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birth to her first child. I couldn’t deal with the clouds of perfume and the decaying personalities of the crowd so I wandered off by myself to walk the maze. There were machines that clicked on, set off merely by my presence and I’m walking through a paranoid blur of mechanical men’s voices crawling out of hidden speakers and image after image floating and shifting into fragments of large grainy black-and-white blow-ups of sullen men standing half conscious with pride next to sinister fat canisters looking like overturned pot-bellied stoves. The voices have all the tone and texture of high school film soundtracks explaining the abstract motions of the sperm entering the side of the egg and fertilizing it, or the hunger and desire implicit in the tiny snake swallowing the egg ten times the size of its own head.
    Outside the shedlike buildings are the constant shrill vibrating sounds of jets taking off into the afternoon heat. Through a back window that overlooks the concrete edges of the runways I see a playground with defunct miniature jets and spare broken engines from spacecraft of the past decades. It is a playground for the kids and at that moment there is a family gathering among the hulls of bomber planes and world war two relics for a photo op. Standing in the shadow of a late-model bomber cabled to the asphalt surface of the ground a grandmotherly type gathers three kids in close to her body, fitting them in the frame of their parents’ camera shutter. It’s three generations of a family and everything is so clean and abstract that I’m feeling dizzy. I’m watching all this surrounded by two screens showing speeded up videos of a nuclear reactor being built by men the size of ants. They build and rebuild the reactors in twenty seconds flat. I’m thinking if I owned the place I’d hook the constant smell of rotting flesh into the air-conditioning unit and have all the screens filled with speeded-up films of rotting corpses and the family outside the window is moving to the next plane for the next photo. A man steps out from behind a doorway I hadn’t noticed before and offers me his hand in greeting, asking if I’d like a cup of coffee. He looks like the kind of guy who’d one day end up in an alcohol detox center studying snakes and insects. I turn away without a word; I’ll never shake the hand of someone I might be fighting against in wartime.
    We are born into a preinvented existence within a tribal nation of zombies and in that illusion of a one-tribe nation there are real tribes. Some of the tribes are in the business of sucker-punching peoples psyches in the form of maintaining the day-to-day job of government—they sell the masses a pile of green-tainted meat; i.e., a corrupted and false history as well as a corrupted and false future, and although that meat stinks of rot and pus and blood, this particular tribe extols these foul emissions as if they were virtues made of glorious sensitivities: “Raise Ole Glory while we do it to them again …”
    Then there are other tribes which work hand in hand with the government, offering slices of meat in the form of doubletalk; or hope —hope as a chain of submission. Then there are the tribes that suckle at the breast of telecommunications every evening after work and are fatally lulled into society’s deep sleep. Day after day they experience waking nightmares but they’ve either bought the con of language from the tribe that offers hope, or they’re too fucking exhausted or fearful to break through the illusion and examine the structures of their world.
    There are other tribes that experience the X ray of Civilization every time they leave the house or turn on the tv or radio or pick up a newspaper or when they suddenly realize their legs have automatically come to a halt before a changing traffic light. A civil war and a national trial for the “leaders” of this country,