by B C Woodruff
Traveling Oddities: My Other City – Oh, How it Shimmers
There’s a story (or a myth, or a fable, or a folktale) that they like to tell in a city by the sea. It comes out differently every time but has one solid focus – there’s a place that once found can never be found again.
You’re probably wondering how that’s possible, like I did, but this is not a story for smartasses who think that there are shortcuts to enlightenment. So while you fight to suspend disbelief, let me return to the description of this terrible place. Triumphant, in a way, how it fights against the natural order. Against roads that work both ways. Against stories that end. Can you imagine a time before the City – for there is only one – sprawled like a rusted mould across the face of the world? Before humanity burned through habitats and dug through mountains to sate the hunger in its heart? To displace. To enclose. To civilize.
But as greedy as the City is, it freely shares its hunger, as more and more people elect for modern convenience over… well, whatever life they could have had elsewhere.
The City reaches towards the skies with towers of shimmering light that cut through the darkness – not with the life-giving warmth of a campfire, but the cold glint of a knife. A sunless night, as bright as day – and while the inner-animal denies me the mercy of contentment, I can see how the glass and the steel are beautiful in their own way. It’s a monument to industry where, when the evening has gone and the factories spring to life, smog billows over the rooftops while air conditioning units make war on warm summers and mild winters.
The City by the Sea is not the legend it carries, but they have much in common.
Once you find the legend, you can never find it again.
But once the City finds you, you can never leave.
I fucking hate this place.
The people move with an impatience that manifests in bitter invectives, car horns, and frantic fingers that wave back and forth at targets aware or otherwise. The beds stink of humanity. The sun is lost behind concrete structures until noon, when it casts its rays directly down like a magnifying glass burning ants.
I come back because I can’t seem to leave, and because it’s always halfway between where I was and where I’m going. And maybe it isn’t all that bad. I don’t mind the weather and the ACC here is good.
So: it was here, after one night spent on stage offering my anecdotes and observations that I was approached by a white-as-a-sheet woman with blue bangs and bleached-blonde hair cut into a star-shape that hung down over her ears and arced over the back of her head.
In this way she rather looked like Sonic the Hedgehog if he was depressed and anemic. With boobs. And slightly more human proportions. And clothes on (at least in the beginning).
Hmmm.
Revision: Her hair looked like a woven starfish, closing its arms around her head.
That’s a bit better, but not great.
All the same, it fit her in a weird sort of way.
“I liked your set.” she said, her voice miniscule and quiet. “My name is Rama.” She gave a low bow that, I presumed, meant she was a complete bastard, trying to seem dignified, or, and as it was confirmed, had some cultural entitlement to it. The name made my inner science fiction aficionado laugh: Here I am, having a Rendezvous with Rama.
I didn’t mention this.
I told her my name and she offered to buy me a drink. We got to talking and after five, maybe six drinks total, she started to get into her life story. I don’t remember everything, only that she was somehow selected from a group of people working at an affiliated Alternative Comedy Club in Wakayama Prefecture in Japan to take her show on tour in the United States.
They paid for her trip, and she had such a good time that she decided to stay, revising her act for North America and working on new sets. She didn’t look very young, but the ACC seems to attract both old souls and the inexplicably ageless, and it’s so hard to tell with Asian people – and believe me, I don’t mean that as a racist comment! I mean that as the purest compliment to those who can maintain the blush of youth until suddenly, youthful becomes venerable.
I already look older than I should, but that’s part of a longer story, just one that hasn’t become relevant yet.
Addiction: The Boon – The Bane
“We should go see the Dorman.” She was hiccupping when she said it and her accent made itself known. “Have you ever seen it?”
I recall shrugging. “What’s a Dorman?”
She just smiled and took me by the hand. I was in no position to disagree with her and the events that followed would mark the beginning of my lasting sobriety. I can’t remember it with any clarity and that’s the problem. I didn’t have Arata back then to chastise me by making me feel like I should be drinking. So, on that night and many others besides, I just drank and drank without thinking much about it.
Like so: I didn’t need anyone to tell me that I should be drinking. I just liked to drink.
So I did.
A lot.
The world was only visible to me like a fish in an aquarium. Before I could compose myself we were out the back of the ACC and into a cab. She pounced on me the moment the car started rolling – to the disgust of the driver who, after a few minutes, pulled over and demanded we pay the fare in advance. I reached for my pocket but she stopped me.
“I’ve got this.” She leaned forward, pulled money from her neon bra and handed it to the man in the driver’s seat. “Do we have your permission to continue?” she asked, sarcastically.
He shrugged and started driving again.
I wish I had looked outside and watched where we were heading but I was… occupied. There’s a vague sense now, as I lay awake at night and wonder about that place and look at maps trying to calculate what road we may have taken. I did remember in the end, but was at a loss for what I would find upon my return.
By the time we arrived I was already tiring of her youthful energy. Traveling so much takes a toll on a person. I wanted to curl up on a bed and let dreams carry me off to places unseen and unimagined.
