Author’s Note:

Vic,

I decided to write and share this with you, given your missing Wednesday incident. You are not alone.

Our day after same day to the next day existence during the plague’s worst phases sometimes caused days not just to blend into one another but for time and memory of them to go missing in small, medium and large sized chunks.

Fortunately, these fugue states were most often brief for us, but most of them involved amnesia of a sort. Sometimes as long as several months would pass before fleeting memories of those unplanned misty wanderings began to filter back. They included rattle-can spray painted road signage along backroads with their ghost town empty sawmills and cotton gins between the coast and Statesboro like:

“Pigs for Sale”
“Work free drug place”
“Worms $3.25 Plants $3”
“Funky Junction”
“Get well soon Bob”
“Cheap Guns”
“Do you hear the voices of reason? I do.”

And last, but not least, this was spray painted on a white wooden cross:

JESUS
C
A
R
E
S

Below is a loopy first draft — a disjointed pastiche of recovered memories.

-Marlow

Recovering a fugue state memory

My name is Marlow. Our world was dry and plagued.

Why was it hurting people? Power, stupid.

Money and power wars, killing in their name and for the fame.

Our old world was running out of time, so the media told us.

Long ago, I was a Cold War spook. A desk man searching for righteous targets for road, sky, and ship warriors to atomize. Sort of a terminal freak-out point man.

Our new freak-out point persons, the media plague rats, went rogue, terrorizing us and themselves with RUMINT, while our earth became sour.

Our bones and minds became poisoned.

We became half-lifes.

As the world fell into separate chunks, each of us, in our own way, was broken.

It was hard to know who was crazier: us or everyone else.

Where are you, loved ones asked over their smart phones.

Some of them were haunted by those they could not touch or protect. More than a few had this disease sometimes at night, involving alcohol and a phone.

We had to exist in a lonely wasteland.

Reduced to the single instinct of eating, drinking, sleeping, while waiting for some all clear signal.

Survive.

Is that you? Where are you? You okay? These are the questions loved ones continued to ask digitally.

Others acted like boys at war as they led the efforts to kill the plague. These Koolaid KarmaKrazees would be our nerdy redeemers. It would only be by their hands that we would rise from the ashes of this plague world.

Do not, friends, become addicted to media’s holy waters, I said over and over. It would take hold of us and make us resent its absence. Turn them all off! Tune them out. Drop back into life.

To fill the growing emptiness, brief hook ups to a fuller-life were required and that meant fuel — truth bullets, mind gas, and farm fresh food.

Dropped back in, we headed out east, west, north or south regularly to reload.

We thundered up for supply runs and run arounds, off-road sometimes while avoiding hostile territory.

Sooner or later someone or something always pushed back. Yet, we would not stay still at home dying soft. We had to ignore the awful and focus on the good — times, people, places, meals, and moments. Only the moments didn’t follow one after the other like pearls on a necklace. That belief was one of America’s greatest illusions. Once they were gone, they were gone forever.

We sometimes gassed up our blood crazy with high-octane juice. We were hoping in so doing to go to greener places. Worked for a while until the next morning’s fog. “Wait, it’s just us two and we’re still trapped?!? Dunno what we did. Dammit.” were our awakening thoughts.

Still we trusted we’d eventually get back to the green, green gardens of the pre-plague . . . with their many pleasures, places and endless diversions.

“How do you feel?” was answered by “It sucks.”

Back then, everything sucked. You just wanted to get through it.

One of our few pleasures involved sitting behind 707 horsepower of a super charged, highest-test-boosted street machine. Didn’t need a head start just a clear road — mostly to bring it to a stop. It’d put a smile on your face, not slowing it down fast enough from a pegged-out speedo wiped it off one’s face.

There were no big rigs, touring families, snowbirds, other hotrodders on the roads, so we just had to avoid crashing on hidden bends or into dopey drivers merging into the fast lane at 55 MPH.

We watched the fuel gages swing wildly toward empty. Didn’t care. Fuel was cheaper than soda pop. Sole rule: no unnecessary dying on the road.

After a day of “turned off, tuned out, dropped in” speed runs, we felt like we had grabbed the sun . . . if only for a moment. Once back home, with the TV turned back on, we tuned back into the blame game of who killed the world.

Later, we’d reload our clips and tanks and in week or two we’d head back out.

We kept moving by keeping moving.

The road and speed were our treasures and our protection. It gave us the high life. We were not things. We needed feelings.

It was our manifest destiny to be spared for the something great to follow. That’s why we drove towards it like banshees in our pursuit vehicles.

It stopped, however briefly, the painful chewing on our tailpipes.

Our fast driving days were A-1 alpha prime. Our engines were very hot and real thirsty.

They were our only retaliation and our Mother’s Milk. They took us back to times and places soon after we were born. We had done similar things long ago. Many times. Driving our old rigs back then were the best shots we’d ever had. Until the plague arrived.

Now we were just looking for hope. Redemption, maybe?

Living confined at home during the plague seemed like we were staked to barren fields beset with crows. The plague was a creepy place with lotsa crows. Lots of empty here.

Marlow’s fugue state pursuit vehicle

That’s why we had to get out. TV was filth. It was poisoned. It was sour plains of silence. The road was an everything present, wide as the universe and all ours. There we felt maxed out, exhilarated, and unafraid while getting full credit for being alive at each journey’s end.

We never surrendered. We never looked back. No pillars of salt for us.

There was no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no causes, no effects to this plague and my moments in it. There was just a jumble of moments that I now see and feel all at once as they approached willy-nilly from the recesses of my memories like glaciers that receded or advanced depending on the day’s weather.

As the plague’s dark star was setting last night over our river town and its sickly afterglow backlit the city one last time, we heard the sounds of ultra large, cargo ships churn upriver to our idle piers and quays. City businesses, for so long blacked out, closed off and unwelcoming, because plague super spreaders might come to stay, started doing one of the most cheerful things a city is capable of doing when a sun goes down — winking its lights on, one by one, ever faster and warmer in a glow that we humans lived for almost as much as holding one another close.

The dread we had felt and that had immobilized us was now disappearing. Its absence freed us to move on, not necessarily forward, once again.

My name is Marlow. The green places of before are just around the bend. I am grateful that so many of my life’s past moments were nice. W and I continue to re-invent our new reality and its still gooey external universe. Science, but mostly fiction I suppose, will be a big help.

As we yawned late last night, the greying, over-toed, black cat of our future, lying at our feet, was snoring.

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