THEODORE SOVINSKI / IF THE KNIFE OF GOD SHOULD BE FOUND DULL LET MY HAND BE HIS WHETSTONE
As the booming voiceover welcomes its thrall, the camera pans and zooms slow in towards the lofty Coliseum spitting up in the valley ringed by sheer escarpments and Mormon sanctuaries tunneled therein, four pinnacles at the cardinal points pulsing hi-def 4k emissions to the hinterlands, frying the brains of said legions locked safely inside apartments and condos and townhouses and tenements, shadowy ephemeral gangstalkers surely lying in wait just outside, four towers inscribed with letters not meant to be read but pumping out thundering rabid waves through the blizzard—we are playing in the elements because that’s what it’s all about—ringing in one hundred and twenty three thousand seats in precipitous array defying conventional thinking on stadia architecture, those so concerned of Abbot Fischer and Nguyen power-pointing high on Adderall in boardrooms with views of sentient stark mountain vistas emphatically driving home the point that the wider you go the worse the view gets so you must go up, higher, seats at steeple inclines going to row quadruple Z.
Perched in plastic seats, knee to knee, clad in designer balaclava, scarves, coats, gloves gripping sixteen ounce beers bought on afterpay for fourteen payments of six fifty each, jawing crude, leering insults at rival fans to their left, mixed in together askance with no semblance of home and away sections although through tychian benevolence the Salt Lake City Dolphins find themselves hosting SB CLVIII but try telling anyone here that that’s a coincidence, all present snarking through handfuls of popcorn turned into mealy spittle cooling in the hiemal wind that the league is obviously rigging the game against the visitors in pathetic obsequience to the besuited god-kings dangling the threads of time from their fingers, weighing souls on chintzy golden scales in dim rooms lit up by electric candles in the holy city of Las Vegas, an entire complex populated by eunuchs trained from castration in the art of odds, at puffs of white smoke chosen to be enrolled in the council of one hundred and four who sit in their high chamber pondering a hollow gold bull squatting over a smoldering grill.
In the midst of a byzantine palace complex between twenty tons of computer servers humming, the whir of their fans cooling their burning circuits as they compile, aggregate and arrange data, their wires bound and guided down to the basement mezzanine, sits slouched atop a purple cushion the Delphic avatar of money, hope, odds and desperation, his wrists bound and his hands turned upwards and affixed to his head a ceremonial wooden mask, rectangular slits cut out at the eyes and mouth and three foot long barbs jutting out emerging in a beatific starburst from the center, the skull within sagging down under the weight, the shafts acting as radial antennae, picking up through the wi-fi raw data and feeding it to the brain inside, the perfect holy odds being computed therein and sent out through cathodes and wires attached by IV to his body into the servers and platforms and across screens all over America, including now the jumbotron gleaming fierce over the hordes, tearing at their hair with impatience for kickoff.
Starkly shorn and clean-shaven in a bespoke suit with matching tie and pocket handkerchief sits Squarejaw, tightlipped smile grimacing amiably across the sweeping glass desk to his color and analyst, the latter making a point about the Broncos’ stoic DC and the pros and cons of the nickel defense while above the stadium imperial stealth bombers shit the bed, the pilots killed instantly in a blossoming fireball as they collide midair, the crowd craning their necks up to ooh and aah and chortle with a smug elbow in the ribs of their neighbor to say, bet that cost the taxpayer a pretty penny, they having too much money to be so designated, this the highest concentration of car dealership owners and in-ground pool enthusiasts and charter jet leasers in the country, all whistle men, as the debris obliterates several dozen SUVs in the Arctic wasteland of the parking lot that stretches into blacktop infinity.
White lines in holy geometry bound the gridiron into a zone of decay, of pain, of career-ending injury, painted across the bioplastic verdant carpet developed in Minnesota laboratory complexes deep inside winding tunnels, into the bowels, muffled crosstalk from the locker rooms drowned by grinding, buzzing bass pounding in spasmodic imitation of devils moving furniture in an upstairs apartment, past the juridical headquarters wherein the officials suited up in zebra skin jot down the last whispered instructions from Vegas, nodding businesslike, down several stories in a concrete stairwell shaved of all niceties, the exit sign glowing dully, into the belly, the zone of pure utility, amongst fiberoptic cable running across the ceiling like veins amongst ductwork and bellowing furnaces and brass sewage pipes so wide Paul Bunyan couldn’t make his fingertips touch if he wrapped his arms around them: there, deep inside, sit Gideon and Koady.
