The extremity of the situation was beyond anything I thought possible. Humanity, with its very individual destinations, was not capable of this. Certainly, I'd read Orwell, Huxley, Mein Kampf, but . . .

They came into my home and into my life during an unsuspecting moment, but I suppose any and all moments would be unsuspecting while under suspicion. They came in through the front door, eyes glazed and inhuman.

"What the fuck?!" I screamed. My boy, Paul, was in the room and we'd always taught him not to use words like 'Fuck' unless it was necessary. 'When is it necessary daddy?' He asked. Paul was, is, a very bright boy.

"Jesus Randall." My wife, Linda, stood next to me, dazed, sleepy; it was three in the morning.

"What is this?" I asked.

"You'll need to come with us."

"Come with you?"

There were four men in all; big, lumbering men wearing dark suits. Still, I couldn't of any reasonable explanation why they were here, under my roof.

"You understand?" Said the biggest of the men.

I knew that there was a new legislature trying to pass anti-intellectualism laws in the states. I knew what those laws meant, and I also knew that if those laws happened to pass than there was a good chance that I would be out of job. You see, I am, was, a philosophy professor at a state college and I would be one of the first to go. But that is not all. I am, was, one of those teachers who has learned to amble just outside of the system. I am an anarchist, an agnostic, therefore a brother to chaos. I went through the whole sixties thing, Vietnam, etc . . ., and I understand what it means to stand up for your rights.

"This preposterous," I said.

"Your opinions, as of now, have no merit," said the man. "Orders of The President." "That little ass fucker!" I howled, completely forgetting where I was, who I was, who was in the room. Rage moved through me in a hot torrent. I would have killed these men if I knew I could . . . just like Dustin Hoffman in Straw Dogs, I thought.

"Get out of my house!" I shrieked.

That's when one of the men held a gun to Linda's head.

"Oh Jesus!" I said.

"Come with us."

And another man held a gun against Paul's.

Sadly, my guts announced that they would not thinking twice about slaughtering my family in front of me.

I looked at Linda, at Paul, and the tears just came. "I'll return," I said.

"Daddy," said Paul.

The men, they ushered me out and it seemed like an eternity ago.

A mathematician I knew, Reese Chancellor, was on one of the first boats with myself and several others. When I say 'several others' I mean many, many. They crammed us into these little boats like cattle. They ushered us down into these dark, abysmal holes where we wallowed naked in our own filth and fed us nothing with the exception of slivers of rank meat and crust of bread.

"I think it's rat," said Reese, in the darkness.

My eyes had adjusted well enough and I could see that Reese had placed a piece of putrid meat between two halves of one crust. His eyes were large in the dark, like greater darkness's carved out of his head. I didn't know how long we'd been here, but I knew that some of them were dying. For one thing, I avoided the meat.

"Where are they taking us?" Said a man who claimed to be a world famous astronomer.

That same question was asked over and over, rolling off tongue and lips like poisoned honey. Of course, nobody knew the answer, which drove everyone out of their God damn minds. This was a rotten, stinking vessel filled with, to steal a line off Allen Ginsberg: "The best minds of my generation."

When the hatches were opened up above, when the light shone down on the group, all I could see were livid, gray bodies thinning beyond recognition. Luckily, we were spared light as often as possible, therefore spared the ghastly sight of each individuals decay.

People died every day; minds turned to mush and hearts lost in the soupy innards of languid-hot bodies. Health waned liked the sun prior to dusk and the remembrance of the way things used to be became like a cruel dream. We became excited when another member of our pathetic party died off because it meant more room; room to breathe and spread out. On the first day there had not been room enough to move at all, but now, ironically, we were too weak to do so . . . I guess the joke was on us.

And they knew. The fucking president knew it. He wanted us dead, buried, and, with luck, forgotten. We had always been the biggest thorn in the country's side. Still, there had never been enough of us to overthrow the entire American government and he should have been wise enough to see that. We simply wanted to let people know that it was okay to think for themselves . . . it was okay to resist authority. Reality was, is, a crutch . . . we all knew that. But their television minds could not accept the fact.

