The Revelation of Karl

After it happened, Karl awoke on a path in a forest so gloomy he could not see a way out. He brushed dirt from his trousers, leaves from his beard and hair. A light appeared in the distance. As it approached, he saw it was a lantern carried by a figure. The figure arrived. It was a man in a grey three-piece suit. 

“Excuse me,” Karl said. “Where am I?”

“You are here.”

“And where is here?”

“Nowhere.”

“Everywhere is somewhere.”

“Here both is and is not.” The man stepped closer. “Come.” He departed. 

Karl hesitated.

For hours they walked without speaking.

“You bear a striking resemblance to Hegel,” Karl said.

“I should hope so. I am him. You may call me George.”

“He’s been dead fifty years.”

“Much longer, now.”

Karl stopped. “Where are you taking me?”

“To your wife.”

“Jenny’s been dead three years.”

“Much longer, now.”

George continued down the path. Karl followed.

They emerged from the wood onto a scorched plain where oppressive light basked oil rigs sprouting in perfect rows to the horizon. Each rig straddled a splayed man or woman, pumping blood from their chest and into the next rig’s motor. The men and women screamed. More, they demanded, more. 

A woman called to Karl. “What’s crude trading at?”

He stopped, spoke to George. “Are they to stay like this forever?”

George shook his head. “They need only stop demanding that the pumping continue.”

Karl knelt to the woman, grasped her hand. “Did you hear that? You can stop it.”

She laughed blood. “And leave more for them?”

George continued the path. Karl followed.

They crossed into pastureland, following pipelines running from the oil rigs into mountainous slaughterhouses. The path was lined with electric fence corralling naked men and women shuffling towards yawning doors from which poured the sounds of saws and screams. Each building oozed rivulets of blood and shit and body parts into trenches dividing them from their neighbor. In these lakes of human waste, bodies coalesced and waded toward shore and the corralled lines. Every so often, meat was passed out the doors and along the line and the people fought to gorge themselves.

“Inside, they take turns running the butchering machines and being butchered,” George said. “In each there is a button to kill the machines. In each there is a door to exit. Neither is ever touched.”

Karl walked the line, imploring them to use the buttons, the doors. They shouted him off.

The slaughterhouses gave way to a concrete expanse covered with sprawling factories connected by roads and railways traveled by trucks and trains. The path cut through the factories. Men and women wearing black suits and white shirts stood alongside assembly lines, wires connecting their limbs to the machines above. Each person lashed their neighbor with a whip of braided cash, tipped with a flail of copper coins. The movement of their limbs moved the machines; the movement of the machines moved their limbs. The machines made whips.

“They can stop,” George said.

Karl sighed. “They won’t.”

“Maybe one day.”

Karl followed George through the factories, telling every soul they could stop the machines, they could stop their suffering and go with him. Most laughed. Some considered. None listened.

After the factories came suburbs overrun by real estate speculators salivating at prospective profits only to be devoured by the houses and shat out in garbage cans as prospective buyers who signed away limbs to purchase the houses they leveraged into capital to once more become salivating speculators. 

After the suburbs came the city, where managers and owners and investors and traders and brokers, all chained to overhead metal rails, scurried from skyscraper to skyscraper, carving each other’s flesh, growing hoards they leveraged into larger shares of the suburbs and factories and slaughterhouses and oil rigs. In streetcorner restaurants, they dined on each other’s shit and sipped cocktails of oil and blood and piss.

Karl wiped his brow and fanned himself.

“The bodies produce heat, the factories produce heat, the slaughterhouses produce heat,” George said. “Everything adds heat. It never dissipates. One day, everything will be aflame.”

“Surely then they must stop.”

“The heat can increase forever, bringing ever more pain, but never death.”

Karl wandered the city. He followed the overhead rails to the tallest skyscraper, rode the elevator to the top floor, and found the biggest office, where a hollow man sat atop a foul heap of rotting meat. Karl grabbed the man by his shirt and pulled him to the floor and shook him. “Don’t you know what you’re doing? Don’t you see what world you’re making? Stop, shut it all down, for everyone, for yourself.” 

The man fell still. In his eyes recognition flared, burned, extinguished. He cackled and drew a carving knife. Karl dragged him across the floor and slung him through a large plate-glass window and watched him plummet in crystal rain toward the street far below.

Karl felt George’s hand on his arm.

He followed George to a pier where a ramp led up into an airship like a low cloud.

“Where does it go?”

“Where you’ve always dreamed.”

“Jenny is there?”

“And your daughters, and some of their children, and some of their children’s children, and so on.”

Karl looked back at the city. “What about them?”

“Nothing keeps them here but they themselves.”

Karl stepped onto the ramp. He stopped. He went to George and took the lantern. “You must be tired.”

A tension went from George’s face. “Are you sure?”

“I’ll take a shift or two.”

They embraced. “Don’t overwork yourself,” George said, then he climbed the ramp.

Karl watched the airship depart and another arrive. 

Lantern held high, he retraced the path to the woods, where he found a lost soul.