The Altonevers

by Frederic Merbe

  “What a jerk! Leaving the girl in the dark like that,” The vixen sneers, slapping the dazed Cider across his shoulder.

  “We have all this, thanks to the good fortune of her Vividness, the lord high Baroness Vivian. The Valiant purveyor of all vividity, and the most powerful studio boss of all the syndicates. My boss and my mentor, we run this city through and through,” Daisy says boastfully. Her bubbly persona percolating as she speaks with reverence of her boss.

  “But how?” she asks.

  “Let me see, it's been so long since I had to say, since Cider actually. She's big, real big where I come from, where we’re going. Everybody knows who she is, everybody's auditioning for one thing or another and she rules over the whole of the Alto. Before the Baroness was around it was all called the Bleaks. It was cold like the Drabs everywhere but worse, like a tundra they say. There was not a blue in the whole of the sea or a shred of green in any of the leaves of palm trees. There was nothing but endless grays, and endlessly dull lives. People didn’t even know what a rose really looked like, or of their family and lover's faces. The colors of each other’s hair was an utter mystery. Not a single soul even knew that color existed. They were just mining folk, slack jaws who set up a tent city seeking gold in the hills. Things were hardly even defined, blurred and with terrible, terrible lighting. Everything you heard had the rasp of a scratched vinyl record. It was always cold and the people were empty of compassion or heart, just cold and clinical, monotone through and through. Vice was rampant. When the miners struck it rich they usually blew it all in town, on the night girls and drinks. Breeding a culture of blood lust and greed over the generations.

  Until a tent of a traveling circus came by on their wayward way of following the InterAlto rail like a river to make a meager living. Striking their own gold in entertaining the miners, and rising in size as the city rose around them. Tents and carnivals showed up by the dozen, until they outnumbered the miners ten to one. Then the gold rush flushed out, and the people of the big tents were left to themselves with no one to entertain but each other. The structures of the circus became the structure of government, they were, are power. Each big topped tent has been in fierce competition with any of the other. Very violent stuff, the troupe’s shooting at each other in the street and on the stage and screen. Under the command of the ringmasters of course, and later the playwrights and directors, until the streets and the stage were indistinguishable from each other. Where no one is who they are, only thinking of themselves as actors playing the role of their own lives.

  The boss was born to the carnival folk, a vagabond family. She wasn't like the rest of the children, her beauty and brilliance was exceptional, unmatched since birth. They didn’t know, and no one could figure out why she seemed to stand out from the crowd, but she did, she always did. It was because she had something no one had ever seen.”

  “Color?” Anna barely says with her mind and eyes now boiling.

  “Yes,” Daisy says, “she was put on a stage, a star from her very first performance. She fell in love with a magician and became his assistant, a good one too. Drawing huge crowds like no other spectacle in a city of stage performers. She was a young woman, and her lover, the magician was growing envious, as all men do of her. Knowing the applause, the crowds and cheers were not for him, but for her instead. He started berating her and drinking until he would black out and beat on her, she would hide her bruises, for the show of course. Then one day she got a call from out of the blue, from above. By that time the studios were forming from the ashes of the old vice gunslingers and tent entertainers into vicious criminal syndicates. Her lover, the magician was on thin ice, and an executive promised her everything her heart desires if only she would ice him.”

  “Did she?” Anna asks.

  “The boss called him to her room to tell him of the plot, so they may fight them together, but he was drunk, and belligerent and began beating her again. She shot him with his own pistol in the struggle, and fled to the new executives who were waiting in a car outside. Close enough to hear the lone gunshot that took her heart from her chest. She drove away with them, becoming one of the first superstars of the newly emerging medium of film,” Daisy says to accentuate the events by animatedly narrating the story of her bosses glory days, “Vivifying every silver screen with her radiance, and warming the hearts of the people with even the coolest of her hues. The colors of her films were crisp and clean while others were still in black and white. As she grew in fame and power the colors splashed off of her and onto ground and walls, into the air itself. Everything she touched turned to breathtaking mind pleasing color, like king Midas, but a queen of more colors than can be portrayed in the pinks of her pinky nail alone.

