In Which Man Proposes and The Gods Dispose.

Shiva, the God of a hundred contradictory aspects, a thousand masks, yawned, blinked her lovely eyes and glanced down at the earthly sphere. She had fallen asleep wearing the Avatar Mask “Creator” and overslept. Consequently the mortal world had just kept creating and creating and creating while she slumbered.

“Holy Mother of Vishnu!” she shrieked “What in the Koyaanisqatsi is this?”

The bright blue globe now teemed with nasty polluting little souls, scheming and squabbling and throwing everything completely out of balance. There had been no serious plagues, famines, wars or pestilences to prune their numbers while she had napped. They looked like a dense cloud of fleas on a dying dog.

“I’d better take care of this fast” she said, “before the rest of the Godhead realizes how badly I’ve messed up!”. She ran to the dresser, opened a drawer and pulled out an Avatar mask from the box marked “Destroyer”, replacing the other one as quickly as possible and simultaneously switching to a gender better suited to the dirty job ahead.

Moments later he gruffly announced, “I am made Death, the devourer of worlds, waiting on the hour that ripens unto thy doom you swarming little nits. And that hour is right now. I will lay you waste in your hundreds, your thousands, your millions and when I am done with that I will roil the earth and your bones will rot away deep in the landfill with your tires and your plastic bags. Let me just check and see how quickly I can get this done.

He scooped a dipperful out of the steaming earthy gumbo, poured it into a platter and stirred it around with a finger and a steely intent gaze. “Oh, Yes” he chuckled, “this looks good! They’ve got computers, worldwide webbing! Social Media, anguished, alienated youth! Oh, this is too easy, it practically annihilates itself!”, he laughed until tears came. A few minor proddings here and there was all it took.

The subsequent collapse of human civilization, version 3.1, was nonetheless a tremendously exciting time to be alive. Fantastically exciting if you were young, healthy and unencumbered by fusty traditional morality. The descent into vibrant, titillating, elemental savagery was leisurely, but brilliantly lit, well directed and nicely paced. Soundtrack, choreography, dance numbers, crowd scenes, riots, slaughter, blood by the tanker car, no effort was spared, money no object. Destruction was in the air and (at least initially) it was welcomed as the necessary precursor to a new, more just, wiser, and lots more fun world to follow. The millions who felt that humans were a blight to the environment and an insult to suffering nature and those who believed that anarchy was the fastest route to a new heaven on earth were about to have their dreams come true.

The middle aged and middle class had a little more trouble getting into the spirit of the thing, being hamstrung by faint memories of order, dignity and civility, but generally, provided they were buffered from too explicit reporting on the mayhem in the streets, had invested well and had good gates to their communities and plentiful security guards, lifted their fists in smiling solidarity for to do anything else would have branded them an outright embarrassment and shamed their children. Shiva was in charge, excitement was in and reactionary doubt was, quite firmly, out. In an oddness that was bound to puzzle historians and analysts (when and if they were to eventually reappear) the wealthiest and most privileged became the most enthusiastic of the cheerleaders and contributors to the early phase of this giddy sled-ride to annihilation.

As for the old, their stock had been falling for a good long time and now held a market value of just below zero. Any ancient ideas associating age and wisdom were long past laughable. In the new world rising, they neither produced “Cool” nor consumed it. They were frankly a waste of space.

But, ah, the dances! The throbbing rhythms. The posters. The entertainments!, The aching love songs. The emotionally wrenching protests with twenty great live bands. Beautiful girls. The wine. The drugs. The great sex. Self love. Self congratulation. Self gratification. Dance til dawn and set fire to the dancehall. Roast marshmallows and hotdogs in the embers.

The next few phases became, however, increasingly less fun, although among the Gods, the new episodes were enormously popular.

Shiva though, had an even grander spectacle in the hopper. Grand beyond imagining.

