The Lovemakers

"The worst is not death but being blind, blind to the fact that everything about life is in the nature of the miraculous. The language of society is conformity; the language of the creative individual is freedom. Life will continue to be a hell as long as people who make up the world shut their eyes to reality."

— Henry Miller "Stand Still Like the Hummingbird"

When I was a kid there was a box on the living room floor. It was made of some kind of cheap wood and it was electrified. The cord was like a tail coming out of the back end which plugged into a wall socket. It had gadgets inside it. Its innards were circuits and wires and all sorts of other things. 

In the middle of the box there was a glass square and when you turned a nob on the box that glass square lit up and there were people all of a sudden, as though they were trapped inside that glass like fish in a petshop aquarium. They were doing all sorts of random things, indifferent to their predicament. It was as though they didn't know they were amusing anyone. 

If you turned the dial a click here or a click there, they went away and they were replaced by other people doing other sorts of things. Or there was fuzz that looked like a blizzard whenever a station signed off and the shows were all over, or when it was set on a channel you didn't get. 

When my brother and I were camped out on the living room floor during summer vacation from school, he would sometimes tell me to turn the volume down real low, but to "leave on the snow." A velvet Jesus being crucified on the living room wall watched over us. A blue velvet Elvis on an opposing wall did, too. I think my mom bought them in a two-for-one sale. 

There was something soothing about the glow and that sound which I cannot describe adequately. It was a sort of endless "Sssssh." Or the sound of a wave constantly crashing ashore and never going back. I think he felt it was soothing. He was afraid of the dark but would never admit it since he was my older brother and his duty was to be fearless. He is a bar of soap now.

They called that thing a television set. Ours was a brand named Zenith. The word "zenith" means the time at which something is most powerful or successful. That was the company who made it. It had a panel on the front that would flip down and there were tiny knobs inside that you could adjust and make people whatever color you wanted them to be. At my grandma's house, everyone in her television set was a shade of red as though they were on Mars, whereas, on our television, everyone was slightly blue. 

Sometimes when my parents were gone, or asleep, my brother would turn it to the dirty channels, as our mother called them, and we would watch people make love. Or pretend to make love. My brother said they weren't really doing anything, which is why they call them actors. It was usually on a channel called HBO or Showtime which we only got when there was a free-trial subscription. It was for filthy lovemakers, before it was illegal. 

On those televisions I saw many things — boobs for the first time, miraculous sporting events, practically every horrible world event discussed ad nauseum — but for some reason what I remember most was a man, mostly flesh and hair, triumphantly hoisting up a lady's decapitated head like a hunter might a plump pheasant. There was a story to it, I was sure, but I didn't know it because it had never been told to me and I didn't see the full movie, just that little bit. 

It was Greek mythology, someone said. His name was Perseus and hers was Medusa. She had snakes for hair and eyes that were blood-red. And just as this Perseus fellow held up her terrible slithering head, my dad, like a Roman Emperor turning his thumb down, changed the channel and we watched Pete Rose hit his record-breaking hit — most hits in a career. Pete Rose held up his hat the way Perseus held up Medusa's head and fans wildly applauded. My dad got a tear in his eye and all I could think of is how ridiculous it was, and why would someone cut off someone's head and hoist it up to Heaven as though God would approve. Savage.

So ever since that time, when I was 3 or 4, I correlate Pete Rose to Medusa and when someone talks about Pete Rose being banned from the Hall of Fame for betting on baseball, or baseball in general, at some point, I see Perseus holding up her head and those snakes wriggling about and hissing. It is as though that still frame image is lodged in my mind like a billboard and I see it at random moments of my life, sometimes when my eyes are closed and other times when they're wide-open. 

But now that most of all books have been burned for heat during the Year of Austerity when there was no electric or gas to save the planet (a year which lasted four), I will likely never know the actual story. Greek mythology books were among the first to be burned, someone told me. Greek, I'd later come to know, is a euphemism for anal sex. The dirty deed. 

I wrote a story about Medusa and Perseus that didn't involve Greek. I thought to write it in the form of a poem like "The Iliad," but instead I wrote it all out in plain English because that is how people speak these days. No one cares for frilly poetry or silly songs in a world where food, clean water, medicine, and toilet paper are scarce. And if it involves love or lovemaking, it is banned entirely as a national security threat. 

Babies are the national security threat, they ought to more honestly say, because unbeknownst to babies behind all their innocent cooing and drooling and cuteness, there lies something sinister. They grow to become adult humans and rely upon fossil fuels and make more babies who will do the same. "They put a burden on precious natural resources," the government officially declared in 2031. Plus, they might be brainwashed by their parents to resist the government and to not do as they are told like good citizens. 

Music is also banned, except what they allow through the Ministry of Music (MOM), which was formerly known as I Heart Radio. A bland, pro-government, genre-fluid pop that doesn't offend anyone, except those who like good music. Taylor Swift is the MOM Minister, succeeding Ryan Seacrest and Pat Benatar. For some reason, they've never had a male minister just as they've never had a male Minister of Sex which teaches school kids the benefits of anal sex and blow jobs soon after they learn their alphabet.

Televisions don't exist anymore. No one cares about Pete Rose or baseball. People gather at bars and tell stories about things they remember seeing on television when it did exist. It was a powerful medium once, but it fulfilled its purpose. It brainwashed the masses to where we are today. To where they collectively supported farcical ideas and beliefs because they were entranced by that glowing orb the way my brother was once soothed by it. 

I was once brainwashed, too. But I grew up and realized that propaganda saturates commercials, sitcoms and the news so prevailingly, that it is hard to watch and not be affected. So when they burned cities to the ground, when they divided the populace so to conquer it and disrespected our country and its history and sought to replace it with preposterous fiction, and when they recklessly pilloried one candidate while deceivingly heralding another, all on the nightly news, I shut it off, long before it was ever defunct. 

People do their best to entertain other people by telling stories — the way televisions used to mindlessly amuse people — reminiscing of the past before the vicissitude of The Chaos. You can reminisce, but you cannot question anything. Questions were outlawed. The symbol, even, was stricken from existence. From keyboards everywhere for those who have keyboards. From phones for those who have phones. Everything became either fact or conspiracy theory and the facts were determined by the Ministry of Truth. The question mark is a squiggly line that resembles a fish hook with a dot beneath it. Oh, to hell with it. It looks like this — ?

The question mark was a dangerous symbol of villainy and treason. But to this day, people will graffiti buildings, bridges and billboards with it. It's become the mascot of the resistance. What was that building downtown before it burned down? That is not what they would say. Rather, they'd say something to the effect — that building downtown was something I do not recall — suggestively prompting someone else to say what they think it was or else their thought just lingered there unsatisfied. Before it was a bakery and before it sold shoes and before it was a haberdashery and all the times between. It was a pizza place where I had dinner one gleeful night with my family before they all died, or were relocated, appropriately I might add, by the government (because the government was never wrong). 

But, according to the government, everything is only what it is right now because history is unfair and was written by the victors. The losers should have a say, and since they didn't, all is null and void. History doesn't exist. 

What you recall something or someone being it never was because it isn't what it is, someone would inevitably challenge. Some philosophical novice who worships Nietzsche says so because the government has a bug in the room everyone calls a "cricket" which records everything anyone says and takes notes for good citizen scoring which gives people points that can be exchanged for real currency. And anyone who espouses dangerous ideology will disappear and when they disappear no one recalls them because they aren't there so they don't exist and never have. 

Even if I were to say — There was an old fellow who came in this bar who always wore a red hat and went by Dave and told bad jokes — the bartender might say something like — Doesn't ring a bell — as he glances over at the cricket which is a small black box that chirps every few minutes or so to remind everyone that they are always listening — to be fair, they say. 

I always wondered who were the crickets. The cricket is the device, but the crickets are what they call the people who surveil those devices and turn people in to the authorities based upon their statements. Some say it is some sort of automated system and there are no people at all. But I always picture a room full of obese women sipping Diet Cokes whose sweaty rolls rub together and who snarl and gnash their teeth when they got something juicy to report. I don't know why. 

Or maybe they were women that once were men. Or men that once were women. It is true, after all, by government edict, one does not need a penis to be a man just as one doesn't need a vagina to be a woman and chromosomes are irrelevant. In fact, the most enlightened among us are those who are gender-fluid. Those who can be a man one day and a woman the next, shifting in and out of gender gears effortlessly. It is an amazing feat of sophisticated enlightenment and evolution and surely Darwin must be rolling in his grave with enthusiasm for the natural progression of humankind, of course. He must have known we would evolve to this broadminded state of carefree androgyny. Or so says a man in a bar before a chirping cricket, pleasing the ears of those fat biddies and earning himself another two GC (good citizen) points.

