A Scene as the End Begins
by Kurt Rasmussen
Arriving just in time for the end of time, I put on my best streetwalk and made my way up Fremont, where the air was cold and viscous like the tears of departing gamblers, and Evel Pie was giving away the last apocalyptic free pizza. The line of takers was a multicolored worm of downtowners, tendriling off down the block.
A chick with a parka on top and just panties on the bottom had her smooth white legs jack-knifed akimbo on a concrete barricade, eating her free pie. Pigeons on the street beside her bird-mobbed the piece she had tossed them.
Vegas was fixin’ to shut down for the first time literally ever, the pirouetting pinup girl atop the cheap Elvis music box, tinkling to a total stop, eyes painted open, staring at the unknown.
I wanted to walk through “The Experience” one last time but security guys were setting up movable fences draped in black.
“Closing it all off?” I asked one of them.
“Yup,” he said, but he didn’t stop me from walking in.
I’d seen it looking empty, but not like this. No one in the casinos or at the outside bars, the kiosks all covered with black canvas hoods, nobody out and about but security and workmen and a few street folks with blank eyes like me. And those circles, where the penniless put on their nightly freak show for the heavily mortgaged, to the benefit of no one at all- the circles were all empty.
I remembered how I felt back in Oklahoma when a tornado was bearing down, except now the fishtank-colored sky, the wind, the distant rumble- these existed only inside me. The swirling fist of devastation was unfolding within.
I took the next sidewalk out of there, passing a random old drunk in a cowboy hat, like a million I’d seen before.
He did a bleary double-take and figured he’d try his luck. “Excuse me…. excuse me, sir. Could you maybe help out an actual veteran of the Vietnam war?”
But there was no time for ritual bullshit now.
I snapped open my wallet and held out a bill. His eyes widened. Only a five- but in his trade, not to be sneezed at.
He hesitated, though. “Just…just let me prove it to you…”
He got out his own wallet.
“I’ve got my VA card right here…”
But I just didn’t want to be there. I had to get away.
“I don’t care about any of that,” I told him. “Just take it. And go with God.” I pulled that word out like a knife.
He took the bill, but now he was angry, insulted that I wouldn’t wait for his proof that he was not like the others, which is the one way in which we are all exactly the same. Of course he knew that. Today of all days we were all the fucking same, but you let a man tell you. You let a man tell you how he is different, especially if it so clearly isn’t true, but I had broken that rule and I could see in his face that he wanted to kill me for it.
“Hey,” I told him, smiling, feeling brotherly now. “They’re closing everything down. It’s the end of the goddamn world, man. Our world, anyway. I’m not even sure we exist anymore, you know?”
He smiled back, liking that joke, and looked up to the sky, but he was still stuck on that knife word.
“Listen,” he said, then paused, because he was drunk. “If you see God…next time you talk to God…put in a good word for me, will you? Because… I need it…I need it.”
I lied and told him I would, of course.
Because here at the end of time there is nothing so utterly, utterly worthless as the truth.
Kurt Rasmussen is an amiable and charming Las Vegas poet who would love it if you bought his awesome and very reasonably priced book:
https://www.amazon.com/YES-Poems-Kurt-Rasmussen/dp/1099750652/
Originally published at https://sgtasz.com on April 7, 2020.
