Mechanation

"The technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition."

-Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

Nels said the baseball bat would be more poetic, but we decided to go with the hammer because it would be easier to conceal. And, in my opinion, it would do the job better.

I never liked baseball. 

As we got to the bar, Nels could hardly contain his excitement.

"I only had brothers," he told me. "I never got to do something like this."

"You think this is fun?"

"You don't?"

I did. My sister was in the hospital and the man responsible was at the bar watching a Yankees game. Nels sat next to him, the orange M on his blue hat sticking out like a sore thumb. I sat at the opposite end of the bar.

"It's a damn shame about Jeter, right?"

The man glanced at Nels' hat and scoffed.

"Same thing happened to me," Nels continued. "Busted my ankle in college. Well, it was at a party, not on the field, but just like that- there went my Major League dreams. Little league, too. Strike. I was out."

The man raised the bottle to his lips testily. It was a bottle of Coke. I stared at it and the bandaged hand holding it.

"But he'll recover. He's an all-star, right?" Nels nodded to me before slowly getting off his stool. I did the same. "Better luck next season."

I walked to the bar, hammer in hand.

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Domesticity

Nels hadn’t done the dishes, and Coney Island was underwater. I didn’t attempt to leave the house the first day, but the basement had flooded, and the sounds of Nels splashing around down there was becoming too much for me to take. Then I heard that Breezy Point was gone and, the smoke from the fire place overpowering my throat and lungs, I forced myself to leave and find my mother.

“Your grandparents had a place in Breezy Point,” she told me over a cup of watery hot cocoa. “On your father’s side.”

“Are they okay”? I asked.

“Oh, honey, I don’t know. They’ve been dead for years,” she replied, before thoughtfully adding, “I want to say they were cremated.”

Back at the house, the basement was still flooded. Dishes from before the storm hit sat in the sink. They were mainly Nels’, crusty and prehistoric just like he was. At the sound of my arrival, Nels had begun the rant that he’d been perfecting- that the world’s end was imminent.

“And to think, the election’s in a week,” I heard Nels say from the basement stairwell. “December will be here soon, and then 2013. I say it’s going to end just like it all started- with a big bang.”

“I don’t know,” I called back, moving a few dishes around before deciding to put on a pair of rubber gloves. “I think it’s all going to stay the same.”

Colonialism

I stood outside the makeshift detention center in the lab, an ancient tank we used to use for penguin colonies when they first arrived, but now housed a writhing man clawing at his chest. He was only wearing a pair of jeans, stained with blood and God knows what else, and kept flinging himself against the Plexiglas. The sight of the smeared blood on the tank was making me nauseous, and my stomach turned at the thought of what would happen when his long fingernails eventually reached his face. 

“We’ve got tranqs for the walruses in the health center,” I told the security guard. “Go get one, tell them I sent you. Tranqs and a defib, Frank.”

After a quick argument (“He’s choking on his tongue, Frank! He bit it off!”), Frank ran out and returned with a scrawny, ashy looking man wearing a Cyclone shirt, and the EMTs following behind.

Frank, Cyclone shirt, and I watched the ambulance leave, standing in the parking lot and letting the adrenaline warm us up in the frosty twenty degree air. When that wore off, Frank walked off to eat something, leaving me and Cyclone. 

“Guess my roommate’s not coming back,” Cyclone finally said. 

I looked him up and down and thought of my mother’s reaction to news of a man violently tripping at the New York Aquarium and attacking a sea otter; how her smothering was just as overpowering as her tiny house in Bayside, her influence as constricting as the penguin tank. 

“Where do you live?” I asked, reading his name tag aloud, “Nels?”

It was time to leave the colony. It was time to revolt.

“Look. I spent 9 long years in prison for stabbing a man who wanted to evict my mother because she wouldn’t fuck him.” –Abdul Hamid in Ishamel Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo