We made it, I tell myself, trying to summon a sense of assurance.
Did we make it?
We made it. We made it.
I wake up in the dark. Listening into the dark, I am not hearing her. Reaching out, I touch cold sheets. She isn’t in the bathroom—I would see her through the wall. I wonder what to do. I wonder for a long time. The bed dips. She’s back. I ask her something. She answers me sleeping.
I wake up again. Carolina sleeps beside me. Still dark, but with a difference. There is something wrong with the ceiling up there. This bed is a four-poster, with transparent posts and a clear canopy, but this is not some flaw or dusty spot in its fabric, this is a chillblain in the ceiling, a blister, silvery, with a velvetty edge.
I jump up. I know what it is! It’s the sun, seen through the ceiling, which has darkened with the light like adjustable sunglasses. There’s no window, no way to stick my head outside to see, but there are birds going by, and the landscape outside is more visible now, the mountains beyond more detailed. I see a pair of men walk by outside, looking at me, and at Carolina, who is sitting up in bed, startled awake.
“It’s daytime,” I say.
She looks around and sees what I see.
“Does it polarize or something?”
The next room looks submerged in dark blue water, and there appears to be a vague form lying on the bed. The people outside are wearing clothes, which makes me wonder if we’re going to have to dash by clothed guests on our way to the front desk, and if our boy of last night hadn’t simply swiped our clothes, wasn’t actually working here.
Down the hall, the same boy, still naked, perched on a stool behind the counter, brightly smiling, eating a bowl of cereal, yes our clothes are waiting for us. I put mine on, stale as they are. Carolina dresses beside me. Outside the daylight is bizarre, falling in sections of varying intensity and color, with blue zones ragged as driftwood and yellow blemishes, always more white, more glaring, than colorful, though. The sounds of the town rise and fall like surf, and the sun stays motionless in the sky, then jumps ahead, stops, jumps. You can tell because you can see the shadows wheel around whenever it happens.
Etsimen is full of spires. Not buildings with spires, just the spires. The spires rise up and there are what I call spines too, like backbones, a forest of horizontal spires like viaducts.
We get breakfast in a cafe the boy, Adonio, pointed out to us; the place is called El Obeliscu Axud, a circus ring under a tent blooming out from an adobe box, at least a hundred wrought iron tables and chairs scattered over the sawdust. A bubbly woman wearing scarves of every color shows us to a seat she seems very particular about, even though the place is nearly empty. She puts us next to a fountain that keeps splashing me. Now we wait for the waiter, and I can’t see the other patrons because this fucking fountain is in the way. Carolina has already told me about Etsimen; it was originally just a small settlement intended for the staff of the nuclear power plant, but then a European company named Groupe Chimere decided to turn it into what they called an Integral City. The immigrants to this new city didn’t like the chimerical administration and there were protests that got violent. Then someone sabotaged the nuclear plant and there was a serious radiation leak that chased most people away and left the rest to blame each other, GC saying that the protesters did it and the protesters saying that GC staged the accident to free themselves from a liability. GC pulled out when the plant shut down, but some former residents came back, and others, too, from all over. Now Etsimen itself is the chimera, where incomplete ultra-modern architecture and infrastructure is completed with junkshop makeshifts in some places, and with ambitious independent constructions in others. Some of these new constructions are expertly made by experienced construction workers and engineers, and others are more like roadside follies, the kind you read about where one man spends fifty years building a model of the forbidden city in half scale entirely out of pipe tobacco tins or some shit.
The longer we stay, the more people we see. The place is filling up. I’m tired of being splashed and move my seat next to Carolina’s so that I am now facing the fountain, which completely blocks my view. The water darkens and trickles down the jagged stone outline and then collects, flashing, in the high basin. The wind rises. It ruffles through the cafe fluttering napkins. I lower my hand to the armrest and the ball of the stickshift fills my hand. The wind pours over my face, orange warning flags flutter over the concrete dividers. There are gauges on the lip of the high basin, the road beyond flashes in the morning sun, the blocked offramp to Etsimen rounds the bend up ahead, we have been circling Etsimen all night. A car with one headlight pulls onto the road behind us, keeping back and still half melted into thin dawn mist.
