Syzygy | Alexander T. Damle

            Great monolithic slabs of luminescence rise high towards the heavens, and as they loom above our Babel, we gaze long up at them in a reverential wonder. Flickering, rippling across their surfaces are images of that which we can buy for the souls that we sell. Behind the screens men and women tethered to more screens, fingers tapping away as pincers on insects, ants scrabbling at bits of sand to build grander super-structures for make benefit some long forgotten queen. Their eyes reflect colours great and beautiful, neon light and steel and glass and bits and pieces of forgotten history painting out the landscape of the city, all born out to hide a concrete infrastructure looming large and ugly beneath the fragile, gilded surface of restless abandon and loud, throbbing music.

            Young people skip as happy idiots through the streets arms clutched round each other tight, clothes made out of the materials born of icy machines thrashing up and down long into the night, their minds and souls and very spirits consumed by the plunging, crunching parasite these nights all worship. Empty bottles shatter on the asphalt’s soul sucking blackness as we pray to gods we stopped believing in when our ancestors discovered the cold cathode.

            They’d do best to remember those old gods though, tonight above all nights, before all nights, for tonight is the syzygy, when the cosmos comes into weird alignment and square peg into round hole falls and we slip long over that precipice that finer men call sanity and the rest of us call happiness.

            According to the dictionary the old woman with the tritium lights threaded through her hair has encoded deep into her brains, a syzygy is a time when all that weird cosmic alignment holds itself up for our gaze and we all get a little broken. Tonight’s the night when I sleep under a roof though I know all these behemothic structures my fellow man forces their souls prisoners to are on the verge of collapse down on their heads, but I forget to care because this is the night of the syzygy.

            So a Vagrant walks into a bar, punchline, roll on snare drum but no one laughs because the moon and the sun are in alignment and that old woman says that ain’t never supposed to happen. The bouncer simply nods though I look younger than he because my eyes betray the truth my skin and hair do not. Pierced through his right eyebrow is a little tube of green light. I wonder at how he sleeps.

            All the faces are illuminated cold sterile blue neon tones. The music is tripping over itself in a rush to get out the door, but then it loops back and a voice implores us some long-gone message of love, its beats harsh and broken, run a few times through an auditory meat grinder. I set myself down at the bar and the bartender gets me a drink that I figure I don’t have the money to pay for because why would I, but then a woman comes up behind me and offers to pay. Before she can the bartender says the drink is free for such a good customer, though I never before have laid eyes upon his face, not in this life.

            She sits down next to me and unto her eyes I am swallowed up big amber pots of honey reminding me of some beautiful creature I saw once upon a mural, before they painted over all the murals because cleaner is better and society forgets about the beautiful in the name of the perfect. Her skin is pure white milk and clean as the city tries to be, hair long and straight and dark, and I feel as though I am falling into some dark spot on a dying sun.

            We sit and look at each other and talk little clipped off phrases - pronunciations about lives no one lives outside of those big screens outside. She touches a hand to my face. It’s warm against my cheek, in direct opposition to the skin’s porcelain tone. Then she asks if I want to take her to bed and I tell her I can’t afford her and she looks offended but I say its my soul that can’t afford love in this time for that which the syzygy gives it will also take away. Her eyes go a little crazy and she says something about fucking myself with a glass bottle and I tell her that’s just how it goes. Then she takes my hand and asks me to walk with her and I feel light headed but I tell her no, I have my reason for this place on this night amongst all, and she leaves on her own, slightly dejected.

