Before the End Times

Bill’s backyard had perfectly trimmed hedges, dainty paths of cobblestone, prayer flags and wind chimes under the security searchlight. If one of the crackheads in the Cowen Park ravine stumbled through the fence at night, that light would turn on and scare them off, in theory. It was a smoky July evening. They sat on the back porch, eating fancy cheese, watching as the sunset drew blood from the clouds. Bill reposed in a canvas chair like Buddha under the banyan tree, breathing audibly through his nose. He cradled the lower seam of his paunch.
	A hummingbird spasmed in front of the feeder. “Look at the little one,” Liz said, crunching her face up. “Glory be! Marvelous creatures.” Teleporting gently from here to there, its wings were dispersed in a perfect blur, its intricate head jerking, reasonless, patternless, in between nips of water. It whisked off. “There he goes! The little bobadoba!” Liz exclaimed. A tired summer dress fluttered over her bones in the sterile breeze of a tower fan.
	Tristan drummed his fingers on the table. “Those hummingbirds have the right idea, man,” he said. “They don’t have evil world leaders or modern bullshit. Like, it’s fucked that streets and buildings even exist.”
	“Triiiis-taaaan, you cannot be so strident,” Bill retorted. “You’re becoming an ideologue. Most people in this country never rise above this idea of good and evil. They cannot conceive that the people who are their ideological opponents are actually sincere people. Now, what if Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell have an earnest belief that their conservative economic policies are serving the greater good? What if Dick Cheney really felt that the invasion of Iraq was the right thing to do? This is the disagreement I’ve been having with Liz. Now Liz, you feel that the CEOs of big oil companies are evil. You use the word ‘evil.’ But what does that word mean? What is ‘evil?’”
	Liz was busy nibbling provolone. Tristan cracked every one of his knuckles and grimaced. His long twig body sat cross-legged, forming a series of jaunty sharp angles. Several strands of gelled black hair dangled above his forehead, the rest coiffed in rockabilly style. He dressed the part, a rumpled Carhartt jacket blending with thin denim. His eyes, scanning, found Bill’s face and locked in on their target. “Man, do you honestly think that Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and those guys had Iraq’s best interests at heart when they invaded it? Do you really think that?” he asked, frown-smiling.
	Bill’s eyebrows rose for a second above his sunglasses. “They had a mistaken belief that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction,” he said softly.
	Tristan’s spinal cord recoiled a little, two jets of hot air bursting from his nostrils. He slapped his palms like whips on his jeans and grinned very hotly, very tightly. “Well, if by ‘a mistaken belief’ you mean ‘a bald-faced lie,’ then yeah, spot on. The upper ranks of the Bush Junta deliberately conspired to lie to the public. Dick Cheney is a war criminal and a mass murderer, just like fuckin’ Reagan and Kissinger before him. If there were any justice in this world they’d all be sent to the Hague. They’d be put on trial for crimes against humanity. As would your beloved Dear Leader Obama, man, the fuckin’ king of the drone strikes and the surveillance state.”
	Bill’s lips were vibrating. “Oh, you are becoming a zealot,” he pouted. “You cannot be so negative about Obama. You gotta be more nuanced.”
	“Tell the children killed in schools in Yemen by Saudi Arabia, using weapons given to them by Obama, that ‘you can’t be so negative’ about him,” Tristan said sternly. “Fuckin’, tell that to Chelsea Manning, who was put in solitary confinement and tortured with Obama’s consent, just cause she exposed the atrocities committed by our fascist fuckin’ military.” His chin flexed and relaxed then flexed again.
	Bill’s jowls sagged in surrender. “Alright, I guess you’re right,” he said. “You’re ahead of me.”
	“Tristan, you are so freakin’ smart!” Liz barked. “I’m so lucky to have met such a deep-thinking and aware young person. Your dad and I can’t keep up with you. Way cool.”
	“Thanks Liz,” Tristan said. He attempted to crack his knuckles again, but they were spent.
	Bill reclined further in his high-quality canvas chair. The expression on his face was partially hidden by durable, well-made, very utilitarian sunglasses. “This is however why I wish you would read Richard Rorty,” he said. “Someday you’ll read Richard Rorty and say ‘that old dad of mine was on to something.’ Rorty had the concept of the Final Vocabulary. He said that everyone has a set of words, words that convey certain abstract meanings, that they use as the basis for their worldview and their outlook on life. Terms like ‘justice,’ or ‘freedom,’ or ‘human rights.’ Or maybe ‘progressive’ or ‘conservative.’ Now, Rorty argued that most of us ignore the contingent nature of these final vocabularies. We think that our worldviews have some sort of truth value that is determined by an intrinsic property of the external world. Now, if we take this discussion to a meta-level, to a meta-cognition, we can recognize how our concept of ‘good and evil’ is really contingent in the sense that it’s determined by our personal histories, such as, oh, where we grew up, the paths we took in life, what have you.”