Enter The Werewolves

Mister Fixit squatted next to his small smokeless fire. Using very dry wood was the key, he had determined, to avoiding telltale smoke. He was picking the last bits of flesh from the ribs of a large Red Squirrel, another species once thought to be endangered but which was now thriving and perhaps the best tasting of the squirrels in the Santiagos. He licked his fingers and wiped them on his pants. The pants, initially a faded denim blue and his once red and green plaid shirt were both now an identical color, an earthy umber with greenish ochre highlights in the more worn areas. Sap, grass, earth, animal fats and the oils that proceed from the unwashed human body had given the fabrics a sheen in areas that might have made an observer wonder if the clothes had originally been tailored from oilcloth. His belt, nearly all of which having been sacrificed to make thin leather strips for traps, was now only a leather shoelace pulling together two belt loops to hold his pants up. In recent weeks the belt loops had become so close one to the other that there was now a great and unseemly puckering outward in the zipper area. To make matters worse the trees were changing their colors, leaves were beginning to drop and so was the temperature. His survival adventure had long since begun to pall and his options were now few and becoming fewer. His reflexes, however, were better than they had ever been and his hearing much more sharply attuned. Which is why the faint rustling of a fallen leaf in an uncharacteristic way caused him to silently melt backwards into the scenery and creep soundlessly to the back side of the large stone outcropping which had been acting as his windbreak. He stealthily climbed the rock to a point where he could just peer over and survey his campsite below for danger.

Entering the small glade even more stealthily than Fixit had just left it, two werewolves appeared. Both of them were small and weaselly but unlike Fixit they were warmly (though equally filthily) dressed, and they had guns. He could smell them from fifteen feet away and it was not a pleasant smell. Fixit’s seven months in the wild had convinced him that he had a certain natural woodsman’s talent but compared to the werewolves he knew that he was only an uncoordinated child of the sort who compulsively trips on his own feet. One of the werewolves, after only the smallest flicker of an eyelid away from the campfire, fired directly into the leafy shadows where Fixit had felt himself perfectly concealed. A small branch next to his right eye was snipped as neatly as though by a barber removing an unruly lock.

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The unexpected appearance of the werewolves and the clipping of the branch by gunshot had the effect on Fixit of an explosive device suddenly detonating in his chest. Fear drove any and every sense before it like the shock wave of a bomb blast. He did not so much clamber backwards down the tall rock as fly backwards from it in a terror fueled airborne arc twisting in midair so as to land on his feet scrambling as he hit the ground. He began running in the way that one runs in a nightmare, with legs infuriatingly reluctant to give the necessary superhuman effort. All woodcraft evaporated as he scrambled over stumps, rocks and fallen logs and slid down slopes leaving a trail it would be impossible not to follow. He had seen the remains of people when the werewolves had finished with them and it had been an unforgettably gruesome demonstration. But this would be to give reason to his fear and right now his fear had rolled reason into a tiny ball and flicked it far away. His death, he knew, was an immediate and horrible certainty. He ran and ran.

He knew he was as good as dead from that moment. There was no hope of reprieve and no appeal. He ran like a rabbit in a circle of wolves with no rational hope for anything more than the same obvious fate than the rabbit had. He ran and kept running.

Although his analysis of his current situation was largely correct, still.. in the inexplicable and arbitrary way in which fortune distributes her favors and grace is granted even to the irredeemable sinner, he was just about to receive not one, but two “Get Out of Death Free” cards. But unknowing, he ran and ran.

The werewolves followed him in a leisurely fashion, moving with sinister efficiency as befitted the top circle of forest predators which is how they quite reasonably saw themselves. The starving valley dweller was a very low priority target for them having apparently no weapons, food, usable clothing or tools and in fact, nothing to profit them except the pleasure of torturing and killing him. They were therefore in no hurry. Hunting down an unarmed derelict with negligible forest skills did not need to be an occasion for undue exertion. Now that they knew his general whereabouts and his relatively low level of competence they could kill him soon, or wait until later if something more interesting were to open up in the meantime. Which it did, in the form of a fat doe and her wide eyed, delicate faun. By the time the first small haunch was browning on an improvised spit, Fixit was forgotten.

