Prologue - The Toothless Kiss Of Skeletons

His dreams were always the same, haunted by phantoms with fading faces, played to the tunes of Mozart and Bach as if it were some dramatic piece written for the fanciful tastes of the less fortunate. The dreams replayed in his mind, as if they were sent by the divine orchestrators of fate to remind him of what had come and what is coming and what will come again. The dreams had come for years, always the same, but they were soon losing their color and vibrance and were becoming faded, like photographic memoirs of a distant past yellowed with time. He knew their names, knew who they were, those who walked and talked and wept in his dreams, but he knew only because of the recurrences of the dreams, not for the detail implicit within them. In a way the dreams, losing their life and vitality, were more haunting than they were before; and he would wake early, before the dawn, not by choice, and he would wake with tears and with shaking fingers and with a sprinting heart and with labored breath, and he would sit up in his sleeping bag and feel the coldness and the dampness of dew and would hear the first birds chirping, and he would lie back down and stare up into the shadows encompassing the trees, and he would think about these dreams, as if searching for some meaning, but he always came to no understanding, and when dawn began to break, cutting through the treetops in shimmering chords of light, he would stand and stretch his legs and allow his mind to be consumed by other things. In these times it was ritual that defined his life, and it was ritual not for ritual’s sake but for survival’s. He knew no other world. He had been abandoned, had been left alone, scorned by his immunity, and earlier in his travels, he had been faced with dangers now all but eradicated with the onslaught of biological persistence. He still carried a gun, but not for the protection of his physical self but for the protection of his psyche. He knew he would encounter no one: there was no one to encounter. He was alone, it was his fate to be so… Fate. He thought of that word often. He had told Camille, There is no such thing as fate. There is only choice, and the consequences of our actions, the consequences of the actions of others. There is no guiding light, no divine hand, in anything. Our lives pan out not due to what the stars have written for us, not for destiny, but they pan out according to our decisions and the decisions of others, and their affects on us. He had spoken so eloquently, and when he talked with her he sometimes imagined himself behind a podium, dressed in a gray suit and black tie, speaking before an audience of naïve children overcome with the ideals of destiny and fate, ideals pressed forth by Disney and cartoons. He had continued, Destiny is an escapist tactic. It is what we use to console ourselves. When life does not go according to plan, we tell ourselves that our destiny is much better, and we convince ourselves to be patient and persistent. It is a lie we convince ourselves is true in order to bear the burden of the present. Camille had told him that she believed in destiny, and he had been enraged. She had been genuinely surprised at his anger when he had leaned over the table and said, How can you say that? Anyone who actually observes the world can see it’s nothing but a lie. Rape, murder, genocide. You say your destiny is good. What about everyone else’s destiny? What about the destiny of the little girl whose father molests her? What about the destiny of the young woman who is chopped to pieces by her husband? What about the destiny of the hundreds in Africa who are slaughtered because of their ethnicity? Where is destiny for them? Camille had dropped the subject, and he had leaned back in his seat and gripped his soda with white-knuckled fingers. She didn’t press the issue, had changed the subject, but he continued to fume. When everything started happening, and when his entire family fell ill but he was left alone, and when he walked the streets amidst the caravans carrying the dead, and when he smelled the stench of the burning corpses, and when he walked through the hospitals with the sick lining the walls, someone had told him, Fate is sparing you. And at that moment he wondered if he was being smitten for his own arrogance, for his own refusal to believe; and he wondered if there were no such thing as fate; and if there were such an animal, he became convinced it was not a pie-in-the-sky and happy-go-lucky phantasmic unicorn but rather a cold-hearted whore. He had never been religious, even when the church attendance swelled as the graves did likewise. But had he been a praying man, his prayers would not be prayers of thanks but bitter prayers of cursing,

cursing the gods who had forced him into this, cursing the ones who had given him that unknown gene, that genetic defect, that had spared him from that which ravaged the world and caused a rapture that sent the living not into the clouds but into ditches and burial pits that stank of sulfur and lime and burned eternally in the night. He remembered the smoke during the day and the flames at night, and he remembered that great story in the Hebrew Scriptures, of God leading His people by a pillar of smoke by day and a pillar of fire by night. Men and women would stand praying and chanting and even lashing at themselves with leather whips studded with bits of glass and stone, and they would weep and wail and cry out for God to intervene. But soon their bodies were overcome with the sickness, and they were dropped into the pits, and their weeping and wailing and crying became drowned out by the crackling of the flames and the sputtering of burning human fat.

On this morning he thought of none of that as he rolled up his sleeping bag and put on his shoes and trekked through the woods. The birds were singing cheerily in the trees, and the sky above was a brilliant blue, the bluest he had ever seen, without a cloud to obscure the blinding sun. He made his way between the thick boughs of the trees and collected sticks and brambles from the ground. He returned to the sleeping bag and piled the sticks together and dumped lighter fluid underneath and lit the wood. The wood was damp with dew, and burning the lighter fluid on top of the sticks enabled them to dry out quicker. It took him an hour, but he soon had a small fire. He went through his knapsack and pulled out some potatoes, skinned them with the edge of a small knife, and he impaled them on sticks and cooked them over the fire. He ate them twenty minutes later, and then he gathered his things and draped them over his shoulder and went back to the road. The fire continued to burn, the pale smoke rising into the forest canopy and dissipating amongst the thick branches.

