As the man clumps together the backs
of his boots, a bit of red dirt falls to the floor, and he watches as the
individual particles are rolled about by the dull rumble of the train. His beat
up old bomber jacket is coming apart along the seam of the left arm, and he
picks at it briefly. Something to do, anything. A train without windows is
really just a tin can on a track, he thinks.
He glances around at his fellow
passengers, all dressed in clothes patched over five times too many, faces
tired, eyes downcast, and behind him somewhere a child cries.
With the surge of noise he considers
the music playing. There are only nine songs left, and this is number four.
“Lookout out a dirty old window
Down below the cars in the city go
rushing by
I sit here alone-”
The people are broken but the car
isn’t, not yet. There always has been something about the trains, the Exclusion
Zones seem to protect them from whatever it is that’s infected the rest, even
as they are all that is ours that lay in the zones.
He imagines what scenes play
themselves out beyond the walls of the carriage, and he knows he can’t, that’s
the point. There are rules. In life and society and physics and reality and in
the Zone there are not. Just how it goes. He looks at the seat below him, fine
red leather, the walls some expensively stained wood. Above a chandelier swings
slightly as the train rolls forwards, real gold and what look like precious
stones (what’s precious - now, in this life?).
“Outside a new day is dawning
Outside suburbia’s sprawling...
everywhere”
Really tired of this song, everyone
is. But they can’t just make more, can they? In the Foreshortening much was
lost, and art was, in the grand scheme of such total destruction, a relatively
minor victim. Afterall, they still have the Nine.
A trolley trundles down the centre
aisle towards him, come from somewhere in the front of the train, it somehow
still perfect though he wonders who cleans it, who bothers, and why. And yet,
though the trolley may be perfect, and the glasses on it crystal, the water
within them is clouded with dirt and muck. Survive.
“Water?”
“Yes.” He reaches across his duffle
bag set in the seat next to him, grabs a glass, nods at the old woman behind
the trolley. He settles back in his seat and looks to where there should be a
window, but still isn’t.
From behind him, commotion.
“You’re all sheep! God save the
Zone!” He turns his head, a man, bedraggled, long beard, matted, shitty old
jacket picked full of holes, under it what looks, based on assumptions of some
old movie (one of Seventeen), a homemade bomb.
“We’re the kids!”
“I’ll blow us all back to the Zone!”
“We’re the kids in America!”
“From the Zone we were born, so back
to it we shall die!”
“We’re the kids!”
Behind the man, the door to the
carriage opens, and three men cladden in olive fatigues, plate armour real
bronze, in their arms old Russian assault rifles (not much survived,
Kalashnikovs and cockroaches, goes the joke. Humour didn’t), and the gunfire in
the tin can on rails is near deafening.
“We’re the kids in America!”
The man’s skull pops open back to
front and blood sprays across the leather and wood paneling and the bronze
trolley, and before any of the passengers can be returned their faculties from
gunfire’s clutches, the flesh that was once man is dragged out the carriage by
the soldiers.
From the PA system, the song peters
out,
“Next Stop: Omaha.”
The man disembarks the train and
coughs, the air hung thick with smog and dust. The train station shoots up
impossibly towards a concrete roof choked black with tar off the train
smokestacks, all concrete and grey and black and all the people dressed so too.
Across the station he catches briefly the eyes of a man and the eyes they too
are deep grey, and half-hid under a scarf of some sort, but as soon as their
eyes match both pairs are turned back to their proper position in study of
shoes and pavement below. He makes for the doors of the station, these once
inlaid with a gold scroll but now, with the constant overhanging smog, their
colours should come as no surprise.
Out the station now, and he looks up
and down and all the same. Born into but barely more than one colour, it can’t
be a thing worth noticing, and yet still he thought somehow here it would be
different, a gateway and a portal. He walks to a nearby railing and looks down,
two hundred, three hundred feet down, a thousand feet up, buildings made pure
unpainted concrete, uncountable windows all looking out unto nothing, but
looking in?
Down below is cloaked half in
darkness, furrows of steam float gently up towards him then above, above more
walkways, below more walkways, until finally somewhere the infamous street
level, cloaked in so much dirt and grime and Nothing. No escape not ever, but,
rumour has it, escape lies somewhere here.
