He
was conceived on the shaft of an atomic bomb plummeting toward utopia with a
singular intention: death. In the age of missiles, paradise on earth was but a
dream, one that lasted in principle only as long as agreement was maintained
between the people. Certainly therefore it was questionable that utopia
actually ever existed. The distant outcrop of humans, remotely quarantined from
the rest of the despicable race, comprised mankind’s great hope. It was the
blood diamond of millennia of rivalry, enmity, backstabbing, betrayal, and
death. And for a moment, it lingered, as the hopes and dreams of a thousand
nations manifested on a solitary island absconded by the ocean, embracing it and
protecting it like a crown jewel. Unreachable, the refugees had thought.
Undetectable. Unconscionable. But as the atomic bomb fell through the bluest
sky, the two hellbent, quixotic dreamers hanging on knew that they would
lay waste to humanity’s greatest moment. And so they bore a child: Tom. Tom was
the bomb. Both the medium and the message, form and function, the spawn of the
end-times.
The people targeted below looked up
at the screaming coming across the sky, the foregone conclusion that they had
wished away unto denial. For a moment they believed they had reached the apex
of human interrelational and societal achievement. And in that final moment of
solace, when the cycles of life would turn back toward death and it was
revealed to all that humanity truly had nothing worth hoping for, they saw the
animals riding the nuclear missile, copulating, ecstatic. This ultimate image
was seared into their retinas as they withered under the combustion of the
mushroom cloud, and the people were all gone. A stroke of ejaculation timed to
the masterstroke of misanthropy. Obliterated, they did not weep. And Tom, his
wild conceivers a disseminated tuft of charred dust strewn upon the land, rose
up from the ashes. In their death, he was life.
Tom knew none of the rituals of his
precedent humans, nor even what other humans were, or what he was. He was
effectively a cultural blank slate, biologically wired with proclivities he
would require ages to comprehend now that science had been erased, entirely
without historical knowledge or any understanding whatsoever except his own
present experience and observations. But, though he did not know it, in spite
of so many years of discovery, education, advancement, mastery, and control, as
the humans populated and depopulated the planet, none of it mattered because in
this moment it was all wiped out, in this moment of his birth. He knew nothing
of the other humans across the oceanic expanse who had sent his mother’s maiden
missile arcing down upon utopia and endowing him with the chance of life.
Sprung up within radiation, he
became fully formed the moment the bomb struck, and his first memory was the
great enveloping of the past that stretched out and coated the sky, eclipsing
the sunlight as it grew so terrible and mysterious and beautiful. Tom’s first
breath was of this ominous dust, and it filled him with a sadness that he did
not understand as he absorbed and oxidized his ancestors and their dreams. He
swallowed their happiness and smiles with his first gulp, his mouth chock-full
of their stories. He drank their wonder, and he excreted their
misery.
In this squalor he made his first
choice, which would come to define his existence in this strange land: he
stepped forward. He felt what he did not know to be particles of bones sift and
crunch under his heavy feet. He was naked, and the humans that once existed cut
him as he walked, reminding him of something he never knew. It was a brave step
because the atomic cloud had completely overtaken the sun, and it was pitch
black. He did not have faith, just naiveté. Or maybe just nothing. He was not
inhibited or ashamed or embarrassed or afraid. He just was, emboldened by the
hopes of the dead that he inhaled, inspiration at its purest.
Tom did not know what to make of what
he perceived around himself. He had no language and no basis for discerning
what he saw, heard, tasted. But he was conscious. He had a sense of self. He
was aware of stimuli. The world spread out before him as a laboratory to
discover. He had no sense of purpose necessarily, nor did he lack one. He
simply was. He knew fire and ash and darkness and his nameless body, and from
these reference points he moved forward as he made his decision and took his
first step.
In a single step he traveled
through the nostalgic grief of a first day of school, the dust of a mother’s
smile as she and her wife send off their intersexual child from the door to an
orange school bus at the curb. The women, arms interlocked, hands clasped,
treasure the baby steps of their child as he skips toward the shuttle. A new
beginning, hope, and anxiety all wrapped into a memory of possibility. The
success of a people, distilled into this first grader’s gait. A post-sexual,
post-gender, post-stigma, post-discrimination society: the quintessential state
of sociocultural liberalism. He steps onto the bus, greeted by a firm but kind
driver with a symbolic destination: the sustained education of utopia’s first
native generation. Precious cargo in an orange vessel, ripe to be picked and
squeezed, the bitter juice sweet. The salvation of centuries of
hatred. The women watch as he is carried away toward school, but first to pick
up other dreams along the road. The women kiss. Their ash scrambled further
under Tom’s foot, he would never know their triumph.
Tom inhaled a lonely widow. She
sits on the edge of her bed, still. Childless and bereft, she looks past the
floor into the land’s bowels, unrooted, unanchored, drifting. Her thoughts ebb
and flow in the port of experience, buoyed by the rush in and bobbing with the
undercurrent. She remembers a distant planet where love danced. Freedom. She
swirled on the floor with her infinite husband. A grin, etching across her
mind’s eye, shuttered. The exposure is too great to bear, and she rests,
exhausted from the vision going back. She places her hand on his chest,
tremulous as he dips her down, his hand supporting her under the nape, as in a
heartbeat she descends to mere inches below the floor, her blood electric and
her eyes thunder. She gazes up in her memory, his
eyes uncolored and black and deep and endless. The dream washes over her, and
in that moment she is paralyzed on the bed, stricken. Tom breathed her in and
her bristling feeling permeated his veins as she was transported into his bloodstream
with her love run afoul. Tom exhaled, never wiser, love lilting, extinguished.
The gravity of her vitality dissipated toward the expansive atomic cloud, the
end of hope.
Tom inherited a legacy of crises
forced from their many moments through the annals of human history. All for
naught. At once that he senselessly proliferated the waste laid to the emotion
that seemed so meaningful, he denied its validity. It never existed, and it
never mattered. His unconscious muse, he carried forward unwitting, insensitive
to the pains taken by those who came before, the unconscious culmination of
trying so hard but never succeeding to signify. He was the death knell of hope,
further propelling life and all its turmoil apart, cutting its very particles
with the gnashing of his teeth, separating its molecules with his breath,
smashing it with his step, decimating it with his conception. Atomic Tom moved
forward, the progeny of animals fucking purposelessly on a convoy of
destruction, rendering meaninglessness even moreso. He was the blind putting
forth to the fire, life from death, meaningless, searching, aspiring upon
inspiration. The simultaneous end and beginning of nothing and hope.
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