The national anthem comes on the radio, filtering in through the dawn static as the station begins its broadcast day. I forgot I left it on. The news: Joan Incienzoa is in stable condition, but, on doctor’s advice, albeit with great reluctance, he is withdrawing his candidacy on the grounds of insufficient fitness. Right away, without missing a beat, a spokesperson for the NFP jumps on the mike and announces their replacement candidate, Raul Varvarviollo, a former truck driver and Sunday school teacher from Carambem, who is distantly related by marriage to Tripi, through her cousin Bolhitu. The NFP formally requests an extension from the electoral committee, to give them time to introduce their wonderful new candidate to the voters. The AUP objects. The committee is conferring at present, but there are rumors that Professor Caral Muoitisorpio, one of the committee members, is having health problems of her own which may necessitate her replacement, and speculation is rife as to how that replacement will be found, and whether it would be possible to insure the process of selection will not be tampered with, whether it will be necessary to call on some third party to oversee the election ...
The head of the electoral committee is a medical doctor named Ajuaviva Besik, who looks like she hasn’t been getting enough sleep lately. She’s got a starey, daunting, patient kind of seriousness that reminds me of a teacher I used to have. You can tell, it’s her way with words that humanizes her. She appears on televisions in the windows as we drive past, crowds of people in front of the stores and porches to watch.
“While we greatly appreciate the generous offers of assistance from the international community, and in particular from our neighbors, and while we will gladly, and with gratitude, accept all counsel, all good advice, and so doing honor to the spirit of camaraderie and goodwill in which they are offered, our autonomy as a nation depends on our conducting this election ourselves.”
*
The wind blew clear and cold on my arm in the empty street, where I fired the gun. I fired the gun, a parabellum, with my left hand. The bolt snapped. The gun wasn’t very powerful. The recoil was almost nothing, like a breeze. I saw a puff come out the back of his knee. He fell. His cries were clear and cold trumpets.
I pulled my arm out of the street, dropping the gun as I did so. Its weight was threatening to draw me all the way through a hole in a clear wall, into the street scene. Only my arm was sticking out into the street from the hole in space. I’m not on the map. I am on the map, but not in the flesh and blood. I had intervened in a desperate shituation. I couldn’t tell if I had done well or not. The moment I withdrew the last of my hand from the street, he disappeared. I see only the street. The sky is just a colorless blank. I don’t see the people or the traffic. No, only the street. I’d have to put more of myself in, if I wanted to see more.
I move around by skating. I lean in the direction I want to go, although that has to be a possible direction. When I lean one way, I get resistance, as if I were leaning into a padded wall, but when I lean the other way, the space around me accordions, and I stretch and slide along in that direction one grotesquely elongated step, landing with a gelatinous shudder. Then I have to lean around to find the next direction, since I never seem to go the same way two steps in a row. Whenever I do it, I have a certain mental image of what happens,
but it isn’t a perception, just an idea: an arbitrary cube of space that folds up, corners splaying out before and behind me, caving in to either side of me, and then the forward edge pivots and shrinks down while the back edge lengthens and I heave along forward.
My chief pastime is arguing with cadavers that are smarter than I am. I think about death all the time.
How do you know?
Maybe one day they will finally accept me. Everything I do is saturated with necromancy. I summon and fabricate souls in the airy magic circle of my punctured skull, fashioning them out of memories and unaccountable sensations. Souls are patterns of adverbs, so making them is more like a performance than composition.
*
I would have been arrested with everyone else, just about for certain, if it hadn’t been for my knee giving out the way it did. That turned me about, sent me home, and by the time I’d hobbled back into my lair there were already fifty phone messages about the police sweep. Tenure was shot. They say he’s in the hospital. I can’t get through. He may be dead. I am sitting up in bed with a pile of ice on my knee, panting and staring at the phone. I know Tenure is dead. They kill you and beg you for mercy while they are killing you.