I grew tired of the despairing nature of bars and the phony conversations that were commonplace in them because of those crickets, which were mandatory for places of traditional congregation. Bars used to be where people went to revile the government, not to be among a league of cowardly sycophants who worried they'd disappear with a slip of the tongue. Bellyaching of how terrible things are because of anyone who opposes the government, and not because of the government, and how they are traitors and a threat to true democracy which is as defined by the nightly news. Only occasionally did someone come to the bar and speak the truth and in opposition to the government. A person that was finally fed up and at his/her wits end, commiting suicide by going out in a blaze of public glory. I had witnessed a few. I admired them when they did, knowing I wouldn't ever see them again, except for in the afterlife. But there I sat saying nothing at all because at home I had a dog named Abraham Lincoln who relied upon me to not be killed or else he would become meat, which was a delicacy.  

The alcohol only drowned so much of it out and it made things all the more gloomy, so I walked to the library on a Thursday evening when I heard on the local radio news that new story tellers were welcome. I was going to tell the story of Medusa of which I was proud as a peacock. Just as I was proud of my lunchbox when I was a kid at the beginning of the school year. The A-Team. GI Joe. He-Man. On and on. 

There is no gasoline available to the public anymore so no one drives. Trash trucks and semi-tractors are practically the only vehicles on the road. Snow plows, occasionally. Police cars are small white electric cars that buzz about like mosquitoes. There are one or two in every town. A moratorium was issued on gas for its harmful impact on the environment years ago, but the powergrid was never able to sustain the practical everyday public use of electric vehicles. 

So everyone walks, or peddles bicycles, or rides horses if they have them. Rickshaws are allowed, so long as Asians aren't pulling them. Few people have horses because other people steal them and eat them because horse, like dog, is a delicacy and such is the nature of the beast, I suppose — to kill and kill and kill and consume despite the enormous amount of death that has occured over the past decade and the laws forbidding it since the Year of Austerity when people killed and consumed each other like common cannibals. It is one of the few things you're supposed to remember by government decree. Remember how savage you are without government, they say. You'd eat your own mother.

The library was thirteen blocks away so I walked. I didn't have a bike lock and was worried that someone might steal my peach-colored Huffy beach-cruiser because they haven't killed all the thieves, yet. They had already killed most of the drug addicts with Operation Hot Shot, which they blamed on the other party, and which took out half the thieves. But in desperate times, thievery persisted, so everyone was on guard and many people flew those Don't Tread on Me Flags.  

I read fiction and poetry. I like Edgar Allen Poe and have a collection of his stories and poems at my house. Abraham Lincoln, my aforementioned dog, keeps watch over my things when I am gone. He is protective over my poetry collection though he doesn't read poetry himself. He likes sitting on the porch at night watching the fireflies and hearing the hopefulness of gunfire miles away and distant dogs barking. He likes when someone sets off fireworks. His head perks up and he looks like he is in the mood to drink champagne. He drinks beer and gets drunk more than he probably should and, given the opportunity, I think he would make love with something. 

I sometimes imagine what he thinks when he is drunk. I sometimes wonder if he knows about Medusa and Perseus and if he ever saw that movie. I bet he doesn't give a damn. Inside his mind there is fleshy gadgets and sinewy wires and bloody circuits. And though he has a tail, he is not electrified. He doesn't plug into a wall socket. 

That is what makes dogs better than people. They don't give a damn about things that don't matter when people are preoccupied with them. I told him my story of Medusa many times over. He is a hell of a listener, even if he doesn't give a damn. 

It was sweltering out, even though it was evening. The bad part about walking is people look out their windows at you deciding whether to shoot you or not. If you loiter for too long on their property they probably will — if they deem you worth the bullet — if even they have a bullet. The government doesn't punish people for murder anymore because it is unenforceable and murder is population control and population control will save the planet. Once there was an ad campaign sponsored by the Ad Council. It went like this: Save the planet. Kill your neighbor. 

They are peering through their venetian blinds trying to determine if you're a thief with the Jolly Roger in your eye, so they would get you before you got them, or before you make off with apples from their tree, or blackberries from their bush, or something that they feel is valuable to their existence. 

I stopped to watch two dogs make love in an alley. They seemed pretty happy to do so. One hoisted himself up on the back of the other and put his paws on her hips and gyrated like they did on one of those cable channels all those years ago. But I read somewhere that there are only two species who have sex for pleasure — humans and dolphins.

I've never seen dolphins have sex, but I was pretty sure these dogs were doing it for pleasure by the foolish looks upon their faces — a look I once knew all too well as I once had made a living as an adult film actor and re-watched all my films when I later took a moral inventory of my sins. I looked somewhat like that black labrador retriever. 

I was sweaty when I got to the library, but I can't smell stench anymore because of Covid-32 or 33, and everyone is sweaty so it hardly matters. There is natural attraction in the pheromones, but sexual attraction is frowned upon and lovemaking is only for the repugnant miscreants of the degenerate class who are often subject to public ridicule and vituperative government radio addresses, often from President Clovis himself who has never fucked a thing, they say, besides the economy.

President Virjohn Clovis was the first openly gender-fluid asexual paraplegic president, who calls lovemakers "pre-verts" and campaigned harshly against them. He promised to usher in a new "age of enlightenment" and "intellectualism." Everyone felt so damn sorry for him in his rickety-ass wheelchair, and so not to be a bigot of some sort, the majority voted for him, regardless of his obvious insanity and incompetence. At least, the majority on paper voted for him. 

88 million people cast their ballots for this ginger weasel nincompoop, mostly because the media relentlessly bludgeoned the other guy to death with their slanderous editorial news masquerading as journalism. There is more than reasonable doubt to believe that the paper ballots were fudged and that dogs and the dead voted highly in his favor. But no one can ask questions or they'll haul you off to Neverland — the term for the place people go when they go and are never to be seen again. 

I was disappointed to find out from the old lady at the front desk that the story telling group would be meeting on the third floor. Higher floors are always much hotter. It is basic science. Basements and cellars are much sought-after paradises. There used to be air conditioning, but they don't do that anymore since no one is rationed enough electricity to power an air conditioning unit and the scrappers have taken most everyone's copper. 

People have fans, but even that is pushing it. Each home has only enough electricity to have a few lights on and their government radio which is to be on at all times by national mandate. Candles are encouraged. They make candles, as they do soap, from the rendered fat of the dead. In reverence, they say. 

My brother, I mentioned, became a bar of soap. I have one of the bars they made from him at home on a shelf in a glass butter dish so that he looks a little like a bar of Snow White lying there. And since I have only seven fingers, they are like naked dwarfs standing around his casket when I do the dusting. Each person makes 16-20 bars of soap and roughly 32 candles, according to the bureau of vital statistics. I don't know what happened to the other bars or candles they made from him. I was thinking of whittling the bar into an effigy, but in so doing, I would lose half of him and it wasn't guaranteed to look anything like him when I finished being that I am no Michelangelo. So he just sits there, in a rectangular white bar, smelling coniferous.

I was sure I forgot something. The feeling haunted me as I made my way into the room that was about as hot as I expected. The air was stifling. Our sweat seemed to linger there making the room even more humid. The windows were open which didn't help because there was no wind. A lack of wind is like God holding His breath, I thought. But God is illegal since He was fact-checked out of existence by MOT and deemed inflammatory propaganda to marginalize atheists, so to say such was illegal and treasonous for fiction was not allowed since it confuses people and there is no God, according to the Ministry of Truth. 

The breathless air of God, my mind wandered in the sanctuary of its private taboo. Skinny-dipping in mischievous religious sin. I've maintained my Christianity, despite my time as an adult film actor and the state of the world and all the angry and soulless atheists in it who profess a sort of nihilist actualism, they say. 

The books on the surrounding shelves all had inscriptions on their spines of what was inside of them. No one checks them out anymore. It is forbidden. You can read them in the library, but only if you are licensed to read and register what you're looking at and/or reading with the literacy monitor or the appropriate authority. These were the books specifically spared from the Great Fire and from heating people's homes. It may seem odd that people once read for pleasure, but they did. They once read just to read and wrote just to write. It is even further perplexing to me that people were once paid, sometimes abundantly, to do so. But it shouldn't be for the fact that I was once paid to fuck women I didn't even know.  

I wore a three dollar black suit I got from the thrift store and it was quickly apparent that I was overdressed for the occasion as 4 of the 6 other people were nude and they looked at me as though I were a penguin waddling on a hot beach. There were no laws banning nudity anymore since there was no air conditioning or organized religion to oppose it. There can be no public indecency when there is no decency to be had. 

They weren't younger fit people, by no means, proudly showing off their chiseled youth and vigorously-endowed forms. They were like the fat gender-neutral people in the latter-day Calvin Klein ad campaigns with terrible tattoos. One lady had a gray mushroom-shaped head and her body was like a blanched-white bowling ball with the corresponding amount of holes in all the appropriate crevices, polka-dotted by abnormally-large freckles. Another woman wore an olive-green kimono but was otherwise naked and had boobs that sagged like enormous brown eggplants in the gap. One of the older men wore only spectacles and had a fire-crotch, a pubic burning bush, from which a large but contorted penis poked through like a balloon before it became an animal, twisted only once, bulbous and pliable, his balls appropriately missing, by government request.  

