Three Moments of an Explosion

by China Miéville

  I hauled back to my body hard enough that I screamed and vomited dust.

  More, I coughed.

  Yes, it said, refilling the skin to whisper with the lips. But get up. They’re here.

  I looked at his hands. A revenant is reverberating in the landmasses, I thought. The room twitched again and the man the dust wore wobbled.

  In the dimly orange city I could see nothing but I heard faint animal noises. I thought of inflated things bobbing behind the trees. What do they want, I thought of saying—and of him answering, Tangles of allegiance, they’re loyalist. I swayed myself like my grinding room, my head full of thoughts of dirigible animals rising and biting the dark, a collaboration of animal and air, angry at dust’s patience, dogs puffed up, cats made fat.

  Quick, he said. With me, he said. He made me blink. The walls vacillate, he said dismally. Architecture’s always centrist.

  I said, he said, we must go.

  Down into a tunnel to a Cornish tin mine, I thought. I’d go anywhere.

  I thought about the denigrated dialectics of nature. I thought about the falling rate of prophecy. The house continued its interrupted collapse.

  The man in the dusty hat hauled open the door and I heard a hiss.

  Crouching in the crook of a tree above us, hunkered in his jacket, hunch-shouldered between crooked knees like a chimpanzee about to hurl its shit, the History Man pointed at us. He bared and chattered his teeth. Before us, there where the falling house had shepherded us, was the gray cadre.

  Now it was clear to me that it was ash inside the woman, the loyalist ruin. She looked at me in a burnt-out triumph.

  I moved back as the dust and ash raised their hands and almost politely interlaced fingers to stand still again. Why would particulate fight like people? They began to quiver.

  The falling-down house blared. I ducked but the billowing of pulverized bricks would not interrupt this battle. I tried to pull the old man away but he was immobile. I pushed the gray woman with no more success. Above us the History Man bayed. My top floor fell in on itself. My house began to fold.

  When I put my hands on the skins I felt the grate of ash against the minute gears of dust. Through everyday abrasions, from tiny cuts and under scabs, they swirled into each other, an in-skin war. The figurehead of my old leadership gibbered at me from the denuded tree.

  I panicked but my panic had nothing to do. It ebbed.

  At last I sat cross-legged with my back to the dust and ash and watched the sky. A thousand miles away the earth buckled and a mountainside was rising like a huge razor wire, making thermals for the birds.

  There was a howl from the branches and I felt a hand on my shoulder. I looked up into the dry eyes of the body that the old man had given to our comrade, the dust.

  The ash hack was gone. I could not see even any skin. I don’t know how ash dies or if it wakes up again after it has died.

  The old man put on his dusty hat. I could hear the sounds of the History Man’s terror. When we were gone he would be pulled out, I knew with dream-certainty, dangling beneath battered animals inflated on the gases of rot.

  The dust said to me, You see you can’t stay.

  None of us can stay. This epoch gets you coming or going.

  “So what’s your alternative?” people say, as if that’s logic. We don’t have to have an alternative, that’s not how critique works. We may do, and if we do, you’re welcome, but if we don’t that no more invalidates our hate for this, for what is, than does that of a serf for her lord, her flail-backed insistence that this must end, whether or not she accompanies it with a blueprint for free wage labor. Than does the millennially paced rage of the steepening shelf of the benthic plain for a system imposed by the cruelest and most crass hydrothermal vent, if that anemone-crusted angle of descent does not propose a submerged lake of black salt.

  In all these and in countless cases, our hate will stand.

  I’ve been with the dust and I’m sorry you’ve been afraid for me. I’ve been living with this skin. Cadre school, the dust my organizer. Watching it recruit. Learning to be in this new collective.

  You remember how strange it was, during the faction fight, how people all over the world weighed in, and we found ourselves lauded and denounced by forces of which we knew next to nothing. Names we’d heard, activists in foreign groups contesting or dutifully parroting bullshit from our control room. Everything took a side.