And yet, escape not even in death,
as from somewhere deep within the train station the soldiers walk with their
man with the bomb and the message, clasped tight in chains, guns pointed at
him, then gentle down an airship flutters, the path of its wind about clearing
a chasm amongst the swarming en-massed crowds, and the perp is led on and
briefly the Man and the Perp make eye contact and then the doors to the airship
glide closed with a hiss like life run out a party balloon, before whisking
upwards into the smog’s upper reaches and some greater permanence than this
endless life of grey.
The man reaches inside his jacket
and pulls out a packet of cigarettes, takes one, taps it on the banister before
him, then takes a lighter from another pocket. He rolls back his thumb and
watches the flame dance, real colours so rare now, feels its heat as the metal
of the striker warms from the flame. The paper and tobacco smoulder red and
yellow and orange, it’s shape curling and unfurling in ways so unfamiliar under
harsh rules of Concrete Architecture. He inhales and remembers a story told to
him once by an old man about a time when cigarettes were a sign of something
else, a something so long gone to them, not since the Foreshortening, cherished
once, even as it was hated, beloved, as all spurned its touch. But in the
Exclusion Zone... or so the story goes.
The man, he sees what he’s here for,
so flicks the butt of his cigarette off the edge, and watches briefly as the
embers flicker off towards darkness and smoke, then turns around, picks up his
bag from the ground, and heads towards the doors labeled, quite plainly,
“Down.” Many around him wait, and he looks briefly to their faces, but they
like his are blank, the essence of feeling lost with death, but that matters
not because always there is pain. Then the doors slide open to reveal a cage
ensnared in mesh on all sides but the ground, a thick sheet of some metal
unknown. People press inwards and fore and aft, the man feels the crush, and
smells some great stink and knows it’s not One but All, the price of life. He
stands pressed near to one wall, and looks out the great blocks of concrete
stretching from ground to eternity.
The cage begins to rattle and shake,
a few people grab out for stability, most find only one another, they, however,
are used to this, the shoddy construction of the capital cities, so far now
over capacity, with nothing left to clear the bodies.
As they move slowly downwards, each
foot with a suggestion of a threat of massive speed up, painful though it may
be, considered welcomed, the city’s grand design spreads around the man, and he
understands briefly just what this place is, ten million people, in a space so
small, between the walls, beyond the clutch of the Zone. Windows of apartments
stacked to the sky, through them rot and ruin, laundry drying brown and grey
out in the smog, a man looks at the man, smoking a cigarette out an open
window.
Somewhere in the cage, a baby begins
to cry, and around the man muffled sighs. But nothing more, nothing more to be
done.
Then, finally, the ground level,
some dispatched on each the walkways, now just half a dozen in the cage, the
man in their midst. The streets are choked with oily brown runoff of industry
and man, agriculture up on rooftops a mile off, floating thick in it scraps of
paper, egg shells, used condoms, toilet paper rolls, orange peel, chicken
bones, the corpse of a large rat, a baby doll’s eye, half a book torn at the
spine, a mould infested loaf of bread, and a smell to make God cry. The man, he
too stifles back tears, before reaching into a pocket and procuring a mask, to
block the smell a little, enough.
He gazes down the street at which
the cage found the end of its journey. It narrows down to blackness not more
than a hundred yards away, sun choked off by skyscrapers, ill-lit besides. What
can be seen with man’s eyes is choked with steam, billowing out of vents on
buildings’ sides, it infected with a sweet, rotten smell quite singular, and
from amongst the steam the man sights a group of kids, shirtless and wild eyed,
clutched in hands handguns the size of heads, and the kids laugh and jeer, then
one the guns goes off in an explosion of fire, colour amongst the grey, and a
child across the street is struck in the chest, blood fountaining outwards,
caught slathered by a bare lightbulb hanging above doorway, white steam turned
red, shadows colour macabre, refracted all across the alley like an old movie
projection.
Still the kids laugh.