They smiled in unison to welcome me — this confederacy of filthy dishabille. Maybe I was overwhelmed by the nudity I was forced to engage rather than to simply ignore as I had in day-to-day life prior to now — at least, since I quit as an adult film actor. I was able to look past the flexing butt-cheeks of some naked cyclist on the bike trail peddling by me, or some bare-ass jogger jogging through the park, or the naked old man who walks his dachshund past my house twice daily with his schnitzel in the wind, swinging back and forth like the pendulum of a cuckoo. 

I didn't notice the other two people at all at first, other than to say they were what I thought was a couple. An indistinct blur of a person with two heads. The unfortunate way some couples become when they lose their self-identity and amalgamate rather than to complimentarily love one another while not losing their sense of self. 

Perhaps they were rebelling against the laws of our insufferably-strict society as I have heard that people do. Sharing forbidden love in a secret safe place. Maybe this was one such place where lovers could love and secrets would keep, I thought for a daring moment. 

She wore a little yellow dress that might have been just a long-ribbed shirt and he wore khakis and a blue polo. I soon realized that he was flirting very desperately but unsuccessfully with her as she looked like she wanted to flee. 

But before I could think upon them any further, it dawned on me that I had, in fact, forgotten something. I had forgotten the story I wrote about Medusa so my presence amongst this odd tribe of story tellers was, in a word, pointless. I was two ears and no mouth. And somewhere in the crotch of my pants there was a penis and two balls that I was not willing to part with because the government wanted them. My meat cannon still meant something to me, even not in use. Like some old war relic rusting in some little town square. A procreant, they would label me if they knew, especially of my past in the adult entertainment industry that realized the fate of the dodo because it subjugated women and, even worse, encouraged breeding, they said. 

We made all the proper introductions and everyone else knew each other and they kept talking about Steve and Diana (pronounced Dee-ana), who were not here as though they were something to miss, but they accentuated the fact that I was here as though to lift their own spirits, as though something ominous might have happened to my predecessors and as though I was some noteworthy replacement. And everytime the group leader with the saggy brown boobs mentioned my name, she smiled and everyone smiled including me, except for the guy in the blue polo and khakis, Eric, who sensed I was some threat to his hopeful relationship with the attractive tan woman he voraciously leached upon. 

If I hadn't been so upset about forgetting the story I wrote, I would have noticed how stunningly beautiful she was. But I suppose I did, innately, and so his primordial fears were merited. Even in this dirty austere life, she was beautiful and pleasing and so little was beautiful and pleasing anymore. If there were magazines that exhibited the splendor of feminine beauty in such a way as there was only a short time ago, she could be on the cover of any one of them. But I got the sense from sitting across from her that those sorts of things wouldn't interest her at all. 

Her name was Ava Sax. She introduced herself to me as everyone took turns dumping the best possible spin of themselves upon me, which I would do in return. I had never met anyone named Ava before, but I had known a clam digger named Stacy Sax from my time as a yogurt-slinging thespian, and I couldn't recall if I had or hadn't with her, which is the polite way to put it, so I hoped they weren't related and there wasn't some future Thanksgiving Dinner in store for me when normalcy returns and I would have to deny my past in adult film, or admit to it. Or where I might give myself away by accidentally saying something like, "Please pass the baby gravy" or "my compliments to your grandma's cranberry jelly hole." A slip of the tongue. 

Ava offered a brief biography as they all did. She was a school teacher when The Chaos began. She was married and had kids. She lost everything as most of us did. Orphaned in adulthood by the death of our country. Marooned on a suddenly pestilent planet. 

Sue was the group leader with the wine-sack milk bags and Carl was the fire-crotch and Jean was the blanched-white bowling ball and Tom was the bearded vagabond who said very little but who was also in the buff and who had numerous faded tattoos on his skin that looked like roadkill or some kind or melanoma. His penis looked like a sick depressed mouse that hung himself in a black tree. I couldn't help but to notice. And then I realized he was not circumcised and so it was all foreskin dangling there. A sickly furless bat hanging in a bowleg cave. His skinny legs looked as though they had shaped themselves around a motorcycle he no longer owned. 

As people spoke, I looked at him and just when I swore that one of his tattoos was some sort of cancer, a shape appeared and through that purplish-blistery blob, I saw a woman, or a wolf, or a tiger being resurrected in the fluorescent light of the library. Something appeared in all his moles and lumps just about the time I swore him to be terminal. His beard was a perfect cloud of frozen smoke and his lips were cold gray gristle.

There are refreshments, Sue reminded us, gesturing to two banquet tables with jugs of decontaminated water and crackers and some sort of homemade salsa and hummus, which everyone pronounced as "hue-mus" and ate like people in old movies ate caviar. There were cherry tomatoes from Carl's garden that attracted a multitude of gnats. Then there was a spread of canned fruits straight from someone's rations. Not very inspiring or elegant, in the least, but generous, nonetheless. 

Everyone had brought something, except for me. I brought absolutely nothing but my body, and bodies were cheap these days. Bodies were everywhere. Bodies were simple white bars of soap in plain paper wrappers with words and phrases like "Condolences" on them. Or "With all due reverence." Or advice such as "Waste not want not." Or reminders such as "Never ask questions." Or things like "Bless the abundance of frugality." Or "Give thanks to the cleanly." On and on. 

Bodies were candles burning for light so to use less electricity so old mother earth could recuperate and be her good-old self again. But she would never be herself again for everyone and everything ages and everyone and everything dies.

Despite forgetting my story, I was excited to sit back and listen to the others since there was no cricket in the room. But then Sue invited Eric to tell us his latest, and so he reluctantly pealed himself off Ava for a moment and made his way to the podium, a sort of tabletop lectern with an attached microphone that was purely for esthetics in that there was no speaker or sound system. He grabbed it and cleared his throat, winking at Ava, who I could tell wasn't interested in him at all, even if there were no laws against coupling. Even if he was the last man on earth, and the fate of humankind depended upon them procreating, she would not give herself to him voluntarily. So he would have to club her over the head if our species was to survive and that is exactly how he looked at her like a Canadian looks at a baby seal. 

He didn't have a good story to tell. He spent twelve minutes talking about how he remembered microwave ovens and what microwave ovens used to do. He described them in such excruciating detail that I could practically picture one on the podium in front of him. I could hear the little bell ding when it was done and see the cardboard tray of a TV dinner zapped for two minutes and twenty seconds. The plastic overlay, piping hot, daring you to touch it. Then he spent another half hour talking about the history of the microwave oven. How it was invented in 1946 by some guy at Raytheon who never finished high school and called it a RadaRange. I thought he was going to go somewhere with the story, but he didn't. He just described what he knew about microwave ovens. 

Then after he was done, the others applauded absurdly and then chimed in on what they remember about microwave ovens and when asked if I had anything to add, I quickly said no. Then someone remarked how they missed microwave ovens and everyone agreed, but Ava and I who were bored with the discussion. We made eye contact for the first time and were in unspoken agreement that neither of us missed the microwave oven. 

It went on this way for a while and then I was offered a turn. But I eschewed in the fact that I forgot to bring my story and I couldn't tell it by memory. It is what prevented me from being a real actor. I couldn't remember lines. In the adult films I did, the lines were simple and when I forgot what I was supposed to say and said something else, no one cared because, as the director often remarked, "It ain't Shakespeare. Just plug her." 

I didn't want to tell my story anyway because it didn't fit in and since Medusa wasn't some sort of outmoded kitchen appliance, I didn't think it would go over well or be of particular interest. 

Several times during the story telling, Ava looked at me and I looked at her and between us there was a faint semblance of recognition that was more likely bore of camaraderie or commiseration. I hoped she hadn't seen any of my movies. I hoped she had never heard of me at all. She was a beautiful woman with a wonderful smile and I couldn't stand the thought of being ruined in her mind. I fell in love with her after about 14 minutes of equally exchanged glances, yet, not a single word between us. And in my mind, I was violating every law on the books about coupling I had previously lived in strict compliance of, even in my thoughts.

But Eric was the impediment to my happiness and my mind toiled in ways to dispose of him. I wondered for a moment if they were married and it was a marriage of convenience prior to the government outlawing marriage and coupling as part of the population control austerity measures that included the government food rations infused with birth control in The Year of Austerity. 

If you were married prior to that time, you were allowed to stay married, but both husband and wife had to report to the Department of Health, or DOH, and be fixed, as they called it. The doctor was referred to as "a fixer." It is what they called it when I was a kid and we had a cats and dogs. They were "fixed" at some point or other so they didn't have puppies or kittens.

The government didn't keep anyone's balls. They put them in the mail a few months later. Bronzed like baby shoes. And men would proudly put them on their mantles or keep them in their sock drawers as a memento for doing their part to save Mother Earth. 

The government included a "sacrifice letter" that said something to the effect of — "Thank you for your good deed and doing your part to ensure the world will go on and Mother Earth will live on even better than before. For not procreating and continuing the destructive ways of our foolish ancestors who multiplied like rats. Besides, there is a chance you might have died of testicular cancer. So, in essence, we may have saved your life by taking your testicles for you. You're welcome."