  The dust, this dust, this most radical wing of matter, supported our stand. We won it over.

  What the dust wants is to push their, our, shoulders against the sky and brace, and shove down so the earth turns a tiny bit faster toward the horizon. We live in a flatland, whatever pictures we might circulate of spheres, globes cosseted in clouds. Come on, now, this is a flat earth, and the problem is there’s too much contempt in the world and not enough hate.

  Hate is not alright, someone said to me once. I can’t bear hate. And that’s not about piety, it’s about living well.

  How can I not understand that? That made me think. Because I’m full of hate, brimming with it. But think, and you have to hate, because if you couldn’t hate you couldn’t love, and you couldn’t hope, and you couldn’t despair correctly. Not because of some fetish for symmetry, but because what matters above all is the utter.

  What’s hate but utterness, the unwordable with a bad inflection?

  That night it was London without Londoners. We ran through the dark leaving ruin behind. We ran by canals and quiet garages, over the rise of roads where train tracks fanned out. We didn’t slow until the dust was sure, I don’t know how, that the loyalists of the tendency—most air and ash and some parts of water, and a lot of flesh, and too much wood, and a few sheets of iron, and old coins, and slates—had lost us.

  Where are we going? I said.

  To a meeting.

  What radicals have you ever known that didn’t have their weekly meetings?

  A runnel of high-rises, a canyon of them, and water. We were below a tower block overhang, where a copse of cold dead trees hung stubby and sculptural across the corner of a canal, where sunken bikes and a rust-scaled supermarket trolley were visible through shallow waters below a half-melted bin and a rise of earth and a squat clot of dark cloud.

  This is where we’re supposed to be? I said. The dust nodded. I knew we looked like rough sleepers. Who are we waiting for? I said.

  The dust said, We’re the last to arrive.

  And I looked again and saw our comrades; a tower block overhang, a copse of trees, sunk metal, water, a misshapen bin, the ground, vapor in the sky. Venue and participants were one.

  We began the discussion.

  I’ve never looked down from the top of the Alps, but I was looking up, along a ravine as if the city was carved by air. If you want that, and I do, because without it no utter, no love, no other, no break in time, how can you not have hate?

  In the internecine battles of the elemental Left, we, the dust and its comrades, agitate where we can. You’ve not yet seen a polemic conducted in the shattering of walls. Or you have, but you’ve not known it.

  Do you want to? You may have no choice. For which I must say sorry.

  When it rushed into me that was the dust’s doorstepping visit. The exposition of its politics. Usually a posthumous persuasion through rot and desiccation, dust recruiting dust, that time was rushed and exigent, and that was my recruitment.

  We’d already recruited it to our part of our party.

  Not all hates are of the same scale. I watch with love, and I’ve been learning to hate like dust hates. The history of hitherto-existing quiddity is of the struggle in matter. The wealth of a society is measured in a great piling up of rocks. Breathe one in, it says to me. I give it my airways and breathe shallower every day.

  This is no death-drive. Or it is but that’s so misleading a term it breaks my heart, what this is is thing-envy. Of course I envy things. Most people do that envy wrong, thinking they hanker for the quiet of
thingness. Things have no quiet.

  There’s no offhandedness, nothing but care and solidarity for you and A and S and what you do, your patience and your work, which I’ve been watching when I can in ways that will astonish you. Your interventions, we would say once. There’s no contradiction, we used to say. It’s the same, it’s all struggle, at endless different levels.

  I don’t know if I can still bear the pace of beasts.

  The ground is a Restligeist that doesn’t recur because it never leaves, that acts through the crinkling of the stone tape.

  I have nearly spoken so many times. You remember when the heat broke and the road outside your house went sticky, how the trash that stuck there looked like writing? But I didn’t want to get you noticed. I can’t bear it, though, to see your fast misery, that of people who think me gone. It’s a selfish comfort to reassure you, because of what happens when abysses see you staring into them. This may be me asking you to forgive me.

