The Trial, by Junius

Corpulent Orson sits at the table in silence—

Brimming room coughs and mutters prayer or foregone judgement

In sweat-lodge bother, the melting faces of church ladies

And dust to dust stirrings their throats like dirtpan on the floor—

Other faces voices shoulder limb thumb stuck in stalled machine—

Corpulent Orson sits back in his chair, tumid eye of the room

Bloody, shot, bloodshot and bleary w/ blaring baritone

But no meat to dress these fleshmade words—

Er, the plaintiff has been wrongly accused, er, impugned I mean, for being of unsound mind and/or opinion.

Now whether this may be the case is not up to me to judge, it is my lot to defend this poor, er, innocent fellow.

Esteemed members of the court, divine church ladies of the jury, I quote scriptures when I say let he who is w/o sin cast the first stone.

—Here an objection was made that this excluded the distaff sex—

Objection sustained, er, uh, taken. May only blemishless menschen pummel his guilt to ruddy dust.

All others, I suppose, have at it.

On the Collapse of Civilization

Headlines proclaim the end of human civilization: What sad reminiscences! What quaint anachronism! Human civilization ended way back. We can only conclude that these headlines conceal a deeper fear that human civilization might begin.

***

Consider the viral video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IGJ2jMZ-gaI. Notice the progression: Each ant added its bits of dirt to the pile then burrowed into it, spit-shit cementing the corridors behind it. An enormous, unthinkable monster comes and pours molten metal into this branch-on-branch of antways. Yes, the old order is preserved: Not a single corridor is allowed to fall. But at what cost? For the few surviving ants, can we claim that removing this hunk of aluminum is a “catastrophe”?

The invasive metal must be extracted if the remaining ants are to have space to burrow a new future.

***

Industrial technology--and its resultant forms of capitalism, population ordering, interconnectivity, etc.--is planetary ebola in its final stages: It knows that its last shot at survival is to be spit onto another planet as its current host bleeds out.

***

Industry itself is the new and improved Kaczynski: Watch as an earth-sized pipe bomb detonates itself before your very eyes! Gold reverts to its weight, returns to malleability, and all presidents are usurped by the best supermarket looter in their respective jurisdictions.

***

Afterlife, legacy, pension, tomorrow: Only so many levels of the Big Con. Fuck a heaven, an enduring name, carefree old age, a “better tomorrow”: The Elysian Fields are out there. They used to run through New Orleans between Frenchmen Street and Marigny, but they had to pick up and scramble in 2005. Now they pop up wherever they’re evoked. King Tut said you could do it with blue lotus, but we have a hunch there are other ways.

***

There’s a grand psychological movement in the phrase, “human civilization is going to collapse.” The word, “human,” has clearly come to mean something esoteric and overarching: Our rumbly gut says Kant. We may translate the common slogan of panic thus: “The universal history with cosmopolitan intent is going to collapse.” Well, let it come down. Though it pains us to use the word in any way other than affectionately, the pun is simply too alluring: Kant was always a cunt anyway.

***

Visions of the future--Afterlife, social security payout, clean safe sustainable happy, paradise for your great-greats--Let’s dispense for the moment with the old talk of libido, chi, animal spirits, humours, sekhu, mystic hydraulics, orgones: Mr. Martin, if that is his real name, is stealing your future. Well, Mr. Martin can go jump in a coal-fired power plant: The space of possibility opens only after the aluminum has been withdrawn from the anthill.

***

Without the necessity of preparing the way for our children, we are free to see collapse as an unprecedented moment of liberation: Much more than drones can be said to “queer traditional masculinities,” we can anticipate collapse as a planetary queering, opening space for the dissolution of traditions and hegemonies, but only if the certain decline in population is not taken as an invitation to strengthen compulsory heterosexuality: The human population will fall, huh? Humans may go extinct, huh? Let it come down. Party with your buds; dance like no CCTV operators are watching, fucking finally; the planetary film has been cut and anything can be spliced in.

***

The preeminent thinker of industrial collapse, Jacobi, should, in our reserved opinion, be read-over with the finest of combs, then once more, out loud, recording technology in hand. This recording should then be played back as one sleeps, so that it will penetrate both conscious and subconscious. Dream about him. He’s cute.

