Morphine

The man laughed awkwardly.

“Well that is strange.” I noticed he realized I must have been very rich, and a momentary idea flashed through his eyes that I knew something he didn’t, by going under.

The room was huge, lit up by ceiling lights that spanned as far as the eye could see. People were in Iron Lungs lined up against the wall, the mechanical sounds of synthetic breath made a wall of white noise. Nurses checked vital signs, and lights flickered, as we chatted. The inoculated blackballed mosquitos huffed their concentrates of fume and oxygen in a gaseous psycho-active cocktail. The Iron Lungs contracted and pumped.

.

My hands hit the thin tubular window of the Iron Lung. My body was sore and weak. The tubular door slid open and I slowly pried myself out. I pulled the nitrous tube from my throat, then the feeding tube. My head was cranking rusty gears and my vision was blurry. I ripped the tubes feeding nitrous into Lillian’s lungs out and slid open the metal casket. They made a slurping noise like wet suction cups. I shook her awake as she murmured drug-induced psychobabble.

“Lillian. Lillian, wake up.”

She said nonsense, half awake.

I shook her.

“Snap out of it!”

Eventually she came to, stepped out of the Iron Lung, and hugged me.

“How long were we under?”

“Long enough, look, all of the others are gone.”

And they were. Every last Iron Lung was left to the empire of dust and rats, who scurried to and fro on the cement ground. There was no sign of nurses or that human life had ever been ca-ressed in bony veils of inhalant fingers there. We ran up the stairs leading into the sweatshop that covered for the Iron Lung facility. Empty. The streets were empty.

“What the hell is this?” Lillian asked, as we stared out over the city, monasteries of capitalism, and crumbling apart-ments. It looked as if a domestic war had taken…

“I don’t know.”

We walked down the dead street, clutching each other’s hands. It had been three months we were under in the Iron Lung. The sound of laughter and screams doubled as soft lullabies to the newborn, stillborn, and reborn. We walked by alleyways, where radiated men eating the flesh of other radiated men hid in the darkness of gang rape. A soured symphony played omnipresent over the city– a German war song, coming from a crashed military plane. I looked inside the abandon warship, crashed in the middle of the street, still playing the government war song for the public.

“Come on. We’re going to Al Burkhari’s place.”

I lead her down countless alleyways and streets, rancid with the smell of revolt. Into the upper-class neighborhood of the wealthy, we walked. Lillian gripped my hand like a vice.

“What do you think happened?” She said, looking around at the human decay.

“I think the drugs did their job…”

“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”

“Revolution.”

“Why is it like this?”

“Revolution gets rid of a lot of bad things, but it will al-so gets rid of all of the good things. It’s the natural order.”

I knocked on Al Burkhari’s door then tried to the door han-dle. It wouldn’t budge. I screamed,

“Al Burkhari! You in there?”

No answer. No answer.

“Let’s go.” Lillian said.

“No. I can’t.”

No answer. I kicked down the door and stepped inside. The first thing I saw was the message written in blood on the wall. The blood had now dried to a crusty black-red.

“IF THE POLITICIANS DON’T UNITE US,

WE WILL IGNITE THEM.”

The second thing I saw was the body of Said Al Burkhari, stripped and burnt to death. I don’t want to describe it, but there was the smell of synthetic chemicals that had been lit on fire, and death.

We walked down to a coffee shop and stood. I put a quarter into the Newspaper box and got a Newspaper.

“America is Dead.” Read the headline.

I set the Newspaper down and smiled. It was the best news I had ever gotten.

“Come on, let’s see if we can find someone who can tell us what’s going on.”

We walked down into the main central of the city; the air was thick and brown. Sirens rung from all side, fire sirens, cop sirens, but they were warped and delirious, like pitch bent chil-dren’s toys. Then I saw a human: a prostitute.

We walked up to him.

“What’s going on?”

The streetwalker spit on the ground and looked at me queer.

“You for real?”

“Yes, I’m serious. Can you tell us what happened? We were in The Iron Lung for the last couple months?”

“What do I look like?” he said staring into me.

“Is that a question?”

“What the fuck do I look like?”

“A hooker.”

“Exactly, I don’t give shit up for free.”

“Shit.” I pulled out my wallet wondering…

“Money isn’t worth anything. If you don’t have food, drugs, or water, the only currency you have if how much someone is willing to pay to fuck you.”

“Come on, let’s go,”

We walked another, we walked inside. There were men drinking shots of bathtub whiskey and smoking crack resin from tinfoil. I walked up to the bar tender.

“Can you tell me what’s going on?”

“With what?” The bartender said polishing a shot glass.

“The world.”

“You want the long or the short?”

“Long please.”

