IT WAS the 36th time we’d been on I-40 on this job, heading back to L.A.
Picked up the samples in the morning at 10. After a twelve-hour drive, we were done. Checked into the Motel 6 in Victorville. The Idiot stays at the cheapest places it can. Per diem is set, so The Idiot saves pennies on the difference. ‘A financial wizard,’ I think and laugh to myself.
The samples are encased in enough ice to keep them at the right temperature for 36 hours. Time enough to deliver by noon, and if our taxes are hard at work, certainly before the lab closes.
***
Originally appeared in the print edition of Locust #8. Splash image by Tish Turl and Adam Turl.
THE IDIOT is sleeping. I’m up thinking. Left the windows open. Police sirens in the distance. Firetruck sirens go by, then the ambulance. Two minutes go by before the firetruck sirens fade out. Strong winds are blowing from the north. We can smell the wildfire north of Barstow, the Ridgecrest fire, eighty miles north of us.
The Idiot is mumbling in sleep. It sleep-talks now. It never used to talk in sleep. But since its self-immolation attempt, it talks and has taken to screaming too at times.
It starts yelling something incomprehensible. Then it becomes clear. It keeps saying, “No, no, no, this is not ... no, not this. That one! THAT’s mine!”
I go in to see what’s going on:
We are in the future. Not too distant future. We’re not flying in a spaceship or anything. We’re in a big rig semi, with a huge cabin, like a tiny house. On a road that looks like I-40, but the road sign we just passed said I-3958. The landscape is all desert. Flat where the road is but mountain ranges in the distance on either side of the highway. Eight lanes going each way. We’re heading east.
The big rig is hermetically sealed. Truck’s computer does most of the driving. A ‘pilot’ must be awake at the wheel by contract.
Trucks work around the clock. Three drivers to a unit take 8-hour shifts. It’s The Idiot’s turn to rest. It is arguing with the other resting driver.
The pilot tells both of them to shut up. He is trying to concentrate. Road conditions not so good. Lots of potholes. Construction crews and machinery to watch for. “Just shut up!”
“Just keep your eyes on the monitor, man! That’s all you have to do!” The Idiot tells the pilot.
It is year 2092, October 28, 08:43AM US Mountain Time, indicated at the bottom right corner of the monitor, which is the entire see-through windshield.
Big rigs don’t stop for gas. They get filled by fuel tankers that hook up to the big rigs and fill them as they keep driving. The fuel tankers also deliver food, drinks and miscellaneous to the drivers.
The Idiot is arguing with the other resting driver about who takes which food packet.
Cut to:
We get to the site. Huge piles of lithium batteries stacked up in giant hills five hundred feet high. Each hill is fenced and marked: Mercedes Benz, MBW, VW, Kia, Tesla, Nio, Xpeng, Li, Lordstown, Workhorse, Fisker, Lucid, BYD, Oshkosh, Nikola, Ford, GM, Volvo, Toyota, Fiat. It goes on and on. Visibility only goes so far as ten or so mini mountains of batteries, on each side of the hard gravel road.
Working men and women in hazmat suits, oxygen tanks feeding the suits. They are handling the batteries, numbering them, recording manufacturing serial numbers and ID numbers with scanners, packing them, sealing packets, and loading them on pales to be loaded on shipping containers that are loaded on transport trucks.
Different battery types, with different components and manufacturing processes, go to different processing centers. Batteries are shipped to processing centers for disassembling and recycling of the metals, the plastics, the microchips, the lithium cores. Lithium cores are shipped down the line for more processing and refining to get the lithium oxides. Cobalt and nickel to be extracted out of the parts as well.
Lithium mines have tapped out; there are no readily serviceable lithium sources. Lithium from spent batteries is the new gold; must be reanimated, recycled, repurposed, reused.
Fleet operators have switched to gas and diesel trucks. The supremacy of fleets of battery-driven big rigs is on pause. Fleets of gas-driven trucks are reactivated; the gas guzzling kings of the road are back.
