Now You Know

“Now You Know”

by eric sean scott

You know all about Truth. And lies. And the things people attempt to keep secret.

You know all about questions and answers -- and keep them tight-fisted and high in mind; a deathgrip on the truth in your pocket.

And you know all about this cartoon-colored modern life of consumerism, selfishness, and the elaborate distraction of chosen ignorance. This thing-seeking, money-sucking, wasteful and wanton image-obsessed culture of liposuctioned, botoxed and spray-tanned shaven monkeys dancing and preening and pining for eyes upon them; looking for a lover like a slave to Caesar, disposably plentiful.

And oh yes, you know all about the hidden and the buried and the as yet undiscovered. Compound chemistry. Elemental interaction. The atomic dance of birth and death; life and the loss of it; chemical pleasures combating concrete pain.

Yes. You know knowledge leads to truth, truth begets wisdom, and wisdom is required now more than ever in these desperate times. The wisdom and will to act accordingly; to do what must be done, and set about it bravely.

There are no secrets anymore. Not really. Not if you know the right people, as you do. And if you know how to dig without getting blinded and buried by the dirt. Sure, plenty of people still keep them, filling their closets, stacking and packing them ceiling-high and bolting doors; burying them en masse in the black-and-blue basements of their past. Year upon year, tier after tier of transgressions and tired lies. But nothing remains hidden forever; no truth exists eternally unknown and unknowable. There is no mystery not eventually uncovered . . . In time . . . Time will reveal all wounds in the end, not heal them.

And the Truth will out, as you well know. The Truth will always out. And these outings, it’s sad to see, tend to be painful and scarring for the most part. And occasionally . . . quite bloody to boot.

Yes. Lasting secrets do not exist. Not truly. Someone, somewhere -- past, present or future -- knows. Or did know, or will know: The Truth of the Matter. Any matter at all.

For instance:

You know JFK was assassinated for many reasons. And you know it was all planned intricately, arranged and coordinated months in advance, and actually executed by a double-handful of mysterious men. And of course, none of the reasons have anything to do with Vietnam. And none of the men involved were named Lee Harvey. Uncommon knowledge, to be sure. Yet, accessible and available, and even unofficially documented and stored deep within some silicon labyrinth beneath Quantico.

You’ve just got to have hydra fingers and a speedy mind, as you do.

Think getting friendly with Castro after the Pigs fiasco.

Think seized Caribbean mob casinos and bright-eyed brother Bobby’s relentless Sicilian witch-hunt.

Think Jack bedding one wrong woman too many.

Nothing stays secret forever. Everything becomes common knowledge eventually.

And yes, you know arsenic smells and tastes like almonds. So you never touch almond cookies or amaretto, lest you inure yourself to the poison, and incapacitate your sensitivity for detection.

And you know the radon levels in drinking water were so widespread and dangerous during the Seventies, that an estimated one in three of our collective Gen-X lifespans have been shortened by a solid ten years. At least.

And of course you know HIV is not transmittable through saliva, but that doesn’t keep you from reeling in horror when you’re spit on by that damn beggar downtown. The one with rotten stumps for teeth, wild eyes, and crazily electrified patches of greasy-gray hair jutting from his cancerous skull every-which-way. The one with the mange eating its way down his neck and into the collar of his shabby Shriner’s trash-jacket; a rashy rainbow of crusty, disgusting colors, glistening and oozing bloody pus in places.

Yes, you know HIV is not transmittable through saliva . . . but then, plenty of viruses are. And then there are the 426 known and recorded flu-strains. The unlimited mutation possibilities of rare, exotic contagions . . . dead lethal and airborne . . . both naturally occurring and bio-engineered. The probabilities astound.

So you cringe, nearly breaking into a run to get away from the spitting beggar. And is it any wonder? You know what you saw was just a glimpse, a taste, of the future. Prescient déjà vu: that could be you -- and may well be, all too soon.

Then later, you discover what you did not know: the beggar with the crusty mange once saved the lives of over 300 people. He herded them into a high school gymnasium locker room during the Frisco quake of ‘92. The gymnasium collapsed behind them, leaving only the locker room intact. The crazy fucking waste of flesh had once been a hero.

You discover this from the paper. The obituaries, in fact. The only section of that worthless daily rag worth reading.