They were ordered to sign an auto-generated thank you note written by the government, to the government, to president Clovis himself, and to send it back or else they would be penalized rations or subject to death for the crime of iniquitous gratuity.

Thank you for taking my balls, it said in sum. 

I never signed a note to the effect and my testicles remain where the Good Lord intended them. I am a proud procreant miscreant degenerate. Whatever slanderous moniker they wish to belittle me by, though I had been celibate since leaving the adult film industry that made me feel like a bologna sandwich. 

It is foolish to keep your balls, they argue on their PSAs — it isn't like you can use them anyway. It isn't like unauthorized babies are allowed to be born and to survive like feral little monkees. The Fetus Termination Act (FTA) and the bureau will see to it. Besides, your rations will not sustain you and a post-birth fetus. Think smart or not at all!* 

*The government had redefined a "baby" to be a human person, born or created by a birthing person or mechanism, who has developed a pattern of self-sustainability and self-sufficiency so that he/she/it/they/them (or other applicable non-assigned pronouns) could invariably survive without the aid, comfort or assistance of an adult parenting figure. Until then, it is a clump of cells that shall be described as a fetus and subject to abortion in accordance to the Fetus Termination Act of 2033. 

Maybe Eric was one of those men who satisfied his innate craving for intimacy and procreation by attaching himself in public to whatever semi-attractive female was present. Ava Sax was an absolute goldmine. A naturally beautiful and intelligent woman who was rife with personality and whose eyes seemed to curiously engage things and people of interest in conversations and inquiries without the need for words. 

Maybe that is why he came, I wondered. Because she was a rare and beautiful person who inspired great and wondrous thoughts and things simply by being, and she did so to all sorts of people. It was selfish of me to think that she did so only to me. But in his brutish ham-fisted way, he didn't know what else to do besides club her with his constant and relentless dubious affections. She was too cordial and modest to tell him that she wasn't interested — or some adequate dysphemism such as to "fuck off." 

But why did she come back, knowing he would be back as well to badger her? I will ask questions until the day that I die, possibly just for the sake of asking questions. I wondered if story-telling meant that much to her. Or if she wasn't as put off as I supposed she'd be by his importunate smothering. 

When it was her turn to tell her story, a dolorous tale about when The Chaos erupted and the wars broke out and the resistance failed, and how she would hide in the attic of her home and listen to the sporadic machine gun fire that grew more and more infrequent as people ran out of ammunition. How her husband was killed as was her son and daughter. And how the sound was replaced by periodic single, yet louder, deliberate shots, which she knew meant a neighbor had been killed by the police for resisting. Their guns confiscated and often times, their homes burned, which she could smell before she could see out the little octagonal window that her husband had forbade her to look out for fear of what she might see. The window that she described as "an eyeball to a burning world."

Sometimes, she went on, there were several shots, but they always sounded different than the resistance fire. They were angrier. Less desperate. Why hadn't people stockpiled enough ammunition to resist, she questioned (though she could argue that it was rhetorical by nature). 

It was the most despairing sound in the world — when that is all the hope in the world you have to be free — the dying of a semi-automatic rifle. There was no hope left when the guns stopped. One by one families fell. How we used to trust the police, she lamented. We should have known they would have turned on us when given the first order to do so rather than to protect us, as they once vowed going so far as to emboss that now phony pledge on the side of their police cruisers. 

Her story didn't go over as well as the others, except with me. If there had been a cricket in the room as there was in every bar, she would have told her last tale. But I got the feeling that she no longer cared, which also helped me understand why she came back despite Eric's pestering. She was numb to it all. Numb to a loveless world with no husband and kids. With no Hell below us and above us only sky. To the nothingness they offered. 

It was a story I wish I would have told myself and those memories were very much like my own and evoked an overwhelming sense of sadness that I hadn't let myself feel because until recently, I had been taking the pink government pill in my ration pack that smelled like cotton candy and allowed anyone who took it to feel no actual despair. 

Yet, within our commiseration, I felt hope. I felt a great sense of relief in our unspoken accord. There was something real and human about her and her story and I knew that unlike the others, she was, in fact, still alive as I was alive. More than a heartbeat and breath and a bag of coordinated bones. More than organs and skin and orchestrated animation of uncertain origin. She still had a soul and a spirit and she made me realize that I did as well. 

It is good to feel sadness, but the others seemed confused by her story and were visibly relieved when it was over. It was as though the feeling didn't register in their minds because all those pink pills had left a residual chalky coating that wouldn't allow negative feelings to stay long enough to be considered and processed at all. But those feelings were of great value and were yet another thing stolen from them, unbeknownst to them, though they wouldn't consider it because who would want to possess feelings of discomfort and sadness without realizing its benefit? Who would think that those are beneficial emotions that serve a purpose as great as their antipodes? That to be pleased and displeased is to truly to live? Who would want to hold on to remorse, angst and sadness when you could simply discard them with simple, far less complex, trivial pleasures? Who would want to be broken when you could so easily be fixed with a pill? To not accept the post-apocalyptic reality, but rather the mirage of some Disney idyll. Some sacrifice you are making to panegyrize your suffering without suffering at all for the sake of all your incessant virtue signaling.

It was Carl who talked about TVs. I looked around at the other faces and everyone was gawping at him grinning foolish grins as though he turned into a TV right there in front of them and their faces were aglow in his radiance. Just as my brother was aglow in the light of the TV snow while he slept on the living room carpet all those years ago, though the government would tell me I never had a brother. Or as all ten of my fingers once appeared when I thought nothing of the possibility that I might ever lose any of them, though the government would tell me that I only had seven because that is what I have now. 

There they were in their collective mesmeric trance, this new Americana cult, all but Ava and I as we were both wondering what happened to people. How did we fold and give up so easily? With the first government mandate to the latest edict of President Clovis, who represents the very worst in all of us. Who has gotten worse as he has gone on like cancer gets worse. 

We were too busy being divided and duped by the manipulators of society in the millionaire class. Kept in a state of constant crisis because the psychological effect would be for us to do exactly as we did. To surrender our freedoms, one by one and to question nothing. To do as we were told. To buy what we were supposed to buy. And to disarm and disengage. 

We were not grinning with them, but in sorrow for them, watching Carl unwrap his simple mind about his love of television. His mind seemingly as rusty as everyone else's, no longer burdened with unnecessary thoughts and certainly no longer addled by scrutiny or skepticism. Doped up on that pink pill which one week was called a harmless contraceptive and the next an antidepressant and the next a multivitamin and the next a vaccination to the latest virus or disease. Do your part not to kill your grandmother or mine. It takes all of us in times like these. 

I borrowed pieces of Carl's description of TV in the intro of this story I later recorded at home in a room with an actual burning lightbulb and not some baby that became a candle for the betterment of humanity. Not someone's dead mother — the part of her that wasn't 16 bars of granny soap with banal epitaphs on the wrappers. 

I used his description up until the part of my brother asking me to leave on the snow — that was my own personal touch — my memory superimposed upon his demotic description. And again with Pete Rose and Medusa. Carl didn't mention either of those things because they were unique to me and my experience. 

Then I recalled my story in such detail that I was sure I could tell it. But again, it wasn't about an appliance, so I decided not to. Not with this group, anyway. Heterosexual love stories were forbidden, after all, and you never know who you can trust. 

Someone could turn you in at any moment for saying the wrong thing and you would be banned from life or hung, depending on how severe the Government Authority Board deemed your insolence and how many infractions you had already, and your voting record, and your terrorist status, and how many times you've been banned on Facebook for espousing "conspiracy theories" or "hate speech" that violated community standards. 

Then someone in a cheap suit and a white electric car comes to collect you on behalf of the federal government for the betterment of society because individualism is dead. They have infiltrated every seemingly benign institution and social group so the likelihood that someone here was a spy for the government was indeed strong. They didn't need crickets where they had people.  

Then Sue described a washing machine and Jean a rotary-dial telephone and it went on and on and I thought I was going to fall asleep or die of boredom. They were horrible story tellers and I couldn't imagine ever coming back, except to see Ava. I knew that I could stand a thousand years of such miserable stories just to see her. My ears bleeding rivers of misery just to be near her and to hear what story she would tell next until one day she disappeared. What more might I learn of her while sitting through the usefulness of blenders and the nostalgia of toaster ovens. Or the history of curling irons and mailboxes. 

And so I did for four straight weeks, sharing only little stories about what I remember of my brother and my family. About Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny, but never Christmas or Easter. About our neighborhood barber and the factory where my dad worked and an old car he fixed up. A 46 Plymouth he painted brown and tan. About how the paint smelled and how I helped him tear off the newspaper and masking tape from the glass and chrome when it was all finished and how I crumbled them up into balls and tossed them into a trash can. 

Then every time Eric went to the bathroom to piddle, I spoke to Ava a little more. And I fell in love a little more — though it was impossible to love her more than I did from the first time I saw her. I loved her, inexplicably, from that moment and everything afterwards was simply affirmation of what I already felt and knew. It was simply the universe telling me that I wasn't wrong and that she was the one. 

