Excerpt from "The Apocalyptic Pied Piper"
THE APOCALYPTIC PIED PIPER
… Or …
EINTSTEIN’S FOURTH
It was over. Finally, at last, the Last Great War of Hurled Things was over. (It had once been called, “The Next Great War of Hurled Things,” when it started, but somewhere in the middle of it, folks got so exhausted of blood and death that they could find only one vaguely chipper conclusion in the midst of the still raging multi-theatre battles: surely, after this war, there would be no more wars. At least they had learned that much. At least … and so the word changed from “Next” to “Last”. Now, they were fighting “The Last Great War of Hurled Things”. And that was how history would remember it.
But The War had taken its toll.
What had caused The War? What had provoked this massive global incineration-confrontation, this Last Great War of Hurled Things? That trivial point, of course, nobody could remember. Nobody, not even the wisest-of-the-wise could come close to recalling the reason.
And as for why Who was Who’s Enemy, and why So and So were Allies … well, to coin an old maxim of war (and of politics, and of corporate maneuverings, and most certainly of all ladies’ clubs), “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.”
That is about all the explanation you are going to get, because that is about all the explanation there is.
As for any details which might prove any more elucidating than that—as to why the world was now all-but-destroyed … well, dear reader, all those enumerations and rationalizations were as dim a memory to the Survivors of The War, as were the lazy vestigia of ice cream carts and mowed lawns and drive-in movies.
Suffice it to say that the Enemy was not Asian nor Latino, not Black nor Indian (and here I generously, without giving grace to individualities, I am meaning neither East Indians nor Native American Indians were the problem), nor was the Enemy White, or Eskimo, or Jew or Muslim or Christian. Or even Space Aliens.
Nor was it Satan.
I think you know who the Ultimate Enemy was, in The Last Great War of Hurled Things. I think we all knew who the Final Enemy was going to be, even before The Last Great War started.
But that The War had exacted a profound change in the world, of that there could be no question.
Perhaps the most noticeable change was that all the governments were gone. The Enemy had blown up every building of administration, every congregation of leaders, every repository of papers … every single vestige of government had the Enemy destroyed, strategizing that in this way, the enemy (that is to say, the Enemy’s enemy) would be easier to vanquish. After all, who could fight a war without a government telling them How and Where and Why? So, in retaliation for the Enemy obliterating their government, the people leftover, the people without a government, rose up and destroyed the Enemy’s government, and the Enemy’s Allies destroyed the governments of the Enemy’s enemy’s allies, and so forth and so on, until there were no governments left in the world.
But governments were not the only institutions that had been obliterated. Powers That Be had made sure that all the libraries were destroyed, because clearly, it was all of these books filled with ideas that gave people the idea to wage war. And big businesses were destroyed, because they always seemed to secretly celebrate the idea of war, so good for corporate economies did war always turn out to be. And churches were destroyed, because god and his might and his big holy moly agenda seemed to be always mentioned in the waging of wars, so perhaps without churches, there would not be so much Holy Warring.
And the peculiar thing was, sometimes it was not the Enemy who destroyed the libraries and the businesses and the churches, but the very people who had patronized the libraries and managed the businesses and attended the churches, so anxious were they all to make non-existent any institution which had contributed to the Idea of War.
And more had been destroyed—some by design, some from outrage, and others for the sheer joy of decimating that which humankind had wrought: monuments and shopping malls, post offices everywhere and tourist destinations near &far, circuses and zoos, museums and movie theatres, hotels and restaurants and car washes and subways and grocery stores and farmer’s markets and Divisions of Motor Vehicles and Departments of Internal Revenues.
(Actually, I guess you could say that not all of the effects of The Last Great War had been bad. Nobody has had the courage to say that in the history books, but I have the courage to say it, and I am saying it here. Yes, it is fair to say that nobody missed the duumvirates and beadledoms, the stratocracies and gynocracies and pantisocracies, the feodalities and adhocracies and suzerainties, the dictatorships and seneschalships, the caliphates and magistrates, the interregnums and imperiums. Not one person thought back wistfully with fond remembrances of the rules and regulations, the codes and the canons, the rubrics and edicts, the sanhedrins and conventicles and amphictyonic councils, the taxes and the traffic, the licenses and the permits, the bureaucracy and the bullshit.)
THE CRY FOR HELP
But of one sad point, there was no making argument. You could not deny the worst effects of The War: it had all but destroyed the children. Alright, yes, technically, the children still breathed and walked and talked, but they seemed to the grown-ups like ghosts. They were zombies They woke from their deep sleeps seemingly refreshed, but their sleeps were dreamless. They walked with direction, but without caprice. They spoke with manners, but no whimsy. They played with energy, but no rapture. The laughed, sometimes, but only after the grown-ups did first, as though they needed to be signaled when something was funny. They prayed, but without the slightest clue to whom they were directing their obiescent and rote supplications.
Perhaps worst of all, though, the children seemed incapable of imagining anything. When the parents read to their children, the children’s expressions were entirely blank, as though the children had no idea what their parents were talking about. As though the words created no pictures, no sounds, no smells, no tastes, no textures in the children’s memories. And just as the children seemed to have no memories of The Past … before The Last Great War of Hurled Things … so they seemed to have no interest in, or understanding of, The Future. Never did a child talk about what they planned to do the next day, never did they mention what they wanted as a gift for an impending birthday, nor did wee she or diminutive he let loose the secret passion of what he would do when he grew up, what she might accomplish when she was a grown-up. It was as though the children had all stopped believing that they would survive long enough to grow up at all, or that a world would exist to be an adult in, if they did last that long on this planet.
Yes. There was no question. The Last Great War had turned the children into the Walking Dead.
