WikiWorld

by Paul Di Filippo

  “You belong to me! You are naught but a tributary! You flow into my vastness! You shall not rebel!”

  He gripped me fiercely by my upper arms. Instantly I felt tethers of strange energies enwrap us, coursing into and out of us both. For his part, Fluvius seemed to be drawing on some vast but distant reservoir, while my own forces were smaller, but closer to hand.

  Immobile as statues, we struggled mightily in this invisible fashion, while the rain cascaded down.

  And then somehow I felt the presence of my sister Naiads at my back, offering support and sustenance. I seemed to hear them speak with a single voice:

  “Bold and deep-souled Nodens oversteps himself. He distrusts and hates all men. But we, we who wind our courses gently among them, fertilizing their fields, ferrying their goods, supplying their recreation—we do not. We must give them a chance to be their best selves. End this now, sister.”

  And I did, with their help.

  Out the window that looked upriver, I could see the wall of dirty, debris-laden water barrelling down, high as the steeple of the Old North Church, aimed to sweep the shoreline clean, and take the Palace down.

  Professor Nodens Fluvius saw too, and in the final moment before it hit us, I thought to detect a trace of pride and even approval in his expression.

  When that liquid avalanche struck the Palace, tearing it off its foundations, drowning its boilers, I too dissolved, along with Fluvius and my sisters and even Usk. (Of the poor unfortunate mortals caught therein, I speak not.) I dissolved back to what I had been before I awoke on that damp coverlet, not knowing my name, back to an existence of endless flow, never the same from moment to moment, yet eternal, owning a mouth that pressed wetly against my old master, yet this time retaining my name.

  Charlene, or Charlie, or Charles.

  YES WE HAVE NO BANANAS

  1. INVASION OF THE SHOREBIRDS

  Thirty years worth of living, dumped out on the sidewalk, raw pickings for the nocturnal Street Gleaners tribe. Not literally yet, but it might just as well be—would be soon, given the damn rotten luck of Tug Gingerella. He was practically as dead as bananas. Extinct!

  How was he going to manage this unwarranted, unexpected, inexorable eviction?

  Goddamn greedy Godbout!

  The space was nothing much. One small, well-used, five-room apartment in a building named The Wyandot. Bachelor’s digs, save for those three tumultuous years with Olive. Crates of books, his parents’ old Heywood-Wakefield furniture that he had inherited, cheaply framed but valuable vintage lobby poster featuring the happy image of Deanna Durbin warbling as Mary Poppins. Shabby clothes, mostly flannel and denim and Duofold, cargo shorts and Sandwich Island shirts; cast-iron cornbread skillets; favourite music on outmoded media: scratch slates, holo transects, grail packs, and their various stacked players, natch. Goodfaith Industries metal-topped kitchen table, Solace Army shelves, a painting by Karsh Swinehart (a storm-tossed sailboat just offshore from local Pleistocene Point, Turneresque by way of Thomas Cole).

  All the beloved encumbering detritus of a life.

  But a life lived to what purpose, fulfilling what early promise, juvenile dreams? All those years gone past so swiftly….

  No. Maundering wouldn’t cut it. No remedies to his problems in fruitless recriminations and regrets. Best to hit the streets of Carrollboro in search of some aid and comfort.

  Tug shuffled into a plaid lumberjacket, red-and-black Kewbie castoff that had wandered south across the nearby border like some migrating avian apparel and onto the Solace Army Store racks, took the two poutine-redolent flights down to ground level at a mild trot, energized by his spontaneous and uncharacteristic determination to act, and emerged onto Patrician Street, an incongruously named grand-dame-gone-shabby avenue cutting south and north through the Squirrel Hills district, and full of gloriously decaying sister buildings to The Wyandot, all built post-War, circa 1939: The Lewis and Jonathan, The Onondowaga, The Canandaigua, The Lord Fitzhugh, and half a dozen others.

  Mid-October in Carrollboro: sunlight sharp as honed ice-skate blades, big irregularly gusting winds off Lake Ondiara, one of the five Grands. Sidewalks host to generally maintaining citizens, everyday contentment or focus evident, yet both attitudes tempered with the global stresses of the Big Retreat, ultimate source of Tug’s own malaise. (And yet, despite his unease, Tug invariably spared enough attention to appraise all the beautiful women—and they were all beautiful—fashionably bundled up just enough to tease at what was beneath.)

