, why live? I figured the worst that could come of it was a true and worthy hobo death either behind a vacant gas station lot among the overgrown vegetation and water-filled tires with skeeter larvae or on the side of the road – literally in the margins of society, which would leave the hobo poet soul brimming with a deep satisfaction, I might add. It was also a solid test of my hypochondria recovery, which I passed.
I pedaled about eight miles or so – not to the nearest hospital, but to the second-nearest. By the time I passed within eyeshot of the first hospital – a place known for its nuns, reforming alcoholics, and a killing off of the hobo spirit – why, I was hurtin’ bad enough to want to live, but not bad enough to want to die. So I pedaled on further to another hospital known by many a hobo as a place to get warm, vomit, and maybe sober up occasionally. It so happened that this hobo had family employed there, as well – a small comfort indeed.
By the time our Hobo landed, he could barely walk. Standing up straight hurt the most, as it does for many hobos or others in such an ostracized social state. But this was much more than usual. Furthermore, he noticed a peculiar cough, one he likened to a whoopee cushion which rattled as he exhaled. As he breathed for the doctors and nurses who were fussing over him with tubes, electrodes, and other doodads, his heart warmed to the hobo credentials he was earning and he smiled a wide hobo grin of snaggletooth delight. Hobos have a way with descriptions. And this one did not disappoint with his whoopee lung. It was a whoopee lung’d pedal journey that would be his ticket to hobo hall of fame. This surely could trump his grandpa’s being born six months premature and incubated in a cigar box next to a wood stove, being too poor to know there was a Great Depression on, and living to tell the tale.
Hobo had many reasons to smile. He was yet alive, still earning hobo points while pilfering some creature comforts in an honest to goodness bed. Bathed in a sterile white, and being unknown to the hobo nature, was otherworldly and only added to the heavenly attributes of the entire experience. Mark Twain wore entire suits of white in his older years. Hobo knows why.
It was soon revealed that a spontaneous pneumothorax had visited Hobo in his sleep, and nearly wrested his eternal spirit through a hole in his lung as Hobo, himself, was resting his very transient body.
Spontaneous.
Truly Hobo.
Like father like son.
As it was in the beginning and so forever shall be… and all that other happy horse hooey.
New Incontinence Data Leaked
According to 300 cubic centimeters of leaked data from an incontinence study, aging Americans are twice as likely to urinate before reaching a toilet than they were 15 years ago. The results put to bed the idea that the European continent was the worst sufferer of incontinence. French scientist, Pierre Talet, thumbed his nose as he quipped “Who’s European now, America?”
Still researchers are not certain of what’s causing the increase. “We are now trying to collect more leaked data to determine if the increase is from a larger, older population, more beverage drinking, enlarged prostates, weakened bladders, shorter urethras, sleeping with the hand in a pot of water, or just laziness,” said lead researcher, Dr. Yuri Nader.
Up to 75% of study subjects, mostly middle age adults or older, reported frequent urinary urgency alone, while 15% reported flatulent urgency immediately followed involuntary urination. 7% claimed to not pee all day, citing “stage fright” while in public restrooms, only to report going home in a race against time, which they often lost. The remaining 3% of respondents did not seem to know why they were participating in the study.
First-World Problems #13
People keep telling me to cheer up.
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Some of my friends teased me throughout college because I’d sometimes wear a frown during class. I’d be staring at nothing in particular; just sitting and listening and thinking. I was never conscious of it; I am certain that it was a default expression of mine; eyebrows knitted in thoughtful contemplation, maybe arms folded across chest, all devil-may-care.
“Why do you look so angry in class?” They’d ask me. “Why do you frown so much while you brush your teeth?”
“I’m not angry,” I’d answer. And it was always the truth. Well, almost always. But people tend to notice when I’m angry. I tend to notice.
A woman at work the other day – somebody I’d never spoken to (I didn’t know her name and still don’t) – asked me, not exactly politely:
“Are you always that intense?”
She asked this based solely on whatever expression was on my face. My answer should have been something like this:
“I’m at work. What the hell is there to be grinning about?”
But I turned it into a joke, like this:
“I’m at work. I’m in the zone. It isn’t any fun in the zone.”
She just looked at me like I’d threatened to shoot up a post office.
What the hell kind of thing is that to say to a perfect stranger? Suppose I accosted somebody I’d never met and asked them any one of the following questions:
Excuse me; do you always look that pregnant?
Hello. Why do you smell like cat poop and raspberries?
Hi! Are you gay? You look pretty gay.
I see people on a daily basis who seem to arrange their faces purposefully in as unpleasant an arrangement as possible. It can’t happen by accident; it’s the sort of expression that takes practice and effort. I stay away from these people. I skirt around them at work, avoid eye contact, avoid anything that might require dialogue. They’re off-putting. They all look like walking great depression-era photographs with a great deal less personality.
So when I am treated like these many dour people, I’m a little offended. I got the usual pleading from my mother to “smile nicely” in photographs, and the same from my father, who was eager to see the return on his investment in my teeth; the cost of my orthodontic treatments throughout the years could have bought a modest palace somewhere in the middle east. Despite this, I’d keep my lips shut and smile with my mouth closed. I have to believe it looked more natural than throwing my mouth wide open in an alarming grin like I’d just discovered masturbation.
