Days after the end of the world. Walking Christ-like on a sea of coffee.
From high ground with the sun behind you, a trick of the light can cast a magnified likeness on to mist, a distorted shadow in the clouds surrounded by rainbows. This halo, diffracted on droplets, is known as The Glory. Living as we do, upside down on God's flattened peninsula, there are no hilltops, there are no mountainsides. Here there can be no Glory.
In exigent circumstances, a disappearance can take place within six hours, leaving no time to get affairs in order. When absence is announced, it can only be announced by absence. An empty orange grove. A student who hated war. The mouth of America speaks with fewer teeth.
We book a trip to Virginia, where there are mountains, and we do it for the Glory. West of the capitol bury networks of caverns, 5-star caves reviewed online. In reality, there is no shadow twin in breakdowns and scallops. Just negative space. Unclassified blacksites of geology. Proper places to disappear.
Not far from the city, in Florida's once protected earth, they slept 30 to a room, body against body, skin tones disqualified by the new criteria. To call it what it is might risk a broadcast license. This is how we learned the grammar of forgetting: No bombs fell; explosions occurred. As though in a suicide pact with destiny. All glory to the passive voice.
Exposure therapy, as they say. Normalization, as they say. A future death arranges the past in new hierarchies. Endings never fully come to those who vanish, but still they float around them like a ring of rainbowed light. Maybe I am projecting, maybe we are projecting like absolute cinema on vapor. I hesitate, then click maybe on the RSVP.
The cadence of omission was learned quickly in the disappearing age. Things happened but were never done. Pain was inflicted, coverage was lost, families were separated. Receptors burnt out. It wasn't light on mist, but my own breath, cowardly and suspended like a halo.
No one had the spine, so we made sure to place an excess between words like concentration and camp, between secret and police. Our hot metropolis grew still in the darkness of knowing who could be next, whose woeful id cast ballots for disappearance, whose masked cousin prowled the parking lots hunting pilgrims in our land.
Brain fog. The fog of war. It settled in our lungs and over cities. We forgot names, histories, entire days. Populations slipped behind a haze. We had high ground on a freak-clear winter day with the pyramid downtown and the southernmost headlands in high relief. Uncanny how fog swallows representation. Under the patio, we shook cans of Krylon and painted the model city gunmetal. A premonition. An opaque chemical cloud.
Language itself disappeared, alongside documents, alongside neighbors and friends, alongside the Glory.
Language itself –