I mix up all my drugs together into a grey mulch that I pour into a plastic bag. Maybe they'd all balance out and I'll end up sober. I take a finger full of the substance and rub it on my gums as I walk onto the terrace of the Griffith Observatory.
From the balcony I can see a diagram of American Eschatology. Burned out buildings beneath a rust-coloured sky, a city of charred machines. What had been the heart of the cityscape was now a bottomless pit, you could see people walk to its edge and fall down into the blackness, still walking in the air as they fell, as if they couldn’t tell the difference between the land and the void. An abominable parade moved through the city, made up of those that had called themselves American. They drove their Fords and Chryslers and Cadillacs into each other, stuttering along, a continuous car accident that moved through the obliterated streets. Those that didn’t have vehicles ran alongside the convoy banging garbage together, screaming pointlessly towards the sky, trying to assure themselves that they still existed. At the front of this procession was a big rig with the Arch-Imbecile sat atop, gnawing on a baby.
I’m in my funerary outfit; a black paisley suit and a monochrome Hawaiian shirt, along with my suitcase and my bag of chemicals. I take the stairs down from the observatory to the garage, passing a figure slouched over the banister. When I'm down a few flights, I look up and see a mannequin peering back at me.
I turn the key in the Sonata, feeling the wheel, the dashboard. The car had been loyal to me on my journey. I wanted to take a moment to remember it's particular contours, the shape where we met. This wheel turned that wheel and so that turned me. As I leave the underground garage I pass burned out cars, black and white collapsed forms, tortured metal, scorched concrete. Fucked on drugs, I guide the car through the destitute streets of central Los Angeles.
The cars that still drove paid no attention to road markings or speed limits or laws; some crawled along the sidewalks, others chased each other through the streets, dodging abandoned vehicles and rubble. The military had lost all morale, the remaining soldiers stood around outposts, half naked, drinking everything they could find and listening to EDM all day and night. They watch the car from afar, blank expressions, less than apes. The Hyundai Sonata drives past a bombed-out school, people searching for food, a destroyed tank with its gun sagging down like an elephant that had burned to death. There's a group of children with rifles, sat in the alcove of a building that had been gutted. It was difficult to tell who was sane and who was not. What was sane in a dead city? I take some more drugs and drive down to the beach.
On Venice Beach there is a dead Sperm Whale, perfectly white, even against the orange sky and the smothered sun, it is the colour of snow. A platform had been set up around the hole in its belly, and on the platform was a man slapping a drum, a hollow clock. By the surf people had tried to construct a ship from wood they had taken from buildings, though it looked more like a dredged wreck. Nobody was leading the construction, so it appeared the boat had three intersecting hulls, its sails clogged around masts that stood like crucifixes across the lumpy deck busy with useless boat makers. It was hoped this boat would rescue the people and they would be able to sail away across the Pacific Ocean and they would start a new life across the sea wherever they would land. Tough this effort to save themselves seemed half hearted, with its strange engineering collapsing onto the sand and amongst the waves, picked up, taken elsewhere, a nightmare of Theseus. I drive along the beach, the sand mixed with ash, crushing sand castles and dead things beneath my wheels. The radio plays silence at maximum volume. I drive past the whale and the drumming emanates from its mouth, amplified, a false heartbeat that set the tempo for everyone else. Up the beach people were trying to escape on dinghies and in canoes, hoping they could make it past a gang of sunburnt surfers that paddled in the waves out from the shore, drinking sea water and eating human flesh. They would focus on a single craft escaping and swarm around it in the surf, capsising the boat, take all their possessions, casting what they didn’t want into the water and dragging away those they would eat.
I drive past the ruins of a Ferris wheel, the people hanging beneath swing in the putrid breeze. I drive north, along a highway like a dirty vein, passing bombed streets where sewer pipes vomit slowly into craters, street lights twisting away and into fallen palm trees. The Hollywood sign now read Ho Woo, with the other letters drifting down the hillside as if a dyslexic God was watching. Up in the hills people had congregated, deciding that if they were to see out the end of the country, they may as well celebrate in the mansions of Los Angeles. Most of the owners had fled, the ones that remained had no choice but to host a party at the end of the world. I pull the car up and head through the ruined gates of a once grand house.