As I run, the night sky moves along with me ... now I’ve stopped, the buildings have stopped, and only the sky moves, the luminous clouds racing away to the northeast. Oncoming cars tense then spring past me on my right hand side. Stop, start, hurry here and then stop, moving at insanely high speed but you don’t disintegrate because you have a strong anchor in your initiation. Nature initiates a real sorcerer, the one who can stop and start. Here comes a man with a leg like a hot water bottle, a cane foot sticking out of it, walking along slowly and unevenly since his legs aren’t the same length. He keeps slipping backwards, too. His approach to me is more like the drifting together of a pair of rafts than like one man walking up to another man. He has a W.C. Fields face painted over a rather lean, melancholy one.
“This isn’t what I really look like,” he says.
We go into a little hollow kiosk on the grass divider between lanes of traffic. The kiosk overlooks a huge smoggy valley, skyscrapers in the distance. Brown and blue sky. The kiosk smells like sunheated metal. The walls are just a big metal band bent around in a hexagon. There’s a shallow, conical roof with a metal pennant on top. Inside there are some old cushioned desk chairs that wheeze when you sit down on them and rasp like gurgling crocodiles when you tip back on their big spring stems. Maybe it’s really an octagon. The man and I sit together drinking coffee from a thermos I seem to have. He’s telling me about the dangers of police work and how to protect yourself against drones.
“Paint or mats all over your car,” he says. “Or not paint or mats. Mud is best. The mud from the dirt where you’re going. Camouflage from the air. You think you’re spotted, you ditch the car that second, even if you have to leave it roll. Run. Don’t run—get under cover tout de suite.”
By now he’s achieved such high caffeineiety he’s vibrating. So violent is his tremor he’s wrecking the chair just by sitting on it, the seat rattles and the slats come loose, bolts pop out and clatter to the floor, twitching like a blunted buzzsaw trebucheting arms and legs—
“Maybe you should wait to finish that coffee ...”
“What are you talking about?!” he screeches. “I feel great!”
He rocks back and forth snapping springs out through the upholstery and I fling my hands up to shield my eyes.
All of a sudden he stops and rises onto his asymmetrical feet, looking up at the ceiling as if he’d just noticed a message written there.
“What is it?” I ask him.
His motionlessness is actually a state of exactly balanced contradiction, a universal bodily tension exactly counterweighting itself.
“Is there something there?” I ask, without getting up. “What does it say?”
The man turns and looks at me.
“Deeeaaathhhhh ....” he sighs.
His face splits apart and sloughs from the bone. Fragments of skull spray from his shredding scalp. Rattling and sighing, his body disintegrates, throwing off huge black motes of crumbled body. He falls into his own footprint like a demolished building.
I can feel them senticompartmentalize me, and by being nice to me and so on they fondly believe they are doing something, and they are. They aren’t berating and beating me; they aren’t race-jamming me, which is something. But that’s just their escape, and I need to escape from that. My escapades are too gnarly for their boxes. I know what their kind pennies-from-heaven words are worth; not worthless, but not worth much, not animal money.
But you’re right when you say the problem is fantasy. The fantasy money that is traded by the greatest of our world’s fantasists. They make their predictions about what will go up or down, they buy and sell bits of the future, and don’t know that all along they are writing science fiction. Isn’t it? A scientific projection from now to then, and a gun-jumping narrative to get there? Just because you do that, you brokers, and just because you own all the money and the computers that buy and sell for you because they’re faster than mere humans, just because you do that doesn’t mean you own science fiction, or fantasy, or even horror, since you have to be able to experience horror to write about it. An endless stream of stock quotes bursts from the chapless jaws of the giant movie idol worshipped by crazed natives. To be native to a place is to be crazed, right? That purest of the purest crystallizations of sanity that we call capital is native nowhere. As long as it keeps moving, who cares where you steer it? Why even steer—just floor it! Can’t you feel the flooring? Getting right down hard against that floor, beneath that hand-cobbled brand-new buffed and polished oxford shoe?