I don't think The Isle was in a remote place at all. As with Auschwitz and Dachau it seemed to exist somewhere outside of time and place . . . an impossible region; yet the Jews had not dreamed it. The Isle seemed a nightmarish and nomadic attack on the subconscious.

I'm not stupid; I could feel myself sinking in the mud when we first got off the boat. I could see the dead trees contained within the smoky backdrop. I could still see with my own eyes, but there was something else that I could not see . . . an ideology that defied everything I'd worked so hard to believe in up to this point.

"What?" Asked Reese on the muddy banks of The Isle. His eyes were black saucers and his mouth was a thin slash across his face that could barely utter a single word. His skin, no longer gray, had taken on a greenish tone. It was then that I realized that they meant to kill us all.

"I don't know," I said.

We all looked that way. My hands were skeletal; my arms, my chest . . . I didn't know exactly how many days, weeks, months we had been crammed down in the bowels of that floating hell, but I knew that I was a dead man even as I lumbered toward the shore.

Large men in black suits, human apes really, gathered around us with semi-automatics. "Children?" Someone muttered.

There was so much weakness; so much deterioration. Simple human needs strived to be addressed. What of our children, our wives? What of all the people we loved?

But maybe those things never existed, just like this place, The Isle, could not exist for anyone other than those who stood on it.

I looked up at the sky and I could see that it was cracked. My head swam in bitter dreams, but I never realized that I was crying. A man standing next to me, so fragile as to be almost broken, slumped to his knees and banged the earth with his head. I turned to see his brittle face half buried in mud; and than the gun at the back of his head exploding fragments of his skull all over the place.

We have never known horror such as this.

"Move!" One of the men screamed, and I wondered exactly when they had become faceless to me . . . or maybe it was the whole fucking country, faceless in the eyes of those who knew more than they bargained for. The whole thing was faceless, really; and gutless. If we were the worm food then they were the worms and all the worms of the world groveled as deeply, as wantonly, as any other. It was hard not to imagine The President of the United States skewered and dripping grease over and angry fire, the flames lapping at his features until there was nothing . . . worm food; that's what happens when morality takes a backseat to misappropriation.

I wiped a man's brain of my hands before turning around.

They were still getting off the boat; lumbering side by side, crookedly and weak. Some of them crawled, and just like the man who taken it in the back of the head, these were put out there misery. I tried to look into these eyes of these killers, tried to understand that they were bound by the same skin, the same bones as myself, but I just could not see it. Call me stubborn.

The prisons they kept is in were long and gray and silent . . . How could the be any other way, I thought? It was perfect. My mind could not have conjured a more perfect, Orwellian wet dream as this. I expected them to strap the cage to my head immediately; to release the rats into my skull . . . to finish the job.

I may have been dead to them, but as long as a man is still taking in breath he is still alive to himself. We were all dead in a way, but we were also determined to believe that we could wake up at any moment.

We sat in a barracks style room in drab clothes hanging from our wasted bodies and waited for the next meal to come. As we waited, we spoke in whispers, but we never spoke of anything that might twist their brains. We all wanted to of course; we were all smart enough. But lack of food, lack of energy, and fear, would not allow us any discussion beyond our own sadness, hope and guilt.

"I should've always believed that this could happen," said The Poet. We'd begun addressing each other according to what we had been rather than what we were becoming, which was nothing. It gave us hope.

There were twenty us in the narrow, windowless room.

"I didn't," I said. I was known as: The Philosopher. But that was all I would say.

"I miss them," said The Writer. He'd written stories about entropy and the devaluation of reality.

"I think I'm ready to die," said The Dope Dealer.

"Nobody's going to die." And The Mathematician broke out in tears. I embraced his thin, trembling shoulders. He refused to believe his own lie.

Mostly, we were too tired to talk at all.

At one time, and it seemed like during another life altogether, we refused to believe that they had the upper hand; they being the faceless machines of the world. At one time, and I'm sure this was another lifetime, we believed that we could overcome them. Never literally, yet intellectually; a full scale Straw Dogs.

They should be eating out of our hands, they should be eating out of our hands, they should be eating out of our hands . . .