The man walks towards them, and they
quiet, watch him back. Their companion on the ground, the blood flow slows,
then stops, and gently his eyes flutter re-open, he feels the blood, still
warm, tastes it, then stands back up, sights his gun at the one who shot him,
and the man quickens his pace.
Down alleys he wanders, jaunt right
then left, forwards and back, feels as circles, but his memory, it’s good, he
knows the directions. Follow them and you’ll get there. “Where you go from
There is up to you.”
It starts to rain, somehow all the
way down here a few drops still, and he sees them hiss against building sides
and asphalt, feels them against his flesh, not how water feels but a slight
soapiness, like cleaning bleach.
Some poor soul, trapped forever
caught just beyond sewer grate watches the man, stark figure caught in the rain
in old clothes, bones and muscle sagging downwards with stitches, duffle bag
caught firm in hand, and the soul thinks to cry out to him, imagining into him
maybe something good, but before he can a new tsunami of sludge washes towards,
him and as he opens his mouth to scream, he is caught by a taste of death, and
though this is all he longs for, it is not, in this sensory format, what he
seeks.
Finally, he rounds a corner, the
rain coming down hard now, crashing and clattering like snare drums on runoff
in road’s centre, and there across same road is the sign he’s looking for,
illuminated like turn-of-some-century cabaret sign, lots of bright white lights
spelling out a name too obvious.
“Bar.”
He crosses the road, the brown oil
come almost to boot tops, almost coming flooding in on toes barely protected by
thread worn socks.
Beneath the sign he pushes open big
heavy door in thick steel once stainless, now blackened.
Inside lights are dingy, the very
bulbs stained brown by dust not-cleaned, beat up wooden tables, beat up wooden
bar-top, beat up man, beat up bartender, dirty glasses, old whiskey bottles
behind counter, now probably paint thinner, shoe polish, all dulls the pain the
same.
Creaking out over a speaker in the
corner, number seven starts up anew.
“I don’t care if Monday’s blue
Tuesday’s grey and Wednesday too.”
Up to the bartender the man steps.
“Looking for someone.”
“Yeah?”
“Told to find him here.”
“Who?”
“Thompson.”
“Yeah.”
“He here?”
“It’s Friday I’m in love.”
“Sure.”
“Gotta talk to him.”
“What about?”
“Heard he knows a way in.”
“Maybe. Maybe not.”
“I got it.”
“What?”
“Saturday wait
And Sunday always comes too late.”
“What he asks for.”
“Not a lot Thompson asks for.”
“I got it.”
“Show me.”
The man hoists the duffel bag up
onto counter, his muscle tingling underused with the motion, pulls at the
rusting zipper. Bartender looks inside, his face shows only the slightest hint
of caring, but care he does.
“Good?”
“Good. I’ll call him.” The bartender
picks up an old phone, with each number punched in dust plumes out. Talks for a
few clipped seconds. Hangs up the phone, turns back to the man.
“He’s coming.”
“Good. Pour me a drink?”
“Sure.” From under the counter,
hidden from sight for some reason once known but now forgotten, values gone to
the Foreshortening, a green bottle is plucked, shit-coloured liquid slithers
its way out into glass dusty as all the rest.
“How much?”
“You paid enough.” The man takes the
duffel bag and the glass, pads through the thin layer of dust on the floor,
leaves tracks, sits down at a table.
Tucked into bar's corner sits a
figure with back hunched, drink clutched hard between two hands, eyes burnt out
into a colour red but for the light.
“It’s such a gorgeous sight
To see you eat in the middle of the
night.”
“You.” The man looks up at the
figure.
“Yeah.”
“Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why do you want to go?”
“Get away from this place.”
“You will never truly know what’s
beyond these walls.”
“I know one thing, and that thing is
death.”
“You think you know another thing.”
“Zion.”
“It’s there.”
“You’ve been?”
“Yeah.”
“Why you here?”
“There’s death, then there’s Zion.”
“So?”
“Only two things are forever.”
“What?”
“The cities and trains. And death.
Not Zion.”
“What do you mean?”
“What the Zone gives, it takes.
Except death. Death is, itself, a taking.”
“Monday you can fall apart
Tuesday, Wednesday break my heart
Thursday doesn’t even start
It’s Friday I’m in love.”
