Settlement

The Neptune Society

In the morning when I wake up the commercials are on. The apartment smells like fish and the commercials are always on.

In the commercial a black actor is talking to a bottle of beer. The actor is famous for his membership in a rap group from a depressed Los Angeles neighborhood. In the 1980s the rap group sang a song about the police in which they expressed what everyone from the depressed Los Angeles neighborhood felt, but had not yet the courage to record on an album.

The song played on the radio and the men who sang it became famous.

Years later some of the famous men were dead and some were less angry. One of the men gave his name to a brand of headphones and later to an American automotive manufacturer to use in marketing a vehicle soundsystem. One of the members died of a sex disease. One became an actor. 

Now it is eight o’clock in the morning in Florida and the actor is talking to a bottle of beer. He is asking the bottle what it thinks. If it thinks it is colder than he is. 

The actor looks at the beer bottle. This is funny because the actor’s rapping name references something that is very cold. 

You think you’re colder than me? he says. You think you’re colder than me?

The bottle of beer responds by freezing everything in the world. The oceans and the fish, the orange trees, the towers of man. 

The actor is taken aback. Though he is named for something cold, it is not within his power to freeze the fish and the towers of man.

In this way the bottle demonstrates irrevocably that it is the colder of the two. 

Fear not. 

Up north a man stands in a hospital room with the curtain pulled. He is standing over an old woman and she is dead. He is looking down at her and he is saying this. He is saying this to her and she is dead.

Well Mary I guess this is it. This right here. This is it. You’re looking at it. 

On the other side of the curtain a girl is singing a song about country roads written by a musician who died in a plane crash. It is her job to sing this song so that people might die to it. 

The man looks down at the old woman. He thinks about touching her face but he doesn’t. The woman he knew is gone.

I don’t know what else to say, says the man. This is the end. 

But for some of us.

For some of us who go on.

For some of us who oversee the burial at sea. 

Those are not ashes that were her face. Those are cremains. 

Fear not.  

In the desert a scientist and a writer are having a conference in a tent. After a long journey they have witnessed an ancient ritual and are now free to return to their families. 

I’d wish you luck, says the scientist. But I know you won’t need it.

Outside the tent the wind is blowing.

The writer nods. He gets his things. He knows the scientist is right.