And so … with no other plan in the parents’ minds … with no other solution that they could collectively conjure … they all knelt and prayed. True, there were no more churches to pray in, but they had heard, they had remembered from some shadowy past, that way back in the year 1820, a very pedestalled man name Matthew had said something very important about god and prayer: “For wherever two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them …”
Who was this Matthew, (a gentleman whom different folks could remember vaguely as having some kind of spiritual grandeur), that was a good poser, and what had happened in the year 1820 which was so special that this Matthew fellow should be allowed some insight into god, they did not know, but still, it seemed like a good idea. The only idea left.
So all the people in the little Hamlet prayed. They put all their differences aside, fell to their knees, and had a good, long, soulful prayer for the children.
And then they waited.
And waited.
And waited.
And then…
Came The Piper.
Oh, what a sight he was! He looked exactly like a Harlequin, from days of old, with tight leggings and a blousy shirt to match, and both decorated with fabulous flashy diamond shapes, all the colors of the rainbow. And marvelous upon marvelous—a matching coat of many colors! (With long sleeves and the coat hem dancing almost to the bottom of his leather boots!) The boots themselves were quite astonishing as well—they came high up over his knees, almost like the boots of a Musketeer, but they were not dullish black or brown, rather the boots were also made of rainbow colored triangles of leather. And the leather in those boots, oh, nobody had seen leather like that since before The War. The leather was as buttery and smooth as a baby’s bottom. The coat was satin, and the leggings and blouson were of the finest silk.
Comes The Piper!
As he pranced into the little Hamlet, all of the folks came out to gawk at him. The very first sight of him made them smile and clap. They were in explicably happy for the first time in ages.
Perhaps much of their giddiness came from the intensity of the colors of his clothing, for as you no doubt know, one of the worst side effects of The Last Great War was that it caused all the colors of the world to go so drab that it seemed now as though everything you saw was a scene from a film noir movie.
But not The Piper! Oh, what a riot of colors his clothing was, with its many diamond patches and spangly bits! The Blue was intensely Blue, but it was not the somber blue of the military flags that had been draped over so many millions of young soldiers’ coffins throughout the many long battlescreeds of The War; rather it was the Blue of the ocean, all aqua and teal and midnight and royal, such as the ocean had been before the weapons and waste of The Last Great War had turned the earth’s oceans the color of cancer.
And the Yellow on The Piper’s garb, oh what a lovely Yellow it was, lemony in some patches, golden in others, but what a luscious Yellow. It was not the yellow of cowardice, such as seemed to be everywhere during The War, but it was the color Yellow of the sun on a perfect summer day, before the bombs had turned the sky to a permanent puke color.
Oh, and The Piper’s Red! The Red was so very Red, but not the bloody red that all the Hamletfolk had grown so used to—no, this was the Red of valentines and strawberries and corvette convertibles—all things that folks had long grown sadly used to not having, in the time after The Last Great War. One woman looked at the Red in The Piper’s coat of many colors, and she was reminded of the lipstick she had chosen for her wedding so many years ago, and of the first kiss she had received as a young wife from her handsome husband. But The War had taken him, as it had taken so many others … It seemed as though there was no end to the torrent of sad memories that flowed through the Survivors.
But I digress—Purple—did I mention The Piper Purple? It was such an intense Purple, but this was not the purple of rage, as had puffed up the faces of so many self important government men and military types, no no no, this was the same color Purple as could be seen in the purple glass pieces that made up the Saints’ robes in the stained glass windows of the Hamlet church, before the Enemy had bombed it to smithereens.
And Green! As The War had destroyed so much of the earth’s glorious dressings, naturally green was not a color one saw much of these days. But The Piper’s Green was a magnificent thing. It was not the green of envy, a mucous color of sickly green that one saw all too much of these days, nor was it the green of covetcash, that evil nowbanned paper with the headshots of dead presidents, that had fueled so much Fight … no, this Green, oh! this Green was the Green of emeralds, of evergreens, of the thriving verdant fields that once had rolled over the sweet dirty earth, giving wildflowers a plain for blooming, deer a home for grazing, lovers a haven for trysting, and poets a place to compose. Such a Green! Such a Green as made me, myself, weep to see.
But the Orange—ah, if the Green brought tears, something about the Orange in The Piper’s Harlequin garb made people laugh and grin; the color itself exuded a warmth. This was not the orange of the sickly veterans who marched home, half dead from being sprayed with the Enemy’s deadly gasses, poor surviving soldiers who harbored deep in their cells a cancer which would finally do to them what the bombs and bullets could not: consign them to a coffin long before their rightful time. No, this was not that kind of orange at all, this was a warm and inviting Orange, a healthful and happy Orange. It was the Orange of citrus balls hanging heavy on the trees, so ripe they might drop off and konk you on the head if you stopped to stare up at them from under their pregnant branches. It was the Orange of sunsets watched by lovers as they clutched one another, it was the Orange of koi kept in ponds before they were eaten during the Starving Part of The Last Great War, it was the Orange of home fires burning in the hearth, such as women had always kept stoked and strong, so that their husbands and sons and lovers returning home from The War, might see in the distance and know that a joyful reunion awaited them.
But perhaps my favorite (for I remember well, The Piper’s first appearance in our Hamlet that day) were the Pink diamonds in his leggings and blouson and coat of many colors and boots even. It was the Pink of a flushed cheek, a cheek flushed with joy and anticipation and running and elation—such as we had seen in the faces of our children before The War, and yet so taken for granted…that was the color of Pink it was. And we, as a folk together, needed to find out how to make that particular color of Pink return to the faces of our children.
Comes The Piper!
THE MUSIC BEGINS
… Or …
Recherche de Temps Perdue
And then, just when we thought we could not marvel any more at the electric colors of The Piper’s clothes, he pulled out his Pipe and began to play! It would seem to be a simple thing, would it not, the tune played by a humble wanderer’s flute? But there was nothing simple or humble about this music; indeed, it was more enchanted than any sound I have ever heard before or since. For it had about it the ability to make the listener feel transported back to a blissful memory, a memory that one moment before had seemed forgotten for all time.