“Why’d you go to Zion then?”
“I didn’t know. But more, I thought
there would be art.”
“Art?”
“The songs. Movies. In Zion we can
create them again. Hasn’t been taken from us.”
“Songs beyond the Nine?”
“Yes.”
“It sounds...”
“It’s a trap. Choose death.”
“To be kind... to be kind... to
be kind...” Song number one now.
The door is pushed open and in walks
Thompson, long jacket caked thick with soot and tar and mud and shit and blood.
But the jacket is special where nothing is special and Thompson loves the
jacket because it’s special.
“You the one?”
“Yeah.” The man hands him the duffel
bag. Thompson opens it and as he sights his prize, his eyes remain impassive.
“Good. You know what you’re buying?”
“Yeah.”
“You ready?”
“Yeah.”
“You.” Thompson speaks to the
figure.
“Yeah?”
“Drink up. Bar’s closing.”
“Sure.”
“You.” To the bartender.
“Yeah?”
“Get your gun.”
“Okay.”
The three, the bartender, holding a
homemade shotgun, Thompson, and the man, walk through city streets, darker now
for sun’s absence. The duffel bag left behind, its prize already taken. They
walk in silence and move to only the sound of boots splashing through the layer
of muck gathered up on sidewalks in the rain. In the shadows occasionally flit
spectres, some with guns, some with knives, some with hands and flesh naked,
some silent, some screaming full.
Finally to a door they come, and
Thompson opens it with an old skeleton key, holds it ajar for his companions.
Within is a tunnel, lit barely, but better than the streets, old incandescent
bulbs hanging every thirty meters, bare but for the dust that cloaks them. The
walls and floor concrete as outside, but here somehow dry, even for all the
pipes run and hung about walls and ceiling.
They walk as the man through the
alleys, twisting towards point unknown but to Thompson, all clung close together
for fear they will not speak of powers they cannot know. Occasionally they come
to patch with bulb dead or shattered, and the barman feels something rising
through his throat as the shadows claw long towards them in these spaces.
Despite an incredible urging in the
very atmosphere, through these passages they make it unharmed. Then they reach
another door, and Thompson pulls a large pistol from under his jacket.
“Beyond this door, you cannot stray
from us until we reach the door at the other end. Once you touch the handle of
the second door you cannot stop. Otherwise it will break you. Through the door
is the Zone”
“What is through this door?”
“The broken.”
“And what are they?”
“Like us, they do not die. And yet,
all they see is the Zone, but they cannot step through the door. That is pain
you cannot understand.”
“How were they broken?”
“With door in hand they hesitated.
Or they made it to the Zone, came back, and sought the Zone again.”
“Why did they come back then?”
“This I cannot know.”
“The guns?”
“Won’t stop them. Might slow them.
Ready?”
“Yeah.”
This door the bartender opens.
Beyond is cloaked mostly in darkness, but for three bulbs, each fifty metres
apart, and the Passage is silent, but for a reverberating growl that is felt
but not heard, and the air stinks of something that is not shit and is not
death and is not rot but is something much worse. Then briefly the silence is
broken by a cry and the cry was once human but it’s not anymore. The three
begin to walk and the two with guns constantly circle around one another,
keeping no angle unseen but still they feel eyes on them that they know they
will never see, not until it doesn’t matter what they see.
Out from a side passage blood flows
liberal towards them, first a trickle then a gush and wordlessly the barman and
Thompson begin to run and then the man matches their pace before it reaches him
and the noise rises to a pitch too high to hear but like its lower register
brethren is just enough to be felt and this feels of pain and cries and the man
thinks maybe he needs to stop to catch his breath but he doesn’t.
The door then, the door the man
imagines is the last door, and they reach it and with his gun Thompson gestures
to the handle, and the man pauses ever so slightly before grabbing it...
space fire on fire after fire after
birth viscera and claws ripping inside and out that time you screamed and
screamed and screamed long into the night and no one came
and he pushes the door and falls
forwards through it and
The man screams in his stomach and
his mouth vomits up a stream steady, uniform, gold then deep scarlet red then
blue then green, and each his features pressured slowly and slightly not by
needles but gentle hands beautiful woman, pleasure from the pain as he slides
down neon river against ink black sky. This is Good and the Zone isn’t meant to
be good but Good doesn’t last.
