Titans are in Town

by Tomislav Sunic

  “No guns, no roses, no love, no hate, no war, no peace,” said Heroine. “In this microscopic cosmic Town of yours, where global history is now unfolding, you, Held, pretend to live like a penniless Jesuit, and I strut along at your side like a passing biped.”

  Heroine had a curious sense of humor which always left Held speechless and in search of his own words. Heroine functioned as Held’s alter ego, always crafting new words and making him briefly forget about his aching Heldian hide.

  “Oh là là, my gosh, what a moron I am,” said Held. “The Town’s end of communism augured the return of primitivism. Once upon a time I was surrounded by komsomoltsi who soon after morphed into the Saturns beyond the hill. Now I have to envision gigantic minefields and scarred old bones in the basement of Town! These are man-eaters who learned to appreciate man’s flesh more than roasted beef for the simple reason that there is no more beef left. Very few folks eat fish as it is polluted by pesticide and causes cancer. I have indeed condensed all my ages, all past and present tenses in my short sixty-something years. I am the past and the future. Must I, like the medicine painter Valverde, also peel off my skin and put someone else’s onto my broken bones? I guess I could hang my own skin in the Jugendstil on Town’s cathedral apsidal since this is the only chunk of the church left intact. You Heroine, you are tired of your Time burden, I am tired of my stinking hide.”

  “So what?,” retorted Heroine. “I am here like a statutory remembrance of things yet to come. Look at the vestiges of your Town, Held. The subterranean creatures, those mischlings below, behave like small kids who can’t control their farts, barely able to grip a gun and join the Saturns beyond the hill. They have no time to shoulder the burden of their own living.”

  Held knew well that the best and the brightest Titanic species in Town were long gone. A few of his companions in Town were made up of a handful of males of his age who were surrounded by several thousand of Town’s old White species living next to the mischlings below. “Oh, how dismal these old Townfolks look,” thought Held. “No matter how intelligent they once were, the time flow has eaten away their mental sharpness. What good is it for a genius to attain old age if he is bound to turn into a burden not just for others but also for himself and become a mental half-breed himself? How old age, with the onslaught of the Saturns, melts away in the shocking grimace of perpetual child-like fear! These old vestiges living now in Town and in the subterranean premises represent the generation that fifty years ago had refused to have children and/or brave the challenge of marriage, naively thinking that time had to have a stop and that horrible times existed only in history books. They had refused to live like humans and therefore must now vegetate like underground species. For decades they had all thought they could live a linear history, thinking forever about staying young and zestful. Their strategy of self-deception, similar to their guru, the Levantine Jesus and his Jewish zealots, whose mental bric-a-brac they admired, had lasted, alas, only a twinkle of a cosmic second, until they hit the age of forty. Then, their brazen stupidity, when faced by the incoming chaos, suddenly began to dawn upon them. Their skin began to peel off and their arms began to ache. Now, along with a few younger ones, here on the surface, they have to face the bravado of Saturnine guns and bullets which at any moment could mean their evaporation into nothingness.”

  “It would not be such a hell of a loss,” murmured Heroine, who also mused about her own rapid vanishing. Ever since the Chaos began, both Townspeople and the subterraneans in their nearby caverns, which were run by Styx Sewage Ltd., never truly lived their lives, but vegetated; they never loved, but demanded to be loved. Now, past their sixties and seventies, they look like wax creatures of Madam Tussaud’s make-believe lives, ready to melt away with the first Saturnine fire coming from the hill.

  “I wish I could give you an answer Mitsa, but how can I answer something that refuses to be articulated,” continued Held. This is not a matter of wording, but rather a matter of concepts which I cannot craft yet, given that we miss the objective replica of our Town.”