For this you also know: death is not an end, it is merely another opportunity for discovery. Death, and the mystery of what may or may not follow, can only remain secret until you die.

So now you think maybe you should have given that mangy beggar some spare change after all. Before he died in a frozen gutter.

Only . . . you know that such kind and generous gestures are ultimately pointless. Just gestures.

And you’ve always known that heroes die and lovers lie and life is not filled with happy endings, everyone all smiles. Instead, it is filled with scary choices and warped intentions. It is filled with pain, and betrayal, and regret.

And blood, of course. Blood . . . and come . . . and the seductive slaughter of speech.

And oh yes, you know that 300cc of amyl nitrate in the wedding punch can put down thirty people in thirty seconds.

The trick is to propose a toast.

You know it takes approximately ninety seconds for the local police to trace a telephone call on the average. And that the FBI is set up for near-instantaneous mobile triangulation. Thirty seconds tops, then you’d better be moving.

And you know Elvis really did die on the shitter. You’ve seen the pictures, and you believe them, though you know just about anything can be faked.

Like how you also know Morrison faked it in France. Jim actually died at the ripe old age of 61, just a few years ago. Back home in Florida. Fishing in the Keys. Sun-cured to sweaty leather; beard to his belly and unrecognizable. They found his boat but not his body -- or so says the ever-reliable word of clandestine whispering wisdom.

And you know the local, chocolate-hued voodoo matrons call it legoûdemort in their lilting, puckering patois. And all your fellow chemists have yet to crack the compound. This “taste of death” that legend and folklore claim only grows within falling stars; this mighty mixture of unknown elements and unidentifiable bonding agents all swirling together to mean so little in the face of your vision.

The important thing is: you have it now. You keep it in your pocket tight. Truth concentrated. The Answer in hand.

And now, you know what sleeping born to dream truly means.

As well as what it means to wake the walking death.

And of course you know that the small pox threat in today’s newly screwed world is much more worrisome than many may suspect.

And you know that half the world’s missing weapons-grade plutonium and enriched uranium is indeed “in the wrong hands.” And the other half? Factions still haggle and the bidding wars continue as prejudiced zealotry abounds.

Money talks, OJ walks, and all legislation is up for sale.

World Leaders, all master magicians; illusionists whose signature trick is “sleight of mind,” using acrobatic semantics to effect a form of mass hypnosis.

And now you know what WMD really stands for . . . “White Man’s Dollars.” And despite popular opinion, you know they were, indeed, found.

And yes, of course the 1% rule the Earth with slick and well-oiled hands, flashing pharmaceutical smiles.

And sure, the human race is really just satellite TV for the laughing alien space-potatoes. So you know to smile big for those star-cameras and put on a good show.

And God? What a laugh. You know Humanity just happens to possess an abominably creative and versatile imagination, an insane desire to question and dissect Everything in existence, and a seemingly infinite capacity for believing its own collective bullshit. All the while exhibiting an historically perverse penchant for all manner of heinous cruelty and destruction.

You know Dear Death doesn’t just stalk the night and stick to shadows. Death adores the day. Just as all Darkness loves the Light.

And all of loving is measured only by how much you bleed for nothing.

Re-birth is simply the curse of being neither damned nor redeemed. And you know Damnation and Salvation are one in the same: just words invented to label arguable concepts that amount to nothing more than pure conjecture.

And you know it takes exactly seven minutes to get from your door to the metro.

Rush hour pulls approximately two million people around the city in about one hundred minutes. And you know you can circuit the city twice in that time and still make the evening airport crowd by seven.

And now you know that third stage contusion has set in. You awoke this morning with rosy red blotches all over your bed sheets, your skull a pounding purple bruise -- a rotten and discarded piece of foul fruit.

You spiked the last ampoule of morphine an hour ago. The whole thing. Now you’re almost walking straight again. Almost feeling normal. No pain and all smiles. No pain, thanks to the morphine; all smiles, because that ampoule was your last. Happy day, happy day. The dawn of awakening.

And how well you know that black wool is the best dress for this miserable mid-winter weather. Wool is warm . . . absorbent . . . concealing.

