An Introductory Vignette
“Likewise, when we too were children, we were held in bondage under the elemental principles of the world…” (Galatians 4:3).
The sunrise in the Autonomous Municipality of Witness was met with a mixture of colorful, explosive lights stirring the local populace out of bed and disturbing those who had no need for such a wake-up call. The local wildlife had long stopped scattering under the display of DIY rocketry and bursting founts, so the townsfolk were less aggravated than when it had initially begun, seeing as how they could continue hunting in the quiet hours of morning. Slam Bradley sipped his coffee at his bar, knowing the peace of dawn was soon to be behind him. The explosions followed a pattern down through the main drag of town then up through the shanties and back again.
The saloon doors opened just as he took his last gulp of solitude. A man with a sallow complexion and an old boonie hat walked right up to the bar and sat as if the night pained him to be away from this particular spot. Slam silently poured two fingers of whiskey. The man drained it and returned his glass and Slam poured another, ‘Fowch,’ Slam’s voice was pulled in and about lost by the emptiness of the bar, where it was as if he didn’t say anything at all; it was not much of a greeting, more a statement of fact.
Fowch wordlessly wrestled for his cigarettes.
Slam once again turned his gaze to Witness, knowing roughly what this day might bring, but not exactly ready to start it. The townsfolk were already leaving their adobe homes, shanty houses, and tents constructed out of old crumbled infrastructure of the Fourth World, forgotten if not for its remnants left behind, to attend to municipality’s garden, the cattle, and any hunting that needed to be done.
He poured himself a cup of coffee before walking over and beginning his morning ritual of slamming the television with his hand until the snow became a light drizzle of sleet; his name derived from the audible smack his palm made against the fragile machine that, after finally answering to his abuse, shivered as if it had felt the very snow Slam was trying to shake when his routine was disturbed.
‘You shouldn’t be watching that thing.’ Fowch said lighting a cigarette. Slam sighed, so it has begun? he thought. Rolling his eyes he responded with what Fowch brought to the bar the last time, ‘Yeah, yeah, the lizard people are listening to my thoughts, right?’
‘Do you ever listen to me, Slam? No, it’s not that it at all!’
In fact, Slam had spent the better part of the last three years not listening to Fowch’s tangents or theories. Once he realized they all bled together into a mess that not even Fowch really kept up with, he began tuning him out, slowly hearing in Fowch’s incessant speeches the very snow he made a goal to rid himself off his television set. It didn’t help that Slam assumed Fowch was only picking bits and pieces up from the tribals in the desert. The men on the edge didn’t get there from a sound mind and Fowch’s excursions led him to deal with them far more than the good people of Witness.
Fowch lit a cigarette before continuing; he always lit a cigarette if he felt he was on the runway toward an impassioned speech. The smoking didn’t slow him down, usually it only made him talk at a faster pace which seemed almost an avalanche of information, rather than manning the snowplows Slam just let him twist himself up into a fury, he had good tender and was one of the only longstanding regulars that hadn’t been shot or run out of town.
Though Slam had a sneaking suspicion that the Dragons might have been involved in the disappearances of some of those folks but kept it to himself, it’d probably lead to the merchants taking another route entirely instead of passing through Witness every so often. The town needed consistency if not simply the wares they offered; it was their source of news from the outer regions.
‘No, Slam, they’re not reading your thoughts. There’s not one of them that cares about what you’re thinking about. What they’re doing is programming you! They’re putting thoughts in your head! Think about all that noise you allow in your head and how much subliminal messaging is in it. It’s not lizard people that are listening to your thoughts; they’re cosmic shape-shifting archons embedded in the airwaves. The thoughts you have don’t concern them because you aren’t onto them like me. Your thoughts are being shaped by them, though, to keep you docile, so they can feed off your energy. No, sir,’ he took a pull of his whiskey and pointed at his crown, a cigarette held betwixt them, ‘you got to keep the mind clear.’
Slam turned, exacerbated by the whole discussion, ‘Fowch, it’s a VHS tape—’
All of a sudden, the porch of the saloon was filled with a loud, colorful explosion shattering the drunk that Fowch had got to, meaning he had to start over, a task he was only happy to undertake again. His fingers twisted and he scrunched his cigarette, meaning he’d have to start a new one of those, too.