But maybe I’m not actually treated the same after all. Perhaps I remain approachable anyway regardless. There’s evidence for this. For some reason I’ll never understand, people want to talk to me. I don’t make any effort to avoid conversation – I just don’t pursue it. A terrible trait for a writer, I’m sure. So I’m astonished anytime someone reaches out to me. What is it about me? I have no idea and I may never know.
But people at work make conversation, and not even what I’d call polite conversation. Which is not to say that the conversation is impolite. What I mean is that it’s not smalltalk. They want to know me. Several of them know details of my recent personal history that one or both of my parents don’t. And I know stuff about them, too. This guy at work – we’ll call him Fred – sidles up to me at startup in the mornings and makes the smalltalk. And then we’re back loading trucks in the afternoon and he’s spilling his guts about lost hopes and dreams and an absentee, alcoholic wife and a gifted kid that he wants to give the world to. He’s 37 years old, and has a perspective that I’ll not have for quite some time. And I value it highly.
And there’s other stuff, too, like the number of times he and his brothers hit each other in the head with shovels and other blunt instruments. One day in his childhood he stole a bike from one of his brothers (he is one of nine children) for a day of riding. That evening as he slept in his bed, the wronged brother snuck up and hit him in the head with a brick. How is it that I know this now? Why must I know this? Fred laughs about it now and I laugh about it. He claims it was even funny at the time, even with all the blood on the pillow and the sheets. I’m torn between wishing my parents allowed this sort of thing to happen under their roof and being real damned happy they didn’t. But I guess I’m glad to have dodged the brain damage bullet. Fred seems to have dodged that bullet somehow, too, though I can’t imagine how.
And there’s “Bruce Lee” Nguyen, a 47-year-old Vietnamese man who I’ve managed to grow close too. He was born without a filter, so he asks me pointed questions about my relationships and for some reason I answer candidly and calmly, glad to have another pair of ears at my disposal. It only got weird after he told me he had a dream about the two of us working in an ice cream factory together. But the creepiness subsided quickly enough and I went back to marveling that this man who’s seen the world for what it is can still have the uncomplicated, joyful dreams of a child.
There are people who were born to share. I’ll never be one of them. I’ll spill my guts if I’ve had a few drinks (it takes considerably fewer now than it did in college) or if I know somebody particularly well. I believe I have a longer than usual warm-up period.
Back to the subject at hand, I have to believe that the expression on my face that my friends (and strangers!) affectionately call “anger” is my face’s neutral state. I’m not about to go around grinning like an idiot. Only people who own windowless vans do that. And it isn’t a scowl that deters or discourages essential human interaction. I’m not conscious of it. I’m not creating a persona. I’ve seen people who do this, who cultivate a personality that is not their own; it’s in their face, in the way they move. And sometimes I see them when they think nobody is watching. And they’re still doing it. They have substituted their personality with a false one – perhaps the most tragic amputation of all.
I am not one of these. I don’t try to appear as anything other than what I am. Not really. Maybe sometimes I bend the truth and maybe I can choose to feign calm when it doesn’t come easily, but that’s really the extend of the deception I’d bring to bear on a perfect stranger.
So much of what we do depends upon our understanding that we exist, physically – that we are seen by others, that we know ourselves to be standing upon this floor with these feet and are holding this box with these hands. What else could we be capable of, if we were not possessed of such a need to accommodate our physicality, to wonder and stress and live and die according to how we are seen by others, and to how we see ourselves?
The Builders by Mendon Kissling
Jingles gunned the plane’s engine and shot over parched farmland. Sweat beads traversed his goggles like lost rain. He clicked the radio’s transmission button for the third time.
“Half-Horse, this is Jingles, requesting permission to drop. Please advise, over.”
He could barely hear the hiss of empty electric air over the shrieking wind. He scanned to Doby’s frequency and transmitted, looking over at his partner across the cloudy gulf. “What the hell’s going on, man? We’re gonna run out of gas up here.”
Doby waved from his plane and cut suddenly towards Jingles in an attempt to tap his wing. Jingles weaved around and over Doby, scraping him with the underbelly of his plane and hearing the satisfying scream of metal over the radio.
“Ha! Just trying to keep you awake,” said Doby. “Nice move.”
“I been tapping wings since… Hell, I used to dust these fields back when they still grew food.”
“Oh, so that’s where you were during the war?”
“Watch it, Doby. The vegetables I dusted fed you kids over there.”
“Sorry.”
They flew for a few minutes in silence, circling their respective jurisdictions. The wind dried their faces and the backs of their hands. The land beneath them looked like their cracked skin, like the reeking chemical-soaked cloth that the Ancient Egyptians had used to wrap their dead.
Jingles unconsciously played with the metal lever that protruded from the floor. He massaged the button that, with just the right pressure, would drop his payload. He pushed it with his thumb, lower and lower, the button’s inevitable click building in his mind, the force of his thumb applied to the worn metal nipple that would open the doors with a weary shout, and then-
“Construction Team Delta Eleven, this is Commander Half-Horse. Permission to drop granted.”
