And the Mountains Shall Labor and Bring Forth . . .

prologue (continued)

He slides smooth into that driverseat and throws the keys into the ignition. Pumps the gas, revs the engine, idles out of the parking lot – no need to showboat. Back on the road, he winds along the bright beaten path and onto the highway. The punk music pumps. He flicks the butt of his cigarette out the driverside window and cranks it tight, exhales the last lungful of smoke off to the side into the vast tiny cabin of the world in which he moves down the road. Three single drops of rain hit his windshield, and he thinks out of the clearish blue sky, The universe is a blue sky with a single small cloud on which the sun floats ahead, and I am a single raindrop. Shouldn’t somebody be writing this shit down? The yellow lines ahead, pretending at a vanishing point, over the crest of a hill, around a hill, on and on and, “Yeahyeah, yeahyeah.” He small-skanks behind the windhield. He leaves a trail of cigarette butts to the past.

Meanwhile, right where he is and in other places, the Earth spins on, inclining people and other animals to eat and reproduce. He sees the world in blues and greens and opportunities, and the world does not see him. It rolls on. He sees the universe in patches and instances and heartaches and touches, and the universe is atoms and empty space. He knows all this as well as he knows the distributive function of multiplication, and, yet, he sees himself as important, as meaningful. Though he’s been trained not to see himself this way, he sees himself as a god or, at least, as a godfunction, creating the world and moving through it as such.

When the forth, fifth, and sixth raindrops hit his windshield, he cannot distinguish them from the other ninety-seven thousand that hit at that moment. This sheet of rain falls so fast and hard that, rather than mix with the ground cover, it forces the dust and pollen and leaves and mites and very small rocks up into the air and down onto the Jetta’s windshield in a thin layer of mud, which the rain washes away almost immediately. Pedascule breathes deep and remains calm and godlike, reaching for his windshield wipers. He flicks the switch and the sitting water shatters and the rain stops. Blue afternoon sky up ahead, and behind him the beginning of the world ends in darkness and windscape.