He falls through that ink black sky
towards the earth, sketched out on the ground lines of blood, rivers and oceans
and lakes and ponds and streams of foaming, frothing blood and pain and as he
nears he sees all covered in thin black spikes and then the sound, screams and
cries and pain so much pain part of the air now, soundwaves and airwaves and
sea waves, bashing his body against rocks sharp as needles, bare skin crunched
down to bone, he feels his member pinched repeatedly under rough stone, cheese
grater, and he feels it mish-mashed out of proportion and shape and with each
crunch of body to stone he feels something slip out of place not in body but
mind, and he waits for the shock to protect him but it does not come and he
remembers what he was told, stay above it but he slips into it and he can’t
think because it’s all pain and and the pain runs deeper than he goes and what
little man was there before the door, what little passion and pleasure and pride
and aspiration in a land of skys always grey now swallowed up to the Pain and
through the Pain he tries to find something and he loses even now his name, so
un-oft spoken, and to the pain he loses the image of the back of his hand, his
mother’s face, the eyes of a woman he fucked, to the pain he loses all feelings
once good, member slipped so perfectly into woman with such pleasure now nought
but blood and when he tries to find that pleasure as Something to claw out onto
all he finds now are shadows and fog and desperation for an escape and now,
more than ever, though such a dominant emotion for so long, now he wishes
himself truly dead.
A place where none of the rules
apply. How could he be so stupid as to think from here he could find any sort
of salvation? He remembers as he remembers so little one rule: always forwards.
Down to the surface now, how he got
here he knows not, as he knows so little. The surface he sees at first red, and
thinks of blood, then as he lifts a foot and feels it spring and sponge neath’
his weight, he thinks of flesh rended from bone by blade. He looks about him
and the land is cloaked like the alleys at night, until a great lightening
fills the sky and he’s reminded of some old notion now long dead of a God, but
knows it’s not this, and the light beats towards him, at first pleasant, then
overwhelmingly bright, he closes his eyes but still the light. It seeps in
under eyelids and rips cornea wide, afterburst afterbirths of light blown
outwards from central wheel in colours still un-named.
Forward, he falls, then crawls, with
each his hand’s grip fingers tearing slightly into the flesh of the earth, and
he feels little bits of Something Awful caught up beneath his fingernails and
this close he smells something, shit and vodka and vomit and sweat and semen
and operating rooms, rotten meat and gone off fish and cheese turned green,
that giant writhing mass of grey and white too perfect to be real that once
grew up off a cauliflower that still for his hunger he had to eat, and the smell
it almost kills him, but he pulls himself forwards bit by bit.
Keep moving always keep moving, stay
above the pain, focus, destination, goal, moving.
Then a breakthrough, he knew these
would come but he’d almost forgotten.
Where there was pain there is now
only light, a sensation run all down his body, oscillating through his spine,
into his fingers and toes, across his face, something best approximated as an
orgasm but an orgasm all to the Self. He opens his eyes, and he stands and at
first he understands not, beyond that he is in a sort of Eye of an endless
storm, a land of colours Wrong but not grey, skies purple and grounds orange,
trees of bark ebony hung not with leaves but with fingers and toes (human).
He begins to walk as he begins to see,
creatures marvelous, one beast the size of a skyscraper, long neck arching like
a giraffe, only each vertebrate made of cubes bony, something sticking off each
corner, and up on top not the face of an animal, but a man, a sad clown, its
eyes crying out for some sort of escape, some sort of salvation, even as its
lips are sewn shut, as blood pours out where ears belong but instead hang flaps
of corrupted flesh.
A man walks towards him, nude, he
sees, but his flesh slowly strips itself away, slopping off his frame and
falling with a sloshing slathering splash to the ground in little piles, and he
looks to the man’s eyes and these are melting slowly down his face, running
round the corner of his lips, down his bare chest, and suddenly the pupils turn
from their downwards course to look up at him, and the mouth opens and the
noise it makes is not like words but like a song, but not one of the Nine, and
from this man’s pain the man takes pleasure, more than what already owns his
flesh, and he begins to stop to listen.