            And as the door takes her into the night, a gentle pitter patter of rain drops across polished stainless steel washes in, accompanied by hiss imperceptible to all but a dog’s ear, telling the forgotten tail of spit fire falling from the sky in punishment for our sins, and with the raindrops come five men in long leather jackets and dour looks, walking a little funny on one side, compensating a weight that feels itself out in more than simple ounces. The man in front’s hair is bleached the color of sand when sand was still the colour of bleach, before the pollution came and the war made it stay, before nature burned itself out trying to keep up with us, a time when we took a simple pleasure in lying in the sun by the sea. As I remember what it is I am here to do, my thoughts turn to whether this mere boy ever truly saw the sea, not just the tar black oil slick that feeds the shipping lines running into this land of empty, echoing steel, and I consider that he probably has not, and I feel the subtlest tingle of a bug landing on the back of my hand, despair, at this consideration. They feel the weight under their arms but they know not how to use it. Broker has long made assurances such as that, but tonight is the syzygy and tonight is the night on which I challenge Broker finally and forever.

            My hand reaches under my own coat, tattered, frayed, broken, patched together as lives after a great flood. I feel cold steel between my fingers and as it leaves its nest under my arm, I feel my hand naturally snap to its form, a fly to shit, each contour of its grim structure designed, shaped, formed, around the idea of my hand, the idea of the few hundred grams of pressure I shall soon exert over and over until the air smells of sulphur and iron, and my ears ring and the men in long coats’ ears ring nevermore. I see the barman hit the floor and I see five hands reach for their own coats but too slow.

            My hand is out and the gun with it and already I squeeze the trigger even as my left hand moves into cup and saucer, and my body turns to center axis relock, and I hear fire and men scream and I see blood leap up in shade absurd under harsh club light, even the pounding music not enough to mask the carnage, man and steel reforged as one, and I squeeze and aim, squeeze and aim, and blood is now painting wet and sticky the floor, and the bleach blonde hair is the colour of October sky. Yet one man screams out, holds his knee, like the palm of his hand can pull back in the blood and bone that is doing its best to leave him, and I level my gun and pull the trigger quiet and slow, action reaction, consequences forgotten on this night of vicious symmetry, beginning and ending with blood. The barman stands and looks to me.

            “Vagrant.”

            “That is as I am called.”

            “Vagrant, what the fuck have you done?”

            “As had to be done.”

            “Broker is gonna lose it...”

            “As he should. Do not worry. I will kill him.”

            “You can’t just fucking kill Broker, you know what happens then, Jesus Vagrant, you used to be a professional, man.”

            “And I thought you no longer recognized me. I have not been a professional since Broker took my profession.”

            I walk outside and I see a man, and behind the man is a car, and in the man’s hands is a rifle, enough bullets to cut a man to pieces bite sized for the carrion, and then the man is on the ground screaming for the bullet in his gut and he casts his rifle away, and I pick it up.
            “Driver.”

            “What the fuck do you want, Vagrant.”

            “I’m working again, Driver, and you’re going to call Widow and tell her I just killed her son, and that Corporate hired me.”

            “Vagrant, Jesus, that’s going to start...” he grimaces for the life leaking out of him “Start a god damned war.”

            “Of course.”
            “Broker...”

            “That name only carries power for men with a past to be exposed, for secrets to be revealed. I am a simple man. I am flesh and steel come together to draw out blood.”

            “What about the rest of us... you son of a bitch...”

            “Make the call.”

            And as I took his rifle, I take his car, and I know the war will begin, exactly as I hoped, exactly as I planned. This is the night of the syzygy, when normal men take total leave of sense, in favor of the carnal, prehistoric truth, us, our great megalopolis despite, no more than neanderthals pawing about in the dark, long branches sharpened to points, hunting mammoths though we know they may trample us under foot.

            Out on the streets of the city the car slips smooth, lithe, as again steel formed into flesh through the hand and mind, a fusion of electrical impulse and grander design. The city spreads out around me and I see cars racing towards the drop bar in whence I just slaughtered a half dozen sons and fathers and lovers and leather coats, police cars armed into tanks, long black sedans with stony faced shooters ready to meet a maker they had forgotten in favor of sex and pills, long night dopamine dumps, thrusting and pushing, fucking and sucking and licking and throbbing, pulsing. I wonder at the grand cosmic weirdness of it all - the firing of electrons and the breaking and reformation of atomic bonds across millions of billions of trillions of eons built up and down again, stars born and died across galaxies of a number unknowable, all pieces of some great scheme or the pure essence of random absurdity, all built behind this moment just before a grand explosion of violence under the star’s alignment called the syzygy.