Outside temperatures are barely livable without protective clothing.
Cut to:
The Idiot is building a pyramid out of the cigarette butts smoked and collected. It is a four-sided pyramid. At its base, it is four by four meters. It goes up two meters. Volume of a four-sided pyramid = height times the base area, divided by three. The Idiot’s collection of cigarette butts occupies a volume of over ten and a half cubic meters. A cigarette butt is ten milliliters in volume: one million six hundred seventy thousand cigarette butts (1,670,000).
Has to get rid of the pyramid in small batches. Ten thousand seven hundred cigarette butts a week. Has to be disbursed inside other trash. The Idiot orders lots of Chinese takeout and pizzas to help in the effort. Gets rid of it in weekly garbage pickups by the city crew. It takes three years.
Cut to:
“Indian roadblock,” the pilot says out loud. “Sit up, guys! The damn algorithm put me through Indian country. AGAIN. The fuckers put me in shit routes every time I don’t check beforehand. Fucking assholes!”
The American Indian border officer’s bullhorn is voicing warnings and commands:
“You are on American Indian land. You are trespassing. Your vehicle is not registered to go through. Turn around. Repeat: Turn around.”
The pilot gets on the truck bullhorn: “Understood, Sir. I can’t change the route myself. It’ll be a minute. I’m contacting the route supervisor; he will punch in the approval. It’ll take a minute. Thank you for your patience.”
“Step out of the vehicle!” the American Indian border patrol commands.
“It’s hermetically sealed, Sir. We are not authorized to leave the cabin. Safety rules.”
“Your rules don’t apply here. You are on American Indian land. Step out of your vehicle! NOW!”
A group of seven border patrol officers point their laser guns at the truck.
“What should we do?” the second resting driver asks.
The Idiot is the junior. It stays quiet. Too transfixed to say anything.
The pilot gets on the horn: “Sir, we are just doing our job. If we step out, we’re in violation of contract, we will lose our jobs. It will only take a few more seconds ... we’ll be right on our way in just a sec ...”
“Step out of the vehicle NOW! Final warning!” The patrol officers release the safeties on their laser guns.
***
THE IDIOT woke up screaming, “Noooooooo!”
I knew where the trucking part of the dream came from.
A new development. The Idiot has been following the new craze over electric vehicles, the lithium craze, the infrastructure legislation stuck in the do-nothing Congress.
“Lithium, son. Lithium. Lithium mining companies, electric vehicles, charging stations. Future of mobility,” even father was saying. When father talks like that about any topic, the topic has reached saturation point.
***
THE CIGARETTE part of the dream came out of the general condition gripping The Idiot. It saw an anti-cigarette public service announcement on TV. The PSA’s punchline: If it doesn’t get you one way, it gets you another way.
The Idiot thought it was a dare. It was now eager to find all the ways cigs can get it. A Japanese World War II Unit 731 in reverse: careful investigation of the process of organ failures, one after another, done on itself. No regard for me.
From tooth and gum decay to all parts of throat and beyond, cigarettes can run the gamut of destruction that goes through the nasopharynx, oropharynx, laryngopharynx, vocal fold, esophagus, trachea, esophageal muscle, the thyroid cartilage and the cricoid cartilage.
Then it marches down to the lungs and the heart.
The Idiot was eager to pursue the matter to its conclusion.
Throw in the alcohol, and it could do major damage to the kidneys, the liver.
High blood pressure would follow. More pressure on the heart to work harder. Added problems there down the road.
When liver is not working well, it doesn’t filter out all the poisons in the blood that pass through it. More poisons get through and run the system.
Give it time, enough organs will fail. Slowly.
No visits to doctors, no hospitals. No dentists.
***
DIDN’T SUCCEED in finishing itself off in a sprint, it would now go the marathon route. More studied, more systematic. A little bit every day. At some point, and for as long as The Idiot can delay it, it would get there eventually. Until then, there was a lot of living left to do. And meanwhile, it could learn how to die even more slowly.