But then he remembers and keeps
moving.
A pair now and both they look at
him, one a woman beautiful in essence but not in fact, face of perfect
symmetry, body venusian form, proportions exact, but somehow just wrong, in
maybe the ways her eyes are deep black or her mouth is beset not by teeth but
by fangs, or, maybe, perhaps, just maybe, in the man’s mind the fact that he
knows he’ll never have her makes her somehow evil. The figure other is a man,
and the man is the man but he’s just a man too, and this new man seems to beg
to the woman as she ignores him and stares at the man. Then the woman, she
procures from somewhere a razor blade and takes hold this new man’s head, turns
his body out from hers, so the two mens eyes meet, and she presses the blade
into flesh of neck, and his whole body begins to twitch and convulse and he
screams out as blood jets out in gentle arcs, as flesh is rended from flesh and
the slit that finds itself on his neck begins to smile at the man, and the new
man is, as his last scream runs from him, a man no longer.
So much more seen, so much
indescribable, pleasure and pain, waves tumbling and crashing over him, great
then terrible, terrible then great, and he walks still forwards, his legs
tiring him and threatening to betray him but somehow never doing so though he
almost wishes they would, let him give up, let death take him, let him be
finally free.
Then he tops a rise, and he finds
himself in the back of a box canyon, walls of stone on three sides rising up to
meet a sky the colour of rotten grapes, and on the walls’ jagged outcropping
bodies of men and women naked and penetrated about the abdomen by the sharp
stones, and still they live for still they cry and the sound pops the man’s ear
drums and yet still he hears. Then below him he looks down and sees now for the
first time his body, cut through with little spikes of black keratin,
outgrowths of once healthy skin and he feels all them now, cutting deeper than
they run, and he begins to fall, but he remembers, and pushes on, tries to run,
though every time he does so the growths on feet bottoms jab into tender baby’s
flesh.
Valley eventually begins to curve
downwards, in an almost cartoonic perversion of land’s shape. Soon he finds
himself running down at angle threatened to betray feet to slip-slide, but
still he moves.
Finally ground levels off and
through narrow passage in rock he steps, and on other side after veil of
blackness he sees lake, surface perfectly reflective, and he stops for there is
nowhere to go but in or back, and he can’t go back, so he goes forwards and the
surface as soon as he breaks it morphs and begins to eat up his legs and torso,
up to his arms, and as it reaches his face he considers briefly that it feels,
somehow, right.
The place the man is now is a place
that cannot be understood or explained, and all the man knows is that he exists
and he does not know if anything else exists but he knows he can stay here and
he knows if he stays here he will die or he can move forwards and if he moves
forward he will be in Zion and he doesn’t really know what’s in Zion.
He moves forwards, because he feels
there must be something, something other than here, other than what lies
behind.
Through a narrow pass between rocks
he comes and before him is a narrow dirt path, but around him all he sees is
beauty. Trees of bark white dappled with sparks of black, their leaves all
turned to red and gold and orange, colours from songs and books but not of
life, not his life, not this life but here, here they are, streamed against the
sky, it a comforting overcast grey as slowly over some horizon, it beset by
rolling hills these too covered in oaks and sycamore and more aspen set to
their Autumnal tones, last rays of a sun the colours of love streams its last
beams of light from ‘neath the clouds, as it sets slow to give place the night.
Then down in the valley he sees a
town, lights flickering on as the sun sinks away, the buildings they not
concrete but stone, each, it seems, set individually, not boxes but arches and
buttresses, rose windows, beauty, in amongst the town still more of the trees
in their coats beautiful.
The man begins down that path,
picking his way around rocks, across a few streams babbling down from the
mountains behind (converging, he sees, far down the valley, in a river that
winds it’s way in between orchards on town's outskirts right into town’s
centre, looking, it seems, like a sort of centerpoint for the people growing
more visible as he descends from the heights of the pass).
