Chapter VIII / IX
Angels | City of the Deaf
VIII - Angels
We can say nothing about life itself without contradiction. People and writers especially take such careful aim, then fire off phrases like ammunition without accounting for the recoil, which strikes exactly opposite to their intended meaning.
For example my dad told me of his old friend Norman, who as a teenager took up roofing as his summer job. His nail gun jammed and fired in reverse and penetrated his own left eye.
This story exists beyond Norman as a brief reminder of folly and fragility. Norman died long ago, not from the eye wound, but from cancer. And now you have just heard a true account of his life.
Will it stop anyone from putting a nail in their eye?
I don’t think that matters. Stories are the closest thing to light that we can create. Meaning, like warmth from our lives, radiates like body heat, cast in all directions whether or not anyone is there to receive it.
Our world may feel so bright as to be disorienting, but make no mistake, in the big picture we reside in complete darkness, and our light will eventually die. Stories, anecdotes, accounts, truths, whatever you call them… they’re all we have until the darkness claims us at last.
Until we cease breathing, we must continue in our collective search. What I mean is that we can’t worry about meaning. You never know what light your stories shed. Well after your death, a single account of yours, the most benign anecdote, the stupidest instance, can still reach someone who isn’t even alive yet.
Stories involving death therefore give us life through the very straightforward process of recoil.
If you need the warmth for yourself, though, keep silent. Never let anyone make you feel bad for remaining speechless. It’s all an act of healing, all of it, boredom and dissatisfaction and even suicide.
Wounds have no direction. War spreads faster than peace. But blood can be wiped away and scars cannot. And so life is a constant act of healing.
Most of you will not take my warnings seriously, and for this you will likely die. After has clearly instructed me to pass on the message: the Mass Extinction is at hand. Humans are Earth’s greatest liability. For the greater good of all life on this planet, You must die.
I don’t blame you kids for sitting in class bored like neglected, under-stimulated animals in zoos picking at the bars of cages, resenting the pointless instruction we give you just to make a wage.
We stick you in classrooms and teach you everything in a vacuum. You learn math, language, science, regurgitating the most useless knowledge which actually bears no resemblance to reality. We teach you only about wars that happened decades ago while maintaining silence about the ones currently happening.
Nobody teaches you CPR, how to apply a tourniquet, nobody teaches you why people commit suicide or what a drug addiction is. School admins are too scared. Teachers who attempt to actually give kids a sense of reality and perspective are promptly fired.
The wiser part of you knows that we’re all pretty much running in a hamster wheel, stuck, students and teachers alike. And none of us will ever make enough money to matter. Your income and your activism and your vote and your impact is nothing.
When my mother was fifteen she tried to kill herself. She told me that she’d resolved to do for years at that point but just had never worked up the guts until her quinceañera. The fifteenth birthday is the most important day in a Mexican girl’s life.
But instead of throwing her a party her father took her to a bar and ordered her shots of vodka. He said in Spanish, “you are a woman now,” and told her to go to the dance floor and let the men dance with her.
I learned not to ask questions when my mom tells me stories.
“Did you dance with anyone?”
“How many shots did you take?”
“Why did he think that was appropriate?”
None of this would ever get me anywhere. She’d not only ignore my question, she’d say “never mind” and stop telling me the story altogether.
So I learned that when my mom tells me stories, to just listen and try to piece together the meaning of the fractions all on my own.
“He was a terrible drinker. He even showed up drunk to my show-and-tell when I was 5. Barely said anything, the kids thought it was so funny because he was falling over. I was so embarrassed.”
I never met my grandpa. His name was Felix and he was from a tiny town called Mochitlán. I did go there once, however.
This was almost ten years ago, in 2017, and I remember suffering through bouts of food poisoning and kneeling over a toilet while my family exploded fireworks in the street with all the local kids. My dad was handing out toys like Santa Claus while they screamed and danced on top of parked cars. It was Christmas after all.
