Nothing As It Seems

They at last noticed Donald staring and told him to go back to sleep until his deadness could sit up in its own crate

Nothing as it seems

For bread he ate pineapple, and for pineapple great heads of lettuce, month after month, until one day the world sat on his foot and said you’re a god, Donald G. Morgan, and must carry a mandate to the people that from now on, all fruits are vegetables and all vegetables must carry the fragrance of hummingbirds and eucalyptus trees.

Donald G. Morgan started to rise to the task, but the morphine receded, and he instead pushed the nurse button, and asked the nurse when she arrived if the day was still Tuesday, but she said no, that the world had sat on her foot and told her to announce that from now on no more Tuesdays shall climb onto the calendar because they’re always mad about something or the other.

What about Monday? asked Donald Morgan.

Monday is fine, said the nurse, and when the anesthetic gas drifted from his lungs and carried his hallucinations away, Donald Morgan looked up from the operating table and saw an entire platoon of doctors studying for their final exam, or so it seemed at least, for they peppered each other with questions such as Will This Be On The Test? and How Many Pencils Can We Carry? They at last noticed Donald staring and told him to go back to sleep until his deadness could sit up in its own crate.

But before he could blink, the truck driver shined a light in his eyes and said are you okay? Your car is mighty crushed and you didn’t have a seatbelt, they say, and when Donald asked who they were, the truck driver took off his trucker hat, wiped it on his pants, put it back on, made the sign of the cross, and said: Jesus and his pals.

Well, that can’t be right, said Donald. I grew up in Los Angeles, and when the quake stopped shaking the city, all the overpasses had flattened the pickups and the smaller, imported cars from Pasadena. The city blew smoke over the sea.

Someone coughed. Is he alive? asked the search and rescue dog, and Donald G. Morgan, or as he liked to say, Donald God Morgan, patted the beautiful Deutscher Schäferhund on his head and said of course. It takes more than twelve floors of earthquake rubble to persuade me that life is but a dream.

Optimistic yes, because Donald Morgan once gathered numbers and placed them in ledgers in case a government missionary stopped by for an audit. Donald Morgan had been a great aligner of columns, and a great adder of digits and other curious symbols of mathematical life. He could twist an eight into a declaration of solvency and a cube root into eleven different shapes that all testified to the irrefutable truth that everyone who bought or sold anything was immortal, but when the sniper squeezed, and the bullet pierced his chest in the Vietnam of no return, Donald cried out for more morphine to drive his pain to the graveyard, and when nobody answered, he asked the truck driver to explain again what had happened, but the truck driver said I’m not here any more, I have a schedule to meet, and Donald slapped himself on the side of the head to awaken from the nightmare he inhabited for surely this was a case of Dengue Fever dumping its droplets on him, and he wouldn’t be intimidated by mosquitos, and so stumbled out of his clothes for the kitchen, where the world sat on his foot again and told him to fight fire with fire.

But Donald God Morgan knew no fire except that which the Germans had ignited deep in the forest,  in the body pits, fire which filled the sky with dark fleshy smoke, and made the trees weep. And he was in no shape to fight this fire because his right arm was burned off to the elbow, and his left foot a black stump. And in a perfect rendering of iniquity, ash drifted over the sun, and soldiers stood above the pits and shouted nimm dieses jüdische schwein.

But Donald grew up in Los Angeles before the quake flattened the buses, and was never inside this particular war, this particular atrocity, and therefore knew deep inside that nothing was as it seemed, that he, Donald Morgan, once alive and healthy with one wife and three children, who counted on numbers to never lie, and counted his days as innumerable, must have stumbled into one of those concentric circles that Dante chronicled.

Donald knew well that all things became possible if you inhaled deeply. All circles tightened, and all the world opened its sock drawers to show you both the clean and the dirt. We could have a turf battle, said Donald, between one tragedy and another, or between two versions of the same truth.

That would be ambitious, a blockbuster explanation for a sky that doesn’t turn blue, or the wars we wage under the surgeon’s knife.

Ambitious or not, and even though not as it seemed, in fact not at all possible to the shortsighted eye, Donald G. Morgan simultaneously lay shattered on the highway, buried in the ashy forests of Burgberg, leaking his heartblood out in an Asian jungle, and staring at the sea breeze from under a fallen overpass in the California metropolis of angels. And before he could reach for another version of the truth, the city’s namesake divine beings asked, in voices that climbed to higher ports of call, if he’d like a sheet to go over his face, or would he prefer to just kick the world off his foot, step over the scalpel’s edge, and run endlessly through the mazes of another inexplicable day.

— — —

Well, Dear Reader, thanks for following me around the block on this one. It’s kinda weird, I suppose, which of course is not like me at all¹. Not sure what happened, but I do remember that I was sober. It was December last and I wrote nine stories that month, perhaps to avoid the Christmas spirit.

At any rate, I hope you enjoyed it. Please let me know with a comment if you’re up for it. Those are always appreciated and help me feel like I’m not swimming in an empty volcano.

Meanwhile, I hope all is well at your end, and remember that you can reply to this email (assuming you’re seeing this in email, otherwise no) and it’ll fly through the internet to my virtual doorstep.

All the best,

Victor David

1. No, not at all as I’m sure you’ve seen from other stories such as The Curious Residual Wisdom of Theodore Walsh and The Recognizable Sky.