Fixit himself was utterly unaware of his almost total unimportance in this small drama. His was, to him, unarguably, the starring role. At the very core of the onion layers of his consciousness, the kernel of the computer architecture of his being in the world, he was now operating only on pure, unreasoning terror. He ran until he couldn’t run any more, felt sick, tried throwing up, failed in that, though not for lack of trying, and began running again in as much horror as before.

The Aggrieved Bladder

He slept briefly and fitfully beneath some dense and scratchy brush waking no less fear-stricken and no less nauseous from it. He started running again long before dawn. If he found himself on a sunlit path he would leave it as being too exposed. He came out of the deep woods onto a section of the old main highway, quake-buckled, twisted and cut by a deep ravine with a swiftly flowing stream running through it. He slogged up the stream and seeing a rock face with several rusty pitons still protruding, recognized it as a onetime climber’s route. He scrambled straight up the face never looking down, wriggled through some growth at the cliff top and resumed running.

Although his restricted diet had substantially reduced his weight and in some ways increased his energy, ultimately it did not provide unlimited stamina. Cresting a lonely ridge all strength suddenly rushed out of him as from a violently punctured tire. He dropped to his knees, toppled forward and lost consciousness.

It was night when he woke up. He was sore in every joint and muscle. He was weary, starving, hopeless, ashamed. He wanted to cry. He cried. Dying seemed like a good idea. He waited to die. He didn’t die. It seemed somehow like another betrayal in a long line of betrayals. Surely if all you wanted, at last, was just to die you should be able just to die. But apparently not. He had to piss. He couldn’t die and now he had to piss. Having given oneself over to death surely should mean that you were no longer required to do anything. But he couldn’t seem to die and now he really, really had to piss. Suddenly he was angry.

“I only want to die and now I have to piss first? Seriously? If I refuse to piss, will you just kill me” he pleaded pitifully.

After it became clear that God did not intend to make even this humiliating deal, resignedly, exhaustedly, painfully he got to his feet using a nearby tree to help himself up. His first thought was to piss on the tree but since the tree had been kind enough to help him get up it seemed somehow ungracious. This pissing, this releasing of a body’s water, had now become linked in his mind to death, his death, this ultimate event, a pissing and a passing away. But, he realized, one couldn’t stage one’s ultimate pissing death performance just anywhere. One needed to stand on an eminence, ureter in one hand, clenched fist in the other and scream at the assembled fates, “Piss On You And Be Damned!” And with this in mind he began to struggle across the starlit meadow to find his special place, his final pissing place.

As he trudged forward he could see the stars under the lowest branches of the pines in front of him which informed him that he was on a high plateau which he could assume would soon come to a drop off. Once having passed through the trees he found himself indeed at the edge of a great dark valley dropping steeply away from where he stood. It was a steep drop off surely but sadly not a precipice. If he threw himself off here the best he could hope for was to roll rapidly downhill possibly still being conscious when the coyotes began to gnaw on his broken legs. He began moving along the edge of the plateau looking for a better and more certainly fatal spot to leap. “Curse God, Piss, Curse God again and then Jump.” That was his plan and he felt it was a good one. He could not at that moment imagine anything more satisfactory.

He was aching, dizzy, sick to his stomach and his bladder was close to bursting but he thought, “You only kill yourself once, let’s try to do it right”. Luckily the soft lip of the plateau soon became a rock shelf progressively cantilevering itself out over the valley.

“This is more like it,” he thought as he stumbled forward. Easing around a huge Juniper he saw his perfect pissing death place. He smiled. A gorgeous starlit view, the loneliest section of the whole range and only thirty feet away from a long row of almost perfectly rectangular boulders shimmering silver grey in the moonlight. In his overwrought state he began to weep again.

“I will go rest against those boulders and compose my pissing death song that I might sing it as I fling myself to the sharp and jumbled stones below. Curse, Sing, Piss, Fling.” he croaked happily.

Seeing a darkened recess in the nearest block shaped boulder he shuffled toward it, clutching his ureter tightly so as to not have his final performance spoiled by any unscripted events before his preparations were quite finished. He stretched out his hand, caught his foot in a low bush and went head first directly into the rock.