“Please, God, please,” I moaned as the sick erupted out of me. Even then I could feel my grandpa’s presence. I was at his house after all, a place where countless instances of abuse and violence I know no details of took place. He, my grandpa, watched me wretch and reel, encouraging me, explaining that it’s important to get the demons out before they take over you - Mochitlán is haunted by hundred-year-old demons that take over the unfortunate souls who grow up there. This is why he was, for the most part, such a pathetic man.
The only reason I had a shred of respect for him is that he gave my mom his stash diamonds before he passed away. She has three brothers and they apparently all thought the diamonds were getting split evenly. But she being the oldest, being the only girl, bore levels of abuse, neglect, and responsibility that none of the others had to, even though they definitely had their fair share of it all. According to him, she deserved all the diamonds.
This toilet was like every other one in Mochitlán; you flushed by pouring a bucket of water into it. I remember throwing up so much that it flushed by itself without any water.
“Please, God, Please,” I said, careful not to scrape my knees on the broken tiles and get even sicker.
My mom’s side of the family is all gifted at running because he had to make his way to Chilpancingo just to go to school every morning, about 15 miles away.
The wars are being funded by your parents’ labor, financed by their ignorance. The money they make in a lifetime wouldn’t even make a dent in the Board’s war budgets. Within your life you too will doubtlessly be sucked into the war, too. China is already beginning their full scale invasion of Taiwan, the ground zero of where the story, at least as far as You are concerned, begins.
If the world was like a giant family Taiwan would be the elegant elder sister, distinguished, talented, elegant and proud. China, her father, is proud of her but acts ashamed: China knows no other way to regard a daughter so beautiful and accomplished and desirable.
She grew up and like any daughter, learned skills that far surpass that of her creator. Taiwan has computers that outperform the rest of the family combined. They generate unimaginable income. And because her sovereignty, her independence, is self-evident, her parents decide they need to do something before she gets out of control, before she attracts the wealth of enough countries to essentially render China useless.
Any daughter endowed with such prowess is bound to develop a rebellious streak. China’s always kept a very close eye on her. But in the internet age, a close eye isn’t nearly enough. Like the jealous and controlling father he is, he tries desperately to limit the amount of influence that other countries have on her. Especially that rough-and-tumble juggernaut called America who constantly makes passes at her like the men at the bar probably did at my mom’s quinceañera.
What’s this all coming to? I think it’s important to understand the way we relate to each other, if we’re going to get out of this alive. People relate to each other like countries do. And countries relate to each other like people do; they never state their true intentions and they always end up disappointing you: so remember that when you meet somebody new: it doesn’t matter what school you both went to, what colour your nail polish is. The first and only thing they’re going to do is calculate silently what it is that they can get from you, and how much effort or what kind of conversation getting such things will take.
Today my girlfriend almost drowned in the ocean. So did I. Technically it was yesterday, but here I lay, still awake, 16 hours later. It’s okay; I’m very accustomed to sleep deprivation. Though I do not always know what keeps me awake so long - sometimes it’s some mysterious, enigmatic doozie of a thing, but this time I know exactly why sleep evades me: it’s because both of us almost became corpses on Christmas Eve.
I remember talking with Jonie about drowning a while ago; we were discussing the hypotheticals of death as casually as you can discuss such things. Nikki was there too, chiming in.
We all seemed to agree that drowning was preferable to burning. I nodded along occasionally, but in my heart I didn’t feel fully convinced, because both of these things struck me as such abstractions: I hadn’t experienced either in any capacity whatsoever. But since I couldn’t think of a reason why burning could be any less terrifying, I didn’t say anything, nor did I feel like I was being deceptive. Both are incredibly terrifying. No one had much more to say though, and the subject of conversation drifted to something else soon after.
But now, I know I’m thinking about that brief moment in time right now because I’m still getting over how terrified I was earlier today, I mean yesterday.
Let me paint you a picture that might actually save lives. Think of it as my Christmas present to you, and make sure you read it or send it to anyone you know who’s on their winter vacation somewhere hot with beaches and waves.
