Loop Day - Chapter One
Day of the Devil
Foreword: Time to get this “Loop Day” Trump-again novel going in this loop year election cycle — Trump on calamitous repeat.
For the good or the bad, “Loop Day” is short, for a novel, unlike “Most Revolutionary” and with perhaps more modest ambition, less visionary. Yet it seems that just such a novel should be created, in an even halfway decent society, or what is culture for? Literature, fiction can help us decolonize the mind, as Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o notes. Decolonize writ broadly. That might be its best use in this desperate day and age of propaganda especially, its greatest stimulus and appeal. If the literati won’t write it, it’s left to someone else’s will. Surely one must flyte the flyter, agitate, and lacerate the retrograde toxic leader of white Empire that is Trump and Trumpism and state-capitalist politics in America — a metastasized manifestation of some of the most destructive, brutal, and bigoted forces of empire ever to be found on planet Earth.
LOOP DAY — A SERIALIZED NOVEL
In this partisan thriller novel, two low-level Oval Office aides relive the day of their deaths over and over again, in a doomsday time loop that will end only if they foil the plan to assassinate the President and save the world.
"The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living." -Karl Marx
Young and strong, and bleeding profusely from his gut, our hero, keen Navajo Presidential Aide, Leif Oak stands with his back to the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office, a bloody sword sticking out through his stomach. This is not the way he had foreseen his career going, speared by an eviscerating sword, his life spilling out in brilliant bursts. Stabbed in the back by the President.
President Tyrump leans over from the other side of the desk squeezing the hilt of the sword.
Surely Tyrump can slaughter his workers in the Oval Office and not lose a single vote — such is the culture of white Empire, the megalomania that backs Con Don Tyrump’s cult of personality. Bully Boy Don. Carnival Barker Don. White Supremacist Don. Con Don.
In fact, far from losing support, Con Don might gain votes by such dastardly deed. So he thinks, having pierced Leif Oak unintentionally when he had meant only to pretend to play war with his ancestral Bavarian sword.
Tyrump keeps tight his grip on the hilt of the sword, momentarily stunned by what he has done. Then he plays it off. Tyrump is an experienced actor who knows instinctively how to front a role, and not just any role, the King role, the preeminent part on the main stage of the whole wide world.
Shysters have always been the best Presidents of Empire, in America as elsewhere, going all the way back to the Original Gangster, George Washington. Some would say that the Top Office of the American state was immaculately designed for the Shyster-in-Chief. How else to form a slave-holding, Native-slaughtering, land-wrecking Empire and call it a Constitutional democracy? You need that bloody Shyster-in-Chief, every time.
And a fervent, deluded, bigoted citizenry. To whom Tyrump today holds the firmest claim. The quintessential Tyrump voters despise democracy and pompously point out that America is technically not a Constitutional democracy but a Constitutional republic wherein only entitled citizens have the right to select representatives to rule in the public interest. This is why the purest Tyrump voters feel so self-righteous in their efforts to deny the vote to people they look down upon, are bigoted against, or otherwise fear or despise.
Only entitled citizens count in Tyrumplandia.
This putrid claim is that a person must be more than alive and willing to legally vote on a stolen continent that the purest Tyrumpists thievishly think is theirs by Divine Right. Yes Sire, one must be an entitled citizen to legally vote in America, be more like the Masters and Lords of olde. Make America Medieval Again. MAMA. No Sire, life itself is not enough to be Constitutional in America. “Life” not so much a value, after all. America is not a democracy! So say the Good Old Boys. Noble geniuses all. Perish the thought! America is a Grand Old Republic! Worthy of a Grand Old Party of contemptuous entitlement and dripping red wealth.
Yes, Kind Readers, there goes the right to vote as defined by a bunch of Native-slaughtering, slave-owning, rich and pillaging, superstitious dead white men – dreadful centuries gone by. Ship of deadly tools. You see, Tyrump and his purest supporters feel infinitely validated by the naughty scribbles — some call it Evil — of this long since rotted crew of Founding Scoundrels. The purest Tyrump voters act in endless titillation, full of necrophiliac and incestuous urges for the sordid European clans of conquerors with blood-thirsty appetites that drove, that drives the European invasion over the continent and world, today, ongoing. Continents and worlds that the invaders claim without irony as their own.
