The Apocalypse Reader (37 page)

But human love, and superhuman faith, saved from the stagnating horror. The conviction that the God of his fathers was present with him, and would save him and Almah to the end, never left him for an instant, but urged him to exertions which, had he not had this all-supporting faith, he would himself have deemed impossible. And his faith spake truth. The God of infinite mercy, who had stretched out His own right hand to save, and marked the impotence of the wrath and cruelty of man, was with him still, and, despite of the horrors yet lingering round them, despite of the varied trials, fatigues, and privations attendant on their rapid flight, led them to life and joy, and bade them stand forth the witnesses and proclaimers of His unfailing love, His everlasting providence!

With the great earthquake of Lisbon, the commencement of which our preceding pages have faintly endeavoured to portray, and its terrible effects on four millions of square miles, our tale has no further connection. The third day brought our poor fugitives to Badajoz, where Alvar's property had been secured. They tarried there only long enough to learn the blessed tidings of Hassan Ben Ahmed's safe arrival in England with their child; that his faithfulness, in conjunction with that of their agent in Spain, had already safely transmitted the bulk of their property to the English funds; and to obtain Ben Ahmed's address, forward tidings of their providential escape to him, and proceed on their journey.

An anxious but not a prolonged interval enabled them to accomplish it safely, and once more did the doubly-rescued press their precious boy to their yearning hearts and feel that conjugal and parental love burned, if it could be, the dearer, brighter, more unspeakably precious, from the dangers they had passed; and not human love alone. The veil of secrecy was removed, they were in a land whose merciful and liberal government granted to the exile and the wanderer a home of peace and rest, where they might worship the God of Israel according to the law he gave; and in hearts like those of Alvar and his Almah, prosperity could have no power to extinguish or deaden the religion of love and faith which adversity had engendered.

The appearance of old Gonzalos and his family in England, a short time after Alvah's arrival there, removed their last remaining anxiety, and gave them increased cause for thankfulness. Not a member of the merchant's family, and more wonderful still, not a portion of his property, had been lost amid the universal ruin; and to this very day, his descendants recall his providential preservation by giving, on every returning anniversary of that awful day, certain articles of clothing to a limited number of male and female poor.

SO WE ARE VERY CONCERNED

Elliott David

THE SHOPPING CARTS have all gone absent: rolled away or stolen or otherwise: perhaps the inevitable unionization of inanimate objects that we've all been silently expecting; or something loudly unanticipated, like the revolt of the overlooked and mobile. Regardless, they're gone. Milk spoils in the parking lots of the Freest Land. Ice-cream questions the structural integrity of paper over plastic. Peanut butter goes unharmed. This is when the riots begin-the riots begin at peanut butter.

In Peoria, Illinois, thirrysomething thirtysomethings shriek in unison, tearing the condiment aisle to the ground. Those not bludgeoned to death lay suffocating under mounds of quadruple-stuffed Oreos and fruit cookies that claim to be something other than what they are.

In La Jolla, California, shreds of tennis skirts and polo collars float through the air, descending onto premarinated flank steak and salmon tartar; the green fuzz of Dunlop balls and flesh coagulating under French manicures, wristbands, and white bandannas stained headbutt-red.

In Corpus Christi, Texas, blood is splattered on the scandal papers and checkout-lane candy bars. Someone yells "yeehaw" as the aisles tip like dominos, the last one crushes a preteen buying eye shadow and an Error Proof Test.

In Portland, Oregon, the stay-at-home dads bash the skulls of mildmannered geriatrics with stale baguettes, and steal their basket-equipped motorized wheelchairs. They stuff the mouths of the deceased with string cheese and balls of mozzarella, re-creating childhood images of world record holders in cigarettes-smoked-at-once. Some dads high-five, others fight to the death.

In Manhattan, New York, a man watching the news wonders: Why not buy only what you can carry?

GIGANTIC

Steve Aylett

STRANGE AIRCRAFT ARRIVED with the sky that morning, moving bloodslow. And Professor Skychum was forced from the limelight at the very instant his ranted warnings became most poignant. `They're already here!'

Skychum had once been so straight you could use him to aim down, an astrophysicist to the heart. No interest in politics-to him Marx and Rand were the same because he went by pant size. Then one afternoon he had a vision which he would not shut up about.

The millennium was the dull rage that year and nutters were in demand to punctuate the mock-emotional retrospectives filling the countdown weeks. The media considered that Skychum fit the bill-in fact they wanted him to wear one.

And the stuff he talked about. There were weaknesses in his presentation, as he insisted that the whole idea occurred to him upon seeing Scrappy Doo's head for the first time. `That dog is a mutant!' he gasped, leaning forward in such a way, and with so precise an appalled squint to the eyes, that he inadvertently pierced the constrictive walls of localised spacetime. A flare of interface static and he was seeing the whole deal like a lava-streamed landscape. He realised he was looking at the psychic holoshape of recent history, sickly and corrosive. Creeping green flows fed through darkness. These volatile glow trails hurt with incompletion. They converged upon a cess pit, a supersick build-up of denied guilt. This dumping ground was of such toxicity it had begun to implode, turning void-black at its core.