	Tristan, lurching forward, gripped his knees with talons and hissed. “But you tell that to the people in Palestine, suffering under the apartheid regime! You just try to tell them that what’s being done to them isn’t objectively evil! All the people, all over the world, living in countries being bombed and gassed and destroyed by the United States. How do you think they would feel about all this snooty ivory tower fuckin’ Richard Rorty shit. Maaan, it’s easy for us sitting here in the backyard of a bougie-ass house eating bougie-ass cheese to go on about the meta-levels of meta-bullshit. In Yemen they don’t have that ability. They’re too busy dealing with fuckin’ real evil. Undeniable evil. If Richard Rorty had seen his whole family killed in a drone strike by Saint Obama, I bet he woulda said that good and evil are pretty fuckin’, what did you say, intrinsic, and not so contingent.”
	Tristan was moving and speaking like a wind-up toy that, now wound up, simply had to finish its allotted inertial movement before it could be still. He jerked around like an inflatable tube man. “And I know you like, you call yourself a pragmatist. But you wanna talk about the Final Vocabulary, or whatever, how about your word ‘nuance,’ man? Every time we have one of these arguments you tell me I should be more ‘nuanced.’ But like, even nuance is only good if it’s useful. Like, right, there are some situations where maybe it’s useful to take the ‘nuanced’ view. Then there are others, like the morality of Dick fuckin’ Cheney, where nuance is actually harmful and it’s better to take the black-and-white view. In this case, you know, that Cheney is just evil, he’s an evil murderous bastard.” He wound down into a careful posture.
	Bill’s nosebreath sustained his nosehairs aloft on a nosebreeze. “Now, you can criticize Dick Cheney and the decision to invade Iraq. Clearly those people who advocated for regime change were really, really wrong. But to just say that he’s evil is not an intellectual position. All I ever ask you to do, all I ever ask anyone to do, is just to consider David Foster Wallace’s advice in his commencement speech at Kenyon College. There’s that part in the speech where he talks about just giving people the benefit of the doubt? He mentions something along the lines of, that angry old lady in front of you in the grocery store line, don’t judge her too harshly when she berates the cashier. You don’t know what her life is like and what kind of day she’s had. It’s the same thing with Dick Cheney.”
	Tristan’s eyes splayed out of their sockets. “What?” he yelped, nasally and pinched, crisp with disdain and exasperation. “David Foster Wallace was an abusive stalker who threatened the lives of women who rejected him. You can read about that in the biography of him. Read about how he abused Mary Karr. I don’t really feel like takin’ his fuckin’ advice.”
	Bill clenched and contracted himself. “Oowwhh, you’re even getting down on old Dave? You’re so critical of people. So cynical.”
	“Yeah, I do tend to be critical of people that fuckin’ stalk and threaten the lives of others. Guilty as charged, man.”
	“I think maybe you could just consider trying to just be mellow. But I understand that that’s the way you feel, so I just say, hey, that’s the way you feel.” He turned to Liz, who was chewing thoughtfully, squinting at the slice of moon above the fence. “Do you have any thoughts on the Thompson family dialectic? Or lack thereof?”
	Liz stretched her eyebrows, pulling the sallow sheet of her face upwards. “I’m trying to just observe and listen, and learn from you guys. I tell you, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree! Botha you guys are too damn smart, and good-looking too, I must say. How’d you both get so lucky?”
	Tristan smiled knowingly. “Luck is when the arrow hits the guy next to you. Plato or Socrates or somebody said that.”
	Liz murmured in approval. She went inside and brought out dessert, a set of fair-trade organic chocolates, along with a Saint Hillary candle.
	“Maaaan… really?” Tristan said.
	“I know you’re a Bernie guy,” Liz said. “I like Bernie. I just don’t think he can win.”
	Tristan shook his head. “I know we’ve been over this. Ya just gotta research Hillary’s stance on cluster bombs, and also how she totally destroyed Libya. And who her major donors are.”
	“There’s an old saying,” Liz said. “The perfect is the enemy of the good. But I gotta say, congratulations to us for being able to debate these issues in a mature and respectful way. Right on!” She reached out to high-five Tristan, which he endured.
	Bill, shifting on his REI Co-op throne, scrolled intently through his iPhone 6 Plus, an impressive piece of technology in those days. He found the set of pixels he sought. “Okay. You gotta listen to this,” he said. “Have you guys heard about Kendrick Lamar? I heard about him on NPR. He is an absolute genius. I’m really serious. His new album, To Pimp a Butterfly, all the critics are calling it the album of the year if not the decade. It’s about the black experience in America. You gotta listen to this through the high-quality speakers. Wait. Why won’t it play. Oh, this fuckin’ thing, I got a broken phone. Wait. There we go.” Sound exploded into the yard and he darted to turn the volume down.