  I miss breath. I’d like comrades with heartbeats to stand with me in this slow struggle.

  It may be I’ll come back and—literally—kick the dirt off my shoes. Truly though I don’t think I can, do you?

  Now I’ve written this to you, with pigments made of chemicals brought up from underground, written it in the blood of combatants on both sides, I don’t know that you can either.

  I don’t know whether I want you to persuade me back, if that direction can or would be taken, or if I’m trying to have you join me.

  Or if I’ve given you any choice at all, to not join me on pickets of sastrugi, triumphant saltation, agitation in soil creep.

  I might be recruiting you to the dust.

  ESCAPEE

  A TRAILER

  0:00–0:04

  Darkness. Sirens blare mournfully.

  Flickering shots of the interior of a factory. Machines perform tasks.

  0:05–0:07

  A man’s closed eyes. They jerk beneath their lids.

  They snap open.

  0:08–0:10

  Darkness. The sound of panicked breathing.

  0:11–0:12

  The man flails, sways. He dangles below a thrumming metal rope, amid other limp hanging shapes.

  0:13–0:15

  He falls.

  0:16–0:18

  Voice-over, an old man: “So what if I asked you questions?”

  Close-up of the man’s bare feet. He walks slowly across dirty cement.

  0:19–0:22

  He emerges from the dark building into a low-rent neighborhood at night. Passers-by gasp.

  0:23

  A steel pole fills the screen, shuddering.

  Voice-over, old man: “Like who you are.”

  0:24–0:27

  A line of police block the road, weapons drawn.

  0:28–0:29

  A woman sketches a series of sharp sickle-shapes, like curved claws.

  Voice-over, old man: “Where you come from.”

  0:30–0:32

  The man punches a wall. He scrapes his fist down.

  0:33–0:37

  Night. A young girl, maybe twelve years old, watches the man.

  He stands shirtless on the edge of a roof. We see him fully for the first time. Protruding from the top of his back, jutting straight up from his spine out through his skin, is a metal pole. It rises four feet above his head. At its end it curves like a shepherd’s crook.

  Voice-over, old man: “What you intend.”

  The man falls forward.

  0:38–0:41

  Darkness.

  Voice-over, young man’s voice: “The only thing I intend …”

  0:42–0:44

  Voice-over, young man: “… is to escape.”

  The man swings over the street, the hook above his head catching on a detail of architecture.

  0:45–0:49

  Cut to the factory. Cut to a huge gear within; antiquated green digital displays; a spray-painting robot.

  0:50–0:52

  The hooked man and the young girl sit under a bridge.

  The girl says: “One way or the other …”

  0:53–0:57

  The line of police fires their weapons.

  The shirtless man jumps up, holding the girl. His metal hooks a girder overhead. He swings himself above the bullets.

  Voice-over, girl: “… you have to go.”

  He lands among the police, scythes his body, knocking them down with his hook.

  0:58–1:02

  Voice-over, girl: “They want you back.”

  The sound of sirens. The great gear rolls heavily down an empty street.

  A bank of high-tech computers falter, their displays replaced by old-fashioned green text.

  A car careers around the corner of a wide city street. Right ahead of it, rising skew-whiff from the asphalt of the road, is the factory. The car smashes into the factory wall.

  Voiceover, young man: “They want me.”

  1:03–1:06

  The man leans over a crumbling cliff. He shouts, “Take hold!” He leans, dangling the hook over his head toward an old man hanging to an outcrop.

  1:07–1:10

  Close-up of the young girl’s face.

  She whispers: “You never got off the production line. You never will.”

  1:11–1:12

  The hook snags the spray-painting robot and sends it flying.

  1:13–1:16

  The man staggers away from a river. A rope is tied to the hook above his head, stretching back into the dark water. He is hauling up something big and unclear.

  1:17

  Close-up of the man, gritting his teeth.