  Normally Tug enjoyed the autumn season for its crisp air and sense of annual climax, prelude to all the big holidays. Samhain, Thanksgiving, the long festive stretch that began with Roger Williams’s birthday on December 21st and extended through Christmas and La Fête des Rois….

  But this year those nostalgia-inducing attractions paled, against the harsh background of his struggle to survive.

  Patrician merged with Tinsley, a more commercial district. Here, shoppers mixed with browsers admiring the big gaudy windows at Zellers and the Bay department stores, even if they couldn’t make a purchase at the moment.

  Carrollboro’s economy was convulsing and churning in weird ways, under the Big Retreat. Adding 10 percent more people to the city’s population of two-hundred-thousand had both boosted and dragged down the economy, in oddly emergent ways. The newcomers were a representatively apportioned assortment of rich, poor and middle-class refugees from all around the world, sent fleeing inland by the rising seas. “Shorebirds” all, yet differently grouped.

  The poor, with their varied housing and medical and educational needs, were a drain on the federal and state government finances. They had settled mostly in the impoverished Swillburg and South Wedge districts of Carrollboro.

  The skilled middle-class were undercutting wages and driving up unemployment rates, as they competed with the natives for jobs in their newly adopted region, and bought up single-family homes in Maplewood and Parkway.

  And the rich—

  The rich were driving longtime residents out of their unsecured rentals, as avaricious owners, seeking big returns on their investments, went luxury condo with their properties.

  Properties like The Wyandot, owned by Narcisse Godbout.

  Thoughts of his heinous landlord fired Tug up and made him quicken his pace.

  Maybe Pavel would have some ideas that could help.

  2. OCARINA CITY

  Just a few blocks away from the intersection of Tinsley with Grousebeck, site of the Little Theatre and Tug’s destination, Tug paused before Dr. Zelda’s Ocarina Warehouse, the city’s biggest retailer of fipple flutes.

  Carrollboro had been known as Ocarina City ever since the late 1800s.

  The connection between metropolis and instrument began by chance in the winter of 1860, when an itinerant pedlar named Leander Watts passed through what was then a small town of some five-thousand inhabitants, bearing an unwanted crate full of Donati “Little Goose” fipple flutes, which Watts had grudgingly accepted in Manhattan in lieu of cash owed for some other goods. But thanks to his superb salesmanship, Watts was able to unload on the citizens of Carrollboro the whole consignment of what he regarded as useless geegaws.

  In their hiemal isolation and recreational desperation, the citizens of Carrollboro had latched onto the little ceramic flutes, and by spring thaw the city numbered many self-taught journeymen and master players among the populace.

  From Carrollboro the fascination with ocarinas had spread nationally, spiking and dying away and spiking again over the subsequent decades, although never with such fervour as at the epicentre. There, factories and academies and music-publishing firms and cafes and concert halls and retail establishments had sprung up in abundance, lending the city its nickname and music-besotted culture.

  Today the window of Dr. Zelda’s held atop russet velvet cushions the Fall 2010 models from Abimbola, von Storch, Tater Innovator, Xun Fun, Charalambos, and many other makers. There were small pendant models, big t
wo-handed transverse models, and the mammoth three-chambered types. Materials ranged from traditional ceramics to modern polycarbonates, and the surface decorations represented an eye-popping decorative range from name designers as varied as Fairey, Schorr and Mars.

  Piped from outdoor speakers above the doorway came the latest ocarina hit, debuting on the Billboard charts at Number Ten, a duet from Devandra Banhart and Jack Johnson, “World Next Door.”

  Tug himself was a ham-fingered player at best. But his lack of skill did not deter his covetous admiration of the display of instruments. But after some few minutes of day-dreaming fascination, he turned away like a bum from a banquet.

  Simply another thing he couldn’t afford just now.