But that was before we amnesiacs heard The Piper’s magical playing.
Plays The Piper!
And not only did the listener remember a happy moment in the past, but the lucky listener actually felt transported there, as though they were reliving the moment in all its splendid glory, all over again—oh but wait, I repeat myself in my giddiness. I repeat myself in my giddiness.
But there was even more to The Piper’s magic music—because for each person who listened, the magic was different.
One sweet young thing heard The Piper’s playing and was immediately swept back to memories of her first kiss in the moonlight, while her sweetheart was walking her home from the Fourth of July Pie Eating Contest. In the distance, you could hear (or The Piper’s playing made her think you could hear) the Hamlet band playing in the Hamlet green, in the gazebo, and they were playing a John Philip Sousa Medley … “Stars and Stripes Forever”, “Semper Fideles”, “In Flander’s Field”, and the like. But as the sun set, the band had moved on from marches and began playing Sousa’s romantic songs such as “My Sweet Sweetheart”, and “Fairest of the Fair”, and “Annabel Lee.” And it was while they were playing “Reverie” that this young lady’s fellow, her date, still lost in a mist of pie and fireworks, leaned in towards her, belched a little before kissing her, which is wonderfully why his belchy kisses tasted like strawberries and blackberries and peaches and lemon meringue all swirled up together, and she thought it was surely the sweetest thing she had ever tasted. She would never have another kiss quite so delightful in her entire life … and all this entire osculatory rememoration brought on by one little flourish on The Piper’s flute.
And to a paunchy, wizened, withered, sweetcoot, made old early by The War, he was sure, absolutely sure, that the tune The Piper was playing was “Take me Out To The Ball Game,” because suddenly he was flooded with distant memories of how he had once, long ago, been a professional ball player, and suddenly he was reliving it again, his finest, shining hour, when he had hit the ball right out of the park, and he had gotten a home run, and it was such a big deal that his picture was in the paper all over the country, all over the world for people who followed that kind of thing … but that was long ago, before The Last Great War, when people still cared about things like home runs.
Yet another woman did not hear band music wafting from a gazebo when The Piper played, rather she remembered the music of her own youth playing, on her honeymoon, in fact, and she remembered—or rather she could actually hear Eydie Gorme singing “Blame it on the Bossanova,” as she and her husband fell into blissful lovemaking for the first time. And as she listened to Eydie croon, the young bride celebrated the triumph of convincing her naive husband that she was still a virgin, by using a concoction of egg white, fleabane, and alum, a clever mixture she had read about in the novel “Fanny Hill.” Yes, there is power in reading, dear children.
And for yet another man, it sounded to him like calliope music, like the music of a carousel at the summer fair, and he remembered taking a pretty young thing to the fair, and spending all of the money on her that he had saved up from working all summer at the munitions factory. And when he hit the barbell it went all the way to the top, and he won her the prize of a large stuffed pink beaver with funny buck teeth, and he took his gal by her tiny waist and lifted her up onto one of the carousel horses when she wanted a ride, and he bought her pink cotton candy and watched it melt upon her sweet red tongue, and he imagined … he fantasized … And he could not have known in that fleeting moment that his fantasies would soon come true, very soon, later by the lake, their gorgeous lust lit only by the glow of a hundred fireflies, nor could he know that it was both the first and last time that he would ever make love to a woman, for he would be drafted a week later, and this particular private’s privates would be blown into smithereens by the Enemy. But at least he had that one time to cherish, to remember, and he was sure, absolutely sure that everybody all around him must also be hearing the sweet, heady sound of this calliope music, and his mind and his heart drifted back in time…
And an aging Flower Child, who had not been treated well by all the cruelty of The Last Great War (she looked one hundred years old if she was a day, although she was only forty something—it must have been all the rapes by an Enemy almost as ruthless and inhuman as the side her people were on), but where was I?, ah yes, to her, the music sounded like the full out orchestral rendition of “Knights in White Satin,” and she remembered the prom, when she was slow dancing with a dreamy hippie who sported long hair and smelled of freshly grown hemp. For the full seven minutes of the song, she stayed in a haze, and as The Piper played and the Hamlet crowd all listened, it seemed to the bittersweet Flower Child as though everybody all around her was slow dancing as well, along with her. She could have sworn that they were all hearing the same music that she was…
And for another face in the crowd, for a middle aged sort of man—or had The War just made him look middle aged?—The Piper’s music took him back, back to a glorious youth, more specifically to a glorious quarry, where he and his best buddies used to swim away the summer days. They would dive from the highest precipice, deep down into the ice blue water, then back up, breaking through the surface to a world so perfect, so sunny, so full of promise that they thought surely it had all been created expressly for them. “Lollipop” and “Splish Splash,” and “Mack the Knife” and “Love Potion Number 9” and “Great Balls of Fire,” as well as everything by Elvis and Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee and Buddy Holly and The Big Bopper, all these songs seemed to be playing all the time on the portable radio that always sat next to their towels and shoes and clothes (they swam buck naked, of course), and they knew with a supreme certainty that nowhere on earth was anybody more content than they were in that moment.
As they lay baking on their towels, bare-assed, talking about the grand future which lay in front of them, they could not imagine life getting any better. And not surprisingly, it did not. All but one of them were killed, during The Last Great War, but in a freak accident, unrelated to The War, when a small plane they were flying in (to a retrospective rock concert featuring Buddy Holly and The Big Bopper cover bands, no less) went down in a small field not too far from the Hamlet.