Rama asked the driver to kindly fuck himself as she slammed the door and pulled me along, laughing and screaming as if no one could hear us there. Looking around, she was probably right. Against all odds, we were out of the sprawl. The stars were dim but visible – that much I remember.
She handed me something and told me to swallow.
I obeyed, unthinking, and in moments my mind was on fire.
Time warped and shifted. Patterns grew and dissolved.
“We’re here!” The blurred woman ahead of me, like a silhouette cutting across a static background like in those old Saturday morning cartoons, jumped and glided down the edge of a hill.
She had said as much, but I knew we were there.
Whatever the Dorman was… I found myself drawn to the gravitational pull of a single, shining point of blackness behind us, marred by the merest imperfection in its depths. It stuck out of the scene like a swollen tumour. Like a fallen star cut into the Earth, held captive within a stony mound where the grass stopped growing and a cave’s mouth that seemed to lick its lips at our arrival.
I couldn’t see the ocean but the smell of salt and the sound of crashing waves suggested it wasn’t far off.
“What… Beauty is this?” I asked, my voice distorted. It wasn’t the right word. I wanted to leave.
She leapt up at me again and planted a dry-lipped kiss on the widening gyre of my expression. I wanted to look ahead but we drifted down to the soft soil and I simply lost the will to fight.
“This is a sacred place. A timeless place. They say that everything ends, Nobody, but…” She was suddenly distant. “Why are we here?” she asked me, looking tired and very confused.
“You brought me here…?” I was worried I’d said the wrong thing, but she smiled and licked her lips with a serpentine tongue pierced with a–
“Is that a compass?” I asked her, staring into her mouth.
“Yessss.”
She stuck it out for me to see. “Do ooh like it?” Her pronunciation was pretty good, considering she was literally tongue tied.
“Why is it spinning?” I watched the needle run amok. “Is it broken?”
Her pierced eyebrow went up.
“It should work. It used to, at least.”
I shrugged it off. “Whatever.” I turned over to get a better look at the anomaly that had never quite stopped pulling on the back of my head. “So, how did you find out about this place?” We were so close to the blackness that I felt like it was going to reach out and touch me.
“Three years ago… I saw a map drawn on one of the bathroom stall walls at the Wakayama ACC. By the time I was sober enough to realize what I’d seen, someone had already scraped it off. I have a good memory, though. It wasn’t hard to recognize this city, and it wasn’t hard to redraw. Once I got them to put me on a plane, it didn’t take long to find it. I visited once a few weeks ago. I didn’t want to come alone. I wasn’t supposed to.”
The world might have been melting, but none of it seemed to touch her. She looked so innocent. But this drugess, if you’ll excuse the neologism, was nothing of the sort.
“Why are we here?” she asked again.
“Are you okay, Rama? You’ve asked that, like, two times already.
You brought me here.”
She sighed. Obviously, I was failing interdimensional orientation.
“NO! Not here. I mean here. I listened to your stories about university, about work, about everyone being the same and they all gave me this... chill. I knew that there was something about you. I knew that you would be able to understand why I needed to go – and look!” She perked up. “We’re here! Just like I thought we would be!” Her smile went as wide as the Cheshire Cat’s.
I was tripping balls.
And that’s an understatement.
The air, the earth, the matter around the vine-covered hole at the centre of the Dorman looked to be the only thing that wasn’t about to catch fire, but I held back that suspicion because Rama looked perfectly calm.
Even if I did find myself distracted by the fact that she was also beginning to look even more like a cat.
“I don’t know why we’re here, Rama.” I said, quietly, resting my head on her chest. She was warmer than I expected, but her heart was beating at a calm, collected, and precise rate. The natural music of a natural instrument.
“Good,” she offered.
“It’s good to be good.” My mind wasn’t allowing for much in the way of profound conversation. The pull from the anomaly was undeniable and deeply uncomfortable, but I had allowed whatever part of me that carried me through situations I couldn’t abide – lectures, meetings, funerals – to take charge. To its great credit, it was still using all of its processing power to make sure I appeared as interested in her, and her alone, as possible.
The rest of me, however, was desperately working to ensure I didn’t start losing my mind.
“How about we be bad?” Her teeth were a mile-wide, shining like a jagged cave of diamond.
This is where the night took a turn for the weird.
Not the drugs, or the isolation, or the woman I had only encountered just hours before, but something was approaching at breakneck speed that was going to… Well, I didn’t know.
Have you ever felt the cold, faceless future come up to you with a look that demands your attention and informs you, in no uncertain terms, that you’ve done something very wrong?
The Future and I shared a lasting gaze that let me know it knew what I was going to do and wasn’t pleased about it. I recall it every day. I recall that morning. I recall it the moment that I get out of bed and feel the flow of electricity streaming from every inch of my home... and I do my best to shrug it off and get with the program.
If I were a religious man, I might perceive the sensation as some kind of omen, like the herald of some grand plan that begins to unfold there and then.