  1:18

  Close-up of his back. Where the pole emerges between his shoulders, the flesh is oozing blood, the metal shaking.

  1:19–1:20

  The cable in the factory angles steeply. We hear something sliding along it.

  1:21–1:23

  Darkness.

  Voice-over, old man: “What did you escape?”

  1:24–1:27

  The grimacing man is high above the factory floor. Above his head, his hook is on the rope again. In his hands he clings to a big chain, bolted to the floor below.

  He pulls on the chain, drags himself down, stretching the cord from which he dangles.

  There are other men and women strung along the line by hooks like his. They are limp, their eyes closed. They slide toward him, their bodies thumping into him, their hooks gathering at the point of the stretched line.

  He cries out.

  1:28–1:29

  Darkness.

  There is a loud snap.

  Voice-over, man: “Everything.”

  1:30

  Title card: “Escapee”

  THE BASTARD PROMPT

  We’re here to talk to a doctor, Jonas and I. We’re both on the same mission. And, or but, or and and but, we’re on different missions too.

  We need a new conjunction, a word that means “and” and “but” at the same time. I’m not saying anything I haven’t said before: this is one of my things, particularly with Tor, which is short for Tori, which she never uses.

  This “and-but” word thing of mine isn’t even a joke between us any more. It used to be when I’d say, “I mean both of them at once!,” she’d say, “Band? Aut?” In the end we settled on bund, which is how we spell it although she says with a little “t” at the end, like bundt. Now when either of us says that we don’t even notice, we don’t even grin. It almost just means what it means now.

  So Jonas and I are here in Sacramento, on missions that are the same bund different. Although honestly I don’t know that either of us thinks we’re going to figure much out now.

  It was a seven-hour drive to get here from Treemont. An unlikely road trip through big fields and flat ugly towns, neither of us saying very much.

  There’s a guy on our little committee, back home, Thoren. He wanted to come. To pass on a warning, he said. If I knew him better I’d tease him about it bec
ause his voice gets this hollowness at the back of his throat when he uses that word “warning.” He’s a pharmacist in the hospital and up until recently if you’d tried to tell him what seemed to be going on, he just wouldn’t have heard you. The moment you got beyond “something weird” he’d have tuned you politely out until his underbrain verified that you were talking sense like a person again.

  Now he’s got more theories than any of us. And unlike most of us he’s not shy of expounding them, no matter how out there. Which some of them are. He says them in that same voice, the warning voice.

  “Who does he think he is?” I said to Diane once.

  “St. John the Divine,” she said. “Harkening the world, starting with Sacramento.”

  Diane would have come too, if we’d invited her. She does something in the city government, so she’s been able to get hold of quote confidential unquote files and whatnot for a while now. It was she who found out about this conference we’re going to. I wouldn’t be surprised if a bunch of people presenting here have had letters from her, careful communications, sounding them out.

  Jonas and I are sitting in a foyer coffee spot in the conference hotel. We’re reading the schedule. We have conference packs and our names on lanyards.

  “What did you tell them?” I ask Jonas. “About why we’re here?”

  “They don’t give a shit,” he says. “We paid our registration fee.”

  Underneath my name my badge says INDEPENDENT RESEARCHER.

  Jonas is here in a last-ditch attempt to figure out what’s happening. I’m here for that too. He’s also here because he’s totally into what’s going on, he sort of loves it.

  I’m here for Tor.

  My theory is that Diane persuaded the rest of the group, at some meeting I wasn’t at, that when I start talking about Tor, I make a particularly strong case. That I get persuasive because I get agitated, and she wants me, us, to persuade someone that whatever’s happening is important.

  I’m an engineer. I’ve been working for the city on a big new mall for months, until I took time off for compassionate leave and then Diane did something with paperwork and that leave got extended so no one’s bothering me about it.

  Tor’s an actor. When I first met her and she told me what she did I called her an actress until she told me not to, and why it mattered.