Fundament 12. Appeasement. The project will need to periodically bestow appeasements so as to reward the consumer’s continued engagement. The appeasements are sops. Sops to whom? To those who might prefer the project to unfold according to principles they themselves cleave to; those who refuse to interrogate their prejudices, and would thereby, otherwise, find nothing but disappointment therein. (Sometimes this cannot be helped.) “The Appeasements” are apportioned with exactly such people in mind. NB, it is unclear whether this step actually improves the project itself; it most likely does not, but, Imo, certainly, a project which lacks Fundament 12 altogether will be treading in parlous territory.
Fundament 13. Sacrifice. What is to be sacrificed is never known ahead of time. But something must always be sacrificed. Something must be put in, for something to be got out. This pertains to the law of conservation of energy or some such. Sacrifice always comes last.
Etc., etc.
So there you are. This much I know. (Unfortunately, this disclosure has only sapped me.)
13
(A NECESSARY PURCHASE)
What did you do to your uniform?
(“What did you do to your uniform?” the Mysterious Woman had asked. She spoke, and that is what she said. “What did you do to your uniform?”)
And feeling an almost animal anxiety arise, I’m determined to deal with the stain now, once and for all. No more delays. Pop a pill under my tongue, take a beat until I taste its bitter runoff before gulping it down, and hurrying out to my admin.
“I warned you about this,” Miss Fairfax admonishes, her official Institute clogs squeaking on the scuffed linoleum while she bustles, simultaneously shuffling through someone’s chart. “Have you tried the residential concierge?”
“Of course I did,” I say, “it was the very first thing I tried.”
She pushes up her errant glasses, looks away from the garment, and fixes me with distended eyes. “Well, you are lucky—it isn’t that bad. I’ll give this some thought. But in the meantime, it’s really your project you should be worried about.”
“I know,” I reassure her, hastening to keep up with her. “But I have a new idea now, an idea of how to begin—”
“No time, Percy,” she declares, turning abruptly left, and straight out.
“Thanks,” I sarcasm at the closed double doors. Pivot, and stride down the corridor in the opposite direction. A quick swing by Mr. Al’Hatif’s studio, that is, where he sits at his archeology table, stacking shards.
“It’s called ‘the Same Same’ shop. Nothing could be simpler,” he tells me, looking up from his intricate work.
“Some kind of dry cleaners?”
“Hardly.”
“What then?”
“A local spot. There are many of them actually. Same Same shops, that is. But you want this one. This specific one. Don’t tell anyone. Not even Miss Fairfax. And don’t mention that you are leaving campus either. You can go this afternoon, it’s perfect timing. No one will see you leave. Everyone will be…here.” And he hands me a pale green flyer which reads: “Surefire Keys to Achievement.”
“But how do I—”
“I’ll ping you directions.”
“Okay, but…in English? Same Same?”
* * *
—
And so, a single hour later, sidling behind a palm, I see the last of the dome’s denizens disappear into the double door between the Art Pavilion’s great stone slabs. I wait until I can hear the lecture begin; the massive, amplified—but now muffled—voice of the Director emanating out, as if from underwater…
Transfer value from the body to THE MIND. Hashtag: valuetransfer. Inspire with awe, and CONTROL in the avoidance of BRUTE REALITY. Transform mediocrity into GENIUS (through Transmutation). What is your purpose? BOLD STROKES. You must act A CERTAIN WAY. Increasing joy and enthusiasm and results WILL CORRESPOND. Tell us about…OURSELVES.
…and time to fly. I hasten to the car park, hop in the back of an autonomous vehicle, and am off with a whir—leaving the metastructure vanishing behind me like a soap bubble on the wind. I feel, almost instantly, myself again.
