Held would never talk about his ruminations in front of Townspeople, as they would not match his present situation on the Town’s edge. He refused to talk about his past to anybody, other than to his Oedipal picture displayed on calm seawater, or on the broken window glasses of his broken Town. And even then he would make sure that he was alone, carefully looking over his shoulders, as he once did in ex-Titoist, Titanesque Town.
Held’s present existence fell short now of a tightrope marathon — a topographical error resembling the foxtrot of a fast-aging man walking along muted minefields; a flicker of accidental existence which could be turned off at any unpredictable mortar fire by the Saturns beyond the hill. Held felt ashamed of all his pastimes of joy and fun. In his now-decapitated Town, which has gone through a dozen ever-changing political iconographies, he functioned as a lone astral traveler in a boundless universe of planetary fear. Like the rest of Town’s people, after the much vaunted freedom of a market economy, which every Town’s inhabitant once flirted with, Held found himself in the Parmenidean river of anxiety, which always and ever contained the stream of the same old muddy water. Therefore it was wrong to assume that the flows of water changed with the riverbeds remaining the same. The silent water of the nearby river that flowed beneath and later merged with the river Styx down under, always remained circular and static.
“Might it be,” Held asked himself, “that it is not me, and that some other Titan, or God, or some demigod is walking in my tired boots?”
And how quickly it all happened! When the rockets slammed into Town, Held’s true self began to peel away into different selves; he was becoming a sum of persons that could all be well conflated into only One Held. The legs of that new person hurt, the bones ached, and that One Held could barely imagine that he was himself each time in a different hide with diverse political carapaces. The words that Held had hitherto attributed to others — sorrow, pain, suffering — suddenly became part of his own One. All superlatives of suffering that had trailed behind him millions of years ago were now part of his One. Why was he not born somewhere else at a different time and in a different Town? The Promethean lineage of his Titanic childhood had always pushed him to look for a situation on the edge — which, ironically was forcing him now to trot alongside the edge of innumerable minefields in Town. Will he ever enjoy that unwilling existence of an amoeba for whose soulless subsistence he had always secretly envied? His deceased ego, who went by the name of Charon the Cioran, once taught him that in the lower life forms of antediluvian times there was more beauty and happiness than in all the creatures of Town’s times. No suffering, no pain. Everything is in vain... Yet, there is a gain!
***
When Chaos began, a new chapter of Town’s history began to be recorded. Purposely, pompously, nastily, and with thunder. Time has now moved into fifth gear; it began to fly by as if monitored by a fast-forward computer machine. Held was visibly surprised when he noticed that the sand in his hourglass near his cot where he lived in the basement of a burnt- out house, was running much faster. Although the sand had been filled up to the brim of the hourglass and designed to drip down slowly and in regular intervals with no deviation for 24 hours, he recently observed that the upper portion of the glass was empty after only 6 hours. Rockets, missiles, bullets, and arsenals of arrows coming from the nearby Saturns must have accelerated the hourglass’s own time flow while turning the local Towns’ defenders into updated fighters. The only problem was that with his creeping burden of age Held needed more time than ten years ago. The Saturns were lurking everywhere and nowhere; from the sea, from the sky, from the scorched land behind the invisible mountain. The curious mark of the Saturns was that they never showed their faces, their physical allure barely visible, so they could never be deciphered by Townspeople. They were reported by Town’s media to be ugly, yet their ugliness was interpreted by Wild Western preachers as a sign of their utmost beauty. But even people out there across the Ocean who were awaiting their share of Titanesque times were not quite sure what those Saturns looked like in real life. In fact, the Saturns portrayed themselves always as Gods. The widespread assumption of Townspeople was that the Saturns were of a different race, many of them being half-mischlings, or centaurs, or hydras, or chimeras with swarthy facial features, albeit some displaying the features of exceptional Nordic beauty. This assumption was based on many dead Saturns who indeed looked human. But the real Saturns looked ugly just like Held had always known them to be. Held had come a long time ago to the painful conclusion that the Saturns who had been hurting him most were his own self-proclaimed lookalike stay-away Titans of his own tribe and his own time.
