Exile & The Kingdom of Gears

Home is where you make it, and nowhere else. It can be invented. It can be found. It can be created, stolen, taken away. Home is where Larry Fiskovitz was going one rainy afternoon, in the year 2034, on a Thursday in August, when the cool, drizzling rain pattered through the sky, splashing onto his crisp, black windbreaker/skicoat and he stood on the corner of Marigold and Broca Avenue, attempting to catch a cab the old-fashioned way: by hailing one out of the casual, constant herd of the rest of the traffic. 

Meanwhile, another man by the name of Jerry Ratbaum, a resident of the New Life Center situated in Hammlett New York (formerly Queens) was piloting his "cab"/a 2016 Ford Chrysler with a rebuilt engine and the assorted technological add-ons like advanced gps radar for superior navigation meant to provide the driver (in some--perhaps unkempt, circles, "Captain") with a convenient shorthand in order to collect more passengers, etc. if only the computerized pharmakon wasn't misappropriated by superstitious idiots.... 

**** 

He'd only been waiting about ten minutes, but it felt like over an hour. Larry had something in his nerves that he felt inexplicably adverse to. This nagging property that chattered in his flesh, bones, and he tried and tried to hold some sense of his wife, Carol June, in order to endure it, and maybe relief would emerge but regardless... 

Jerry Ratbaum took notice. He looked through the rain-clean windshield of the Chrysler into the New York atmosphere and its proudly tall infrastructure and the neat cement of the sidewalks and the carbon-friendly blacktop that every auto- & Ludditic vehicle that rode upon to achieve their destination depended on and his eyes met the form and visage of the stranger, Larry Fiskovitz, dressed in black and aqua-blue doing something he'd only ever known of from Wikipedia articles and the like that he'd read from the internet. Jerry Ratbaum became inexplicably thirsty when he saw this. 

He tapped his brakes, switched up the left lever, and found his way to the curb where the stranger, Larry Fiskovitz, stood in his conditional-anxiety becoming conditional-relief. 

It worked. Finally: The thought moved and he opened the rear-passenger, stepped, entered, closed the door behind and tried to get comfortable on the seat. 

Ratbaum was wearing fingerless pleshleather driving gloves stitched with zycron-metal diamonds that only partially winked in the light before neutralizing the effect, as they did now, when Jerry slipped his right hand out of the anterior portion of the vehicle and over the passenger-side headrest, an unbecoming odor, a stale, crusty, yeasty substance moving through the air towards Larry's unsuspecting, unprovoking nostrils. "Looks like I caught you just in time," said Jerry. "You are looking for the ride, aren't you?" 

'The ride?' Larry thought. 'Well, no sense starting off with a grammar lesson.' This stranger was kind enough to pick-up Larry without the usual, official ride-share appointment formalities, so it only followed with his fearless, eccentric shadow/id that some other things that would ordinarily be taken for granted be cast into the winds of fate & redistribution once the gears had been set into motion. "Yeah," said Larry. "Do you know how to get... I mean, are you comfortable to drive up to the Plains?" 

"White Plains?" 

"That's it." 

"Got an exact address for me?" 

"Yeah. It's 79 Appletree Circle. Let me know when you can see it on the screen. It should be at the end of a little cul-de-sac." 

"Big money in those hills," said Jerry. "I imagine you're not doing any discount options today? I don't take any kind of a moral issue, you see my friend, but they kill my profits if you know what I'm saying." 

He should have known better. 

"Actually, we're doing pretty good this year -- me and my wife I mean. Worked hard enough for it. But, so...yeah. You can drive up there okay? What's the full amount?" 

Jerry withdrew the toxic appendage, sloughing through the air of the vehicle where it came to the touchscreen-monitor located in the center of the dashboard where a hundred years prior you'd be lucky to have a functioning radiator. He typed in the destination. The computer computed. They waited approximately five seconds. (Larry thought of what his wife's eyes looked like.) (Like most of the people who lived in the same building as Jerry in the New Life Center, Larry had no fucking idea why Jerry was so excited that it made him smell like that, because anyone who didn't sleep through every last day of science class anymore could tell you a person wouldn't have an odor like that unless their adrenal-hormonal glands were especially responsive to something in their environment.) (Or was Jerry some kind of rogue android, broke out of a Modern Southern Plantation, staffed almost entirely by artificial-labor to manage & harvest the various pharmo- & organic crops that came to blanket those acres long since exorcised of America's shamefully racist past?) 

The computer gave Jerry a figure, the non-adjusted price for a one-way from where they sat on Marigold to where Larry lived in White Plains. 

Jerry told Larry the figure. 

"That sounds good," he said. "I should be able to pay you a little more even. You guys gotta earn a living, too, right?" 

For some reason that wasn't clear to Larry at the time, Jerry was about to start driving to Canada. 

In Canada, it's a little bit easier to get away with a homicide, since it's cold and not as many people talk to each other and the snow proffers the suggestion that time itself is in fact illusory and the sins of deficit and the burden of hopelessness cry insufferably into the anonymous heart of the gone world. 