“What the hell took so long?” said Jingles. “We get audited all of a sudden?”
“Negative. Scanners picked up life-forms. Humans. We managed to hail them on an old CB and they refused to leave, so…”
“No, no, no,” said Jingles. “You get them out first, then we build.”
“They’re batshit crazy, Jingles, holed up in a bunker somewhere. They won’t come out. We’d need an armed extraction team, which means holding up an already tardy operation, which means eventually answering to the zoning board. I don’t answer to you. Do it.”
Jingles was about to protest again when a squalling beep and a red light issued from his instrument panel: Doby had started his drop. He pulled away from Jingles and descended toward his jurisdiction, his goggled head squinting at the panels and aligning his approach. Shining metal seeds the size of fists shot out of Doby’s plane like synchronized divers and plummeted toward the earth.
“Jingles, what the hell do I pay you for? Your job-”
Jingles cut his radio and ground his teeth and gripped the worn payload lever til his knuckles cracked.
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Each metal seed was a house.
They penetrated the hard, useless ground and bloomed immediately. They tunneled outward into gleaming metal basements then upward into foyers, dining rooms, and state-of-the-art kitchens. Stairs rolled up and up, past climate-controlled bedrooms and bathrooms, and some terminated there while some kept going and zig-zagged into the optional third-floor extension. At whichever terminus they reached, a compressed bag of plasti-paint exploded and rained upon the houses’ outer walls to lay the first coat of beige while a timed second charge waited patiently for it to dry.
Doby spread his seeds perfectly. He laid the houses in lazy ovals designed to optically calm their residents with a maze-like sense of space. His computer told him he’d left exactly four meters between each home: his first perfect run. Doby hollered and pulled back on his joystick for a celebratory backwards loop. The hot air streamed through the cockpit and dried his exposed teeth as he leveled out, doing 200 kilometers easy, and calculated his next drop.
He’s good, thought Jingles as he watched Doby’s tight loop taken at manic speed. Too bad he’s a fool.
Jingles could see the occupied bunker Commander Half-Horse had spoken of, a long, flat slab of concrete in the path of Doby’s next drop. The bunker had survived this blasted land, sure, but he’d seen the seeds rip through whole city blocks, scattering bricks and rebar while they burrowed and swelled like blood-gorged ticks.
“Doby, you stop it now, you hear me?”
Doby sped away from Jingles and banked towards the bunker with his hand on the drop-lever. “Orders, old man. Maybe if you’d fought in the war, you’d understand.”
Jingles swooped down into a barrel-roll and accelerated until he was almost on top of Doby. His plane shuddered with the extreme speed.
“C’mon, they’re not the enemy! If you pull that lever-”
“What, you’ll kill me?”
Jingles ground his teeth, searched for words, and had found none when the red light went on his cockpit. Doby was starting his second drop.
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God, keep me safe and keep me from killing him.
Jingles shot up between Doby and the bunker to edge him out on the inside curve. Seeds shot from Doby’s underbelly. Their wings touched and screamed. The air shimmered and stank with fumes. Jingles gripped the shaking joystick and banked against Doby. The metal seeds fell wildly around the bunker in too-tight circles and built houses upon houses, welding garages to third floor extensions and shooting stairs to nowhere.
If I can hold him, he’ll run out of seeds.
Doby dropped altitude and swooped under Jingles’s plane. The seeds followed him, bored and cruel as marching ants. They bloomed closer and closer to the bunker.
“You…”
Jingles dived too hard and the engine cut and the propeller stopped. He swore and prayed as his plane leaned forward and fell free toward Doby, his stomach so light, time so slow, the world impossibly bright through his old goggles. He pushed his body back against the torn foam seat. Doby’s plane loomed closer.
Jingles didn’t know if it was gravity or fate that guided his free-falling plane through the back of Doby’s and sheared off his vertical stabilizer. Both, he guessed.
The two pilots fell.
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“You see that? God damn, what a crash!”
“Watch your language.”
“Sorry.”
Jesse and Lisa stood in the shaded doorway of their bunker and watched the mighty plumes of smoke choke the setting orange sun. Lisa rolled a cigarette and lit it with a wood match.
“That’s more than an engine fire. I think they caught a house, too.”
Jesse nodded. He went into the cool bunker and came back with an old Savage rifle in the crook of his arm, and a pick and a shovel roped to his back.
“The kids are all asleep. Let’s go bury that pilot.”
“Just the one?”
“The one that saved us. N-48-6L, it said on the side.”
“Don’t you read the book, Jess?” Lisa stubbed out her cigarette. “If they hadn’t both been there, it wouldn’t have worked out like this. Praise God, look at the house they built us!”
As the sun burned out, Jesse and Lisa walked past the great mansion Jingles and Doby had constructed with their furious banks and turns. Many rooms were fused into a great serpent, with two sets of overgrown stairs that would do well as lookout towers, and who could guess how many living rooms and toilets and state-of-the-art kitchens were hidden inside?
Mendon Kissling is a writer and musician from York, PA.
