Hey Hierophanatics! History’s ready, willing, and parable, are you? parabolic, that eternal arc — perpetually relimned, always rainbowed realigned: surveillance aeroplanes ziz overhead, dive down; the zatzatzat of helicopters through cloudcover, their rotors hacking air through a smokebank. Postmortem reports conflict with the broadcasts, contradict our intelligence, which is preferred by nine out of ten, blow our hopes for a sustainable crisis all to futz, Kingdom Came. Contrary to information previously invented — there’s less rape, and even less torture; certainly lesser crimes than are reported, at least those perpetrated upon any humanity worthy of them — as for the rest of the beasts, no comment, next question. Suffice to say, there’s no mad Golgotha stand. No Hail Mary last ditch trenchmouthed teratological fight. Zoglandia rid of all the perfidifiers, it’s been easy and fast, too easy and too fast it’s simpler and quicker to state, which might imply to any dissent a specie of problem, a disconnect amid the chatter of wires, a true resistance still lying in wait, Underground. But rest assured, you — you in your new homes, tucked into your new beds, dreaming new dreams of even newer homes and even newer beds and ever newer kinder tucked within their own dreams, which are yours, too — that it doesn’t, that every once in a while we just get lucky, having barely begun just when victory’s ours, the world already ended on us. This is the first time in our history that we have had so much power, and yet there’s no one left to inflict it upon, which is strange. What hasn’t there been: none of those rumoredly huge hostile armies, welltrained and kept at the ready to outnumber even the most mystical permutations of hope; no ridges clouded with enemy stormtroops recruited from unworlds imagined or not, overcasting in their shadows the valleys we held; no strike force so elite that we can’t reveal even to you its designation, falling its heroes so deep up the river we’d have to deny their very existences, the rivers’, too — first response dead thousands on the uprooted fields outside Austerlitz only a myth, a legend merely useful, parabolic in the extreme, reinforced by a detachment from the 18th irregular regiment of the Very Idea, routed from Hell, the Middle Finger of the Hand of God — Whose lips presently wail the bugle call, sevenvalved echoes of Jericho off the tremulous walls, if any still stand, a sentinel if not for peace then for still.
Threestar General Ariel Support dips a schmeck tabak, an imported brand he plugs deep in his cheek; riding shotgun, he sneers spit to his underlings as they make their seventh and ultimate rotation around the perimeter. At Camp, action’s calming, becoming routine: the horizon’s a mass of hair, of blondhair, of yellowhair and goldilocked, flaxen, platinum, and towlike, ginger, and strawberry sunned, auburn and otherwise Caucasianally burnt: plaits of the stuff, reeds and weeds of it, tangles thicketed, brambles barbed wiry.
Fire from the sky and all that mishegas, the General’s yelling over the engine with the windows cranked down, then we’re hauled in to deal with the mess, that’s the infantry, son…he’s preaching to his driver, a recent enlistee just in from Monsey or Muncie (check his mailcall, a relation once shipped him a challah postmarked Walla-Walla) — you should’ve talked to a lawyer before you signed up. Visibility edging the rim of zero, the same nullity as that of the temp. General Support’s in field camos, his neck and ears warmed with the worn of a stolen chinchilla. Their vehicle’s a wonderful new feldgrau Mercedes, shanghaied just last week outside Marienbad and ingeniously refitted: a turretmounted machinegun, a handful of surface to airs. Support’s spitting orders for an end to what’s been a cursory search: interlocking circles of like Mercedes and caterpillaring tanks never to make butterfly rank, to converge treads and wingless tires at the apex of Zaol II, is what it’s known as — to ensure no one’s survived.