  3. UNPLANNED OBSOLESCENCE

  The Art Vrille movement that had swept the globe in the 1920s and 1930s had left behind several structures in Carrollboro, not the least of which was the Little Theatre. An ornate music-box of a structure, it had plainly seen better days, with crumbling stucco ornaments, plywood replacement of lapidary, enamelled tin panels, and a marquee with half its rim’s lightbulbs currently missing.

  Today, according to that marquee, the Little Theatre was running a matinee in one of its four rooms, subdivided from the original palace-like interior: a double feature consisting of Diana Dors in The Girl Can’t Help It and Doris Day in Gun Crazy. Tug had seen both films many times before, and was glad he wasn’t the projectionist for them. Tonight, though, he anticipated his duty: screening the first-run release of Will Eisner’s The Spirit. Early reviews had Brendan Fraser nailing the role.

  Tug tracked down Pavel Bilodeau in the manager’s office.

  The short, mid-thirty-ish fellow—casually dressed, blond hair perpetually hayricked, plump face wearing its default expression of an elementary school student subjected to a pop quiz on material unmastered—was busy behind his desktop ordinateur, fingers waltzing across the numerical keypad to the right of the alpha keys. Spotting his unexpected visitor, Pavel said, “Right with you, Tug.” He triggered output from the noisy o-telex (its carriage chain needed oiling), got up, burst and shuffled together the fanfold printout, and approached Tug.

  “This is a spreadsheet of the Little Theatre’s finances, Tug.”

  Tug got a bad feeling from Pavel’s tone. Or rather, Tug’s recently omnipresent bad feeling deepened. “Yeah?”

  “Receipts are down—way down. I’ve got to cut costs if I want to keep this place open.”

  “I read about this cheap butter substitute for the popcorn concession—”

  “I need bigger savings, Tug. Like your salary.”

  “I’m being fired?”

  Pavel had the grace to look genuinely miserable. “Laid off. Starting today. You can collect.”

  Tug sank into a chair like a used-car-lot Air Dancer deprived of its fan. “But I was coming here to ask for more hours—and if you had found any leads on a place for me to stay.”

  Pavel clapped a hand on Tug’s shoulder. “You know the worst now, Tug.”

  Regarding his newly-ex employer, Tug suddenly realized the gap of years between them, over two decades’ worth. Pavel looked incredibly young and callow—like the growing majority of people Tug encountered lately. Kids! They were all kids these days! He tried not to let his resentment of Pavel’s relative youth and prospects surface in his voice.

  “But how will you run the place without me? Dave and Jeff can’t work round-the-clock on four machines.”

  “I’m installing automated digital projectors. The new Cinemeccanica o-500’s. No more film. It’s a bit of a capital investment, but it’ll pay off quickly. Jeff will handle days, and Dave nights. They’ll have to take a pay cut too. Together after the cut, they’ll still make less than you do now. They’re young and inexperienced, so they won’t mind so much. Oh, and shipping charges on the rentals come down dramatically too. The files get transmitted over CERN-space.”

  “I’ll take the pay cut!”

  “No, Tug, I think this is best. You wouldn’t be happy just pressing virtual buttons on a monitor screen. You’re too old-school. You’re filaments and sprockets and triacetate, not bits and bytes and command language strings.”

  Tug wanted to voice more objections, to protest that he could change—but a sudden realization stilled his tongue.

  What Pavel said was true. His age and attitudes had caught up with him. If he couldn’t manually load the reels of film and enjoy guiding their smooth progress through the old machines for the enjoyment of the audience, he would feel useless and unfulfilled. The new technology was too sterile for him.

  Tug got wearily to his feet. “All right, if that’s how it’s gotta be. Do I dare ask if you stumbled on any housing leads?”

  “No, I haven’t. It’s incredible. The shorebirds have totally deranged the rental landscape. But listen, here’s what I can offer. You can store all your stuff in the basement here for as long as you want.”

  The basement of the Little Theatre was a huge labyrinth of unused storage space, save for some ancient props from the days of the live-performer Salmagundi Circuit.

  “Okay, that’s better than nothing. Thanks for all the years of employment, Pavel. The Little Theatre always felt like my second home.”

  “Just think of it as leaving the nest at last, Tug. It’s gonna work out fine. Bigger and better things ahead.”