The dunes are flashing by. A scattering of derricks, far off, also moving, but at a different speed. The desert, delirious, stroboscopes forward even as it moves backward relative to my car. I cannot tell which is moving: the car or the dunes. The impression is once again of brightness, save for the matte darkness of the sea lying far off. There is little sign of anything else on this car trip. Occasionally, one or two other vehicles—scarabs which, like their miniature cousins, contain, carapaced within them, the only possible sign of life out here. But no mammal, tree, or dwelling. Nothing else. (Another dead corridor.) It occurs that this may be why the Institute has such an incredibly impressive success rate with the projects. It houses us all in an utter void, and our minds are forced to compensate by repopulating the world with ideas.
But eventually the city approaches, and other roads, devoid of vehicles, diverge with ours. There are now a few scattered housing developments, partially under construction, probably being built by offshore interests as investment silos. This is the sign that we are beginning to penetrate the outer rim of the urban zone and, before I know it, the car is among bigger and bigger structures, and now I see a truly mind-bogglingly tall tower, which corkscrews as it leans back and away, disappearing into the now sand-filled sky.
The Freehold Crown Spar. One of the tallest buildings in the hemisphere. It is quite famous. Built by yet another influential architectural collective in the initial, frenzied gold rush that was the opening of the region. So very influential were these architects, in fact, that no one questioned their use of reflective cladding on a building situated in the middle of a heat field. Some surrounding objects—none too important really: cars, a crane, a hut, and one or two people (both local workers; helots)—were liquefied on the spot. The building was unclad and reclad, this time with a bespoke titanium, concocted specifically so as to diffuse the sunlight, rather than amplify it.
It is not common knowledge but (Dennis, who has bragged about staying in this building, tells me) it is practically uninhabited throughout the year. All those rooms, thousands of them in the central spire alone, mostly abandoned. The Spar was built to draw, herd, and house crowds; but none came. The site became famous by way of its official photographs—which, because of its indecent height and architectural importance, were so widely viewed and commented upon—and, as it turned out, the images, by themselves, were enough; enough for anyone who might be curious about the Crown Spar, and so no one felt compelled to see the buildings Irl.
And truly, why bother? Such a hassle. So now the adjoining parking areas are all empty as unused graph paper. The skeleton crews which maintain the Spar—the cleaning staff, plumbers, electricians, contractors, as well as that group of locals whose job it is to go room by room through it, switching the lights on and off manually—say that, on occasion, as they crawl through the empty building, like ants cleaning a large bone, they hear sounds; an almost-music. The empty Crown Spar, they say, will hum like an enormous, muted Aeolian organ, pumping out an eerie diapason to nobody, or, at least, no one in particular (especially during the big sandstorms).
My car continues past and I also think: I’ve seen it too. I’ve seen it more than most people have. And I wonder if this “more” counts. Or even if I have in fact “seen it more.” And then the tower is covered by red dust, sand, and the encroaching sprawl.
Another several kilometers, and we are downtown. The car eases to a stop on a corner and I step out, and it drives away, leaves me there, and this is it.
I am there.
Here, that is. This white mecca, on the shores of disconsolation.
Downtown. The city.
* * *
—
In essence, a city is its history, structurally, sure,
but also in the sense of: “Before the bank was the café, and before that was the cobbler, and before that was…” Temporal, sedimentary layers. But this city, this city is only a now-city; existing purely now, for now. The Freehold’s urban capital has no past, and can’t even presume a future, ruined or otherwise. Or perhaps it is more accurate to call it a timeless city: a theoretical city, a conceptual city; no more than a projection, asynchronic; a CAD city. A message city, a city of signs. A model, imagineered by gods from impossible vantage points—looking down a three-quarters angle from on high, and rendering Bézier points and other manipulatable vectors. They thought up these networks of meticulously aligned streets and broad avenues, and when they did, they imagined it all: white. Everything is white. White rock, white cement, white tile, white plaster, white glass, white steel, white sand.
