The Rape of Wayne, New Jersey

Today begins your liberation. The masked gunman addressed the crowd from the back of an envelope, speaking in a glaringly formal register of English. You need not fear we who have come to free you. In the starlight, the microphone popped and squealed. The faces in the crowd were forlorn, expectant, confused, possessed. You mean our occupation, said an old man, and a cloud passed between them and the moon. What the gunman said after that is obscured by the sound of shattering glass. Time freezes, the raccoons clutch cold apple-cores in fresco, a swallow stops in midflight. This artifice allows me to observe that the shattering of glass is, in almost all instances, an isolated event, vanishingly brief in duration. We don't really know this sound, do we? At least not in the same way we can be said to know the first four notes of Beethoven's Fifth, the first five of Stairway to Heaven. The sonic event in question, as commonly experienced, dissipates its tight waves before we can process their significance. And then our central nervous system recovers, and we look for the causal glass. Like the sudden death or disappearance of a loved one, it serves only to separate one moment from the next.

But this night is different. The sound persists, unaccountably, in a fermata that goes on and on. It's punctuated by screams, accentuated by screams, echoed and shadowed by screams. The masked gunman keeps on talking, but his words falls on changed ears.

They're herded out into the street, and shot in their temples. A few brave souls, their weight suspended from the alien hands clutching their hair, freeze their faces into noble expressions before their brains are airbrushed onto the asphalt of the parking lot of Wayne Valley High School.

They came in as the sun was setting and from all directions, on horseback, waving rifles out of jeeps, in cigar-shaped aircraft, crawling on their elbows through the frozen slime in the golf course at the bottom of French Hill Road. It would be too easy, too trifling, to say that they pierced our complacency like what happens when a needle meets a balloon. But ten minutes earlier, we'd been driving around in our Lexi, shaking garlic salt onto flat triangles of pizza at Brother Brunos and Tony's Touch of Italy. Tossing old bread to the ducks on the muddy peninsula that juts into Packanack Lake. Pushing cold hard baseballs around at North Cove and Randall Carter. For all intents and purposes, we were making love in front of the television.

No one saw them coming; no one knew from where they came. To tell the truth, most of us were unaware that we even had an enemy.

But the twilight fell, the town was surrounded, and it was götterdämmerung all over again.

Conventional theorists still imagine that their consensus is not the product of social forces.

The cops tried to make a stand at Willowbrook Mall, our sprawling suburb's main financial center, but they were gunned down, en masse, in a twelve-minute firefight, each clutching her kevlar and raising a plaintive palm to her final vision. Soon the Mall was burning. The Wayne Town Centre, that stripmall waiting to pour poison in Willowbrook's ear, caught fire at about a quarter to seven. The books in Borders exploded, each by each, their ghosts evaporating in shimmery blue howls.
We've got to form a resistance, said the seventy-nine year old Holocaust survivor to his palpitating daughter-in-law. We need guns, not teacups, he continued with a raised finger, grimacing as she made the tea behind drugstore makeup.

No, papa, we can't, said his Jersey-born son. Look, maybe they'll just leave after a while. Maybe they're just after our virgins.

OMG, said his daughter, you totally didn't just say that dad.

The teacups chinked against each other in her trembling hands. Her sunspot elbow overturned a bottle of lite salad dressing; it reeled onto the floor. They all flinched through the roof.

On the other side of Alps Road, a twelve-year old boy with a Jesus complex crouched among weeping willows, pushed back his wavy-faced hair, aimed his divine brave freckles at the starry wisp of night. He was couched in the hollow of a thornbush, his knees mashed into half-melted snow, his ears ice-cold. His heart was out of rhythm. I'm a citizen of the galaxy, he said to himself. Every other night, he'd be in that bush hiding from his family thinking about L.H., that straight-haired blonde girl, in a spasm of erotic resentment. But this night, his sufferings signified something greater: he was a man: he was the Resistance. With his Harrison Ford haircut, with his wounded vest and openhaired stare. With his mental map of the land, each icy stab of frozen skunk cabbage in the scattered woods, each storm-pipe passage under instant roads. This was his land, and he'd fight like Lafayette. Like a native American.

Two blond-haired boys, the one big and curly the other stunted and wry, leaned back against the railings of a footbridge in the glimmery wooded dark, smoking weed from a one-hitter. Under normal circumstances, they'd be shit-scared of the roving, unpreoccupied suburban cops, but the cops were all gone now. The midnight moon rose high above the frozen soccer field.

I wonder if we'll have school tomorrow.

The other one cracked up slowly.

