A Story: "Around the World"
Mar. 7th, 2003 11:50 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rfmcdonaldI was going through my more notable academic accomplishments (to add to my portfolio) when I came across this short story.
It's flawed--I can see that now, more clearly than when I wrote it. The language is stilted, the tone is a bit self-obsessed, and so on. Still, there's a lot here that's worthy, and the anti-war theme is interesting at this point.
Here it is.
***
He felt all of the people rushing around him; he saw clearly and distinctly only his parents standing before him.
“You’ll be going, now.”
His father clasped him on the shoulder, even as his mother folded her arms around her son’s torso. None of the three were crying, in public at the railway station amidst the crowds of busy people, but none of the three were clear-eyed.
“Remember to check out your apartment as soon as you get there,” his mother smiled as she carefully released her grip on her son’s shoulders. “They can cheat you, you know --” She stopped speaking, and she smiled faintly as she looked him in his eyes. “What a pity that your brother had exams and couldn’t get leave.”
“It’s fine,” he found himself saying. Each of his hands were full with the plastic grips of two of the three pieces of luggage, the leather strap of the third pulled hard against a shoulder, and his left foot was poised against the stainless-steel baggage cart that held his luggage. (His trunks had been taken to the freight cars one long hour before.) He felt comfortable in his clothes, and in his skin. “I said good-bye to him before he left for the bus, and, well, we can always talk on the phone, or write in letters. Or,” he continued, “talk in person when I come home on vacation.”
His father took placed his right hand on his son’s shoulder. His father’s hand, he knew, was creased only by age, not by manual labour; that, he realized, was indisputable evidence of his father’s prerogatives. “And you’ll do that, now.” His father inhaled again, and he saw that belly be drawn inwards, just as the whistle sounded.
“I have to go,” he said again. Quickly, he turned around and dropped the bags, the one after the other, upon the cart, and turned back again to his parents. “I guess that I’ll see you–I’ll phone to let you know when I get there.” He walked backwards a step, and he felt his fingers reach backwards to grasp the cart’s handle. “And so, see you later.”
He turned around again and repositioned his fingers about the handle, and quickly began to stride away from his parents, towards the passenger car with its door open and the ridged dirty metal stairs unfolded to the cement siding. There was a conductor standing by the door, who reached over to the cart and picked up the top suitcase.
“You’ll take the bottom bog,” the conductor said in an easy metropolitan accent, “and I’ll show you to your seat.” The conductor lifted the bag up, towards his breast, and he grunted quietly as he carefully climbed the narrow steps followed by the son (not any more) who tried, just as he got up to the top step, to turn and wave. It was a narrow corridor, though, that led to the passenger seats, and he could not turn around, so he simply had to keep on walking, following the bobbing blue-clothed back of the conductor through the rows of high-backed seats covered with imitation leather.
There were two seats to either side of the corridor, he noticed, and each pair of chairs was turned to face another pair to create a square of chairs. Most of the seats were filled, mostly with people his age, or perhaps somewhat older. In the middle of the car, he stopped for a moment and tried to bend down to look through the window to see if his parents were still out there, but that was the moment that the conductor chose to stop walking.
“Your seat, sir,” the conductor said as he planted the suitcase on top of one of the seats. The imitation leather on the seat seemed to be smoothly worn, and it reflected the light from the bulb overhead only dully. “Refreshments are three cars that way,” he pointed in the opposite direction, “and you’ll need to display your identity card to get served at the bar–if,” he emphasized with a grin, “you’re of legal age.” The conductor tipped the brim of his cap forward with his index finger and slowly began to turn around. “Anything else I can help you with?”
“No,” he said automatically. “You’ve been too kind, thank you–”
“I’ll help you put the luggage in the overhead compartments,” the conductor interrupted. He pivoted back towards the passenger and reached up with his hand (worn not like my father’s) to tap an odd little mechanical-looking clutch attached to a plastic panel. The conductor pressed down on the clutch, and the panel slowly rose towards the roof of the cab, carving out a quarter-circle in the air as it did so.
“You can only have one bag at a time outside of the overhead compartment–can you pass it to me,” the conductor while he carefully took the hard-sided traveler’s case from its spot on his seat and placed it in the open compartment.