“Well…” he said taking a breath in and then exhaling slowly, “Nobody really knows “what happened.” One second, we had our foot in the door of war with half of the world, and the next thing I knew people were Molotov bombing The White House. People stopped caring about what movie star is having a child or an af-fair. People stopped watching reality T.V shows. People real-ized they didn’t need the new IPhone, television, cloths, all that bullshit. The economy crashed. Suddenly nobody believed in Ronald McDonald, as if suddenly everyone just knew it was a re-tarded farce. I helped burn down some of the churches. Every-body refused to be drafted and die for politicians, but they didn’t have the space to jail everybody. All forms of social control just… disappeared. The Fascist’s religious freedom laws backfired. Tax-exempt pseudo churches started popping up for ma-rijuana, bestiality, heterosexuality, meth, you name it.”

“Is that it?”

“No. I don’t really understand it, but without laws, there ceased to be crime, without money, there ceased to be poverty, a paradox kind of thing, counter intuitive,” The bar tender said sliding a shot of vodka into my hands, “But for whatever fucking reason, it worked.” The shot burned and warmed my stomach.

“You seem to understand this revolution pretty well.”

“I do, never would have been able to without the drugs.” The bartender poured two people a couple shots of bourbon into greasy glass.

“Drugs?”

He leaned in close.

“I heard a rumor the government was testing fucked up drugs on people by putting it in the water supply, but it backfired.”

“Don’t listen to Jack, he’s one of those conspiracy theo-rists.” One man said from one of the corner tables.

”What happened to the politicians?”

He laughed,

“Fuckin’ politicians. But little did the Politicians realize, all their brainwashed war slaves had drunk the milk too. They realized they were being made into pawns to be shot down for an extra dollar and twenty-seven cents in a senator’s pocket each, so they turned on the government as well. Most of the pol-iticians were burned to death. Others shot. Some hung.”

“So, we’re living in an Anarchist State?” I said, gulping another gritty shot back.

“Yes and no. Turns out three hundred million can rule there hundred million better than two hundred can. Call it Anarchist Direct Democracy.”

“When did all of this happen?”

“Two months ago. But the main point to my whole little spiel being we are all equals now.” He pointed to a man sitting at the back of the bar, “That pedophile drinks the same whiskey the fireman. The doctor pisses on the same brick wall the home-less man does.

###

I gathered newspapers from the overflowing garbage cans in the street outside my place. To my best understanding the only reason Lillian and I woke up is because the machine ran out of nitrous to pump. Three months. All money became useless, as the populace reverted to the barter system, chickens for antibiotics, whiskey for cigarettes, sex for therapeutic advice. The Roth-schild Family, amid the revolution dropped an atomic bomb on the Midwest killing 300,000 people in a desperate attempt to subdue the revolution. Fucking like animals, in a certain sort of structureless Zen. People couldn’t care less.

.

Lillian stuck the needle in her arm and dug around until she hit a vein and deployed the plunger. She rolled her eyes around, and then grabbed my journal from me. She flipped to the last page.

“Why are you always writing in this thing?”

My eyes told her to go ahead, so she cleared her throat and started reading.

“…The thought that effectively ended the Enlightenment was Karl Marx who rejected dogma in pursuit of science in the German Ideology.

“The premises from which we begin are not arbitrary ones, not dogmas, but real premises from which abstraction can only be made in the imagination. They are the real individuals, their ac-tivity and the material conditions under which they live, both those which they find already existing and those produced by their activity. These premises can thus be verified in a purely empirical way.” –Karl Marx

Beyond that, he stated that he would not try and explain why humans are different from animals (religious) but how we are dif-ferent (scientific). What makes us different from animals is the ability to change the way we meet our needs from a day-to-day ba-sis, as were animals cannot. The bird has been building a nest the same way for thousands of years, termites, flies… but a human could become vegan in one day, change his rituals of producing food, or money for food, and so on.” Lillian stopped reading and looked up at me in a sort of confused perplexity.

“Keep reading…” I said.

“…We have the ability to do this through ideological insti-tutions, or systems of thought that organize how we choose to meet our needs, the major ones being governments and religions, and I think it would be correct to say these are the things that divide the human kind the most, and the most severely. Racism stems from stereotypes, which are ideology, terrorist attacks from politics and religion, wars over fictitious divisions of land.

In my conclusion to this journal entry, I will say, it is not race, or gender, or sex, or sexuality, or age, or social standing that makes us inherently different. It is ideology: governments, and religions, and other ideologies, and other cul-tures, which separate us on a personal level and create hate. Hate is a necessary evil of the only thing that makes us differ-ent from animals…”

She set it down.

“So what do you think?” I said.

“It’s pretty dry. Is that the end?” She said.

“Yeah.”

“So… you think the revolution took away what made us differ-ent then animals?”

“What’s so wrong with humans being animals and nothing more?”

“It’s just so… nihilistic. We have to be something more,” she said.

“I don’t know about you but life as an animal is better than life as a human was.”

“…Can we just shoot up and just be fucking animals for the rest of our lives?” She said it absurdly, and grabbed my hands.

I smiled and said,

“Literally,” I said, and kissed her like a savage. A god-less heathen. Consumed by love. She had a Heart Shaped Locket.