Take merely one of the Tyrumpists' oh so noble forefathers, General George Custer — he who fiendishly pranced across the Great Plains with the US Army in an attempt to build his resume to run for President by slaughtering indigenous Americans, the conventional path, only to be himself slaughtered by those he would wipe from the face of the Earth, good European invader that he was. Sometimes the Empire gets nipped back along its blood-bounding way.
Now, here today comes Con Don Tyrump fiendishly prancing across the cheap plywood and electronic stage of the Incorporated Estates of America denouncing and attacking Black and Brown refugees and citizens and women and children and the impoverished and the neglected and the health-wrecked, the destitute, the victims of Empire in order to gain the Presidency of the World! Tyrump and all the bully boy presidents want nothing less than to fully create the Incorporated Estates of Dearth (yes, a geo-political IED) — at the point of a gun — that is, by way of the Incorporated Estates of the American Empire's existing global military force — worldwide installations and weaponry that already dominate land, sea, air, and space — backed by the Empire's bone-crushing economic power — marauding corporations, investment banks, and sanctions galore.
President Con Don Tyrump is the very apotheosis of the terrible fixed idea held by his purest supporters — Death to Democracy! — an idea that is so horribly wrong that one cannot go too far in denouncing it. Or shall we go-along-to-get-along and subtly nuance the thing and call this malignant notion perhaps, say, “misguided”? Well, then, Tyrump's purest supporters are misguided in the light they are blind to and brainwashed against.
You're not a serious or lively person, you're not clever or big-hearted — you're a weak sell-out and you're wrong and dishonest — if you want to see the thing subtly limned and nuanced, the rapacious way of the purest Tyrumpists — those most pure Tyrump souls who accuse honest intellectuals of being know-it-all, above-it-all, dumb-as-a-wall, bleeding flakes and fake tender heartless hearts.
There's no point in trying to assuage bad faith actors or the wholly duped. Others certainly know them more than they do Others because they don't know Others any more than they care to. The purest Tyrumpists are very skilled at being wrong even as they think they are right. They are certainly of the right — tyranny — and opposed to the left — freedom. And they are certainly not in the right in being of the right — even though they think they are. If they even care, which many do not.
The purest Tyrumpists are among the most brainwashed, uncaring, and careless people in the world. And many are very, very rich. Some think they see the Divine Light. Some are Liars of Empire in an Empire of Lies. Insanity abounds where so much foolish and fraudulent and deadly make-believe is both fostered and allowed to fester. This make-believe often comes with as much power as reality — or more – as much appeal and force as sanity — or more. Better the Devil you think you know by your own good day than the Devil you wildly imagine in those nasty Others’ wicked, wicked nights.
And so in this sad, bad day of their lives, the purest Tyrumpers say, “Fuck 'em all.” The purest ethos of Tyrumpists is to act tough, bully along, and pretend to righteousness, self-righteousness, no matter how bloody or insane.
And so it is that on this fateful day, Dear Leader Con Don Tyrump thrusts with his scurrilous blade wreckingly and without remorse, and Leif Oak takes the sword through his guts, from behind, from the incendiary aspiritual leader of the Incorporated Estates of Dearth.
Poor Leif is torn in half, and in no way surprised.
Fortunately — and not — today is Loop Day.
And what of my own seeming self, as the teller of this tale that strips bare the current state of The Fake and Unholy Disunion? A discorporeal entity of time? Let it be. Let me bear ripe witness to the ever-lethal trap, this endlessly cruel Day of Our Lives.
You can't shock a particular sort of viewpoint, victimizer or victim. You can't shock Leif Oak, not by now. And, if you're a novelist ambitious to the hilt (so to speak) you've made it your purpose in life to see shit that most people can't even dream of or won't because they don't dare, or they don’t wish to, or they don’t want to. Not yet, anyway. Meanwhile the blood-soaked vampires of the world and the dumb-as-a-rock brain-eating zombies are so hopelessly and destructively puritanical in their brute violence that they try to ban as many novels as they possibly can — just like the witch hunters and the idea killers of old. Witch! Witch! Witch! These Crusaders are medieval and waging a Holy War in what they think is Divine Light but is actually make-believe bullshit. Witch! Witch! Witch! They speak of Hell because they know it — they created it. Witch! Witch! Witch! They are the literal Original Gangsters of Hell. Here to haven Hell on Earth. They point the finger of accusation at everyone but themselves. Witch! Witch! Witch! Unwitting or not, and ironically so, the witch hunters are easily among the most possessed beings on the planet. Witch! Witch! Witch!
