The New Normals Chapter 8

“Just a little further,” Violet reassured them. Vivid orange lights from within a tiny shack came warmly into view. They were all exhausted, Violet too.

“Not sure where you guys are headed, but you’re welcome to spend the night here. Just the one bedroom, but I have a couch and an extra mattress I could pull out…”

Roland thanked her.

The house was an odd combination of homey and antiquated. There were a few pictures and paintings on its dark, wooden walls that boasted sprawling midwestern landscapes with jutting plateaus. One contained horses. Another one, a prairie with a mountain behind it. There was a large, box-shaped TV with an antennae that neither of them expected would actually deliver reception this far. The house didn’t look as though it had been decorated by Violet herself. It looked like a display home, but not in a way that either of them felt disconcerting. It felt to Kit along the lines of what he had expected from a home so deep within the Mojave desert.

After a good night’s sleep and an egg breakfast Violet had made, she offered to drive them. Violet had roused them with the sunrise. Kit was unaccustomed to this strange schedule of hers, but was thankful enough for the free meal anyway.

Kit was surprised to see that her car was in little better shape than his own — at least before the whale droppings had hit it. With one look at the rusted, blue pickup truck, he doubted it would even turn on.

It took two attempts, but it did in fact start.

“My dad gave me this car.”

“You can tell how much love was put into it,” replied Roland with a good-natured smile.

“You guys are headed to Vegas?”

“Guess so… definitely need a new car.”

They didn’t speak much on the car ride into the city. This was due in part to the fact that Kit didn’t usually wake before noon. The sunrise over that barren landscape kept Roland and Violet steady in sublime silence.

“This is as far as I go,” said Violet suddenly, as though afraid of entering a haunted house. Roland looked at her curiously.

“I don’t like this city.”

“We can handle ourselves okay from here, right Kit?”

Kit was somewhere in between awake and asleep.

“Right.”

The city ahead was colorful and culture-less, but it wasn’t due to lack of effort. There were attempts to inject culture into it. There was a smattering of multi-cultural eating establishments. There were fountains reminiscent of great European architecture. There was a colossal, fake Eiffel Tower. All of these efforts still, somehow, amounted to little more than a half-baked, materialist hell-scape. The neon colors surrounding them would have felt almost welcoming if they weren’t so steeped in commercialism, Kit commented.

“Can never have too many billboards for the big mac,”

Roland replied.

“Or strip clubs…”

“Or casinos…”

The city had fared little better than the desert had during the storm. In fact, it had fared decidedly worse. While the desert storm, which Roland had now begun referring back to exclusively as “the shitstorm,” had been jarring, it was more or less taken in stride by the desert now nearing its three billionth birthday. The desert didn’t look much worse for wear.

Broken glass and confused faces, however, littered the city streets. Businessmen grimaced and wiped fecal matter from their tuxedos while the city’s flourishing homeless community seemed almost to revel in the aberrant weather. Street magicians looked like they’d seen magic, the strippers alongside them, too. Those holding up signs proclaiming the end times wore faces of utter glee. As Kit and Roland continued forward, they walked passed three men huddled around a crushed mailbox. They appeared to be deep in debate.

“It’s just a boulder,” said the first man matter-of-factly.

“Then why does it smell like shit?” retorted the second man.

“I think it’s kind of fragrant…” replied the third.

At this, Roland nudged Kit and shot him a faint “I told you so” look.

As Roland looked around, he noticed that these three men didn’t seem to be the only ones engaged in this very debate.

Entire businesses lay crushed beneath heaping mounds of gooey mush and beside shattered piles of neon. Shop signs flickered ominously and crushed-looking awnings hung precariously. The glass windowpanes in their entryways had cracked severely, many of them broken to pieces. A shop with ten TV’s stacked on top of each other all simultaneously painted a scene of utter chaos in the city.

“Doubt it does much good having them all on top of each other like that,” commented Roland.

A couple of the TV’s, too, seemed to have taken on damage from the storm. A disheveled and poop-stained man who looked somewhere between a pastor and a news anchor took center screen. He looked toward the camera, the disillusionment in his face plain for the world to see.

“Now I’m a man of God… and when I see literal feces rainin’ down on from the heavens… “

With fingers firmly clenched, he tried to look contained.

“… I say it’s time to pray!”

The sweat glimmering on his forehead exuded little confidence.

“It is a time to reflect… it is a time to REPENT!”

The studio seemed to shake at that moment, the camera nodding up and down as mic stands came briefly into and out of frame. Another giant pile of whale shit had landed directly atop the studio, this one straggling behind most of its fallen friends. The man suddenly looked caught between deeply disheartened and skittishly hyper-vigilant as his remaining confidence drained from his face.