            I pull the car out onto the freeway and echoing stark miles down the road away from me is the Edge, Broker’s great watchtower, his skyscraper looking out over the city, home of many things unknown to me but one that is, and that is Broker, a man whose very name seems to grant even this city’s biggest psychopaths the whispered fear of children speaking of the monsters that lay beneath their beds, but here there is no father figure to lift up the bed skirt and look, here the only one left allowed to stand truly is Broker, and Broker is no hero. Two hundred stories, the outside of every one a screen, one great canvas upon which Broker may paint his threats, on which he promises this city its peace, its prosperity, in exchange for only its fear, its subservience, its life blood.

            The great screen crackles to life with a hum palpable at the deepest marrow root of my skeletal structure even yet a few miles out, through every piece of steel and glass and cement that builds this place, past every hazy boozed out oblivion, down every stoned state of existential bliss, every needle and snort, every orgasm, a hum felt in all our hearts and minds for we know that Broker is about to speak, and when Broker speaks, you’d best listen, lest you too fall prey to his omnipotent wrath, his cyberactive vengeance. The screen crackles to life, and we all watch, and we all listen, for in this screen is every screen, every phone and television and computer and tablet, for that is part of the deal, in exchange for our peace he takes our screens as his own face, his own Orwellian vengeance. Not that he needs to watch, not that he bothers to watch, because the promise of him is enough, because our eyes are all too glued to his face to dare oppose him.

            The great screen crackles to life and upon it is his face, angular and handsome, eyes bitingly intelligent, all other features ageless, and out of the face comes a voice that is also a post horn and also the word of god.

            “Tonight, I hear gun fire rattling down our streets. It must stop. You have six hours to restore peace, through arrest, blood, or negotiation, before I fulfill the promise I made when first you met me. I ask that all citizens stay indoors, stay safe, and allow the men of violence to solve this violence themselves.”

            So it is with Broker, simple statements, quiet threats, uttered as promises, claims of peace born only at the cost of war, but what is peace without the threat of war, what is love without hate, art without carnage, beauty without shit, where once this city was the world’s crowning achievement, perfect collusion of the yin and the yang, the great and the terrible, now it is a place of people barely living under a constant shroud of fear.

            Before Broker I was a cog in the city’s undying superstructure, one gear turning another so that the grand machine may never stop, violence to bring about peace and peace in fear of violence, art and beauty born of struggle and chaos. I killed men for a living because that was what I was paid to do, because in the city before the Broker it was a job that needed doing. Before the Broker the old woman that spoke to me of the syzygy was a muralist, painting the most beautiful things across forgot swathes of steel and concrete, but now no one dares to vandalize what the Broker calls his creation.

            Before the Broker, this city had two masters, Widow, who took her throne after her husband died, and Corporate, a cold, even headed man, exercising violence only as a matter of necessity. Corporate owned me because he paid better, but in that city loyalty extended no farther than a paycheck. No one really noticed Broker at first, when he was just a petty dealer of information, a way to get a cop who wanted desperately to be straight back into the fold, to keep activists in line, to make sure a judge kept your man out of jail, kept you out of jail. He was as the rest of us, a pusher of a particular product, drugs or women or death or information, all products, all the same. We forgot, though, that information is different, information is powerful, information is a spider spreading its web across a void until naught can pass through for fear of becoming ensnared. We thought he gathered information as requested of him, but really he was gathering everything on all of us, for every man, woman, and child in the city, he knows a secret, deadly, destructive, the sort of thing that would make life very hard to live if it got out.

