You may also refer to them as: Scavengers, Gong-farmers, Night Men, Toshers, Hole Men, Pot Boys, or the Unclean. Though if you do so within their hearing, they will shun you thereafter to your death and beyond.
You are always within the hearing of the Night Soil Salvagers.
Nocturne for 3:10 a.m. in the Dorian Mode
Title: “The Mocking Bird”
For three or more performers.
Find
• A length of cane, reed, bamboo, rolled willow bark, etc., one to two hands’ length and a finger’s width. You will need one less of these than the number of performers.
• A deck of cards
Performance
Fashion a whistle from the scavenged material, with six tone holes tuned to the major scale.
The performers are called the Face in the Window, the Suitor, and one or more Rivals. The Face in the Window and the Suitor sit on a rooftop, facing each other. The first Rival sits on a roof one block away, with any additional Rivals each spaced an additional block farther.
The Face in the Window discards all but the ace through six from the deck. At 3:10 a.m. exactly, the Face in the Window turns over four cards in a row in front of the Suitor, who plays the resulting song by lifting the corresponding number of fingers from the whistle—one finger for an ace, two fingers for a two, etc.—starting from the bottom. The fundamental tone (all holes covered) is never played.
The Suitor repeats the song three times, with a slow breath between each repetition. After the third repetition, the Face in the Window places a fresh card on top of any one of the current cards, thus altering the song. The Suitor pauses for an additional slow breath before starting the new song.
The closest Rival listens to the Suitor’s song. During the breath after the Suitor’s second repetition, this Rival echoes the song as closely as possible, with their own three repetitions spaced by slow breaths. In a similar fashion, each additional Rival echoes the preceding Rival’s version of the song.
The performance is complete when all the cards have been played.
Variation
Title: “The King of Regret”
Find
• A length of bone
• Four knucklebones
Performance
Fashion a whistle from the length of bone; other materials may not be used in this variant. Mark the knucklebones with ink or a knife with numbers from one to six like a die. In this variant, the Face in the Window is known as the King of Regret, the Suitor is known as the Waker, and the Rivals are known as the Disturbed.
Performance is as above, with the knucklebones rolled in a line to determine the notes in the song. After three repetitions, the King of Regret chooses one knucklebone to reroll. If the Waker cannot read the marking on a die, they must play a false note. The King of Regret may cover any of the dice at any time, causing that note to be skipped through the end of the current set of repetitions. The Disturbed echo the sets as above. The performance is complete when all four notes are false.
Commentary
Florens says, “Learning to listen elsewhere while you play is a step toward listening to what you yourself say.”
Parch says, “The performance is complete when someone throws a rock.”
* * *
The Night Soil Salvagers will sit with you and others of the city for three nights. These nights will provide the deepest, most restful sleep you will know. The nights might be consecutive, or they might be separated by years or decades. How the nights are chosen, whether that deepest sleep is natural or due to the stillness of the Salvagers or created by some potion or manufactured air, whether one or more Salvagers will attend, what characteristic or behavior it is for which the Salvagers will watch: None of these things are known.
Nor is it known why the Salvagers sit.
What is known is that the Salvagers take the remains of only some of the dead.
Nocturne for 9:00 p.m.
Title: “In Confidence”
For at least two performers.
Find
• A street with one or more trees, along with nearby streetlamps, stand pipes, fire escapes, etc. Boulevards will offer many options, as will a place either square or oval with a small park at its heart.
• Four or more metal cans, candy tins, kitchen canisters, etc. These are call the Voices.
• Enough fine metal wire to stretch across the desired street once for each can plus an additional arm’s length or two per can. Discarded piano wire is ideal, or unbraided copper or steel cable. Partial lengths may be joined with a fisherman’s bend.
• Additional small lengths of wire
• The means to cut the wire
• One large button or metal nut per can
• An awl, sturdy knife, or the like
Preparation
Tap a small hole in the bottom of one of the Voices. Thread an end of the wire through the hole, then tie that end to one of the buttons or nuts, such that the wire cannot slip back out of the hole.
Pick a suitable tree. The ideal tree is not too dense, and has limbs branching above the height of common street traffic. This tree is the Throat.
Pick a suitable lamppost or other sturdy metal pole or pipe to anchor the first length of wire, ideally across the street, sidewalk, or path from the Throat. This anchoring post is called the Notion.
First performer: Climb the Throat with the Voice, and find the nook of a branch that has an unobstructed view of the Notion. Place the Voice in the nook such that the wire trails down to the other performers.
Other performers: Unreel enough wire to the reach the Notion. Loop the wire around a high point of the Notion—e.g. by climbing or by looping the wire over it—and gently take up the slack.