**** 

The Bayview area descended from sight in the rearview-mirror of the Chrysler and the clear windows and Larry had the briefest inclination to look through the rear-windshield where pedestrians exited & entered buildings in search of food or new housing or old ones or because they were responsible for taking care of the homes or the people and the possessions held within them...and when he turned his head again to look through the front-windshield of the car, Jerry was approaching a yellow-traffic light that turned Red, and he braked. 

Jerry gripped the steeringwheel, as if to threaten the inanimate object with strangling. 

Larry looked out the window as the car rolled back into motion. 

Larry said, "How long you been driving -- You guys still call them cabs or what? I know everyone likes to apply their signature to things. I don't..." 

"Cab is fine," said Jerry. "I've had this one about five years. It is what it is." 

Larry related. But he also knew that the way money affected a life had a tremendous, even concomitant, amount to do with the way one spent it. Before Carol June, Larry often felt overwhelmed by his depression, even to the point where nagging, little voices sliced into his thoughts and sometimes it got so bad he wanted to hurt himself or kill himself. After Carol June, of course, he mainly tried to keep himself balanced. "Can I ask where you live?" said Larry. "I mean, hey. You know where I live." He smiled to show this last statement was a tease, and that Jerry didn't have to answer the question at all, if he didn't want to. 

Jerry said, "I've been staying at the New Life Center in Hammlett for close to 20 years. It is what it is." 

"Twenty years!" responded Larry. Larry was only 27 years old. He hadn't lived anywhere for twenty consecutive years. "I imagine you must have a friend or two there. Are you married? Do you have a partner?" 

Jerry had neither. "Oh yeah... Well, it's hard to make new friends at my age. I won't date myself, but I'll wager I saw more of the Terrorist Attacks on t.v. than you did." 

Larry had seen nothing of the attacks when they happened: he wasn't even a baby or a zygote yet. "No," he said. "I read everything I could about it after the fact. But I no way saw it...you know..." 

"In the flesh." 

"In the flesh." 

They passed underneath a bridge in one of the so-called Friendly Zones of the burroughs and there was other traffic in the street but very little where they drove and their view of the city from within the vehicle rendered the neighborhoods and the people walking through in the course of their business took a quietly surreal, magical tone and impression of itself and Larry thought on the notion of how beautiful his country was at times in spite of all the nightmarish events that took place on its soil and he thought about things like karma and how the legacy of the world is a kind of shared legacy, that, on occasion can be thoroughly avoided and that on most occasions the good & bad luck in things, living & otherwise, will find its way when its time is ready. 

"What's the worst thing you ever seen happen?" said Jerry. (He didn't keep speaking after he said the question the way he usually did.) 

Larry didn't have an immediate answer. Most of the international warfare at that point was as under control as the study of dinosaur fossils and the pressure-control of seacraft in deepsea exploration. He'd seen people yelling at each other in the street, and seen threatening silhouettes in 7-story windows where he'd wonder when he was incredibly frightened that one person might throw the other person out of the window to either kill them or hurt them really, really bad. (The erudite word is 'defenestration'.) "Well, I've never seen a murder except in movies. Maybe a car accident? I don't know. What's the most violent thing that you've ever seen...? Did I ask your name yet? I'm Larry." 

Jerry squinted in the rearview-mirror. Pain in there. "My name is Jerry Ratbaum. (What's it to you?)" 

"Larry, Larry Fiskovitz," he said moving his right hand in-voluntarily towards the anterior-portion of the vehicle...to Ratbaum's annoyed chagrin. Ratbaum, Jerry removed his left hand from the steeringwheel and his ugly digits took one of Larry's fingers and wiggled it like it was a hissing toilet lever or a rattle of some queer fashion. "Desperate to meet ya," he said. 

Larry took his hand and his arm back. "No offense, man. But you got some ways." 

"How's that?" 

"I mean..." The words he wanted to say, he couldn't hear. This gray, slimey fog of consciousness crowded the inside of his skull. "I think I'd like to get out of the car here." 

Ratbaum stopped at the traffic light. He locked the doors. Only he could re-open them. The Chrysler seemed very big, with very little room inside it. "You didn't pay me," he said. (No one in the street paid this any special attention nor did they have any outstanding reason to.) "I need my money, Larry." His odor, somehow, got worse. It reminded Larry of mustard-gas. He wanted to vomit of a sudden, but there was no fresh air to bring into his stomach and to push up the rotten debris that was inhaled and activated into his intestines and so forth, so the abhorrent mess just stayed there. "How do I know you're gonna pay me?" 

"I already said... I would... What's going on here?" 

Ratbaum put the car in gear, started looking for the highway.

**** 

Now, this is critical to the remainder of the story, which is going to take some highly implausible turns, so it's important that you trust my judgement and it's only fair that I provide some psychiatric information about Jerry Ratbaum. I don't mean to humiliate him any further than the burden of his life already has. But then maybe Larry deserves some second-chances, too. 

