The dead became hillsides of snow unto themselves, and soon all were too weak to carry a body, even these half-bodies, and now four men were required to carry them and another two men to help those who stumbled and collapsed into the snow. And soon there were those who snuck across the camp to this mound with knives, and when they returned to the hall there were those who pretended new rations of “beef” had been discovered, and all were ravenous at the smell of “beef” scorching and sizzling on heated skillets, and none dared turn down these new food stuffs.
And you and this woman in your cabin yet consumed your rations of canned roast beef, no longer heated, and then the frozen meat, and the slow chewing.
And you remained in your chair before this woman swaddled in your bison hide, and how she wept for those dead unpaid, and for those living unpaid, and even for those soldiers who had died, and for those who were forced to live.
*
You prayed in those days that she would learn to forget those others, and you and this woman and a piercing light, and you and this woman and what seemed the voice of your father, the fragrance of the prairies, the smoke along the grasses, the clover and yellow primroses, and you and this woman and your talk of the coming spring, of the animals you would hunt and smoke and salt, and how the two of you could live the rest of your lives in this land.
And soon you woke alone in your bison hide, although your skin seemed numbed from where she pressed into your figure, and you knew her coat and her boots would be missing. And when she returned you pressed your knife to her throat and said, “No words” and bound her wrists to the cot, and her hoarse screams through the door as you hunched against the winds. And in the low light of the hall, the horrid faces and near skulls of your men, and perhaps five yet living unpaid, and the sleepless faces of many dead unpaid, and you said unto these men, “I have found the woman who is stealing our rations,” and you and your men bound this woman by her feet even as she wept. Her low wretched sound as you carried her panting into the open night, her tongue hanging in the lamplight, and you watched her laid to the ground even as she said she had never loved you. “Please,” you rasped to the soldier nearest you, and you meant to say, “In the back of the skull. Immediately,” but no words came, and you made only the fatal gesture.
“Can you send lightning that they may go?”
And after dim years alone amongst these skulls, you in the shadow of the bones of the unpaid and the bones of your men, bleached in a hillside of their own, you believed these men who emerged from their ship were mere apparitions. And soon they called you in the name you had not heard in years, and indeed, in their mirrors, you seemed an ancient figure, a withered thing in rags, and when you smiled you smiled with blackened teeth and black-red gums, and when you spoke you said words like “plague” and “starvation,” and you said, “There were those who became crazed in their illness. The winter was terrible. I sought to appease their souls. I sought to grant them mercy.”
“Where were you when this morning was born?”
And for the first weeks after you returned, you sat in your apartment,, wrapped in scarves and beneath layered bison hides. And when you again walked the open air of the capital city you saw now what it had become, the limitless buildings of steel and glass, the avenues of shimmering towers. Some monstrous new universe incommensurate with the old. And there were those who called these towers “vertical cities” and those from across the seas who marveled at a population that would never run out of room, that would never overstuff its metropolises. And you wandered in the reflection of these buildings, in the radiant glint, and you gaped at those figures scurrying and scaling the sides, swinging on cables, those anonymous black specks smaller than fragments of dust, and the nights were lit with the florescence of these towers, and all the skies were fogged with their glow.
And other than monuments erected in honor of generals, it seemed this city had never known war. Men and women laid flowers at these monuments, at the tombs of generals, and they passed along Abraham's enclosed figure, and there a mother explained to the child at her side, “So we don't forget,” but when the child asked, “Forget what?” this woman could only say, “Liberty” and “Our struggle.” And you searched for the monument devoted to your father and you found none. And when you asked where one may stand, those you questioned only looked away.
No matter. Your name, by now, had surpassed his; there were those reporters who called you “the man who could not be killed” and “the walking miracle” and the “first truly modern man,” for it seemed the age fast approached when man would not fall to plague. And they asked you of your diet and your “regimen,” and they wondered of your biology, your blood. “The fountain of youth,” they speculated, tapping your chest, your veins, “is perhaps within reach.” And in those times death seemed but another obstacle to conquer, now that space had fallen, now that airships of hydrogen floated above the cities and trips that once took weeks now took hours, and journeys along the plains and to the coasts of the land that once invited death or murder were now taken by wealthy families as amusements.
*
And after some months returned you finally met with Robert, who by now wore the top hat of a millionaire over his silver hair, silk suits and polka-dotted scarves, his face ever lost in the pungency of cigars. And he smiled, and he said, “It seems you are no leader of men. But don't take it to heart, old boy. In fact, its better this way. Turns out we needed the workers after all.”
And you wandered his rows of rose gardens and topiary while his mansion loomed along the hillside, and you said, “I've never seen such a house” and Robert smiled, and smoked, and said, “My father claimed I would never live up to his example. He considered me cold. He said, âI fear you will never be the man I am, Bob.' I believe I've proved him wrong with Hildene.” And there were children who raced along the lawns with butterfly nets, their screams and laughter, while men in suits brought Robert coils of paper, and of these he said, “My father destroyed landscapes. We build them anew” and he gestured to the shimmering structures pricked along the horizon. “Soon all our nation will be towers of glass and steel. Someday it will be the right of every man and woman to live thousands of feet above the ground.”
In the evenings you ate roast goose and drank brandy until you no longer felt your face and the label of the bottle blurred. And when explosions mere miles distant echoed and rattled the silver and swayed the chandeliers, Robert smiled and said, “So long as we are fat and healthy there is little they can do.” And after dinner you drank more brandy and smoked cigars, and Robert said, “No, old boy, I owe you something significant. I'll never forget the way you botched that jobâ” and waved you off when you sought to interrupt him.
