There are thousands of these waste sites and these ghosts are the reason that access to technology has been extremely limited. Jon stops watching. He’s been absent-mindedly playing with his father’s brass pocket watch, turning it over and over in his hands, feeling the engraving with his fingers: You will become whatever you want to become. He returns it to his inside jacket pocket, where it’s close to his heart. The view of this particular ghost, this endless loop of a quite famous bank robber trying to rescue or kidnap his daughter—depending on who you speak to or what newspaper you read; there are only two newspapers that are still published for the remaining populace, and they still disagree with each other—once drove the property prices sky-high amongst the last humans.
But now, this place, like the little girl outside, is just another ghost.
If teleportation were still allowed, at least the food from the one remaining commercial airline wouldn’t be wasted. It could simply be teleported off the plane, onto the table of any starving person. There were once plenty of starving people, all over the world. But not now. Back then, everyone wanted to work in New York, have lunch in Paris and pay rent in rural India. But no one figured on the ghosts. People got caught in endless loops when the machines malfunctioned or were modified or were used on Sundays. The excuses were numerous but it soon became clear that the technology just wasn’t stable. At first, the looping ghosts were shrouded with tarpaulins, wherever and however it was happening, surrounded by police tape but people seemed to care less and less and many found some kind of fascination in watching moments and people repeat themselves endlessly. The people in them never know. For them, it is always now.
Jon is full of these things, feelings and thoughts, not just in his heart but in his head. The first thing taken out in the war that followed The End, the common name for the day it all went to shit, the great reckoning of mankind, was the Statue of Liberty. If you squint you can see the remaining bits: a spike from her crown, an eyebrow, a hand with a torch. Apparently, you can still see the book she once held, if you get close enough. Bombers dropped a billion tons of hate and fire on it. Jon should know, he used to fly one of those bombers. They were told that they were destroying an enemy but he can’t remember the details. No one was allowed to remember the details. Now, even without the memories and with so few things left, the war was clearly about resources. The remains of the earth. Mankind has been reduced to a scavenging dog and its ribs are showing. Besides the algae farms far outside of NewLand, there’s barely a patch of land left on the planet that can grow even the stubbornest weed.
He turns his head and looks past the remains of the Eiffel Tower, to get a better look at Lady Liberty’s crown of thorns. This is another thing he keeps inside himself, this piece of knowledge about the bombings, the things that cause ruins and remains and survivors. It is a thing that makes him clench his jaw. He knows they take the families of “enemy” aviators and strap them, alive, to the sides of their aircraft in glass coffins. Military airfields are often filled with screams before takeoff, as young girls and boys, wives, mothers and fathers are lead towards the aircraft to be strapped in. And so all pilots know that when they shoot at the enemy, there’s a chance that they’re killing their own, or a friend’s family.
And while the pilots weep as they fight, neither side’s generals allow themselves to care. This is/was/could be war, after all. Thousands lived. More died. There doesn’t seem to be much enemy left. Or anyone really.
Jon carries on looking out the dirty window and stretches his long fingers out and back in again and again like he’s squeezing an invisible ball. His fingers miss playing with the pocket watch but that habit irritates him. Faint memories of what once happened crash through his mind. Different memories do the same in the street, through the weak, tenuous fabric of now, riddled with holes from billions of people jumping back and forth from place to place, shadows and glimmers, caught in loops forever.
Jon tells his head to shut up and he picks up a tiny rust-red vial off the Venetian-carved antique table. He examines the lime-green writing on it before holding it above his mouth. He can’t read the word properly but he thinks it starts with an “S.” Exactly three drops land on his tongue and he counts them off carefully as they fall.
Lacrymatory: Lat. lacrima - a tear. A bottle used to collect the tears of mourners at funerals, found in ancient Roman and Greek tombs, normally made of glass but occasionally also terra cotta.
The drops taste like peach ice tea. It is sweet, not harsh at all.
“What’s this one called?” asks Jon, swallowing, turning the vial over and over in his hands.
“Saudade,” says Emily, “It’s a Portuguese word for the almost terminal, endless longing for a lost love.”
“Cute.”
She can hear him because she’s spent a good portion of her life practicing hearing him, no matter how quietly he speaks. Her red hair follows her shoulders down her back and her eyes are deep blue, deeper than Jon’s, speckled with flint and green. Jon does not think about the curves behind her Victorian blue dress. They are friends and always have been, nothing more. Jon, instead, thinks that Saudade, the drug he’s just put on his tongue which causes one to be overwhelmed by emotion, is a bit like Limerence (again, another word used to describe an endless longing for love) or Stendhal Syndrome (the term used to describe being bought to tears by a work of art), which is what he’d had the first time he’d tried Sadness with her. But this has slightly more of a body rush because he can feel the tips of his fingers start to tingle and go numb. He walks around Emily’s dirty, cluttered, little apartment, which is filled with antiques and the bric-a-brac of mankind, while his legs can still hold him, hands still opening and closing, breathing like they’re lungs. His eyes glance out the window, sick of the bank robber and his daughter with the blonde hair and the pink dress looping outside, hoping in vain for something more moving to look at. Please, God, give me something else to look at than an old fire escape and this hopeful, desperate father. Still, the fire escape with its rust and its textures has its own kind of nobility, a defiance of some kind, because it still stands, which is so much more than can be said of so many things these days.
In the distance, he thinks he sees someone falling from the top spire of the United Government building. But it might just be crows and shadows.
Table of Contents
Central Avenue Publishing Edition
INTENTIONAL DISSONANCE
The End
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Epilogue
The End
Chapter 1
Intentional Dissonance Page 16