 |
 |
Over a Beer The generator of destiny is indifferent whether it is itself a mind or a system, past or future. It creates a series of mirrors, and assignations with mirrors. It arranges delusive meetings and models of the essential meeting. Whatever Christ was, for example, is disappointing: a user, a taker. More recently, the decay of democracy demands one invoke it everywhere, saying *There is no destiny, only lives* – which is silly. The crank without destiny, the poor who might have had destinies had they been rich are no argument against destiny. And a Friend isn’t someone who asks me to “follow him”; he’s *unequivocally on my side*. I hear his defense of me, feel his supportive fists approach the murk of this place and its voices; if he can defeat them, I’m real. 19th Thai, Szechwanese and Ribs compound a scent that soars when trucks, the stilled and seething trucks of five PM, move. It disturbs, even inside the copy place, a guy who brings his three hundred pounds out for a smoke. Also black, and big in a different way, a beggar is returning towards Dupont. His spiel (“I know how to say Thank You!! I served in the military!! Help the homeless!!”), though repeated many times, brought him no joy this afternoon on K. It’s hard to decipher, except for the salutation, what he says, loudly, through laughter, in passing to his impassive brother. At the corner of N Street, glass and concrete yield to buildings, pastelled, beshrubbed, secure, that were houses a century ago; as if each go-getter had left his slaveys, nanny, wife and kids for the office, which returned. Now lawyers descend for drinks, a meeting, and later ribs, Szechwanese, or Thai. The men are as jacketless as their careers allow; the woman so blondly beautiful (more in angles than curves) and laughing, that a minor Saudi princeling at an outside table envisions her beaten, swaddled, asking *permission. The beggar who served in the military wonders if a certain image can even be imagined. Not in this good world. Dream Before Sleep *I’m leaving*, the rich man (the richest, actually: Dives) subvocalizes, *to become Lazarus*. His private Artificial Intelligence informs him he’s confusing Luke 16 with John 11. *Whatever. As the great door closes behind him, his dependents fold swiftly into one dimension, a point on a screen, which goes out. He admires the profound emotion accompanying the thought *They felt no pain*. Some workmen are painting his flagstones with a barely material polymer that sheds acid rain. Illegals, they murmur with that famous old- world politeness. Taking a last breath of autumn, he thinks how they’ll die at their post. As he crosses his lawn, the grass dies. As he enters his woods, the leaves fall, his remaining accounts are liquidated, the liquid flowing into the most arcane of instruments. For who knows? *Non omnis moriar*, his AI contributes, and translates. An elevator opens in a tree. Dives descends. The tree vanishes. At the end of the shaft lie a bed, a pill, and machines. He wonders what he’ll do eventually with resculpted continents, under clean skies and undoubtedly new trees. He isn’t worried that others will inherit, or if so that they will have no use for him. For business inheres in number and number in nature itself. I began as a numbers-cruncher, he thinks fondly, drifting off. Start again at the bottom …