to sightless, speechless slumber? Perchance by dreaming? After all a dream is a voyage to the end of night. But unlike a cruise or the clan’s yearly motorcade to Aunt Bertha’s clambake a dream has no fixed itinerary, no scheduled destination. It just unfolds. And there’s no need to pack.
It is the very nature of such journeys that compels those of us who embark on their gossamer wings to question their significance or merit. What’s the point? Why wander when the old armchair cradles our weary frames and conformity extends its all-embracing arms the better to receive us? We are apt to discover on arrival at some unscheduled port of call, as I did on Mars’ barren shores, that there may have been no good reason to make the trek in the first place. For when all is said and done, at the very end of some aimless expedition, worn out and confused, we will sadly conclude that some dreams are just too close for comfort, some dreams are just not meant to be.
So I wake up.
Opalescent moonbeams filter through my bedroom’s lace curtains and I see shadows dancing on the wall. Could dawn be far behind? On the short ride to the launch pad, past Building D where tomorrow’s dreamers train, I’m struck by the notion that knowledge is rewarded with an ever-widening chasm of ignorance and superstition.
Today is the first day of winter -- December 21, 2012. The sun is aligned with the plane of our galaxy. At its center, the gigantic black hole is as black and elusive as ever. Earth’s magnetic field has not changed. The only calamities recorded on this fateful date echo man’s bestial cruelty to man. Apocalypse has been big business for 2,000 years or more. From ancient Persia to Daniel and Enoch and Habakkuk and Ezekiel and the deranged author of Revelation and the death-obsessed Maya, deceivers and impostors and self-deluded mystics acting under the pretense of divine inspiration have hoodwinked the multitudes and driven them to act like lunatics.
As I ease myself into the pilot’s seat, I tell myself that future explorers, however vast their knowledge might be, will bear burdens of ignorance immensely heavier than my own. But once aloft, their sails will hug the wind and ride the tempest. For, they too shall have dared to go beyond their dreams as prophets of doom, foiled again, rewrite their contemptible scripts.
THE VAMPIRE STATE
(First published in the December 1991 issue of OMNI Magazine)
Like flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods.
They kill us for their sport.
William Shakespeare -- King Lear
A rank, sulfurous halo hangs low over Manhattan. Driven by icy gusts, tentacle-like fingers of swirling amber gases swoop toward the slime-slick pavement, probing deep into yawning doorways, arcades and atria, seeking out the specters that lurk within their drafty expanse.
It’s Christmas Eve in the Big Apple. Chiming in the distance in pious unison, ethereal and uninvolved, church bells summon the faithful. Chiming? No, tolling -- a lugubrious knell for a swarming, moribund metropolis, for the one thousand and one night creatures that stalk its streets, for the living dead I get paid to hunt down and kill.
It all came together half a century ago or more when politicians, anxious to save face and give voters the impression that justice was being served, let the long simmering rancor, the restive hatred burst like an ugly abscess. Violence, sporadic and extemporaneous at first, grew bolder and deadlier with each secret municipal emergency meeting.
No one complained. Not a single cry of horror was ever heard. It was too late. Justice -- like truth -- the stronger of two conflicting arguments, justice, the paradox suspended on the tip of a sword, put on its most fearsome face. The Lady took off the blindfold and winked lasciviously at the oligarchs. And the carnage began.
‘Tis the season of all folly, falalalala … and the blood of the young, thinner than water, cheaper than hogwash, coalesces with the putrid rivulets of swill and excrement that hug the curb and cascade into the storm drains.
Torn by crime, soaring unemployment, triple-digit inflation, homelessness, merciless slashes in social services, suffocated by Orwellian federal statutes, America’s big cities are putrefying and crumbling like the toes of a leper. For every child who wakes up poor and hungry, another dies of neglect or abuse. One-parent families are now the norm, each producing its quota of junkies and juvenile offenders. America has the world’s largest and fastest growing prison population. More than four million minors are in custody on charges ranging from truancy and drug use to petty theft and prostitution. Two million more serve hard time for capital crimes: murder, rape, aggravated assault, armed robbery and home invasion. Most are incarcerated with hardened adult criminals -- ten to a cell. There is no more room.
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