But no matter how many said it . . . the mantra had no distinctive merit.

Months passed into centuries passed into infinity and many had perished beneath the thumb of these persecutors and for all we knew our families might have been suffering the same cruelties.

We marched in the muddy yards outside of our gray-slab prisons and watched the dark ash of our brothers spill into the sky.

How long could this go on, I thought?

But the boats kept coming in and prisoners were filtered in and out like mute cows. The only destiny was death; and, for many, the only hope.

We had become skeletons with empty heads and sorrowful, deep eye sockets. We clung to high fences with tired fingers and watched the muddy water collect at the edge of The Isle.

I had seen all this before. It was single, dark dream that the world had shared; a single, dark dream marching across hills of bone and ash; and the world would share it again.

Two days ago I watched them gut a man in front of a decayed looking sunset. As the steaming innards unraveled from the man's body in looping ropes I could see in their eyes that they had crossed some kind of line. For a second, a moment, an instant, I could see the reflection of that dying sunset in the assailant's eyes. It was a pitiful excuse for remorse; a primitive softness bordering the inhuman. Your a man like me, I wanted to scream . . . like us. Can't you see that now? Can't you?

And the man whose guts were piled on the mud looked up at his murderer with shallow graves in his eyes . . . there were pits all over The Isle filled with the stink of decay.

"My wife died in another lifetime," he said, the froth of those words bubbling at the corners of his mouths. "I only ask to be buried beside her."

One man, another philosophy teacher I think, lost it. He ambled weakly toward the assailant, arms failing . . . and I could tell by the look in his eyes that he no longer cared whether he lived or died.

"Get back!" Yelled the man, brandishing a blade that glinted harshly in the half-light . . . but I couldn't believe that he'd any intention of using it again; it stuck out of his hand like a violent reminder of everything he'd become. And than I recognized him. The dark around his face unraveled to reveal features both curious and wise. In another life, perhaps on another planet all together, this man had been one of my students. There was always a chance of this happening; of the snake shedding its tired skin and showing us the mechanics of the trick.

He looked at me too . . . he looked at me and dropped the blade . . . he dropped the blade and turned away . . . toward the shore . . .

And I knew that he wanted of The Isle as badly as we did.

Tonight I do not sleep. I lie awake in the dark, in the madness, and continue to think about the man with the blade. Was it symbolic, or simply coincidence? I cannot help but think that the edges of a higher plan have begun to fray.

It is also the first time I have allowed myself to think about Paul and Linda other than the fleeting glimpse the subconscious tortures us with. I thought them frankly, deeply, consciously . . . I let the idea of them move through my struggling heart and mind; and I let them warm my bones.

Humanity will never be a family, I realized. Love and understanding will need to come from the individual man and mind; never the whole. I will always think like the anarchist; I will always be my own Isle. But to force you down in the dirt; down into the grave . . . to make you see before you think; to make you love before you feel; to make you sink.

So I thought about them and I cried because I knew that I loved them more than I could ever love myself . . . And what country, what nation, could say that?

It was three days after the man was killed with the blade that I got the call.

They burst into the room . . . two men with squarish faces and vague expressions; errand boys.

I looked around the room to see who they might take and I quickly realized that I did not recognize anyone. So many had died, so many bodies had been exchanged for others, that nothing every stayed the same. All of humanity will never be a family, but we still needed communication; and badly. We needed to know that there were others that felt the same things we felt no matter how illogical; no matter how personal. Certainly, they were murderers . . . but they were also rendering us speechless, which meant that ideas could never be exchanged and, therefore, extrapolated; and this was the worst crime of all. I hated them for it.

"Randall Frank?"

It had been so long since I heard my name being spoken that it took me a while to realize that they were speaking to me.

"Come with us."

As a philosopher I have always embraced the subject of death, not to be confused with the physical act of dying. I have always believed that there is something more; that man's soul is too complex to waste on one investment. Call it recycling. I have never been afraid of death and, when in the right mood, I've even become excited over the idea; at least excited about the idea of transmigration withal the body is ushered into any composite of alternate realties.