He pondered over the fate of his tribe and other hostile tribes now appearing under the guise of the Titans. Not much was left of his tribe, and to be frank he could not care less. Those who had hurt him most, those he once described as demigods or Titans, were his own people. He had studiously avoided any contact with them in Town. It may have well been the case that the Saturns had turned into Titans although they self-designed themselves as Gods. This self-deception must have been going on for ages with Held never caring much about the plight of Thermopylae and the alleged bravura of his three hundred past companions. After all, the Peloponnesian wars were fought among and within his own tribes having the same racial features and wearing the same postmortem masks. And those wars were far more murderous than the ones imposed by Sultans or the Bolshoi, or the modern Saturns now beyond the hill, inflicting far more harm to Town then all the Saturns, wogs and mischlings combined. The same was the case with the Thirty Years War when Held had burnt down the town of Magdeburg. And then again and again with the accelerated time that ended up in Chaos I and then Chaos II. Why worry then about the strange Saturns with strange allures coming now to Town? Even if they come and take over Town and open up the Styx sewage system for the captured Titans, some Townspeople will always find their place under the new Saturn sun.
Over the last 30 years the war against the nearby Saturns had been fought vicariously through different mediators, up and down, with countless ceasefires, left and right, with many broken media bonfires. All types of weapons were tested on Town — from aluminum foil dropped by the Saturns and their collaborators from choppers in the skies, to nets for capturing humans in besieged Town. Then came also some culinary diplomats from the Wild West, all dressed in white whom Townspeople derided as “ice cream men.” They were make-believe soldiers with massive plastic toy guns and fake bullets. Yes, for some time even a replica of small UFOs hovered over Town which tele-recorded fear on the faces of scared run-away Townspeople. Those flying things, however, were for real. Held was frequently warned to watch out for those tiny UFOs resembling little Frisbees in the air that he had once played with in his youth. Back then, you know, overseas on the beaches of the Wild West. Except that these new Frisbees now spurted real fire and surreal death, setting parts of disemboweled Town ablaze just like in surreal movies. The whole Town would then experience a light show, all lit up in the pitch-dark winter of power shortages, yet enlightened by the limpid and bright colors of the Art Deco Yule-time celebration. Oh what fantastic colors Held and Heroine witnessed on the horizon during the Saturns’ latest bombardment! The whole velvet purple of millions of shades melting into a cascade of a nonstop light show which even Heroine’s former cabaret reflectors could not match. How bombastic looked those flying bombs searching for humans running for cover into the basements of nearby buildings! Many inhabitants, when hit, went all ablaze, walking like Dresden torches, strolling and trembling as in a Saturday night fever! That lunar vision inspired Held with surprising literary metaphors, with allegories of sorts with his own poetic justice which he kept in abeyance on his never-ending run.
Townspeople ripped to pieces, dozens of human hands dangling down the gutters, or hanging from the top of barren Town trees, bits of arms and legs flying in the air dispatching into oblivion millions of body particles at the dawn of a new Pro
methean Age. Held once spotted an attractive Townswoman on fire, who yelled from the nearby balcony, only to realize a moment later how her head had come flying off and bumping into the gutter near the pavement where he stood in a meditative gaze. For a twinkle of a second the decapitated woman’s body on the balcony stood upright pressed against the rails. The body quivered for a second; it wished to yell like a headless ventriloquist, like a character in that old Muppet Show, and then the rest of her body finally folded and fell on the still burning balcony, just like a dead piece of meat in a nearby Town’s slaughterhouse.
Similar scenarios were quite common in Town, and after the first maze and shock, nobody took the light show seriously, except of course those who were no longer there. Once, a bomb exploded with a thud in vicinity of the market and another attractive woman had her clothes ripped off by the windstorm created by the bomb’s turbulence, which in turn caused tremendous air decompression in the market vicinity.
