A man should always take an interest in the end of the
world. It should be his pain, but all he can think of is the ride. As the water
is rising, as he recognizes its rising, as it’s up to his ankles. It is a
matter of the world being an empty form, a shape. It had once been a system,
perfectly balanced. He thinks of the zoo, full of the lost, desperate, and the
drowning thoughts of an animal. It is a matter of sheer hope. To roll along, to
be as like a thing as the thing itself. All he cares about is escaping. Is it
hunger or the flood, the inevitable justice of the world, the rain or the
collection of rain?
The rain reminds him of the boundary, the animals at the zoo,
the subtlety of consuming freer space. The boundary between the inevitable and
the dream, and the rain bursting on the pavement.
A car pulls over, finally. The way it comes to a stop. The
way it seems like this has happened before. The way the lights shine in and
through the rain, illuminating the rain. The way the rain is coming down so
heavy it is like a sheet, a dense gray sheet. The way the man rolls down the
window and the way the man blinks at the driver, through the rain, the rain
falling down his face, down his face
The man driving the car reminds him that he is no position
to barter. He has stopped for different men who had tried to barter, and these
men did not get rides, were not saved. When he asks did you hear about what
happened he must, he stresses, know what he means.
He is referring to the flood, and the flooded cages at the
zoo, of animals, not yet things, between things, immediate and beyond our
understanding of what is immediate, their bodies filling with water, their eyes
through the bars, filling with the vision of a world filling with water. The
man removes his clothes. The tamer brings his lion to the surface of a lake. He
has come from deep within the jungle down to the lake where the women bathe
before the day, and the day, like earth, seems to rise on chains of light in
the water, wavering yellow chains, braided in the folds of the water, the not
quite still water, and he believes that nature does not contend with itself,
that it instead seeds into itself its own beginnings, to begin again,
and again, because there is little to add to the present effort. The man had
never been lost before. Rain falls through his body, mocking his skin. Slapping
the pavement, mocking the pavement.
He’d never been lost before. He repeats himself. He is
soaking wet. He had waited for a ride. He had waited for hours. The rain is
betraying the convex surface of the world of things, it is a pushing, pummeling
into—progressively, and it will. No it will not. Let up.
When the car stops and the driver rolls down the window the
man knows. The interval between collapses between. The rain rushes. The make of
car makes a difference. He is middle-aged and white. Not particularly handsome,
not particularly. He wants to help but he doesn’t know what to do. Let me help
you, help you. It makes a difference to me. That it is white, expensive, that
it is like his first conceptions of ancient animals, alone in a world of
unrelenting darkness, these first animals, nosing through time. The man says
yes, in time. He is saying yes the man says in his dream of the father. When
the man removes his clothes he crumbles, but it is okay, the driver says. He
removes his clothes too.
The radio estimates numbers, corrects itself, offers
timidly, like some sort of hope, another number. And another, it is growing and
shrinking in proportion to the extent that the tragedy of drowning animals is
affective. The American bison is dead. Two men ride, near the other, unyielding
and naked, and this we are to assume, is also affective. The blue-eyed lemur is
dead. He had wanted a ride and he has a ride. “But my clothes are all wet, you
don’t mind if I?”
“Why don’t you just take them off?” the man in the car says,
again, in the past tense.
The red-bellied parrot is dead. “Take them off?” the man on
the side of the road asks, in the flashback.
“I will take mine off too so it’s even,” the man in the car says.
“So long as it’s even,” the hitchhiker says.
In the past tense, he is undressing on the side of the road.
The reticulated giraffe is dead. But he does not undress hurriedly. From where
he stands, he sees the road and the nature on the either side of the road, and
that’s all that he can see. As he undresses he concentrates on the low beams of
the car, on the rain hitting the hood of the car, the rhythmic swoosh of the
windshield wipers. Naked, he sets his wet clothes at his feet and waits. He
counts the time of the windshield wipers, the number of times he blinks the
rain from his eyes. Not the number of raindrops. Not the number of heartbeats.
The man in the car rolls down the window and beckons. He has wondered if there
was ever another man like himself who had stopped to help a man escape the rain,
reaching safety together before the inevitable flood.
They stop at a truckstop twenty-miles up the road. Forgotten
children wait under the awnings protecting the gaspumps. The rain slaps the
thick leaves of the black maples and the turkey oaks in the surrounding woods.
It bubbles in potholed puddles and the mud in the ditch on the far side of the
road, across from the pumps, the small neon lit food mart. The man in the front
seat blames himself, there are so many like him. Who is it that answers? What is
it that you need man? But there is not enough room. For your void and my void. Man would build it out of something. The man driving the car blames himself for not
having a bigger car. A man should always plan for the worst. You never know
when the earth will flood. The radio estimates the number of dead. The number.
While undressed to his pitiless nudity, a woman had once told him something that made him feel exposed. That conversation
crossed his mind, but he persisted in becoming naked. The hitchhiker tossed his
clothes and climbed in the car. “Do you know where we are,” he asked the
driver. “Yes, buddy, I know these things well,” he said.
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