But nobody could take away the memory of those spectacular youthy days, nor the sound of that immortal music, which had continued to play in the old man’s head, until long after The Day The Music Died, and The Day His Friends Died. And all of this, all of this grand music, from the frippery of flute playing on behalf of the Piebald Piper.
And for another younger woman, she flashed back immediately to her greatest hour. It was the day she gave birth to her children, quintuplets, and she had asked, please, that in the delivery room, to help her through labor, they might play that lovely piece by Ralph Vaughan Williams, “Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis.” The birth maestro agreed, and that is how it happened these lush, soothing strings ushered five lives into the world, and took the edge off the pain of giving birth, although that sweet, spiraling music did not take the pain off the Pre-War-Family-Birthing Requirements (part of a desperate Global Attempt to prevent The Last Great War), that she give up all five children except for one, the other four being opted out for Mandatory Redistribution.
And for yet another man, the Hamlet’s preacher, his memory was of a different kind than all these other bittersweet and slightly carnal incarnations. He remembered one of the most difficult tasks that the universe had ever thrown at him. He was called to give the eulogy of the most hated man in all the Hamlet and beyond. It was his charge, his job, it went with his position in the church, and almost from the moment he got up to speak, (inexplicably, hundreds had attended the old fart’s funeral, but later the preacher realized that it was only with the intention to boo and hiss—and indeed the preacher had been right spot on) … but where was I? Ah Yes. As soon as the preacher began his eulogy of the hated man, someone hit him smack straight on with an overripe tomato! So lame was the preacher’s speaking style, and so reviled the dead man, that the bitter crowd was willing to “kill the messenger”, if you will. They had been celebrating the dead man’s passing, and they were bitter that the jubilation had to be interrupted with this public memorial so ordered in the dead man’s will.
But the preacher was rather an old man himself, you see, and had grown up alongside the hated man. Neighbors they were, and over the many long years and decades of living in and around and through each other’s lives, the preacher had come to understand why the old man was now, at the end of his life, so bitter, sad, mean, and cruel.
So then … ever so humbly … and offering up a silent prayer that god might give him the strength and eloquence to do right by this poor man—this tragic character who had, in secret silence, in modest privacy, in terrified solitude, suffered more slings and arrows of outrageous fortune than most people do in ten lifetimes (and we all do have many lifetimes, you know, I found that out),—anyway, I ramble.
The preacher began the eulogy again. A do-over. He had the sense to “cue music,” and his nephew, who had been instructed in the will to DJ the funeral, did a brilliantly executed mash-up of Verdi’s “Requiem” and Mozart’s “Requiem” and the “Pie Jesu” from Faure’s “Requiem,” and then the preacher regaled the Hamletfolk with the story of this man’s life, and all its twists and turns: loss, death, dashed hopes, betrayals in business, Fate’s cruel jabs at his health, with its cancers and burning arthritis, a heart wrenching tale about a puppy, an agonizing story about a kidnapped daughter, a wife gone mad from the former, that same wife shooting herself to stop the pain, the finding of the daughter’s body—you don’t even want to know. Then, an anecdote about the poor suffering man turning to religion, but only then to be robbed-off by oily men-of-the-cloth who promised Heaven for a price … and on and on the sad story of the man’s life spilled forth.
By the end of the eulogy, the audience was rapt, the way one watches a tragic movie with an even more tragic end. They were weeping and sobbing, and some of them were thinking that a man who had suffered so much, yet survived it all, ought to be made Mayor of the Hamlet, until they realized that he was dead. And then they thought they should erect a statue of him, because this man had actually built the Hamlet from dirt, along with its fountains and waterwheels, its gazebo and gardens.
The preacher knew he had done right by the poor old soul, who was now dead and out of his misery, and it was a memory of this merciful triumph…yes, it was that amazing trifecta of “Requiems” that the preacher heard coming from that sad, solitary flute on which The Piper played …
And on and on the fantasies went, for all the folks in the Hamlet.
Finally, the music ended. The Piper’s perfect timing suggested to me that The Piper knew each listener was just in the most magnificent throws of memory, their Recherche de Temps Perdu, but of course you know that—anyway, suddenly, there was silence.
No more breath blew through the magical flute.
Halts The Piper.
The Hamletfolk all stood in a mystical haze. Nobody knew how much time passed as they stood in their personal mists of intimate time, and later, when everybody talked about it, there was vast argument: some said it was thirty seconds, some claimed that hours had passed. One man claimed to have experienced a birthday and New Year’s while in the fog, and claimed to have gone grey in the hair because of it, and by gum he had!
But there was one thing they all agreed upon as they came out of their sweet stupors: The Piper had Magic. And they knew, somehow they just knew, that The Piper could heal their children. The Piper was the one to bring them back to life. The Piper was the Miracle for which they had prayed so profoundly.
“Oh Piper, can you work this same magic on our children, for they are numb and sad, not like children really at all. And we cannot imagine what the future holds for them, or for the world?”
And after being asked this, The Piper paused for a long time. So long, in fact, that the Hamletfolk began to get nervous: What was he thinking? What consideration was his mind weighing in the ponderous stillness of the dusk? Would he refuse them?
Finally, The Piper opened his mouth to speak, and the entire body of people turned their ears close to him.
“Yes, I can heal your children of their sadness. Yes, I can restore their imaginations, their joy.
But it will cost you. It will cost you a lump of gold for every child—for you see, my lovely family has been kidnapped by the Enemy’s agents, they are holding my lovely wife and beautiful children, and only with gold can I ransom them. I miss them so, my heart is breaking!”
Well, when the Hamletfolk learned that this was all The Piper wanted, that it was only money which stood between them and having their children restored to the darling dancing creatures they had been before The War, well of course they agreed.
Of course they agreed.
They Promised The Piper. And the Promise was a solemn one. A blood oath. And as they swore, they prayed that this was the last blood that would be shed upon the Earth.
