Strange Weather

Dispatch #W23

J. A. Tyler

 

Together they huddle, a group of men and women in tatters, their bodies as thin as any, their eyes vacant, soupy with nothingness.

Pockets like this collect people, some accidentally, gone too close to the edge, wanting to see what it is really like, to experience it just once, or simply walking too near without the proper precautions. Most here, though, are huddled on purpose.

Once, they were survivors like anyone else, holding to the threads of former lives: Salvaging loves or searching for their families or chasing down some hopeful stability in the face of this new chaos. Then a stray breath, an inhale, and the glorious, ripe feel of nothingness, of falling, of absolute gutting. Now, they are addicts.

Because it isn’t loss but forgetting. It isn’t fear but the leveling of carnage. It isn’t cowering but standing upright amongst the bones of the world and not knowing anything is wrong.

Huddled, the warmth of the July Winds courses over them. They inhale, deep and large, only needing to stand where they are, breathing regularly, their lungs a constant gathering of absenteeism. They are not there anymore.

Their bodies stand in a knot of used-to-be, a glut of once-was. Their minds are nothingness, a blank slate, a fabulous wasteland. They don’t remember who they were searching for or where they came from. They only know to stand and breathe and, in doing so, they’ll maintain this nothingness, they’ll continue on without worry or fear, without the need to traverse the wreckage, the world going on without them.

/////////

Journal Entry CCCXIII

When I first saw you, it was like I was stilled, caught in a loop like a holding pattern, watching you interact with others and me not even knowing your name. Now I know it and I feel like I can’t even talk to you. What I want to say can’t be said, has to be swallowed or spat, festering as it is into some ugly, uncontrollable blackness, the epicenter of us falling apart. Are we falling apart? That’s what I want to ask you, but I’m too afraid. Instead I’ll wait, breathe, hope for the tide to turn.

/////////

How to Play
Dead as a Doornail

First, arrange yourselves in pairs. Next, one of each pair plays dead. Playing dead can look like going limp or slumping chairside, or it can look like slitting your throat or diving from a great height or closing your eyes with scissors. The mode and manner of the deadening is wide open. The more important part is the living half. When the dead half is dead, the living half of the pair has to keep on living as if nothing has happened. Eat. Sleep. Go adventuring. Converse as if the dead aren’t dead. Anything done before the death has to go on past it, without hesitation, and must be sustained for as long as possible. The game is lost when either the dead refuses to stay dead or the living half starts to believe in dying, starts to understand that the dead are dead. The game is won if the living half lives so hard and with such blinders that the player actually dies from buried grief, and in that, the pair is reunited.

/////////

I’d seen it in the Old Mountains, on my first leg, the opening foray into and through the new landscapes of this rattling world, how everything had shattered and crumbled, fallen around us: men or women, reluctant to let go, unwilling to give in, unwilling to admit or recede or live otherwise than before.

Trees no longer bloomed or blossomed. Grass no longer grew. Meadows were only dust and glass shards. Trees only upright stalks, a dried leaf clinging to the branch, and that’s where they found the idea.

Just as the idea of flight came from nature. The invention of bullet trains. The notion of sonar. These men and women who couldn’t let go decided, like those reluctant trees, to just keep holding on, forever.

I passed some in the streets of burned-out cities or in the foothills of the Old Mountains. I saw it as I entered those first Incorporated Burroughs, Jamie and I way back then, searching out our separate loves. I saw men and women who wielded their dead like feathery anchors among wagons and wheelchairs, laid gently in semi-fold in steamer trunks. Once, I saw only the top half stuffed rootward into a backpack. They would do whatever it took to keep their loved ones with them, no matter the stench or decay, the chance for disease, the gathering of blood gnats, the groan and grimace of others as they passed. These men and women, for whom there was no such thing as letting go. These men and women, desperately holding to what once was.

/////////

The
Sound
a
Death
Makes
in
the
Apocalypse:

Fixed,
and rigid,
the tail-end
of something greater.

Visceral
and
explosive,
or muted,
when love
is involved.

/////////

Love,
If you were dead, I’d carry you in my arms as far as you needed to go. No matter the frailty of your body, the thinness of your skin. I’d cradle you against me, your bones to my heart. I don’t know if you’re dead. I don’t know if you’re in pain. I don’t know even where you are. Can you see trees out your window? Do they have leaves, or are they like here, burnt and skinned in perpetual post-fall? Is there rain there, or snow? Remember weather? Sunshine? Is there sun where you are? Are there stars? Send me word. A single word and I’ll be there. I’ll track over snow or wasting dunes. I’ll work through Cultists or Figments. Even Sustenance Keepers or the Gvmt won’t deter me. Because all I want is to wrap you in my arms and bring you home or take you wherever you want to go. One word. Send just one word,
Me

/////////

When it got bad enough, The Cultists started performing Easements, seeing the opportunity to both help fellow survivors and to recruit new hearts to their cause.

