The decor hasn't changed since the 1970s. It is rustic, outmoded, mellow and peacefully quaint. We have a shag carpet, a slowly turning ceiling fan, and a freezer full of automatic food. Jazz is playing, an an involuted piece of music that seems to be as deep and remote as the night stretching out on every side from this town.
Nothing could change here. The air is so thin that things don't even rot. I could spend a year or two here, rereading the most pedestrian of material, and staring off into the distance, my focal length unsure if beyond the miles of featureless scrub and distant mountains, anything else existed at all.
But tonight, we are going to blow up the world. Or alter it greatly, a final gambit before a war between exponentially more destructive powers comes to a head. And so Charlie is tinkering with a Commodore 64 hooked up to an old rabbit-eared television set while Jenifer looks on in a mask. This is, improbably enough, our command system for the salvinorin tipped missiles we wish to launch into the upper atmosphere, apocalyptically changing the world's consciousness before someone else changes it for us.
And me? My active role in this is over, and all I can do is wait and see if the world we make will make anymore sense than the world we live in now, and if the little things will still be enjoyable to me afterwards.