You think of icebergs when you see them. They are the ones who do not care. They are the ones above it all. You see them on the streets, cell phones crammed against their ears like they are trying to make their ears eat them, like they want the phones to be a part of them, like they only want to hear what is on the other end, not the farting buses, crying babies, squawking gulls and the, “Hey mister, c’n you afford 42 cents for a cuppa coffee—”
You think of monsters when you see them; giant insects in shiny chitin clothing; the only thing they’re missing are the compound eyes; the insect mind is already there. Maybe they need a few more legs; the exoskeleton is certainly there and like bugs, they carry their armor because they are so squishy inside, but unlike insects, they know it, and the knowledge of that makes their armor even thicker, makes them even colder, like ice.
You know them. You’ve watched them on TV. The Jeb Bushes, the Kathleen Harrises, the Supreme Court Justices. They are bought and sold and they don’t seem to care, or it’s not in their interests to care—much less yours. You’ve seen them before throughout history: the brownshirts in Nazi Germany, the folks who gave Native Americans blankets infected with smallpox, the Stalins: one of whom in particular was said to have remarked, “They who cast the votes decide nothing. They who count the votes decide everything.”
You go to bed and you dream of them. Of a vast army on insects, cold, mindless, surviving, eating everything, trampling everything. You dream of them, you dread them because you are just in the way; you don’t matter; you can be stopped; you can be silenced. It is very easy. You aren’t shot these days. You just can’t pay your electric bill. Or your property taxes become overwhelming. Or your rent goes through the roof. Or the IRS comes tap-tap-tapping on your door. Or just months before you retire, your pension gets yanked. Or you get fired before you retire. Or your medications get too expensive and you have to choose between them and food. That, or you end up eating dog food. Or, you hear, cat food isn’t too bad. Or you get sick and your insurance drops you.
In your worst nightmares, Kafka is there to comfort you, to help you understand. “See?” he whispers, “see? My father appeared in all my works as a bureaucracy, something overwhelming, indifferent, crushing. Is it any different now, here, this place? In my time, the fascists were gaining power, shoving their beliefs down everyone’s throats whether they wanted it or not. Is it any different this time, this place, now?”
You lay there in bed, it’s four a.m., and you realize how right he is. But you also know that, in the quest for absolute power, it has most likely always been this way. And it was that way in Mao Tse Tung’s Little Red Book Land and it was that way in Soviet Socialist Realism Land and there is nothing that stops it from being that way here, wherever here is at whatever time or place you just happen to be born.
“Where is it safe,” you wonder. “Where is it safe?”
“Where there is a quest and love of power, of domination of others, there is never safety,” says Kafka.
“Why such a quest?” you ask.
“Such a question,” Kafka says. “Why was my father so abusive? He doesn’t know. I don’t know.”
“It’s as if,” you ponder, hearing the rain rattle against the window, hearing the wind howl, “it’s as if—the more powerless one feels in one’s life, the more they seek power to make up for what they never had?”
“Or,” Kafka says, “maybe their father was powerful and to make their father proud, they became even more powerful. Who knows? Or perhaps the one who gets the power understands all too well who has the position of power in the families of the culture.”
You lay there in the dark, wondering. You are aware that Kafka is no longer there. You also become aware of the distant sound of millions of busy feet—then silence, then the feet marching in a rhythm, a cadence, and you wonder where the army is going next, who is to be dominated next? Who is to be exterminated next?
And all the while, you are aware of those cold, insect minds—minds that become more and more like ice, each mind in a body cold as an iceberg; those bodies becoming like icebergs, all those icebergs becoming thicker, creating yet breaking off of an immense growing chitinous ice sheet, slowly, again, as it has in the past, freezing the world in yet another ice age, the depth of which, the duration of which is unknown. And outside, the rain has turned to snow, and everything is going to a soft and numbing cold, and in the distance you hear the low moan and rumble of the coming of the ice.