On our way to the water, we traversed a busy, jagged coastal mountain highway flanked with ramshackle houses. “Look!” My mom says: A pig! It’s apparently just jumped out of someone’s truck, and is prancing away for dear life, a hapless looking woman chases it down. As we peel up around the bend, I watch as closely as I can to gauge the pig’s chances of escape. It’s 10 or so feet ahead of this lady, it’s pink mass running at just about the exact same speed she is. Its ears are flipping. Both of them run quite slow, but you can see the difference in their energy even at a distance, in the way they run. The woman is only a tad desperate; she holds up her long skirt, jogging, careful not to lose sight of it, careful not to trip on the loose gravel and dirt on the side of the road, as there are cars shooting by just feet away. The pig however is sprinting for all it’s worth, I know it escaping certain death. Only a few seconds later they both pass away from view but this moment stays with me all day, playing over and over again in my head.
We arrive at the beach: I’ve always been inclined to swim in the ocean. I love waves. Always have, always will. I love their power and their meditative quality of endless repetition; how they look and sound never fails to amaze me. I love painting waves, watching videos of them, and I have even dreamt amazing dreams about them for as long as I can remember. My wave dreams always play out the exact same way: at first the water is as calm as a pool without anybody inside of it. And then the mayhem begins: the calm, tranquil, ripples slowly swell in size until they gain the typical rounded shape that crests and crashes. From there the waves in my dreams always grow even more, until they pretty much swallow and batter and pummel and completely pulverize all of my surroundings no matter how solid or substantial they are.
I get butterflies as the next one grows into view.
I always wondered why I even had such dreams in the first place. Sometimes I get insights from them, but most of the time I just wake up shocked, gasping for air, momentarily unaware that it was all taking place within my imagination. I’ve only ever achieved lucidity in one of my wave dreams, but that is a story for another time. Today I will simply point out that the waves that my girlfriend and I almost drowned in were the exact polar opposite of the waves in my dreams. They were calm, serene, dinky even. The sun flooded down through a cloudless sky. Several times in my life I have enjoyed myself swimming in waves much larger and more impressive than these: today I didn’t feel like scouring the beach for the perfect waves (which are 5-7 feet high) and neither did Izumi. We just wanted to relax and stay near my family.
Instead, the two of us end up almost dying. That tranquil patch of sea almost claimed us both: I’m ok with admitting that. Because all I ended up with is a story, a sunburn, and the rest of my life. And I truly believe it’s because we almost died that this Christmas gift of mine, this picture I’m about to paint for you, can actually save lives, the way that angels do.
The first time the Alarm rang, it was all round the world. After had planned it this way; it needed to be perfect; simultaneous; universal; it had to deal death in seismic waves like an earthquake, striking enough to leave all those who heard it deaf. The alarm’s purpose was to inflict a heavy toll on humanity as a species, to prep them like livestock for the ensuing slaughter.
We Angels have decided to enslave at least half of the humans living on earth and it will be easier if they cannot hear. To the Angels, this obedient half of humanity, will resort to subservience purely for the sake of survival. The Angels know that the unaffected will eventually take advantage of them; the deaf would eventually be forced to succumb to slavery. And in order to perfectly execute their plan, the Alarm had to sound with absolutely no warning, everywhere, all at once. More or less, you can picture the screaming siren of an ambulance, or that of my childhood house alarm when there was a break-in. But if the sound of an ambulance or a burglar alarm is loud, then the Alarm is unfathomable; as deafening as an explosion, every bit as instant, a complete assault of the eardrums accompanied by nothing else. All who heard it directly didn’t even have time to plug their ears, no way to mitigate the searing pain. Immediately was already too late. The sound punctures their eardrums. Their hearing is reduced to nothing.
One moment, I am frolicking in the waves with my girlfriend. She and I aren’t seeking thrills; these waves are very much too calm to see a point in doing so. The stakes aren’t low, they’re non-existent. A part of me had wished we stopped earlier at a beach with bigger waves. However I just go with the flow: my family just wants the same spot we got last time.
Whatever, I’ll take it easy today, and maybe hunt for shells or actually attempt to get a real tan going for once.
