AFTER SOME RESTLESS CHANNEL FLIPPING — I linger for a few minutes on a Netflix special entitled Trade War With The Dodge City Dead, in which Paul Sweetie’s new edict that all aborted fetuses must be buried is contradicted by The Dodge City Dead, who claim that aborted fetuses don’t count as human beings and thus have no business in the underworld. To make their point, they dump a wheelbarrow full of them back in the Town Square in the middle of the night, in a see-through bag labeled THIS IS TRASH — I finally settle on an Amazon special set at Dodge City High:

From what I can gather, it has to do with the efforts made by Dodge City’s most infamous private security contractor, Greg van Groos, to run a tactical combat simulation in the high school’s hallways. “In case,” he claims, “anything such as one of those school shootings we hear so much about were ever, God forbid, to go down around here.”

The paramilitary forces of Moonstone Securities — van Groos’ firm (or “mercenary army,” as some Left-leaning pundits have taken to calling it) — descend on the school, securing the hallways with giant machine guns and smoke grenades, mowing down every student, admin, and teacher in sight.

“Just to be safe, just to be safe,” they keep saying, whenever the smoke and carnage clears enough to reveal their faces.

At the same time, on the righthand side of what’s now a split-screen on my laptop, students run in terror, arming themselves in the bathrooms with handguns and slingshots and Molotov cocktails. “We never would’ve done anything like this, but we have no choice,” one of them says. “These maniacs have declared war. Even if it means certain death, we have to defend our school!”

They shave their heads and don trench coats and write nihilist manifestos and do themselves up with Slipknot tattoos, “just to get in character,” as one of them puts it.

Back on the lefthand side of the split-screen, one of the mercenaries says, “See — here they come now. Total deviants. Terrifying. Just look at these kids. We must remain calm, though. Remember, this is all a simulation.” Still, he ducks when a wall explodes behind him, and the fear on his face as he pulls shrapnel from his neck is either genuine or extremely well-simulated, deep in the uncanny valley.

*****

THE SPECTACLE CONTINUES as a voice blares, “Everyone remain calm, everyone remain calm, classes are to proceed as normal,” over the intercom.

“The question,” one of the high schoolers says, just before being shot in the head, “is whether their claim that this is all a simulation ought to be believed as such. If we believe it, and thus let our guard down, then we’ll all be killed. But if we insist that all of this is really happening and thus fight back and die anyway, then our deaths will be indisputable. When we die, we’ll surely have died for real. Whereas, perhaps, if we agree that it’s a simulation, then we’ll — ”

After lingering on his corpse a little longer than seems strictly necessary, the camera cuts to a scene of two middle-aged Dodge City citizens in a sterile conference room, staring at their fingers splayed on the plywood table.

“It’s just so … it’s just so shocking, to think about it, still,” says an overweight middle-aged woman in a sweatshirt bearing a “SURVIVOR #1” logo. “To think of the things that happened to us, back in high school. To think that one minute we were in class, learning about standard deviation, and the next they were shooting the whole place up, like it was a war zone. I mean, those guys were serious. Full-on armor, riot shields, gas masks … you name it.”

An overweight middle-aged man in a “PRIVATE SECURITY CONTRACTOR #1” sweatshirt says, “Look, we were just doing our job. We needed to run a convincing-enough simulation to be sure we’d be up to handling the logistics if something like this ever really happened. It was in the interest of all the students of Dodge City High, past and future, to … I mean, no one told us the bullets were real.”

He falls silent and twirls his sweatshirt-hood’s drawstrings, like he’s afraid he’s said too much.

SURVIVOR #1, picking up the sudden slack: “We — those of us that made it out — never could understand why someone would want to kill us all like that, out of nowhere. If it wasn’t for Dylan and Eric and a few other students who happened to have guns on them that day, Lord knows what would’ve happened. I wouldn’t be here now, that’s for sure. It would’ve been a bloodbath. An even bigger bloodbath, I mean. Those kids are heroes, even if they did kill a lot of my friends.”

*****

I DOZE OFF FOR AWHILE HERE.

When I come to, I’m watching a character that looks like me, in a room that looks like the one I’m sitting in now. He’s just sitting there, thinking, his thoughts narrated either inside my head or out loud by a narrator within the Amazon special:

“What about my own high school experience?” my thoughts begin. “At Dodge City High or elsewhere (I’ve long since given up trying to remember) … can I truly claim to have survived it? Does anyone, in the end, emerge from high school intact, or are we all victims of it in one way or another, battered into the adult forms we are then doomed to inhabit?”

It occurs to me that perhaps the simple fact of Death enters us all in high school, simulation or not, so that any actual violence in our high school hallways is merely the tip of a very deep iceberg … merely the making-obvious of what was already inherent.

“In this sense,” I go on thinking, aware that I’m growing increasingly hypnotized, my thoughts ringing increasingly false to me, “Moonstone is our only bulwark against certain doom, whether it comes in the form of a bullet to the head in algebra class or the slower but in some ways even more insidious creep of decay and despair over the decades and decades after graduation.

“If the only true subject of high school is Death, if that’s all we’re there to learn, then surely those who would murder their classmates during study hall are nothing but the manifestation of their schools’ secret beating hearts, the inevitable emergence of what high school truly is and, all along, always was.”

*****

Here the screen goes black and a giant “MOONSTONE SECURITIES: WAGING THE WAR ON DEATH” slogan comes up, and I realize I’ve been watching an advertisement for the firm this whole time, and am now so confused as to where the lesser evil is to be found that I gladly switch over to Netflix and lose myself in the spectacle of Pussygrab and his goons purging the Chelsea Motel, on the Outskirts of Dodge City, where the last of its counterculture has been hiding out, plotting a “60s Style Celebrity Uprising” that is now gruesomely and spectacularly quashed, even if all the people involved are wax effigies of their real-life counterparts, as it now appears quite likely they are.

“Phew,” I hear myself think, aware that I’m reverting to Swamp Mode and will soon be so deep inside it I won’t notice, “at least someone’s doing something around here.”