  Tug wished he could be as optimistic as Pavel, but right this minute he felt lower than Carole Lombard’s morals in Baby Face.

  4. TRASH PLATTER CHATTER

  Hangdogging his way through the lobby, Tug ran into the Little Theatre’s lone janitor and custodian.

  Pieter van Tuyll van Serooskerken was a Dikelander. Like a surprisingly uniform number of his countrymen and countrywomen, Pieter was astonishingly tall and fair-skinned. In the average crowd of native brunette and ruddy-faced Carrollborovians, he resembled a stalk of white asparagus set amid a handful of radishes. Today, alone in the lobby and leaning daydreamily on his broom, he seemed like a lone droopy stalk tethered to a supportive stake.

  Pieter’s native country had been one of the first to collapse under the rising oceans. Dikeland now existed mostly underwater, its government in exile, its citizens dispersed across the planet. The Dikelanders were among the longest-settled Big Retreat immigrants in Carrollboro and elsewhere in the USA, hardly considered an exotic novelty any longer.

  Back home, Pieter had been a doctor. Informed, upon relocation to America, of the long, tedious bureaucratic process necessary to requalify, he had opted out of the prestigious field, although still young, hale and optimally productive. Tug suspected that Pieter’s discovery of Sal-D, or Ska Pastora, had contributed to his career change. Blissfully high throughout much of each day and night on quantities of Shepherdess that would turn a novice user’s brain to guava jelly, Pieter found janitorial work more his speed.

  With a paradoxically languid and unfocused acuity, Pieter now unfolded himself and hailed Tug.

  “Hey, Ginger Ale.”

  Pieter, in his perfect, nearly accentless yet still oddly alien English, was the only person who ever called Tug Gingerella by that nickname. The Dikelander seemed to derive immense absurdist humour from it.

  “Hey, Pete. What’s new?”

  “I have almost gotten ‘Radar Love’ down. Apex of Dikelander hillbilly-skiffle music. Wanna hear?”

  Pieter drew a pendant ocarina from beneath his work vest and began to raise it to his lips.

  “Naw, Pete, I’m just not in the mood right now.”

  “How is that?”

  Tug explained all his troubles, starting with his eviction and culminating in his dismissal from the Little Theatre.

  Pieter seemed truly moved. “Aw, man, that sucks so bad. Listen, we approach lunchtime. Let me treat you to a trash platter, and we can talk things through.”

  Tug began perforce to salivate at the mention of the Carrollboro gastronomic speciality. “Okay, that’s swell of you, Pete.”

  �
�So long as I still possess a paycheque, why not?”

  Pieter stood his broom up in a corner with loving precision, found a coat in the cloakroom—not necessarily his own, judging by the misfit, Tug guessed—and led the way five blocks south to the Hatch Suit Nook.

  The clean and simple proletarian ambiance of the big diner instantly soothed Tug’s nerves. Established nearly a century ago, the place ranked high in Carrollboro traditions. Tug had been dining here since childhood. (Thoughts of his departed folks engendered a momentary sweet yet faded sorrow, but then the enzymatic call of his stomach overpowered the old emotions.) Amidst the jolly noise of the customers, Tug and Pieter found seats at the counter.

  Composing one’s trash platter was an art. The dish consisted of the eater’s choice of cheeseburger, hamburger, red hots, white hots, Italian sausage, chicken tender, haddock, fried ham, grilled cheese, or eggs; and two sides of either home fries, French fries, baked beans, or macaroni salad. Atop the whole toothsome farrago could be deposited mustard, onions, ketchup, and a proprietary greasy hot sauce of heavily spiced ground beef. The finishing touch: Italian toast.

  Pieter and Tug ordered. While they were waiting, Pieter took out his pipe. Tug was appalled.

  “You’re not going to smoke that here, are you?”

  “Why not? The practice is perfectly legal.”

  “But you’ll give everyone around us a contact high.”

  “Nobody cares but you, Ginger Ale. And if they do, they can move off. This helps me think. And your fix demands a lot of thinking.”

  Pieter fired up and, as he predicted, no neighbours objected. But they were all younger than Tug. Another sign of his antiquity, he supposed.