Night Train

(3)

          “Something’s rotten in Denmark,” Big Bluto announced at the company meeting today. At first I thought he was talking about the ten cases of Dr. Sharpe’s Shakti Tonic the Colombian guys boosted, but it turned out he was talking about a rat—the four-legged kind. Big Bluto put out rat traps in all the corners and under the counters in the lunchroom, and now it appears that a rat got caught in one of the traps and dragged the trap through a hole in the wall, and he’s rotting there, that fat rat, inside the wall. The stink is fierce, but I have to laugh. Because Big Bluto has to put up with it, same as the rest of us. I mean, we all breathe the same air. The difference is, we’re used to foul odors and he isn’t.

          This rotten in Denmark bit was Big Bluto’s way of kissing up to us. He thought he was being cute. But most of the workers have never heard of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. They don’t have Shakespeare Festivals in the shantytowns of Phnom Penh.

          Things were different in Shakespeare’s time. War, slavery, child labor, sure. That’s the world. But you could drink the water. You could breathe the air. Bluto’s world is dying. The signs are everywhere. The super bugs are with us now. Golden staph, VRE, enterococcus. Lean furious mosquitoes that eat DDT for breakfast. Amoebas that eat your eyes. The big diseases are coming back. Cholera, tuberculosis, diphtheria. They’ve been sharpening their incisors in the dark, rehearsing their lines just offstage. And now they’re ready to pounce. It’s not only Denmark that’s rotting away like a diseased rat. The stink is everywhere. The Bluto World is dunged under, played out. Only an influx of barbarian sperm can save it now. That’s the only hope. The wombs of the Bluto women are crying for it.

          Big Bluto with his Swiss bank accounts, connected all the way up to the Texas oil families and the Saudi princes, is nervous as hell. The richer he gets the more worried he gets. Because what he’s doing, with all his money and his connections, is reserving himself a stateroom on the Titanic. The ship is going down. And he knows it, although he won’t admit it, even to himself, he knows it. The Bluto World is jacked. The whole stinking edifice is crumbling, shaking off its foundations, rotting away like a termite hill. Rats are gnawing the taproots, carpet beetles are tunneling under the wallpaper. But a new world is already in the making. The barbarians appear at the gates of the city, their eyes sizzling with vitamins, their loins freighted with erotic dynamite. A silvery trumpet sounds somewhere, and conquered and conquerors gaze at each other like moist flowers opening in the light of a new and dazzling sun.

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