Doomed

^{DECEMBER 21, 10:30 A.M. PST} The Abomination Advances

Among the students of Plato, the mythos of the thing-baby continues. According to logographer Hellanicus of Lesbos, the plastic cups and empty prescription bottles form a motley fleet launched on a cursed mission. Alternately subjected to blazing sun and pounding rains, this garbage armada makes its arduous trek across the equatorial belly of the planet, traversing that widest stretch of the Pacific Ocean, this voyage not unlike the voyages of Darwin and Gulliver and Odysseus. And leading this campaign is the thing-child, steeped in this broth of decaying plastic. For the sun photodegrades these grocery bags and dry-cleaning bags. The action of wind and waves churns them, grinding them into smaller particles. As particles cling, its arms grow hands, and those hands sprout dangling fingers of fluttering plastic. The thing-child, its legs bring forth feet. And those feet are fringed with limp toes. Adrift in the center of the Pacific, the pallid thing-child is lifeless, as loose-limbed as a drowned corpse, but still it grows. Nourished on this soup of plastic particles, strands as fine as hair extend from its head. Two bubbles swell, and those erupt to become the shells of ears. Specks of plastic swarm and attach to become a nose, and still the lax thing-child is not alive.

Note how similar is our thing-baby’s pilgrimage to that of the infant Perseus. He of Greek legend who later slew the Gorgons and harnessed the winged horse Pegasus, as a baby he was locked in a chest and cast adrift. And let’s not forget how similar Perseus’s ordeal was to that of the Welsh saint Cenydd, who, as an infant, was placed in a willow basket and pushed to sea by no less a hero than King Arthur. And how this story is, itself, echoed by the fate of the Welsh bard Taliesin, who as a babe was tucked within a bladder of inflated skin and floated away. And the story of the warrior king Karna, of Hindu mythology, whose mother cradled him in a basket and put him at the mercy of the Ganges. All of this history and cross-cultural theology sails along with the thing-baby and its plastic armada.

And in so many voyages are all religions made one.

And now the juggernaut is thronging past the Hawaiian Islands. The decomposing beach balls and toothbrushes are agitated by the seas, and they break down to undifferentiated flakes and specks and shreds. To coumarone-indene and diallyl phthalate. The photons of infrared radiation and ultraviolet light, these cleave the bonds which hold together atoms. Hydrolysis causes the scission of polymer chains. And these, these disposable cigarette lighters and flea collars, they’re reduced to their constituent monomers.

And so suspended in this rich bath, the Neoplatonists believe, the thing-child waxes plump. It evolves lips, and those lips part to reveal a mouth, but the thing-child is still not alive. And within the mouth grow teeth of polyarylate.

Above Wake Island, the flood of thermoplastic polyester compounds and polyphenylene oxide veers north, lingering near Yokohama along the coastline of Japan. There, a discarded wristwatch wraps itself around a growing wrist. The thing-child face floats above the water’s surface like a tiny atoll. The broken wristwatch begins to tick. The graven idol opens its eyes, dull eyes that stare up at the ocean skies. And on clear equatorial nights those polystyrene eyes marvel at the stars.

The new lips do tremble and utter the words, “Ye gods!”

Yet, still, the thing-child is not alive.