A scrawny man in a cut-off vest and aviators entered through the swinging doors, toting a satchel full of explosive devices and grinning from ear to ear, ‘Well, well, well, if it ain’t my favorite watering hole.’ He sat a few chairs down from Fowch, not because he was unfriendly but because Fowch was on his days off—and his days on. Slam filled a coffee mug, contented with his workmanship on the television set which was alight with flurries, and set it in front of Pabst, ‘Fowch was just explaining the lizard people in the television, trying to make us not think about them.’
Fowch, choking on his smoke, ‘That’s not what I was saying!’
Pabst took a big swing of his coffee, slightly burning the roof of his mouth but made no face to reflect it, ‘Ain’t lizard fella you got to worry about, Slam Bradley.’
‘Oh, no,’ Slam, regretting the social foible he had made in his attempt at sarcasm, braced himself for another of Pabst’s tirades. He could handle Fowch’s theories, despite practicing inactive listening, Fowch at least had something new to say each time he got into his drink and began yelling at the walls and heaven; Pabst had no stable of subjects to draw from, though that demonstrated his wariness of the tribals, especially the Dragons; if they were brought up in conversation Pabst grew quiet.
He didn’t visit the bar nearly as often as Fowch nor did he ever wet his whistle on anything but black coffee, so much so that many in the town had taken to calling him a banty rooster behind his back, on account of his small yet aggressively caffeinated state. This notoriety was not helped by his taking to think of himself as the town’s resident firework delivery boy, something that not even Slam could figure out how the young man even concocted such a vocation.
The best he could figure was that Pabst had stumbled upon pictures from one of the old Fourth World “Independence” celebrations, enamored by the flowery colors and assuming that someone must have been hired to bring them for the crowds to enjoy, though he had never worked up the nerve to ask and likely never would. It was simply what Pabst did and had always done and probably always would do, much to the chagrin of the townsfolk who would have liked him to disappear the same as others.
‘Oh, no, indeed.’ Pabst pumped his fist as if he were facing an eternal threat meaning to intimidate it, ‘It’s the dang coyote sickness!’
Fowch sighed an annoyed cloud of smoke from his nostrils, he eyed Slam with a knowing glance tapping his glass for a refill, as if to acknowledge that Slam was the cause of this and it ought to be accounted on his bill.
Pabst waved his coffee mug with fervor, sloshing the hot black liquid across the bar. Fowch barely noticed that some splashed on his hair and shoulders. ‘It’s like the dang “Tower of Babel!” They ain’t just implanting thoughts, they’re confounding our speech and wrenching us up hankering for a can of whooping crane with our neighbor!’
Slam had returned to watching television and, responding as he always did, inquired in monotone, ‘We all got it, too, right?’
Pabst pointed a finger to his chest, ‘Inside us. It’s like a pawprint on a pacemaker. And I’ll tell you something us else, Timothy,’ both the men looked at Pabst as he addressed Fowch using his given name, an unthinkable act in the bar, mostly because none of the patrons had ever learned Fowch’s name nor had he given it. Pabst loped over a chair and leaned over to Fowch, ‘Just like you said they don’t care about reading your mind through the television, they ain’t just using that to impede upon your agency. There’s the dang demon whispers to contend. Ain’t nobody thinks of them until they realize they’ve been driven like steers into snake-infested waters all the while thinking it were their own thoughts behind it.’
‘That just doesn’t make any sense,’ Fowch said inhaling his smoke and holding it as if the smoke helped him collect his thoughts to ruminate in his lungs, ‘If that’s true then what’re our thoughts? Do we even have thoughts that are our own?’
‘Shoot, yeah, but I’m saying they ain’t no good either. All them thoughts are going to do is hit you with a switch to drive you faster in them waters.’
‘But,’ Slam couldn’t help but interject, thinking it might wind Fowch up, ‘Isn’t that what the lizard folks are for?’
‘They’re shape-shifting archons, not lizard people,’ Fowch became incensed, ‘If they do appear as lizards that’s only because these people,’ he motioned toward Witness, ‘haven’t got a lick of imagination beyond what they ate for breakfast. See, they know what you’re capable of perceiving, that’s why they implant thoughts in you.’