Here ends the Sneak Preview for “The Apocalyptic Pied Piper”
… Or …
EINTSTEIN’S FOURTH
It was over. Finally, at last, the Last Great War of Hurled Things was over. (It had once been called, “The Next Great War of Hurled Things,” when it started, but somewhere in the middle of it, folks got so exhausted of blood and death that they could find only one vaguely chipper conclusion in the midst of the still raging multi-theatre battles: surely, after this war, there would be no more wars. At least they had learned that much. At least … and so the word changed from “Next” to “Last”. Now, they were fighting “The Last Great War of Hurled Things”. And that was how history would remember it.
But The War had taken its toll.
What had caused The War? What had provoked this massive global incineration-confrontation, this Last Great War of Hurled Things? That trivial point, of course, nobody could remember. Nobody, not even the wisest-of-the-wise could come close to recalling the reason.
And as for why Who was Who’s Enemy, and why So and So were Allies … well, to coin an old maxim of war (and of politics, and of corporate maneuverings, and most certainly of all ladies’ clubs), “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.”
That is about all the explanation you are going to get, because that is about all the explanation there is.
As for any details which might prove any more elucidating than that—as to why the world was now all-but-destroyed … well, dear reader, all those enumerations and rationalizations were as dim a memory to the Survivors of The War, as were the lazy vestigia of ice cream carts and mowed lawns and drive-in movies.
Suffice it to say that the Enemy was not Asian nor Latino, not Black nor Indian (and here I generously, without giving grace to individualities, I am meaning neither East Indians nor Native American Indians were the problem), nor was the Enemy White, or Eskimo, or Jew or Muslim or Christian. Or even Space Aliens.
Nor was it Satan.
I think you know who the Ultimate Enemy was, in The Last Great War of Hurled Things. I think we all knew who the Final Enemy was going to be, even before The Last Great War started.
But that The War had exacted a profound change in the world, of that there could be no question.
Perhaps the most noticeable change was that all the governments were gone. The Enemy had blown up every building of administration, every congregation of leaders, every repository of papers … every single vestige of government had the Enemy destroyed, strategizing that in this way, the enemy (that is to say, the Enemy’s enemy) would be easier to vanquish. After all, who could fight a war without a government telling them How and Where and Why? So, in retaliation for the Enemy obliterating their government, the people leftover, the people without a government, rose up and destroyed the Enemy’s government, and the Enemy’s Allies destroyed the governments of the Enemy’s enemy’s allies, and so forth and so on, until there were no governments left in the world.
But governments were not the only institutions that had been obliterated. Powers That Be had made sure that all the libraries were destroyed, because clearly, it was all of these books filled with ideas that gave people the idea to wage war. And big businesses were destroyed, because they always seemed to secretly celebrate the idea of war, so good for corporate economies did war always turn out to be. And churches were destroyed, because god and his might and his big holy moly agenda seemed to be always mentioned in the waging of wars, so perhaps without churches, there would not be so much Holy Warring.
And the peculiar thing was, sometimes it was not the Enemy who destroyed the libraries and the businesses and the churches, but the very people who had patronized the libraries and managed the businesses and attended the churches, so anxious were they all to make non-existent any institution which had contributed to the Idea of War.
And more had been destroyed—some by design, some from outrage, and others for the sheer joy of decimating that which humankind had wrought: monuments and shopping malls, post offices everywhere and tourist destinations near &far, circuses and zoos, museums and movie theatres, hotels and restaurants and car washes and subways and grocery stores and farmer’s markets and Divisions of Motor Vehicles and Departments of Internal Revenues.
(Actually, I guess you could say that not all of the effects of The Last Great War had been bad. Nobody has had the courage to say that in the history books, but I have the courage to say it, and I am saying it here. Yes, it is fair to say that nobody missed the duumvirates and beadledoms, the stratocracies and gynocracies and pantisocracies, the feodalities and adhocracies and suzerainties, the dictatorships and seneschalships, the caliphates and magistrates, the interregnums and imperiums. Not one person thought back wistfully with fond remembrances of the rules and regulations, the codes and the canons, the rubrics and edicts, the sanhedrins and conventicles and amphictyonic councils, the taxes and the traffic, the licenses and the permits, the bureaucracy and the bullshit.)
THE CRY FOR HELP
But of one sad point, there was no making argument. You could not deny the worst effects of The War: it had all but destroyed the children. Alright, yes, technically, the children still breathed and walked and talked, but they seemed to the grown-ups like ghosts. They were zombies They woke from their deep sleeps seemingly refreshed, but their sleeps were dreamless. They walked with direction, but without caprice. They spoke with manners, but no whimsy. They played with energy, but no rapture. The laughed, sometimes, but only after the grown-ups did first, as though they needed to be signaled when something was funny. They prayed, but without the slightest clue to whom they were directing their obiescent and rote supplications.
Perhaps worst of all, though, the children seemed incapable of imagining anything. When the parents read to their children, the children’s expressions were entirely blank, as though the children had no idea what their parents were talking about. As though the words created no pictures, no sounds, no smells, no tastes, no textures in the children’s memories. And just as the children seemed to have no memories of The Past … before The Last Great War of Hurled Things … so they seemed to have no interest in, or understanding of, The Future. Never did a child talk about what they planned to do the next day, never did they mention what they wanted as a gift for an impending birthday, nor did wee she or diminutive he let loose the secret passion of what he would do when he grew up, what she might accomplish when she was a grown-up. It was as though the children had all stopped believing that they would survive long enough to grow up at all, or that a world would exist to be an adult in, if they did last that long on this planet.
Yes. There was no question. The Last Great War had turned the children into the Walking Dead.