            Corporate and Widow and ten thousand angry foot soldiers on each side saw it happen, and together they conspired to kill the one that whispered in back alleys, under bridges, in dingy bars late at night, was being named Broker. But Broker knew, just as he knew all the rest, and his proclamation was simple - if ever he should die in any circumstances not strictly natural, it would all be revealed, every secret great and terrible.

            Then the proclamation was extended, and he declared a war on violence, and any who tried to make a new war, a real war, a war of blood and flesh and steel, their secrets would be released and they would be undone. And we all thought he was crazy, but, despite, the fighting stopped, and all the city’s crime came direct under his control, and if you broke the law it was only with his express permission.

            And then those of us who were told to kill was to live were suddenly without job. Some moved back into the fray, got real jobs because Broker left no other course. But not me. I couldn’t bear the straight life, the drugs and the booze just to get through. And that is when I became Vagrant.

            I find the car that belongs to a man quite likely now dead in front of the Edge, for in the fusion of flesh and steel that so defines us, the motions of driving, the thought process of navigation, have become fused to firing of cylinders and the tight squeeze of brake pads against rubber. The building up above me rises and I see the people of the book turning their eyes to god, but their god answered back in that past threats, their god saw violence’s purpose for its own sake, recognized the great fallacy of eternal peace in a breed cast in a crucible moulded of the penicillin promise of eternal war.

            The Edge’s face is a sheer, rippling black with the screens off, interrupted only by occasional spotlights, rendering it ever visible across the endless expanse of concrete that it reigns over, stretching up into the low hanging smog. The lights in the lobby are on and a dozen men and women stand tense and sweating, their flesh clinging tight to high calibre, high capacity assault weapons, but they know as well as I do that, if rumors of Vagrant’s return are as founded as I know them to be, then this can only end with their blood spread across the sparkling tile floor. I reload my pistol and grab the rifle off the seat beside me, step out of the car, the rain pawing at my face, warm with the transient heat of the city’s streets, washing off the layer of grime that finds itself an essential part of the life I have chosen, and I am renewed, as again I find my purpose.

            The doors slide open for me automatically, and I consider that maybe if they’d been locked, the job I have to do would not be done so easily, or its basic process would be delayed, but it is too late for that now as I raise my rifle and a body hits the floor in a roar of fire as blood leaps from its chest and face in a squelching, squirting fountain, and all at once there is a cacophony of gunfire, and I find myself running ducking, rolling, aiming shooting, and a man’s face vanishes across the room, and I throw myself over the reception counter and a woman is there too, her with a shotgun, but my knife is through her throat before she can cry out, and her blood mists across my face as the rain, the noise is deafening, but it’s been many years since I noticed the sound, the blood, just now me and steel as one, and bodies on the floor and screams of men because that is one thing you can never cease to notice, and all at once is a blessed silence, and I look out around me at an array of bodies and I think to myself that they all were deluded by Broker into thinking they lived in an age of peace, and in a gift beyond the lead I taught them the essential un-truth of this assertion.

            I ponder briefly how I might scale the tower now that those few that once absurdly called themselves security now lay dead, and I think of two hundred flights of stairs, and I think of the twelve labours of Heracles, battle fought long and hard against lion of unimaginable size, when guns were just a fever dream of men who deigned to call themselves heroes despite a gut clenched desire against the rending of flesh from bone. I cut the heads off a hydra only to have them grow back, a continued struggle as proof of my quest’s righteousness. Chase a stag that can run faster than my bullets may fly. As I ponder driving a boar into the snow, in a time when snowfall is long forgotten to a past a few essential degrees colder, a sleek panel opens across the room and I see an elevator, and with that I know Broker is ready to face me, come what may.