So daringly, in the break between stories on that fourth week, I invited Ava to my house, partly because I feared she would disappear if I didn't. Her stories had gotten progressively more aggressive and if someone had turned her in, she would be lost to Neverland. She said she would love to come, but couldn't get rid of Eric, even if she tried. She said she was fairly sure he patrols her house. He was in the bathroom as we talked, probably pissing about as fast as he could piss, dreaming impossible dreams in the accumulation of pale yellow bubbles that frothed in the mouth of a porcelain urinal. 

She said she thought he was "one of them," which I knew to mean she thought he was a police detective surveiling social events for dissidents and law breakers. The more they find, the better their chances are at promotion to the next level. Every good police man and woman aspires to be local, state then federal officers not only for the pay, but the prestige of being something in a nothing world. They often make up great travesties, which they claim to fix themselves subsequently documenting their heroism in all the proper paperwork so to get the necessary public adulation for the advancement they so desire. Steve and Diana, she said, were lovemakers. Eric was the one who arrested them, she opined, though she hadn't seen either of them be arrested or hang.

I gave her my address on a scrap piece of paper, which she quickly stuffed into a pocket of her shirt-like dress. If Eric was a policeman, he could search her at anytime, so it was dangerous for her to accept. But I only listed the address and not my name so it would afford her the opportunity to make up an appropriate explanation. 

She looked at me for a moment and I looked at her in a sort of mutual understanding there over the assortment of dried fruits and canned goods someone had elaborately laid out on silver serving dishes on those foldout tables. Fruit cocktail never looked so fancy as it did in a crystal bowl that likely belonged to someone's dead grandmother, elegantly impaled with a silver serving spoon. Peaches in heavy syrup. Dried prunes. Cockroach milk for coffee. You name it. The amenities were endless. 

"I'll think of something," she vowed in a whisper just before Eric burst out of the bathroom making a beeline to her. I hoped she was wrong about him, but I knew she was probably right, judging by his reaction to her latest story and his obvious discomfort. It wouldn't be enough for her to suffer a permanent consequence, or a PC, as it was called, but likely if he was a detective it was duly noted in log of accumulated circumstantial infractions and, in addition to her last story, it could be damning. 

But it wasn't enough for him to arrest her and it appeared that he was conflicted somewhere between lust and duty. A million years of natural human inclination to make love and procreate with the most attractive partner you could lawfully attain, whether by obligation or pleasure, was not going to be suppressed so easily by the White House, or to save the planet. 

Do your part. Population control will save the world, they promised in all their celebrity-laden commercials with fancy absurd clothes and cosmetics with botox lips and foreheads and ridiculously-sculpted noses and Brazilian butt jobs and three or four facelifts. Mother Nature needs us. It takes all of us, they promulgated in unification.

I hadn't seen a policeman in quite some time, I realized watching Eric follow Ava out the door. I remembered when I was a kid that they used to wear uniforms and shiny badges. That they used to come to school and hand out pencils and stickers and tell us not to do drugs. I listened. I didn't do drugs. It made sense. But others did not listen and became drug addicts, so it was all deemed a failure rather than a success because failure is easier to declare when success is not an absolute. 

But I couldn't remember when was the last or who was the last. And certainly, at the time, I didn't ever think that this was probably the last policeman I would ever see. But he was probably one of them on TV who shot someone and went to jail. Or one of them directing traffic. Policing is all furtive now and they don't wear uniforms or badges. They look like him. Like social workers in khakis and polos. But when it comes time to arrest someone, the implants in their eyes light up and flash like they did on top of police cruisers all those years ago, which reminds me of the ads in the comic books when I was a kid that promised X-Ray eyeglasses if you send in 5.95 plus postage. See all the girls naked, it never said, but every boy dreamed. 

An hour later, Ava appeared at my fence gate. She told me that Eric walked her home as always, but this time when he tried to get inside, she told him she was dying and wanted to be left alone to die in peace. She said she wouldn't be there next week for the group because she would be dead by then, she was quite sure, but she would request that the government give 1/16th of her dedicatory soap to him, as portioning yourself was allowed, at least, it was allowed to request it. When he believed that she was dying of some incurable illness, his face went flush, but rather than sympathy, he looked crestfallen, she recalled with a slight chuckle. 

"I think he was dissatisfied that he had invested so much time in a dying thing like myself." 

The world was full of death and so he didn't want to be a witness or attached to a dying woman in such a sad platonic way, though she did say for a moment that he looked to consider sticking around to rape her corpse.

I asked her where she thought of such an idea and she smiled again, before she paused as though to consider if she wanted to disclose one of her great secrets. If I was secret-worthy or not. 

"Dragonflies," she admitted. "Female dragonflies pretend to be dead or dying so to discourage unwanted male attention."

 

She said he shook her hand in a sterile fashion, the way an insurance salesman shakes the hand of someone who didn't buy a policy, and said goodbye and good luck awkwardly and left her alone in such a way that she knew he would never be back. 

"I didn't know that about dragonflies," I confessed. My insect knowledge was exiguous. 

"My father was an entomologist," she explained. She took a deep breath as her words had invoked some sad memory of him and his wonderful bug collection. 

I let her in and showed her to the backyard where the apple trees were. She was astounded by the fact I had apple trees and the way I had concealed them with a 16 foot-high privacy fence and by surrounding them with silver maples so that no one knew they existed. Had someone knew they existed, surely I'd have no apples for fruits were a delicacy and the government ration packs only contained canned or dried fruits, and in very limited portions. Nothing was fresh. Nothing was plenteous. 

"I haven't had an apple for years!" she pined.  

"Have two. Take your pick. Go on!"

"I couldn't!"

"You must!" I insisted.   

I thought about those dogs I saw screwing in the alley. I still couldn't believe they were not doing so for pleasure, but rather by an innate urge to procreate like they were determined to continue their species' existence. If they had knowledge of how bad the world was, perhaps, the male would pull out, or maybe, like the dragonfly, the female would feign death. 

I suddenly had an urge to procreate with Ava as I watched her float about the backyard marveling at my apples, finally picking two apples. There she stood in my Garden of Eden. A more perfect Eve than Eve. I thought I would never have the urge to do so again after so long in the pornographic film industry which I thought had ruined my natural desire. 

But I tingled and stiffened, as I had when I was Dick Haze, this time, for all the right reasons and not for some random muff and gratuitous sex romp. Not for "Humps and Bumps," which was the title of my last film, incidentally, before I quit the industry. It was a Halloween story in which I played a horny ghost named Ichabod Jones. It was while doing that film that I saw the image of the Madonna glistening on the fuzzy back of a costar. I seized her by the hips and stared madly at it until she shrieked and broke free, but on a second look, it was gone and no one believed me that it had been there at all. They said I had imagined it, or that it was a hallucination. But I knew it was a clear sign from God and so I heeded it. 

Ava picked two modest apples, so I picked two of the best for her and confiscated the smaller ones she picked for myself. She smiled at my gesture and didn't bother to argue, as she knew it would have been fruitless to do so. 

"Don't sit under the apple tree with anyone else but me, anyone else but me, anyone else but me. No! No! No! Don't sit under the apple tree with anyone else but me. Till I come marchin' home!" she sang. 

"The Andrews Sisters." I smiled, naming that tune. 

"It is! Very good. My mother loved old music like that. It was so melody-driven and pure. I'll never forget the lyrics. It was one of mom's favorites."

She was even more impressed by my shower which utilized rain water from the gutters collected in a barrel which I strapped to the side of the house. A showerhead was connected to the bottom and a chain lever turned the water on and off. My yard was full of roses and wildflowers and bees, and she was like a curious girl looking around. Like Alice in Wonderland before the abundance of curiosities confounded and anguished her. But my yard was free of tweedle dums and mad hatters and such convolution, so it would never get discouraging.

The government banned male-female coupling years ago in the The Lewd Sex Act of 2032. Police who enforced the anti-gun laws also enforced the anti-coupling laws. The punishment is death for one-half the couple, but not both. The other's forehead is branded by a heart-shaped hot iron and he/she is left to suffer a brokenheart, which is a worse fate than death when the love is true. 

If it is not true, you are made to live life branded as a filthy degenerate lovemaker, but one doesn't consider that at the time, I can say now standing here watching her eat the apple. 

She could smell the roses. She could walk barefoot on my grass and take a shower and let the dragonflies and bees play upon her skin, but she would have to go home or else we would be discovered and one of us would die and the other would live with that terrible heartache until, mercifully, we died as well. 

This could never be her home, I lectured myself, as much as I wanted it to be her home. Baggers, they call those guilty of what I was suddenly guilty of in my mind and guilty of in my previous occupation before it was outlawed. The people they hang for having sex like mongrels. To have babies that die soon after their birth for the world is inhospitable, purposefully and irrevocably inhospitable, unless it is carefully engineered like those melancholic gender-neutral children that are being created in biolabs to continue the species in better climates and more favorable zip codes. 