Slam shook his head, ‘So they can make us see something other than lizards?’
‘No, I—’
‘It ain’t lizard fellas, Slam Bradley,’ Pabst cut in before the smoke helped Fowch’s thoughts along, ‘I don’t know what a shape-shifting archway got to do with it, but I’ll tell you that coyote sickness is at every man’s threshold, looking to raid our pantry. Sooner or later you’re gonna look at your dang dry goods and wonder just how the heck all this got in’ere.’
Slam was puzzled, ‘I think I should like my pantry to be stocked. It’s been some time since I was able to have a food menu in this place.’
‘Au contraire, Slam,’ Fowch exhaled smoke and a trail of thoughts with it, ‘Why do you think they’re implanting thoughts in us through that screen of yours? They want you to think that the pantry is full of what you put there, or at least assented to, but what they’re after is they want whatever it is that makes you you.’
Slam grimaced at the pull of whiskey, but it made him feel warm though no one needed that in Witness, still choking on its burn he returned to the television, ‘According to Pabst what’s you isn’t good either.’
‘That ain’t what I said, Slam Bradley, you better try harder if you’re trying to sully my character this early in the day. All’s I said was that your thoughts ain’t too evergreen. They’re in cahoots with the demon whispers, you see.’
‘So, we need to stop thinking?’
‘Well… no…’ Pabst had never been asked that before, mostly because no one wanted to talk to him past the fiery explosion that went off over their heads without consent, and it perplexed him to think about what a man could think about if he couldn’t trust his own thoughts. The fact that he couldn’t trust his thoughts was a given, but then what do you do with that kind of given? How do you not trust the demon whispers and guard yourself against the thoughts that crop up from within?
Pabst began confusing himself and his face reflected a deep inner turmoil that simply had never thought past these two ideas; what was he to do? Almost at the precipice of despair, he returned to himself, took a slug of coffee, and stole a firework from his bag. He didn’t know what kind of thoughts one ought to have nor if the prescription should be to stop thinking altogether; he appeared incapable of the latter just right now and it seemed to only make things worse.
He was not unaccustomed to thinking strenuously, though he tried avoiding it as much as possible in no small part due to the notion that none of his thoughts were particularly trustworthy. He had noticed that even the thoughts which appeared harmless on the surface would only lead to dangerous ones should he indulge them, which ultimately led to a his treating every thought like a prized shoat rooting out the rats, rattlers, and lizards before they could burrow into the depths of his heart’s soil or lay eggs in his inner boots.
Hunting every thought, sifting through snake skins and truffles merely reinforced the impression that thought itself was a tricky, if not a downright fly-by-night, enterprise—trafficking with the demon whispers. Eventually he recognized that thinking itself was generally difficult to do when an explosive was going off in the vicinity, instilling in him a sense of duty to help try to keep his mind—and others—off the business entirely. He lit the firework and threw it across the bar toward the television set.
Slam jumped out from behind and Fowch crouched with his drink in hand, though he noticed immediately he left his cigarette in the ashtray to which he was mildly irritated.
The great flash rained bits of pink and blue around the bar, reflecting in the big windows looking out over Witness. The townsfolk, on their morning routes, watched on from outside knowing precisely who was up to what which meant the premises would be sparsely attended for at least another hour or so. The explosion temporarily deafened Slam who, rising, mercilessly hit his ear as if beating it like a television would cause the snowy audible sensation to return to normal. ‘Dang it, Pabst!’
Fowch slinked back on his chair, greedily taking his cigarette as if they had been parted for some time longer than they had. Pabst, in a typical cadence, took the defensive, ‘It’s a ward against the coyote sickness! You start feeling a little sluggish in thought these dang peonies will liberate your mind from the sickness and its whispers. It’s bringing some sunlight into your cloudy morning, Slam Bradley!
‘I don’t really take in the sun too much,’ Fowch happily replied, he was feeling the whiskey finally, ‘I like to get warm inside with my good friend Slam.’