And so … with no other plan in the parents’ minds … with no other solution that they could collectively conjure … they all knelt and prayed. True, there were no more churches to pray in, but they had heard, they had remembered from some shadowy past, that way back in the year 1820, a very pedestalled man name Matthew had said something very important about god and prayer: “For wherever two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them …”
Who was this Matthew, (a gentleman whom different folks could remember vaguely as having some kind of spiritual grandeur), that was a good poser, and what had happened in the year 1820 which was so special that this Matthew fellow should be allowed some insight into god, they did not know, but still, it seemed like a good idea. The only idea left.
So all the people in the little Hamlet prayed. They put all their differences aside, fell to their knees, and had a good, long, soulful prayer for the children.
And then they waited.
And waited.
And waited.
And then…
Came The Piper.
Oh, what a sight he was! He looked exactly like a Harlequin, from days of old, with tight leggings and a blousy shirt to match, and both decorated with fabulous flashy diamond shapes, all the colors of the rainbow. And marvelous upon marvelous—a matching coat of many colors! (With long sleeves and the coat hem dancing almost to the bottom of his leather boots!) The boots themselves were quite astonishing as well—they came high up over his knees, almost like the boots of a Musketeer, but they were not dullish black or brown, rather the boots were also made of rainbow colored triangles of leather. And the leather in those boots, oh, nobody had seen leather like that since before The War. The leather was as buttery and smooth as a baby’s bottom. The coat was satin, and the leggings and blouson were of the finest silk.
Comes The Piper!
As he pranced into the little Hamlet, all of the folks came out to gawk at him. The very first sight of him made them smile and clap. They were in explicably happy for the first time in ages.
Perhaps much of their giddiness came from the intensity of the colors of his clothing, for as you no doubt know, one of the worst side effects of The Last Great War was that it caused all the colors of the world to go so drab that it seemed now as though everything you saw was a scene from a film noir movie.
But not The Piper! Oh, what a riot of colors his clothing was, with its many diamond patches and spangly bits! The Blue was intensely Blue, but it was not the somber blue of the military flags that had been draped over so many millions of young soldiers’ coffins throughout the many long battlescreeds of The War; rather it was the Blue of the ocean, all aqua and teal and midnight and royal, such as the ocean had been before the weapons and waste of The Last Great War had turned the earth’s oceans the color of cancer.
And the Yellow on The Piper’s garb, oh what a lovely Yellow it was, lemony in some patches, golden in others, but what a luscious Yellow. It was not the yellow of cowardice, such as seemed to be everywhere during The War, but it was the color Yellow of the sun on a perfect summer day, before the bombs had turned the sky to a permanent puke color.
Oh, and The Piper’s Red! The Red was so very Red, but not the bloody red that all the Hamletfolk had grown so used to—no, this was the Red of valentines and strawberries and corvette convertibles—all things that folks had long grown sadly used to not having, in the time after The Last Great War. One woman looked at the Red in The Piper’s coat of many colors, and she was reminded of the lipstick she had chosen for her wedding so many years ago, and of the first kiss she had received as a young wife from her handsome husband. But The War had taken him, as it had taken so many others … It seemed as though there was no end to the torrent of sad memories that flowed through the Survivors.
But I digress—Purple—did I mention The Piper Purple? It was such an intense Purple, but this was not the purple of rage, as had puffed up the faces of so many self important government men and military types, no no no, this was the same color Purple as could be seen in the purple glass pieces that made up the Saints’ robes in the stained glass windows of the Hamlet church, before the Enemy had bombed it to smithereens.
And Green! As The War had destroyed so much of the earth’s glorious dressings, naturally green was not a color one saw much of these days. But The Piper’s Green was a magnificent thing. It was not the green of envy, a mucous color of sickly green that one saw all too much of these days, nor was it the green of covetcash, that evil nowbanned paper with the headshots of dead presidents, that had fueled so much Fight … no, this Green, oh! this Green was the Green of emeralds, of evergreens, of the thriving verdant fields that once had rolled over the sweet dirty earth, giving wildflowers a plain for blooming, deer a home for grazing, lovers a haven for trysting, and poets a place to compose. Such a Green! Such a Green as made me, myself, weep to see.
But the Orange—ah, if the Green brought tears, something about the Orange in The Piper’s Harlequin garb made people laugh and grin; the color itself exuded a warmth. This was not the orange of the sickly veterans who marched home, half dead from being sprayed with the Enemy’s deadly gasses, poor surviving soldiers who harbored deep in their cells a cancer which would finally do to them what the bombs and bullets could not: consign them to a coffin long before their rightful time. No, this was not that kind of orange at all, this was a warm and inviting Orange, a healthful and happy Orange. It was the Orange of citrus balls hanging heavy on the trees, so ripe they might drop off and konk you on the head if you stopped to stare up at them from under their pregnant branches. It was the Orange of sunsets watched by lovers as they clutched one another, it was the Orange of koi kept in ponds before they were eaten during the Starving Part of The Last Great War, it was the Orange of home fires burning in the hearth, such as women had always kept stoked and strong, so that their husbands and sons and lovers returning home from The War, might see in the distance and know that a joyful reunion awaited them.
But perhaps my favorite (for I remember well, The Piper’s first appearance in our Hamlet that day) were the Pink diamonds in his leggings and blouson and coat of many colors and boots even. It was the Pink of a flushed cheek, a cheek flushed with joy and anticipation and running and elation—such as we had seen in the faces of our children before The War, and yet so taken for granted…that was the color of Pink it was. And we, as a folk together, needed to find out how to make that particular color of Pink return to the faces of our children.
Comes The Piper!
THE MUSIC BEGINS
… Or …
Recherche de Temps Perdue
And then, just when we thought we could not marvel any more at the electric colors of The Piper’s clothes, he pulled out his Pipe and began to play! It would seem to be a simple thing, would it not, the tune played by a humble wanderer’s flute? But there was nothing simple or humble about this music; indeed, it was more enchanted than any sound I have ever heard before or since. For it had about it the ability to make the listener feel transported back to a blissful memory, a memory that one moment before had seemed forgotten for all time.
