“Here we are, alone again. It’s all so slow, so heavy, so sad… I’ll be old soon. Then at last it will be over. So many people have come into my room. They’ve talked. They haven’t said much. They’ve gone away. They’ve grown old, wretched, sluggish, each in some corner of the world.”
-The opening paragraph of Death on the Installment Plan (1936), by Louis-Ferdinand Céline…
That I should lie down and hold my rifles in step with the stalks so that they may pass by leaving me undetected… GAD! I’ve overstayed my welcome yet again. Please do march on, men, I won’t be getting up for quite some time. Down in the dirt and mud I hum the Christmas tunes of Hawaii, down with John Wayne, John Ford and Lee Marvin getting slap-happy and Irish-dumb in 1963’s Donovan’s Reef.
I might try and whistle a jazzy “Yankee Doodle Dandy” as the guards and military men keeping marching, not always in lockstep but always together. My head burns… I am made only of esophagus… I’ve been abandoned and cast aside and left to “my own devices”... there are no microwave ovens down in the dirt… GAD! Another one… I keep mixing up the real dirt with the gray matter left behind by these machines… they ate everything in sight… Hungry?... They couldn’t help themselves!... Microbiotics and microchips don’t mix… but once they found animal protein, you could throw in the rag, you knew it was over…
At least I did… decades after more and more mandatory vaccines and physical restriction began to make people sicker and sicker, like factory animals, the nanobot clean-up crew was supposed to pull double duty and pick up bodies along with dusting the windows of skyscrapers. Big mistake… those things didn’t know fish from fowl… Oh, I still remember when the President of… what country was it?... well, not someone I liked very much… Turned to metal dust live on the air… you should’ve seen the faces of all the fat men and women on the street… they knew… they knew they would be the easiest to find!
Oh but they were swallowed up in the clean-up… those bastards left nothing on the bone… of course they were the first to welcome the introduction of artificial intelligence and machine learning and auto-didactic robots that take care of all of life’s messy inconveniences and necessities for us… they should’ve made nanobots that made us leak less… not so many liquids and solids and froths emerging from the human body… every crevice… Hole? Every pore on your skin is a candidate… you don’t become a doctor by going to college, you get it by delivering a baby in the rain while the mother tries to bludgeon you with a yardstick… these have not been easy years…
I must go now… not away, just lower me, I want to see the rest of this madness from below, I want to look up at this maddening folly through glass ceilings and periscopes in a Las Vegas fallout shelter... I should’ve invested in Death… when the markets were still open I was told again and again, “Invest in DETH, invest in DETH, it’s the only thing that’s coming up these days…” What an asinine ticker, I thought… no one wants to invest in finales… besides, death comes faster than you think… no parties, no dramatics, no fireworks… about 100 years ago, or so… maybe 90… it’s hard to remember without Wikipedia… Mr. Céline dropped dead of an aneurysm one day after completing his Rigadoon... it’s been so long since I’ve read any books, seen any movies, listened to any music…all I hear are bombs…
Nobody should’ve trusted technology this much but I suppose it’s no good saying that now… I can’t believe I can still write, still spell… I can’t believe I’m still alive… How?... Why?... The path of least resistance… “Yes yes, get in the octagon…”... They stopped calling them “cages” decades ago, claiming “negative connotations”... I used to pity those who’d scream to their executioners that “history will look down upon you”... Please… as if there will be anyone left to write a history after this… I don’t even know how much of the army is homo-sapien anymore… I lost track a long time ago… it hasn’t been fun living like a mole, but it’s better than the gray death…
You hear rumors down here that make you howl, these tales that make your skin pimple… now, apparently, there is no “just death,” no “natural death”... the cessation of consciousness is no longer common… but no ascension… souls are trapped… suffering eternities inside of ugly metal machines built to withstand bomb blasts several megatons over… “No one could have saw this coming”... Sure… “Believe the science”... no more broad licenses… oh, what am I doing… my life is over… at least I hope so… suicide is painless… but I can’t let the gray death capture my spirit… oh no, I want this all to be over, I want to shoot out all the lights and bring the roof down on them.. Oh, but that won’t do anything… No… Nothing will do anything anymore...
Almost out… oh, the day will come, handsome machine… when all my dreams become reality… reality… reality… reality… reality… reality… reality… reality… reality… reality… reality… reality… reality… reality… reality… reality… reality… reality… reality… reality… reality… reality… reality… reality… reality… reality… reality… reality… reality… reality… reality… reality… reality… reality… reality… reality… reality… reality… reality… reality… reality… reality… reality… reality… reality… reality… reality… reality… reality… reality… reality… reality… reality… reality… reality… reality… reality… reality… reality… reality… reality… reality… reality… reality… reality… reality… reality… reality… reality… reality… reality… reality… reality… reality… reality… reality… reality… reality… reality… reality… reality… reality… reality… reality… reality… reality… reality… reality… reality… reality… reality… reality… reality… reality… reality… reality… reality… reality… reality… reality… reality… reality… reality… reality… reality… reality… reality… reality… reality… reality… reality… reality… reality… reality… reality… reality… reality… reality… reality… reality… reality… reality… reality… reality… reality… reality… reality… reality… reality… reality… reality… reality… reality… reality… reality… reality… reality… reality… reality… reality… reality… reality… reality… reality… reality… reality… reality… reality… reality... reality... reality...
—Follow Nicky Smith on Twitter: @nickyotissmith