  Mitsa was the name Held had given Heroine long ago, and this word never meant anything to anybody, yet meant everything to him. Torika, borika, mica, micanović, eniso shipeme — bizarre and surreal word constructs were just about the only inventory Held toyed with, which allowed him to enter into the deep magma of his prehistory. The two syllable word “Mica” rhymed well with his erratic paces in the Town’s dirt and helped him hide his hide on the run. It was the rare intellectual pleasure he enjoyed in Town. Some late Christian sects had used “Bejesus” or “God bless you” even when Gods had long departed the planet Earth. Not so Held. He had his own cusswords and bywords. His shorthand vocabulary reminded him of small cats, birds and other little creatures whose dry bones and skins lay scattered on the barren minefields. It also reminded him of the past System of the Saturns which used bizarre words like “brotherhood” and “unity,” or phrases like “ethnic sensitivity training” or “racial diversity.” Hardly anybody could remember those old catchwords now, words whose misspelling sent lots of Townspeople into the System jail. Now the magic master key that opened all computer portals down in the basement of the sun-scorched surface of Town was the sacred pound of meat and a gallon of clean water. The religion of the Holocaust had been replaced by the religion of Subsistence. The widespread belief among all Townspeople was that a White Zeus must inevitably show up some day and provide food for thought for the new Titans, no matter what their odds were.

  “Thrown into this world, tossed back into his Town, I wonder if I could have predicted this statutory life of mine and the static poems of yours a long time ago?,” asked Heroine aloud.

  “Yes, sweetheart,” said Held. “You were always musing about some crystal balls. I prided myself on the capability of foretelling the unpredictable, but the unpredictable had a nasty tendency of outliving me. I don’t care about Zodiacs or my Thirty Year War Wallenstein, also an astral traveler like myself, a man who had also yearned to protect his hide from the Habsburg henchmen by studying how to escape to Milky Ways. It did not help. He could have tried some homemade Bohemian beer instead, or better yet considered suicide. That is the surest way to escape time. Let alone that one is relieved then from facing again the stinking upcoming Time. Now, the burden of my body is outweighing my accumulated past.”

  Oh, how many times Held and Heroine thought about changing the barricades and shifting their positions to be with the nearby Saturns. So many Townspeople did it. Character? Nobility? Sense of sacrifice? He could vaguely remember that those words had disappeared from dictionaries back in the 2000’s AD. Whatever has been passing through the heads of the Saturns? Did they not, after all, have their own version of justice, their own concept of honor, and their own sense of sacrifice which was now wasting away the entire Town? They, who were now hiding several miles away from Town. Saturn was the God of time and not good to mess with, and he was the one who had created Titans and Gods. What difference does it make being a Titan or a God? Aren’t they both the same and is it not just a matter of sheer luck and hazard that reverses cosmic roles? The Titan Prometheus did create fire, which Town had now the honor of using only two days a week, whereas the Saturns had the luxury of setting the whole Town on fire.

  “Listen Heroine, look at the sky. Look at the everlasting sun that shines. Once I longed for heat and warmth and everlasting sunbeams. Now I have too much of it. With this climate change thing I have forgotten the meaning of the word rain. It seems that we won’t get any of it any time soon. Everything is so dry and dismal and what use are Town’s parks, now just animals’ graveyards scorched by the everlasting sun? We may spend years now debating about the strayed-away Titans beyond the hill, but with or without them we no longer have a chance to return to our four seasons.”

  Chapter VI: Those About to Outlive

  The nearby Saturns had an invisible glow of passion on their face, which only a few Townspeople had a rare chance to ever see. They
held their guns differently and never hesitated to shoot at every moving creature in Town. Things that were absolutely repugnant in Town, the Saturns venerated as deities, and their death was mourned in a fashion which was considered repugnant by Townspeople.

  Held began to realize this difference only when after a brief transatlantic lull the Town atmosphere began to change. When the times of peace and pleasure were over, Held replaced a merry-go-round living for falling in love with his shiny Heckler und Koch G11, studiously learning the tricks of how to kill the nearby Saturns. He could have never predicted that he would end up killing off those who once looked very much like himself in every Titanic posture. Indeed, he could have never foretold that he would have to kill his equals. His late mastermind Ernst once taught him that all people are indeed equal — insofar as they could all whack each other in a more or less equal fashion. In fact it turned out that despite the fact that he could never decipher well the physique of the Saturns, his hatred against his own Townspeople was growing much faster than his hatred of the Saturns. Time now began to slide out of Held’s wet fingers which always kept clutching the trigger of his gun. Held realized that a gigantic struggle was now in the offing which would surpass everything he had seen so far. This was no longer a battle between the leftover Gods vs. leftover Titans. This time it was the battle of his own species, each representing the other side in a reversed fashion of the truth, stretching beyond good and evil, or Blacks and Whites combined. Both Titans and Gods were taking turns in changing their roles, both claiming that their justice was the only game in Town.