At first I did love you
But now just wanna fuck
Late nights thinkin of you
Til I got my nut
Toss and turn, lesson learned
You was my first girlfriend

	Bill fingered his phone for a while. “Oh, look at this,” he said eventually. “Trump attacks McCain: ‘I like people who weren’t captured.’” He tapped on the article and paused to read it. “Okay, here’s Donald Trump saying that John McCain isn’t a war hero because he was captured. Can you believe this? What a butthole surfer. Well, so much for the Trump presidential campaign. You cannot criticize veterans, definitely not POWs. That’s the most sacred of the sacred cows. If he’s thinking the Republican Party base is gonna react well to that. What an idiot.”
	“Hillary Clinton vs. Jeb Bush. What a joke this election is gonna be,” Tristan said. “Haven’t we had enough of the fuckin’ Clintons and the Bushes? Are we in fuckin’ 1992? Besides, it’s not like John McCain is some great hero, like c’mon. Like what did he do that was so heroic? He bombed a bunch of innocent peasants from the air in Vietnam, then he got captured and tortured. Like I’m not saying what they did to him was justified. Torture is never justified. But he was in their country, murdering civilians, just so U.S. corporations could have another location for profitable foreign investment.”
	“I don’t think that John McCain went to Vietnam just so the U.S. could have profitable investment,” Bill said. “Come on. I’m sorry, but that is just a little bit silly. You’re too smart to be saying that.”
	“There’s no other reason why the U.S. goes to war. There never has been. Like the purpose of the war in Iraq was so the occupying force could privatize Iraq’s state-owned industries and give their resources to multinational corporations. Read The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein.”
	“Wow. I bet the other kids your age aren’t reading this stuff,” Liz said. “I bet you’re more well-read than anyone at that school of yours.”
	“Isn’t this a cool kid? Am I right?” Bill said. “Of course, it’s not ‘that school of yours’ any more, now is it? We’re in the presence of a man with credentials now. A gentleman and a scholar.”
	“I’m gonna make some business cards,” Tristan said. “Tristan Thompson, G.E.D. You know like how people say ‘I’m so and so, Ph.D.,’ except instead of that it’s G.E.D.”
	“HYAAAAAAAAAH! HAAAH! HAA!” Liz screamed. “Well, Tristan, I hope you keep your passion and idealism. I will say, though, I’d take John McCain over those Tea Party lunatics any day. I think we can agree on that at least.”
	Tristan managed to crack his right ring finger. “Yeah. Is it alright if I get the next 48?”
	“The young lad wants to go off and spread his wild oats,” Bill said. “Alright. You’ve done your duty. Now when you come back, make absolutely sure to lock the door behind you.”
	“When have I ever not locked it.”
	“I’m really serious. We have had massive break-ins all along this neighborhood. I’m really serious.”
	“Okay. If you’re really serious. I’ll make extra sure.”
	“Have you had enough of us elderly folk?” Liz hunched over and pointed a crooked finger. “You darn whippersnapper. Respect your elders, sonny.”
	Tristan grinned under duress. Bill bobbed his head to the sweet scratchy sound of Kendrick Lamar’s voice.

I got a bone to pick
I don’t want you monkey-mouth motherfuckers sittin’ in my throne again
I’m mad (he mad!)
But I ain’t stressin
True friends, one question

	A shaggy caterpillar scooched along the polished wood of the porch. “Look! Look!” Liz cried. “What a sweet little munchkin. I wonder what he’s thinking. What does he think about us?”
	“Nothing,” Tristan said as he rose and checked his pockets for phone/wallet/keys. “We’re just galaxies to him, man.”