Made in China Chapter 13

               One thing I forgot to mention, which may show my ineptness as a writer, is that there is no longer night in the Western Hemisphere—which could be one of the details that Carlos Tequila noticed in my various writing samples preventing me from being of the literati. I don’t know how to describe the daylight but the old timers in Ohio say that it looks like twelve-noon. The sun is directly overhead. It used to go up and down, rise on one side and fall on the other. But I couldn’t imagine it. I watched old movies with sunsets and sunrises and they looked like something truly phenomenal. I couldn’t fathom watching such a change; it was too mind blowing. In the war, we were lost in night and our only reprieve from it were those bonfires and Jana Olavstrauss’ jingly, glimmering body, beading with sweat from the fire, reflecting the flame’s wicked flicker. She was our sun; at least, she was my sun. But I sometimes forget that such things as a perpetual twelve-noon are unique to my time and that they haven’t always been this way. I am sure there is a scientific explanation for it but no one cares why it is, it just is. People stopped trying to figure everything out a long time ago. They left it alone, theorizing that “there is no sense wasting time in trying to figure out something we will never really know.” Science and religion were widely replaced by an absence of belief in anything.

As I crossed into Ohio, greeted by the dilapidated rusty sign that said “Welcome to Ohio Sucka: The Heart of it All” (“sucka” added by some graffitist), I thought of dropping out and taking the familiar rural Route 37 exit that would lead me home on which deer have been massacred by automobiles for a hundred years. I cannot recall a time when riding that road as a kid that I didn’t see a dead deer’s mangled corpse on the side of the road. That was when I knew things would someday be like they are today, when people showed what they are capable of; driving past without thinking or feeling anything. They barely noticed. But as a kid, I stared and I felt my soul being bruised by the sight of such innocent deaths because someone was driving too fast, or the deer walked out on the road at the wrong moment. They would worry of damage done to their cars, their busted grill, or a radiator leak but not of taking a life, so I suppose we as a people have beget this life. I remember dad stopping once when there was a frantic-looking middle-aged driver checking his fender, crying about a busted headlight, meanwhile the deer lay in the road in agony, just short of death, those last few despairing moments that I have become so familiar with, pulling itself to nowhere with two front legs that hadn’t been hit, still with strength in its neck, eyes wide-open, scared. The back two legs were like snapped branches and drug along leaving a trail of black raspberry-colored cinders and the spilled ooze of its insides. I could smell its exposed entrails; hear it scrape along; hear its cry and its desperate rasping breaths. It began to rain. Dad looked at me and told me to go back to the car before I got caught a cold. He walked over to the deer, pulled out the knife he always wore on his belt, slit her throat, stood there for a moment, wiped the blade on the deer’s back, placed it back in its sheath and returned to the car. His hands were bloodstained clinching the steering wheel on the drive home. I stared at one bloody thumb. Maybe I was five. Or maybe six. I went home and drew that deer, happy, living, as though my crayons could bring it back to life. I cried a lot when I was young. That night was one night I remember well. I never died on the inside as most everyone else did when life became a succession of horrible tragedies so terrible that newspapers stopped trying to keep track. Part of me is still living like a plant in winter, a splendid perennial, under barren earth. Instead of going home, I pressed on for the mere fact that I couldn’t face anyone if I quit. And what would I do? What did I have left, truly? A lifetime of searching through houses of the dead until I was dead myself and someone searched through mine? Rusty, the twelve foot WWI statue of zinc told me to do something and if that wasn’t a sign enough for me to do it I was in the wrong business. By business I mean the business of living. Zula Zane didn’t deserve what fate would befall her if I am not the one to get to her first. She deserves me. I love her. I don’t know how but we will make it in this mad world, I reassure myself of all of the above.

Utter boredom from Ohio through Indiana on a placid Route 70. The radio announcer was assuring us that people were being massacred still in Pennsylvania and ahead in Illinois and Missouri. Tornados took many of the front runners and some others were killed by people dropping explosive devices, rigged microwave ovens, and other small appliances from overpasses, or by ruthless drivers.

Ho hum.

The radio announcer reminded us about the legend of Captain Jumping Jack Flash, the greatest American hero of all time. It was meant to be inspirational. I could see his smiling face in my oval odometer; his handlebar mustache twirled perfectly, his confident smile perfectly beset in his strong-jawed face and two mad green eyes harbored under intense eyebrows. He was originally the face of Lucky Guy Cigarettes, on every pack and advertisement until he decided he didn’t want to have anything to with the cigarette business anymore, thereupon, the brand tanked and Heathcliff Bernard bought the company dirt cheap and renamed it after a lucky black cat. The black cat’s name was Henry and he was shot with an arrow and lived to meow about it. I wrote a book report on him in 7^th grade. Flash, not Henry. I recalled my research to take my mind off the race and to calm my nerves. I could be killed at any moment and it isn’t something you ever get used to. I lived for four years this way yet there is not a gray hair on my head, not a wrinkle on my face; in fact, I haven’t aged much at all since I turned 21. I took off my tank goggles and my aviator cap. I rubbed my sore eyes. I felt exhausted. Maybe it was the bottle of 95 wine from the night before.