Soon enough he is passing through
fields then those same orchards, and he passes a few farmhouses here and there,
self-hand-made out of wood and glass and something else some emotion he
has never felt and doesn’t understand, he thinks he knows the word, from one of
the songs, but he doesn’t know what it is, up till now a simple piece of gibberish
like the tonguings of a newborn babe. He will make the connection, but not yet.
From the front faced windows of one the houses oozes a scent he knows, and
knows the word for but has never smelled like this, apples and cinnamon and
nutmeg and cloves, all cooked together in a buttery melding, a conflagration of
chemicals hung the air with some emotion their own, it tied into their
nuclear structure, his own neurological structure, a reminder of another word,
still extant but rarely used, cozy, even though the air blows cool with
rain on it some few hours down the valley.
Then the first the buildings of the
towns, little houses all warm and welcoming and again, and still, cozy,
and within, through windows and occasionally open doors, he sees families and
young couples and they all seem so happy, so complete, no notion of oblivion,
no apocalyptic Foreshortening hanging over them, no eternity of life in hell to
bar them from... something, that feeling... and this time now he thinks of the
word, but shrugs it off immediately, that can’t be right, can it?
Into the town centre he strolls, and
here people walk the street, wearing instead his proto-industrial punk, long
flowing dresses in colours elegant, shirts of lace under jackets with coat
tails, images stuck only to faded film reels. All the people smile and a few
greet him with cheerful evenin’s or how are you’s, and once he sees a pretty
woman smile at him and it’s that word again, and somehow he thinks of a
throbbing guitar lick with keyboard running under, and he knows exactly the
sounds in his head, but he knows not why
“I don’t care if...” he hates
number seven, so why should it come to him now, why here, set on all sides by
such beauty, such stirring in his heart.
He knows there was more that died in
the Foreshortening beyond art and agriculture and death, emotion,
certain kinds, beauty in certain forms, connections, what’s that word and why
and why seven?
“It’s Friday I’m in love...”
then he hears something, something new, and he knows it’s a song because he
knows what songs are meant to sound like, but it’s not one of the Nine, it’s a
surging clattering cluster of piano keys, a beautiful female voice laid
underwith, and these sounds pour out the oft’ opened and closed door of a place
across the town square that reminds him of Bar but isn’t, labeled instead “The
Last House,” and he flows towards the surge of people dressed so well (but not
him) headed through the door, the beauty of the words, and as he approaches the
words ring clear, and it’s that word again and that feeling again and this time
he makes the connection.
“Love” and this time the word
strikes a chord, not just with the guitar he now hears intermixed with the
piano, but with some other string, this one struck within him, run from brain
to heart to member, and as it plays his whole body seems to vibrate with some
pursuit of Other Beauty, some wonderful stirring, some notion of a feeling like
cozy but more than cozy, like beauty but more than beauty, like
camaraderie but more than camaraderie, dedication but... but now he has the
word and the word he knows the word as a man holds open the door for “The Last
House” to him and as he steps inside he’s struck by a cacophony of sounds, of
glasses on table tops, of the instruments and voice once faint but now
dominating, of voices making merry, laughter and happy chatter, energy and
light and something to love.
Now he looks about, as he’s struck
in this burst by the smell, like good alcohol and apples more cooking and
lady’s perfume and men’s cologne, and the sights of all these people their
faces lit by some great wonderment at life and existence, and, he thinks, this
is what death grants! An ability, finally, to live, to truly live, to love,
and then he sees her, woman raised up on a slight stage amongst the
instruments, crooning gently into a microphone, and now, finally, he
understands that word.
It’s not that sex is dead, back in
the cities. There is plenty of that. But just motions and attractions, nothing
more.
But the word! It seizes him and
becomes him and his heart aches and his stomach leaves him briefly, and he
stops understanding anymore what it is he feels and sees, this woman tall with
auburn hair and long red dress clutched tight around her curves, down almost to
her ankles, and she closes her eyes as she reaches a high note, then, as the
song winds down her eyes open and she sees him and their eyes lock.
From stage down she walks, towards
him she steps, and away from him his heart leaps, and then she’s but a few feet
from him and somewhere from within he brings forth words which tumble out, as a
piano hit with a sledgehammer.