Like a fractal, detail reflected the whole. Skychum saw at once the entire design and the subatomic data. Zooming in, he found that a poison line leading from two locations nevertheless flowed from a single event-Pearl Harbor. One source was the Japanese government, the other was Roosevelt's order to ignore all warnings of the attack. The sick stream was made up of 4,575 minced human bodies. In a fast zoom-out, this strand of history disappeared into the density of surrounding detail, which in turn resolved into a minor nerve in a spiral lost on the surface of a larger flow of glowing psychic pollution. A billion such trickles crept in every tendril of the hyperdense sludge migration, all rumbling toward this multidimensional landfill of dismissed abomination. And how he wished that were all.

Future attempts to reproduce his accidental etheric manoeuvre resulted in the spectacle of this old codger rocking back and forth with a look of appalled astonishment on his face, an idiosyncratic and media-friendly image which spliced easily into MTV along with those colourised clips of the goofing Einstein. And he had the kind of head propeller hats were invented for.

Skychum went wherever he'd be heard. No reputable journal would publish his paper
On Your Own Doorstep: Hyperdimensional Placement of Denied Responsibility
. One editor stated simply: Anyone who talks about herding behaviour's a no-no.' Another stopped him in the street and sneered a series of instructions which were inaudible above the midtown traffic, then spat a foaming full-stop at the sidewalk. Chat shows, on the other hand, would play a spooky theramin fugue when he was introduced. First time was an eye-opener. `Fruitcake corner-this guy's got the Seventh Seal gaffa-taped to his ass and claims he'll scare up an apocalypse out of a clear blue sky. Come all the way here from New York City-Dr Theo Skychum, welcome.' Polite applause and already some sniggers. The host was on garrulous overload, headed for his end like a belly-laughing Wall of Death rider. How he'd got here was anybody's guess. `Doctor Skychum, you assert that come the millennium, extraterrestrials will monopolise the colonic irrigation industry-how do you support that?'

Amid audience hilarity Skychum stammered that that wasn't his theory at all. The gravity of his demeanour made it all the more of a crackup. Then the host erupted into a bongo frenzy, hammering away at two toy flying saucers. Skychum was baffled.

He found that some guests were regulars who rolled off the charmed banter with ease.

`Well see here Ray, this life story of yours appears to have been carved from a potato.'

`I know, Bill, but that's the way I like it.'

`You said you had a little exclusive for us tonight, what's that about?'

`Credit it or not, Bill, I'm an otter.'

`Thought so Ray.'

It blew by on an ill, hysterical wind and Skychum couldn't get with the programme. He'd start in with some lighthearted quip about bug-eyed men and end up bellowing `Idiots! Discarding your own foundation! Oppression evolves like everything else!'

Even on serious shows he was systematically misunderstood. The current affairs show
The Unpalatable Truth
was expressing hour-long surprise at the existence of anti-government survivalists. This was the eighty-seventh time they'd done this and Skychum's exasperated and finally sobbing repetition of the phrase `even a
child
knows' was interpreted as an attempt to steal everyone's faint thunder. And when his tear-rashed face filled the screen, blurring in and out as he asked 'Does the obvious have a reachable bottom?', he was condemned for making a mockery of media debate. A televangelist accused him of `godless snoopery of the upper grief' and, when Skychum told him to simmer down, cursed him with some vague future aggravation. The whole thing was a dismal mess, smeared beyond salvation. Skychum's vision receded as though abashed.

There was no shortage of replacements. One guy insisted the millennium bug meant virtual sex dolls would give users the brush-off for being over a hundred years old and broke. Another claimed he spoke regularly to the ghost of Abe Lincoln. `My communications with this lisping blowhead yield no wisdom atall,' he said. `But I'm happy.' Then he sneezed like a cropduster, festooning the host with phlegm.

The commentators deemed radical were those going only so far as to question what was being celebrated. Skychum himself found he wanted to walk away. But even he had to admit the turn was a big deal, humanity having survived so long and learnt so little-there was a defiant rebelliousness about it that put a scampish grin on everyone's face. For once people were bound with a genuine sense of kick-ass accomplishment and self-congratulatory cool. Skychum began at last to wish he was among them. But just as he felt his revelation slipping away, it would seem to him that the mischievous glint in people's eyes were redshifted to the power of the Earth itself if viewed from a civilised planet. And his brush with perspective would return with the intensity of a fever dream.

Floating through psychic contamination above a billion converging vitriol channels, toward that massive rumbling cataract of discarded corruption. Drawing near, Skychum had seen that ranged around the cauldroning pit, like steel nuts around a wheel hub, were tiny glinting objects. They were hung perfectly motionless at the rim of the slow vortex. These sentinels gave him the heeby-jeebies, but he zoomed in on the detail. There against the god-high waterfall of volatility. Spaceships.

Ludicrous. There they were.

`If we dealt honestly, maturely with our horrors,' he told the purplehaired clown hosting a public access slot, `instead of evading, rejecting and forgetting, the energy of these events would be naturally re-absorbed. But as it is we have treated it as we treat our nuclear waste-and where we have dumped it, it is not wanted. The most recent waste will be the first to return.'

`Last in, first out eh,' said the clown sombrely.

`Precisely,' said Skychum.

`Well, I wish I could help you,' stated the clown with offhand sincerity. `But I'm just a clown.'

This is what he was reduced to. Had any of it happened? Was he mad?