Nevertheless, we’ve got a couple ounces of grain-fed, RBST-loaded beef to hash out with him:

1.Though human rewilding--especially of the psychological variety--is self-evidently necessary, we must assert serious precautions against nostalgia: Better to look to populations in industrial-era famine conditions for advice than to primitive hunter-gatherers. It takes quite a long time for wilderness conditions to return in an area that has been contaminated by civilized development. By the estimate given in that last link, the notoriously conservative UN’s recent climatological study places “climate catastrophe” about 70 years before even a small section of land could rewild. Yes, these numbers are all very nebulous and meh, but they still argue moderately well that a hunter-gatherer style of human rewilding may only be available to an extremely small number of humans; Jacobi himself claims that “even back-to-the-landers cannot fulfill their visions without the restoration of great tracts of nature.” Human rewilding must therefore come to mean several things, each of which is more or less demonic by the standards of contemporary bourgeois morality: 

(A) One must learn how to shrink one’s moral circle in practice. Certain people and things simply lie outside your sphere of ethical consideration, and whatever you do to those people and things, it is not “wrong.” Morality simply does not apply. This mindset cannot be thought into action. It must be practiced, dark as that may sound, in a way similar to the old Spartan theft-education. And to any but the most nihilist modern observer, it will look like sociopathy. Michael Haneke’s movie Funny Games is a good example: Notice how only the two torturers turn to the camera. By their union they have moved into a different world from that of the tortured family, who, in typical Western/European fashion, are literally walled-off from all others--take special note of the scene in which the mother runs from gate to locked gate of her neighbors, screaming into the Cartesian forcefield. We see clearly that the torturers’ separation from their victims places them beyond good and evil: If they feel any guilt, they clearly enjoy it, grinning mildly as they maim and joke. Now, of course we do not suggest that anyone commit crimes, much less torture. We simply look on this movie as one instructive iteration of an abstract principle.  

(B) The old mind-body/me-you distinctions must erode--not necessarily completely, but enough to make contact--among those who have adhered to one another. The Eunuch is, in part, an abstract experiment in this direction: Are we the same plural author who wrote The Manifesto? Who wrote Climbing a High Mountain? William S. Burroughs claims, in his old Naropa lectures, that until the advent of written language, humans had no distinct consciousnesses but maintained direct contact with their gods or oversoul through their right brain hemispheres. “When Homer’s heroes in the Iliad talk to the gods, it’s not a figure of speech.” What we’re talking about is beyond metaphor: It is a process venerated in older societies (think of the Islamic umma, the Kabbalistic tikkun olam, the early Christian church-body equivalence) but largely ousted from our own. The Holy Spirit, in the Book of Acts, directly projects a divine linguistics into the Apostles, and it debatably continues to do so in various Pentecostal sects of the rural American South. We understand this interconnectivity to be the psychological basis of tribalism, of The Eunuch, of a social model that is able to withstand the breakdown of mass communication technologies and global economics. More abstract, diffuse identifications--ethno-nationalism, ideological affinities, etc.--tend rather to efface those who adhere to them: In a situation in which people are guided not by regional/national/global economic pressures, such self-effacement seems a clear threat to the survival of the effacer. Now, 

(C): While Jacobi has done a great job outlining the necessities of gaining traditional wilderness skills, such skills do not conform to nature as it would be if, say, industrial civilization ground to its predicted halt around 2050. At such a point, defunct cities, roads, and factories become parts of indifferent nature and are no longer conducted by human powers. Learning the locations of grocery warehouses, the relative pollution levels of various water sources, and the general artificial environment become at least as important in the short- to mid-term as plant identification, hunting, and trapping skills, as do interlinked considerations of physical and social health. In this sense, the nostalgia often espoused by primitivists simply harms aspiring “rewilders.”