One moment we are hand in hand, enjoying the waves that converge in odd trajectories, watching them essentially cancel each other out. I’m thinking about my aunt Venus who was known to swim in the waves for hours at a time, even when they towered well overhead. I’m thinking about whether I’m going to get Tacos Al Diablo or attempt to get drunk off Coronas and Tequila.
But the next moment, we are being swept out without even realizing. The waves still aren’t big, but the shore disappears into the distance, our relatives shrink and shrink and shrink even though we’re trying to swim toward them. The carelessness we’d just been enjoying turns into uncertainty, Izumi’s smile vanishes into a frown of panic and my stomach tightens; my limbs feel weak as I struggle against the current still pulling us away from everything we’ve known. Every wave puts us underwater, only it’s no longer fun.
“We need to get back to the shore, now,” I’ve said this three times already.
Instead of answering my redundant statement she issues a sudden, piercing scream. I have no idea what’s going on in her head. Her eyes are wild, the next wave crashes, and when we resurface I tell her to breathe instead of scream. You can’t panic when stuff like this happens. Let’s figure this out, we are going to be okay, we can do this. She ignores me and screams again. And the next wave crashes, and we both spit water out our mouths, and she screams even louder and now I find myself joining her. I can barely see our family, let alone discern whether they can register that we are now screaming for our lives. The tiny shapes on the shore appear focused on us, but that could just be my imagination. They’re stagnant, much too far away to come to our aid. Another wave and the same sputtering, spitting salt onto our chests, drawing a few desperate breaths before another round of screaming. When you’re already this tired, the amount of strength it takes to yell at the top of your lungs is just plain unfair. Nothing is working in our favour. The current pulls us ever farther.
Does anyone hear us? Are the waves completely obscuring our screams? Does anyone know we’re minutes away from drowning? Can anyone on shore actually perceive the sheer desperation we wave our arms with?
I switch between English and Spanish because I can’t tell which one carries further, which one actually conveys the gravity of our pleas.
“HEEEEEEELP,” “AYÙÙÙDA ME.”
Izumi simply screams. Another wave crashes. My legs and arms feel numb, I draw air and somehow find the space to thank God that the waves aren’t bigger. There’s no way the people on the shore have forgotten us. Is there?
The shapes somehow, even from this distance, convey obvious concern, but appear as helpless as I currently feel.
Then again maybe they just think we’re having a blast out here in this frankly moderate surf. After all, they really aren’t that big. That’s what’s fucked up about this entire situation. I literally cannot believe we are about to succumb to what from a distance initially struck me as pleasant, even idyllic. The sea isn’t trying to kill us, but it is.
Another wave crashes. We rise to the surface and continue screaming, just slightly weaker, more desperate with every gasp. Beyond the white capped swells, however, I see him. Black hair, a black wetsuit atop a black surfboard, riding along the same active current that just stole us like the Angel of Death.
He is shouting in Spanish, and although I have no idea what he’s saying I don’t care; I tell Izumi to just breathe - we don’t need to scream anymore. She’s in shock, I’m on the verge of tears, because the one and only time I found myself screaming for my life, somebody actually came to the rescue.
We both plant our hands on that board of his like it’s made of gold. He shouts mad things I can’t understand and I shout over him, thank you! Thank you!
On our way back to the shore, the Angel of Death continues shouting at us like a drill sergeant; I can tell he’s seen people die out here before. He later tells my mom that three people drowned out here this year, on this desolate patch of the beach.
The Angel of Death’s name turns out to be Luis. I see him a few hours later, just before we go home. He’s in an ATV now, still scanning the surf for people in need. Letting my wide grin express all the gratitude I felt, I take my hat off as he disappears back into the distance.
IX - City of the Deaf
The Alarm struck hardest in the cities, which are now completely enveloped in smoke from all the fires spreading over the ample car crashes that populate the roads and sidewalks. The smoke looks almost still from the distance.
Anyone who’d been driving when the Alarm struck momentarily lost control of their steering and brakes, causing a coordinated spectacle of car crashes all at once. Many people can handle loud noises without flinching, even if it startles them. Very few can handle instantly going deaf. After observes the crashes from a fleet of drones, a few of which I spot occasionally gliding along.