But not here. Not in the natural wombs of beautiful mothers bore out of love and attraction, but rather from a scientific formula like lab rats. Like COVID-32.

The lovemakers are what a faction of the contumacious rebels call themselves, distinguished between Romeos and Juliets of the corresponding and unambiguous genders. With pride in their insolence and without fear of retribution. As they are hooded and sentenced to death. It is televised on US Gov TV. There was one TV in every town which was broadcast and projected on a movie screen in town square. A block wall or a repurposed billboard painted white glowing with the display of these mongrels being hung wherever they were found. 

Every Saturday they show movies, but before the movies, baggers and other criminals are hung somewhere in some town much like our own to reenforce their new world order. And people cheer and ballyhoo and beach balls are bounced over a sea of heads and the theme song to the old TV show "Good Times" is played over and over because jingles, they call them, aren't considered music. Jingles are effective "reeducation" tools as administered by MOM. 

They have hung people a few times in our town. The gallows still stand waiting in town square by the gazebo for them to do it again. Birds in the meantime perch on them, unaware or unconcerned of the grimness of the gibbet which they exploit and inadvertently repurpose. Children sometimes climb them to incur the scorn of their mothers. That dying breed of woman who once was so important to have her own day before it was hijacked and renamed "Birthing Person Day" by government decree. 

"You'll fall and crack your head open!" those mothers warn. "You'll get splinter!" 

The ropes sway in the wind, waiting. There is a padlock on the trap door through which someone will invariably fall when the lever is depressed. They will go with a whoosh and then the only sound over the murmuring of the crowd will be the anguish of the rope. That waspish mewl of its inscrutable strain. 

In a daydream, I thought of the story Ava told about losing her family. About when the shooting stopped how it was such a helpless feeling. I recall it. I didn't recall it before she reminded me, but I recall it again as she admires the life in my yard and as she seemingly comes to life with everything she sees and touches. 

I would love to watch her take a shower with a bar of soap I made. Perhaps the lilac. Or honeysuckle. A bar that was never someone. I would watch her shower and jerk off in my mind for it is not yet illegal to think such thoughts, nor do I think she would mind if I did. 

I would watch her and admire her beauty if she doesn't mind me watching her. Or I could affix a curtain and offer her privacy because that is the gentlemanly thing to do. That is how one of us will hang. Naked but not at all afraid of what waits us next for we are both certain there is more than just this life and this life is just an inglorious gauntlet we have to run to prove whether we are worthy to continue or whether we get sacked and have to start over and do it again. 

And maybe, someday, while we are having school pictures taken in 4th grade, there will be the semblance of familiarity, and we will know, however briefly, that this isn't the first go around for 4th grade pictures with an Olan Mills photographer. We've been here before in another elementary school like this one. Like children on a carousel who realize at last that the purple unicorn they ride is not actually going anywhere at all. It is the first metaphor for the redundancy of life that we are taught. 

She showered and asked me to watch her as innocently as such a thing could be asked. Not like those women in the movies I had done who said absolutely everything lurid and sleazy. I soon realized we were making love before we even touched. As the water and the soap cascaded down her beautiful body, amid all the flowers, the butterflies, the bees, the dragonflies, and the dying light of day that gave her a golden-orange hue. 

I couldn't remember seeing a woman naked, though I had, of course. Rather, Dick Haze had in 32 films and thousands of takes of debauchery with young ambitious women of all sorts, most of whose names I certainly don't remember. And before that on those old premium channels and dirty magazines that most every boy has seen once or twice in the age of his puerile mischief. 

I had relationships before as well, but Ava made me forget them. I had never really noticed any of them naked. Clothes were removed out of necessity to make love, but they were put on again rather quickly when the act was over. There was no appreciation of the body, it was about the efficiency of the act, the thrill of the relative taboo of lovemaking while children slept in another room or company slept in the guest room. 

I certainly never realized that the last woman I saw naked on a film set with the Madonna in the tremulous light shimmering on the dewy down of her lower-back would be the last. The last until now — 3 years later. I never desired it in all that time. I never thought I would desire it again. But this was natural desire. This was pure. 

There I stood gawking as she got clean in a perfect stream of captured rainwater that seemed to have dropped and collected in that barrel just for her. Just for this moment. I got her a towel and she dried herself and put her yellow shirt-dress back on and we went inside where she ate the second apple I gave her as though it was the most delicious thing she had ever tasted. The other two she put in a paper bag for later. 

We turned on the gramophone on my cabinet and played records — old records from the twenties, thirties and forties and then Elvis. She said she loves Elvis and I told her that I love Elvis, too. If you don't love Elvis, I said, there must be something wrong with you. 

"Oh, yes I've got a lot o' living to do. A whole lot o' loving to do. Come on, baby, to make it fun it takes two..."

We must have danced to that song a hundred times singing it a little better and more accurately as we went. Neither of us made a very good Elvis, but we were Elvis. We are all Elvis. Some of us just don't know it, yet. Even Medusa was Elvis. Perseus was Elvis. Pete Rose was Elvis tipping his cap to the Cincinnati crowd who were all Elvis. My brother, the bar of soap, is Elvis. My dad was Elvis. But President Clovis is the anti-Elvis and the anti-Elvis is doomed to fail. He just doesn't realize it yet. He is too drunk on power. 

We made love the rest of the night until our bodies were tender and then again until we torpefied ourselves in the act. It was like I had never done so before. Our lips were numb and I was drained of every ounce of desire I ever had. She rested in the burrow of my arms in her own nirvana as I lied there in mine. 

We hadn't bothered to close the windows because it was a cool night and the breeze felt good like air-conditioning once felt good and cooled us as we made love and then lied upon the soft sheets of the bed that hadn't known two people in better than five years for I had only had sex on stages and beds in studios with cameras rolling and people standing around watching, none of us thinking we would be as extinct as dinosaurs in only a few years and our acts declared illegal. It was, at the time, unfathomable. 

My bed bellowed an otiose groan and then caterwauled in clear objection to our lovemaking. It was taken by surprise for it had only known me and the peace of a single catatonic soul, but now it was subject to verboten activity that violated the latest U.S. Constitution and so it mewled in disdain as though it was complicit and would be damned with us. As though it were desperately protesting us so not to be implicated otherwise in our lurid coitus. 

Her sweat glistened upon her skin in the candlelight and we throbbed and ached in a surfeit of pleasure. And afterwards, we were as those in Pompeii in the ashes of Vesuvius that was our exhaustion. There was a thunderstorm which gave us privacy despite the open windows for no one is ever about when it rains. Not even to prudently collect water and put it to good use for they've been so long conditioned to have an adversity to wetness. 

"I don't want to leave," she sighed half-asleep. "I don't ever want to move." The bed was finally at peace with itself and us. She kissed me as if to convince me, though she needn't because I was long-since convinced. I was in her pocket. I was hers.

"Then don't," I dreamed with her aloud. "We will live this way forever — however long forever is. But if they do find us, you live and I go. That is my only condition." I had never imagined that I would be so quixotic, but here I was — an unabashed Romeo. 

"Dying would be the easy part," she countered. Her fingers running softly over my chest as though they were writing playful love letters. "I couldn't bear to live. I can only pray that forever is a long, long time."

"I pray as well."

I lied there and thought of how fortunate that we were to be contemporaries who had the opportunity to meet despite the virulent times and the antipathetic government that levies such vitriolic and disingenuous attacks against opposition. Yet, had this oppressive state not existed, I never would have met her. Had she not suffered what she suffered, losing her husband and two kids, endured what she endured, had everything not happened exactly the way that it did, I never would have known her. 

We were birthed by The Chaos in which we lived as we all are. Thrown together by events out of our control. Our love is the result of the pain and suffering of a world at war with itself. Of pigheaded lunatics with power, nuclear bombs, rape, cannibalism, slaughter and hate all at their disposal. How ever could I not be grateful that things happened just the way they did, even if it was selfish of me to do so? Even though so many people suffered and died because of it. I wondered if she considered the same, or if she would have not endured a world on fire, and all the pain she suffered to be with me. Did it matter? I had lost three fingers and a family. All of us had our scars. 

I smiled. Her head still upon my chest. I couldn't see her face. I presumed her eyes to be looking about curiously as they were when I first saw her. I wondered what thoughts she had, but I didn't speak so not to disturb the peace of the moment. She burrowed further into me and her right leg wrapped around my waist and moved up and down softly massaging what I had happily given her. There were universes of infinite thought in the flickering candlelight that cast shadows on the otherwise drab desert of the textured ceiling. There was knowledge somewhere in those tiny plaster stalactites. 

"I was just thinking," she said. "I do not even know your last name."

It was illegal to refer to yourself by a last name. It was considered tribalistic and some law forbade it. Everyone was given a number, which was included on their monthly ration pack. You could use that if you wanted to, but not a real name. Mine was 7782877. But those of us who resisted kept our last names for the sake of those who we lost. For our heritage and for the hope of a future that was fast-dwindling under the authoritarian boot of this intolerant regime of social buttfuckers.  