2.The idea of war, influenced by the aforementioned nostalgia, does not correspond well with the current scaffolding of industrial civilization. This is likely the result of the Wild Will Project’s infatuation with Ted Kaczynski, whose essay “Hit Where it Hurts,” despite nominally allowing for other-than-violent forms of war, does not expand widely on what these might be and is largely taken to be a delineation of the most strategic targets for typical ecoterrorist attacks. This implicit leaning, in addition to some obvious residue of democratic modes of thinking, leads Kaczynski to recommend the attack of biotechnology infrastructure. Economic and political systems, however, have at this point in history globalized to such an extent that any foreseeable systemic collapse is likely to be triggered by a rupture of financial flows. In this we echo, albeit in a different direction, the assertions frequently made by Maurizio Lazzarato that (A) Finance is the underpinning of capital itself and (B) Debt relations--the driving conflicts of finance--are literally, not figuratively, civil war. The focus on primitive war, then, in Jacobi’s article, and on biotechnology attacks in Kaczynski’s, appear anachronistic and/or simply misleading. It is quite literally guerrilla warfare, to various extents, to practice small-scale gift economies, to grow/make your own X and Y and Z, to hack financial systems; and these practices prepare us for the (potentially impending) collapse of capital infrastructure.  This point may be seen as premature, as the ideas have only just been published and remain in a nascent stage, but we are reasonably certain that Jacobi and the Wild Will Project will find this critique via pingbacks from links, and that the critique may aid them in further formulation of their work.

3.The Blowback Effect: People are likely to defend their beliefs even more aggressively when those beliefs are challenged. Scale it up: The surest sign that civilization is on the decline will be that it stamps out, more and more viciously, any attempt to move outside of it. Do we really believe that all recent “cults” have been homicidal, suicidal? All the more reason to adopt a new model: Diffuse, acephalic, strewn across space. To attempt any revolutionary activity through traditional exercises of political power-gathering is confusingly useless if we believe that collapse will come in the relatively near future. Coherence is the last thing to try and foster. Nihilism is only a starting point, to be tossed away once de-individuating connections--tribalisms, Eunuch--have been established, to be replaced by actively created meaning, which implies that there can be no coherence, and in any case, coherence on a macro-political level, as argued in 1.B only serves to subordinate the human-scale people/cohorts/Eunuch involved. Ideology cannot drive resistance: The will to resist, the revolutionary impulse, the enactments of these, are fundamentally physiological, contingent upon the material conditions of specific actors in specific circumstances. We must remember, even if we speak of “industrial civilization” or “capital,” we use those blanket terms out of convenience: Neither of these things is any more coherent than the Eunuch ourself, and their various instantiations at different time and space coordinates allow and require vastly different modes of revolt and/or exit.

Parable of the Stoner

Follow the thread, mind as fingers feel along a near-Gordian mass of headphone wires:

I speak of that which is not new nor old, but enduring...eternal return...the two fundamental movements: Cyclicality and sexuality, each of which powers the other, such that the collective pound town turns the earth around...To endure in time, any structure must present predictable recurrences...The view from the Land of the Dead, flashes of serene timeless joy...Their way of thinking is basically different from ours, not oriented toward time and sequence and causality...The concept of plagiarism does not exist: it has been established that all works are the creation of one author, who is atemporal and anonymous...Buried up to the waist then to the chest until finally only a mouth, taken over by a gadget...They can remain in this invisible state for years, only materializing in order to breathe…*

Yes, the old in-out, stretch wires, turn over, rescramble: I speak of cyclicality and sexuality, the predictable recurrences: To endure in time, dead flashes of serene timeless joy, each of which powers the basically different time and sequence and causality: It has been established that atemporal and anonymous, taken over by a gadget in invisible state, only materializing in order to breathe, yes, the old in-out, not oriented toward time and sequence and causality, the old in-out, enduring eternal return not oriented toward sequence from the Land of the Causality, basically different from dead, buried until finally in this atemporal and anonymous invisible state, each of which powers the other, such that the view from the flashes of plagiarism of one author turns the earth around:

I do not claim to be William S. Burroughs any more than Burroughs himself did. “I am HIS and HIS is me...For HIS is the ultimate threat to their parasitic position...HIS position is desperate...Shadows are falling on the Mountain…‘Hurry up, please. It’s time.’”

