Through grotesquely chapped lips, Bert whistled a bright tune, and managed to keep whistling with melodious tenacity as he and George walked.
What’s that tune?
I don’t know. Something I heard a long time ago.
It’s nice Bert real nice. And the fact that you’re whistling at all . . . my hat’s off to you.
George doffed his derby.
Bert continued whistling.
The two men walked.
Behind them, the toxic oasis, the Bird Woman, the town square, the monkeychildren, the stone trees, the hooded dead, yet none of it seemed real, or rather relevant episodes in the continuity of their blind migration. Those were fugitive spectral imprints from a series of dreams with no central dreamer at its axis, no governing entity to verify the images as viable, or hold them accountable for their claims to reality. Once upon a time was a paradox with no matching equivalents, and now . . . now, here they were, at present, the movement of bodies abused by the elements, Bert whistling a tune whose origins he couldn’t place, George relishing the sweetness of that tune, and what lay ahead of them the metronomic torment of nothing nothing nothing nothing, at one point Bert ceased his whistling to muse—How much nothing can a man take? then he immediately resumed whistling because that was one way to battle or divert or cover up the masticating saw-teeth of nothingness.
Then, something.
A crossroads.