The performers at the Notion now slowly tighten the wire, while the performer in the Throat ensures that the pressure holds the Voice securely in its nook, and that the wire runs freely, like the string of a child’s toy telephone. Additional small lengths of wire may be used to further secure the mouth once it is settled into the nook.
Now pull the wire taut until it thrums when plucked, and fasten it securely to the Notion.
Repeat these steps for each of the remaining Voices. Each Voice should be set in the nook of a separate branch, with its wire running to a new Notion.
Audition
Wrap your arms around one of the Notions—as roughly as the drunkard climbing from the gutter or as gently as a child slumbering on a parent’s shoulder—and press your ear against the metal until you hear the wire’s thrum and drone. The indecision of the breeze, the wayward steps of passersby, the unwinding of the phonograph from windows overhead, the bistro’s bawdy band: Each of these will inspire a harmony in the wire.
When ready, move to the next Notion and do the same. The performers may choose their own Notion, or share one as space allows.
When every performer has listened to their ear’s content at every Notion, gather under the Throat to listen to the song of every Voice at once.
Variation
Titled “Evangelisme”
Use just one Notion but separate Throats for each Voice. Listen first at each Throat, and then at the Notion directly.
Variation
Titled “The Mob”
Use the same Notion and Throat for all the Voices.
Commentary
Florens says, “The song comes from the nameless wire.”
Parch says, “Variation titled ‘Getting the Last Word In’—perform this in a thunderstorm.”
* * *
The Night Soil Salvagers tell this story:
Attende! I and others remember when the Salvagers took the living.
One day some days past, Parch and others were walking alongside the river gathering what it had left for them. What looked to be a promising pile of cloth proved be the corpse of a woman whose youth had been taken by disease and despair and the river.
The Salvagers fashioned a pallet with which to carry her to the anti
node, where what remained of her would be returned to the flow of the city. But when they rolled her onto the pallet they discovered an infant girl at her breast.
The mother’s burden had weighed heavily upon the child. Her legs were no more than stubs. She had just two fingers on one hand and one on the other. Her body was as round as a balloon. And most remarkably, she was from spherical head to nonexistent toe the same ember orange as the moon at autumn dusk.
Parch reached down to place the child on the pallet. She opened her eyes, wrapped her few fingers around Parch’s, and smiled.
Parch looked up at the others, astonished, and laughed.
The other Salvagers shook their heads sadly.
“It is not our work to take the living. How can we know where she belongs?” one said.
And another, “We will let the Careful Sisters know. They have a House nearby.”
Parch, who had suffered the care those Sisters provided before finding a home among the Salvagers, picked the child up. “She will die in that House, or with mercy before the Sisters take her there, and then she’ll be our work after all. You know me for a lazy fellow; I’ll take her now and save myself the walk back.”
Parch carried the child to the Salvagers’ garden, and placed her at the foot of a small tree that grew there. An elderly Salvager, half-blinded by age and the steam from the cauldron she tended, said, “What a glorious golden hue, that flower that young Parch is planting!”
And so Parch named the child Florens, and every morning when he was done with his night’s work he fed her with milk from whatever source he could find, and wrapped her in scavenged blankets, and told her stories of what he had seen on the streets of the city.
Florens never gained the use of her legs, never grew much larger than a child, and never fully lost that pumpkin hue. Though the Salvagers constructed her a mobile wheelchair, powered by bubbling yeast and belching bellows, she rarely moved far from the spot where Parch had first planted her, and never left the garden at all.
But her understanding of the city, built upon the stories that Parch and the others told her and all the myriad things they brought back to the garden, was as complete as that of the eldest and most experienced of the Salvagers. She held in her head an image not just of the streets and sewer that made the city’s bones, but of the people and all that those people called “waste” that was in fact the lifeblood of the city. So clear was this vision of the city that a Salvager could bring her any item, and she could tell them exactly where in the city that item belonged.
With time, she came to be both respected and beloved by all the Salvagers; “our heart” they called her, at a time when their traditional work collecting the city’s night soil was ending and a change of heart was most needed.
“She sees so clearly because of all of us she is most free of the city’s burden,” they would say, all but Parch, who would laugh and wave his arms—such a stench!—and say, “No, she sees so clearly because she bears that burden more than any other!”
And before Parch set off for his night’s work, he would stop in Florens’s nook between the roots of the tree, which had grown tall and wide above her, and say, “Well, that’s another day you’ve saved me the walk back to the river.” And she would smile and take his fingers in her few for a moment before sending him on his way.
They did this every night for eighty-seven years.
Nocturne for 10:00 p.m. on a Rainy Night
Title: “Heart’s Tears”
For one or more performers.