***

Groom, Texas. March 2018. Semiarid, the midpoint between eastern forests, central plains, and western deserts, an old waypoint for Canadian River wagon caravans, now a particularly desolate stop on the old Route 66. Population 574 by the last census, but I wouldn’t trust it. Our party of four, packed into my Beetle, is the quintessential horror movie group: Two men, two women, and the other guy, Joey, actually had the telescoping coffee cup-bong from Cabin in the Woods. We were doomed from the start.

Groom’s layout does not, at first glance, exhibit any kind of complexity. A grain mill along 66 with its row of silos and indecipherable labyrinth of iron bars and PVC. On the other side of the road a gas station, behind which the 574 alleged inhabitants live in sagging vinyl-sided stilt-houses. In the near distance, next to Interstate 40, a two-hundred-foot white cross towers menacing over the town, the fourteen traditional Stations of the Cross arranged around it in detailed sculpture. On the monstrous white crossbar, the town’s motto:

O vos ómnes qui transítis per víam, atténdite et vidéte:

Si est dólor símilis sícut dólor méus.

There is no Christ on the cross, not yet. In the beginning is the Word, and the Word is God.

We stopped at the gas station for water. The clerk was running around the store with a baseball bat, swinging it wildly around his head. He whipped around when we opened the door and fixed us with shocked, bloodshot eyes. “There’s a goddamn pigeon got in here.”

Water in hand, we stood around the car. Ruby blinked sleep from her eyes and chomped the head off a sour gummy octopus, offering the legs to Mack. “Slobber sisters?” Seeing no one around, Joey packed his telescoping bong.

Just as he prepared to light up, a pure-rust flatbed truck skidded around the side of the station and pulled alongside the Bug. A pair of German shepherds with matted fur ran in circles on the bed, and three men, each as rusted-out as the truck, eyed us from the front seat. The driver slurred through his three visible teeth, “Y’all ain’t from around here, are you?”

We didn’t need to answer. His laughter intensified until it became a hacking cough. “Well, if I’s you, I’d get out ‘fore sundown.” He and his silent cohort cackle-hacked away through the vinyl-sides as the dogs slid and crouched, struggling not to fall off into the road. The clerk must have busted out a back window: A crash, then a lone pigeon soared in a great arc and perched above the word “símilis.” I hadn’t noticed it before, but all the station’s front windows were boarded. My eyes had grown so tired by the passage of the road stripes they could scarcely hold more; I struggled to see the distant gaps between window-boards and silently repeated the word “rehabilitation.”

A passing cloud of weed smoke jarred me from my reverie. Attribute to me whatever virtues you will, but I am a paranoiac beneath it all. I turned as a handicapped panopticon, checking and rechecking each road until Ruby caught my shoulder. “It’s fine. This is a ghost town.” She kissed my cheek, a faint whiff of sour octopus, a sleepy grin over her downy cheeks. Behind her, Mack stared with unfocused eyes at the pigeon, biting off octopus legs and tapping her feet with the same metronomic rhythm. She does that when she’s thinking. We’ve seen her spit hexametric epics at the speed of casual speech after a good tapping sesh.

Joey cackled, rocking back and forth on the roof of the car and spitting smoke down onto our heads. “Y’all look crazy. Call me responsible, but I think we should stay here for a bit.”

Only half the sun was visible above the nearby overpass: Ruby, Mack, and I traded anxious looks. “You heard those--”

Precisely on cue the flatbed skidded back around the gas station. This time it didn’t stop but zoomed by us and back into the vinyl-sides, the three guys cackling as their dogs prayed for thumbs.

Joey thumbed toward the truck. “They’re just fucking with us. They know this looks like the opening to a horror movie. This is probably all they can do to pass the time.” Their laughter echoed across the empty landscape. At least I think it did.

I wanted to leave, but Ruby and I hadn’t been together long enough that I felt comfortable looking scared, but nevertheless she would trust my judgement either way. Mack had resumed her metronomic munch, but we all knew she’d follow Joey into the blazing Gomorrah if he giggled first. “What do you suggest we do, then?”

The words ebbed and flowed in grey-teal smoke: “Let’s go check out that cross.”

