Extinct

Let me tell you the Gospel: first of all, it has nothing to do with God or the bible or anything Testament-oriented. The Gospel is the truth of all truths, and I have it. I told it to Ricky on the last day of the year and the next day he died of ink poisoning, so take that for what it's worth. But I'll tell it to you not because I'm worried about you dying the next day or because I want that to happen or anything, but because I have to tell somebody, just like all those fools in the bible did.

The Gospel is this: It is all an illusion.

I went to the museum with my father once, I remember because it was one of the three times I ever saw him in my life, and we looked at the dinosaurs. I had never seen bones that big, it was a radical sight and I near about lost my mind over it. My father, he said to call him Bill, stood behind me with his hands in his pockets and I could hear him jingling his change around, and he said those dinosaurs were extinct. Extinct, I said. Extinct? I knew about it, I'm not dumb and I've been to schooll, but for some reason when he said that word right then I sure heard it different. Extinct meaning they're not around anymore. They're all dead. No more dinosaurs.

And yet I had trouble with that because there they were, standing right in front of me with mouths open and teeth looming, with vengeance. I could see them, how could they be extinct?

They're dead, my father said. Bill. I know. Does he think I don't know? But none of us were here when they were alive, we couldn't see them. But they lived, the walked the earth. So was all that a dream? Since no one was here to see it? Was it an illusion? Or were these bones an illusion? When Bill dropped me off at my apartment where my sylph of a mother was be walking around the house in her fake ruby slippers, the dinosaurs were only alive in my mind. An illusion, a remembrance. Just like Ricky, who's still dead. And just like Bill, just like the third time I saw him when he took me to a baseball game and left me there, just off to take a piss and I'm alone in the stands after the seventh inning. And I went home that day, when I managed to be lucid enough to call my mother from a pay phone collect. But it was an elemental game that I wasn't even really watching anyway, because I knew somehow that it was the last time I was going to see Bill, so I was taking him in piece by piece as he sat next to me. His dark muzzle, his eyes that never stopped moving and his hands that were dry worked constantly, thumbing little circles on his knees. His blue-jeaned knees that bounced up and down to an extinct beat. Dead. Imaginary. But alive in his mind.

So I'll go home and hide behind the tapestry of the living room curtain, hot and heavy breath all around me that suddenly seems so real that it will never, never go away.