            The back wall of the elevator is wrought in glass, and through it I watch the city stretch impossible away, tumbling out ever further in that which was once countryside but is now just further reaches of the endless swallowing expanse of light and energy, the day by day more infinite expanse of Broker’s land. As I fly upwards at a speed that feels an affront to god’s laws of gravity, I wonder at the lives spread out below, all the secrets and lies that define them, that, in the hands of Broker, cage them and keep them. I think of all this and I think of how, in just a few moments, every last one of those dirty little secrets will be known to all the world, the moment that Broker lies dead by my bullet, in death fulfilling his last promise to the city, his promise of total truth. What freedom will they then have, knowing that all their darkest angles are known to all, that they are no longer held prisoner to the vampiric urges of past sins that refuse to die. On this night of the syzygy, the rules of our reality, the basic physical laws that define this city, shall be undone, and force will become equal to past times willpower, no longer a simple matter of mass and acceleration, the gazelle will preside over the lion by way of the bullet, the grand old war between Widow and Corporate shall begin anew, and all of us workless killers shall once again have their place and purpose.

            The halt in motion is sudden, sharp, unnerving, and I know it is my time. As the doors slide open, I drop the rifle to the ground beside me, its magazine exhausted, and draw my sidearm. The place that the doors welcome me into is like no world I’ve ever believed in before, a space echoing, cavernous, but not empty. Only Broker would build a crown like this, walls all glass, city stretched out in every direction, but more than that, this is a server room like I’ve never seen, a dozen tanks on either side of a central walkway full of hulking pieces of blinking, flashing steel, suspended in cooled oil, the sort of vanity project that only one with the endless money, power, of Broker would ever consider, all the oil illuminated from below with a radioactive green. At the far end of the room lies a desk, and sitting behind it is Broker. I advance towards him, a distance of easily a hundred metres. I raise my gun, hold it steady, and, as I approach, a young woman comes out from behind a desk and I consider that she does not appear as expected, but I care not, in her eyes I see the one that we have long called Broker. Icy, steely grey, the flat, intimidating, clinical metallic glint of a CPU cover, of clouds on a day promising acid rain, of the cold, broken, metal that stands in place of people across this city, eyes the color of death.

            “So, I suppose you’re Vagrant.” I keep walking towards her. “You need to stop this, now. Before you do something stupid, something you’ll regret.” I don’t stop. “Wait, just fucking wait, listen to what I have to stay!” I’m still closing distance and I’m just a few feet from her. “Wait, Jesus Christ, wait, please, none of this is what you think!” She’s crying now as I point my gun at her chest and I squeeze the trigger, and she clutches the hole in her middle, blood pouring out across the floor, once cleaned with clinical precision, and pitches backwards into one of the server tanks. Her body floats towards the window, and Broker again looks out over her city, neon lights and cold steel for as far as the idea of man exists, a hundred million faces alit with a hundred million screens. Tomorrow again I shall work, even as the city burns out bright for what may be one final tonight. Tonight, the old woman’s prophecy has held true - the syzygy came into being and that which it wrought can never be undone.

            This passes through my mind, as the floor around me begins to rumble, the oil becomes of magma, and I smell something I have never smelled before. The ideal height at which to drop a hydrogen bomb approximates to 550 metres above the surface of the earth. At this altitude, the effects of the bomb will be widest spread, the burst of light and subsequent atomic fires allowed to ripple out across the surface of the earth, burning through all that stands in their wake, flesh or steel or concrete, unstoppable, endless, true power, true freedom, true god, and I remember that the Edge stands too at 550 metres, and I need not wonder at this grand coincidence, need no longer ponder the purpose of oil cooled servers, for I know their meaning, the great divinations of architecture and nuclear physics conducted long ago, one perfect master plan, a great proof at man’s inherent failure, his lust to sow only violence, even in the face of his own destruction. In this moment, I love Broker, respect Broker, one stronger than Widow, smarter than Corporate. My eyes tear up not in sadness or horror, but in absolute wonder at the lesson we shall all learn in consequence of my careful bullet.

            This is the truth of the syzygy, when nothing is as it seems because it never amounted to anything anyway, and the greatest light in a city of blinding brightness shall be not neon or halogen or compact fluorescent, but atomic.