“Hey, uh can I drink you a buy?”
“Haha, drink me a buy? Sure, I’ll
take it.” He laughs and inwards he breaks a little bit but still he laughs.
“Buy you a drink, I mean...” He
forces a smile across his lips which feels lopsided but she smiles back,
radiance, diamonds sparkling out from across the city’s endless greyness, but
not any more, this land of colours and nature and cozy and art and love.
“Sure, I could do with a drink.” So
to the counter they walk together and he feels inwards like someone holds a
footlight in him, and the warmth from within glows up about his features and he
smiles at her again and this time it feels right.
“What are you drinking?” The
bartender asks with a smile.
“I’ll take a hot cider.” The woman
says, flashing the bartender too a smile, and at this the man feels the
slightest stirrings of jealousy, and even at this he feels something beautiful,
for how can one be jealous without love.
“And what about for you?”
“I’ll have what she’s having.”
“Hah, sounds good!” The bartender
then grants them both a jolly belly laugh.
“How much?” The man asks with the
slightest reticence, realizing he probably doesn’t have whatever counts for
money here.
“You paid enough.” And somehow the
world briefly acquires a grey palour, before the light and energy of the room
flows back in, and the man wonders where this darkness sudden came from, but he
brushes it off.
Then from somewhere outside he hears
loud cracks, as on the train, then screams and crying and the world seems to
melt around him, and the cracks become more frequent, a few sprays, crying and
yelling, silenced without warning before beginning again, then the door is
kicked open and inwards poor a dozen men, olive fatigues, bronze plate armor,
Kalashnikovs, and they greet the room with a flurry of fire, and heads and
chests pop in sprays of blood, the man watches the pianist have his hand blow
off and begin to scream then his eye explodes out in another spray of blood and
fire and he stops screaming, then the bartender is cut down and he realizes
with a certain sluggishness that all is on its way to hell, and he grabs the
woman and tries to protect her, holds her warmth, and in this, in this warmth,
in this last comfort as it all slips away again, he feels, somehow now the
strongest, again love, then a soldier comes up and rips him off her, and
she begins to cry as another soldier pulls a knife from his belt, then slits
her throat wide, and the man is reminded of the Zone, as the soldier then
points a gun at the man’s chest and he doesn’t hear the gun crack this time.
Through the train station the soldiers walk him. The man remembers not
the time between the bullet and the return to the grey. But all he sees around
him are people all so broken again, and he begins to sob, for he knows he
missed his opportunity for death, his one opportunity for escape, can’t step
through the door again.
In a moment of deja vu, down an airship comes, this time to scoop up
him, and he rides the airship in silence.
He’s blindfolded, he doesn’t know why.
Into a room they walk, and off the blindfold is taken. There is at its
centre a desk of grey metal, the walls of course, are wrought of concrete.
Behind the desk is a doctor, and he gestures to the chair before his desk. The
soldiers leave and the man sits.
“You think you’re damned.” The man doesn’t respond. “You’re not. You
will undergo six months of therapy. Then you will be released back to the
city.” The man stays yet silent. “I know how poorly you feel now, but after
therapy, you’ll realize how much you have to live for in this city. You didn’t
really want to die, or stay trapped in that horrible zone. Things are much
nicer here.” The man stares at the floor. “Do you understand?”
“Yes.” The soldiers return, help the man to his feet, and lead him out
of the room, down a flight of stairs, to a door.
“Go on.” One of the soldiers says to the man.
He’s met by guitar chords, and he knows the words that follow, but he
can’t admit them yet to himself. Around him sit people all in grey, eyes glued
to the floor of concrete, walls much the same. Outside the windows more blocks
of concrete and grey sky.
“It’s Friday...” the man runs to the wall and begins to bash his
head against the concrete, feels his skull begin to compress, the skin begin to
tear, hears his jaw crack, his brow snap, sees a splattering of blood all about
the grey as the soldiers run and grab him, bind his arms and feet, sit him in a
chair. Another doctor comes to him.
“Nothing to worry about there, a few months and you’ll feel as good as
new. Feeling a little stressed is normal, after what you’ve been through.”
“It’s Friday I’m
in love.”