And I'll say it again: conventional theorists still imagine that their consensus is not the product of social forces. That's just some string of fourteen words I found somewhere on the Internet. What will we call them, we all asked one another. They don't even all seem to speak the same language. They roll in their panzers over the hedge that's cut into the letters W-A-Y-N-E on Valley Road in front of the municipal complex, and they won't even tell us what they want.

The night carnival on the long lawn of Our Lady of the Valley had ground to a halt, its Ferris wheel dreaming of its youth at 1893's Chicago's World's Fair, its cotton candy strung out like the soluble hair of an erotic dancer. A plush frog slumbered in the shade of a blue-ribbed trashcan. From an alcove above, a woman in a black hood gazed out at the wreckage, crossed herself in slow motion. Jesus, mother of Mary, she muttered, but frowned where she should have smiled.

Qwertyuiop.

There were still patches of woods in those days, unfurling from drainage ditches and creeks, springing from steep hillsides, in the odd triangles left on the map after the surveyors had divided the land into lots and cut off the crusts. These scraps of woods, for me, held the holy of holies, the last hairs on the head of God. There were still patches of woods in those days, unfurling from drainage ditches and creeks, springing from steep hillsides, in the odd triangles left on the map after the surveyors had divided the land into lots and cut off the crusts. In a meadow in the woods off of Tall Oaks Drive, I found a girl beneath the powerlines, drunk and crying.

So I'm an alcoholic now, she said, with beautiful fat in her cheeks. If he's gonna be an alcoholic I'm gonna be an alcoholic. I didn't know what to say; no one in my family drank. They say it skips a generation. . . like baldness, like anima. She had skinny hoops in her ears, a puffy vest, slightly faded jeans. She was at the point in her adolescence where she was still unsure of the significance of her body's tumescence. Aren't we all?

I just can't stand living with them any more. I just can't stand living. Her whole face was hard and wet. Everyone's got a tell: their eyes, their posture, the way they finger their hair. I studied her lips, but it was years before I understood. But I recognized at that moment, however incoherently, that she was different from everyone else who seemed to be going straight down the drain.

There was the proverbial screaming in the sky, and I realized they'd closed the perimeter.

Asdfghjkl.

We all wondered why the Feds didn't step in. After all, we were not some anonymous, autonomous city-state whose medieval rise and fall is of no concern to the larger world; we were an economically integrated suburb of the most powerful cosmopolis since the fall of Tenochtitlán. Hell, you could see the Twin Towers from up in the beech trees. And the United States, at that moment in history, was capable of astronomical violence.

Where the hell were they?

We had no way of knowing, of course: they'd cut the phone lines, scrambled the transmissions, smashed our incipient Internet. But no way of knowing doesn't stop the questions. Don't ever think it does. Who were they? Why did they come here? And how about a little verisimilitude, added those of who'd suffered through the late Mrs. Dette's Honors English. Where's the chiaruscuro? Where's the onomatopoeia? We compared notes, circling and undermining all the literary devices we'd employed in our varying narratives of the events, to no avail.

The whole premise was just too far-fetched, the skeptics among us maintained. The reality of the moments we were living through just didn't jive with all our previous conceptions of how the world works. The term “cognitive dissonance” doesn't even come close.

Tell me: what color is the sky?

Yeah?

What color will it be tomorrow?

How do you know?

It was disorienting, yes, ontologically speaking. But if there's one thing I've learned in these years on my own, it's that the human conceptual ability. . . well, one can get used to anything.

The mayor took his place behind a podium in the sanctuary of a small Protestant church. Behind him were curtains of imitation blue velvet; above him, a plain wooden cross.

You all know, he began, that the past twenty four hours have presented us with the greatest challenge this township has ever faced. We find ourselves, apparently, under the occupation of an unknown power. Perhaps unknowable, said the deacon at his elbow. Yes, well, said the mayor, er, clearly uncomfortable with this expeditious union of church and state. He happened to be a Roman Catholic himself, the mayor that is, or at least, he said to himself briefly thinking of his mother, he had been raised as such, and that was good enough. His aides whispered to each other beneath counterproductive sunglasses, and the mood of the room nudged down a notch.

And it's been brought to my attention that some of you are stroking guns, he continued, apparently unaware of the obvious allusion he'd just made to a contemporary episode of The Simpsons. And others of you are not inclined towards violent resistance, of course. There was a great deal of shuffling and sideways glances. As you know, I have always stood strongly behind the Second Amendment, while also always remaining a firm supporter of sensible gun control policies. It is, and always has been –– and at this point, he quite transparently paused to assess the impact his words were having on his audience –– my view, that this is not a contradiction in terms. And so, I would like to say, that if it be the will of this body. . . not that this is of course a body in any sense of the. . . at any rate, if we are going to form a militia, not that I'm saying that's my wish, I think we can do so in a way that satisfies both those who

There was a burst of gunfire, and the mayor was gunned down where he stood.

