The Last War

I’ve been seeing a lot of armadillos lately. All dead, roadkill. Haven’t seen a live one yet around here. Back when I lived in Arkansas ten years ago there was a herd that lived near my cabin in the woods. I didn’t know we were neighbors until they woke me from a dead sleep one summer night, foraging in the pine forest, tromping around on some corrugated roofing left in a heap nearby. Scared the shit out of me. I lay frozen in the stuffy sleeping loft, listening as the noises migrated around the cabin. All of them together sounded like a bear, or, possibly, several escaped convicts. My barely woke mind concocted several terrifying explanations for the noise before I forced myself to climb down and investigate. The truth was finally revealed by the wavering beam of my flashlight. After that, I’d see them in the daytime pretty regularly. I would sit and watch them, or stroll with them as they moved along digging little holes, looking for snacks. Fascinating creatures. Adorable little prehistoric-ass bastards. They were fearless. Even my dog didn’t scare them. I could walk right up to them, reach out and touch them. I don’t know that they’d ever seen another human being. Here in Illinois I’ve only seen their brothers and sisters on the road: mangled bloody things half-smeared on the pavement.

In my dictionary the entry that immediately follows “armadillo” is “Armageddon.” Now, I don’t know when they arrived this far north, or how long they’ve been enjoying the mild winters of our changed climate and breeding in all the hidden places. And I don’t know how much time we have. But whenever I see one of their gory corpses through a cloud of flies I imagine the battle must be coming soon. Armadillos, then Armageddon- that much is clear. The ultimate battle between good and evil must be approaching. I am the evil.

When I look into my dog’s eyes, gently stroking the short silky fur of his ears before scooping some [corn-based glyphosate-soaked slaughterhouse-by-product] kibble into his bowl; when I watch and laugh and cringe at some insipid action movie [that lives on a server linked to a massive coal and nuclear powered network], streaming it to my phone [an irreducible composite of slave-mined coltan, lithium, silicon, precious metals, and petrochemicals]; when I adjust the thermostat; when I take a long hot shower [in chloramines], letting the water run to soothe my sore muscles; when I eat every tasty goddamn meal, every snack [grown in depleted soil, packaged in some hellish combination of plastic and metal, trucked thousands of miles]; every time I turn the key in the ignition switch of my [oil-burning gasoline-powered] car to drive six miles to work, enjoying my freedom, passing a dead armadillo draped over the double yellow in the center of the two-lane asphalt highway… I am evil.

All the choices, the cumulative effect of the choices we all make every day in our wonderland of plentiful cheap food, energy, and high technology… it all adds up to this: dead armadillos on the side of the road in a place where armadillos could not survive ten years ago. Ten years is a long time. Ten years is as the blink of an eye.

Ten years, measured out with coffee spoons, miles of lawn mowed, beers swilled, nine-hour days in a smog-belching factory. Every day an agony of commingled pleasure and awareness of self-destruction. Seeing the effects of each choice I make rippling outward, tracing the paths of each connected thread. Here is where my consumption of chicken intersects with the life of a woman working long hours in a frigid slaughterhouse, her nail beds so regularly bruised from wearing a chainmail glove that the fingernails on her left hand begin to fall out, one by one. This is where the steel was smelted to make my washing machine, here’s where the waste water from the steel plant was illegally dumped into Lake Michigan, and this is the little boy drinking tap water on 68th St. in Chicago who develops an exotic terminal cancer.

My chicken sandwich hurts your hands. My washing machine gave you cancer. I am the evil. How can I see it any other way?