They rub their eyes after having camped inside an unmarked utility closet for one week prior, emaciated and dehydrated, putting faith in their circadian timekeeping, no digital miscellany allowed so that they could be undetectable, off the grid, non-people—they squat to debrief, weary but steel-eyed, reviewing schematics pinned flat by bottles of ammonia and formula 409. In them is the hollow look of the vagabond without much left to lose, traipsing from waterlogged Virginia coastal ghettos dotted with FEMA tents manned with bottom-rung bored federal employees in branded polos tucked into khakis, doling out rations of rice and dried vegetables weighing not more than eight ounces in plastic bags to shuffling empty-eyed assorted arranged in long zagging queues, across empty re-wild country scoured with interstates like whip scars on a flagging back, giving wide perimeter to febrile animals chattering in packs hoping to cast out the heat in abandoned strip malls cum dens, hiding out under overpasses from hulking choppers thumping the air mercilessly in deafening search for persons indicated to be misaligned, out of sync, in need of time spent in the tank and a voucher on their way out for a few hundred bucks in free bets to the sportsbook of their choice in order to seduce them back to the world of the financial living.
Not one for speeches Gideon, he of the twisted ankle that had so hindered their progress that for the last three hundred miles Koady had carried him, silently, on his shoulder towards the skiey peaks brooding in the west, accepting the thanks proffered only by looks, cedes the floor. Koady clears his throat and his gaze goes slack, fixing on the middle distance of nothing, the resolve washing over his face honed in degrading service jobs like faux-gondolier in the neo-Venetian downtowns upon which schlubby weekenders descended from their suburban stilt-houses to gawk at the ruins of a decadent society now sleeping like Redbeard, one day to wake up and drink the seawater in big, thirsty gulps until it was banished to its proper remit, Koady poling the boat through the old financial district sparsely peopled by stubborn locals like Romans doing their laundry in the dilapidated forum, droning his lines about how it was here that the great titans of capitalism had once made and remade the world each afternoon with the click of a mouse.
“Though we are of the meek world subaltern we are scholars in the field of violence, of the song that’s sung to pierce the ears of the ornithologist, of the open table to which no invitations are made. We string hope like pearls on the ribbon across time, reaching back to the unmarked graves of the pamphleteers and dynamitists and unionists and field men, stretching forward to the great host of the unborn who will live in Utopia. Our welts ache on our arms and legs and necks, reminders of the chastening we suffer under the daily torment of neofascist lunch halls and movie theaters and gyms and ice cream parlors. For this we seek to erase the blemish, to burn off the wart, to apply a salve to the burn.”
Bleach poured like wine in a solemn offering, they climb, past security and beer vendors and social media managers, all presently too bored to notice the couple dressed in military fatigues with suspicious bulges under their clothes, tiptoeing past the locker room and still, after all their conditioning to let nothing usurp their focus, enamored enough with the figure as such to waste precious seconds spying on the quarterback in the locker room suspended in a glass tank filled with green liquid, electrodes stuck on his bare chest, his eyes rolled back in his head as he absorbs the monotonous play list whispered by his OC, the Justinian to his Belisarius, the former ticking down the list to make sure they’re all up to speed.
They shake off their revery and brush past the final guards dicking around on their phones and stride onto the resplendent field and snatch the microphone from performing artist Jonny Go Hard, decked out in a diamond studded ball gown and combat boots, cutting off his unique take on the Star-Spangled Banner and turning to announce to the crowd their impending martyrdom in the crusade against zombified feudalism, wage labor, the Imperium. As Jonny Go Hard is whisked away by helicopter, tears falling down his cheeks, Gideon and Koady can’t help but notice that the stadium is silent as a tomb and that the faces hanging down towards them are torqued with desperate fear and their mouths gagged and their hands bound in front holding up their phones, livestreaming, and that their clothes are rather shoddier than might be expected and their chins unshaven and their buccal fat notably present.
They sweat a beat under the eyes of the cameras and gargoyle drones bearing mounted automatic justice, all pointed fixedly at the same spot, looking at each other in the sadness of this final cruel trick being played and manifesting a wordless accord that to perish now, instantly, will still be a lighter sentence for all of them, the declaration nevertheless made, open season, and the veil of the unimaginable that separates with black crepe the world as it seems, all nothings and inertia trundling along towards some placid destination, from what it is, brute force wielded without compunction or mercy in order to keep the train on the tracks and the lowdown quiet and festering. As the squeal of SUV tires fades into the distance, all gathered shatter forth to the other side, fire sucking up the oxygen of Rocky mountain gales, annihilatory light flashing out in a blast both towards and away from the two lonely figures, the last thing their eyes see the face of the other, and in that they find some brief recompense for the evil tattooed on the skin of the world, for trillions of hours spent in grinding toil.
Harried into a bunker and still being broadcast around the globe, Squarejaw, not a silver hair out of place, nods affably as his color excitedly points out that the odds of a terrorist attack on the Super Bowl had been two hundred to one pregame, what a payout if you were clever enough to lock in those odds ahead of time. Above them the ceiling buckles under a mighty crash of something hitting hard and wet. Color throws back to Squarejaw who turns his gaze to bear straight down through a billion screens and launches into an ad read in the golden, Orphean tenor of a true pro as the graphics package flashes across the screen, reminding viewers to please, gamble responsibly.
Theodore Sovinski is a writer living in Worthington, Ohio. His work has appeared most recently in Full Stop, Apocalypse Confidential and Propagule.