Page 97 - The Myth and the Moment

Evening

Sunday night. Just ditch the car behind this oversize camper. Done.
What else? Wipe my fingerprints off the steering wheel, gear-shift
knob, door-handle. Ah, that’s enough. He’ll figure out who did it.
But he’ll never find me. In a matter of hours I’ll be far away, money
in traveler’s cheques, heading east. Maybe Palm Springs. Ought to be
lots of work there for English-speaking pool cleaners.
Ah, scenic Sunset Boulevard. Don’t look back, Nathan: chance has
given you a narrow escape, and it’s only in one direction. Bound to
be some taxi-cabs down along the Strip, cruising for chippies and
hippies, slummers on bummers, out-of-bounds tourists and—the last
of the purists. Rock and roll clubs with sidewalk loungers hanging
around like casual labor waiting for the call. Let them have their danse
macabre; responsibility for the civilization that died to give them
leisure now rests upon my aching shoulders. I’ll miss L.A., anyway.
Probably I’ll come back next year, if all goes well. Phil won’t give a
damn by then; insurance companies will salve his injured dignity, and
Aestheria will doubtless present him with several rehabilitated sitcom
writers. If The End hasn’t come.
Ah, why do I bother? Spacetime is a closed book; you can’t escape
the Big Collapse, according to informed cosmologists. Yeah. Load
your rocket ship with all the classics, all the great paintings and music
and philosophy; make it as large as you like, engineer it to go ninety-
nine point nine percent of the speed of light, and you still won’t make
it. The invisible walls close in, you’re like an insect crawling around
the inside surface of a slowly deflating balloon. Cosmic
claustrophobia. Ultimate futility. But that is knowledge arrived at
after billions of years of evolution; living creatures have too strong a
drive to keep going, to spread their genes all over the map. Ferenczi
was right: we’re just vehicles for chromosomal distribution. And
knowing The End is in sight—be it the death of this planet or the
whole damned Universe—doesn’t really bestow the power to quit, to
give it all up and abandon oneself to the final feast of the condemned
prisoner.
Bah! Maybe I’m a mutant, ready to transmit my essence in some
non-corporeal form. Immortality as the coveted footnote. I am not
seeing taxis. So keep on walking. But not past Crescent Heights; that
will get me into rough trade territory. Why does a soft underbelly go
with a weak backbone? Shape up, America! I think it’s finally starting

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