  She never really wanted to be a performer, she had bigger plans than to sell herself on the silver screen. She used her fame and notoriety to lead her fellow performers into forming her own clique, her own studio. The Vaudevs, who went onto to become the most powerful of all studios. She lead them to an overwhelming victory in the decades long studio wars. Her grace spread, brightening the Alto as her power, her hold over the Alto grew through bloodshed, the blood became that much more red. She brightened the streets and skies, and lightened the hearts and minds of the people. She succeeded in rising to supremacy over the whole of the city, and reigning as the most ruthless of studio bosses. A few of the studios were allowed by her to continue their operations, making the rest merge into larger, centralized studios that she can more easily combat if ever need be. Forcing them all to sign contracts granting her full control of their lives, and their allegiance to her alone. She took pleasure in personally executing the executives that she met on the day she killed her lover. Some say she lost something of herself that day, but who knows ya know, Carrots” Daisy says “the daughter of vagabond immigrants who was the only baby ever born in color. Becoming a magician's assistant that rose to become the most powerful person, more than a person, an entity, by her chosen fate, free,” Daisy says, adding affectionately, “almost free,” while wiping a tear from her eye, worried of it ruining her eyeliner.

  “When she started her studio she just wanted to unite the artists and performers, for a place to feel home, like she had with the freaks of the carnival as a child. Now all the colors in the rainbow and more, so much more, are lifting the smiles of all the people of the entire Alto. Coloring their lives, their souls with her grace,” Daisy says, and Anna’s curiosity spurs her ask “You call her graces the color that she spreads?”

  “Yeah. By her graces we see the beauty of what’s always been brightly all around us,” Daisy says and sighs blithely.

  “And?” Anna says.

  “Huh,” Daisy says, awoken from a seconds long daydream at the wheel.

  “Sorry, but I was just wondering what you meant by they're all actors?”

  “Everybody in town's an actor, most under contract to the boss or a rival studio. Everyone, even the governor, or a plumber, an anchor woman, the waitress, that cop back there, the commissioner, you name it. They aren’t actually those things but portraying a lifelong role as the person they were born as, being those things, acting through the lives that they actually have. All pining for some of the gold in the hills of their own, not dug from the ground but plastered through the drive-ins on date night. Though mostly shattered souls serving the fortunate, who are playing the roles in life which they wish they were cast. The City, the spectrum is the set.”

  “That’s a touching tale of a life. She must be a wonderful woman,” Anna says, wiping a tear from her stinging red eyes.

  “Beautiful, majestic, timeless, strong. I wish I was there then, when she used to rule the theatre stages, then the screen. Now the Baroness of everything from the streets to the sky above and higher,” Daisy sighs, “that was before my time, the golden age of the silver screen, to be a dame then was really to be a dame”

  “Shouldn’t you play your own role?” Cider snarks.

  “I do, and as should you Anna.
It's the only way to live,” Daisy says as though passing wisdom.

  “With him it's been a lesson I learned well enough,” she answers.

  “Enjoyably times I hope,” he says.

  “We're almost home. Where fantasies fill the screens and stages, and the viewers live vicariously through the actors, though the actors are living vicariously through them,” Daisy says with a hint of wonder that softens to a somber tone.

  Rolling down the freeway straddling a high ridge as fast as the suped-up hot rod saoutchik Sally will take them. The two sit stupefied in the throes of dim sickness unable to be thrown by each jerking swerve the car makes. The two are nauseated to nearly vomiting in their own mouths at the sight overlooking the brilliantly luster and lacquered poly-chromatism of an expansive art deco designed metropolis. Seeing the pigmentation of any single thing that can touch her sense of sight as brimming and beaming so brightly it radiates prismatisms that permeate through the air like the wavering heat of an oasis. Even when seen from miles away in the light of broad day, the raw unbounded chromatism easily eclipses the brightest stars Anna had ever seen. The scene displaying an Alto of pupil saturating shades, that are endlessly intensifying as the three descend toward the splendorous color spectrum's supreme source. To the Vivids, anything around the living embodiment of vividity, Vivian the Baroness.

