On Night’s Plutonian Shore
I was halfway across the Brooklyn Bridge when the rain came down in earnest. It slashed down in horizontal slices that rendered my umbrella mostly impotent. Only a full-body parka or a diving bell had any hope of keeping me dry and I had neither on hand. The Manhattan skyline was dissolving in low-hanging murk. The Statue of Liberty was an old gray lady lost in a fog. It was only natural that my mind wandered, as my body plowed through the wet, towards darker, if slightly drier, climes.
Yesterday, an email bulletin arrived, entitled “Important Message from Health Services”. The crux of the missive was the ever infamous swine flu:
We have learned that a few employees at our site have been diagnosed with probable cases of H1N1 Flu. Please note that, due to medical privacy concerns, we cannot provide additional information as to the identity of the employees who have become ill. But we have been advised that the situation is being appropriately managed, and we have taken all appropriate measures to protect you.
…The Pandemic Task Force, Health Services and Human Resources are all working together to ensure the health and safety of our employees, and we will update you as events require.
Ignoring my initial question of how, exactly, the situation is being “managed” (to the War Room!), I look forward to the eventual informing and casual betrayals before the might of the jack-booted Pandemic Task Force (PTF to those in the know): scarlet letters, biohazard tattoos, trips to dark basement operating chambers stacked with 7-Eleven coolers full of stolen organs, strange half-knives half-scissors heaped on rusty trays, metal tables discolored with old blood, and a greasy haired surgeon in an apron stained with anonymous offal and past meals- impossible to tell each from each. Trust no one, the resistance whispers. Well then I can’t trust you, I whisper back.
Better to die in such a dark anonymous hole in the corporate underworld than in a hotel room closet, an old man done in by his own private kink. I thought at first David Carradine was just another Michael Hutchins - a man who swallowed too much of the taste of death he was chasing - but it’s become clear that there was somebody else there, a trusted friend, a whore, another traveler lured in from the hotel bar, that took part, watched an old man die, tied and choked off in a body stocking, and ran for their life.
Not for the first time. Not in that part of the world. This was Bangkok after all. The first thought of the cleaning lady who found the corpse was probably, translated into English, “not again.” Somewhere in the employee locker room, a white board counting the days since the last sexual accident was reset back to zero. The rest of us, shaking our heads in false solemnity, could mutter, “Kwai Chang Caine would never do something like that”, and feel better about our own deviances, still hidden and, probably, featuring less fatal side-effects. In a way, these celebrity deaths are oddly cathartic.
The same can’t be said of the Air France jet liner that the South Atlantic plucked out of the sky a couple of weeks ago. Stolen without warning, without quarter. This is the nature of the sea and, apparently, that stretch of sea is as lethal as any of the world- a uterus of hurricanes, squalls, and storms. I have a great respect for, and fear of, the great deep waters of the world. To see the tail fragment of the plane bobbing like a toy in a bathtub is to know how puny we are, not on some cosmic scale, but in relation to the natural power of our own home turf.
There’s nothing to be taken from such an accident. It’s a bald reminder of everything we can’t control that can so easily, at the wrong time, in the wrong place, snuff us out like candles on a cake. What can we do but thank ourselves we weren’t there, in their place? What could they do but close their eyes, hold on to the seat-as-flotation device, and forget that the seat-as-flotation device isn’t going to help much when their altitude and speed has rendered the sea below into a solid harder than concrete. There was to be no gentle splash into that dark water.
By the time I arrived at work, I had accumulated a good deal of water myself, most of it standing in my shoes. Wet shoes are an interesting phenomenon: you seldom notice them until you stop moving and then it feels like you’ve stepped into a fetid swamp. The inside soles mush downwards under the weight of your feet and the water bubbles up, through the socks, between your toes, cold and clammy- a dead substance leaching off the living flesh.
Just par for another June workday morning. It’s been all rainy weekdays and bright, sunny weekends so far this month. But it’s Tuesday and the memories of sun and leisure have dimmed behind a curtain of sluggish lead, more days of work, rain, and soggy shoes ahead, before the sun will show itself again. Time to buy some galoshes.