***

Traditionally, the Stations of the Cross comprise a series of fourteen cross-sections of Jesus’ path to crucifixion:

1. Jesus is condemned
2. Jesus takes up his cross
3. Jesus’ first fall
4. Jesus meets his mother, Mary
5. Simon of Cyrene helps Jesus carry the cross
6. Veronica wipes Jesus’ face
7. Jesus’ second fall
8. Jesus meets the women of Jerusalem
9. Jesus’ third fall
10. Jesus is disrobed
11. Jesus is nailed
12. Jesus dies
13. Jesus is taken down
14. Jesus is placed in the tomb

We learn from Friar William Saunders that “because of the intrinsic relationship between the passion and death of our Lord with His resurrection, several of the devotional booklets now include a 15th station, which commemorates the Resurrection.” Groom’s set follows this relatively recent development, with an empty stone tomb set at the end of the circular route.

Groom, Texas’ Via Crucis is a circular dirt road with one-way signs stabbed liberally into its side so that all cars that happen upon the road must proceed before the fourteen sculptures and the tomb and must either continue around the circle forever in contemplation or else commit a crime to leave. I have since learned that a local law written in 1954 only demands $7.50 for driving the wrong way on a one-way street, to be paid--I couldn’t make this shit up--in quarters.

By the time we’d bumbled through the maze of shacks to Via Crucis the sun had sunk to crimson-purple mood light, so Joey read to us by his phone’s flashlight from the tourist guide he’d picked up at the gas station. “‘Local legend holds that some citizens with great respect for the law have remained inside the circle forever and eventually were granted by God the privilege of becoming the figures in the fourteen Stations. This is clearly fantasy, but Groomers will maintain that there is no other explanation for the strangely modern clothing on the statues.’ And then, on the next page, holy shit: ‘Law enforcement records show that, since the Cross’ erection, 133,316,666 citations have been written for those who have violated the one-way signs to leave the Via Crucis. Somehow, this number has not changed since 9/11. Groom’s beloved gas station clerk, Tantalus, has informed us that this number is the same as the earliest estimate of Hell’s population.’ This is so tone-deaf. Seriously, ‘the Cross’ erection’?”

No other cars on the road, we meandered slowly from station to station, stopping and getting out of the car from time to time to admire the detail in the sculptures. Dark bronze, they bore a level of intricacy I’d never encountered, every pore and anachronistic fiber distinct. Simon the Cyrene had clumsily trimmed nasal hair. Veronica had torn her skirt on the left side, and tendrils of cotton leaned back away from the hole as though pulled in a westward breeze. Each Jesus bore a markedly different face, and each expressed a qualitatively distinct agony. Joey offered the third fallen Christ his coffee-bong. “Most High, right?” He winked.

By the time we reached the nailing, the sun had sunk below the horizon, and the clouds fizzed out their last violet dregs before fading into the night’s grayscale. These statues were clearly held against their will: Tears streamed down the sob-marred faces of the flanneled centurions, their snapback helmets pulled tight over sweaty bronze curls. Semijokingly I muttered, “I wonder what bet these guys lost.” I distantly imagine that Mack heard me and gave some witty response, but I had fallen elsewhere:

It is an underdiscussed fact that the hypnohighwayed mind is capable of retrieving and synthesizing information at a level of sophistication or egolessness that often seems random and diseased to a normal mind, even that of the same person at a different time. Through my mental haze I recalled a line I had read, that anybody who doesn’t get a hardon at the thought of nailing Jesus is nothing but a disappointed slave. It’s anyone’s guess who wrote it. Raging antitheist or heteroskeptic? Wherefore that “or”? In any case, a sadist, glee at the messenger pigeon’s hazy dólor or its dolorous haze. The question is only of sequence. The dentist’s office situated just outside the entrance to the Via Crucis circle, “Nash Dental,” with its yard full of tastefully groomed willows; another line from deep in memory: “...the past follows from the present and the present from the future”; no one knows the day or the hour, say the prophets, yet Mack is our metronome, leg by leg, the heads spat onto the ground, someday to reach the bellies of whales, but Nineveh was destroyed in 2017, and so they swim in circuits, waiting, waiting, slowly filling with heads, debris…

My eyes bolted to a movement somewhere close; I realized with a stomach twinge of foreboding that I had been holding a centurion’s hammer hand and that I had a half-chub. Joey put his hand on my shoulder. In the clouded darkness I couldn’t make out his face immediately, but his bud announced his presence loud and clear. “All good, man?”