  The long-awaited bombardment came this time from above. It began to thunder like the wrath of Zeus, tearing up the skies and causing again a massive void of time. Strange how it is that each time when a real fight and real bombing began, the only sign, or at least the only impression he had of it, was that it would never come to a stop. It could go on for months or even years as it did during the First World War with soldiers on both sides having the impression of living in a vacuum-packed time, never ever thinking that the Chaos would someday come to an end. Yes, by now the warfare had changed its allure; it ceased to be horizontal; it became vertical. It was not only killing the bipeds but also the quadrupeds. The glowing fire of invisible flying objects was flaring up everywhere and from nowhere. Giant bullets were whizzing past Held’s head, which he always miraculously managed to dodge like Munchhausen on his aerial reruns. But was he not that eternal man on the edge of the never-coming disaster? Was he not the last European man Nietzsche once taught him to be?

  The Saturns have made it this time over the top of the lone hill, but then for inexplicable reasons, they slid back to where they had lived for centuries. The Saturnine way of life has always been a mixture of the bizarre and the primitive, although it used to be greatly copied by Townspeople themselves. It was a fact of the nature of matter that the Same always had his Double. Even the winning side during WWII loved to emulate often the traits of the vanquished, thus inadvertently proving that the vanquished had character traits that were in many instances more noble than their own. Many German savants after losing World War II were used as path-breaking Titans and cultural role models by both winning sides. Even when defeated, the Titans continued to thrive, if for no other reason than at least as symbols of the utmost evil they were supposed to represent in school books. How else would the Saturn System have survived had it not been for its constant invocation of the negative Double of the vanquished side?

  Each warring side called the other side names. Everybody was a chosen species in his own eyes while the Other was always regarded as a primordial monster. Held remembered Thucydides who had written that during the Peloponnesian wars, words had changed their meanings, with every side using its own grammar to explain its ways of war. Held recalled having witnessed in early Town how this linguistic drama had played out with each new Titan and each new Saturn. It was the previous Judeo-Bolshevik System that had introduced the rules of monomorphic meanings and kept bestowing words with forever new and different meanings. In his youth the buzzword “democracy” was trendy, and he could not understand its true meaning until this word began to be used by everybody, by both Gods and Titans as also by Saturns and Townspeople, in all places and on all wavelengths.

  The enemy could not starve out Townspeople, because dead meat was still plentiful in the nearby streets and carcasses of birds were plentiful around the minefield, which the Townspeople often used for their homemade brew. The Saturns could barely use their flying machines because the Town’s self-propelling grenades perched on the Town’s perimeter poles successfully kept knocking them down. These little devices were the only beauty in Town. They were put up on isolated light poles which encircled Town in a huge circle, one to the south, the other to the north, west, and the east, and always ready to trigger a rapid counter fire for every Saturnine incoming object hovering above Town. When a sparrow had the courage to venture into Town’s zone of exclusion, the devices never missed its fluttering wings. Held remembered how these electronic devices were the first and the last invention of the now deceased Venner — the alter ego of his now decapitated Town.

  The battle around Town was in many respects an outdated warfare in postdated history with updated weapons. Held could never comprehend that this bellicose charade was happening in his life in his own time, and not in that of someone else. Might it be that he was this time anchored in a new Helgoland, or was it only just one chapter in his cosmic eternal return? From gauging his own disasters stretching from his hippy stint in Srinagar and ending up in his nearby Vukovar, Held vicariously imagined different scenes of all of his archeo-futuristic combats. This was not real stuff, not a surreal TV show; this was all transreal occurrence.