For long minutes and long seconds several nearby Townspeople remained shocked. What shocked them was not the thud of the bomb explosion, but rather the tremor of the woman’s naked body, which kept quivering around the crater caused by the explosion. Held was once told by his comrade fighter, a Titan himself, who went by the name of Snake, how a bullet had once hit the head of a woman he was sleeping with, and how he continued making love with her without realizing that she had turned into dead meat. This and countless similar stories circulated around decapitated Towns and nobody paid much attention to them any longer. There were no more tears left and gradually those stories turned into Town’s distant legends which went unrecorded as sagas crafted thousands of years ago.
Yes, the present monthly respite in fire provoked deep anger among Town’s inhabitants since everybody thought about some secret deals in the offing between the Gods, the Titans and the Saturns. Conspiracy theories were abundant in Town and every minor pause was held to be a sign of some extraterrestrial ploy. Yes, each parenthesis in Chaos inspired every Townsman with keen ideas of a dance macabre with a tantalizing appetizer for more war, more chaos, and more scorched women. More, more, and more progress!
Chapter IV: The Transatlantic Lull
The concurrent respite in Titanic tornadoes reminded Held of his long sojourn in the Wild West — albeit a different static place where everything was meant to remain static forever. Kind of an everlasting end of history. A utopia achieved. A so-called American dream come true. Oh how similar that sojourn in the Wild West was to his preceding static times in his preceding Bolshoi universe where he had previously lived — times in which the Saturns, under the name of communist world improvers, also kept on delivering their menu of static truths. Their frenzied fleeting hours also turned into a void, because their happy endings had never ever materialized and had to be always put off to a new shining future. And when Town’s former local apparatchiks did pretend to arrest their time, their actions turned into the opposite of what they had announced. Held’s entire life, or thousands of his previous ones, witnessed the same old reenactments of his will to vanish into nothingness. This suspension of time had always filled Held, ever since his early childhood, with a great deal of anxiety. He knew well that sparse moments of arrested time would be immediately followed first by boredom, then by fear, dread, and death.
Finally, at long last, after arriving back in Town from the Wild West, he had learned to keep his simmering ecstasy in check. He had learned over and over again that sudden joy would instantly succumb to grief and horror. Over and over again he brooded over the static poems of his ex-comrade, the medic Benn who had been well versed in the static meat of his static dead prostitutes he used to carve up in his morgue, only to discover in their intestines live bugs or rats which in turn would also become static meat in someone’s static belly, just like the meat they had all previously fed on.
If Cronus had almost devoured Zeus, his precious son, what was the big deal after all if he gets killed now by the Saturns yonder? But the God Zeus was also voracious and he knew the laws of nature. To kill or to be killed — that’s the question. Several years ago Benn also followed the itinerary of his prostitutes on which he had once performed autopsies. He also ended up himself on his same mortician table stinking of formaldehyde. Benn’s two legs had been cut off as a result of a deep shrapnel wound. He passed away shortly after with a huge sigh of relief on his round and sad face, as if wishing to tell his younger apprentice mortician who went by the name of Tom: “give me a break fella, you will soon be next.”
Back then during the Transatlantic Lull, time was timeless just like the frontispiece on the facade of a cathedral displaying a large movie screen. It was largely from that place, on the plasma screen hung on the portico of the cathedral, where this false imagery of universal happiness had been exposed, contaminating in turn the Townspeople’s perception of their own infra-reality. But this has been the scenario at numerous towns all over the world which after 1945 the Saturns denominated immovable times. Such optic fraud was so powerful that all politicians, all people everybody gradually began to imagine that henceforth the future could be framed in a linear and horizontal fashion where everything and everybody could become predictable and transparent: from predicting a fly’s fart in the air to divining high flying passenger aircraft servicing the Earth, all the way to foretelling the future of the cosmos and the underworld.