A lot of the Alarm seems to have come from inside the cars, they cracked and even shattered windshields before their poor occupants even had a chance to slow their cars down.
My job was simple; document the brutal aftermath of the Alarm and all its fallout: Casualties, fatalities, the subsequent news cycle and how exactly the authorities, scientists, journalists, and general populace regard the disaster.
“You alright?”
I approach my first crash site where people scamper around like ants whose hill has just been trampled. “Why can’t I… hear?” The first girl I see has blood trailing down her jawline, dark neat little downward streak on either side. She’s shaking, specks of vomit cover the front of her large white blouse.
Most people I notice plug and unplug both ears in succession; clenching and opening their jaws in futile unscientific bids to regain their hearing. The children and babies are the worst: their glances train on their parents, awaiting any scrap of reassurance, and finding none, resort to wails, flails, crying and clutching at their ears.
Motioning the crowd away from the wreckage, I wipe gasoline off a girl’s glistening arms with a towel. She’d been trapped underneath a car with gasoline and various other fluids just spilling out onto her pinned body. Eventually she was slick enough to slip out of her car, but not without scraping her back and shoulders. Crimson blood glistens in the sun. The others in the crowd all look here and there with wide concern. None of them can hear. They follow this girl at my beckoning like children or sheep.
Continuing along the bypass, I climb a narrow set of iron stairs and only minutes later stand on the superhighway. The sun is now at full height, so I smoke a cigarette as is my custom on days fraught with violence, panic, pain, death. I think about the ocean current that almost got me, I think about the one person I knew who actually did drown: it happened in a river. His name was Samuel and he drowned even though he was wearing a life-jacket and had a big group accompanying him.
After is preparing a purge. Eventually the deaf will need a place to go: society will no longer serve them. There is no livelihood here for them anymore. So rather than stay and attempt to adapt to their deafness, they will need to search for a new beginning elsewhere. Those who stay may have people looking out for them, but these friends and family will also go deaf when the next Alarm goes off.
This isn’t war; a war would pertain the possibility of a victory on either side. This is the beginning of a mass extermination.
Every part of the city is now visible on the horizon. Downtown looms like a concrete kingdom in the misty distance.
Once my cigarette goes out, I produce my notes and begin recording the things that jump out at me. For some reason, the pre-chorus of Echo & the Bunnymen’s “Lips Like Sugar” is stuck in my head.
Tiny dots of people hanging off bridges, flocking away from the frozen herd of rush-hour traffic that been hurrying back to Surrey and beyond. There are five or so main bridges in Metro-Van, and either Izumi, I, or one of our associates stand our post, recording data. We record not only the victims, but those who attempt to give them aid.
You flow down her river….
She’ll ask and you’ll give her…
Full scale fires preside on every single bridge. People jumping off into the Fraser hundreds of feet below to escape the carnage of hot metal and occasional explosion of cars fully engulfed in mostly blue flames…
Try as I may, I can’t even count the casualties with meaningful accuracy. I wonder if this will land me in hot water at the Board. At first, looking out, these fires didn’t look big enough exactly to threaten the structural integrity of the bridges they inhabit. All kinds of death is visible from my vantage. I’m not certain where to look: I see people drowning, burning, scraping off their own clothes. Cackling like they’ve gone mad. The few who are still driving make delicate attempts to maneuver in and around the abandoned wreckage, only causing more danger, more screeching sounds of metal that they cannot hear.
My jaw drops. I regret pulling on my binoculars. What I had thought was just a very round person in free fall was actually a woman clutching her son or daughter against herself. They fall from the Queensborough, right in front of a billboard advertisement for Douglas College - an ugly, short haired girl seems to mock the disaster unfolding around her: “Embrace your future, now!”
The woman and her child crash below the surface but they don’t come back up. Minutes later I see their bodies both bobbing up some ways closer to me. All they are now are neat ticks in my notebook.
