Cargo planes and jet fighters swarmed above. There is no way to prepare for anything like this. We hadn't prepared. I hadn't said good-byes. Nobody could have anticipated this. We were Americans; we had rights.
"Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness", I recited in a whisper to myself. Reaching down to the car radio, I shut off the news broadcast. The silence was deafening. Shoved a tape in and it began to play familiar music. Music that I may have heard in my mother's womb, before I was born, but after John Lennon was shot. I laughed and cried, and wondered how painful it would be to drive head on at 70 miles per hour into the brick wall of the demolished house ahead.
Quick right turn instead. Driving along side a heavily bombed area. The wreckage seemed to stop at the curb. Life on one side, with small potted plants and dogs chained up in the yard, starving and barking, wanting to be free like me. Barking so loudly that I knew they'd bite me if I had courage enough to unleash them, when the madmen with guns could be behind each pile of debris, or each strong and vital tree. Silent trees, no breeze today. I thought of freeing the dogs, which is more than most would have done, I thought guiltily. At least I wasn't killing everything.
    The feeling bothered me most. No dead bodies in sight. No people. Just the hum of the planes, no other cars. The only visible confusion existed within myself. Gas tank on full, did I think that I had a chance at escaping whatever was doing this to suburbia? Tearing life limb from limb, silently but surely, obviously, eating away at everything
present to create a consuming void; that which we all fear called Nothingness.
    I needed some new music. The irony of imagining all these people that weren't even here living life in some sort of utopic peace began to irritate me. I'd just resume daily life for a second. New tape, food for the road, and I'd head for the airport because it was closer than the border in the opposite direction. I could fly somewhere much warmer than Canada, anyway. Why wasn't anyone in the car with me? The fallen bricks, branded with destruction from the planes above, were stacked into an orderly blockade like fashion. Where were the people?
    Wal-mart. That was the most reassuring, banal thought of the day. There stood Wal-mart before my car, solid and holding. Constant Wal-mart, preparing for Christmas with the Northern Star perched on its holy roof.
    I parked in the handicap spot because everyone else had, and they had no stickers, and who would be out in this kind of weather anyway if you needed a crutch or a wheelchair or any kind of help other than a suicidal bomb?
    Automatic doors, whoosh, I'm whisked into normal life. No one at the cash registers. Just need the music, then I'm out of here. I'll leave the money, I'll leave extra money, I just need something normal. Nothing too free.
    "Ah- ha ha ha, ah-choo, a-hem." Sarcastically obvious. Who are you, I thought, that beckons me to notice you? I turned. A man, with a weapon. Something that fires. A gun. As if choreographed, I ducked. What a lovely day this would be.
    I moved to where he directed, seeing other hostages scattered throughout. "God,"
I thought, "hell is across the street and I'm going to die in Wal-mart. What have I done to deserve this?" I pictured a field of grass and wished I were there, but for some reason, the present was becoming too real for escapism to have any effect.
    Someone called me over. Hostages gathered in the center. A siege on the terrorists. "The Bloody Battle of Wal-mart," I thought. That's one for the history books.
Every hostage stood. I followed them. Like a flock of sheep we stood, like a guilty black sheep I followed. Hand to hand combat. We were forced into a corner, I in the back, in a nook. Perhaps I would be saved in Wal-mart with hell across the street because an architect sometime somewhere decided that Wal-mart needed a small nook that 10 hostages could fit into. Perhaps. I was behind a very rotund lady, who reminded me of someone I used to know. I knew she would die.
    They fired into the crowd. Gasps, falls. I fell, acting dead, hoping it looked real, and at last hoping it was real. An hour later (must have been, or was it only seconds?) Id my eyes.
"A ha-ha" said the man who then shot me in the gut. Felt like a ray of sunshine at my body's center. Center of balance, center of everything, shining out instead of in. Sin? Making me hungry. The Wal-mart slushee stand was closed. My last request and they denied it.
    They must have left. Stealing their sweat-suits or maybe practicing by killing Wal-mart housewives first. Honest people, they are, making a living... the housewives, not the gunmen...
    I stood up. In a bath of blood. Dead rotund woman in front of me, to the side of me, on the top of me, taking the bullets that would have killed me. Latched onto my bell bottomed pant leg, she was stiff. Latched onto my pant leg, that was the least I could let her do for saving my life. Bullet Catcher.
    After freeing myself of her morbid grip, I ached for something, a gun of my own, for defense. Nice violence, right, beckoning me to create more of it. How pleasantly reproductive and harsh this cycle could go.
"A-ha ha." I was whisked away by the gunman. I was on the plane ride to Europe. To Germany, so it seemed. The year? I asked myself, but times were present. Blood stained and before some official, I said "but I am not a Jew."
    "When, I ask," he said, touching my face and wiping his hands, "when do you think you are living? We seek not world domination, we seek not extermination, we seek only one race."
I spit in his face. "I am German by blood, you idiot!"
    "Hmm... and Irish, and Italian... Native American. How politically correct. Now there's a race that should have been exterminated, not assimilated."
    "Stop trying to rhyme." I set my face in defiance. I'm in a novel, I thought, for I would never be so courageous otherwise.
    "I do it all the time."

    I don't know what they did to me, but they let me go free. I came to a land in Africa, where the people went about tilling their land. They had to eat and had no time for me. I was in such a foreign land. I thought about how to get home, then remembered that I didn't want to get there. I didn't have anywhere to go. Homeless with my seventeen year old three-thousand dollar life savings stuffed in my pocket.
    Running through the weedy path, past huts and a few who turned their head at my sickeningly pale and impractical white skin gleaming like ghostlight in the sun, I stopped abruptly for there was one woman who towered over me, slender and delicately.
    "I speak your language."
English, thank God. She continued.
    "There is a family that will help you."
    I followed her. I tried explaining America and the rigor mortis of the rotund lady who had caught the bullets in Wal-mart.
    "You need food." And then she left.

    Thatched roof, matching carpet, clothes from the 1960's, goodwill clothes from my country, and now I sat down at an honorary space. Rice entree, beans, fresh food that I wanted. I had the feeling that I was not supposed to ask or beg for food, but let them serve me. The pudgy son went for the food that was presumably meant for me, and handed some to his friend. Alfalfa, rice, beans, mix.... eating.
    The patriarch of the family turned from his barbecue. He said something slowly to me, of which I only recognized the word "American." He served, on a porcelain dish with snowflakes upon it, a hot dog, without the bun. The family (one mother and father, a boy, his friend, and a girl) sat around me to watch how I ate. Was it the same as how they ate? They knew that I was an American. I was supposed to be used to eating this kind of food. And fast food, and fat. Americans are supposed to be fat like that lady in Wal-mart.
    I pushed it away, rejecting the food simply because for years I had refused to eat an animal. The father began to cry. Perhaps he thought that he hadn't cooked it right. There were no pigs around. No animals. Where had he gotten this food? There was a table, near the barbecue outside. A plastic, fish-killing-when-thrown-into-the-sea-uncut plastic ring beer bottle or soda holder. 12-pack for the road. A plastic artificial oil bearing wrap for the remaining hot dogs. American hot dogs. I saw and pointed to a stalk of celery. I ate it faster and greedier than I had eaten the most rich chocolate cake fudge double Dutch capture me Germans and hold me captive... now I was eating food.
    I needed a flight somewhere, but I handed them my credit cards, my passport (it was brand new) and my birth certificate. People of the world, you are going to die and there's nothing I can do about it.