Mutants Under Glass

Something struck me as strange as I was walking from my car into the corporate office building in which I work today. I stopped in the middle of the parking lot for an instant, wondering what it was.

Right away, I knew – it was quiet. All around me were objects made by humans…a couple hundred cars, several large trucks, half a dozen multi-story office buildings, a daycare center, a water tower. And nowhere in that manmade landscape could I see a single person for that one moment. There were no artificial sounds, no evidence of people other than all these THINGS that they had made.

For a moment, my imagination flashed on a scene from “The Omega Man” (I watched way too many afterschool movies in the seventies – heavy on Planet of the Apes, Fantastic Voyage, and other cheesy sci-fi) – the scene where Charleton Heston is walking down a city street surrounded by buildings and cars, trash blowing around him, nobody else in sight.

For those of you who didn’t spend your afterschool hours watching bad sci-fi, “The Omega Man” was a movie about civilization being wiped out by a plague, and Charlton Heston being the last normal guy alive until he finds a bunch of normal kids that he saves, but he’s killed by evil cloak-wearing mutants in the end. I had a college film history professor (don’t ask) who played the ending of that movie SEVERAL times, to show the students how Heston died laid out on his back in a pool with his feet crossed over and arms spread out wide – a classic Christ pose, according to the professor, and therefore meaningful.

This movie was also beautifully parodied by one of the Halloween Simpsons episodes in which everyone in town turns into cloak-wearing mutants and Homer is the only normal person left, but I wondered when I saw it how many people really got it.

Well, that was a long digression from the original story.

Anyway, as I was standing in the parking lot wondering at how I couln’t see or hear anybody, the next working drone pulled into the lot in his/her midsize sedan, and the spell was broken. I started walking again. That was when I looked up at the ring of office buildings surrounding the lot, with their many stories of mirrored glass. And I realized there could be any number of people (or cloak-wearing mutants) behind those windows staring out at me, wondering what that guy was doing just standing in the middle of the parking lot looking around. Shouldn’t he be working? (or at least contaminated so he can turn pale and join us mutants?)