He didn’t wait for me to respond. “We got some new friends.”

Ruby and Mack leaned against the car, chewing octopi with a couple of women in long skirts. One of them laughed a twang like a bucket-bass, and Mack’s foot tapped to an invisible rhythm.

I don’t remember what we talked about. The words turned around the Beetle of their own accord, a relay, laughs and comfortable lazy agreements. I’m sure I slipped into my old Texas accent. Ruby probably mocked it. Joey probably shifted into German more and more as he ripped the bong. That’s what he always does. I couldn’t make this shit up. And Mack probably tapped her foot and said nothing and laughed, and we probably set our conversation unconsciously to her rhythm. The crowd around the car grew as the night wore on. Not much else to do in Groom: Folks hear voices, it’s moths to porch lights.

Here’s where my memory kicks back into earnest gear: We had a good-sized crowd, probably a couple dozen, long-skirted women and flannel-clad good ol’ boys spit tobacco into grimed jars, and Joey regaled them all with some apocrypha about Gustavus Adolphus, the Swedish king. At some point he had gotten so baked that he switched from German to Swedish, but he doesn’t speak Swedish, so he spoke English at a bounce. Midway through an impressive recitation of the Truce of Altmark in the original Latin, Joey’s performance was interrupted by a loud horn, skid of tires, frantic barking. A viscous call pelted the assembled with its gravel: “Let the games begin.”

The Groomers ran from the car in pandemonium, falling over themselves and scrapping, and eventually formed a military-style line, shoulder to shoulder, at the side of the road nearest the sculptures or, rather--I saw with an idiot shock of re-recognition--nearest the empty concrete circles where the sculptures had stood before nightfall. In front of the line, his hands swinging mechanized flat at his sides, strutted a burly man in tattered jeans who I immediately recognized as the ominous driver at the gas station. His now-bare back bore a cascade of scars, reminiscent of the ancient flagellant sects. He barked to the silent rank, “I ‘preciate y’all waiting, but you know the drill.”

I quickly discerned, as the rank split and formed a series of thirteen files, one in front of each empty circle except that which, earlier, had staged the nailing scene, that the local legend was true: These were the faithful, and they were competing for positions. At the first station a gaggle of men growled sentences at a central figure, who held his meshback hat in front of his crotch in both hands, his head bowed, a thorny crown thrust bloodily onto his balding scalp. At the fourth, a group of women cradled another man, his face caked in dried blood, and each tried to sob more piercingly than the others. One woman’s voice cracked, and the others kicked and shoved her out onto the road. Her skirt torn at the left hip, she rubbed the grit from her bruised arms and stumbled on to station six, pulling a filthy washcloth from her bra.

Two men, each competing for the role of Simon, fought viciously in the thin strip of grass between the street and the pedestal, tearing at each other’s faces with blood-crusted fingernails. One landed a hard, crunching kick to the other’s balls, and with an inhuman squeal he passed out as the victor slung him by the legs into the dirt road. Joey ran to the downed man’s side and slapped him awake, quickly loading a bowl. “Here, man, take this, it’ll help.”

The dolorous took a long pull and slurred through a concussed haze, “My Savior…” Joey laughed, his long beard twitching mirthfully, but on hearing the downed man’s endorsement, a cohort of three rushed in and took Joey under the arms, dragging him to the first circle, where they ripped the crown from their balding Christ and dug it violently into Joey’s brown curls. Ruby, hearing his surprised yelp, ran with her idiosyncratic bouncing stride up the dirt road, broke through the competing judges, and wiped the bright blood from his face with her sweater. The shirtless sergeant sprinted up the road, yelling, “Too early, but I like your spunk, Veronica!” He tossed her over his shoulder and ran her to station six before turning to run back to me.

“I didn’t take y’all for the type, but I’m glad you didn’t take my warning. I’ve never seen folks take over the competition so fast. You better light a fire under your ass, though, if you don’t wanna be leftovers.” He stressed the last word so heavily as to leave no question that “leftovers” was a term loaded by dread and long habit. Before I could open my mouth to question him, he nodded and pointed with a gnarled hand to the formerly empty nailing scene.