“Um, sure,” he nodded dumbly. He quickly judged which of the two bags was more important–the one in his hand had the magazines he had taken to read on the trip, but the other by his shoulder contained a slim book of a foreigner’s translated poems that was less scandalously interesting than the magazines, but it was more impressive to passersby, so that one would stay–and passed the loser to the conductor.
“My thanks,” he said to the civil servant with a polite nod when the clutch snapped back into place and locked the compartment, and then, he took his seat and listened to the steps of the conductor move away.
It was not a window seat and he could not see his parents through the window, but then the window was so smudged that he likely couldn’t see them if they were standing dangerously close to the trimly-painted metal. Besides, someone was sitting in the seat between himself and the window. (Not on the seats across from him, though; it looked like no one would sit there.)
“Hello,” he said to the girl. Woman, he corrected himself; it was far better not to slip into the vernacular than to risk a miscommunication.
The girl–woman–took a moment to recognize him, perhaps because, he considered, she was deep in thought. She turned in her seat and smiled a genteel smile. “Hello yourself,” she said in her metropolitan accent as her left hand reached up and smoothed her short straight red hair. “I’m Maya.”
Maya had an oval face, he noticed in a moment, and eyes that were an interesting shade of deep blue framed by long eyelashes.
“When did you board the train,” he managed to say.
“A half-hour ago,” she replied. Maya smiled again, a friendly smile, what his father would call a man’s smile. “I wanted to make sure that no one would take my seat, and as it turned out, no one did.”
“That’s good,” he carefully said. He self-consciously ran his hand over his hair. “I just got on–I’m going to work, you see, intern in the capital. Officework, in legal.”
“Really?” she said with polite interest. “And the train is an inexpensive way to travel, besides which you get to see the parts of the countryside that you’d never see otherwise. Even if the seats,” she smiled briefly, “are stiff and uncomfortable.”
“Exactly,” he said. Carefully, he turned his torso towards her, placing his weight against the curve of his elbow on his armrest, just a quarter-metre away from her own–He shifted his weight in his seat and unobtrusively tried to flatten his rumpled tie. “And why are you traveling on the train? I mean, where are you travelling from?”
“Oh,” she began carelessly, “I was at the university, helping them out with their anti-war movement, the anti-nuclear movement. I was helping the local organization select the posters and the delegations to send in–a few students, ten or so,” Maya briefly frowned, “are driving in a caravan to the city. Now that I’m done, I’m traveling alone.”
“The anti-nuclear movement?” He blinked for a moment. “What is that like?”
“It can be scary,” Maya confessed. “To know what would happen if one, well, went off. It was nice, you know, to be in a province for a month that isn’t on the top of the targeting lists. At least, not the lists that we know about.”
He arched his eyebrows. “Odd, I haven’t thought of the province like that.”
“And you’re lucky,” she said emphatically. “The city, now, if it’s targeted, will be razed if even a single one hits. They say, you know, that the terrain here can serve as protection against all but the largest blasts.” She tapped the window, just as he felt the train begin to move forward on the track, and the smudged landscape outside blurred further.
“I didn’t know that,” he found himself saying to her. “I didn’t know, to be honest, how big the blast radii are.”
“Most people don’t,” she said with a grimace. She didn’t slosh her red wine around in the glass; rather, the train shuddered briefly as its body hit some obstruction in the tracks and her glass rattled along with it, leaving the inertia of the cheap but effective vintage to create the illusion of the liquid sloshing about in its cup. When they had both had ordered red wine from the bartender–a poor fellow tending towards middle age with a thin beard that did nothing to conceal his multiple chins–the man had warned them about it the train’s nasty habit of shaking moveable objects down onto the floor. “But then, we don’t want to think about that.”
The train bar was cheap-looking and made almost entirely out of shiny stainless steel, save for the synthetics that covered the bar stools, but the overhead lights had dimmed and the glare was less. After the bartender had given them their tall glasses they went to one of the window seats, with two modern-styled metal chairs mounted to the floor of the car and to either side of a table that folded out from the wall of the cab, just below a plate-glass window.
