One day, at about 6:07 Eastern Standard Time, everybody forgot everything.
         Except I didn’t.
         I don’t know why it happened. It had nothing to do with me. But it was amazing. All my life, everyone, from my cunt mother on down, just had to tell me their stories. I must just look trustworthy. But now no one knew any stories at all. They walked around, bumping into each other, grunting and waving their hands. I had to be quick, before they started making up their own goddamn stories again.
         So I picked a likely-looking dope to start with. A few minutes earlier he’d been walking down the street with his wife, pushing a brat in a baby carriage. Now the wife had wandered in a different direction and the baby carriage was all by itself on the sidewalk. I gave it a shove and it rolled off down the street and out of sight. (Oh, this was in San Francisco, that part’s important, with all those hills.)
         I told the guy whatever came into my head. This city—I waved my hand, maybe he thought I was talking about the immediate surroundings, or even the air itself, that’d be hilarious—this city is called Dubai. Dubai, say it. Dubai, he said. Those men over there—I pointed at some randoms—they’re called Arabs. Say Arabs. He repeated it.
         But it wasn’t all that great right at the beginning. No one had any vocabulary. I could teach them that up meant down and down meant up, but so what? The concepts were still the same. And look where we are right now, after people have started learning languages again from books and videos and things, all these semi-private lexicons that skirmish with each other every time someone tries to have a conversation. I know one guy who taught himself to speak from a dictionary, but he thought A’s sounded like L’s and S’s sounded like K’s and M’s sounded like A’s. I told him his name was Worf because he talked like a Klingon, and when I asked him to try writing it down he wrote Rlf (he got the F’s right).
         Still, I gave it the old college try, and I did pretty well. I convinced one group of ladies that men give birth through their anuses, and a bunch of priests that the guy on the cross was their worst enemy. Harmless stuff really. The biggest thing, the biggest thing I’m proud of, is I taught them how to make movies again. What an effort! So many moving parts. I was really winging it there. Anything you film is fine, I told them, you can show anything at all, express any idea, the medium is capacious, as long as somewhere in the film, non-negotiable, you kill a real black person on screen.
         I’m pretty sure I introduced the concept of rape too, although they may have figured that one out on their own.
         Eventually I set myself up as a sort of guru-guy and then people came to me to get answers, and they did half the work of it inside their own heads.
         I wish I knew what was going on in other parts of the world, though. There’s no CNN or anything like that. I miss Twitter. One day a guy showed up, and he spoke perfect old-school English and he told me he also remembered everything, and he’d come all the way from Nebraska because he’d heard rumors about me. I had him thrown in the oubliette. (I had an oubliette made. My soldiers love the word: Oubliette, they say, when they toss someone in it. Oubliette, oubliette. I think they think it’s a verb.)
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