And the level of fraud is almost beyond comprehension. Right — the purest Tyrumpists know they are become the Evil they spout on about, and they don't care, because they are like their White Supremacist, White Empire, old dealer Con Don Tyrump himself. They've played the long con their entire lives. They've become the Con. They are the grotesque Con Don mini-hes. The purest devotees of the Con Art. The witting and wealthiest among the purest Tyrumpists are easily among the worst people in the world — all menace and thug exploitation. Not at all ameliorated by their thinking or pretending that they are among the best people in the world!
Then there are those hapless Tyrumpists who don't have the faintest idea what they are doing in their brainwashed work. Not even when they think they do. Especially then. Does not make them any less damaging to the vote. They've been fooly Conned, their brains fooly conditioned to the habit of fooly Conning right along. They've become fool Con Don addicts, fool Con Don believers, fool Con Don Nuts. And they fooly think it's real! Vibrant flesh-and-blood brains turned into synthetic counterfeit plastic flexing any which way the Con Don pushes. It's Sad, it’s Bad — in Con Don speak.
Meanwhile, most Tyrumpists may be a psycho-babbling mix of the two — the Lying Cons and the Fool Cons. Lying Fool Cons. Supplicants, lethal swords of the King of Empire Con Don himself. They all would be ignored or isolated if there were not so much rich support for their profitable twisted spirits and their brazen cuckoo bird callousness. A mendacious, malicious type of cultural money laundering. Normalization of the corrupt. Making the illicit legit. These are the cultural foot-soldiers of the White Empire of the Big Buck.
How dare you speak power to truth?! People will get mad!!!
Tell it to Leif Oak. Tell it to Dhyna Durango. Tell it to the fucking Marines. Go pound sand. All that. Or tell it to anyone merely sane who is being torn apart and smashed to pieces for every bad reason on Earth.
Then tell it to the giant teratorn of this stubborn Loop Day narrative who haunts the Rose Garden by the Oval Office and stalks the dire days become Day of Dhyna Durango and Leif Oak. And see what kind of reaction you get from the giant teratorn.
Dearest Dhyna will be met soon, Patient Reader. And the extinct but intensely angry giant teratorn, as well, who arrives screaming into the day with the long-buried demands of the dead.
One might channel Nobel Prize in Literature winner, Wole Soyinka, or even the First Amendment of the US Constitution, to note that “Criticism like charity begins at home.” Imagine that.
Some have.
So then, by all means — ban this book! Censor it! Censure it! Gatekeep! You do so in Royal Defiance of the letter and the spirit of one of the actually inspired quality moments — the First Amendment — in the Tyrumpists’ Truly Holey Constitution.
Surely there's a special place in Tyrumpists’ Hell for the book banners of the world, the run-of-the-mill idea exorcists and their unwitting or willing dupes. The insidious movement to brainwash in the name of a fraudulent purity is part of the game run by the theologist extremological shock troops and their ideology of Empire. Pious Moms and pugilist Dads. One might even consider it a sad, sad book these days where can be found no attempt to ban, censor, gatekeep, or torch it out of existence by the purest Tyrumpists — and also by their status quo liberal yet reactionary-in-effect counterparts. The hammer of Empire falls both as hard as the words of a culture war Tyrumpist, and soft as the keystroke of a financial warlord Corporatist.
Let’s not allow poor Leif Oak to linger too long in his painful, pitiful, eviscerated state, impaled by the corporate-state on its grinning gleaming sword, Kind Readers. We'll return to that moment of the macabre soon. Meanwhile, these recriminations, extended denunciations, may be as much the story as the drama itself. Bear with, if you wish to see Leif Oak rise from the dead to triumph against those who would reign over his spilt blood in this too Terminal Day.
Okay, okay, Impatient Readers! You think I don't hear you banging in my head? Back to dearest Leif, his fate, our fate, and the eternal play.
Joint Chiefs Chairman, General Krushin Karvin Kilman stands shocked in front of Presidential Aide Leif Oak who doubles over the killing edge of the sword in front of President Con Don Tyrump.
With both hands, Leif reflexively grabs the blade that sticks out through his belly. His hands then bleed in streams.
General Kilman has gone catatonic at the unnerving blood of the scene in the otherwise pristine Oval Office. Leif Oak and Con Don too are immobile, if clutching opposite ends of the sword that entirely guts Leif.
“Christ!” says President Tyrump.
“God oh God!” says General Kilman.
“My meds!” shouts Tyrump. “My med man!”