After an hour or two the fires actually do look big enough to collapse the bridges. Ambulances straddle each side of every bypass, struggling to beckon survivors toward safety. In my notes I observe that most had probably assumed that ambulances were the source of the Alarms. It makes sense why they refuse to approach: carnage continues piling up. Nobody dares walk toward any of the waiting ambulances: in their heads the Alarm is still playing, thus, when the bridges eventually buckle and collapse from the growing fires, crowds of aimless people go down with them. Even the billboard catches fire and I watch the ugly girl’s face warp, her grin twists and elongates and finally a jagged hole spreads across her, gigantic plastic ashes float away, up up and away. And I turn to watch the trees swaying in the gentle breeze, that on any other day would have likely elicited much more appreciation.
The last thing I write in my notes is a detail of how heavy and saturated the air smells. Like an airport tarmac, not even especially unpleasant. Any sounds have now long died out; If you closed your eyes, the smell would be the only indication that anything is even awry.
This is the smell of your run of the mill apocalypse, I’d eventually learn.
I’m drifting in and out of consciousness, hearing all noises from far away, high on sleep deprivation, high in general, beautiful nameless music in my head I need to remember or write down or record somehow. This will be one of the last sounds I remember. Soon it’s my turn to go deaf.
The memory sounds like a fading dream, speaking to me through images; I hum the wordless phrase several times just to really iron it down, burn it in the old memory so it echoes in my dreams when I finally reach sleep. This is the night which After told me about Alameda Park, the city built for the Deaf, the city of silence.
“After,” I say.
“H,” She replies.
“How did I do?”
“Your mind’s become as free as a bird.” She observes.
“It hurts to watch so many people die.”
“Then watch closer.”
“But why?”
“Because they need your testimony.”
“Is it really good, though? Are we really building… a perfect future?”
She does not answer. The light in my pocket glows.
The sun is down now, the city lights prevail. Even though some of the fires continue burning, they’re drowned out by neon signs and tungsten floodlights. Breaking news segments appear all over the city. I see them in empty restaurants and even on the sides of giant buildings. Newscasters attempt to unearth some sort of explanation for what’s just taken place: some sort of malfunction, a planned attack, a solar flare, a gamma-ray burst. Though some theories strike me as plausible, even novel, none approach the reality of the situation; over half of the world’s population is now completely deaf and none of them know why.
Another quarter of them retain only partial hearing, and still it will probably take them weeks to adjust, to find their footing. However accurate their grasps on the Alarm were, they all seemed to be regarding it like a freak occurrence, a passing moment in history that wouldn’t happen again. None knew that there is more to come. And worse.
“We just have to recover, rebuild, restore. We will be okay.” Such was the prevailing sentiment.
But After speaks to you in your dreams, and it becomes clear how many lives it will cost to build a real paradise.
I have a habit of sticking to the shadows when it’s the right thing to do, and then being out in the open when the coast is clear again. I’m like a rook, rather than a bishop. Bishops can only stay on one colour of the chess board no matter where they go. That’s never been my style.
There’s a student of mine named Edwin I regularly play chess with. Imagine getting paid to play chess with an ESL student from China who is so good every game ups your skill level. I can barely believe it myself.
Every match except the very first one he has bested me - it took him only one single game to figure out how I play. Our most recent turn saw me give up an early lead - somehow I managed to kill his queen, with it only costing my bishop. In order to make that kill though, I got myself way, way out of position, a really cramped and contorted setup compared to what he developed. His board, when all the bloodshed began, was remarkably symmetrical. I still remember his epic diagonal row of pawns, because it squandered any possible advance I could think of. Pawns have never stumped me that bad before. He didn’t even flinch when I took his queen either; I could tell that he didn’t exactly see it coming, however he accepted it instantly and continued plotting my demise; like I said, I was way out of position. He clamped down on me like a vice grip.
