Blue Monday

by Edward Morris

conclusion

Here is another woman writing about the government’s Black Budget to pay for the covert operations. She says that our real presidents do not live on Earth, that technology is too far ahead of our evolution and the media has to explain everything to everyone to prevent stampedes, and dumb down all the wars and everything so we understand and do not panic.

Perhaps the system is not failing, she says. Perhaps those who actually run this planet know exactly what they are doing. I snuff out the joint half-smoked in the dirty glass ash tray she left me. I only have a few things. The necessary things. No more.

I am thinking about that movie What the Bleep Do We Know? where the shaman was the only one who could see the spaceship. Most of the people on these funny sites are insane people who live alone. The world drives them mad. That I can understand. I will put on a tinfoil hat so my brains will be nice and shiny when the police scrape them off my wall.

No. I am tired of this. I will go smoke joint on the roof. Where is my Walkman?

My building is tired. They made it in 1910. It used to be a small hotel. But every building used to be something. The hallway floors are tiny white hexagon tile, patterns of patterns, echoing and old. The landlord’s wife fills the halls up with bad art. There is always note from someone’s girlfriend or boyfriend on bulletin board by the buzzer in front hall.

My footfalls echo in the stairwell. My ears ring. The white stripes on the sleeves of my hooded sweatshirt glow in the orange light from the street outside.

On top floor, I walk out onto the fire escape and hoist myself up and out onto the ladder above it. The roof is walled in by old, cozy bricks with a concrete slab along the top. Tar and gravel get friendly with my sneakers. The vents sound like homeless people howling in the cold. Over to the north, they still have not taken the Christmas lights off the KOIN tower.

I light the joint, put my Walkman on and find Metallica on the radio, leaning against the wall and looking out over the city. West of the KOIN, high up on a building whose name I do not know, they have put up a big bank of lights for the news and police helicopters. The whole square switches from green to red to white as I watch. They must be testing it out.

“Dostoyevsky,” I mutter through the smoke, “This is the new underground.” But I am on the roof. Why did I think of that? What means this? Oh, yes. It means I am high.

On the radio, Metallica’s “Turn the Page” becomes nonsense and static. There is a huge grinding sound, a beep that makes me fall to my knees and scream as I rip the headphones from my ears, and the music goes away. Everything goes away except beeps and beeps and beeps of broken digital code. I put the headphones back on for a moment, curious.

But I am only curious in the back of my mind. As I fell down just then, the whole city has gone dark. Everywhere, from the Cheerful Tortoise bar down the street, to the offices and the freshman dorms, there are sounds of shock. I am quite suddenly very glad to be up high.

The radio is, I think, picking up the police band. The voice I am hearing sounds like a cop, anyway. “Copy that, uhh... Consul. You and your associates have about half an hour for your look-see before the lights come back on. Don’t touch anything. Don’t cause any trouble. Copy?”

I have no love for police. In Bratislava, they broke my papa’s nose when he was eleven just for waving around a toy gun. I take the Walkman off.

A spotlight shoots up from the helicopter-traffic signal to the right of the KOIN tower. It goes far, far, far up, seemingly towards the moon. But it is cloudy. I cannot quite tell.

There is a low kind of sound that makes my teeth hurt. The sound gets bigger and bigger. Over and above it, in a different range, come the sounds of helicopters. I realize I have been done with the joint for a while and not paid attention to this. Where did the roach-end go, this... Oh.

Oh. My.

It is a black bullet with a Honda “H” on the nose. The back tailfins look like certain kinds of planes, or the kind of flying taxicabs the British want to build now. The parts are familiar, chrome and steel and tinted glass. But the car flies, and makes no smoke.

As they pass, I can see them, three of them, behind the lightly tinted windows. They have long heads, lots of teeth, and funny little hands. They are making notes, pointing a lot. Their heads go back and forth, up and down, like little old babushki very excited about something.

They are pointing at buildings, hopping up and down when they see some, vigorously negating when they see others. Everyone stops dancing about when they look over at the Pearl District. Then all three of them just kick back for a moment as they go by, satisfied with something. They did not look at my building.

Yet.

Wait. Where did that thought come from? I am on my knees, by head below the level of the concrete slab, because I cannot stand up and I am seeing this go by and... Let me slow down.

They continue rubber-necking like tourists, like the big builders did in Communism. I would see those big crooked construction-mob hardasses walking up and down the Stardmeska in the center of my city, always toward the old Novy Bridge across the Danube that has not been blue since I was alive, anyway.

The builders would look at vacant lots, making notes where to put a house or a car park or anything like this. They would be excited, and why should they not be? They have just sunk the plot.

They are like the happy couple with the new home, like the way Marlena and I decorate this apartment... And we will put this here, and this here... Wait, I think that looks better over there...

The little people all nod their heads. The driver raises one of just a few webbed fingers and points all around, making a clockwise corkscrew gesture.

It is getting warmer out here. Just like the whole planet. Maybe they special-ordered that too... But I am high, and I do not know what means this.

So many cities all look like the Pearl District here: Cheap, cheerless and lifeless, with multiple-hundred-grand studio apartments they call condos and this is why they drive out the poor, like the poor were this other species beneath even recognition, H. Sapiens Sapiens...

Let me slow down.

But I cannot. For an escort the Honda has a police helicopter, leading them down to where a faraway pair of flashlights flags them in from one rooftop of River Place, by the waterfront. The last thing I see, before the lights come back on, is a bumper-sticker on the Honda-thing: RECLAIM CYDONIA. At my feet, my headphones bark the creatures’ answering radio call:

“We can get the original tenants out of sectors A-K, Captain Roberts, Sir. Just tell us when you want to rebuild.” It is a leprechaun voice, high and tiny, like the little people in your Machen and Yeats. I remember what I saw of the things in the car.

More than their odd shaped heads, more than anything else... they look somehow like they belong here, like they would do okay in this gravity, like... they were here first. No other planet in the solar system is habitable by humanoids that I know of.

Wait. Maybe it is still impossible to say exactly what I mean. But maybe the little people belong here more than us. I think of the government giving casinos to the Indians after so long. I wonder what your government gave these.

Maybe we’re almost done destroying this planet the way we destroyed Mars. I should have asked Karl Rove. He would know. My heart slows down as the lights come back on. I know that in the news there will be UFO reports. Oregon is getting the Northern Lights in part, this year, though. Or at least this is the party line I hear on the news. How do I feel? Tell me now how I feel.

Even if anyone did believe me... so what? I put my hands on the edge of the slab and look at how long I’d have to fall. Not long. I don’t jump. I knew I wouldn’t.

I feel cold and oily, higher than an old-growth redwood, coming down from a bad fright and making another joint. When it is a dog-end and I can think again, I go downstairs to pack my bags.

There is still the morning. Matthieu in Montmartre still has a futon free for me. Perhaps real life begins at time like this. Or perhaps not. But at least I get to find out for myself.