Fourteen Thousand

Although, I wonder how much there is to say, really, when you are a dutiful cog in this machine. Or that machine, depending on where you are or what shift you are working. It is, of course, the beast. It is the graven image. It is the subterranean dynamo upon which the crust of western hemisphere existence sprawls from sea to shining sea. But duty is noble. Is it not. Is not it. It is not. We turn in shifts, Comrades, we turn in shifts. I am below with the swelter-tongue, oil-tang stench for nine hours and then surface, numb, sticky, and disoriented into the light, while your eyes are just starting to adjust to the world for what it really is. But not for too long! God help us if we see for too long what the world really is. What it really is. How would the machine run then, Comrades? What would become of us then? Rice bowls and distended stomachs, that’s what. And what to do with all those clocks. In every form imaginable. So you take your place behind the levers just as I am squinting, staggering up from the shafts, paying my fees at the door before I lumber off to lick my wounds and spend my earnings on whatever nepenthe will comfort, distract. As I lie whimpering, sniveling over some inconsequential gash that won’t, for God’s sake, won’t stop bleeding. For numbness is life. Numbness is the petrol, the calories, Comrades. It is what the gaping maw of the beast requires. That and our progeny. This is why it is imperative, Comrades, absolutely imperative that you train them up in the doctrine we now profess and hold dear. That doctrine whose icons we salute and on which we dry our tears and in which we wrap our naked bodies. There is nothing else. All is vanity but vanity and vanity of vanities. For you are not here to feel, Comrades. You are not here to touch the void or drink too deeply from what might be beyond the celluloid soporific ric-tic-tic-tic flickering mesmeric projectors you worship. No. There is nothing. Nothing behind the curtain. Defiance is death is fear is paralysis is poverty is unhappiness is sullied white gloves, Comrades. Sullied white gloves. We need not revert to puritanical names like Mammon, of course, for what did that fool know after all? Crazy, dirty, impoverished, desultory—slaughtered, after all. For God’s sake, is that really an example to follow? Come, now, Comrades, let us reason together. What is this? It is, simply put, a fee for what you cannot, must not live without. Incidentally, another one has gone missing this morning and so you, friend, you must take his shift as well as your own today. The congeries awaits you. Oh, the nobility and pride and satisfaction you must now feel! 25 Oct, 2007