And you know this flu-season is the worst in nearly a century. Since the Spanish Flu Epidemic of 1918. Broadcast news common knowledge. It has everyone’s immune system knocked back a collective 33%. So susceptible. Just ripe enough to rot.

And oh yes, you most certainly know small pox is indeed a much more imminent danger than most everybody imagines.

You also know there is not enough vaccine in existence to contain it. CDC says it’s so, all shamefaced and working overtime, admitting their ill-preparedness and brandishing time-tables and stockpile projections to curtail the panic: one year to cover the world.

Oh well. Out of time. Besides, you know there are much worse things out there than small pox. Ever so much worse. By far.

Unidentifiable bonding agents. Seventy-two hour gestation period. Rapidly accelerated cellular degeneration culminating in sudden eruptions of flesh, your very skin disintegrating bit by bit before your burning eyes and mind. Full-blown and falling apart, you are now the biggest bomb on the planet.

And you know now that it’s time to go. Time to let all these clueless people know what you know.

It will officially be rush hour in seven minutes and counting.

The clock is tick-tock-ticking, marking off the moment’s movement with its ignorant metronomic insistence.

And you . . . you alone know the Truth. It rests in your righteous hand so ready and real, as you grip Death by the balls with your teeth, biting back all your laughing tears.

In less than seven simple minutes, you know that Time will stop dead.

And you smile, because it is you who will perform this silent miracle, this invisible wonder, this unseen act of blackened magic.

It is you who will kill all the clocks.

It is you who shall bury Time itself -- along with all the rest of Mankind’s pomp and arrogance.

And now you know the sweetest, most melodious music you could have ever imagined. You can hear it all. It’s of your own making.

It is the sweet siren-song of The End a-coming.

You listen to the whispering trash stirred to speech by the wasted and shuffling commuters headed homeward all hangdog -- most of them sniffling, sullen and sick. Blowing their nose-trumpets and singing sad-sack sighs for nothing. And you can feel the muted metal-on-metal of the metro thump-thumping through your brittle bones and boiling blood, faster and faster, accelerating Time and tumbling the magic moment toward freedom. It all echoes and thrums throughout the city’s foundations -- the very foundations of Civilization -- creating an ominous and urgent underground symphony of soon-to-be silent hearts and long-dead dreams.

And you shiver quick and glad as your frail fingers spread wide and let loose the miracle.

Tick-tock, tick-tock . . . The clocks all stop and Time shudders to a halt unnoticed by all except yourself. The tender tinkling of shattering crystal is swallowed by the sudden shriek of screeching brakes. Then comes the pneumatic whoosh of the metro doors exhaling and inhaling all the poor, exhausted, unsuspecting denizens of this future-dead city.

You breathe deeply of your beloved oblivion, so odorless, tasteless, and imperceptibly ruthless.

Heaven meets Earth, and you brought it down.

And you know: the world has now shifted, the measuring hands resuming that incessant clocking of stressful, sorry seconds . . . only reversed . . . running backward . . . counting down till the unknown hour of eventual annihilation.

And so you smile some more. You smile more on this day than you have in all your lifetime.

You smile because you now have a secret all your own. The biggest damn secret in all of human history. A secret you will carry to your grave.

Oh, they’ll all realize soon enough -- a matter of months maybe -- that Armageddon has arrived; that there is no hope left at all, only quick and vicious decomposition.

And as far as you know, it goes like this:

First, a three-day gestation period, asymptomatic and allowing for the airborne mutating viral contagion to spread far and wide.

Followed by normal night-sweats and incontinence, escalating joint and body aches, excruciating hypersensitivity, and complete loss of appetite.

Finally degenerating into brain-scorching and blood-boiling fevers, erupting lesions and contusions, and rapidly accelerated leprosy.

In the end, inside a week at best, you will be a bloody puddle of rotting flesh curled up somewhere as you feel your heart literally fall apart inside your chest. That is, of course, if you haven’t blacked out from the massive blood loss by that time.

And you smile because you know you’ve been blessed. Blessed to be the only witness to The Beginning of The End. Blessed indeed, to be the cause. The first. The catalytic seed of doom for all Mankind.

You smile because you finally know something more. At last. A secret that had for so long been unknowable, unreachable, and unimaginable.

Now you know what it must feel like to be God.

Yes. Now you know.