The Question
by Iman Nielstroy
My daughter rose her head from the crater, her mouth dripping with the pooled rain. She looked at me. This look broke my heart. It made me want to drop what was in my hand and join the cause. Not that I even knew what it was. I was willing to sacrifice and I wanted to. I wanted to die to be able to create something better for her.
We were now returning home after a month of fighting. It is actually a farce to say it is fighting. There was plenty of fighting, it would be false to say otherwise. More fighting than this area has seen in many years. But we weren’t fighting. It was them against them. And yet it was in our back-yard. I wish there were no such thing as government. That word is only a way to trick people into allowing themselves to be slaughtered and robbed. It tricks people into believing they are cared for when really, they are not even known.
I couldn’t answer her stare and looked away. Her little hand fit calmly in my own and a tear began in my eye. My neighbor was walking past this water-hole that used to be a street and I watched him. We nod in small and I forget about my daughter for a moment as she’s climbed up.
And is watching me. Her mother and brother are not here now. They are… somewhere north, past the capital where her uncle lives. We got separated. Our vehicle doesn’t work.
People who fight cannot accept the status quo. They are vain enough to think they can change it. And they care little for the price. I dream of a peace my child can have but I do not know how to arrange it. Any obvious option this world gives me is in antithesis. Fighting would only make this world worse. There is no genocide in the world that will ever work. We, who are here, are who is going to stay. No guerilla will ever be beaten militarily. Intellectual matters are different.
If I honestly thought there could be a winner and peace I would fight. But this will not ever be true in the farthest reach of my thought. the only solution I see is to… simply stop. To stop caring about these grand illusions… to care only about your family, your little daughter and family who are forced to drink rain water out of craters from missiles.
I have a 255 dollar plane ticket to New York and I want to go more than anything in the world right now. Which is to say: there’s this incredible lady out there who wants me to visit her, who wants to put her head against my chest and create a beautiful peace. What I’m saying is that during the five work days of the week I’m over in western Michigan, against the high-rise sand dunes, and work in the Lake Michigan. It’s not a bad gig, I play outside and document the ‘what-is’ of the world. We use technical wenches and pulleys and nets to remove, from the deep waters, different species of fish at varying depth and over different habitat cover and different temperature. We use smaller micron to catch the invisible (to the naked eye) plankton. Then we enter this data into sophisticated computer models and programs and map their distribution and run equations at it, varying one or more parameters at a time and discovering what will happen to the range. And of course, when one species leaves an area, others will respond stochastically.
Word!
I’m a fuck-up when I’m not out there camping in the stations office… I guess I’m a fuck-up there too, because someone else has thought of this study and I just do the labor aspect. They told me and I’m able to repeat it. But these scientists drink. They all do. Fucking dorks are devoted to their bottles… Especially when they’re off away from their more realistic women.
These guys are off in their own world… anyway.
I return from the lake to my college town outside Detroit and this weekend I’m supposed to fly over Erie and Ontario and visit a girl in New York. This is a girl that means much more to me than the 25 plus years of data these old grey-beards have taken. I’d destroy all their shit, is what I’m saying, to be able to lick her pussy and fuck her tonight. Word, indeed. There’s an undergrad here, bringing that shit back. ‘Word’, that is. He’s from Maine and this might explain it. Up there they’re 96% white…
But the point was that several power stations in the Midwest and northeast have shit the bed and we have no power here in this college town. It’s fucked. No street lights. All the businesses shut down. The downtown: complete darkness at dusk. People wandering around hopelessly wondering what to do. The kids upstairs, without their computers and their fans, forced to come down to the porch and look at us, as we drink. Wondering who we are and who their friends are.
It’s an interesting psychological experiment, I think as a drink heavily from a warming beer and a biker passes in the dark. This is a glimpse… this is a taste of chaos that will inevitably come to us… my only question in this matter is if it will come during my lifetime…
I feel like I’m the most alone person on the face of the earth. And why don’t I have reason to believe this? It’s been over 6 years since I’ve lived in the same place more than half a year or so. What is this? I’m just alone. Day in and day out. I’ve stopped thinking about sex, even. What is that? I lust after it now like we’ve all done over a million dollars. Sure, I look at porn and picture my nose running from the inside of the knee up the inner legs to the moist pussy lips, all tucked up inside the vagina, inserting the tip of the tongue like a lizard and dropping the shades down with their own heavy moisture. Shit. Finding that ball with the tongue and inserting a finger, sliding it against the smooth skin and rubbing the mound. Fuck.
I’m alone and I wander. I talk to roommates and smile at these women and girls and walk on. See a female in this coffee shop carved from the desert and share a small conversation. But she’s got her own thing going and soon a friend has come to pick her up and I leave. go to the construction-worker bar, one of only three in this small desert town in one of the western states that reaches down to Mexico.
There is a female that I found my way into, north in the mountains, and I think of her. She said I could visit her and entertain her. Pay a little rent and that would be simple enough, eh? I could be a jester, right?
What should I do with my life?” We have to start asking that at what, 17? Our parent’s friends first start asking, “and what do you want to major in?”
“Major? …shit, is Life an option? …hold on…. uh?”
No. none of us has ever had an answer.