Leif bleeds from his guts like end times. His work in the Oval is indeed that of Addict Con Don’s on-the-spot nurse and ready rapid drug tailor, as well as impromptu gopher, Presidential pin cushion, and general punching bag to Lord Tyrant Tyrump.
How on Earth did someone of Leif Oak’s demographic disposition land in Tyrump’s Oval at all? The crazy optical dance of bigotry is not always what it may seem. More often than they like to admit, even the bigots make a pact with their fantasized Devils if they believe it’s the only way to get the goods they so desire, or need.
And so the Socialist Resistance covertly maneuvered both Leif Oak and Dhyna Durango into their oblique White House slots, as a last ditch attempt to control the worst of Con Don’s mercurial moods and terminal machinations in power. Not to mention as incidental espionage for the people. Dhyna and Leif are the Peoples’ spies, the Peoples’ eyes in the Oval. Though to no entirely great point, Dhyna would judge. As so would Leif. In fact, so ineffective has Leif felt in the Oval Office, so insufferable has been the maltreatment — long before the killer blade — that he wanted to quit more than anything. Only the warm and steady presence and the insistence of his co-revolutionist lover Dhyna Durango kept him on in the execrable job.
And yet now he has been killed by it.
With one last impossible effort, Leif squeezes the blade of the bloody sword, slicing deeper both hands, which ooze in fatal sheen.
In desperate attempt to not do nothing, General Krushin Karvin Kilman grabs Leif by both arms and jerks him off the sword. Simultaneously, President Tyrump – offended by his ancestral Bavarian sword being tainted and smeared by the impure blood of such a commoner – rips back, tearing the red blade out of the shredded guts of Leif.
Tyrump falls into his chair and drops the bloody sword onto a large map of Texas that covers the Resolute Desk.
“There will be blood today!” shouts Tyrump.
Leif staggers to the near wall, collapses to floor. Gasping.
“God oh God!” says General Kilman.
“That guy supplies my meds,” says Tyrump. “Who will get me my meds?”
“Medic!” screams Kilman.
Leif vomits blood. Dies.
Satisfied now, Greedy Reader, by that little bit of undignified and unholy and most gruesome action? A hero falls. Don't worry. We're merely getting warmed up to Leif’s greater rise from the dead, from the defeated, the dispatched, to the victorious, to the real, to the righteous, and — if not to ultimate revolution — at least to relief, release, and to some not insignificant and hopeful reprieve from the slaughter of his own mind and body in this ghastly day and age.
Yes, yes, and yes, don't worry, Edgy Reader, it's all very structural by design and designed by structure of a particular sort. Of good form, by good form, whereby form is most unique in shape when unique of content. Meanwhile, our story holds to the two-eye nature of story in that authors pursue themes as characters pursue goals — a story that flows from a main character pursuing a goal, in a challenging and dynamic world, where characters suffer, struggle, and overcome (or succumb). Can it not be that constant pursuit of a goal is as crucial in story as is constant focus on the one thing the story is truly about – the theme? How to be human in an inhuman world? How to be revolutionary in a reactionary world? How to be a survivor among killers? And so this story maintains both character focus on goal and author focus on theme — given our two-eye nature of story and mind that marks the mortal soul of a life, religious or not, that vast inner sea of who you really are, and the eternal swim of what you might become.
Who are you really? And what have you done? What is the scope of your sea? And what is the direction of your swim in the brute nature of this cosmic world that contains us?
Leif would like to know the answers to it all, even as he lies, for the moment, in death.
Okay? So that’s the nature of the structure of the story that might help us out here, the protagonist's relentless pursuit of their goal, the author's pursuit of their theme, and the drive of waves and particles, narrative engines that reveal emotion, insight, wonder, delight. Each scene or section — as you may see — illuminates and evokes theme to give the story artistic unity, integrity — to save Leif’s and Dhyna’s and our own true life. So if you think I don't know what I'm doing here, Doubtful Reader — well — strap in and buckle up, because we’re going in fast and furious on one Jonah’s Whale of a dynamically designed ride.
But first, do you think, Skeptical Reader, I can’t help but ask, do you wish to hear what more might be said about the purest Tyrumpists and their vaunted long-sought Dystopia? Righteous indignants with their one idea that is catastrophically wrong. Of course the purest Tyrumpists say the same thing about leftists, but they are wrong and in the wrong. And leftists are not — my blunt working theory — because why not? It's clear. The purest Tyrumpists bray their one idea about America and the world, and it could not be worse in being so belligerent, so vicious, so bogus, so richly bankrupt.
