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Here, inside the wormhole, everything is both as it has always been and as it will always be. There is no Viagra here, no e-mail, no homeopathy, no pink cocktails or witty repartee. Mobile meth-labs share the horizon with rusty, hulking farm implements that are no longer useful since the people here sucked all of the good news out of their land, and it in turn bled them dry of imagination and will. Art and hope left no forwarding address. In Deadwood SD, light comes and goes, but days and nights cannot be identified. We eat and sweat beneath an invisible dome, its grow-lights flicked on and off by some unseen hand that knows what’s best for all of us. Our fleshy children swim in fluorescent blue pools and ride bored mechanical horses to nowhere while we sit on stools in loud video-gaming parlors, gambling away the family fortune and growing fat on fried cat a la mode. What was once the American counter-cultural frontier, a lawless place where grinning chaos had its way with the unprepared, has since become merely another Las Vegas outpatient clinic, buried deep between the corpulent love-handles of every perspiring slot sucker. But hey, drink up, all is well, just as it always has been, and by the way, that Kaczynski feller sure was crazy, wasn’t he? We try to escape into Wyoming, but the dome hangs over us still. A stumpy, bespectacled man hungrily eyes his grandchild at a diner in Four Corners, while the two proprietresses poison us and charge us double for not dying. We learn the hard way that out-of-state plates and funny haircuts equal deviance, which equals an escort to a “safe place” out on the edge of town, under a viaduct where, yes, we did find some body parts, but they might not have been human....Nobody, be he cowboy or busboy, wants to see us hanging around here, unless it’s at the end of a short rope. The wormhole finally closed during the wee hours of the next night, somewhere down the backside of Cameron Pass on Highway 14 in northeastern Colorado. We had stopped at the summit, eleven thousand feet above sea level, to smoke and congratulate ourselves on leaving Wyoming without the help of canes, walkers, or other ambulatory aids. Shortly thereafter, as we hurtled through the night, I became acutely aware of the dense blackness that rose up everywhere outside whatever land was visible in the Clipper’s headlights. I had no clue what was out there—steep cliffs, rolling ranchland, unforgiving mountains—no indication of anything. Nor had I any idea whether we were heading up, down, or straight ahead. ==30== Max Riistoffel .
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