“Let us build a city and a tower, whose top may reach into heaven”
Along the valleys the rapid mounding of the dead meant the slow creep from the rivers and swamps, it meant the coming of leather and murder, it meant the ancient and insatiable arrival of death. It meant the hissing and growling of monsters, it meant the slow swaggering crawl, it meant the thrashing tails, the clattering claws. It meant doom and oblivion. It meant the death of small children and fathers and mothers and family dogs. Militiamen postured along alligator-free streets, smoking cigars and whistling at women, and most by now understood these positions as the foreshadowing of horror. And some veterans scoffed, they said they had seen bodies blown into pieces, they had known the death of a thousand, thousand men, they said, “no lizard is gonna put the scare to me.” But a coldness grips the heart of even the sturdiest man when the yellow eyes frequent the night, when what has been the world becomes the insatiable ravaging of neighbors, the screams of children, the screeching of poodles and hounds, and the stinking, timeless gullet is never stilled, it only ever approaches. So all men armed themselves, all men prepared and waited.
And then rifle shots, the bodies of alligators slumped limply in rolls of barbed wire on the lawns and in the streets, and the untold spill of blood, the wide milky eyes of alligators, and these bodies rotting in the streets, hoisted from gas lamp poles, gutted and fly-swarmed while gulls swooped and tore chunks of meat.
And unpaid children devoured handfuls of rotten alligator from the streets, their blood-smeared faces, while militiamen snickered and hooted across the way. And when the militias tired of observing they flooded the streets with rifle-fire and the screams of children scurrying and dropping and writhing. And those who escaped joined their parents in shantytowns, their mothers and fathers asleep on dirt floors after long days shoveling alligator manure or hefting alligator hides or cutting open alligators at the leather factories. And through the night, while these families attempted sleep, came the crunching sounds as alligators devoured the bodies of unpaid children shot through the skulls and left decaying in the streets.
And many cities and neighborhoods along the land became cities of alligators, the hundred, hundred bodies of alligators, their necks slung with chains and hanging from burned-out gas lamps and flagpoles and apartment windows, the picked-cleaned carcasses of alligators, the skeletons and leathered-corpses of alligators swinging as gulls swooped and pecked at their pillaged bellies, and the cockeyed flights of too-fat gulls who snapped their necks and shattered their bills against brick walls. And the low crunching sounds as alligators devoured the broken corpses of fallen gulls. And alligators half-climbed flagpoles and gas lamps to chew the swinging bodies of dead alligators while militiamen fired into the back of their heads. And how still more alligators swaggered along the bonfire-lit streets, hissing.
And how in those days, the shops and stores of certain cities and neighborhoods were vacated, and the bodies and fluids of embalmers spilled to the bricks, to the soil, and alligators lapped the embalming fluids, and it was said that their bodies never rotted nor did the bodies of the rats and birds and unpaid children who fed upon this flesh.
And these cities of alligators became cities of rifle-shots and bonfires, of wagons over-brimmed with the bodies of alligators, of alligators fallen from wagons and scattered along the streets. And enterprising militia-men made their fortunes from the hides of alligators, for many leather factories and fur factories had gone to the exclusive manufacture of alligator-leather boots and jackets and purses and wallets and belts and gloves and briefcases, and there seemed not a millionaire or child of a millionaire who did not wear these ancient hides in some manner. And with their new fortunes these militiamen purchased mansions along the hills of the valley, and the cases of champagne they consumed, the cases of whisky, the rifle-fire jolting each night.
And it was said that militiamen allowed alligators to consume the unpaid children before firing upon them, and the shot dead corpses of alligators bulged in the belly and when slit open therein a child's arm, a foot, a hand.
And it was said that the new president blamed the unpaid for the deaths of any children, as those who slept upon the floors of hovels, on rugs and in the dirt, were “natural feed” for wandering alligators, and the savage lives these “near-animals” lived were no doubt at fault. “Those wretched children are the unfortunate victims of bad fortune,” the new president said. “We must never forget the heroic acts of our militias in these dire times.”