Long ago, so very long ago, King of the Realm, George of England, was removed as Conqueror of America only to be replaced with a new form of King of Empire culminating in king cretin Con Don Tyrump today — he who continues the centuries-old slaughter of impoverished Blacks and Browns across all borders, and the ongoing enslavement on plantations called prisons of impoverished and attacked Blacks and Browns and plenty of busted Whites. Doing their deathly time in these internal concentration camps. Dungeons. You know, those infernal places of the Mid-Devil Ages into which the great Kings flung and doomed the desperate, the willful, the disobedient peoples of the realm, when not merely butchering them outright.
Can it be mere coincidence that Con Don's near ancestors hail from the German Bavarian white supremacist heartland of the Nazis? There it is. Not to mention that the ex-wife of the blubbering campaign orator writes in her memoir of Con Don’s keeping Hitler's book of speeches by his bed. Germans, ironically and tellingly, are by far the largest traditional immigrant group to America. And Con Don, born with a silver spoon in his ass, has predictably risen to the damnedest place in the world — Shyster-in-Chief, blood-red in tooth and wallet.
Kind Reader, might you insist that all this is too much sordid background for The Story of Our Day? Taboo background at that?
Is it, though? I think we can a have a little bit more honest and more expressive and more meaningful and more heartfelt literature than that. One does not wish — does one — to do the witch burners work for them in advance. Witch! Witch! Witch!
Be that as it may, let's move on to the remainders of The Story of the Day of Our Lives in this potentially last and mangled atomic apocalyptic climate collapse of a Loop Day. Or, Doomsday Time Loop. Or, The Long Crying Death of the Mighty Extinct Giant Teratorn. Call it what you will, it's a Day we can only hope to survive to never forget.
What might be some other good book-banning titles for such a tale?
Life 'n Death in the Fracking Oval Office of the Filching White Empire.
All That's Taboo.
American Taboo.
People Will Get Mad!
Ad Infinitum.
Okay, Restless Readers, back to Leif Oak, to the action line of the story, to the heroic pursuit of the main goal: life itself.
With no memory of being killed and no idea that the day has reset in a time loop of unknown origin, Presidential Aide Leif Oak stands behind President Tyrump who sits at the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office staring at a huge news screen on the wall.
A more than life-size Wolfe News Moderator reports in disbelief: “After last night’s bombing of the historic Alamo, President Tyrump is planning an invasion of both Texas and Mexico. Yes, you heard correctly. An invasion of the Lone Star state.”
Unhealthy and morose, plopped like a big shapeless lump of incredibly ambulatory cheese and — to use his own words against him — garbage at the Resolute Desk, President Tyrump hypnotically strokes his ancestral Bavarian sword. Con Don Tyrump would appear to be the very “garbage people” that he decries, with no irony, though he is very rich garbage, and supremely positioned, very dangerous in power.
Tyrump curls his upper lip at the Wolfe News anchor.
“My wonderful glorious invasion,” he says. “My gentle and lovely incursion.” He taps his billion dollar nails on the smooth where not sharp blade of the sword.
Leif looks away from the dispiriting news into the Rose Garden where he sees a massive bird land with an impressive thud, as if — rather than floating gracefully down — the giant teratorn superhero-hopped off the roof of the White House.
Fierce. Spreads wings. Thirty foot wingspan.
“Impossible,” says Leif, remembering from science class. “That's a teratorn. Extinct since the Ice Age. Heaviest flying bird in history.”
The teratorn hisses at Leif.
“Is the Cabinet ready, Leif, goddamn it!” says Tyrump.
Leif checks his phone.
“Soon, Sir.”
Leif looks out the windows again into the Rose Garden. The teratorn is gone.
“Leif, did my Chief of Staff die?”
Leif responds with tact: “He did indeed meet his end, Mr. President.”
“Did I replace him?”
“Not yet, Sir.”
“So it’s just you and me running the ship, Leif?”
“Sir, it’s just you.”
“That’s good.”
“Very efficient, Sir.”
Like an enormous turkey vulture eyeing potential roadkill on a country lane, Con Don Tyrump watches the approach of kitchen aide Dhyna Durango, a young Puerto Rican woman, as she brings him his diet cola. The good thing, from Con Don's perspective, is that a server like Dhyna Durango is very affordable. The bad thing, from Tyrump’s awful eye, is that Dhyna Durango is an obvious border crosser.