"Moneysworth."

"Arthur Moneysworth?"

"Yes."

"Well, Arthur Moneysworth. I am Ms. Ava Sax."

I smiled. "It is a pleasure to be formally aquatinted, Ms. Sax." 

"Ms. Sax," she chuckled. "It's been a long time since I've heard that. I think the time for formality has passed, though. Considering. 

"You know, in my mind I am writing out my name and yours on the brown paper cover of an imaginary schoolbook like a silly schoolgirl. Mrs. Ava Moneysworth. And our initials are carved in a tree. A giant old sycamore. AM + AS. Do boys and girls have such dreams anymore? Do they still cover school books with brown paper sacks? They probably don't, do they? No, I don't believe they do. 

"One day, though, maybe they will again. Our children's children. I hope to see trees with initials and couples holding hands in the park and churches full of people. Or those silly things scrawled on book covers when they teach history again. I am not afraid to be myself, nor will I ever allow myself to fear them. I will carve our initials myself on Clovis' forehead in a heart, if I get the chance."

I tend to be loquacious in such contemplative matters and I had plenty to say, plenty of my own thoughts to share. My writing is often too prolix and discursive, so I was careful not to let my thoughts wander off too far, or at all. The occasion called for me to keep my opinions leashed and only to listen so I did so and told her that I love her and she replied with a subtle caress of my stomach when she was out of words. Then contented she fell asleep in my arms. 

I stayed awake a while longer, traveling intergalactic light-years of thoughts upon that desert ceiling. I almost figured everything out in such a deep contemplative dive. The meaning of life itself. But I was drawn back to her whenever she moved, or sighed, or made any noise at all. I believe it was the first time she was at peace for quite a while, which made me happy to be a part. She lied still in my arms. When would I tell her that I once did adult films? That I was Dick Haze? Never is too soon, I resolved then and there. Never is too soon.  

What ensued was months of pure bliss. But I knew that our forever wouldn't be long enough and it certainly wouldn't be the long, long time we had hoped it would be. It never is when you're in love with such passion. The flame is too hot. But in a negative and cruel world, it is incumbent upon the living to express gratitude for that which you have and however long you have it, or else you have nothing and everything is tainted by evil and the grunge and grime of the nihilism and foreboding that abounds us. You belong to them when you let yourself be mindless and hateful. And they are what they believe in — nothing. We are all what we believe in. We are all how we act. 

There are things you cannot give them. What is yours and no one else's to take or touch. Life is not a commune, nor should one ever lose their sense of individualism, for if you do, you'll lose yourself. We must be grateful for that which hasn't been taken from us and that which life leaves us to enjoy despite the austerity of "our new normal" and the lies they have sold us and sell us still. They will sell lies so long as they are being bought. Just as they will sell us sin so long as it is being lived. 

I am happy that I got to be with her through the seasons changing from summer to fall and to the early winter. Every night we lied in bed and told stories. Magnificent stories of fantastic things. Our stories often played upon each other's. I was happy she was there when it got cold. We drank cups of hot coco in candlelight as we watched the snow fall outside and listened to our records when we were supposed to be listening to mandatory government programming about the continuation of the climate change crisis and how record snowfall this year was a sure sign that climate change was real, just as we were told that a lack of snowfall last year was a sure sign that climate change was real. Billions more were allocated to thwart it. Where it went, no one knows because no one questions anything. 

We set her house on fire to explain the missing body. In the dead of night, we got a Christmas tree from the park and secretly drug it home. She rode on it like a sled down a snowy hill and I laughed so hard I fell as she crashed into the shrubs of a frozen creek bed where I found her, spilled over on the ice and laughing at herself in the wintry moonlight. But no one celebrates Christmas, of course, so we were like two deer, vigilant of our surroundings and who might be watching us, as we furtively drug that tree all the way home.  

Then one night, sometime before Christmas, she woke up to ask me about the story. What story? I replied. Of Medusa, she said. The one you told me about but that you never told the group because it didn't involve an appliance. Tell it to me as I sleep. I want to hear it. I will hear it and remember even though I am asleep. I promise. You'll implant it in my head and there it will live. 

I stroked her hair and promised her that I would tell it to her another night because I loved to hear her breathe and I was tired from making love and from a long day of making soap and reading with her the banned books we found in our attic. The ones my brother stashed before he disappeared.

Goodnight, Mr. Moneysworth, she yawned. 

Goodnight, love. 

They say those who are old enough remember where they were when Kennedy was shot. Or when the World Trade Center was attacked and toppled. I will never forget the knock on the door at 3:13am when we were in bed. The shine of a red strobe light glaring through the window, alerting the neighbors that this could happen to them if they challenged authority. 

I cannot forget the sound of Abraham Lincoln barking madly, then yelping. That strobe light which looked like cascading blood over the walls from an old horror film. Then it was pretty, like that of the carousel I remember when the fair came to town and mom took me to ride the rides at night because she said they were always better in the dark. It was true. They were. But even then I knew that was an excuse because she had lupus and wanted to avoid the sun but didn't want me to know or worry. Even then I knew I was just going around in circles. 

I don't know why they knock. They don't give you time to answer. Almost immediately the door was broken down and the voices of angry police people filled the house where Elvis' golden voice and music seemingly just was and still ulteriorly lingered. Where the redolence of rosemary soap hung sweet as though every vapor lived in the conspiracy of an unwillingness to relent from our nightly soapmaking. 

They were like a pack of wild hogs, careless and angry, hungrily scowling at every object they could scowl at as though it were all contraband primed for dutiful confiscation. Their eyes and sneers condemned everything as being illegal and subject to their unholy inquisition. Of course their eyes looked all the more sinister because they wore their mandatory masks so not to inhale any miscreant plebian disease that was created and spread to trim the fat of society and kill old people who strained natural resources. 

They had a small capsule device that could detect if you made love. They grabbed Ava and inserted it into her and it beeped twice and when it beeped twice their eyes lit up like a carnival and there was red and blue flashing all over the walls like a cop disco and I was struck over the head by someone from behind and fell near where Abraham Lincoln lied quivering.

Ava was taken, but she didn't give them the pleasure of resisting or crying. She went as though they were taking her to someplace she wanted to go and she smiled at me as they took her out the front door as I lay semi-conscious on the living room floor. The porch light haloed her in amber and her face was red then blue, red then blue, red then blue until it seemed to die in a shade of purple. Then the blood streamed into my eyes and I could see nothing else. Nothing more. Everything went blurry then black. Everything was lost in some hopeless abyssal fissure.  

"Goodbye, Mr. Moneysworth," she smiled through a purple veil. "Thank you for the good time."

Ava must have laughed as they put her in one of those little white electric cars. And at the ambiguous absurd man with the glib face who drove her away to certain death. He worked for JFS before he became a "collector," as they were called. Or maybe he was a school teacher, reprogrammed a little to better serve the government more suitably. I have to imagine because I didn't see it happen. 

And down at the station they probably asked her if she made love before they did their confirmation test and she laughed and exclaimed, "Yes!" with vehemence and an air of pride and no sense of panic. To which they replied nothing, but they wrote on their devices. Their tablets. Checked a box they needed to check. The standard questionnaire. Reacting in no particular way. 

Then about as matter-of-factly as they would turn on a light switch or flush a toilet, they would pull the lever and there she would hang dangling on that taut rope that nearly ripped but didn't. That, instead, groaned and guffawed as suddenly taut ropes do. Between those giant sycamores on Broad Street where they used to have live music and parades. 

She would dangle there, naked and cold in the early morning snow. A plume of a last exhaled breath from her blue lips lingering like an empty talk bubble. Her curious eyes seeing nothing but darkness because she was hooded, but imagining the sycamore tree from which she was to hang and our initials carved on it inside a perfectly-shaped heart. Or maybe they forgot the hood and she could see everything. 

Maybe she caught a snowflake on her tongue and made a wish. Maybe she thought of sledding in that pine tree or of making love in our bed that seemed to object considerably less each time we did. Or of all the stories we shared in a story telling group of our own intimacy. Just the two of us. Or of all the apples she ate in my backyard, my share that I gave her telling her there were twice more than there actually was and that I had already eaten mine. I wouldn't know because I wasn't there, yet I wondered. 

They hooded me and took me to jail and appropriately branded my head with a heart-shaped hot iron, as promised. Then they released me. They didn't say a word to me. There was no need for an interrogation. No one said good luck or goodbye or told me to do anything or report anywhere afterwards as some sort of duty or debt of probation. They didn't cut off my testicles as I thought they would. 

The branding hurt, of course, but the woman who did it quickly sponged my head with cold water and I knew from looking at her, though she didn't say a word, the sponging was not supposed to be part of the process. I could tell by the way she quickly did it in my cell and put it back in the bucket and looked around nervously before fleeing the room that she was violating protocol. 