Outside there is a choir, trying to sing the anthem but were already forgetting the words.
“By the rockets red glare…desecrate…the sprinkles…the spangled…azure vault”
The prosthetic hymn for a dead country fades into the background as I walk into the entrance hall. The room is flanked by marble staircases with people fornicating beneath ragged flags. A chandelier lays smashed and twisted in the centre of the room like a crashed spaceship whilst stray dogs sniff among the wreckage. I head through to another opulent room. On the tv there's helicopter footage of a headless Statue of Liberty, her neck a ragged line of bare copper, with the ruins of New York appearing behind. Someone changes the channel to static, more static, every other channel is dead. I look over to the famous film director, Hans Pewtershmitt, talking to Willem Dafoe and Emerald Fennell.
“Your Fursona can’t be a person, it has to be an animal.” Hans says. Willem shakes his head.
“Who says it can’t be a person?”
“The community.”
“In my remake of Metropolis everyone’s going to be a Furry, won’t that be mad?” Emerald says. I roll my eyes and take another handful of drugs. The room starts spinning as I push my way through the dance floor, pushing past actors, musicians, models, real people, a man selling burgers from a barbecue he has lit in a shopping trolley. I step out into a walled garden. The swimming pool is empty. Off to one side there is a Bald Eagle in a cage, with people playing a game where they poke their fingers through the bars and try to snatch it away before the bird grabs it. Shia LaBeouf walks up to me with no fingers or thumbs left, wriggling his bleeding palms in front of me.
“I did it on purpose. I did it on purpose.” He keeps saying, walking around to different people, drifting inside. Whether people were building a boat or overdosing on drugs, it seemed everyone wanted to escape the end. I go over to a telephone, unable to remember when I’d last seen one. I pick up the receiver and phone myself twelve years ago.
“Hello?” I said in the past. I don’t know what to say. Behind me a door slams, I turn around to see a man who looks familiar.
“Baudrillard?”
“Huh?” he says. I realise it is Danny DeVito.
“Nevermind. I thought you were a ghost.” I say, realising I still have the phone in my hand so put it down. I leave the party. I leave Hollywood. I leave the city and go to the wilderness.
The Hyundai Sonata drives through a dust storm. I cannot see the road in front or the road behind. I drive in silence, listening to the engine turn, the dust brushing against the car’s body, sandpaper kisses. As the storm settles, I see I am in the mountains. I grab things from my car and begin walking, following the dusty trail among scorched trees. I have no sense of time or place, just walk upward, focusing on my steps, left then right, then left, so that once I reach the peak, I am surprised there is nowhere left to go. I have carried the statue of Shiva adorned with the skull of Walt Disney with me, finally removing the deathly crown and hold it aloft as if it were John the Baptist.
“If you can dream it, you can do it.” I whisper, running my fingers over the skull before pushing my thumb through its forehead, ripping away the scalp and casting it from the mountain. I take out the bag of drugs I have been carrying and empty it out into the skull so that the chemicals pour into the hollow shell that once held a brain. We look eye to eye, through time, through death, through drugs, through destiny. Walt Disney and I, connected through oblivion. I then twist my body round, extend my arm and then spin back violently, sending the skull flying off into the sky and it disappears into the clouds.
I meditate in front of the statue, then stand. I mirror Shiva’s movements, the Nataraja, the cosmic dance of creation. On top of the mountain, I dance. I dance for all that had been and all there will be.
I dance and I
sing.
“The end had begun.
It looked like there were no stars in the sky and I was alone.
I draw a sword in the darkness and it shines like blood.
My heart can see where I cannot.
The corpse of America begins to scream.
A bleeding yawn of concrete teeth.
The rot white skull dreams empty.
Its grave laid with bouquets of rust.
As a carcass shines with maggots.
In every end there is a beginning.
Reflected in the wet eyes of the living.
We all look up at the machine.”