Dhyna's ethnicity, her race, her skin color make Tyrump both reflexively angry, nervous, morbidly suspicious, and — he could never admit it — tantalized. Here she strolls, even struts in his land, all angles soft and motions dizzying, independent and standoffish, in his territory, his space, walking all over his rights — in the very Oval Office itself! — in the Whitest of Houses! So Dhyna moves, in face of Tyrump, like a stealthy border crosser, smug, he believes, in possession of his diet cola.
What is to be done about this invasion of even Tyrump's own house, the House of the Nation, by these affordable Others? True, two of Tyrump's wives are immigrants too, and all of his grandparents, and his mother was an immigrant as well — but they were white! And worthy! Not brown! Not black! Not bad! Why cannot the entire world be all-white, blonde, and blue-eyed? That would not be Devilish at all! Why, it would be saintly, ethereal, snowy, pure.
If a bit bloody.
And so it goes. This is the sick and perverted legacy of those whites who feel threatened by the extended Day, by the formerly captured and enslaved black people driven and controlled by white merchants and white slavers and by the formerly exterminated indigenous brown people in the land white Europeans and their descendants continue in systematic ways financial and social to attempt to conquer. Dhyna knows too well. To Dhyna, President Tyrump is merely one in an unending line of bigoted bosses that she has seen and dealt with through life — a psycho sort so often sitting at the height of power, in the middle of The Fucking Day.
Though much more to the point at the moment, Dhyna and only Dhyna is aware of the otherworldly time loop that holds Leif and herself and who knows how many others in the fearsome grind of the Oval Office, in the White House, on this fatal fateful final day.
Leif and Dhyna are lovers. They tried to keep it on the down low at work with great success. But this eternal infernal stretch of time changes everything for Dhyna. She no longer cares who knows what, given the unprecedented demands of her day. The relevance of her office love life to an office work life that never changes — she sees no ramifications worth worrying about anymore. She now could not care less if even the lumpy old letch Con Don Tyrump is forced to deal with the fact that she and Leif are lovers — because why not? They all die this day. Each and every one. Every time. Each and every cycle. Might as well let out the last secrets before the big boom ends it all again. And again. Again.
Lizard-eye Tyrump fixates on Dhyna's shape — so full and promising to his pineal mind. (Nothing against lizards but evidently this is the rather primitive level that generates what might be considered thought in Tyrump.) Tyrump's eyes dribble out of his head, passing from Dhyna's swell of breasts to her methodically working butt and on down to her shockingly human legs and toes — he simultaneously consumes her and dismisses her as server — while piercing her into the musty old museum case of his shabby brain. Trying to grab her all the way around her back by the spine with his brute eyes he would swallow her whole if he could. There is something about Dhyna though that he finds to be indigestible. He projects and thinks he knows what it is. She is a dark witch. Tyrump is certain.
He is both repelled and fascinated by this outlander of a kitchen aide come to present to him and to serve him as he properly must be presented to and served. So very Royally. The pleasure he finds in being served by a witch in the White House remains one of the more appealing parts of his day. Not that he could ever admit to it. But it’s almost on the order of carrying out his plan to invade Texas and Mexico simultaneously. Such is the potential and feared power of the likes of Dhyna Durango over Con Don Tyrump and his ilk.
Tyrump flicks the tip of his grabby tongue over his bloodless lips as Dhyna carries the diet cola toward him, for him. On a small metal tray. With a coaster and a napkin. In a classic glass bottle. With a plastic straw. Per Creepy Con Don's pleasure and request. Here she comes.
“Mr. President, your diet cola.”
Dhyna hesitates, then sets the napkin and coaster on the map of Texas that entirely covers the desk. She places the cola on the coaster near Dallas. Dhyna feels a complex blend of bad vibes for Dallas, something to do with the snotty white wealth of the place made plain by the old TV show that runs on endless repeat. Not that Dallas is only one thing, Dhyna knows. Far from it. There's a different Dallas – much less well known than the one typically shown on the big money screen.
Tyrump raises the cola and manages to tear his gaze from Dhyna's body to look into her eyes for a darting moment. He feels instantly stabbed, seen, misunderstood by Dhyna’s laser look. She seems to be telling him something. It seems to be, “Fuck you, you Cretin, you Creep.”
Tyrump is knocked back. Briefly jolted, then frozen. He does not drop the cola.