I was, at the time, strapped to a chair and thoroughly at her mercy. Her eyes were beautiful and kind and full of sorrow. She looked at me for a moment as though to say she was sorry, though she said nothing at all. The only sound was the water from the sponge trickling back into the bucket and then that of the gears in the door turning and her fleeing the room, bucket in hand. 

There was no going home. My home would have been burned. I was in jail for three days. But I realized as I instinctively walked home, perhaps just to see the embers and woefully reminisce with the ghosts in the smoke, that there are two kinds of people in this world. Some might say there are sinners and saints; the good and the bad; the rich and the poor; the haves and the have nots; but I define it differently. 

There are police and there are thieves. They are not the same and no one is a little of both, as they might try to say they are. You are one or you are the other. Not that you ever have to steal anything, or rob anyone, or even break a law to be the latter. Nor that you must police something, or arrest someone, or tell on anyone about anything to be the former. It is simply what is in our basic nature. There are some of us who are free and will be free no matter the circumstances or consequence. We will do what we want and pay the inevitable price for doing so whether it is prison, or death, or a heart-shaped brand we must bear. 

And there are those who will never be free because the potential consequence far outweighs any attainable pleasure. Who will always do what they are told and live in the prison of conformity no matter how authoritative, or unjust, or unholy, or corrupt that it is. They thrive knowing their place is in some pecking order with dependable pay and benefits and the potential for more of what they currently have. They will sell their own mother in order to get any sort of adulation or advancement. You can wish you were not what you are, but you're either one or the other and the sooner you accept it, the better off you are. 

To my surprise they hadn't burned down my house. And there I stood in the front yard looking at it in the cold dark. It felt so cold and empty I almost wished they had razed it. Perhaps this was part of their punishment. Abraham Lincoln was gone. I half-expected to see him lying dead on the living room rug as a reminder, but they took him, undoubtedly for meat. I had a woeful lack of representation of him in my house, I soon sadly realized, other than his dog dish that was licked clean and an empty silver water bowl that sat dry as a bone.

The sheets still smelled like her. Strands of her hair were on the pillow. She had become the house and the house had become her and there was no way that I could ever separate the two. Perhaps in a day or two they would send me a bar of soap with some kitschy sentiment written in black ink on the plain white paper wrapper.

"Salt on the wound cleanses it." Or "You are not alone in your suffering." Or, even worse, and the one they use most often, "It is what it is," which is the absolute worst euphemism ever expressed and little better than the impotent slang of the inarticulate and exasperated. 

Our Christmas tree was still standing in the living room without a single decoration on it and nothing had been confiscated. The only thing missing was the two souls who I loved most in this world, which was psychologically more lachrymose than having nothing but a heap of smoldering ashes. I was empty. 

The next day was Christmas Eve. A fresh snow fell to cover the already blanketed earth and I sat by a fire in my house that burned from sticks and branches I had gathered earlier that morning. I listened to Elvis singing Christmas songs. I had intended to give it to Ava as a gift and had hid it in the attic so not to ruin the surprise, but it wasn't to be. 

I got drunk on a bottle of wine and listened to that album at least four hundred times. "Blue Christmas" over and over. I thought about that blue velvet Elvis that hung on my living room wall as a kid. Then the name on it at the bottom. The signature of the artist. "A. Sax." I was sure of it. But maybe I had lost my mind. I saw polar bears on the Antarctica of the ceiling. 

I fell asleep to sporadic gunfire as the evening quickly turned to night. Someone must have been hoping to inspire another ill-fated Christmas rebellion, which was an annual bust. The bullets would eventually run out, as they always did, long before the spirit. 

Half-asleep I was awakened by a polite knock on the door. I thought at first I was drunk and had imagined it, but I wasn't that drunk. I had slept off the buzz and all that remained in my head was the morose feeling of melancholy, which was worse than a hangover. I was almost depressed to the point of stupefaction. But by the time my eyes opened, I was sober as a nun. I was surprised to hear gunfire still. What must have been many hours later. I would have been hopeful by the knock and the gunfire, but I had been hopeful too many times to know better, to realize it wasn't the bearer of good news. And there was no way to be hopeful without her.

I stepped down the stairs and looked for a moment where Abraham Lincoln would have been, racing between the landing and the door, spinning around in excited circles. His fluffy tail wagging deliriously. He was the most hopeful dog I had ever known for no matter how many times the person at the door disappointed him, he was always excited when someone knocked. I knew it would be a long time before the reality that he was gone would settle in me and I would no longer have such hallucinations where I could actually see him — a faint apparition of him. 

I suppose they saved me the inevitable end that would naturally come. When his body would betray him, as all of ours do and he would suffer a terrible illness or incurable disease and when I would have to decide if now was the time for me to kill him and how I would do so to end his suffering without him indicting me of murder and betrayal with his sad brown eyes. I suppose for that I am quietly grateful, despite the stolen years he had left in the tank of his natural lifespan. So few of us die cleanly in our sleep. 

I thought not to answer the door as it could have been anyone. It could have been a meth-head or a looter hoping to gain entrance civilly or to see if anyone occupied my home for either the purpose to ransack it or to squat in it. They knock and if there is no answer or no sign of life, they bust through a window. Or it could have been the police. No. It was far too polite a knock to be the police.

But the dark silhouette in the open frame of the door belonged to a man with vacuous eyes. But not just any man. It was Eric, the story telling policeman, who told the tedious tale of microwave ovens and who once desperately clung to Ava.  

"The revolution is here," he spoke softly. "Repent sinner. Know that in the word 'revolution' is the word 'love.' The first five letters spelled backwards is 'lover.' If you drop the 'r,' you have 'love.' Love is what God teaches us. God is love." 

He was wearing a white robe and around his neck there was a crude rosary of sorts, made of twine and wood. He handed me a handwritten pamphlet, but I was full of rage. 

"You killed her! You did this you —" I was about to attack him but I was rendered powerless by a force much greater than myself. Perhaps it was that of the Holy Spirit, but regardless, I calmed down and was at peace with him. There was enough violence in the world something seemed to say to me. Attacking him will not bring her back. He was not responsible. 

No matter how bad the world gets, there were always be Jehovah's Witnesses going door to door. He advised me that I should find Christ before Christ finds me and that he was from The Church of the Last Resort.

I have already accepted Christ as my Lord and Savior, I replied. He smiled and handed me a blue pamphlet. On the front was a drawing of Jesus riding horses with Elvis. 

"They've be raised. Eyewitnesses have seen them in D.C. and Philadelphia. In a day's time they will be here. They say everywhere they go peace is restored. Sanity is restored. The entire government has resigned and a new election will be held soon. Clovis hung himself like Judas. It will be a free and fair election. A new covenant has been ordered and will be established. Men will be men. Women women. Children children. The mother and father, holy again, and the family protected from the sin of the sinners. The sodomites will again be sodomites. And the unholy will no longer be righteous in the eyes of man."

Then I realized he was blind. He looked over my head as he spoke. I told him who I was. How we knew each other and he seemed unaffected to the point I knew he was not in anyway complicit in Ava's arrest and execution. He went on to tell me about the grace of God. 

I told him Ava was hung, but he looked at me with those glossy eyes as though he could see for a moment and said, "No one has hung since I burnt down the gibbet as I was instructed by the Holy Father and the Holy Brother. Ava is not dead. She was in jail with the others — the saboteurs and conspirators. The allies of Jesus Christ."

"She was in jail? What do you mean was?" 

Then he stepped aside and in the crystal fall of snowflakes, like a miracle, she appeared. I stood there in disbelief for a long moment and she smiled at me, dressed in all gray. Her eyes sparkling in the glow of a vigil candle she burned before her. She looked like a caroler and I half-expected her to sing. 

"Eric is my guardian angel. Can you believe it? I have a guardian angel. I was wrong about him. Thank you, Eric."

Eric excused himself, saying there was work to do and that his work here was done which was a subtle assurance to us that everything was going to be okay. He gave Ava a kind hug as he walked away and as soon as he was gone, she walked up to me. Then we kissed on the porch in the flickering light of her candle. 

"Have you ever heard Elvis sing 'Silent Night?'" I asked her. 

"No," she smiled, tears freezing in her eyes. "But I'd love to!" 

The sporadic anarchy of a variety of weapons of all different levels of loudness and speed snapped and popped seeming to inspire each other to go on. There was the sound of homemade bombs. Car bombs. Pipe bombs. And fires raged staining the sky a hopeful shade of a burnt-orange marmalade, the color of burning paraffin. The revolution, our liberation, was so close we could almost smell it and we watched it briefly from our frozen porch swing. 

We went inside and lied on the couch listening to Elvis and watching the snow fall and the colors flash in the distant sky out the window. We soon fell asleep, living in a dream. Occasionally, an explosion or the sound of gunfire startled us awake. 

I must have been dreaming because I woke up and there was my brother beside me on the floor. The TV softly humming at our bare feet, both of us there in its comforting glow. He stirred beside me and whispered, "Leave on the snow." And then I went back to sleep, at my zenith. Tomorrow I will tell her the story of Medusa and Perseus, who were wonderful lovers. I am grateful for tomorrow.