The End Is Now

The police tried to stop the red bandanas at first, but then the President went on television and said they were an official militia, like in the Constitution, because we were losing our grip as a nation. It was probably the Pan Asiatic Ecumen’s fault, but then again, everybody blamed them for everything.

* * *

Two days later, Sally said I had to get out of the house and breathe, because too many people were staying indoors all the time and we had a duty to show we weren’t scared. I crutch-hopped my way down the empty street as Sally ran rings around me for a change. I was glad I didn’t have to step over junkies any more, even though I worried about what had happened to all of them. Sally said they were locked up in camps, or tossed in bonfires, or just hiding out somewhere.

All of Sally’s film student minions cheered for me when we got to B.U. Even the ones who’d high-backed me when I first showed up in town. Maybe because I’d become a casualty of art, or maybe because the new movie had gotten mad hits. Either way, people wanted to carry me around and pour stuff down my throat, and everyone signed my osteogenic body-sheath. We were promoting creative anarchy and that made us super important radical artists, and hey, we should take it to the next level somehow. I thought if they wanted to promote anarchy, maybe we could find one of the camps, in Medford or Malden, where the red-hanky guys had rounded up the homeless people and undesirables, and set them all free.

We could film it. We could put Napoleon hats on all of them and turn them loose. It would look cool, sort of like the final episode of The Prisoner.

Everybody liked that idea, and they were all up for doing it, but not on a day when they had classes.

The film students kept adding more and more layers to the plan. We would dress as animals, and there would be a huge round clock which we’d roll downhill to cause a distraction, and maybe we could time the attack to coincide with a joint lunar/solar eclipse so the lack of both moon and sun would sensory-deprive everyone. They jumped up and down with excitement, but I realized they were making the plans fancier and fancier because they didn’t want to have to follow through. That was fine with me because I was only half serious about the camp liberation idea too.

“Most of those guys, you just tell them where to stand and what to do, and they’re happy. Don’t make them think too hard,” Sally told me afterward. Our movies had built her into a queen bee. She wanted to walk me home, but the sun sagged and I didn’t want her to get caught out after dark. I ran into a couple of red-bandana groups on my way home, but I told them I was a friend of Ricky Artesian, the red bandana leader, and they practically saluted. The second group insisted on escorting me home. Film students and red bandanas, both whooping at me, all in one day!

Soon, I was healed enough to go back to work at the convenience store, where I kept seeing bone-crushed Reginald on fire whenever I looked at the lighters. Nowadays, I saw both Raine and Reginald in my dreams, unless I watched some Buster Keaton right before bedtime.

Some of my housemates were planning a giant protest against the red bandanas and the economic policies and the move to expand the war, and the crazy weapon projects like that sonic gun that people claimed would make an army shake itself to pieces from a distance. I was leery because, duh, the last time I’d gone to a protest I’d wound up covered in slippery bodies, choking on a piece of my friend’s brain.

I started hoping my body wouldn’t heal too quickly, because once it did they would expect me to create more serious mayhem, and just the thought of it made me start to shamblequake. Sally texted me saying it was time to do some more mad slapstick, and I texted back that we really needed to talk.

* * *

I have a perfect recall of my meeting with Sally, maybe cause it was our last-ever conversation.

We met in the middle of the Mass Avenue bridge, with faded paintwork measuring the bridge’s span in “Smoots,” the height of some long-ago MIT student whose classmates had rolled him across the bridge. On either side of us, the river swelled with gray bracken and flecks of brown foam, and in front of us, the jagged Boston skyline. The John Hancock Tower’s windows had all started falling out and hitting people on the head, so they’d condemned the whole building and only gotten halfway through demolishing it, and now it looked like a shiny blue-green zigzag climbing to a single razor point. We watched the water churn a while. The wind battered us.