Let’s face something besides. How about a brief round of creative amnesia, to be followed by a skillful reorientation toward what has to be done? My ever-mutating inner boogieman tells me that the only way to hit a moving target is to move faster. It’s fast, it’s protean, but it’s very very nearsighted. It likes Mozart, red wine, travel, Paris of course, it’s self-effacingly vainglorious, but it can’t see past the tip of its serrated nose. As it changes shape to grab you, change its shape even more. As it tries to escape, deepen the escape tunnel, dig it down to the buried lava that will singe its nose hair and bring tears to smarting, myopic eyes. What is this glowing orange—gold? Some kinda money? This money sure does hurt! Just keep counting, Magoo, don’t miss a single coin, counting magma money with charred and smoking fingers, with roasting calcium, with barbequed blood turning to sugarless candy, a big white smile in a staring raw brisket face. Just keep counting! There’s plenty more where that came from!
The police form a staggered line of scooters and slide alongside us, trying to goad us like cattle off the avenue and onto a side street. A woman is shouting, half walking half skipping backwards—stay together! close it up! don’t let them separate us! We press forward. There’s nothing like this feeling, a terror that has nothing to do with terrorism; that’s bland fudge compared with the craziness of blocking this avenue in the middle of the day, daring the police to do something about it. Charge in and start clubbing? And how do you suppose that will clear the avenue, all that mayhem? The smug, no eye-contact cop faces under the hats and helmets, the air of paternalistic indulgence, as if we were here at their invitation, to celebrate them and the beautiful efficiency with which they reduce us to livestock. Nothing personal—no, of course not! That’s the problem! It isn’t the bad attitude of this or that officer or this or that tycoonian, it’s the bemused disdain this whole daffy society has for most of its own members. And, as always, it escapes its particulars and crawls onto the faces of horribly fucked people when they turn on each other. We struggle with it, against it, against becoming it, too, because we don’t want to be pod-replaced, and that’s, as I say, the reason I keep renewing my superscription to my ever-mutating inner boogieman.
I got rained on and eventually went home. I stood in the shower, washing
off the rain and feeling rotten. What did we do today? We inconvenienced some commuters and threw off some of the traffic calculators, big deal. Got rain in the potion.
Later on, though, I feel my spirits rising again. They wanted their war and they’re going to get it. But they won’t be able to say they got it without trouble. They’ll say it wasn’t really trouble, and the news will lowball the estimated turnout by fifty times, but they have to say that, and they have to lie about the numbers, that’s the point. They have to lie, because under the smooth sneering finish they’re afraid of us. Not of me or you, but of a nebulous people they have spent their lives escaping from, pretending not to belong to. They can’t stand on the balcony gazing out at a silent, whipped nation with TV lights in all the windows, sigh with satisfaction and say—“they bought it.” From out of the dark comes a sound of sirens, breaking glass, a plume of smoke, a lot of angry voices shouting. There’s trouble. There’s lying to be done, and that takes time and money. Those flavorless, tranquilizing TV haircuts don’t cut themselves. So it was worth it, after all, like before—not worth everything, not worth nothing. We set the value, not them.
The party goes on into day two. Our lanky guest brought us a gift, although I don’t quite know what to call it. He came in suffused in his own private smog. What he left behind, a thin, sour odor of decay, of death, put us all in a productively tragic frame of mind. There’s no more talk of a slide into authoritarianism and all that, a backing away from what is hilariously referred to as moral responsibility. No more absconding to the cloudcuckooland of bourgeois bullshit where every problem is personal between a man and his god, especially when it’s Mammon and it never isn’t. You can flash organize to deal with symptoms but a status quo problem needs a status quo solution, not an emergency solution. So, on general initiative and by acclamation, we have come to the consensus finding that we’re all broke.
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