It is the future. It is terror. I am Mel Gibson in The Road Warrior, driving a huge 18-wheeler with some mysterious cargo in the back under a big blue tarp to the JFK airport before nightfall. I am lost and find myself in the military portion of the airport, where a woman in camouflage, talking on her cell-phone, refuses to let me back up because the entrance bottlenecks into one of those gates with a pole that raises up to let the good guys drive through. I try to turn around, but I get wedged in an alleyway, and as I try to climb out of my truck, an attack dog, a German Shepard, comes flying at me. Helpless and cornered as the furious beast leaps at my throat, I put my arm up to protect my neck and it sinks its teeth in, cracking my radius in two. I scream for help but the woman just sits there on her cell-phone, watching me get gnawed on; desperately, I manage to work my hands tight around its muzzle so it can’t open its jaws to get at any vital organs or arteries. We were locked in a fight to the death for what seemed like 15 minutes, when a cloud of military guys finally run over and pry us apart, but the dog is already dead. I choked it and broke its neck with my hands. The men are visibly devastated, moaning, and calling the dog by its name and sort of lying over it and petting the pelt of this dead, still-warm dog, and then, the anger set in— with red eyes and blood breaking in their cheeks, they scream, threatening me, and accusing me of crimes and inhumanity; I’ve never felt so guilty and low inside; I start to cry, but I know it is true, even as a boy, I never liked dogs, besides, I have this cargo to carry, and it’s nearly dark.
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Hollywood is the departure point for most dreams in the 21rst century. The government is always implicated in his dreams. As are his hands. The dark cargo is the moon. A crossbow-wrist. Or some other device of terrorism. But isn’t terror always arriving, isn’t it always already the future? Flying objects, everything in the dream is subject to such distinction. The unidentified is at the heart. Of things. No one noticed that a rag fell on the road, accidental elegy, invisible flag of surrender, something to be tied to the world, to clean what wasn’t there, and what will always be. The blood on his hands, the blood on the road. There are no roads where we’re going. The difference between the future and terror is u, f, and o.