You and Robert sat on white steel lawn furniture and gazed over his acres of lawns and gardens, the giggling of children chasing goats, their bells clanging, the impeccable posture of his servants, the trays of goose liver and brandy they brought for you. And he said, “All of this flowered from the war my father built. The war your father built. All of this splendor is owed to us.” He said, “We have seen enough horror, you and I. We have lost everything we have known, save for my Mary,” and he gestured to a window overlooking the lawn, and there the shadow of his wife's figure, pressed to the glass. “Now we must cherish our magnificence. No important man will ever want again.” He said, “Oh God, if only we could forget,” and then “I have done everything I could to avenge him.” And he was silent for some while as he smoked and mused, and finally said, “I heard she died alone and raving.”
*
And now came the advent of the flatbed truck, and these clogged the streets with their shuddering, their wheels, their smoke, and rarely did a day pass when some man or animal was not murdered by these machines skidding and careening and out of control, and how the fly strewn bodies of mutilated horses banked along the streets.
And the leather factories and fur farms gave way to truck factories, and where once a few men worked the floors of factories, now all men worked these floors save those men who owned the floors, and now all men who once lived in fields and on farms moved into glass towers and worked shoulder to shoulder affixing wheels or tightening bolts, lost in the mindless repetition of movements, dreaming of when they too would clog the streets with their honking and squealing and the sputtering of their engines. And how school children stayed home when the sky seemed especially “poisonous” and infants coughed char while doctors listened to the rustle within their lungs, saying, “I doubt this one will ever be an athlete.”
And in the night you leaned out your window into a city of trucks, piled and roaring and stuck between other trucks, and in the fury of their malaise men left the cabs of their trucks to punch each other, to beat each other with crowbars, and the city hummed with pistol shots and backfiring trucks and trucks bursting into spontaneous flame. And when a man was shot, or a tower swarmed with fire, there came the wailing of still more trucks, their flashing lights and copper vats, and so many towers burned, and many died gulping blood after gunshots while sirens wailed some miles away, unable to penetrate the morass.
*
It was in those days that the man who innovated these trucks desired to bring prosperity for all, and it was this man alone whose factory and mansion windows were not punched out by gasoline bombs, and who did not masquerade for fear of insurrectionists, for it was this man who said, “We believe in making twenty thousand men prosperous and contented rather than follow the plan of making a few slave drivers in our establishment millionaires” and he said, “I believe it is a disgrace for any man to die rich.” And this man was esteemed along the land for his ignorance and his disgust of high-birthing or for anything intellectual and for all things bookish, and he was fond of saying, “I would not give two cents for all the art in the world.” And this man often said he would never run for political office, for politics housed the most ambitious of snakes, but if elected he would surely not decline the office. And along the land there were politicians he knew and donated to, who calculated to have him elected although he could not spell and although he did not know the name of the first president, nor the second, nor the name of the first revolution, nor the name of the empire defeated.
So it was that Robert brought you forth unto this man's countryside mansion, this man who greeted you in his manure-stained overalls though there seemed no cows or pigs on his land, this man who smoked a corncob pipe on his front stoop and who said unto you, “You have seen two fellows on a street corner. Both of them are down and out, but one has ten cents. With that he can buy a bun and a bed for himself or he can buy a bun for himself and a bun for his chum and take chances on getting a bed. If he does that, he is my kind of folks” and he led you into a small farmhouse-style kitchen, and there his wife, who he called “Ma,” served you biscuits and gravy, and this man said, “It's all I eat” and “Give me Ma's biscuits and gravy over a fancy dinner in some fancy city any day.”
This man led you to the black and white glow of what in those times were called television sets, and upon the screens of those sets shone the chaos of riots and wars overseas, where men of your country assaulted without warning or cause, and he said, “I have come to know who it is that starts all wars” and he said, “Only one class of man profits from mass aggression and that is the international banker” and he said, now to Robert, “Your father” and here he tapped a leather bound book, “Knew too much and for that
they
had him murdered.” He said, “I have to be very careful for I know all of their secrets, and they know I'm not afraid to say something about it.”
And so this man gestured to his wall of television sets and said, “This device shall free the decent common fellow from the perversions of those long and awful fingers” and he said, “Since the advent of the motion picture industry, an industry entirely run by the international banker as you know, we have seen a marked deterioration in our literature, amusements, and social conduct, yes, and this is attributable not to the white man but to a nasty Orientalism which has insidiously affected every channel of expression” and he said, “With the advent of the television, man may now relax his mind without relaxing his morals. Now a common fellow may endlessly recline in the glow of simple, harmless entertainments.”
This man labored until all men could work shoulder to shoulder in the construction of enormous machines, and any fellow need only perform a few simple gestures, twisting and cranking motions, thousands of times each day, day after day, and through the night, and in their dreams, and this man said, “The common fellow doesn't want to think while he works” and he said, “The common fellow would rather labor mindlessly and enjoy his time in the radiance of his television or traveling in his truck.”
And here he gestured to various scale models of amusements he needed the television to promote, toasters and blenders and watches and board games and mallets and baseballs and footballs and basketballs and figurines of founding fathers and biblical heroes and football heroes and tin miniatures of flatbed trucks and airplanes and vacuum cleaners, and he said, “We simply must populate each house with a television or two. How else will the common fellow learn of these fine relaxations?”
And this man wished to construct a line of wires from one end of the land to the other, and through these wires the white and gray luminance of televisions would flow, and so it would be now that all days would drone with the static of television for “where once a few kings could bask in this light, now all men may prosper. You see now what a beautiful thing is democracy.”