Monday, February 07, 2005
Not
Doug and Bill plummeted for what seemed to be days. It was exactly like church, except without the sermon, liturgy, choir, organ music, parishioners, pews, walls, floor, ceiling, stained-glass windows, sunlight, or dust motes.
That is, they assumed they were plummeting. As they could neither see nor feel their bodies or anything they might be rushing past, or even the displacement of air as they rushed past it, it was as if they had simply ceased to be.
Once Doug heard the tinkle of an ice-cream truck's song. But it dopplered past at several times the speed of a speeding locomotive.
When at last they came to rest, the only discernible difference from their plummeting was that they felt constrained and somehow uneasy. It was rather like being delirious and thinking you have to vomit and then having nothing come up.
They had plopped down square in the middle of the abstract essence of notness in the sentence "George W. Bush was not impeached in 2005," pronounced in rueful hindsight with so little emphasis on the word "not" that it was practically a "wasn't."