And along the land the militias and millionaires cheered the new president's “incorruptible nature” in pardoning the militias in the “accidental slaughter” of any unpaid or lowly paid children, mothers, fathers, or the like, and many of these smiled at the mention of an unpaid child shot or an unpaid child covered in flies, and many of these talked with disgust about the squalor of those shanties and tarpaulin cities, and the unpaid's penchant for stealing from the grocers. They said, “Have you ever seen an unpaid buy so much as a loaf of bread?” and how the unpaid and the lowly paid smelled of the muck and feces they slept in, and from brownstone homes along the land: “They are like animals, rutting and breeding when they have no jobs, or paying jobs, and cannot possibly support their enormous broods. And we are supposed to express surprise or remorse when these brutes starve or are devoured?” And there were many along the land who said of the riots that “the unpaid think only of themselves,” that within the heart of every unpaid or lowly paid there resides the yet unkindled flame of an anarchist, and that these unpaid were greater menaces than any alligator. And it was said the entire nation would profit from the swinging of unpaid and lowly paid bodies from every lamppost in every city.
And no matter the bodies of all the unpaid and lowly paid and their families, there were always new workers migrating into shanty towns from the fields of what were once farms, from across the ocean, and by now these magnates and barons were millionaires a hundred times over, and they lived across the river from these smoldering shanties, and there they constructed brownstone homes ornamented with Oriental rugs and European paintings, with woodwork cherubs and horned-gods, ceilings of stained-glass, and in the evenings the gentlemen retired to their libraries of plush sofas and stained-glass doors, toured their greenhouses filled with orchids, ferns, vines, and all the flowering plants of the land, and when they tired of their homes and their dinner parties and their various social circles, they began baseball leagues, and now all along the land there were those who were not dead or dying of starvation or of militias and these attended baseball games where they ate roasted peanuts. This was a golden age of fine amusements, and when baseball was in remission they attended circuses and what were called “moving picture shows,” and they bought the gramophone recordings of operas, and they stayed indoors and smoked cigars and listened to the voices of the dead with their wives and children, and when on the long-off horizon came the sounds of gunshots and the screams of riots, when the horror became intolerable, these people simply increased the volume of their Puccini.
And you attended many of these parties after those in the city learned that your father was the General, and there you sipped scotch and wafted cigars, toured the art collections of coal magnates or bankers, the numerous portraits of bare-bosomed virgins sprawled on marble steps while some mutton-chopped man lectured on what he called “glittering depictions of splendid piety” while gesturing to what you saw only as heaving bosoms, the fine hairs between legs, and you followed millionaires through the coiling of cigar smoke while a young girl plucked a harp or sang liltingly over piano strands, and these millionaires said, “I have known a man to come into my office, and I have given him a check for a million dollars when I knew they had not a cent in the world,” and you toured their private collections, a molar belonging once to Mary Magdalene, a stone sarcophagus covered with depictions of a journey to the underworld, and Abraham's letters, speech drafts, legal papers as well as a twenty-two stanza poem from his younger years entitled “The Bear Hunt,” and a blood-stained wallet with no contents but lint, a pencil nub, and a newspaper clipping reading
The Man is an Ape
. And as you observed these objects through their glass cases, these millionaires, or the men who worked for these millionaires, said unto you, “You have a bright future, my boy, if you listen to us” and “There's no damn reason why you couldn't go all the way to the top, if we like you well enough.”
“Let us make a name, lest we be obliterated from the face of the earth”
And in those days your father wandered the streets and factories of your town, the ragged lands of ash and alligators, the area of extermination, and there the alligator-fattened gulls investigated the piled alligator heads and alligator legs, the eyes eaten to sockets, the skulls hollowed, the tongues gone into their gullets and the bulbous bellies of various rats and birds. And militiamen lobbed burning rags into leather hillsides until the streets clogged with charcoaled bodies, while the streets lit into fires and skies sweltered with a smoke musked with swamp and peat and fish. And in the land of leather and murder, the militiamen wore masks resembling the pointed faces of birds, while they prodded the burning ancient hillsides.