“… to repent for the sins of mankind! For homosexuality! For abortion!”

It was unclear whether he was cut off or whoever controlled the channel of the many store TVs had decided on a change. Another distraught man in a suit and tie, this one slightly more poop-stained than the last, had suddenly taken his place on screen.

“While it’s clear that the weather patterns within the city may have appeared unusual…” He paused momentarily and searched fruitlessly for conviction. “…Events like this are not actually so uncommon. When the humidity in the atmosphere — ”

“Get a load of this guy… he doesn’t seem to think it’s so odd either,” Roland chuckled to himself.

“…actually combine with high pressure storm surges within the gulf — ”

“This is just dishonest now,” offered an annoyed Kit.

“… that can sometimes result in rain patterns strangely reminiscent of whale feces,”

“Ahhh, that’s all it is,” sounded the voice of a man who had appeared rather suddenly in between them. He appeared deeply relieved. “Phew,” he said as he picked back up the suitcase he’d planted at his side and continued merrily on his way, making sure to shimmy carefully around the whale excrement now checkering the sidewalk. The whale droppings hadn’t stopped, but that the turds falling now were mostly no greater than the size of snowballs seemed to be a relief to many.

“You’d think raining shit might be enough to take the day off of work,” said Kit, looking suspiciously toward the shrinking businessman in the distance.

“People are very good at adjusting to new normals.”

A shopkeeper gave them a friendly look and a subtle nod as he turned his “closed” sign to “open.” This was followed quickly by another whale turd landing within arm’s reach.

A less friendly man stormed past them, talking loudly on his cell phone. “So just because it landed on your car it’s somehow my problem? Look, I don’t care if your car is at the bottom of a river or in a thousand pieces. You’re scheduled for 7am!!” He closed his phone suddenly and noticed he’d walked feet first into a heaping pile of shit.

“For the love of…” He noticed Kit and Roland.

“What are you two looking at?” He shot at them, looking both furious and embarrassed. He was a hulking, arrogant looking man in a clean pressed suit. He pulled his pointed, leather shoe from it with a graphic squelch and continued down the sidewalk, his footsteps now somewhere in between caution and seething fury. Kit and Roland continued ambling down the sidewalk.

“Looks like that place sells cars,” Roland noticed, pointing toward it. Kit nodded lazily. They approached the dealership and were quickly bombarded by three men carrying an assortment of squeegees, buckets, mops and sponges as they rushed urgently past. They looked exhausted. They painstakingly wiped clean a Porsche that had been partially poop encrusted and as they did this, a squishy new thud sounded from another car on the other side of the lot. One of the workers glanced toward it and let out a defeated grunt. The men hurriedly finished work on the first car and made their way now frantically toward the second.

“How are we supposed to sell any cars with them looking like that!? Clean faster, Raul! Carlos! If we don’t meet our quota it’s coming out of your pa — ”

He evidently hadn’t noticed Kit and Roland approaching. He quickly threw on a smile.

“…How can I help you today?” His voice had brightened dramatically.

“I’m looking for a car,” said Kit simply.

“Well you’ve come to the right place!” He responded cordially. He was a clean-shaven man who wore a plain blue shirt embossed with a simple logo and tucked tightly beneath a black belt and slacks. And while Kit was examining him, another piece of poop had landed nearby. Kit watched as his cheery, entrepreneurial conviviality faltered for a moment before repairing itself.

“What kind of price range you working with?”

“$10–15,000” replied Kit slovenly. Roland looked at him.

“For a second I thought you were about to put some of that money in that bag of yours to use.”

“Why’s that?”

“Well… it is your money. Can’t say I wouldn’t be a bit curious how that sports car over there runs though.”

“Actually, can we see that one?” asked Kit, to Roland’s surprise.

“Sure… it’s a bit out of that price range ya mentioned but right this way!”

Kit didn’t know a lot about cars. Roland, too, was an expert in many things, but knew almost nothing about the world of automobiles. The salesman ran them through a series of specifics that went over both of their heads simultaneously.

“I gather it’s a pretty good car…” said Roland quietly to Kit as the salesman rambled on.

Suddenly the salesman glanced up and stopped in his tracks.

“Sorry didn’t mean to interrupt you, how many horses did you say are powering it?” asked Roland.

Kit thought he heard thunder. He looked up at a clear sky. Excrement was still continuing to fall, yes, but the sky was still cloudless. Roland looked stumped as well.

The salesman looked into the distance, panic-stricken now. The whole ground seemed now to rumble. Glancing back toward the desert they’d come from, they saw what looked like an enormous wave.