No one is born here, really. No indigenes. Everyone shipped in. For tasks. For color, even. Shipped in for the tourists. Now-cities, timeless cities, exist only for the tourist—those who might compare the empirical evidence with the evidence of the guidebook city and find the empirical evidence wanting. See, down here, away from the god-eye view, the guidebook view, it is different. More detailed, meaning: fraying at the edges. Grainy, and rife with jagged edges. And hot. There is no metastructure. The heat is almost unbearable. Wide avenues, broken up only by the large panes of light, which form triangles, parallelograms, and rhomboids of all angles. The heat comes off the pavement in waves, and it bakes everything indiscriminately, including, it seems, the very air itself. It reimposes itself with each step, and with each unthinking, casual movement. I decide to not move my arms. I wrap a thin cotton scarf which I’ve brought for just this purpose about my head. Bonus: now I blend in. Quickly scuttling into the shade, which, though less bright, is no cooler, I follow my device’s arrow onto an avenue, and then onto another. In the distance behind me, the still enormous hotel tower.
Around the public parks between smaller skyscrapers, tourists in wraparounds and diaphanous windbreakers. Some wear headscarves. Everyone seeking shade. I pass the absurdity—no, banality—of a public sculpture. A biomorphic blob in a rippling silver. There are no public artworks where I am headed though. Not in this next part of town.
Off the main roads now, and I come upon a covered thoroughfare, and then a side street off that. And then a warren of arcades, shops, close in, the relief of small margins, low clearances. It’s tight and very warm. Smells of people—broods—and cooking, oranges and cloves, and turpentine, and garbage but also marijuana, Drakkar Noir, patchouli, sweat, Pizza Hut, sandalwood, and Forever 21. A very rich scent, and a very rich picture. Let us see, here, above and all around, some signs, in foreign alphabets and displaying a variety of infographics. These signs throbbing with color, some pulsing with light: gaslight, or neon, or pixels probably—all of it swimming together like a bright and primary-colored finger painting, playing out their colorful subroutines irrespective of who looks at them. And of course, lots of those ersatz citizens. Here’s a wash of vibrant and pied cloths, jewelry, etc. Some urchins to pester me, local thugs and bravos, unsticking themselves from darkened doorframes, a prostitute, a witch, a local jolly…Tumult, spice stall, tawny people, birds, in bursts. Drab, bereted members of the security force, bearing stubby guns with huge wafer-clips on glossy straps. A real orientalist circus. Why does the whole thing feel put on?
The people themselves are mostly undifferentiated, flat masses. Subalterns, I guess. Strange to see them not in the Institute uniforms, those people who do not belong to the Institute and its culture, who don’t breathe its contingent air. People who aren’t rarefied or special. Though most do wear uniforms of their own. Uniforms of the Freehold. Ones I don’t recognize. I mean, I know the colors, but I don’t know what they mean. Scarlet, and ocher, and sea green. Gray. There are shouts and a general hubbub. Bustling, imprecations, fruits and tchotchkes, eggs and smoke and rugs and the like.
It’s a labyrinth, but I know where I’m going. No one gets lost. Not anymore. And what is this like, to be unable, literally unable to disorient oneself? We take this state of geographical surety for granted, don’t we (late times), but it is a kind of hell. Unspooling the same old map—a cartoon’s rolling background, a repeat pan—same doorways, same windows…nothing new, no stakes. And of course, I’ve seen all this before—the Street View. So now let us round a couple of more familiar bends, and then let us spill out onto yet another pathway—this, growing ever narrower. Let’s follow it until it is time, and it is, to duck into a very specific alley, an alley we have been told about, which our arrow points at, the arrow seeming eager now, almost like a dog, to lead us to yet another maze of claustrophobic corridors.
Then, we are led by a snaking, fenced-in, smutty little street, back in the wrong direction it seems, to beneath a massive motorway overpass. Under the monumental roadway are corrugated shanty homes. Some open on one side. No roofs because the roadway is the sky, and the stacked concrete columns are a forest. Life finding a way at the feet of giants. Several buildings merge directly into the T-columns. The roads overhead intersect and diverge. There are too many vanishing points to keep track of here. Three more quick zags—around a corner or two, and here we are. Our eager and motivated arrow got us here, to this spot, explicitly, and it is impossible in these (late) times to get lost, so this must be the place, beyond a reasonable doubt. And now let us close out our map, dismiss our arrow, just pinch it away, and follow our instincts as the maps do not drill down to a geographic specificity this granular, and let us now see, start to head toward a little unmarked passage on the left; it is not more than a back lane.
