Afterword: Remembering What We Don’t Know We’ve Lost

Abstract

It turns out that the caveman is we and the conspiracy against us is caused and propagated by us. We did not sit down and think that people are lazy and like to be busy about little or nothing so that they may achieve the superficial sense of having “done” something in the course of their day. We stood up, maybe in line for fast food or other nutritionless food or maybe just waiting for the DMV worker to finish paring her fingernails (like a god) and help us renew our driver’s licenses. At least that’s what we think we came for when we left home two weeks ago, managed our way through the press of people in Manhattan, and waited outside and then inside on line for so long that we feel as though we’ve missed several meals and have even considered going on a hunger strike in order to jiggle the bureaucracy into paying some attention to us only to finally, breathlessly reach the bullet-proof plexiglass window and have the woman first adjust her entire fashion display, her make-up (scrabbling about in that drawer just to her right where she may well hide her NRA approved and state licensed handgun), and her attitude of resentment not over having a job at all but having this job where she has to put up with the unwashed likes of you and me, finally asking— no, people ask people—finally issuing an interventional interrogation, “Do you have two items with your current address on them?” and when you offer a utility bill and your former driver’s license, taking the license in her pudgy hand with fingers so short you tell yourself not to stare, and holding it up to the light as though driver’s licenses are translucent, smacking her recently re-rouged lips and says, “Ah. But this one’s expired.”