It's Done Already

2008, Decemberish, 12:48 am.

'It's silly' Jeff Swim said. He was standing on a platform in a pulp mill with his son. They were in Crofton, Vancouver Island, on a night run to deliver either sawdust or groceries.

'Smoking science, now that's what you should go into.' Dswim wanted to be a doctor, but his father, a night trucker, had other plans. Jeff held the cigarette up to his face and pressed the button, causing a big metal grate to open up. A massive load of fresh breast implants came flying out of the storage bin and landed into the back of the truck's loading bay. They bounced around off each other like waterballoons and made garbled squish sounds in the darkness.

'It's silly,' he said again, the red operation light glowing up the whole area's dim midnight haze. He hung up the loading bay control and they got back in the truck. Dswim slept in the back cabin the rest of the trip as they toured up the Malahat from Crofton, a ghost town whose pulp industry rotted away under digitization.

He dreamed of the old white house in Mercroft again, the one they'd split back in 95. The backyard was a patch of grass with an old construction site behind it. In the dream, he'd been sitting in a sand-lot near a tall mountain of dirt with his friend Derek. A dirt biker was trying to climb the mountain, but failed each time. They laughed at him. The biker got pissed and raced towards the two kids. He skidded out right in front of them, engines wailing. Darude Sandstorm playing in the background. Interspliced in the dream was a scene inside the house, a fishtank in a middle room near the upstairs hallway bathroom. Out of the blue, Mac Swim dumped white paint in the fishtank one day, and all the goldfish suffocated. Their dying action was to suck at the glass, and all you could see was their small goldfish mouths gasping for life. They tried to dump the fishtank in the bathtub to save the fish, but in the end, they all got flushed.

Outside the dream, there was a reacurring theme of trampolines. Backyard trampolines surrounded by black, dress like shades, their surface as black as space. In victoria, the trampoline took up the whole backyard, so it was the only thing Dswim saw when he opened the sliding glass door. Beneath it, all the grass had died, and in the cold months it went unused. Rain and frost built up on it, making it useless. In cumberland, the trampoline came from Julie, and again they fitted it with a big space-black cover. It never went used at all, but became a space-filler prop in the random assortment of redundant lawn furniture. The last Dswim had heard from her, she was trying to convince him to go on a hike down King's Passage. He flatly denied, and she was never seen or heard from again, except at the pool party where Dswim had broke her black plastic pump trying to inflate a raft to float on the over-chlorinated, sand-filtered kidney shaped swimming pool behind Neo's garage door, painting simulation light room. God's house. The last he'd seen or heard from any of them was when Dswim went with Mac to the store to get Fanta drinks. Mac's charcoal bag, laced with bath salts, was used to enhance relayed radio transmissions to derail the vehicle after the meadowland intersection up the road. He screamed and yelled as Long nose came out of nowhere hollering about his kids playing in the street at 10pm with no street lights. Next thing Dswim knew, he got cuffed after leaving the vehicle, on his way to church, and wound up in a looney bin for 2 weeks surrounded by francophones and playactors. He built puzzles, worked out, and ate too much to pass the time.

In the crazy house he remembered Neo's parents when they came to visit. Old holocaust folks walking around with no clothes into rusty shower rooms, guilt tripping about water. They brought two giant pizzas some day in between their visit. Dswim went to the back door one time and saw them travelling together with Neo on his 3-wheeled Honda god vehicle, travelling like pioneers in the sands of time between universes, moving slowly, high on painkillers and muttering ancient prophecies in a tounge the world has never known. They slammed doors and shut off lights to explain god's wrath. Grandma neo had her junk ripped out to explain god's need for perfection, and now they feasted on bloated pizzas packed with meatballs and sausage to plump up their prostates like peacocks flashing walls of bright feathers.

Dswim woke up 8 years later in Royal Jubilee. He was working the night shifts in a downstairs basement, surrounded by computer screens and underpaid philipenos. One of them could say about 8 words of english. His name was ronnie, and he always smiled. Tonight, Ronnie was riding around on a big floor washing machine in the Atrium. The Chariot, they called it.

'Heyy, Dallass. You're here so early!' he said in excitement. It was one of the 3 or 4 phrases of english he knew. One of the other popular ones was 'it's done already' when he'd call down to the helpdesk bunker to say when a job's done. Ronnie was a hard worker, and he never complained. There was another worker named Lois who worked so hard everyday. He was quite smart, and extremely nice. His position got upgraded to Island health housekeeper, so he broke out of the subcontractor's grips. He reminded Dswim of the Mac's store night worker. Buddah was his name. Was buddah even a real person?