But right then I was petrified; a lone cow, shaved to the skin and made to wander through a field of glass. It was pain and only pain that I was afraid of. I've looked at the sooty sky enough days to come up with my own idea of how it would feel to gassed, cooked, burned, erased.

I was more than petrified; I was afraid.

The led me out of the room and down a dank corridor. Again, I thought of Orwell's cautionary tale at its brutal end. I was fairly certain, though, that these men, faceless or otherwise, were not creative enough to come with a like scenario.

I followed for a while, through the dismal, ungodly labyrinth. The air smelled of shit and death. I knew we were close. And than one of them opened a door and told me to get inside. What is inside, I thought? Inside of that room? Inside the minds of cruel men?

What I was me with was a spectacle of crueler intent than I first imagined. In the middle of the room there was a table and on the table there rested foods that I'd forgotten even existed.

"Sit," said a bearded man on the other end.

There was an empty chair across from him. I sat.

"Before you eat though, I have a question . . . You are philosopher?"

"Yes."

"Good," he said. "There are some of you left. We kept you for a reason I see. I did not believe it before, but now . . ."

"What is this all about?" I asked, looking at the delectable, my stomach rumbling; a feast before I die . . . it was so fucking cruel; so, well, American. You had to appreciate the irony. I was a criminal and this was my last supper. I felt like Jesus Christ; or Ted Bundy.

"About? You tell me. After all, that's why your here."

I noticed that his expression had changed; had become softer and more imbued with human compassion. I didn't, couldn't, understand. I thought about the man who cut open the prisoner out in the muddy yard and maybe, just maybe, but . . . "I guess it means nothing," I said.

"Nothing?"

"It hurts now, but men will go on."

"Were you aware that The President of the United States committed suicide."

"Good," I said, not giving a God damn.

"Three months ago," he went on, ignoring my comment. "The whole country is turned upside down. Riots. The works."

"And The Isle?"

"Your right . . . it doesn't mean anything."

"To you?"

"That's right.

"Why?"

"Following orders."

"And now that The President is dead?"

"They'll kill us, you know."

"Just like you've been killing us."

"Not you," he said.

"All of us," I said. "A part of me is very dead."

Tears tried to fill his eyes. I could tell that he was as scared as me; maybe more so. His circuitry didn't work the same as mine. My kind have always known more; we are survivalists.

"I'm sorry," he said. "Truly, I am."

I felt it was my turn to ask him: "Why?"

"Why?"

"Yes. Why?"

"Because we were ordered to."

"And how many are dead now?"

"Thousands," he said. "Maybe a million."

"On the Isle?"

"There are other places. The Isle is one of many."

"In the states?"

"Some."

"Women and children?"

"Only recently."

My heart sank.

"Eat," he said.

I looked at the food brightly displayed and knew that I wouldn't be able to eat a bite of it.

"Please," he said.

"I'm not hungry," I explained. And than I looked into his face, his frightened eyes, and asked: "So what does this mean?"

"It means it didn't happen. It means you can go home . . . back to your family, your life."

"What do you mean 'it didn't happen'?"

"I mean they will kill us otherwise. It didn't happen. I'm not ready to die."

"Your a fucking coward!" I hissed. "And you can't cover this up! No one can! It's impossible!"

"Some people still think the holocaust didn't happen Mr. Frank. Some people think Hitler was a hero. They still do."

"Fuck you and your kind!" I said. "Right now, you wear the mask of compassion, but you have no idea what it means . . . if you had any balls you'd cut your own throat right here!"

But I knew that that was just as much a part of the dark dream as anything; that would mean an ending and that was impossible. Those who chose to believe this ever happened would be outraged until the end of humanity, but the rest . . .

"I really hope there's a Hell," I told him. "And I hope, when you die, you go to it."

"I am in Hell Mr. Frank," he said. "I am in Hell."

"Bullshit!" I said, standing up tall; and my shadow seemed to blot him out.

"Listen," he said.

"Get us back," I interrupted. "Just get us back."

"No one will believe you," he said. "Besides, they think The President was murdered."

"Just get us back."

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