  He could well remember back about 20 years ago the scenario of the hyperreal town of Sarajevo. It was not that far away, about one thousand miles south of Town, a town once rocked by foreign artillery, a town on the verge of collapse, yet always miraculously proliferating in its new rebirths. Sarajevo was just experiencing forever new reenactments since 1697 when it was besieged and burnt down by Held’s own army, back when he carried the name of Eugene. He almost managed to evict the Saturn Turks and give the town the role of a little caravan, albeit with a Christian meaning and thus possibly change the course of history. Had he just stayed a day longer and enlisted more Christian Titans, had it all happened earlier, then all the mosques, all bazaars with their acrid smell of kebabs would have been burned to the ground. It was a fraction of a cosmic second, or the inadvertence caused by his frail health, or his severe cold that day that affected the future times of Sarajevo and had him divert his troops further to the north. Was he plagued by diarrhea on that day? Or by rainy weather? The subsequent events, when Saturns began their postmodern bombardments centuries after, were thus the consequence of that erstwhile Eugene’s bad stool and sneezing. Now Sarajevo was again under the jurisdiction of Saturnine Turks becoming a full-blown Islamic city of worshippers from all parts of Europe and Africa. Their popular relationship with the new Saturns beyond the hill was very unpredictable. It seemed that that they had found a common language, which was quite understandable, both being bent on the destruction of what they called the glories of the white racist West. The lines of religious and racial demarcations back then were in any case very blurred, just like they always are when two enemies fight together against a common third party. The Turks have now made their baleful return onto the European scene and continued their thrust where they had been stopped in 1878.

  “How much easier it is, to explain away the chain of past events than predict them and project them into our near future,” Heroine remarked.

  “Yes,” said Held, “everything makes more sense when you look at the past events than when you have to decipher their logical outcome in the future. Historians boast how well they predicted Town’s end, but where are they now when they are unable to give us a simple weather forecast for the next week? Oh how fine it is and
how much sense it makes to explain away moments that had led to Chaos in Town, but there is no way I can predict the future of my own digestion for tomorrow let alone foresee the status of my aching legs for months to come. Remember the te deum in Town on April 10 in 1941 and the same te deum by the same priests on April 10, 1945? After the Great Catastrophe in 1945, all nice theories of social constructions of culture evaporated in a minute. Even when I came back to Town from the Wild West recently, I could not have foreseen the charade Town had enacted. The remnants of it you can see down under in the sewage of the Styx River, where those halfwits and half-breeds still thrive in their lost memories of their past glory.”

  The sun was setting on the distant horizon, touching the surface of the nervous sea. Held could see the first lights far away in the distance announcing yet another nonstop light show of many towns and cities cut off from the meaning of Town’s own Chaos. Just a few hundred miles west of Town life was going on normally, with distant foreign residents watching on their TV screens the sight of Townspeople, oblivious of the fact that their turn of Chaos was awaiting them a year, or possibly two hundred years from now.

  Chapter VII: Our Hourglass

  Since the first robots had come into being everything was happening much faster in Town — from fast food and fast sex to fast death. Held could vaguely remember his old companion Morand, a man always in a hurry, well-known by all former Town beauties. Morand had high blood pressure, and he was a highly neurotic Titan, but also an eclectic lover who could make love in fifth gear in front of merciless squadrons of Saturn fighters. Now the time was ripe to act more slowly and encounter the embrace of death or love in a careful and hidden posture. Heroine and Held had long ago ceased looking for pastoral pleasures in the thick of grass or in the woods, which in part was due to the fact that crystal devices dotting the minefields deprived them of the luxury of private sexual escapades. In incredibly rare moments when Held and Heroine had a chance to grab each other, they did it standing like dogs... It was their parody of the grotesque which otherwise they hated and hoped it would never be spotted by others. Their brief bodily encounter lasted only a minute or two and ended with a huge sigh of relief from Held’s mouth and Heroine’s muted silence. His love with Heroine was a far cry from the massive necking and petting they once madly engaged in before the Titanic war tornadoes had set in.