The sun was merciless so I put on my Ray Bans, fixed my short brown hair for no one. I took off the red leather jacket—the skin of some unlucky animal, and threw it out the window. I don’t understand why Alexi Olavstrauss wore the skin of the Turkish president he ousted. God only knows. Or Alexi Olavstrauss knows, wherever he is. He is either with God or Satan, or nowhere to care. Two out of three ain’t bad. Jesus looks handsome on the air freshener in the one-in-the-afternoon sun of Indiana. I thought of going to the Muncie Sardine Factory. There was a sign for it back a ways. Jesus could have dated anyone he wanted. It would be nice if he came back now. Captain Jumping Jack Flash, according to Flashians, was Jesus Christ, times ten.

....

“I don’t know if Captain Jack Flash was Jesus Christ times ten,” I said all those years ago giving the oral presentation of my report. Some Flashian kids fidgeted in suddenly uncomfortable desks. The teacher grimaced at my use of past tense. “But he was the greatest American hero.” They were somewhat appeased. You can get killed saying a cross word about Captain Jack Flash, then and now, or for leaving out the Jumping. I am no longer going to quote my junior high self. Let me continue, in modern times, driving through the doldrums of Western Indiana...

Jack Flash began as a simple boy living in New York. His father, Harry, was a linguist for the UN and worked in the World Trade Center. He never had a mother. His father was working the day terrorists working for Allah, to be paid in virgins, flew planes into it and it collapsed. Jack was there, too. He was ninety-one floors up trying to find his dad. Maybe he was five. Or maybe six. He never found his dad. He stood at a busted-open window on a burning floor and was faced with only two options. Jump or be burned alive. TV cameras were capturing images of people who chose the former. Nothing was edited and everything was raw, live feeds. Later they would edit it. There is no class in showing people falling to their deaths but it was all about ratings then and no one had any time to have a sense of decency. So Jack jumped. From then on he would always be known as Jumping Jack Flash and radio stations would tell his story, which most people thought was urban legend because it didn’t make sense. His real last name was actually Hubert.

Obviously, Jack didn’t die. In fact, Jack landed on his feet shortly before the building collapsed in plenty of time to be whisked away by some heroic man who had never done a heroic thing in his life before that moment. During his dissent, Jack began to fall normally, but as he fell, illogically he began to slow down, slower and slower like a pillow feather until he came to a nearly complete stop and his feet touched the ground. This story is what started Flashism and created a league of Flashians. When he turned eighteen in 2014, he joined the military. He killed more terrorists than my Bobby Bubonic killed rats. It didn’t matter where, he killed them everywhere; Burger King, movie theatres, birthday parties, while sleeping, fucking, bathing, shitting, in temples, in cars, many, many, in strip clubs, and some in caves. Not everyone he killed was a terrorist but no one or nothing is perfect. He never apologized for killing anyone by mistake because apologizing is a sign of weakness. After eight years of Special Forces operations, too many medals to count, and innumerous brave feats of heroism, and becoming a Captain, he went solo and became an assassin. The government contacted him when they needed his expertise. In his last victory for America, he uncovered a terrorist plot that involved attacking a nuclear power plant in Ontario, Canada which was to signal several sleeper cells in the continental United States to hit their targets. No one knows which or where but it was supposed to be some terrific correlative domino-like chaos. Though he was never awarded a Blue Eagle, he surely deserved one. 

The way he died was quite fantastic. The explosive device that was set to detonate the nuclear power plant was in a speedboat. Two of the terrorists were in it dressed as Ontario police men and the boat was applicably marked. Their code names were Hansel and Gretel even though they weren’t at all Germanic. They were from Saudi Arabia which produces quite a few terrorists though it is supposed to be an O.K. place, Middle-Eastly speaking. They were sleepy, having spent most of the night in a strip club called Pussy Kat’s to remind themselves why they were going to die in a suicide bombing. Apparently, they believe that Heaven is filled with virgins who will have sex with them and they are just like the girls in Pussy Kat’s except they are chaste. Allah is a big pimp. Bigger than Yeh-Po Chung. Hansel and Gretel sat there shoving single tented digits of hardworking terrorist funds into the pretty garter belts and G-strings of the loosest women in Ontario, or the hardest working girls, whichever you prefer. Ontario is known as the strip club capital of Canada and it draws tourists from all over the world. They also visited Niagara Falls earlier that afternoon, but they weren’t so impressed.

