Dead in Long Beach, California: A Novel

by Venita Blackburn

We have theories on the concept of debt as a method for humans to enslave one another through a rhetorical magic that results in possession or being possessed. Our theories were quite elaborate once, but most have been discarded due to a space-saving campaign in the archives. Still, the concept is quite intriguing due to the carnage and devastation enacted in the name of debt over thousands of years. If there were a beast at the heart of human suffering, a gnawing, drooling, stinking, hungry fiend of crowded teeth and eyes yellowing from hunger and thirst, that beast would be greed, and its feces would be debt. We are not sure if that image is accurate; we can only speculate that it might convey the magnitude of the consequence that debt held over humanity.

The despair of being indebted beyond all hope of ever reaching a neutral point again bloomed, so some people surrendered all their hours on this earth in labor, burning calories, sacrificing their offspring, clogging arteries with cheap sustenance, all to feed another set of humans that ate slightly better food, labored slightly less often, and who themselves paid a debt to another set of humans, who ate even better food and labored a little less often, and so on and so forth, until there was only one person, lazy in his self-concern, divorced from the larger community of his people, paranoid, fat (in the metaphorical sense) with the intellect and physical fortitude of a spoiled Pomeranian. How lovely! How sad. How baffling and defunct the system was. Yet it prevailed. Yet it was in everything.