Ain't Talkin'

A Novel of the Wastelands

As I walked out tonight in the mystic garden,

The wounded flowers were dangling from the vine.

I was passing by yon cool crystal fountain,

Someone hit me from behind.

Ain’t talking, just walking,

Through this weary world of woe.

Heart burning, still yearning,

No one on earth would ever know.

They say prayer has the power to heal,

So pray for me, mother.

In the human heart an evil spirit can dwell,

I am trying to love my neighbor and do good unto others,

But oh, mother, things ain’t going well.

Ain’t talking, just walking,

I’ll burn that bridge before you can cross.

Heart burning, still yearning,

There’ll be no mercy for you once you’ve lost.

-Bob Dylan

There was dust on his coat and dust in his boots when the hunter rolled into a dead town somewhere near sunset.

He spat a long arc of chew across the dry road. The hunter tipped his hat and walked down the street past empty windows.

The sun was high on his neck and the desert threatened to eclipse into the white nothing at it’s edges. The world was turning onward, and the hunter moved with it along dusty bootheels and the rustle of denim and leather.

Two and a hundred years back the wise men had tried their very best to empty the world of knowledge and writ it all down on carbon copy and it cost them the world. It cost them reality too. The hunter was one of the few who could stake a claim in this new madness that had become existence itself. One of the lonely few who knew what it felt like to decay, who knew how to navigate the endlessness of the white.

Now there was just the desert and when the sands spilled off into the endless ether there was the white.

Somewhere past the Polkun County line at the other end of Route 88 the ether flipped in like changing a channel to static.

Once you were in it you knew, and not a moment before. Sand and brush stinging at your cheekbones and the knobby bones of your wrist and all of a sudden there ain’t a peck but for the cold and the emptiness of the white.

Deaf.

The hunter always felt deaf the second he stepped over the flip into the ether. Not for a moment did he ever think it was possible, because no one went deaf for no reason, even plane changing, and he’d heard fine all his life.

But, no, deaf for a moment because all of that nothingness hit you like a sack of bricks every time you clipped in.

Bootheels rocking along, the hunter slapped his three fingers against the drum of his revolver in tune with a far away song he barely remembered. He kept walking through the white, knowing every step of the way exactly where he’d come out on the other side.