Jerry Ratbaum was born to what we might politely refer to as subtly abnormal parents: Eileen & Alfred Ratbaum were like most of their neighbors in Virginia in the 1970s. They were terribly confused, seemingly out of habit, by the fluctuating natures of the political parties at that time and they did what people, Virginians and otherwise, do when they are ill-prepared or simply unwilling to confront an emotionally difficult situation: they denied the entry of new information and therefore new questions, and insisted on some pathetic default of the past. Nixon's resignation of the presidency crippled them in their souls. By the time Carter came around, and they were shopping around for pre-schools for newborn-toddler Jerry, their cognitive-navigational brains had been molded into  largely feckless, flaccid hunks of excess amyloid and needy, annoying habits. (In other words, shitty people with a lot of codependent tendencies who never return a simple favor or express gratitude until all other selfish, arrogant options have been thoroughly exhausted.)  

And these were the people that raised Jerry Ratbaum. And he often saw through it for the tragically insecure charade that it was. When he was in his early-twenties, he thought to speak with a psychiatrist. He told the psychiatrist how unfair the world had been to him. He thought that it was unfair that so many people were having sex that he wasn't allowed to. The psychiatrist, who'd stayed awake & present during all of their classes (which isn't all of them) informed Jerry that he was forcing his infatuations on other people and that there was essentially no chance of his ever discovering a lasting sense of happiness, serenity or joy until he had more control over his emotions than they had over him. 

Jerry thought to micromanage every last aspect of his pitiful life. And that's exactly what he did. 

**** 

The following is the word-for-word transcript of Jerry Ratbaum's and Larry Fiskovitz's conversation prior to "the incident." 

LF: Excuse me, Where are we going? 

JR: I'm taking you home. That's what you wanted. 

LF: You just drove clear past the exit. 

JR: That was the wrong exit. 

LF: Wrong exit, bullshit. I know where the fuck I live. What are you doing? What are you trying to do? 

JR: I am claiming my birthrite, Larry. 

LF: You're... What? 

JR: Well, I guess since you & I are about to become a singularity, there's no harm in telling you, I plan to sacrifice you to the god Uranus Socrates, celebrate your corpse by sexually penetrating it, and then devouring the last grams of your soul as they exit the denatured body.... Got all that? 

LF: In the name of god and fuck What is wrong with you? 

JR: Nothing wrong with me. Nothing that can't be fixed. 

[Audio of the vehicle accelerating to something like 90 mph.] 

[Satellite-box readouts confirm this.] 

LF: Listen, man.  I don't know what this is about or if I've done something to offend you but I think you should know that I have a wife at home and she expects me to be there an hour or two after I get out of work and if I don't... 

JR: I'll take care of her after I take care of you. Don't worry about your pretty little wife, Larry. I know how to treat a mom, if you know what I mean. 

LF: You Fuck! [He smashed his medial-bicep against the pyrex window.] [He lunged forward in an attempt to grab Ratbaum and interfere him into crashing the vehicle.] [It didn't work.] 

[Ratbaum checked his mirrors and he found only automated-driver vehicles occupying that particular segment of the northwest-bound Lennon Interstate, and he also saw a vehicle-rest-area, and an in-voluntary thing in his heart pulled the Chrysler into there.] 

[If Larry said anything, the car's internal-microphones didn't register it.] 

[This is when "the incident" happened.] 

**** 

The Incident  

An uncanny blinding flash entered the interior of the vehicle and filled its entirety with a warmly gentle electricity and the car flipped and rolled over the pavement and the concrete and through the oscillating-world and just as soon the flashing presence was extinguished by its own internal-gravity and the chaos of it left the Chrysler head-under-heels or upside-down and slowing in its metal-to-stone grind over the rest-area floor. 

**** 

Larry climbed through his broken window. In the daze, he got to his feet. 

Ratbaum's head was bloody. There was blood in his eyes. The glovebox had opened and a 9mm semi-automatic pistol had dropped onto the ceiling of the car, and Jerry took it before he climbed out of the wreckage of demolished glass & fried, whipped metal. 

Larry was on point. In another year, when he was younger, he might have hesitated. He didn't hesitate now. He charged his would-be kidnapper-murderer and he, Larry, dived into the air before the pistol-wielding freak of nature and when Ratbaum lifted the firearm to kill Larry dead in his tracks Larry's instinctive muscles took executive-override of Jerry and the gun and the gun went off, sent a bullet into his suddenly-relieved heart. 

Larry climbed off of him, off of his slow-breathing, dying body. He looked at him with stunned equanimity. 

There was a young woman with her ten year old son in the parking area with him. (The police would question her later.) 

Larry Fiskovitz thought of his wife, Carol June and how he was going to get home to her. 

If he knew then how long it would take and what he'd have to endure before that he might have never had the courage to begin. 

The word 'exile' came to mind. 

It was, and is, the most perfectly fitting word for his situation. 

****