And before I can forget what I feel, what I know, I am reminded of an image on the roof above the altar at the church I attended when I was younger and still naive. It depicted an angel shattering the lock on a cloud-seated brass doorway. “The Welkin Gate”, they called it.
The movement captured in that painting was a testament to the power of an artist that believed in the work he had been set to do. Even as you looked closer, and even though you knew it was all a trick of the light, the angel’s golden hammer drew ever closer to the lock. As if at that very moment – at every moment – it would finally break and unleash all the celestial brilliance held within.
That was how I felt then. It has never left me.
Energy flowed out of the dark spot and cut through me as the moonlight pierced the canopy of a tall ash tree not too far away. I gasped as I heard wood splinter in my chest.
As a child, looking at the mural, I was inspired – even if the image, I was constantly reminded, was an interpretation of the doorway to heaven rather than the real thing. There were no passages in the Bible that suggested an angel was going to break the seal to paradise.
I wonder, though, to this very day: Why was it locked from the outside? And by whom?
Rama was ahead of me, and she looked like the very image of a fallen goddess.
I drew a deep breath and the world, as I believed it was going to, burst into flames around us.
Without a thought, we took each others hands and ran.
We had drifted away from the Dorman somehow, but the return trip was faster than I expected – or perhaps I’d just never run with fire at my back. But sure enough, the shimmering field offered protection from the elements. We fell to the grass and struggled to catch our breath, and somewhere along the way we started kissing. In the light of a world on fire, we wrapped ourselves up in one another – and tearing through our clothes and every lie we’d ever told, it wasn’t long until we were breathless again.
That Place – The Trouble with Perception
Something opened.
Pulled from that spot of deep light, we floated or soared or screamed our union and forgave ourselves for getting carried away.
The darkness drew us in and together we fell. Down into the veins of the world and through their winding, chaotic passages to somewhere else. Hands became steel jaws snapping at my throat; stars pulse in my chest; Rama’s breasts lay just out of reach, only to be replaced by lidless eyes and crying laughter I couldn’t recognize.
It must have been the acid.
If it was acid at all.
It could just as easily been some newly-imagined or ancient fármako that should never have been. All I know is that I had never tried it before, and in the throes of being torn apart by pain and pleasure (I really wish I had been able to tell the difference) I was struck by how abjectly unprepared I’d been for the things I’d seen and done.
I can remember screams – but I still can’t remember if they were inspired by terror or orgasm.
Sometimes, even after all these years, I have out of body experiences and feel like I’m being pulled back through to that place.
Inside: I Met a Lightblue Dick – The Tetranne
I walked through a kaleidoscope and watched as Rama and I separated into two, joined together into one, and fell apart once more as our minds measured reality and reality grasped to understand US.
Colours started to take shape around us. Not just any shape. Human shape. Things that were distant and uncertain took on structure, focus, and proportions that made sense to me.
At first there was a flat surface. A horizon.
It warped and from it, like Genesis in fast-forward, terrain sprang up and changed the perfect plane into something new – but not too different from where we had just been. A tree (or something near enough in size and shape to a tree) was the first to arise, as a deep magenta colour spread across the ground and into the distance. The tree was blue, with greenish leaves shaped like small triangles.
I looked around and found myself alone. Alone
and… translucent.
Note: This isn’t precisely what happened next. I could tell you the story as I experienced it, the sounds I heard, the people I met, and the emotions I felt, but it would fall on deaf ears. Let the madman on the corner tell the story true; I’ll do you the courtesy of meeting you halfway.
I stood up and found it easy, as if I didn’t so much need to get up as I needed to think that I needed to get up, and my body reshaped itself into that position. On the ground, cuttingly through a broad field of blue moss-like foliage, small footprints went off and away.
Looking around, I saw that this side of Dorman was polarized. At the centre of the shimmering circle was a single black spot, but it had no gravity of its own. In fact, I felt pushed away. Naturally, I took the opportunity to stare at it for a while. Call me contrary.
Where Are We: What... What the FUCK?!
I followed the footprints in the coloured soil. Trailing away from the Dorman, the steps started off tentative, then spread out into a run, but after a while, they slowed and became more collected. I’m no Boy Scout on Earth, but those tracks spoke as clearly of a quick victory over panic as any relieved confession. I just wish I could tell you how..
It was beautiful, though. The geometric edges had faded from the world, and tall fleshy trees danced in the absence of wind. The sky, a grayish shimmer, almost like the reflection off of a metal surface. It looked like an old film. It reminded me of Casablanca, dull yet undeniably alive. Sound here was different. Rather than fading gradually, sounds seemed to be locked to the objects that produced them, with consistent volume until you stepped outside an imperceptible sphere of influence. Then silence.
This, I noticed when I approached a… well, it would be stupid to call things here strange or weird. They certainly seemed unreasonable by my old standards, but fucking your way into another dimension has a way of redefining one’s standards of normality.
Note: The ground, where Rama’s feet had left her trail, had already started to return to its original shape. Stranger still, insofar as I could tell, all the footprints seemed to lose definition together, denying their own creation in service of some natural law I couldn’t begin to comprehend.