Maybe she’s having a bad day, he thinks. He recovers.
“To my great and glorious day.” He toasts himself gaudily.
Con Don Tyrump sips his cola and strokes his sword and returns to watching his swaggering, threatening presence onscreen where news of his announced invasion of Texas and Mexico is reported nonstop.
Nothing quite like his ultra-enhanced image on the big screen. God, he loves to look at himself, listen to himself. He is his own idol. What a figure he cuts. The screen makes him look even bigger than actual three-dimensional life, especially to himself.
It's the strangest sort of advanced technology, digital beams burning people's brains with neuron-killing power. Studies show: the more you watch, the less you know. And Tyrump, like his carefully courted and counted faithful flock of loyal-consumers-in-training, devout to all things would-be holy but in reality very shitty, he watches and is watched constantly by these digital beams of mental evisceration. Con Don Tyrump watches and is watched as if by artificial hawks flying high on shifty currents of predatory algorithms.
And what of Dhyna Durango? What of Leif Oak? Caught in the Day's loop for endless months, with no one in the know to talk to, Dhyna has lost track of the passing days, weeks, eons. She is no thug ruler like Sisyphus, so why does she need to roll that damned boulder of his to the top of the mountain each day, only to see it roll back down again, to be pushed back up by her the very next day. Which is every day. The same fucking day! And the next. And the next. And goddamn it!
Today, yet again, Dhyna takes the long way out of the Oval Office. She carries the metal serving tray like a shield against Con Don Tyrump and circles toward her fellow doomed captive, Leif.
If this Devil's delight of a day is Dhyna's life forever now, her precious one and only existence, she could use less of it. Maybe that's the point of making up the afterlife, to lead people to tolerate the intolerable, the one and only life that always kills you and everything in the end. Death, as it happens, is part of a full life, not that you want it any too soon. Your own death can be extremely interesting or entirely Evil — and may be avenged if need be or, more likely, not. Either way, people are inclined to put it off — the final straw. Somehow even a tiny, creeping, miserable bit of life is perceived to be typically more compelling than oblivion. To meaningfully endure, or better to escape, or far better yet to change the remorseless day is the point of being human. So Dhyna thinks. For one and for all. And all for one. She knows it's an old and incomplete thought. But goddamn it — this life of hers now — it truly sucks to be so totally on her own.
Dhyna stops beside Leif and taps him with the serving tray.
“What's going on, Leif?” she says, though she thinks she knows.
Leif nods to the Rose Garden. “Strange day. Dhyna, strange day.”
What passes for civilization seems so often utter nonsense and barbarity to Dhyna, especially now that time no longer goes by, each day always fatal, each and every afternoon terminal, this day the same as the other day, forever and ever, on end, without end. Amen — not. Dear gods — let it be otherwise if only for once. As for the Rose Garden, Dhyna feels eternally beset, bored by the flowers, bushes, thorns, and dull patch of lawn. No one ever promised Dhyna a Rose Garden, and here she fucking got it forever and ever without fucking end.
Dhyna Durango knows other things too and wonders if she increasingly sees the way out of this endless day. She hasn't been able to fit all the pieces together yet. Something is missing. Something always goes wrong. She could use some goddamn help here.
She could use a change. The far too pristine Rose Garden seems to change least of all aside from the giant teratorn, coming and going at unpredictable moments. Unfortunately, only Dhyna is able to see the teratorn. As far as she knows. That is, until today.
Dhyna puts herself directly in front of Leif and pushes her left index finger into the center of his chest. “He’s going to kill you, Leif. He always does. One way or another – personally, impersonally. You die. And we all die. Beware the sword.”
Misunderstanding, Leif says, “This whole place is killing me, Dhyna. I want to live before I die. Let’s get to the farm on the Rez. Come with me. Today.”
“I mean literally. He will kill you.”
Still misunderstanding, Leif nods. “I know, right. I can't leave without you, Dhyna. I won’t do it. Can’t do it.”
“I know,” says Dhyna. “I know you can't, Leif. I can't leave either. Doesn't mean I don't try.”
“We must.”
“Yes, we must.”
“Come with me, Dhyna. Today.”
“We're a day late, Leif. And maybe a trillion dollars short.”
“Don’t say that, Dhyna. I’ll get it going again. We can make a success. We know how. We should go now. Screw this shit.”
“Yes,” says Dhyna. “This shit is most entirely screwed.”