Held also had once thought that he could never age in the Wild West and that he would constantly remain young and husky with his eternal Helios smile on his face, giving the impression of a dispassionate and static Kabuki dancer. But so did other Townspeople with countless makeups, plastic surgeries, or better yet with their chromosomal adventures, all attempting to change the color of their skin, yet never able to alter the color of their heart. He saw hundreds of wogs on the streets who would next day look just like him, if not even more attractive. The discoveries of science had by then altered the meaning of race. Standard verities were replaced by a whim of a local warlord or a ruling Saturn, so that every would-be Titan in Town could decide to play his own version of Russian roulette, switching places as he best saw fit. In fact in Town one could become temporarily a rent-a-Black man or a rent-a-White man, or a rent-a-Faggot, or a Dyke on a mountain bike. The only problem was that time was the big tormentor. It could not be replaced, as it stayed always open and inevitably kept destroying all and everybody. It turned out to be the great Equalizer for all, with nobody able to predict who would be next. There was probably some justice in it, as it helped Held and Heroine come to grips with the notion of death and gradually ease their fear of slowly dying.
Now back in Town he was not far from the area where once upon a time the Turkish dervishes whirled themselves to death in preparation for the big onslaught against glorious Town. How terrifying sounded once to him the music of their tambour-beating whose cacophony meant hope for some and death for others. Town’s mischlings went delirious and they could not hide their high hopes for the future. Hope, but also someone else’s despair.
Now, when he considered that in a fraction of those cosmic times, only some centuries ago, he could have also ended up a prisoner of Saturnine Turks, just like many of his compatriots who had to whirl themselves to oblivion as local Ottoman eunuchs for the Sultan’s pederast pen, with their sexual equipment cut off for good. Or just like his first grandfather Titan Uranus, who had to endure the same fate. Tragic racial compatriots whose timeframe had hurled them into the abyss of the Oriental land where they suffered so much for the benefit of their new Islamic masters. Now again, these semi-wogs under the name of Saturns seem to be surfacing behind the hill, trying to reenact their adventure that had once failed before the gates of Vienna. Not that their mischling progeny inside the gates of Town were vicious. They just bred well and ignored the meaning of the Town’s sense of the tragic. They just waited for their Time.
As time flew on, new verities and new lies began to emerge and swamp Town, gradually altering conventional
wisdoms and making new ones sound truthful insofar as they were in accordance with the new Saturnine beliefs. And indeed, many local folks in Town gradually accepted wogish beliefs and fashions just like their hapless Catholic predecessors had been forced to do centuries ago at the big White slave market at Thessaloniki.
Everything was bound to become self-evident — a term that became entrenched in Town’s new parlance. It did however dislodge an old self-evidence consisting of a stern belief that was once enforced by the Shoah squads. That old belief was a strange Levantine tale of a strange tribe who had turned its strange verities into a secular religion of Town and townships all around the globe. Soon after, following the end of the Transatlantic Lull, when the Saturns had temporarily departed from the Titans and merged with mischlings and Antifas, Held witnessed again how that old belief system began to crumble away — only to be replaced by another set of self-evident stories. Strange how folks in Town always needed to believe in something, even when their new masters would fully discard their former myths and have them replaced in turn with their own self-styled truths.
When the Wild West was still thriving — and that was not long ago — many wogs and mischlings became victims of Town’s new ecumenical beliefs and abruptly changed their names into their new aliases. Plastic surgery and various forms of bleach were used to cover their exotic origins. The Ali Babas, the Mustafas converted their names into Alex, Harris, Daniel, hiding their once former desert-bound appellation with mundane and marketable new denominations. Held knew a guy who went by the name of Alex, and who once lived not far from Town and who, just like his entire kindred, constantly kept changing his identity in order to better to be able to secure his time span and blend with the new masters of the universe. But his kindred used to be very mean when they had administered punishment to the raya of Town over which they had ruled for everlasting centuries. It is interesting, thought Held, how local and dethroned Titans in despair quickly learn the games of mimicry. The Other becomes the Same, as seen in the eternal Jew, who was quick to pick up the accent and the attire of countries in which he was trespassing and whose proverbial overreaching vindictiveness always announced his sudden demise.
Titans are in Town Page 3