You knew how a country was doing when its tanks were driven down city streets. Checkpoints had been setup on every major road, people knelt in lines on the sidewalk with bags over their heads, surveillance helicopters and drones flew overhead like cicadas.
In the weeks following Trump’s crackdown on Washington D.C., he also announced Los Angeles would be placed under similar restrictions. Martial law in all but name, there were several reasons people suspected why L.A. had come under military control. One was that Trump was reaching the end of his life, and in a desperate bid to get into heaven, had decided that he must subjugate his people under an American inquisition, with every bloodied scalp acting as a prayer and every click of a handcuff as a rosary. The other reason was that the Governor of California had made fun of him on Twitter.
Whatever the reason, the militarised zone of Los Angeles felt dangerous, with the oppressive atmosphere inescapable no matter how many drugs you took. On the horizon smoke from wildfires combined with the black clouds from protest arson. When ICE agents were taking breaks between assaulting schools and pointing guns at children, they were eating burgers alongside National Guard and military personnel, doing impressions of people screaming and panicking for a quick laugh. These men would go home at the end of the day to their families, watching Theo Von and Joe Rogan podcasts in bed, leaning their phones against the back of their wives’ heads and smiling to themselves that they are protecting America. Similar to the last days of Nazi Germany, the age restriction had been lifted for the leaders’ domestic army, creating a fighting force of old men with brittle bones and brittle minds.
Frail bodies hidden inside Kevlar body armour wielding assault weapons was more weak than it was strong. Many shows of force amounted to fragile men desperate to cover their fear, so it was the same with the latest bluster from the gonorrhoea-rotted mind of Trump. The grains of sand were falling through the hourglass. The best days were behind and only decline lay ahead. Just as the hanged man kicks hardest when it is too late, so this last, desperate thrashing signals that we have passed the point of no return.
I’m snorting PCP in the Hyundai Sonata, drifting through streets littered with trash and abandoned protest signs. A library is on fire and people had gathered to watch, ignoring the curfew. The air smells of plastic smoke. A bottle is thrown from the darkness, smashing against my car, followed by another, another. Running footsteps. People lit in the orange glow from the burning building, shadows melting back into the night. I drive, pass a red light, keep driving. There’s not much traffic on the streets. The power had been cut for the next few blocks, a black shape backlit from the riot of security lights around us. I snort a little more PCP from the back of my hand and push the accelerator all the way down. The headlights zoom past abandoned cars, burned out trucks, smashed windows, surprising a man pushing a trolley. I roll the windows down and feel the wind in my hair, laughing as I go faster and faster through the blackout, swerving past people, cutting corners across sidewalks, over a fallen streetlight, almost crashing into a wall. I take another bump of PCP, seeing tail lights up ahead. I feel as though I am looking into the eyes of a demon. I look at my eyes in the rearview mirror. They are also burning a bright and brilliant red like exploding stars. All along I have been screaming.
“For I am the harbinger, the cockerel crowing the last day and you shall listen to my words and know it is good. I shall become an instrument and I am played by one of the angels and the music that is played is a funeral hymn. You shall listen and from the edge of your eye you shall start to see the great parade at the end of Empire. It is the march of the psychopomps and they shall play their own strange music and you shall know it is good.”