Of course, there is no sign, and of course no one would notice it unless looking for it or otherwise spiritually prepared as such is the way of these things.
Let’s continue.
Down the lane, which reveals itself to be a cul-de-sac, no windows on the brick walls, but a dense and dank impasto of old posters and flyers, none of which are legible, and the lane gets more and more narrow as if we were walking toward the corner of a triangle, and the end of the lane approaches until it isn’t wider than four or five cubits or so, at which point there is a door and a mark or sign above the door indicating commercial status.
The doorknob.
* * *
—
“Hello?”
I am in a shop. Your basic shop.
Nothing exotic. A plain old room.
Could be a defunct post office, or a copy shop, or a banal customer service hub. A gray Formica counter, grotty rug. The room is illuminated by a smoky yellow fluorescence. A few plastic plants. A small metal cash box. A generic ledger book, about a third of the way open. Some chairs, several ratty magazines upon them. No one else is in here, but it looks like the shop must get occasional business: the linoleum is a bit scuffed, and I see a bunch of scrawls down in the logbook. There are two doors: the one I came through, and another behind the counter, leading to the back, and, presumably, to a workshop and an inventory of some kind. No sounds from back there. The indistinct harmonica wheeze of an old metal fan, bracketed to a juncture of wall and ceiling. There’s a plain calendar tacked up on the opposite wall. Wrong month. There’s no one behind the counter, and no bell on the counter, or on the door. It all seems so very ordinary. I take a few strides over to the countertop, and there’s a loud round ding and I look down and I’m standing upon a dirty floor mat marked with the words “Same Same” in black rubber. Pressure-sensitive, hence the bell, and now a back door opens, first a crack and then all the way and then a man emerges.
A man. With a long face and wet, expressive eyes.
He looks askance.
I try to arrange my posture to look casual and courteous, and I say:
“Yes, hello?”
He stares at me.
“I was told to come here by an associate. Mr. Ousman Al’Hatif. I need to fix this garment; I mean, to
remove a stain from it. I can show you…here, see? This. The stain. Ink? It’s a funny story, it was my pen, the one I always write with, and so, it kind of exploded. Went boom? The…I need it removed? Do you understand?”
“…”
“Can you…do you even—?”
(Nothing.)
The Same Same man (for this is how I begin to refer to him in my head) stands there like a house cat, staring at me; waiting.
“Listen, I have a…I was told you could help. Wait—”
I reach for my device, yank it from my shoulder bag, and find the instructions from Mr. Al’Hatif:
When you get in the shop, do not speak with the proprietor. Approach the counter, place the item down, and say the words: “Same Same.” This is the procedure and you should not deviate from it. The proprietor does not, strictly speaking, have to serve you; to deny you service is his prerogative. But if all goes well and the proprietor agrees to take your case, he will nod, and quote you a price. Pay the money required in cash. Don’t dawdle, or stare, or make frivolous inquiries, as it is impolite. Bow as you leave (not too low). Exit backward. Relax. Everything will be fine.
“Ah,” I say out loud.
The Same Same man frowns, half turns, and takes a single step back toward the door he just came out of.
“Hold on,” I mutter, and, adjusting my gaze away from him, I pull everything out of my satchel—all my junk, under which the garment is buried—and pile it on the counter. I find the uniform at the bottom of the bag, and pull it out.
Slide it across to him.
I point at it.
And then I say the magic words.
* * *
—
“Well, he counted the price on his fingers, Ousman. I had no idea this process would cost me so dearly. Not that I’m complaining, if it works, that is.”
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