  “Welcome Anna, Carrots. I like Carrots for you, to the land of high definition, high quality, high resolution, high color, high contrast, that we here call The Brights. Soon we’ll be next to her, in vivid definition, or the Vivids for short,” Daisy says, while sailing with ambivalence for anyone else on the roads or sidewalks. Speeding and weaving through the blocks and avenues of this art deco architect's paradise lined with palm trees, wide streets and filled with early and future looking cars, overflowing with countless theatres and stages.

  The starlet rolls the ragtop down, gleefully giggling, to see Anna and Cider fully immersed in the cities full spectrum of sense over saturating shades. Of hues so rich they seem to be moving, swimming in themselves, enriching and intensifying with every passing inch as Daisy whips around town at a hundred miles per hour. Everything from the people’s passing faces, to the pavement, storefronts and palm trees looks beyond pristine, exuding their own colors entirely new to her, with even the dullest cement looking like chrome freshly glazed in wet candy paints. The mind blinding ruby of a candy apple in the hand of child on the sidewalk casting bows of garnet light darker than itself, are astonishing Anna to a mouth opening drool.

  “I want one of those?” drips from her drooling mouth.

  “Of what honey?” Daisy asks, “anything you like?” It takes all of Anna's concentration to gaze at the blaring half eaten red apple, she's spinning on a stick in her fingers seconds later.

  “How's the apple?” Cider asks.

  “Delicious,” she slurs in awe of its aureate flesh aglow on her clothes and skin reddening the cream white leather interior of the Daisy's ride. By the third stop light Daisy blows through the spectrum of even a single color becomes so numerous, so severe and of unquenchable succulence to Anna's sight, she can’t blink her eyes away from drinking in the pupil sizzling scene. The stimulation is as irresistibly sweet to their sense of sight as nectar is to a bee.

  “Oh poor thing, you'll shake it off,” Daisy says to Anna though not to Cider, who’s drooling with his face on the dashboard, licking it and muttering on about taffy. While Anna’s seeing fireworks bursting throughout her field of view, her mind is lost in a sea of flashing color and the rapidly snapping synapses of her nervous system crashing. Her brain is crackling as though pop rock candy is flooding her frontal lobes, dripping down her brain stem and seeping through her spine. With each drop feeling like the shock of a defibrillator jolting through her entire body. Paralyzed, gritting her teeth while the drips and drops turn from a dose to a dousing, then a cascade of crashing waves of visual stimulation. She nearly seizures as her sensory system red lines from the continually intensifying technicolor bliss that everywhere she can look.

  Wide silver tinted cloud bottoms hang high above, like set lights directing the sun over the whole of the panchromatic city. Insatiable to the eye, like seeing the reality around her as though her pineal gland popped and slowly dripped over her pupils. Even more colors emerge and are continually growing greater in intensity. Daisy is bouncing in the driver’s seat humming and speaking even more upbeat than before.

  “This is it, this is the place,” the starlet says, pulling up along an long ivy covered white brick wall with each passing leaf being more lush, more luscious looking than the last. Daisy stomps down, suddenly screeching the brakes sliding them to stop an inch before large polished brass pearl studded gates, adorned with the same art deco eagle head that crowns the city's tallest skyscraper.

  “Daisy!” Daisy shouts into a speaker box, and the brass gates glisten as they swing open to a long, long driveway. At least a minute of speeding past elegant sculptures of former film stars littering the great green lawn to reach a lavish cream walled gilded age Manor house converted from a baroque period theatre. The two, now horribly ill from dim sickness, stumble up the red carpeted black marble stairs, each step seeming like a struggle for their lives. They barely follow Daisy up to a two story solid redwood double door decorated with colorful inlays of elaborately detailed peacocks tails.

  “Do we knock?” she asks.

  “No, I live here,” Daisy says.

  “This is where we'll be staying,” Cider mumbles.

  “Really?” Anna asks.