The road was empty. Many of the roads were often consumed with broken-down cars, and he found it surprising that this highway was all but abandoned. There were a few cars, in various states of disrepair, with flattened tires or broken windows, and the paint was chipping and rust beginning to radiate from the hoods down the sides of the vehicles. He followed the highway for several miles. On either side of the road, great fields of grass waved back and forth in the wind. Tall grass, at least waist-high, littered with wildflowers weaving their way up to the sunlight. At one time, he imagined, these had been farms, but they were slowly being overtaken by nature. Mankind had subjugated nature and sought to control it, and the conservationists had feared that mankind would turn the planet into an industrial hot zone, eliminating nature all together; their fears were quite displaced, for even the factories in the distant cities were being overcome with weeds and ivy, nature advancing and reclaiming its stolen land. By lunchtime he realized these were not farms at all but wineries. The Great Valley of California had been home to wineries decades ago, thanks to the climate created by the mountains encircling the valley and the nutrient-rich soil that had once been a seafloor. The vines, once well-manicured, had become spidery and snaked out from their sectors, the grapes large and thick in the sunlight. He picked a few and ate them and walked down the rows of fencing; the fences cast shadows across the ground, and he felt as if he were walking through tunnels when the fences arched above him, where the vines grew so thick that they blotted out the sun. He sat underneath one such arch in the cool of the shade and ate grapes and unfurled his sleeping bag and lied down and took a nap. In the distance he could hear the howling of wolves.

He saw them, but he wasn’t there. At times they were not memories but detached and iconic observances. There were a dozen of them, standing in a line, and behind them raged a wall of unstoppable flames.

Those gathered had no form about them, were nothing but dark shapes standing stoically, with no eyes nor noses nor lips nor ears, nothing to give them any character or meaning or vitality. They stood there, and behind them he walked, draped in an ink-black robe, the hood veiling his face. In gnarled hands he carried a scythe, and one by one he swept the blade across the forms, and they vanished, disintegrating into nothing. He watched them without emotion, and then Death faced him and extended its scythe. It came towards him, moving, gliding, and then the scythe fell upon him, but it had no affect. Death swung again and again, each blow more vicious than the one before, but there was no pain nor injury, and Death turned and sulked, and then he awoke.

He stood and stretched and gathered his things. He left the grapevine tunnel and returned to the road. The sun had lowered in the sky, and clouds had gathered in the distance, their underbellies streaked dark gray. He continued farther down the road, hearing her words echoing in his mind: You love me, don’t you? But as the road stretched on, her words faded, becoming a bare whisper, and then nothing, and he heard only the sighs of the growing wind and the coolness at his back as the storms rolled nearer. The rain began to fall over the distant mountains, and he didn’t want to get wet, and he considered backtracking to the nearest winery to find a place to stay, but he knew the storm would reach him sooner that way, and he wouldn’t make it back in time. So he continued forward. The road continued unabated, and he passed a school-bus with graffiti along the sides, and he read them placidly as he walked by. FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS was scribbled along the side, and then: IT TOLLS FOR US ALL. On down the road the grass was not as thick, and the road was stained with charcoal. His shoes left footprints. The road went around a bend, and he saw several burnt-out vehicles, and beyond them a great pit. He set his things down in the road and walked past the skeletal vehicles and came to the pit, and he looked down and saw ash caked into mud in some places, and in others it had become hard as stone, and protruding from this ghastly modern-day tar-pit were femurs and tibias and hip bones, all darkened by fire. He turned to go and hit something with his foot. He looked down and saw that it was a tiny skull, with eye sockets barely large enough to fit a finger through. He nonchalantly walked past it and back to the road, and he picked up his things and continued. The wind grew stronger, and he felt the first pinpricks of rain.

The road had reached the mountains and moved up along them. He followed the road, and the stormclouds moved overhead, and the downpour began. He went into the woods and sat under the trees, where the rain was not so intense. Great droplets of water rolled off the leaves and sprinkled around him. He sat on his sleeping bag to keep it dry. Thunder rumbled low and without menace, and then the storm had passed. He gathered his things and went back to the road, where the sun was warm. It dried his clothes as he continued on. The road snaked up the side of the mountain, and he paused several times to rest, at each pause standing at the far side of the road beside the guardrails, looking at the valley below. The sun was beginning to set, and over the valley thick with forest and grass, he could see in the distance the sunlight glinting off the steel sides of scattered low-roofed buildings. An outcropping of Silicon Valley. He had been there once before, as a boy, when his mother, disgusted with her appearance, sought plastic surgery. He remembered standing outside the building with his brother and father, and he remembered his father smoking through an entire pack of cigarettes while complaining about the money they were wasting just to make Mom feel good about herself. At one time such things had been important, and society was dominated by the way things looked and not by the way things were: what composed a person became less important than how the composition looked. His mother had come out of surgery, and when the bandages were removed, she was half-silicon and half-human, but she felt more alive than ever. That was only six years before she was laid to rest in a grave. He stood and looked out at those buildings, nature encroaching, and he wondered in a detached way what she looked like now: bits of bone strewn with

plastic components. The sun set behind him, and the valley grew dark, and he moved to the side of the road and unfurled his sleeping bag, and he lied down and felt the dampness, and he looked up through the trees at the vast panorama of stars, and he closed his eyes and prepared to be haunted in his dreams once more.