Though my eyes had adjusted to the darkness, I could hardly see the chaos for its miasma of dust. In bits and concealed pieces I glimpsed each of those I had seen ousted from the other stations, whirling in mayhem of punches, kicks, and bites. The driver explained, “First one to fall three times has to be crucified, but if one of them manages to stay upright, he gets to skip to the fifteenth station and walk out of the empty tomb. That’s what these guys train for every night: That’s the Second Coming.” The guy Joey had replaced skidded out into the road and barely caught himself on an outstretched hand with a sickening crack as one of his fingers snapped. “There’s the key to this cryptogram, if you’re curious,” the driver slurred on, his tongue protruding through the yawning abysses between his teeth. “It’s been my plan since I built this place. I’m grooming these folks for the apocalypse.” I gaped. “Don’t hate me ‘cause I love puns. Anyway, your buds’re doing great. Cutie’s already starting to bronze.”

At the sixth station Ruby vacillated wildly between struggling to move her hardening legs and tenderly wiping the face of the redneck Son of God. She caught my eye with a look of turbulent panic.

I ran to her side, the driver at my heels, and with a grating heave pulled her up onto my back and took off toward Joey as a chorus of voices barked after us, “Trust me, y’all don’t want to leave. Out there it’s Hell for you now, it’s weeping and gnashing of teeth.” In the distance I caught sight of the dentist’s office and its thicket of willows and groaned.

Both my hands occupied, the driver gaining ground quick, I shoved Joey from his pedestal with my shoulder and tossed Ruby out across the grass as the driver fell on me with a blind flurry of punches. “Squeal like a pig, demon!” I caught one across the forehead and felt a warm gush over my right eye, vision fade to middle-gray as I felt his weight lifted off me.

I was sure I had gone unconscious and would awaken nailed to a cross, but as the scene fizzled back into focus I saw Ruby’s outstretched hand. On the ground next to me the driver lay with Joey’s bong stem in his temple, gushing clear fluid like a hellish fountain cherub’s penis. “I’ll pick up another one in New Mexico. Come on, man.”

As they helped me up, a pigeon landed on the driver’s shoulder and, after drinking from his gushing ear, cried into the wound, which healed almost instantly, spitting Joey’s stem out onto the grass. The driver, somehow revived, with barely a scar, shouted, “Again!” and didn’t pursue us but, rather, plunged the stem back into his head and crumpled forward onto the grass with a crackling thud. We heard several iterations of this as we hobbled away.

My arm over Ruby’s shoulder, we arrived at the Beetle to see Mack in the same spot as before, her feet, for the first time, still. Joey jumped in the driver’s seat, high as a kite but confident, and Ruby pulled me into the back seat, patting my forehead with her sweater.

Nothing changed as Joey contradicted the one-way and zipped through Hell back toward I-40. After some time on the road Mack clarified to us, “Poor dumb dummies. They weren’t fucking with us. God is fucking with them.”

My usual cocking eyebrow out of commission, Ruby took over and cocked her eyebrow quizzically at Mack, who expanded, “The apocalypse already happened. Dummies say they’re waiting for the Second Coming, but Jesus was born, then he resurrected: One, two. The prophecy says that ‘no one knows the day or the hour’ when he’ll come again because they can’t know it; they can only remember it. A centrifuge of nostalgia just spun us out into its Hell, the present. Only thing I can’t tap out is why God goes along with it: Why bronze ‘em every night? Oh, and why the puns?”

None of us could think of an answer. Somehow Joey had fashioned a new bong out of a phone charger, a sticky note, and a Coors can while simultaneously driving and navigating, and after a long rip he smogged Mack with the best solution he could muster: “Who gives a shit? We’re out.”

*Cut-up: G.W.F. Hegel, Philosophy of Right; Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science; Georges Bataille, “The Solar Anus”; William S. Burroughs, The Western Lands and “The Ghost Lemurs of Madagascar”; Jorge Luis Borges, “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”; Mladen Dolar, “Nothing Has Changed.