  “Yeah Carrot’s, get used to it. Forget those dives he’s been takin’ ya through,” Daisy says as the heavy redwood doors swing open to a small atrium with Victorian era gold leafed furnishings. A polar bear’s pelt hangs on the wall over a large black and white checkered marble floor, and second door, a smaller sort of the first door opens to six penguin suited men bowing to Daisy and her guests. Welcoming them to a long hall with gas lamps lining the walls and hanging from a tall vaulted ceiling. Third eye piercing paintings run the length of the hall to their left and life size stone sculptures of rich earth tones that can be found nowhere else, to their right. Halfway through the hall the floor opens to a large fountain forged of brass, pearls, ivy and ivory. It’s centerpiece is a monolithic sculpture of three mermaids climbing up a thirty foot tall merman, who's wrapping around a turquoise oak tree and playing the harp with its bare branches.

  “This is her favorite fountain,” Daisy says.

  “Looks like it,” he says.

  “Why?” Anna asks.

  “I don't really know,” Daisy replies. Anna doesn’t know why, but looking at the fountain is soothing. She rests her eyes in its nearly invisible water until Daisy pulls her by her shirt back to the red carpet. Nearing the third set of peacock decorated doors they hear the rising rhythms of a brass band playing their hearts out through their instruments. Leading them like bread crumbs spread through a forest toward the rumblings of a crowd’s cheers and laughter. The whole commotion is on the other side of the door, but Anna's already swelling with a sensation of jollity sweetly skinned and weightless, in anticipation of what hues she’ll see next.

  “Ready Carrots. This can be a bit much for even the normal visitors,” Daisy says with a hand on a big brass doorknob. “This is where her vividness holds court. It's a three level theatre room that was stripped of the ground floor seats and replaced with marble, of course, and dining tables. The stage is to the right and the bar is a little past that. The Baroness sits across the room from the bar but where the room starts to slim to the size of this hallway, okay,” Daisy says to the squinted eyed Anna so she she’ll have some sort of way about here.

  “Okay,” she says, “but why are you telling the layout of the room?”

  Daisy ignores her question, knowing that to open the door will answer.

  “What about me?” Cider asks

  “Oh shut up you,” Daisy snaps.

  “What can be a bit much
?” Anna asks again “what? what is it?” she musters the strength to fume. Daisy nods to one of the penguins and together they swing the doors wide open, blinded Anna with what she thinks is the flashes of a thousand cameras at once, though is actually the glimmer of a thousand raised champagne glasses lit by a grand chandelier swaying fifty feet in the air.

  “Wowww,” she says lowly, in awe as her eyes breathe in ethereal hues making the light of the heavens seem pale and feeble. She stumbles into the roaring applause for Daisy's return, blinking uncontrollably, seeing through throbbing heat for split seconds at a time, seeming like epileptic optical Morse code is punctuating the perpetually saturating chrome beaming radiantly richer by the step, already shades far past what her mind can even comprehend. Everywhere she look is blurring and melting from any form of shape. A grand piano plays on, lightly under a frenzied crowd of circus performers, acrobats, comedians, magicians, assistants, ringleaders, strong men, snake oil salesman, actors, playwrights, animal trainers, directors, and the most violent of all sorts, the mimes. All dressed in a mix of new wave and vaudeville looking clothes of mostly blacks, whites and shades of silver. To represent the white of no color, the black of all color, and the silver of the silver screen. They are the Baroness Vivian’s clique of rabid criminals, the Vaudevs, filling the large dining room floor with frenzied festivities. Many reaching out to shake Cider’s hand and pouring fawning adoration over their dear Daisy, the most brutal of them all, also their lieutenant answering to no one but Vivian. To Anna’s surprise the smiling faces are introducing themselves to her in the most polite way. A thousand men must've kissed her hand, though she can hardly see a single anything through her heat wavering visions of the dim sickness delirium.

  “Vivian! Vivian we’re here,” Daisy says ecstatically, jumping up and down like a child.

  “Oh Daisy, Darling come closer,” a woman’s waspy voice resounds with over the playing brass of the band, and crowd of festivity frenzied Vaudevs like thunder carries over water.