possessing a moral compass askew from their own versions of the due and true directions, well, it wouldn’t be the end of the world. Thinking about what he would post, Jiro grew slowly more content and settled in his heart.
The end of the world, he thought sleepily. So many ways in which the world can end. So few in which it can keep on going—only differently. If there was to be a close to the Great Day of the world, Jiro planned to stay past The End to watch the credits scroll up the sky. In the meantime, he could still believe in a religion not of blood but of flowers, a world that did not assassinate and crucify but lovingly embraced all the many pieces of truth it contained—even if such a wonderland could as yet be realized only in his dreams.
* * * * * * *
Bowling with Death
Driving out of Wyoming, Mike Dalke’s car scared loose a swift-running mob of pronghorn antelope from beside the road. They were beautiful, running beside the car, pacing it with a grace no construct of metal and polymer could ever hope to match. Tears came to his eyes. He had never seen them like this before. He feared he would never see them again.
He could never go back home again, certainly. Not given the way he had left.
Mom had been enraged, irrational, ranting about how her boy’s mind must have been seduced by the secular humanist conspirators—the poisonous alphabet soup of ACLU, NAACP, NOW, etc., with Hollywood producers and even Unitarianism thrown in for good measure. Dad watched quietly out of his usual prescription-tranquilizer evening funk.
“What do you mean you’re moving out?” his mother shrilled.
Mike put down his rucksack and faced the blonde fury of his mother moving to physically block his path.
“Just what I said, Mom. I’m moving to the west coast. I’ve transferred from Christian Heritage University to California State University at Humboldt. I want to do my graduate work there.”
“Well you can just ‘untransfer’ yourself right now, genius!” she spat. “You’re always thinking of yourself—what you want to do. Think of your parents and what we want you to do, for once!”
“I never stop thinking of that,” he said with a weary sigh. “No more. I’m going to live my own life now. You can’t live it for me, and I won’t let you.”
“Your own life! Your own life!” Mom mocked, suddenly brandishing an eight-inch-long kitchen knife before her. “I’ve given my whole life for you boys! Waited on you hand and foot! And this is the kind of gratitude you show me? Oh no—no son of mine is going to move out until he finishes college or gets married!”
She jabbed toward Mike with the broad meat-slicer’s blade.
“Honey!” Dad cried, startled, but Mike was already moving, deflecting and taking his mother’s cutting hand, using her own momentum against her the way the Christian Martial Arts teacher at CHU had showed him. He brought his fist up and slugged his own mother hard on the jaw before he really knew what he was doing. The blade skittered across the floor. She crumbled against one wall and burst into tears.
Dad put a restraining hand on his shoulder. Mike shrugged it off.
“You only waited on us hand and foot to bind us hand and foot to you,” Mike said bitterly, bending down to pick up his rucksack as his mother sobbed and maoned against the wall. Behind him, his younger brother Ray was witness to it all, but Mike had been too angry to say anything to him, too angry for farewells.
He regretted that now. Who knew what kind of tweak seeing such things might put on his younger brother’s head? But Mike had to get out. Living at home had been like living underwater. Each day he felt his airflow being cut off a little bit more. Soon he would have woken up dead and not even noticed.
No, there was no going back. Not since his car had broken down east of Wendover, Utah. Not since he’d had no choice but to sell it to the Salvia div-chewing mechanic/tow truck operator who had hauled him and his vehicle into town. Not since he’d stuck out his thumb in the late-afternoon light and gotten picked up by an ancient four wheel drive station wagon hauling a rental trailer.
At the other end of the station wagon’s bench seat now sat a heavy-set guy with steel-rimmed specks and long gray hair down to the middle of his back (but was, nonetheless, also scrupulously clean shaven). The driver, which he was, had recently become an ex-Information Technology administrator from the university in Bozeman. Mike didn’t catch his full name—Brewster, Schuster, something like that—but the gray-haired man in plaid shirt and brown pants and blue gimme cap was clearly trying to forget his own woes through permanently altering his state of consciousness.
“I took it with what grace I could,” said the defrocked administrator, passing Mike a burning flat-pipe of marijuana somewhere between Elko and Winnemucca. The gray haired man suddenly laughed. “The university bureaucracy is a real hippo hierarchy.”
“How’s that?” Mike asked, curious despite himself, absently scratching the brownish-blonde goatee he’d begun growing not long before he left home and which was still at the itchy (or at least unfamiliar) stage.
“Hippopotami range themselves in a river current according to status,” the older man explained. “The highest ranking individual takes a position alone and furthest upstream, facing upstream. The rest of the hippos fall into tiers and denser numbers downstream, though they’re facing upstream too. Each hippo has a short, flat, paddle-like tail which it spins like a propeller when it defecates. That breaks up its dung into a cloud of fragments.”
Mike laughed at the image, but didn’t quite get it.
“How’s that fit a university bureaucracy?” he asked.
The man with the long gray hair inhaled deeply from the pipe and held the smoke a moment before answering in a constrained, smoke-conserving voice.
“The lower the rank of a hippo the more dung comes hurtling at it from upstream,” he said, exhaling at last. “When the hippo shit hits the propeller, the consequences flow downstream.”
They laughed at that. Mike guessed it was pretty much true of hierarchies everywhere.
“How about you?” the man with the long gray hair asked, uncapping a bottle of vodka. “What’s made you a gentleman of the highway?”
Mike told the older man more of his own story than he had initially intended to: his troubles at home, his father’s psychological problems, his decision to transfer to a different college out of state and away from home—as well as the crisis that decision had precipitated. The gray-haired man remained quiet until they were well west of Winnemucca.
“Here,” the driver said at last, breaking up a capsule and tapping its contents into the vodka. He swirled the bottle. “I put a little KL in this. Good for what ails you. It’ll help you forget about the latest explosion in your nuclear family.”
Mike didn’t know what “KL” was, but he took a healthy swallow of the vodka. It had an unexpectedly bitter, alkaline taste.
“That phrase, ‘nuclear family,’ is more descriptive than you might think,” the older man continued. “If you head just about due south of here you eventually cross into what used to be the Nevada Nuclear Weapons Test Site. E = mc2 and all that. In most ancient creation myths, ‘energy’ is male, and ‘matter’ is female. Yang and yin. Bright and dark. Even the words: ‘energy’ is from Greek roots meaning ‘at work,’ and the Latin root of ‘matter’ is mater—mother.”
“Yeah?” Mike said, not making the connection. “So?”
“So Einstein’s mass-energy equivalency is a real gender-bender,” the driver said. “Energy, the male principle, is equivalent to mass, or female matter, times the constant of the unbreakable law, the speed of light, squared. Maleness is femaleness raised by the Law times itself.”
“And the Test Site?” Mike asked, wondering what he’d gotten himself into, hitching a ride with this guy.
“The detonation