He was a collaborator, someone explained. A quisling, I replied, and no one got the reference.

They will eventually fall due to their own internal contradictions, he said to me across the table in a drinking establishment near the waterfront in Packanack. For a moment, I was impressed at his diction, at his mastery of the issues; but then he disappointed me with his ethics. We just have to keep the pressure up, he continued. Their main encampment is now in the field below Fallon [he was referring, of course, to the defunct elementary school which was at the time occupied by the Environmental Discovery Center], and we're headed there tonight. Are you in?

I'm not going to take sides, I said.

Take sides! These are occupiers! This is our homeland!

Let them have New Jersey if they want it, I said. There are other places. I wished for another mind-numbing-freeing pitcher. Anyway, I won't fight my brothers.

Your brothers!?! They're aliens! . . . come on, grow a pair!

They're relatives. Existence and relativity are the same thing, if you think about it. All I really want is to wreck my stockings in some jukebox dive. Of course, this is only what I wish I'd said. In actuality, all I did was mumble something about the Gita and draw heavily on the smoking thing in my mouth.

There was one hope, and that was Mona Devine. But that's another story; she didn't pan out. There were a lot of things the wise among us figured out in those condensed, harrowing days, and not the least among them was the fact that beautiful women aren't God.

The Battle of Fallon was unremarkable except for the slaughter of a good portion of Wayne's young and muscled, whose convocation at the football field behind the high school on the other side of the woods had not gone unnoticed by the occupiers.They'd unleashed small surveillance balloon-animals á la Heinlein just under the light pollution to keep tabs on us. And so the football team and their ideological adherents died gruesomely in the woods, along the banks of a creek of crayfish and plaster-cast coonprints. Hemlock and maple shadowed their corpses from the cold sun of the following morning.

In the midst of all this, I dreamed of peace, of peach and salmon clouds, of pea soup with fragrant fishbones. Far below me, a plastic battle raged. I saw men and women gang-raped, jagged glass left inside them. The invaders hosted a sword-swallowing contest for their new subjects; none of the chosen survived. The bleeding were buried in shovels of salt, screaming as they were separated from the air.

We vomited in the streets while they fucked the nuns to death.

It soon became clear that small arms were no match for them. Their ragged fundamentalist beards concealed a savvy, centaurian amalgamation of brains and brawn, and they didn't mind dying if they killed us along the way. There was no fighting them. That didn't stop the other half of Wayne from trying, however. Pines Lake was convinced it would succeed where Packanack had failed. And so began the battle of Indian Road.

Zxcvbnm.

All we have, I said, or someone like me said, is our noncompliance. They can tell us what to do, but we won't be their slaves if we don't do it.

Go sixty-nine with Gandhi, they said, although it was probably less clever than that.

The twelve-year old boy was still biding his time, stroking his heart, focusing his energy, blindfolded, practicing his weird suburban yoga. When you're young, you believe in shit. There was no doubt in his heart. He just had to wait for his moment. You'll remember me, he said to the lamplit darkness behind Carvel.

The seventy-nine year old Holocaust survivor, his hands shaking with incipient Parkinson's, clutched a Kalashnikov in a jerry-rigged machine-gun nest in a glass-strewn exterior classroom of the doubly defunct Anthony Wayne Middle School. His toes tapped with a strange joy. He'd shaved himself clean, missing only a few white hairs near his nostrils, and worn his best suit for the occasion.

The girl from the forest was drunk again, clearly, wandering down the silent yellow lines in the middle of Valley Road, which had been closed to all vehicular traffic except for their panzers and pickup trucks. She held a half-shattered bottle of Rolling Rock in her left hand, the bottom like a mouth of freshly filed teeth, and she was menacingly drunk.

The two blond boys stood by and watched, blending in.

All was quiet, and for a few moments you could hear the singing of insects, the moans of the butterfly, the sadness of spiders. The fireflies excreted their bioluminescent pleas for love, and I watched, my heart beating, as they recreated the vast celestial meaninglessness above. It was so fucking profound, I got hard, and as the aliens surrounded us, I remembered the awesome fields of blackberries of my youth and how they'd succumbed to particle-board housing, and I looked at the aliens, and I hated them, and I loved them.