The Cultists believe that the earthquakes, the planes, none of it was inadvertent. In their minds, each and every twist of this gnarled living is a result of The Disruptor, who chose to send these plagues, these cadences of turmoil and earthly vandalism, all for some other purpose, and if you become a part of their ilk, they’ll share it with you.

And in the first span of our new existence, many carried their dead with them, afraid to plant the bodies in the ground, relegated instead to amateur fireside cremations if anything, scared and haunted by the decimation of so much so quickly that they refused to let go of even one more thing.

A sister or a brother might attempt to untangle another sibling’s hands from the body of a mother or a father, but the strength of grief is a glue, resolute. So the brother or sister would give up, and the family would cart the body, waning and withering, alongside, unashamed of their grip on love.

The Gvmt air-cannoned the pamphlets our way, encouraging burial deep down in this apocalyptic wake, but it took The Cultists to convince those who were still strangle-holding their loved ones well-past death. It took the sensitivity and the darkness of their robes and the seemingly unconditional caring of them to help people see how, under the right blue moon and breeze, they could let go.

And when the Easements took hold, it kept The Cultists steeped in bodies both dead and alive, holding on and letting go, gave The Cultists their first brag in numbers, a dangerous step up the hierarchy, new devastations always at the ready.

/////////

from
The Cultists’ Handbook
Prayer #81

Lo, grant us the power to help others cross the border between living and dead, between here and Elsewhere, between holding on and letting go. Help us to provide comfort and peace in our actions and our words, in the touch of our hands. Help us to see how we might exchange an ended vessel with a new faith in The Disruptor, to whom we owe anything and everything, and in whom these grieving souls will find solace.

/////////

In their robes they stand, arms linked, hands clasped, making a nearly impenetrable wall of darkness in the moonlight, where from outside the circle the bereaved can hardly see their deceased at its center.

It is a secret only The Cultists know, and to learn its maneuvers you’ll have to join their ranks, have to believe in The Disruptor and the greater scheme of these plagues and pitfalls, this world ripping apart. To be a Cultist you’ll have to give up your wandering and settle in their robed bosom, kneel for their prayers and rites of passage. But if you joined, you’ll know how they do it, the secret of these Easements.

The bereaved look on to the dead in the middle of their circle, agonized in having to let go of their loved one after so much time in the wagon or the trunk or the wheelchair, so much of their wrecked lifetime with the body featherweight and brought along thin and airily decaying.

A prayer is said in perfect unison, then masks are donned beneath The Cultists’ hoods, the grieving survivor held just outside the circle by two likewise masked Cultists. And once the masks are on, the warmth comes, the drift of July Winds, the bereaved unable to tell where it emanates from, or how The Cultists harness its direction or duration.

The July Wind comes and the bereaved, attempting to raise a hand or a sleeve to stifle the breeze, are restrained by The Cultists on either side, until the warm air is ingested and the need to run, to escape, is stilled.

Meanwhile, in the center of the prayer circle, the loved one’s body begins to disappear, fading under the dark shroud they’ve placed over its bony ranges, until there is only the smooth, flat blanket atop a meadow of brick-dust and glass splinters, until the survivor has let the loved one go, and the body dissipates, and the moment of grief made to pass.

/////////

from
The Cultists’ Handbook
Prayer #90

Lo, grant us these July Winds in service of The Disruptor, to whom we owe anything and everything. Let the vessel-body fade into the ether, riding in particles to the Elsewhere, waiting there for the arrival of their survivors, sighing ad infinitum. And the bereaved, let them forget who they are, so that they may see the work of the moment, the waves breaking where no ocean exists.

/////////

Love,
What is an Easement, if not a trick? And what are these July Winds except a devious route blown into our minds by a chemical knife, driven down in a thrust of makeshift lobotomy? I don’t want you to disappear, to fade into the Elsewhere. I don’t want you to stand beside a circle of robed figures, forgetting I exist. You know what I want? I want us to stand, hand in hand, and watch the sun rise again, steeped in pink and purple and orange. I want to bask in the love between us, the way we were made to fit one another, and how nothing will ever make me forget that, and all the rest that has come before.
Me

 

J. A. Tyler is the author of “The Zoo, a Going” (Dzanc Books). His fiction has appeared in Diagram, Black Warrior Review, Fairy Tale Review, Fourteen Hills, and New York Tyrant among others. From 2007-2013 he ran Mud Luscious Press. He resides mostly offline.