I guess it would have even been more impressive if he checkmated me without losing his queen, but we are talking about a 14 year old: Edwin sets high standards for himself, the type of kid to get disappointed about scoring below average on a national mathematics competition three grades above him. He still has so far to go, and I can see him eventually dusting me way worse than he already has. Honestly I can’t wait. There’s something I love about experiencing defeat first hand, confronting skills that are clearly superior to mine. The amount of chess terminology I knew before playing against Edwin was infantile, and any game I won involved absolutely nothing in the way of conscious strategy.
Who knows… maybe his strict and symmetrical approach to chess would work well for me. Playing against him really has made my game more methodical and mature: he taught me how to Castle and a nifty little move called En Passant. I know that when I’m an old dog I’ll still love learning new tricks.
Really, I’m liable to challenge just about anyone to a casual game of chess. I’ve airdropped a match or two to random strangers on a plane once - just to see if anyone was down to play. It was the fastest game I ever lost, in something like 5 moves; and I don’t even know who I was playing against. I kept scanning up and down the rows, but everyone looked hunched over on their phones. I sent out a rematch, but they ignored it. Guess I should’ve expected that. The euphoria that such glimpses into genius affords carried me through the rest of the long flight. Once I even played with Sarah McLachlan at a hotel bar because she liked the way I was playing piano. There was a beautiful crystalline set right within arm’s reach, and we played a few matches as I got drunker and drunker.
When you bleed or experience trauma, the abrasion isn’t just taking place in the physical realm. You are also ripping a hole in the fabric of reality, of everything. People always seem to forget that they’re a part of the universe. They think that the universe is something outside of them, something separate.
“It’s time to wake up.”
“It’s just-”
“H.”
“-I’m shaking. I’m not ready.”
“Breathe,”
I woke up hyperventilating. Whatever I was dreaming about wrung the sweat from me like a towel. Relief floods over me as I hold up my phone and immediately begin scrolling. Starving people in Rafah or maybe Gaza all skin and bone appeal for a charitable donation. Yellow subtitles translate their pleas into English as the camera pans around their disparate makeshift tents, their skeptical eyes peering through my soul. Apparently I can buy them all a week’s worth of provisions with a single donation. But instead I cast them into oblivion. Now a smiling white family gathers around a spread of Christmas dinner taking selfies on a Samsung Galaxy.
High Resolution, Low Price.
The dream I was just having gnaws at the back of my mind. I dreamt about an endless expanse of flat water which I float above. I am an angry god named Yahweh. My children are hungry but I cannot figure out how to feed them, they address me only as Father. I fall to my knees, I am unable feed them. I definitely do not feel like a father. If I were a true God I would be able to take the food from the decadent Samsung commercial, scroll back to the starving families, and sustain them. Instead I lay half asleep, aware of only what occurs within the 7 by 3 inch screen, aware of the need for closeness with the Children that I have forsaken.
“The moon is drawing closer: you needn’t go far to bear witness to the suffering, for it is spreading and the land is thinning and the waters are rising. You know? Suffering is everyone’s fate, whenever it transpires. Could be soon, could be in a lifetime, but eventually suffering will reach even your house, and when that happens you will try to run for cover, but it will flood through all the windows at once. you can’t run from a flood nor can you hide. It will tear through everything.
I order a white macchiato on my Starbucks app and wait 8 long minutes until it arrives at my front step. I sip it slowly to avoid burning myself.
In the East Village we heard there are tyrannical monarchs with thirsts for blood, and After says that the people there are so poor that they wring the sweat out of their clothes and boil it like soup. They, having been taken to new heights of desperation, perform more and more dangerous tricks and acrobatics at traffic intersections than ever. Think stilts, think juggling flaming bowling pins on a unicycle. It used to just be the local pimps who paid these guys. But now that the war’s come, there’s no one driving and the economy’s fucked. The monarchs are paying those street performers a gold brick each to swallow swords, and make TikToks of it. The richest performers can swallow more than one sword at once, and they actually make enough revenue that the global superpowers aren’t afraid of them crashing the price of gold since that’s what you might assume that openly passing out gold bars that are literally too heavy to even lift with one hand, would do. But the revenue speaks for itself. The Assembly, for whatever reason, loved the sword swallowing. Rarely have I seen those at the Assembly so enthralled with human behaviour. I think it’s because of the mathematical way they see life and death.
