The Damned Highway by Nick Mamatas Read Free Book Online Page A

rather than shambling toward Bethlehem to be born. In such a world, I can be forgiven for not remembering whether or not I gave the driver my new pseudonym.
    The engine revs and the gears groan as we slowly start to roll forward. I take my seat, ignoring the suspicious glances from the other passengers. The Hispanic girl shrinks in her seat as I walk by, and I can’t really blame her.
    We pull away and too late I realize that I’ve made a bad mistake. I shouldn’t have told the Committee to Re-elect the President about the bus. They already know my true identity. Now they know where I’m going, as well. Making up my mind to get off at the next stop, I lean back in my seat, pull out my Moleskine, and begin to write.
    â€”—
    There is no such thing as America, no such child born in a mansion on a hill. There aren’t even two—not a white America and a Negro one, or an America of wealth and privilege held aloft by an America of the poor and twitchy. And even the dark wisdom of Richard Milhous Nixon, with his understanding of the great chasm between North and South, has an incomplete picture of this great experiment. Great, but not grand. Audacious, not enlightened. America is a Frankenstein’s monster, stitched together from the corpses of the damned. The slaves of the Middle Passage, the raped and ruined red man, wave after wave of half-wit imbecile Scots-Irish not too different than the cats I’ve met so recently, swarthy Mediterranean inbreds, the insectoid masses of Asia, an electrified conglomeration lurching and howling in the frigid night. And in the abnormal brain of his monster, one so recently liberated from the brainpan of a criminal lunatic, there sits a single figure, a homunculus behind a bank of levers and switches, who dominates and controls us all. Nixon believes himself to be this entity, but he is not. Every candidate from the diabolical George Wallace of Alabama—he who perspires tear gas doesn’t so much call Brazil nuts nigger toes as he actually chews on the feet of little black babies—to the surprisingly effective but ultimately delusional Patsy Mink wants their turn behind the console. But that is not a throne meant for a human posterior.
    And speaking of posteriors, I met an old man in New York once in saner times, when tribes worshiped their totems of Democrat or Republican with an unwavering loyalty. When brats died to confront the swastika, and didn’t even think to raise a peep for a part of the great franchise when they got back home. When the youth of America was as placid as a brace of well-dressed Negroes. He was an immigrant who came here as the free-range catamite of a Greek steamship, who painted the Brooklyn and Verrazano Bridges, and then sent back to his native island for a wife. Up to Massachusetts to find his version of the American Dream—a home, a fishing boat, and a little business of his own. The man was unused to the sheets of black ice that coated the region six months out of the year.
    He broke his hip the hard way, against the thousand-ton anchorage of a suspension bridge, and now he slung hash at a luncheonette, huffing like a steamship as he moved from one end of the counter to the other, from the ever-rotating display of pies to the coffee machine—and why were they kept at opposite ends of the room? “The Jews,” he said by way of answer. “They arrange things to make us Greeks suffer.” He was good company, and as we shared pulls from my flask he told me a story of his native tribe: Once the parts of the human body had an argument over which was the most important. “It is I,” said the eye, “for without me the world would be unknown to us.” “No, it is I,” said the hand. “I manipulate the world and make it so that we can live, and eat, and prosper.” “You’re all wrong,” said the brain. “I am the most important. I interpret the input of the