Sludge:
The freeways of the world run on the blood of dinosaurs. On
these freeways, paved with the good intentions of scaly prospectors, are those
looking for the promised land of a better world. Their engines are turning over
new leaves within their hope engines, a metaphoric combustion at the cost of
whatever is nearby. Throw anything into the furnace; see if it burns, see if it
moves the machines, progress for progress sake.
The pavers and pushers don’t look back, they are firmly
looking into the future.
If you get off the freeways and you turn around and head
back where you came from, you will find a whole constellation of rest stops
dotting the skyline. Those maintaining
the rest stops are a twisted sort, go-getters who ran out of steam; movers and
shakers with some sort of deformity preventing high-speed merging. They have
kindly resolved themselves to service of corrosive coffee and communal urinals.
They are mercifully occupied janitors of decaying past, ushers of a world
falling back into a forgotten and dusty place.
One such rest stop attendant is an old man named Billy
Fogerty.
Billy was once an important part of society, he was once a
school teacher. His breaking point was a zero-tolerance policy which had crept
into the class rooms. Zero tolerance meant that children could not be removed
based on their behavior. They could spit, fight, scream, insult anyone and
would not expelled. Everyday he thought on how a zero-tolerance policy was in
fact a type of crushing absolute tolerance. The senselessness hurt, like a
knife-hole in his head.
Previously children had been removed if they could not fit
into the classroom required behavior. Billy found teaching quite rewarding when
his classroom was filled with students eager to learn, or at least able to
learn. The new policy however had reduced the concept of learning to mere babysitting
of those destined for incarceration once they moved into their adult years.
This dismal perspective was the solvent of Billy’s
enthusiasm for teaching. It melted him into a numb and speechless stump. He
didn’t want to think about it or talk about it.
Now Billy was content to pour terrible coffee and collect
donations for overly sweet cookies. The rest stop made sense, people came there
with needs. Even if there were stopping by to simply use the bathroom, they
were on their way to somewhere or someplace.
It felt good to know that someone had idea about where to go
or what to do, Billy certainly didn’t. Part of him was waiting for a rambler or
traveler to stop by the rest area, perhaps share a little of their destination.
Their story could sustain him for weeks, it would keep the senselessness at
arm’s reach.
He fantasized most of his volunteer shift, it was his
payment.
On a pleasant day in late spring, a technician from the
Metaphoric Freeway Administration stopped by to inspect the rest area that
Billy volunteered at. The technician wore a white outfit; standard issue field
attire, with the highest safety ratings.
The technician inspected the parking lot: looked at the
paint lines, looked for roots or decay perturbing the surface, even got down in
their hands and knees and looked at the variety of moss growing on the parking
stall near the public dumpsters.
The inspection also included an up close and personal
observation of the traffic coming through the rest stop. Records taken from
cameras were categorized and indexed. This was a new requirement, proposed as a
method of preparation for future needs. Billy watched with bated breath. He was
eager to question the technician, eager to learn about other rest stops.
Bathrooms and other facilities were last: their wear and
tear were measured on replacement timelines, as new project managers had
discovered that a higher frequency of replacement served as a baseline for
cleanliness. The other facilities did not need any real consideration, they
would be replaced at the same time as the bathrooms.
Billy finally got to talk to the technician at the end of
the inspection. It wasn’t the pleasant talk he had imagined, instead the
technician told him that volunteers would no longer be needed, rest stops would
be enabled by sub-contractors.
Billy’s world shriveled with the conversation. Where would
he go? No one needs teachers, no one needs rest stop volunteers. He got in his
car and got on the freeway with no particular destination in mind. His world
had shrunk to the 5 lanes of traffic and a thin shoulder-lane that promised no
room for failure.
He drove for hours,
following whatever lane kept the freeway in front of him.
He burned the rest of his bank account on fuel and dirty
food. He slept in his car. Day after day he drove, stopping by whatever rest
stops he could, drinking their nasty coffee and doing his best to find a new
section of the road to travel down.
After a couple of weeks Billy found himself on a freeway
which had turned into a 2-lane road leading into a flat horizon. On the 3 day,
the lanes smudged and began shrinking to a single lane.
The road grew smaller and smaller until the edges also
disappeared. The road ended in a tattered edge, just dirt and gravel that
seemed to melt into the flat landscape. Billy had no idea where he was, and
desperately wished someone knew of any reason to be anywhere else.
He drove his car as long as he could. His machine couldn’t
handle the off-road and soon the car came to an exhausted and final stop. Billy
was old and tired, he wanted to be somewhere but didn’t know where, he wanted a
destination but didn’t know why.
So he did what any good lizard does, he took off his
clothes, and laid naked in the warm sun on the rocks of a wide desert. It made
sense to die like this. It made sense to be surrounded by an empty horizon, it
made sense to admit there was no destination worth going to. The horizon didn’t
lie to him, it wasn’t pretending like any place was better than any other.
Under the hot sun, old Billy cooked. His skin soon resembled
a lizard molting. The red creature underneath was eager to get out, a
sun-stroked brain beginning to understand that its demise was inevitable.
There was a death spasm, an attempt to rally an emergency so
great that would compel Billy to preserve his life at all costs. The
conjuration took the form of a great coffee pot that had been left on, Billy
had to get back to the rest stop and turn the coffee off before anyone else
drank more of the old sludge. His brain encouraged the hallucination with
strangers faces contorted in bitter disgust, and a wave of failure.
Billy was a typical lizard, the world was too confusing for
him, too senseless to endure any prolonged exposure to an unknown destination.