Leif thinks of simpler and greener days on the broken farm of his family, his people. He pictures Dhyna and himself working in and around the greenhouse, tightening downspouts connecting the roof to water tanks, using hand carts to wheel heavy fifteen gallon pots of soil, positioning everything in full sun. They take a break. It's so hot. They wear shorts and tee shirts, every bit of skin covered in sweat. They hold hands, damp embrace, their warm kiss in the bright day.
Leif wakes from his quick daydream and finds himself holding hands with Dhyna behind the back of President Tyrump in the Oval Office.
“Wake up, Leif,” says Dhyna.
“I am,” says Leif.
“He's going to kill you. I’m telling you.”
“I know.”
“No you don't.”
Tyrump amps the volume on the news, mostly reports of himself discussing his desire to invade Texas and Mexico both, to take possession of the vast oil and gas fields as punishment for yesterday's bizarre and suspicious modern-day bombing of the Alamo — that stone-walled trap of the mind for tourists, where a bunch of white settler invaders back in the day anticipated Custer in trying to kill as many browns as possible in a land to which they were not welcome and did not belong before succumbing to their gun-first fate.
“Texicans!” shouts the image of President Tyrump from within the electronic liquid of the screen in front of the actual President Tyrump. “Texicans are to blame! Neither Texan or Mexican! People with no allegiance to any country, to no God. These are worthless non-souls who deserve to be deprived of their possessions — oil, gas, gold, copper, turquoise, you-name-it. Godless men. And women. Bombing the Holy Mission that is the Alamo.”
Leif tries to comprehend the sheer depth of the outrage of these most recent events called news, and he tries to think of one thing actually new about it. He struggles.
“Crazy like an ox,” says Leif. “Everything a bullshit story. Each one as bitter, bold, and bad as the one before. Time for another dose of his meds, I think.”
“You should double the dose,” says Dhyna. “We live longer in the day when you double the dose.”
“I should be dosing and growing new things far from here,” says Leif. “My grandfather said he knew I would come back one day. To the land, to the people, to his dream of feeding people in the outposts and in the communities.”
“You must,” says Dhyna. “And we’ll video-log the work. The revolution — the permaculture revolution will be monetized if not televised.”
They are amused. Then grim.
“If we can ever get away from DC,” says Dhyna.
“We will,” says Leif. “Come with me today.”
“We can’t. You can’t. I can't. No one can. Not today. Ask me tomorrow. I want you to ask me to come away with you again tomorrow, as if it were today, Leif. Because I will then. Tomorrow, I’ll go. Not today. I can’t.”
“What’s the difference — tomorrow or today?”
“Everything goes to shit today, Leif, I’m telling you. The whole fucking thing goes nuclear. It’s one colossal climate collapse of a day. That’s why.”
“But that’s every day anymore,” says Leif.
“It certainly is,” says Dhyna.
Dhyna looks past Leif into the Rose Garden. Without turning, she nods at Tyrump. “Because of him, I guess. People like him.”
“Unbelievable, isn’t it?” says Leif.
“Yes, they are.”
“The insanity.”
“Yes, it is.”
“And the support for it.”
There's no sign of the Teratorn in the Rose Garden. A shame really. Most days the impossible dead bird seems the realest thing in the world to Dhyna. Sometimes the only real thing because it too lives outside all time, alone with Dhyna, alone in her world.
“The old Con can’t stop us,” says Leif.
“Oh, he can.”
“We're free to leave.”
“No, we're not.”
“You watch,” says Leif. “End of the day, I'm out of here.”
“Okay,” says Dhyna. “Me too. I hope.”
Leif smiles and squeezes Dhyna's free hand. “We only need to make it happen, Dhyna. I knew you would say yes.”
“Did I?”
Dhyna scans the Rose Garden for the teratorn.
“Every day anymore,” says Dhyna. “It's always the same.”
“That changes today,” says Leif.
“We need to survive it first,” says Dhyna. “And everyone else needs to survive the day with us.”
“It's only one day,” say Leif.
Dhyna has been through too much for too long to know that to be remotely true. “Okay, Leif.”
President Tyrump slams his right fist onto the map of Texas on the Resolute Desk. “Lovebirds! What’s the big cabal?”
President Tyrump twists in his chair and looks at Leif and Dhyna lewdly. “Are we going for some touchy grabby feely time today?”
Dhyna whispers to Leif: “We need to survive this day. The sword. Beware. Stay alive.”