So in their stupor, their big moment came and there they sat in the Niagara River as Ontario police men with olive tans slowly trolling near the nuclear power plant, they didn’t recognize that they were being stalked by the greatest terrorist killer the world has ever known. He was like a river panther. Captain Jack Flash was in the water alongside of their boat in a one piece diving suit, as natural as a seal with a handlebar mustache. He maneuvered himself up on the boat lifting a leg gently out of the water and around the side of the boat. Hansel and Gretel were talking about the hair color of those soon to be lucky virgins. “All blondes?” Gretel laughed nervously. Dying isn’t easy even when you think virgins wait for you in some whorehouse in the sky. “All forty of them?” Half of Flash’s body was in the boat. His eyes were on their backs. He was pulling the other half in as they spoke. “That’s crazy! I will do 10 blondes, 10 brunettes, 10 reds, and 10—no wait.”

“You better decide soon!” Hansel’s teeth chattered wickedly looking nervously at the enormous power plant. They spoke English because they were not allowed to speak Arabic until they were to yell their final words which they decided would be in unison “الموت للكفار!” or “Death to the Infidels!” They thought about yelling it in English so people could understand but they figured no one would be close enough to hear and if they were they would die shortly thereafter anyway so they may as well shout it so Allah might be even more proud of them for putting it to the Westerners. They wouldn’t have time. In the next six seconds they were both floating in the river with they throats splayed wide open and Captain Jumping Jack Flash, named after a Rolling Stone’s song by eager radio jockeys, who spoke over fifty languages, and who killed so many men that if you lined them up turban to toe they would wrap around the world, twice by some accounts, was in command of the bomb that would have killed millions. It is unclear of Hansel and Gretel’s souls fled their body and went to Heaven and got some action. You decide.

Captain Jack Flash coolly lit a cigarette, not a Lucky Cat Cigarette but his own blend from his North Carolina farm, rolled by his own hand without any of the toxins put in Lucky Cats. Then he looked over the bomb, his green eyes focusing intently on the gadgetry. He had seen more bombs in his lifetime than he had seen naked women and he understood them better. He was made for this. A Walkie-Talkie screamed: “Hansel, Gretel, is you there? What is you waiting for, Christmas? Hansel...” It spoke English. It said Christmas like Christ Mus. Frantically, it repeated until Captain Jack Flash picked it up and replied in perfect Arabic.

“Hansel and Gretel can’t come to the phone right now. They are in the oven. Go fuck your mother.” He tossed the Walkie-Talkie in the river as well. He refocused on the bomb. Unfortunately it had an external detonation device so the person he told to go fuck their mother activated it. He was able to finagle some of the mechanics to delay detonation but he wasn’t sure how long he had so he kicked the boat in gear and made a run for it down the Niagara River, over Hansel, over Gretel, and past hundreds of tourists who were walking along the river from wherever they parked to see Niagara Falls. “Get away!” he screamed. “Get away! Bomb! Bomb!” Of course people being the strange animals that they are didn’t do the sensible thing, especially after they recognized that this seal with a handlebar mustache was Captain Jumping Jack Flask. They took pictures. Many pictures. Especially the Japanese.

            He knew any minute it would explode but he couldn’t take the chance of jumping because the ship might go of course and strike the river bank where giggling goofy tourists were snapping photographs with camera phones and Nikons, thinking this was some sort of daredevil stunt, or the bomb might be torn to bits and detonated by the force of the rapids if the boat overturned. Full speed ahead he went, until the thirty-something hero jumped the falls before a stunned throng of curious onlookers, who in disbelief of their eyeballs checked their cameras. Captain Jack Flash thought of many things at that moment as he hung in the air, suspended seemingly for hours like a bird floating on the gusts so precariously. He thought of the last woman he made love to, the last bomb he defused, the New York Mets, the taste of a cold Miller beer, and mostly, a final remembrance of his father. He only remembered then that his father came back down from his office to tell him that he loved him after he had dropped him off in the daycare that fateful morning in 2001 before the ordure hit the fan. He never recalled it before then, somehow it was lost but now it was found. He smiled thinking of it. And suspended in midair for the world to see, the speedboat burst and the explosion knocked anyone within two hundred yards on their ass. Luckily, there were no boats below, or any tours on The Maid of the Mist at the moment. Splintered flaming pieces of the speedboat showered down but were doused in the mist and some Japanese woman on an observation deck said something curious about daredevils to her bewildered husband.