Your father was well known by the militias, sooty and hooded and barefaced, and they saluted him as he strode the mounded streets, and he called them by the names of men who had served under him, and your father shook their leather-gloved hands, and he called them “Corporal,” and he called them “Sergeant” and your father said unto these men, “We sure burned the hell out of those bastards, didn't we?” and he gestured to landscapes of char. He said, “We must investigate these dwellings for survivors, or the inkling of survivors, so we may smite them also.” And they surveyed this landscape of ruined carriages and burned-out yards and coiled barbed-wire, and from nowhere in these came the hissing of alligators. “We have murdered them all,” the militiamen told your father, “But even in death they are difficult to eradicate” and they indicated with their bayonets how slowly the leather of dispatched alligators smolders, and they indicated how even the disembodied head of an alligator resembles the head of a living alligator, and they indicated how an alligator does not decay in the same manner as a man, and they indicated how a given alligator may exist for a billion, billion years while a given man is doomed to die within his first forty-five.
And in the valley of nightmares, and your father sneered, and your father pulled away from them, and your father thrashed at the wind, saying, “We'll see about that” and “You boys may accept those terms as finalized but I will not,” and “This is not the first time in our history that we have seen these monsters,” and your father said, “Nor will it be the last.” Your father said, “Many an ancient filled the chambers of his death with the wrapped, eviscerated bodies of alligators,” and he gestured to the smote-out ravages, saying, “You see now why the ancients considered our world harvested from the body of an alligator.”
*
Your father wandered the streets of the valley, lost against tides of militia racing in carriages or on foot, the thumping of their boots like long-ago hooves. Your father wandered into alleyways stuffed with parts, with the chewing and thrashing of birds, and your father continued along cobbled streets piled with the arms and heads and tails of alligators, and to these the rats scurried, and to these the emaciated children of the forests and shantytowns darted, and there they chewed the crisped-hide and cracked open the bones and sucked out the swamp water, these children sallow and hued in soot, blotted for the light of a sky always in darkness, for the smoke of fires and leather factories, and against the constant fumes of cities burning, the sun seemed smothered with sackcloth, the sun seemed choked black with barbed-wire, and in the midst of this landscape the bodies of alligators seemed as risen anew before your father, their charcoal mouths pink and hissing, their emptied sockets inflamed and yellowed. And before these apparitions, your father fell to the soil and wept unto your absence.
And your father sat on the rooftops of the remaining buildings of the land, watching the circling gulls, and he cupped his ears for their shrieking, and he directed militiamen to fire upon these with their repeating rifles, with their marksman sightings, insisted that they bring the corpses to him, and these he held, bloody and limp, and these he whispered unto, and these dead eyes he gazed into, and these dead beaks he listened to. And unto the assembled militias of the land your father said, “We must build,” and commanded these men to cart the husks of alligators to his lawn, and your father stood in the hollows of his home and cried into the naked swells of this dwelling, “Run along lad, we have much work to attend to!” and your father stood in the silence, leaned against the edge of your bed, and there he spoke unto your sheets, your pillows, said unto the atmosphere, “We don't have time for dilly-dallying,” and slid his smooth child's hands along your pillow, and there the smear of his alligator blackness. And in the still of your vacant room, your father uttered, “I have been strange, I know,” and he said, “I have not always been as I should,” and he said, “There is something within that seeks to destroy me” and he gestured to the lawn of alligator parts, saying, “But I will cure our ailments.”
And soon infant alligators no larger than salamanders lay on your father's mud-lawn. And these he tore from the leather membranes and gathered along the rivers, harvested as they struggled forth from their first beds, from their leather eggs. These he gathered within his hands as a mother alligator gathers her infants within her maw. These he smothered, thrashing, the dying echoes of their miniature hissing.