I took a few slices of stale bread to the park the other day. I fed it to the birds. Like I’ve seen in movies. Old men, New York, park bench, pigeons. Normally, I would just eat it, even though it was a little stale. I like toast. But every time I make toast I think of Ed Begley Jr. riding a stationary bike for fifteen minutes to generate enough power to make his toast, whereas I just push down the lever of my toaster and imagine the coal-fired power plant down the road chugging a little harder. So I thought it would feel good (better, anyway) to toss some crumbs to the birds. I like to watch them peck and hop and flutter. They’re so fragile, so exposed to the elements, so obviously in need of a handout. As I sat there watching them, my mind began to flow down a path that slowly began to make my eyes itch. For some reason I started to think of evolution. I don’t know why. I watched this one little bird, a sparrow, dip his head to peck a crumb, then he tilted his head and looked at me with one eye- the intelligent eye of the universe simultaneously seeing into and reflecting me. How many millons of years were bird-kind here before humankind? When did we first bake bread? When did we first share it with you? Was it before or after we began to hunt small birds to extinction? You don’t need my fucking bread. I stood up, disgusted with myself, blinking the itch-that-was-not-tears-forming from my eyes. Trying to feel good about feeding an extractively farmed wheat product to creatures who’d been taking care of themselves for longer than the human race existed? What was I thinking? And what the fuck is wrong with me, that I can’t even feed the birds? Maybe I’m just not old enough, yet. Maybe I need to move to New York.

No, see, the problem with learning things is you can’t un-know them. You can kind of forget about shit for a while, maybe. You know, a few drinks help, or a joint. Shit’s still there, though. Hexavalent chromium still causes cancer. Conflict metals in your phone were still mined by orphans in the Congo. Remember that shit? Oh, yeah. How could I forget. Oh, wait. I didn’t forget. See? Evil.

Then I had this dream about Armageddon. You were there, against a desolate horizon saturated with the colors of sunset, though the sun itself shone dimly through clouds overhead. You were wearing a homespun tunic, leading a herd of armadillos. You waved your arm, beckoning, and the herd-army surged forward, and began to dig. A trench rapidly appeared, and soon became a chasm, a jagged gash with vertical walls that plummeted into darkness and seemed to be breathing, pulsing. From the chasm crawled a gigantic armadillo, the size of a horse. It was a pale, sickly green. I could see every scale of its armor, every bristly hair. It was wearing a crown. I smelled death as it brushed past me, almost knocking me down. It galloped across the flat plain, toward an approaching army. The battle was beginning. But, no, it had already begun. You stood quietly on the other side of the trench from me, watching. Something glinted dully against your chest. I think it was my locket. Behind you, I could barely make out the shapes of people who looked like they were building something. The silent armadillos stood still around you. All their pointy little faces looked toward the crowd that was shambling closer, raising a cloud of dust.

I could hear noise coming from the opposing army. There was music. And laughter. Voices telling stories. Crying, screaming, angry shouts. But as they approached I could see that almost none of the sounds were coming from their mouths. Some of them were coughing, looking almost as sick as the armadillo-horse, but they were all looking down, gazing fixedly at their outstretched hands, as they walked. They all held smart phones, each blaring something different. The war was already over. They zombie-marched toward the trench, and, without pause, walked off the edge, into the open mouth of the living Earth. I screamed for them to stop, and clawed my own face. My heart pounded up into my throat and I shook with terror as I tried to grab one by the arm and pull him away from the brink, but he slipped right through my fingers and disappeared. You watched, a look of sad resignation on your face. The faces of the armadillos were inscrutable. But as the last of the human army plunged into the chasm the little beasts began to caper about in a sort of victory dance. I stood at the ragged edge and stared down into the abyss. There was nothing to see, and in that moment, as in all other moments, the universal consciousness looked through my eyes and saw the void. I looked up to meet your mournful gaze. Our eyes met like a mirror facing a mirror, the universe seeing through us into itself, and for a moment I wondered if I should take another step forward. Instead, I sat down. Right on the edge. And then I woke up.

I don’t know what’s coming next. I don’t know how it will all turn out. I do know this world is ending. A new one is on the horizon. Can’t quite see it yet, but I can almost feel it. Until it gets here, I’m just marching in place, going nowhere. I wash my clothes. Watch a show online. Eat a chicken sandwich. Every choice collapses a set of possibilities into one reality.

My thoughts wander to my nine-banded neighbors in the woods. And I wonder: what were those people building behind you in my dream? I ask myself that about a hundred times a day, now. Sometimes I sit on my sagging couch and stare down at the empty heart-shaped locket I like to fidget with, clicking it open and closed. Open. Click. Closed. I don’t expect you to know the answer, I mean, it was my dream. Its just something I’ve been wondering.

"Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony." -Mahatma Gandhi