from Channel-Surfing the Apocalypse by Susan Smith Nash

From Channel-Surfing the Apocalypse

by Susan Smith Nash

Jake's Last Prayer

Jake had in fact shot himself. We add to this narrative an element of Dionysian abandon, but it's not a convincing mix. It's not at all persuasive unless we have an idea of context, which should include a generous portion of wine and perhaps women, preferably Bacchantes, offering themselves up for dismemberment, which some people persist in calling group therapy. "Dionysus, the god of madness, is also death" (Heraclitus).

This is a typical 12-Step Program.

Jake had in fact shot himself. And now his fiancee of eighteen months, Aubrey, is not talkinga bout it. Instead, she is watching videos of Beladi oriental dancers performing a modified cane dance to a techno version of Ofra Haza's biggest international club hit. She contemplates binge-eating chorizo sausages follwed by orange juice and seltzer. The juice would clarify the palate. The idea does not satisfy her, even though chorizo sausages do contain enormous quantities of saturated fat. She decides to binge on bland food since life with Jake has left her with the beginnings of an ulcer.

She has targeted every restaurant in Lawton, Oklahoma, that offers an all-you-can-eat deal for less than six bucks. Three weeks ago she was thrown out of the Cowboy Steak Corral for outrageous, over-the-top binging at the Mega-Bar. Yet, it still hasn't sunk in to her that they know what she's up to.

Jake had in fact shot himself.

They know what she's doing. It's possible she's not even aware of it herself. Her eyes suggest that she's completely oblivious to her own actions. They're glazed and driven and they make strange counterparts to her body, which moves in awkward, contrary ways as if she were partially in a trance, and partially robotic, with an electronic brain controlled by remote control.

Unfortunately, she's part of Lawton's disorganized, disowning, denying army of female bulimics who are catalyzed into predation by large, glowing signs which are readable at 45 mph.

MEGA-BAR. MONSTER FOOD BAR. ALL-YOU-CARE-TO-EAT. ALL-HAPPY CHINESE.

She's not the only 115-pounder who eats 5 platefuls of nachos, fried okra, french fries, chicken nuggets, broccoli-cheese casserole, rolls, follows it with 4 or 5 bowls of chocolate syrup-drowned softserve ice cream, then disappears into the bathroom for 10 minutes.

"No longer the artist, she has herself become a work of art" (Nietzsche). Kafka's Hunger Artist starved himself in the performance of his life. He had quite an audience.

She is an anti-artist. She doesn't want an audience. She doesn't want anyone to see.

And yet, she gives the performance of her life each and every night she feels that terrible urge to tear the veins from her arms, mutilate her belly with razor-blade hacks, smell cigarettes burn holes into her inner thighs. She never considers the fact that her stomach is not a completely elastic and forgiving tool of addiction. It may rip. She could hemorrahge. She doesn't have to think of the consequences of Act II of her art, her performance. Everyone knows the dangers of induced vomiting.

Kafka's artist became skeletal, weak. Aubrey is not thin, but bloated. She sleeps for hours after her ordeals. Her face is a moon carved of mozzarella cheese. Her eyes are fleshy bits of pink grapefruit.

Jake's mother told all her friends that Aubrey had as good as pulled the trigger. She was unstable. Jake should never have gotten mixed up with such an emotional mess. Jake's little girlfriend he had when he was in college had been such a sweet, genuine person. Aubrey was not. Aubrey was nervous and she tried too hard. No one likes a person who tries to hard. It is repellant. You can't trust a person like that. She said she warned Jake every time she saw him.

Aubrey had spent that last, horrible, cold night listening to Jake bitch that the Margaritas he had mixed were too warm and that the locally-produced Orbit brand tortilla chips were too thick and too tough. She was eating carrot sticks and watching Pat Robertson introduce the Prophecy in the News segment. Armageddon was slated for June 6th. She counted up the words in the Daily Oklahoman "The State of Our State" section headlines. There were 79 words, which contained a total of 451 letters. There was a numerological significance to this, but it was not apocalypse. She took a bit of carrot and shuddered as if it were the last spponful of an enormous bowl of chocolate syrup swirled with vanilla ice cream.

Jake had in fact shot himself.

Last Will

When you die, can I have your car?

I was going to go rollerblading, in spite of my broken arm, but it was too cold. 23 degrees F, 15 mph wind. That meant the windchill would glaze me like leaves stripped from oaks. The scent of materiality fills my world with roses. "More things than blood fill the heart" (Louise Bogan). At the beginning of every semester, they have to watch a film on the effects of drinking and driving. The room stays very quiet. Rose petals drop like cannons into spring mist. No one would ever think of aggression when it's so pastel in her eyes.

I'm as concerned as much with what language cannot do as with what it can do.

Wittgenstein heard and did everything because he collected old silent films which featured sweat, bad weather, and fake Russian icons. He said, "Don't develop plans, develop Fate."

Someone in the mall objects to all modernist theologies of the books. The teenager who sells earrings and hair ribbons wears a t-shirt that says Distribute spring survival to the roses. Of course there's a skull under the words. It's not a condom public service announcement, even though it sounds like it.

Distribute roses to the survivors. Distribute everything in spring when roses think they have survived. Survive and distribute. In spite of spring.

It's all a way to combat the way he looks at my car.

"O remember in your narrowing dark hours" is something I can't quite place, like the wind chill that reattaches petals to the roses, skin to the woman whose deliberate nakedness only makes her want to find the words that will seduce him once and for all, make him stop wanting the material exteriorities of her existence. She doesn't want her life to be a Tennessee Williams play. "It is indeed difficult to perceive, clearly and distinctly, how death, or the consciousness of death, forms a unity with eroticism" (Georges Bataille).

I glued plastic roses to the VCR they used to run the drunk-driving films. Then I asked him if he'd like to go on a road trip with me, all the way into a Saguaro Rincon Mountain-lined poster of sunset. My audacity is as plastic as a dying swan dancer who has piled Mardi Gras doubloons and bead necklaces on the edge of the stage so she can kick them into the pit whenever she thinks of Pavlova.

The wind had changed when I heard it again.

It came out of the north, out of the abandoned drive-in that would have double-billed Young Wittgenstein and an apocalyptic remake of The Days of Wine and Roses.

The voice was not a young boy's any more.

When you die, can I have your car?