Chuck Palahniuk - Lullaby

And Oyster says, «They were all misshelved.» Mona's head is asleep in his lap, and he's peeling apart the strands of her hair into skeins of red and black. «It's the only way she falls asleep,» he says. «She'd sleep forever if I kept doing this.»

For whatever reason, my wife comes to mind, my wife and daughter.

What with the sirens and fire engines, we were awake all night.

«That Book Barn place was like a rat's warren,» Helen says.

Oyster is braiding the broken bits of civilization into Mona's hair. The artifacts from my foot, the broken columns and stairways and lightning rods. He's pulled apart her Navajo dream catcher and braids the I Ching coins and glass beads and cords into her hair. The Easter shades of blue and pink feathers.

«We spent the entire evening searching,» Helen says. «We checked every book in the children's section. We looked through Science. We checked Religion. We checked Philosophy. Poetry. Folk Stories. We checked Ethnic Literature. We checked all through Fiction.»

And Oyster says, «The books were on their computer inventory, but just lost in the store.»

So they burned the whole place. For three books. They burned tens of thousands of books to make sure those three were destroyed.

«It seemed our only realistic option,» Helen says. «You know what those books can do.»

For whatever reason, Sodom and Gomorrah come to mind. How God would spare the city if there was even one good person still in it.

Here's just the opposite. Thousands killed in order to destroy a few.

Imagine a new Dark Age. Imagine the books burning. And the tapes and films and files, the radios and televisions, will all go into the same bonfire.

If we're preventing that world or creating it, I don't know.

It said on the television how two security guards were found dead after the fire.

«Actually,» Helen says, «they were dead long before the fire. We needed some time to spread the gasoline.»

We're killing people to save lives?

We're burning books to save books?

I ask, what is this trip turning into?

«What it's always been,» Oyster says, threading some hair through an I Ching coin. «It's a big power grab.»

He says, «You want to keep the world the way it is, Dad, with just you in charge.»

Helen, he says, wants the same world, but with her in charge. Every generation wants to be the last. Every generation hates the next trend in music they can't understand. We hate to give up those reins of our culture. To find our own music playing in elevators. The ballad for our revolution, turned into background music for a television commercial. To find our generation's clothes and hair suddenly retro.

«Me,» Oyster says, «I'm all for wiping the slate clean, of books and people, and starting over. I'm for nobody being in charge.»

With him and Mona as the new Adam and Eve?

«Nope,» he says, smoothing the hair back from Mona's sleeping face. «We'd have to go, too.»

I ask, does he hate people so much that he'd kill the woman he loves? I ask, why doesn't he just kill himself?

«No,» Oyster says, «I just love everything the same. Plants, animals, humans. I just don't believe the big lie about how we can continue to be fruitful and multiply without destroying ourselves.»

I say, he's a traitor to his species.

«I'm a fucking patriot,» Oyster says, and looks out his window. «This culling poem is a blessing. Why do you think it was created in the first place? It will save millions of people from the slow terrible death we're headed for from disease, from famine, drought, from solar radiation, from war, from all the places we're headed.»

So he's willing to kill himself and Mona? I ask, so what about his parents? Will he just kill them, too? What about all the little children who've had little or no life? What about all the good, hardworking people who live green and recycle? The vegans? Aren't they innocent in his mind?

«This isn't about guilt or innocence,» he says. «The dinosaurs weren't morally good or bad, but they're all dead.»

That kind of thinking makes him an Adolf Hitler. A Joseph Stalin. A serial killer. A mass murderer.

And threading a stained-glass window into Mona's hair, Oyster says, «I want to be what killed the dinosaurs.»

And I say, it was an act of God that killed the dinosaurs.

I say, I'm not going another mile with a wanna-be mass murderer.

And Oyster says, «What about Dr. Sara? Mom? Help me out. How many others has Dad here already killed?»

And Helen says, «I'm sewing my fish.»

At the sound of Oyster's cigarette lighter, I turn and ask, does he have to smoke? I say, I'm trying to eat.

But Oyster's got Mona's book about primitive crafts, Traditional Tribal Hobby-Krafts, and he's holding it open above the lighter, fanning the pages in the little flame. With his window open a crack, he slips the book out, letting the flames explode in the wind before he drops it.

Cheatgrass loves fire.

He says, «Books can be so evil. Mulberry needs to invent her own kind of spirituality.»

Helen's phone rings. Oyster's phone rings.

Mona sighs and stretches her arms. With her eyes closed, Oyster's hands still picking through her hair, his phone still ringing, Mona grinds her head into Oyster's lap and says, «Maybe the grimoire will have a spell to stop overpopula-tion.»

Helen opens the planner book to today's date and writes a name. Into her phone, she says, «Don't bother with an exorcism. We can put the house right back on the market.»

Mona says, «You know, we need some kind of universal “gelding spell.” »

And I ask, isn't anybody here worried about going to hell?

And Oyster takes his phone out of his medicine bag.

His phone ringing and ringing.

Helen puts her phone against her chest and says, «Don't think for a second that the government's not already working on some swell infectious ways to stop overpopulation.»

And Oyster says, «In order to save the world, Jesus Christ suffered for about thirty-six hours on the cross.» His phone ringing and ringing, he says, «I'm willing to suffer an eternity in hell for the same cause.»

His phone ringing and ringing.

Into her phone, Helen says, «Really? Your bedroom smells like sulfur?»

«You figure out who's the better savior,» Oyster says, and flips his cell phone open. Into the phone, he says, «Dunbar, Dunaway and Doogan, Attorneys-at-Law …»

Imagine if the Chicago fire of 1871 had gone on for six months before anyone noticed. Imagine if the Johnstown flood in 1889 or the 1906 San Francisco earthquake had lasted six months, a year, two years, before anyone paid attention to it.

Building with wood, building on fault lines, building on floodplains, each era creates its own «natural» disasters.

Imagine a flood of dark green in the downtown of any major city, the office and condo towers submerged inch by inch.

Now, here and now, I'm writing from Seattle. A day, a week, a month late. Who knows how far after the fact. The Sarge and me, we're still witch-hunting.

Hedera helixseattle, botanists are calling this new variety of English ivy. One week, maybe the planters around the Olympic Professional Plaza, they looked a little overgrown. The ivy was crowding the pansies. Some vines had rooted into the side of the brick facade and were inching up. No one noticed. It had been raining a lot.

No one noticed until the morning the residents of the Park Senior Living Center found their lobby doors sealed with ivy. That same day, the south wall of the Fremont Theater, brick and concrete three feet thick, it buckled onto a sellout crowd. That same day, part of the underground bus mall caved in.