But that was before we amnesiacs heard The Piper’s magical playing.
Plays The Piper!
And not only did the listener remember a happy moment in the past, but the lucky listener actually felt transported there, as though they were reliving the moment in all its splendid glory, all over again—oh but wait, I repeat myself in my giddiness. I repeat myself in my giddiness.
But there was even more to The Piper’s magic music—because for each person who listened, the magic was different.
One sweet young thing heard The Piper’s playing and was immediately swept back to memories of her first kiss in the moonlight, while her sweetheart was walking her home from the Fourth of July Pie Eating Contest. In the distance, you could hear (or The Piper’s playing made her think you could hear) the Hamlet band playing in the Hamlet green, in the gazebo, and they were playing a John Philip Sousa Medley … “Stars and Stripes Forever”, “Semper Fideles”, “In Flander’s Field”, and the like. But as the sun set, the band had moved on from marches and began playing Sousa’s romantic songs such as “My Sweet Sweetheart”, and “Fairest of the Fair”, and “Annabel Lee.” And it was while they were playing “Reverie” that this young lady’s fellow, her date, still lost in a mist of pie and fireworks, leaned in towards her, belched a little before kissing her, which is wonderfully why his belchy kisses tasted like strawberries and blackberries and peaches and lemon meringue all swirled up together, and she thought it was surely the sweetest thing she had ever tasted. She would never have another kiss quite so delightful in her entire life … and all this entire osculatory rememoration brought on by one little flourish on The Piper’s flute.
And to a paunchy, wizened, withered, sweetcoot, made old early by The War, he was sure, absolutely sure, that the tune The Piper was playing was “Take me Out To The Ball Game,” because suddenly he was flooded with distant memories of how he had once, long ago, been a professional ball player, and suddenly he was reliving it again, his finest, shining hour, when he had hit the ball right out of the park, and he had gotten a home run, and it was such a big deal that his picture was in the paper all over the country, all over the world for people who followed that kind of thing … but that was long ago, before The Last Great War, when people still cared about things like home runs.
Yet another woman did not hear band music wafting from a gazebo when The Piper played, rather she remembered the music of her own youth playing, on her honeymoon, in fact, and she remembered—or rather she could actually hear Eydie Gorme singing “Blame it on the Bossanova,” as she and her husband fell into blissful lovemaking for the first time. And as she listened to Eydie croon, the young bride celebrated the triumph of convincing her naive husband that she was still a virgin, by using a concoction of egg white, fleabane, and alum, a clever mixture she had read about in the novel “Fanny Hill.” Yes, there is power in reading, dear children.
And for yet another man, it sounded to him like calliope music, like the music of a carousel at the summer fair, and he remembered taking a pretty young thing to the fair, and spending all of the money on her that he had saved up from working all summer at the munitions factory. And when he hit the barbell it went all the way to the top, and he won her the prize of a large stuffed pink beaver with funny buck teeth, and he took his gal by her tiny waist and lifted her up onto one of the carousel horses when she wanted a ride, and he bought her pink cotton candy and watched it melt upon her sweet red tongue, and he imagined … he fantasized … And he could not have known in that fleeting moment that his fantasies would soon come true, very soon, later by the lake, their gorgeous lust lit only by the glow of a hundred fireflies, nor could he know that it was both the first and last time that he would ever make love to a woman, for he would be drafted a week later, and this particular private’s privates would be blown into smithereens by the Enemy. But at least he had that one time to cherish, to remember, and he was sure, absolutely sure that everybody all around him must also be hearing the sweet, heady sound of this calliope music, and his mind and his heart drifted back in time…
And an aging Flower Child, who had not been treated well by all the cruelty of The Last Great War (she looked one hundred years old if she was a day, although she was only forty something—it must have been all the rapes by an Enemy almost as ruthless and inhuman as the side her people were on), but where was I?, ah yes, to her, the music sounded like the full out orchestral rendition of “Knights in White Satin,” and she remembered the prom, when she was slow dancing with a dreamy hippie who sported long hair and smelled of freshly grown hemp. For the full seven minutes of the song, she stayed in a haze, and as The Piper played and the Hamlet crowd all listened, it seemed to the bittersweet Flower Child as though everybody all around her was slow dancing as well, along with her. She could have sworn that they were all hearing the same music that she was…
And for another face in the crowd, for a middle aged sort of man—or had The War just made him look middle aged?—The Piper’s music took him back, back to a glorious youth, more specifically to a glorious quarry, where he and his best buddies used to swim away the summer days. They would dive from the highest precipice, deep down into the ice blue water, then back up, breaking through the surface to a world so perfect, so sunny, so full of promise that they thought surely it had all been created expressly for them. “Lollipop” and “Splish Splash,” and “Mack the Knife” and “Love Potion Number 9” and “Great Balls of Fire,” as well as everything by Elvis and Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee and Buddy Holly and The Big Bopper, all these songs seemed to be playing all the time on the portable radio that always sat next to their towels and shoes and clothes (they swam buck naked, of course), and they knew with a supreme certainty that nowhere on earth was anybody more content than they were in that moment.
As they lay baking on their towels, bare-assed, talking about the grand future which lay in front of them, they could not imagine life getting any better. And not surprisingly, it did not. All but one of them were killed, during The Last Great War, but in a freak accident, unrelated to The War, when a small plane they were flying in (to a retrospective rock concert featuring Buddy Holly and The Big Bopper cover bands, no less) went down in a small field not too far from the Hamlet.
But nobody could take away the memory of those spectacular youthy days, nor the sound of that immortal music, which had continued to play in the old man’s head, until long after The Day The Music Died, and The Day His Friends Died. And all of this, all of this grand music, from the frippery of flute playing on behalf of the Piebald Piper.