And how to take revenge. Sweet revenge!
Two neighbors paid for its momentary madness. Did The Idiot go back to see what had happened to the people who saved its ass, OUR ass? Does the Pope send assassins to kill the pedophiles in his church?
The Idiot never apologized. Never mind offer help.
After it recovered, it rented a detached one-story house. In a neighborhood where you hear gunshots some nights, or fireworks. Some nights both. Police helicopters and drones circle the neighborhood.
It’s in the middle of a short block, thirty feet set back from the street, a small backyard that backs up to a treelined dead-end street; no through traffic behind the house, just the neighbors. Some fruit trees in the backyard: three citruses, a peach tree, a native cherry tree that birds and squirrels love to pick at and fight over.
Eight hundred square feet of living space: one bedroom, one full bath, a carport. No front yard to maintain; no trees, no living plants, no lawn, just a narrow strip of baked brown dirt with chain-linked fence marking the outer perimeter. There are some carcasses of old cactus plants. House is on a well trafficked street, hard to get out of the driveway in rush hour traffic.
***
CAN’T BE a rabbit? Be a turtle, of the order Testudines.
Or, better, be like the barely moving bees on the back patio’s hot cement.
The Idiot has resolved to find out what the bees experience, how they live, how they die.
It can only do it by doing what the bees do. There’s no reading about it. You read about something like that and it’s just an abstraction in your head. Then you get on with your TV program, or get to clearing your inbox, or go grocery shopping, or preparing dinner, washing up and tidying up after dinner, or you must pick up your kids from school, or take them to a game, or do homework with them, or visit them in jail. You get on with your life and your daily chores.
Daily chores force out reflection.
The Idiot was determined to die a bee’s death. Bees get human waste to deal with all their lives; transportation chemicals have morphed their climate into a double-baked hell overnight; overnight for their species lifespan. In any of their specific locations, carbon dioxide has increased by a factor of sixteen valleys; their air oxygen has dropped by a magnitude of few lakes; and the plants they land on, polluted by tons of shit we spray, and the poisons we put out by living the way we do.
The Idiot would follow the example of the bees. It would expose itself to an equivalent set of pollutants and find out how long it takes to die while doing daily chores.
Bees don’t go to a hospital, get all intubated, drip bags aplenty, hooked up to twenty machines, spending months on a bed, just to die. They die working. They’re out there, outside the hive, looking for nutrients, looking for flowers, for a source of water to bring back to the hive.
The Idiot sees crawling bees, almost lifeless, on the back patio cement. But they’re still trying to get up to get back to work. Or report back to the hive about places to avoid. But they just can’t fly anymore. The right wings flapping barely, the left wings trying to get the strength to do something, flap once a minute. The Idiot sees the bees dying in real time, one or two at a time, more on hotter days. When out for a late evening smoke, the bees are still where they were, now lifeless.
That’s how The Idiot wants to go. In the middle of daily chores. Leaving no organs behind. Not a cell.
***
YOU MAY be imagining that The Idiot is a vessel that I happened to land on and can handle at will. Like, I’m the spirit driving the body, or the superego to its ego.
It’s not like that. The Idiot has a mind of its own. I happened on a wild horse. A willful wild horse. There’s no controlling it. Not in the short term anyway. Nor at a moment’s notice. Most often not when it’s most needed. Once it gets going, it gets going.
I now need to learn its language, its logic, or the logic of its illogic. I can’t be disrespectful, can’t impose my language.
The Idiot’s dreams will tell me more. It argues in a lot of its dreams. What does that mean? Must pay attention to the arguments. What’s it thinking in there?
The longer march to final destruction is good, I concluded. Gives me more time. Time to derail its stupid plans. Time to interrogate it. I must shake it out of this so-called ‘plan’.
I had to find its cracks. Where were the cracks?
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