Find
• A number of discarded metal containers, such as office waste bins, milk cans, flowerpots, chimney caps
• Metal sheeting, such as roof tin or bakers’ sheets or a round platter of tin or similar thin metal
• Sturdy shears
• Wire
Performance
Tap the bottom of each container. If it sings or bellows with a pleasing tone, call its bottom its head and be done with it. If the tone is dull, then cut a circle a little larger than the container top from the metal sheeting to form a drumhead, or use a platter, if you have one of the correct size. Poke holes around the edge of the head, place it on the open top of the container, and loop the wire through these holes around the container until the head is firmly attached.
Place each drum on a rooftop of a neighborhood, lashing it in place as needed with more wire, such that the rain falls upon its head. In accordance to the setting and your whim, the drum may be exposed directly to the rainfall, where runoff gathers, or under a solitary drip.
Variation
Title: “Heart’s Fail”
As above, but fasten the drums to the most precipitous angles of the rooftops with small lumps of clay. The clay will eventually wash away.
Commentary
Florens says, “Some art is most successful when it goes entirely unnoticed.”
Parch says, “If everyone would just stand out in the rain all night we could save ourselves a lot of work on rooftops.”
* * *
The Night Soil Salvagers tell this story:
Attende! I and others remember one day some days past, when Parch told us whither to deliver his body when he had no more use for it.
“That nook under the tree where one low root shaped like a sprawling drunkard meets one high root like a prancing passante,” he said.
Another replied, “But that spot is where Florens sits. You placed her there yourself, and bade us never move her.”
“Gah! Leave it to a Salvager to make a riddle of a simple request,” Parch said. “If you won’t move Florens, move the nook!”
“But … but the nook is not a thing! It is just a place where, ah, where the tree isn’t.”
Parch laughed. “Takes one to know one! Well, if the tree is the thing, then it’s the tree you’ll have to move.”
“But the tree’s roots run the length and breadth of the garden, hold its walls to the earth and the earth above its secret cellars!”
“Well then, move the garden.”
“But the garden is the antinode, the unmoving heart of the city!”
“Ah!” Parch said. “Now we are getting somewhere.”
“Move the city itself? But how?”
Parch threw his arms up—such a stench!—and said, “What a burden you are! Might as well ask how to move yourself!” He laughed his laugh again and stomped away.
The next morning, the Salvagers found Florens sitting a dozen paces from that nook where one low root meets one high root in which she had lived as long as any had memory. Her books, her papers, her musical instruments, her shawls of spidersilk, all of it still surrounded her as it had before.
In the nook itself, the earth had been dug up three by six, and smoothed down again. A fine layer of ash covered the dirt, and in the center sat a small stack of coins, enough to buy half a loaf with butter and a cup of the cheap red wine Parch had preferred.
The Salvagers gathered around Florens, some laughing, some crying, every one agreeing it was a miracle, but not one agreeing on what the miracle was: Had she moved, or the tree, or the garden, or the city itself?
Florens shook her head. Her face was sad, but her voice seemed to quiver with laughter when she spoke. “Are these your questions? Better to ask who it was who found this.”
She held up a paper that had been folded three times each way. On it was a single word: “Parch.”
And then she turned it around, and on the other side it read: “Florens.”
“Who,” she said, “and what, and whither?.”
Nocturne for the Hour before Dawn
Title: “The Call”
For three or more performers.
Find
• A pair of pipes for each performer, as follows:
• A section of pipe the length of a leg, with an inner diameter somewhere between the width of a single fingertip and the width of all four fingers together.
• A second section of pipe of roughly the same length, wit
h an inner diameter such that it slips over the first pipe smoothly but with as little gap as possible.
• Beeswax
• A sheet or two of paper
• A deck of cards
Preparation
Smooth the ends of the smaller pipe with a stone or brick to remove any sharp edges or burrs. Wipe the pipe clean with water, and then with aqua vitae. Place some of the beeswax into a small jar and heat the jar in a bath of simmering water until the wax flows like honey. Dip one end of the smaller pipe about a finger’s width into the wax, lift it, and let the wax cool. Repeat this step until a smooth lip of wax has built up on the end of the pipe. This wax-covered end is called the Source.
Rub some of the unmelted wax onto the outside of the smaller pipe. Slip the larger pipe over the smaller. It should slide smoothly, but snugly enough that it does not rattle or slide off when released. If the fit is not snug, wrap a strip of paper around the inner pipe and seal it with a touch of the molten wax. Add strips until the outer pipe is snug but may still be slid in and out. The assembled instrument is called the Ray.
The score
The performer with the Ray with the narrowest diameter or the shortest length is called the First.
Each performer draws a card privately, and remembers the number of pips. Face cards count as zero.
The Night Soil Salvagers Page 2