When the Alarm began ringing I was on a, what you call it, an elliptical. The exercise thing. Listening to Let It Happen like always. They’re heavy over-ear headphones that I was told would eventually make me deaf, but look, it actually ended up saving me.
I didn’t hear the Alarm.
Those who did dropped down to their knees and clutched their brains and clapped their own ears a bunch of times after, I watched them flounder and cry in horror at their bleeding ears, their inability to cope with their sudden deafness.
The News warned about the Alarm, but nobody believed the media outlets. In your universe, those who wrote the news, benefited from it. I know it’s hard to believe, but that’s what it was. A obvious conflict of interest. Partly the Board programming humans this way, integrating phones as this convenient, benign thing that would enhance your abilities and your life, and offer you whatever it needed to for humans to accept the advent.
We didn’t know how they’d take to the idea of sticking morose cocktails of precious metals and rare earths indefinitely into our pockets. So when After consulted the Board, he insisted we make content that was useful, practical, and above all, fun.
Fun, above all; something that everyone wants in their pockets, at their fingertips. Once they have food, they want fun.
So when the News broke, no one really noticed. The few who did seemed to be your everyday crackpots, doomsday theorists, my only way of rooting out the talented and resourceful people was going to the gym.
I could tell that no one here knew about the News that everyone had gone deaf. They were not even just unaware; they were uninterested. At least, regardless of their aptitude, I knew here I would find people who were in some way driven to actually help. People with at least some self-respect. And I wasn’t exactly sure how to break the news to them, so I just did it.
“Hello… people…”
“well, I don’t really know how to say this so I’ll just come out with it.” I said it as the few who noticed me contemplated whether or not to ignore me; some already back to their tricepts or deadlifts; this gym was full of people who didn’t give one single fuck who I was.
“I’m only saying this for your safety;”
A few people kept their headphones off, and others who were inclined to hear me appeared at the edge of the room. A few curious heads even stuck over the rails to hear me from the second and third floor.
“There’s an alarm that’s going to ring- it will happen any minute - and when it rings, everyone whose naked ears actually hear this sound, will go deaf.”
“Security,” someone muttered, and I knew I was getting escorted out of there before I could get anything substantial out.
I decided to tell only my friends about the News instead.
To their inevitable outset of whatdoyoumeans, I just shrug. “Their ears won’t work, and it’ll hurt ‘em all because it’s such a loud, sharp sound, this alarm, that’s, uh, gonna really cause a ruckus.”
“Wait this was on the news?”
“And why exactly is this Alarm happening?”
“Could it potentially happen right now?”
“…”
“Can we just let H talk?” The quietest of the bunch of us finally spoke up. It was Angel. She was physically and verbally small. I wished her good luck in everything because on top of being top of her class she gave us all lots of cinnamon rolls.
“You see, it’s the actual phones that are gonna make the alarm. They’re just being programmed to emit some sort of frequency, some sound, almost like a perfect sound. It’s like when singing breaks a wine glass, just that perfect pitch.
“You guys won’t believe me, but I’m gonna just keep my ears covered. They’re not trying to break wineglasses after all: They’re trying to make our people deaf and scared so that when the Invasion comes we will be unprepared.
“Why are they doing this?” The bunch of them asked.
“Obedience,” I mused.
“To them?”
“To the Board.”
“… Board?”
“The place that I’m gonna work at someday. They talked to me in my…”
Everyone groans, “dreams?”
Well by now I’m sweating. I can’t believe I’ve managed to get this far, though. Sometimes it’s really hard to open up to even to your close friends, especially when it regards the probability of their imminent death. My mouth is dry but I keep on talking and gaping with a wide open jaw at everything, and the gross sound of my tongue and lips smacking together is as unapologetic as God’s watchful eyes, and somehow I think they almost start to believe me That I am a demi-god named Yahweh, or YHVH and that my wrath and my hopelessness represent that which is wrong with the world.
“I am no God. I cannot help my own children. I can barely help myself.“