“WHAT IF I could use Time Rabies as fuel for my jet?” thinks Calcium in voiceover. “Would it work? Would my jet take me back so I could search for my Rosenberg?”
Calcium calculates.
“It would take a great deal of Time Rabies fuel to get back to B.,” he mumbles to himself. “And there is, of course, the Great Nothing to factor in. The mysterious mass extinction. Part of me believes it was the result of an asteroid. Part of me believes it was a gamma ray burst. Some of me believes it was a flood. Then there is my clathrate gun hypothesis, which is about a fifth of me. Global warming, perhaps. Global cooling. I am of many minds. In any event, there was, it seems clear, a long period, perhaps a million years or myr, during which all life was extinguished with the exception of ants. Probably I should not have named it the Great Nothing because that is, of course, dismissive of my own kind. Perhaps the Great Very Little? This has two meanings, since we are small creatures and as such is clever. I must use that in something. Still, the Great Nothing packs a wallop, and since my kind does not seem to know the difference or care, I will stick with it until such time as I hear any objections, at which point I will happily change it. So according to my calculations, it was a million years of ants. And a million years of backward-traveling Time Rabies feeding on them. If I could invent some sort of net, some sort of vacuum device, to sweep Time Rabies from the air, I might be able to use them as fuel for my jet and travel back to the time of B. Rosenberg.”
And so Calcium works on rigging his jet with such a sucking machine. When it is complete, he fills his plane with Time Rabies, points it backward, and watches through his windscreen as the present disappears forever.
I KNOW MY creator is finished with me. I know he has gotten me out of his system. He has reduced me to a punch line. He has abandoned me here in the clown hospital. I know he is tired, exhausted from the effort and the time it took. The jokes. The jokes. The fucking endless jokes. These take their toll, I am sure. I know he will move on from here, to something else, someone else, someone else on whom to seek revenge, and I will cease to be. I know that is coming. He is tired and I am mined. I will, however, continue to exert my existence, my opinions, which are the things that prove I exist in my own independent, autonomous, crippling reality. I have opinions. I must have opinions. The only way to be in relation to the world is to be in opposition to it, to stand firm, majestic, unbreakable, like Oleara Debord before me. Otherwise a person is nothing but weather, at the mercy of the breeze, the wind, the tides, the ideas of others. Ephemeral, billowing smoke, going this way and that, dissipating. No one watches the ocean and thinks, look at that amazing water molecule over there. No, that water molecule is one of trillions, going for a ride, unseen, anonymous. And, anyway, I am not contrary as an end in itself. My contrariness, when it occurs, is always the result of my refusal to submit to groupthink, my need to look beyond the hype, the spin, the faddish, the now. My opinions are born of painstaking analyses. But now I am tired, and there is very little I grasp about this new cave world. The young people have their slang: pibbly, q-swipe, Michelle Trachtenberging. I don’t know what any of it means. I no longer care. They have their new celebrities: DeLazer Flypaper, Cappy Bint, The W, Nils Treak, Liddell Bopeep. Good-looking man-children and manic pixie dream girls. And I cannot bring myself to care. I have fought. I have fought a losing battle.
I have attempted to make myself relevant in this vacuous culture constructed by Slammy’s and enforced by the Trunks. For it seems now they are in it together (were they always?). I despise the products of this insane marriage, but oh how I want them to love me. I long for them to adopt me as their William Burroughs, their Sam Fuller, their Hunter Thompson—their sagacious primogenitor to be trotted about, admired, raptly listened to. But I suspect it is not to be. That position has been filled by that monstrous and doddering Armond White, who has the distinct advantage, at this point in history, of being African Cavian.
It occurs to me that even my forgetting the movie seems almost to have been orchestrated by Ingo. Was it designed to be forgotten after viewing? Was my coma built into the film, just as was Molloy’s? The world after watching the movie is different. Of that I am sure. I am changed by it, but the change is mysterious and impossible to pin down; the change is always changing, you see. People are different, angry sometimes, sometimes smiling for no reason. The weather has grown strange: stagnant, hot, cold. Often there is no weather at all. I feel weird. I am not me. I am me as a child and me as an adult, all at the same time. My head is soft. My neck is stiff. There’s something that doesn’t make sense right now. And it is always right now. I am so tired. That door won’t open. Staying up this long to remember the film has left me confused. What door? There is no door. What did I mean?
“Everyone is miserable. Injured. In pain. Worried,” comes an announcement from somewhere. This goes without saying, so why announce it?
And then it is over. The final reel has unspooled and I am stunned. This Nameless Ape viewing is like no other Nameless Ape viewing that has come before. I can only sit here, mute, as the projector continues to whir. I cannot speak. I do not want to speak. I am mute. I stare at the now-white rectangle before me. The film has left me broken. It has fixed me. I am reborn. My very DNA has been altered. I sit here for what feels like hours, days, before I am able to move, to walk, to step into the world.