Come On, My Selector

“What does a scanner see? ... I mean, really see? Into the head? Down into the heart?… into us - clearly or darkly? I hope it does…see clearly, because I can't any longer… see into myself. I see only murk. Murk outside; murk inside. I hope, for everyone's sake, the scanners do better. Because…if the scanner sees only darkly, the way I myself do, then we are cursed, cursed again… and we'll wind up dead this way, knowing very little and getting that little fragment wrong too.”

-Philip K. Dick

A Scanner Darkly

Murphy chucked aside the paperback copy of Zamyatin’s We he’d been reading – God, what a bore! – and stood in front of the Visor set as he strapped on his armband. The President’s on screen, laying out the new policy he’d moments ago signed. Order, order, yes fucking order!

“Disturbing the Peace” means whatever the fuck you want it to mean.

A tiny bump is tantamount to a Pablo Escobar flood.

One single grain of black-tar makes you Nicky fucking Barnes. 

Qualification is arbitrary.

We decide who is Aryan.

The uniform makes the Übermensch. 

A line of button-up inflatable honkies behind the President all bobbled their heads up and down. Murphy, pushing sixty but still ripped and powered by the unshakable belief that he is Rambo, Robocop, Jesus and Terminator all rolled into one perfect specimen, bobbed his head along as well.  

The months and steps leading up to this dead-collision shaped up an awful lot like Mao’s Cultural Revolution – actively encourage the youth to riot and fuck shit up, burn the textbooks, then turn to the elder generations and say “See how out of control they are? This is why we need a firm, strong, paramilitary force to restore order!” Then, their function fulfilled, they round up the kids they themselves goaded on and ship them to the country, to be used as slave labor on farms. 

Though naturally no one, not least of all Murphy, picked up on this.

Alfalfa got thrown outta the Grindhouse for tugging his Paul Reubens during a screening of The Night Porter.  

While he was looking over his shoulder at the marquee, sore about it, Murphy marched up and walloped him upside the head. Wringing his little neck all the way down to the station, Murphy loved the throttle. His vice grip around this four-eyed beak-nosed little twerp’s chicken-tube. 

Waiting for the stoplight, Murphy let his eyes travel up from his hairy knuckles locked in their death grip to the red band around his arm. He looked at it lovingly. Black, lower case ‘e’ against a red field. Einsatz. Commitment.

Alfalfa thought the color scheme and even the letter font looked more than a little bit like the hockey jersey worn by the Aryan-looking youth on the cover of Rage Against the Machine’s ‘Evil Empire’. 

Murphy would tell people that the Prince song “Sexy Motherfucker” was about him. He’d been an audio engineer briefly for the Artist Formerly Known As in the early ’90’s. That’s what he’d whisper in the dives he hit up after his sash was pressed and hanging in his closet back home.

Once, this leather-hided Spaniard chuckled and told him this: After Nemesis led Narcissus to the lake, where he dropped to his knees and from that moment on couldn’t tear his eyes away from his own beautiful reflection, the lake where Narcissus eventually fell into and drowned after leaning in too close to his image – three goddesses stopped on the shores of this lake, having seen the whole thing and, seeing the fresh water now become salty tears, asked the lake why it was crying. “I weep for Narcissus” came the reply. “No surprise. You alone got close enough to contemplate his beauty.”

“Was Narcissus beautiful?”

“You of all should know!” They said incredulously.

“I weep for Narcissus, but I never noticed his beauty. I weep because when he knelt by my banks, I could see in his eyes the reflection of my own beauty.”

Murphy laughed, though he had no clue what the old man was going on about.

Now, on his vantage point - like the Dark Knight looming over Gotham - he broke out of his reverie to swoop down and Judge Dredd a closet-case giving it to a tranny in an alley across the way. 

Alfalfa squinted at the blur seated next to him. On the way to the station, Alfalfa’s specs got knocked off his nose and Murphy crushed them with his cheap discount Doc Martin knock-offs.

The crooked-necked beanpole who also wore specs and looked not unlike a turtle tapped a hand-rolled cig he fished outta his pocket protector against a blue binder balanced on a jerking knee, packing the tobacco into thin rolling-paper.

“Ayn Rand said: “There’s two sides to any issue: one side is right and the other’s wrong – but the middle is always evil.”

Can’t say I agree with that – mostly because I don’t believe there is a middle.”

“No, I guess they phased that out, haven’t they?”

Canon shakes his head. 

“No. There never was a middle to begin with. Humans are incapable of impartiality. Moderation is bullshit. The barometer flips this way, or it flips that way. I say, one must always assume the extreme of any ideology. An ideology is defined by its most extreme end. Everyone’s a Scotsman, no one’s a Saxon.”

“The Saxons never reached Scotland.”

“Yeah, and Christ stopped at Eboli. Doesn’t mean there weren’t Beatniks for Nero to fuck up.”  

The iron door slid open and the perv got the bum’s rush into the cell. Murphy dragged the RuPaul simp into a separate cage.

“Hey! Hey! Fuck you! That shit was good enough for Brando!”

Alfalfa pipes up, “James Dean too!”

Murphy hops down the concrete steps, black trench flapping around him. Makes sure his black turtleneck is tucked into his Khakis and the sash is pressed firm to the wool. Draped from the left shoulder down to the right side, the red strip has two sets of three gold bars spaced evenly apart – three bars clustered at the shoulder, three at the side.

Murphy thought it an odd design choice, but you can’t always get a Hugo Boss.

At home, before changing and hitting up his regular dive, Murph plops into an armchair and flicks on the visor as he slips off his Not-Doc Martins.

Re-run of the morning’s policy changes.

The President yields to the Secretary of Edumacation:

We started on the right path, but that path was a dirt trail. Now we have to pave it into a concrete road. 

It starts with small dictations.

The Karen teaching English clucks:

“It’s not “Getting Fucked”, Timmy, it’s “Personal Responsibility” (a favorite Orwellianism of theirs since they’re never on the receiving end of it); We don’t say “Lynch Mob” anymore – we’ve added extra steps when forming one, so now it’s called a “Jury of one’s peers”; It’s not an Inquisition - we’re not Spanish so it can’t be an Inquisition – it’s an unbiased, Catholic-free “trial”, even if the law is still based on anal-retentive Puritanical principles.”

All the farm-fresh test-tube Murphy’s bobble their understanding. 

Just as now the Good Soldier Schmuck nods his approval.

He hangs up the sash, locks his door, and exiting the lobby pats himself on the back, for not just anyone can round up all those leering dime-store Osamas and Pablos, McVeighs and Aileens bumming around on the corner of every block. And there are so goddam many.