Slam ceased hitting his head, the combination of whiskey and an explosive device so close to sunrise was enough to cause a headache enough that hitting his own head was only exacerbating it, he looked at Fowch, ‘Don’t start calling me friend, last time that happened I had to cut you off.’
He looked at the other end of the bar at the firework smoking beside the sink, he often wondered how it was Pabst could have crafted such a nuisance but the less he knew about Pabst Overdrive the better he felt. He watched the trail of smoke ascend to the ceiling only to find that the television, rattled from the firework display, had responded in kind with a blizzard. Slam poured himself another shot of whiskey in a medicine cup and, rubbing his temple, shot it.
‘Besides, the sun’s not real,’ Fowch stated shattering Slam’s sip of solace.
‘No, don’t you go on about that now Fowch,’ Slam replied apprehensively.
‘Huh?’ Pabst was intrigued, though taken aback, ‘You mean that big’ol circle outside makes you kind of sick if you stay in it too long or sets you squintin’ for hours with big black spots walking in front of you? That’s ain’t real?’
Fowch appreciated the tinge of vexation in Pabst’s voice, nothing could ever get to him except talking about luminaries which he had a soft spot for, ‘Maybe it’s your thoughts make you sick or maybe those black spots are the demons who offer you their sweet nothings.’
Pabst shrunk in his seat, he hadn’t ever thought that something like the sun wasn’t real, but he felt he had to at least try to get his mind around that, even if it was just to dismiss it. Suddenly, it struck him that that was impossible, ‘Uh-huh, no it ain’t. I told you God made it. He hung it right up there to divide the times and seasons, a greater light to rule the day.’
‘God, heh,’ Fowch lit a new cigarette with his old one before discarding the latter, ‘You don’t even know who God is, you just read about it in them pages you got.’
It was true, Pabst did not know who God was; buying magazines at the scavenger stalls last winter introduced him to a few pages of what the trader called “Ghenesis” and while a few pages were missing he a few chapters from beginning to around the Tower of Babel, a fact he did not conceal with his talk of the coyote sickness which he did not, contrary to the townies gossip, pick up from “Ghenesis”. While he did not know who God was or what he was up to now, he was mighty happy that he decided to make a sun and cause it to shine. This led to a more than sentimental view of the “firmament” and the lights that populated it.
‘Well, anybody who invents the sun ought to be extended a handshake is all I’ll say. I reckon I’d even like to offer him a coffee and a sit-down, pick his brain.’
‘You’d want to hear God’s thoughts? I thought you said none of us can trust our thoughts,’ Slam inquired absentmindedly; he had returned to his ritual of changing the weather and had slowly tuned the bar conversation to static in the background. He wasn’t unkind toward talk of God, but he simply didn’t see the point in talking about him, as far as Slam was concerned God was a man, and perhaps a problem, for the Fourth World.
‘Shoot, a fella who creates the heavens and the earth ain’t going to have just you and me type of thoughts. He’s gonna have something else going on up there,’ Pabst tapped his head with a grin on his face. The grin was short lived. Fowch broke their moment of silence, ‘Well, it doesn’t change the fact that the sun isn’t real.’
‘I just don’t know what that could possibly mean!’
‘Space is fake!’ Fowch responded vigorously and drunk.
‘What kind of talk is this? Space is fake. Shoot, you’re fake! How’s that feel fella? Probably not too good to have your whole existence undermined by a ludicrous statement’
‘I could be a figment of your imagination for all you know. My whole existence might be ludicrous and you’re the one conjuring me up. What does that say about you?’
Pabst was perturbed. If Fowch was merely a figment of his imagination he would likely have bigger problems than arguing with himself over the reality of space. He looked at Slam, hoping that the proprietor would wave away his confusion and state outright that Fowch was, indeed, a different–and real–person than himself. But Slam was busy watching an old tape of a futbol game played between countries that none of them could pronounce nor anyone in town had ever heard of.
Pabst, rather than continuing to engage with Fowch, breathed long and deep, taking stock of the thoughts that had been accumulating and swirling about. He couldn’t be sure, but he thought he saw something on Fowch’s shoulder, vague but oddly personable. His eyes twitched beneath his aviators and he shrugged it off, convinced his mind was only playing tricks on him, as it was wont to do.
Witness, NM 