The Vocabulary of Guns

64.

Lake Charles arrives like a vision of hell. Columns of blue flame burst above the skyline, refineries going all night, cleansing their smokestacks of excess natural gas. Clouds of yellow steam pump into the night sky, beautiful cumulonimbus clouds manufactured by man. A high narrow bridge takes you over an estuary, exposing the city in all its futuristic horror. A purple canal meanders among railroad cars, sausage-shaped tubes full of matter and anti-matter. A helicopter buzzes above the lake. Miles of orange lights dot the Saturday night landscape. Truck drivers on their mission to mama or Montana hog the bridge, drive you into the rail, over the side, you’ll fall forever until you emerge through some wormhole into the future, the imagined world of Blade Runner and the other dystopians, 2010, a space catastrophe. You’ll be old by then. You’ll be in your 40’s. I do the math as I crest the bridge, one last magnificent view of Dante’s 8^th circle, fire and steam and majestic complex buildings composed of pipes and reactors and scaling ladders and fat, squat chemical tanks. When it’s 2010 I’ll be 43. That’s old. That’s crazy old. 2010. Will the world even exist? Will we have made contact? Will we have blown ourselves off the planet, left it for the roaches and the sharks? Flying cars? Certainly. Jetpacks? To be sure. Laser guns? Absolutely. Space stations and a base on the moon? Are you kidding? Yeah. All of that and more. You can see it arriving out of the black landscape of prairie that surrounds Lake Charles, the last shot of Louisiana before Texas and another world with other laws. Cities of the future will be covered with domes to protect them from terrorist attack. Ireland will still be in chaos, as will the Levant, Angola, Nicaragua, Colombia, Venezuela, Argentina, Chile, Ecuador. Castro will still be alive. Flames will rise on the Korean peninsula and Southeast Asia. Pakistan still hates India. The Russians will still be in Afghanistan, Germany, Poland, Rumania, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia. Only Yugoslavia will remain outside the Bear’s orbit. Turkey will burn, Iran too. And what about the home turf? What will America look like in 2010? Cities that stretch down both coastlines. Flooding of the ports, immigrant violence, terrorist attacks. There’s already that vision in 1984 of an empire on the ropes, of a last swagger towards some disaster, an accidental nuclear explosion, a horde of jihadists burning Uncle Sam in effigy, all our duplicitous maneuverings on the behalf of fat cats will finally lead to towers falling, clouds of destruction raining down on American peace of mind. And how will we react as we watch our grandfather’s hard work fall in our lifetimes? One day you hear they’ve crossed Hadrian’s Wall and twenty-five years later the barbarians are at the gate. Will the simple things change? The car I’m driving, speeding tinnily through the night on a 1.3 liter engine, front wheel drive, made in Japan. There’s no stopping that wave. If we still have cars in 25 years they’ll all look like this little rattrap. American steel, like doomed dinosaurs pass me left and right. Wave to their disappearing taillights as if they were driving off a cliff. But perhaps cars will be irrelevant. Perhaps we’ll travel some new and exciting way. Like eggs shot out of a cannon, we’ll travel in pods through the stratosphere, 23 miles high and descending into another cannon-like tube. No pilots, we’ll travel based on algebra, calculus and trigonometry. Magnetic energy, untapped, as alien to 1984 as uranium was to Charlemagne, will finally be harnessed and used to end all our energy needs. Walk to the pod station and it’ll shoot you across town. Buy a ticket for Europe and the pod cannon will shoot you into the rare air and then drop you down on the Louvre. A beautiful way to travel, like Pullman cars. People will chat, listen to music, eat their lunch. A trip to Paris in ten minutes. A trip to Constantinople in 13. A trip to Calcutta in twenty minutes. We’ll fly over our burning, terror-gripped world, marveling at the formation of cyclones, hurricanes, the tidal patterns and the wakes of huge convoys of ships. The future, the future, it’ll be a better place. Hell, dream big. As you ride across flat land betrayed only by billboards and road signs, the big trucks pounding you but your hands are sure and the digital clock is your friend not your enemy and you still have gasoline and the gun is sleeping like a baby, hell dream big, big daddy, dream the ultimate dream. Yes you’ll be alive and no the world won’t have ended and yes you’ll be happy and you’ll be a writer and you’ll have a dog and a girl and a sunny place to live and the skies won’t darken with death each night, no, and the suburbs will be for others to uncover and most of all, best of all, you will have lived to see the Saints win a Superbowl. Amen, hallelujah and gimme the love. Fortified by that heart-palpitating thought, I check the next sign. Twelve miles from the state line. Ain’t no stoppin’ me now. I’m more than halfway to my future, to a Blade Runner world ruled by guns and machines and men.