FAR WEST Afterlude

Well, I hope that we learned something in all this madness.  That our characters evolved and became fully rounded players in the cosmic game.  

After the fires died the black sooted Tower still remained standing above the city.  It was left as a reminder of what man can do and what man cannot.  A monument to our inescapable frailties, our venality and weaknesses;  To the characteristics that were ours no matter how hard we worked to repress our evil; For the artificial ethics and morality propagated by the academics and religions to give our lives a purpose beyond fucking and farming, and the golden nostalgia of days now long gone. 

            Maggie Bezzeg, enough of your didactic rantings!

            I am sorry, I tend to get worked up and have a difficult time bringing myself back down to reality.  This, I am the first to admit, is not a good quality for an FBI agent to possess.  I will try and control myself.  The story is nearly over and badly in need of a proper bookend.  Read on.  I promise that it will make sense in the end. 

            The black ziggurat could be seen from the jets that passed over en route to Montreal or across the ocean towards Europe and the world.  This great tangled phallus of charred brick and mortar rising high into the blue sky above the green trees, was in great contrast to the overtaxed road crews busy filling in the crater that was Taconic Street and gutting the empty buildings of the depressed Cranbury downtown for the copper before demolition. 

            The day the Tower fell was lost to the official records but it was the highest rated newscast in WQNP’s history, according to Peter Schneider, the producer departing to join his young career woman wife in Albany.  From the beginning of the implosion to the cloud of dust blinding the crowds disabling the city another day, the audience was transfixed.  In the dust cloud, the remains of the Tower came crashing down into rubble that would be not be mopped up before the winter snows arrived.  Audie was granted a furlough from prison to watch the Tower fade into darkness well as to attend the funerals of the civilian victims, the helicopter crew, and the shot police soldiers. 

            That was the gist of my husband’s last days in Cranbury.  He would convalesce at the state hospital in Farmington and serve his prison time without complaint as he devoted himself to his newfound faith. 

            He is still mine, unable to work, unable to travel, and unable to change his reputation or his future.  But he is alive.  And here comes the long-winded and heavy-handed existentialist part of the tale because after all every story must have a moral.  A lesson.  A purpose.  Why else would anyone read anything, for entertainment value or because it’s intellectually fascinating?  No, that would be absurd. 

            We love being manipulated to take heed of whatever life-altering message that the pretentious author happens to believe.  Thank you, L. Ron Hubbard, Mark Twain, and Joseph Smith.  Thanks for showing us what we are, blind monkeys lost in space, eager to accept any path home.    

            The point is that nothing could save the Cranbury Vale.  There was no hero of the day.  No delusional political campaign promise fulfilled.  No government stimulus package.  No welfare.  Nothing.  My husband’s sacrifice was meaningless.  The city was selected for extinction like the dinosaurs and the dodo bird.  Cranbury died while no one weeped but all came to cheer it on.  The population continued on the road to disincorporation, a triple X bond rating, and irrevocable bankruptcy.  This was oblivion—more than just becoming another vacant city of the rustbelt with Rochester, Buffalo, Cleveland, or Toledo.  A fate worse than death. 

           

In the days leading up to the demolition of the Victoria Tower, the remains of Robert Stegner were returned to the earth.  In the Litchfield piedmont, near the covered bridges of Cornwall, his ashes were scattered on a wet autumn eve.  His killer, Audie, in chains, watched the west wind take the ashes into those woolly green hills beneath the bare branches of a great oak tree. 

Who were laid in this ground
 Living, their enemies, dying their guests,
In honor of service and sacrifice
For the Strengthening of Hearts
This memorial is placed.

 These are just the erased words of the burned books and legends of history, of those before us who made us what we now are.  Shed no tears for the ghosts.  Who truly remembers history?  Who will remember our time a thousand years from now?  Who will remember my husband, but me, his wife? 

            No one.  No one will ever live to see the future.  No one escapes this life.