And for another younger woman, she flashed back immediately to her greatest hour. It was the day she gave birth to her children, quintuplets, and she had asked, please, that in the delivery room, to help her through labor, they might play that lovely piece by Ralph Vaughan Williams, “Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis.” The birth maestro agreed, and that is how it happened these lush, soothing strings ushered five lives into the world, and took the edge off the pain of giving birth, although that sweet, spiraling music did not take the pain off the Pre-War-Family-Birthing Requirements (part of a desperate Global Attempt to prevent The Last Great War), that she give up all five children except for one, the other four being opted out for Mandatory Redistribution.
And for yet another man, the Hamlet’s preacher, his memory was of a different kind than all these other bittersweet and slightly carnal incarnations. He remembered one of the most difficult tasks that the universe had ever thrown at him. He was called to give the eulogy of the most hated man in all the Hamlet and beyond. It was his charge, his job, it went with his position in the church, and almost from the moment he got up to speak, (inexplicably, hundreds had attended the old fart’s funeral, but later the preacher realized that it was only with the intention to boo and hiss—and indeed the preacher had been right spot on) … but where was I? Ah Yes. As soon as the preacher began his eulogy of the hated man, someone hit him smack straight on with an overripe tomato! So lame was the preacher’s speaking style, and so reviled the dead man, that the bitter crowd was willing to “kill the messenger”, if you will. They had been celebrating the dead man’s passing, and they were bitter that the jubilation had to be interrupted with this public memorial so ordered in the dead man’s will.
But the preacher was rather an old man himself, you see, and had grown up alongside the hated man. Neighbors they were, and over the many long years and decades of living in and around and through each other’s lives, the preacher had come to understand why the old man was now, at the end of his life, so bitter, sad, mean, and cruel.
So then … ever so humbly … and offering up a silent prayer that god might give him the strength and eloquence to do right by this poor man—this tragic character who had, in secret silence, in modest privacy, in terrified solitude, suffered more slings and arrows of outrageous fortune than most people do in ten lifetimes (and we all do have many lifetimes, you know, I found that out),—anyway, I ramble.
The preacher began the eulogy again. A do-over. He had the sense to “cue music,” and his nephew, who had been instructed in the will to DJ the funeral, did a brilliantly executed mash-up of Verdi’s “Requiem” and Mozart’s “Requiem” and the “Pie Jesu” from Faure’s “Requiem,” and then the preacher regaled the Hamletfolk with the story of this man’s life, and all its twists and turns: loss, death, dashed hopes, betrayals in business, Fate’s cruel jabs at his health, with its cancers and burning arthritis, a heart wrenching tale about a puppy, an agonizing story about a kidnapped daughter, a wife gone mad from the former, that same wife shooting herself to stop the pain, the finding of the daughter’s body—you don’t even want to know. Then, an anecdote about the poor suffering man turning to religion, but only then to be robbed-off by oily men-of-the-cloth who promised Heaven for a price … and on and on the sad story of the man’s life spilled forth.
By the end of the eulogy, the audience was rapt, the way one watches a tragic movie with an even more tragic end. They were weeping and sobbing, and some of them were thinking that a man who had suffered so much, yet survived it all, ought to be made Mayor of the Hamlet, until they realized that he was dead. And then they thought they should erect a statue of him, because this man had actually built the Hamlet from dirt, along with its fountains and waterwheels, its gazebo and gardens.
The preacher knew he had done right by the poor old soul, who was now dead and out of his misery, and it was a memory of this merciful triumph…yes, it was that amazing trifecta of “Requiems” that the preacher heard coming from that sad, solitary flute on which The Piper played …
And on and on the fantasies went, for all the folks in the Hamlet.
Finally, the music ended. The Piper’s perfect timing suggested to me that The Piper knew each listener was just in the most magnificent throws of memory, their Recherche de Temps Perdu, but of course you know that—anyway, suddenly, there was silence.
No more breath blew through the magical flute.
Halts The Piper.
The Hamletfolk all stood in a mystical haze. Nobody knew how much time passed as they stood in their personal mists of intimate time, and later, when everybody talked about it, there was vast argument: some said it was thirty seconds, some claimed that hours had passed. One man claimed to have experienced a birthday and New Year’s while in the fog, and claimed to have gone grey in the hair because of it, and by gum he had!
But there was one thing they all agreed upon as they came out of their sweet stupors: The Piper had Magic. And they knew, somehow they just knew, that The Piper could heal their children. The Piper was the one to bring them back to life. The Piper was the Miracle for which they had prayed so profoundly.
“Oh Piper, can you work this same magic on our children, for they are numb and sad, not like children really at all. And we cannot imagine what the future holds for them, or for the world?”
And after being asked this, The Piper paused for a long time. So long, in fact, that the Hamletfolk began to get nervous: What was he thinking? What consideration was his mind weighing in the ponderous stillness of the dusk? Would he refuse them?
Finally, The Piper opened his mouth to speak, and the entire body of people turned their ears close to him.
“Yes, I can heal your children of their sadness. Yes, I can restore their imaginations, their joy.
But it will cost you. It will cost you a lump of gold for every child—for you see, my lovely family has been kidnapped by the Enemy’s agents, they are holding my lovely wife and beautiful children, and only with gold can I ransom them. I miss them so, my heart is breaking!”
Well, when the Hamletfolk learned that this was all The Piper wanted, that it was only money which stood between them and having their children restored to the darling dancing creatures they had been before The War, well of course they agreed.
Of course they agreed.
They Promised The Piper. And the Promise was a solemn one. A blood oath. And as they swore, they prayed that this was the last blood that would be shed upon the Earth.
Here ends the Sneak Preview for “The Apocalyptic Pied Piper”