After that, Maya began to talk about her life. It was true that she came from a good stolid bourgeois family, and that she herself had been stolidly bourgeois and content with aspirations for a professional career. It was only when she saw a diorama of the city dissected by a nuclear blast that Maya changed her mind about all that and looked up the campus chapter of the anti-nuclear front. From that one involvement, she shamelessly confessed, she had gone on to try to become someone important in that movement, which she plainly felt that she did.
“We live in a world that can end, quickly, over a single night, if someone wants to,” Maya passionately said over the hum of the train over rails. “We live in a world that can be made a nightmare if the wrong people get in power. We want to deny that, but if we do, we’ll be doomed.”
“You know,” he slowly said, “even before I got on this train, I knew that people don’t want to think about what would happen if the bombs fell. We don’t want to think about after,” he said as he looked out of the window. Only now had night begun to fall, and in the distance, ahead of the next bend in the tracks, he could see the city’s lights shining above the horizon. “You’ve got it absolutely right.”
“Yes.” Maya looked at him kindly from across the table, and despite the distracting distant rattle below them. “When I saw you come on board, with your expensive business suit and gelled hair, I was half-expecting you to be a brainless whelp of a businessman who’d prefer nuclear craziness to dialogue.” Suddenly, Maya laughed. “If I had not seen you reading that Czech’s poems, I’d never have known that you had a sensitive mind of your own.”
“Why,” he cried out with a hand above his heart (and inside his jacket, but outside his dress shirt), “such a cruel thing to say to such a new friend!” They laughed a bit at that, so much that he almost spilled his wine on his jacket when the train hit a bump and his off-guard hand almost didn’t clench in time to hold the glass firmly to the table’s surface. “But a fair assessment, I suppose.”
“Yes. It was a relief, you know, to see you reading that Czech’s poetry,” Maya replied. “It was nice to know that you thought them to be human beings.”
“I respect genius wherever it is found,” he said with a flourish of his hand (that hand not holding down the glass). That book–or to be more precise, eleven poems from that book–had been assigned to him in one of his undergraduate courses, and at the time he had read only the dozen poems that he and his fellow students had been assigned. Since then, on occasion he had taken the book down off of its perch and read a poem to pass an idle moment, but he had never finished the book. No matter that it had been proclaimed to him a collection that he must read, he always had better things to do. He never felt guilty about that lack.
He knew–as Maya apparently did not–that the Czech was indeed from an enemy nation, but said man had the luck to defect at a relatively early age. He now taught his homeland’s literature in one of the sunny campuses by the warm blue sea and the bleached sand. The poet was a half-enemy, at very best, he knew, and he knew that she didn’t know, not for sure; he hadn’t felt the need to correct her initial impression when he let her hand fall on his in surprise, when she glanced at the book cover.
Between Maya and the wine, he didn’t have a chance yet to set to reading the poems. Feeling the vibrations of the train, he found that he didn’t particularly care.
“I do feel that way, too,” Maya said. The train began to go around the bend, the final bend before they arrived at the outskirts of the great city, and for a moment her eyes reflected the city lights. The city shone brightly just as evening came to an end, and the sunset’s red light was everywhere. “That’s why I’m in the anti-nuclear movement–I don’t want to die, I don’t want any of us to die, and I don’t want any of them to die.”
“That’s a very humane sentiment,” he said to her. “I agree with that.”
“It is sad,” she continued as her eyes met his and she lifted her glass to her lips, “that our generation–the generation that knows the truth about the universality of humanity, about the vast and varied accomplishments of our past and our contemporaries–might be the one that sees its own extermination. We deserve much better than that.”
“I agree with that, too,” he whispered. “I deserve better, you deserve better–we’re just starting out.”
“Yes.” She paused for a moment, and looked down at the three-quarters-empty glass of wine. Idly, she hit her index finger against the glass’ base; he fancied that he could hear its high tinkle. “We are, aren’t we?”
“Quite.” Just as he turned away from her face’s elegant oval to look out the window, a high concrete wall suddenly appeared before him and moved, features blurring at incredible speed as it expanded to cover the entire scene. “This is the wall, I take it, that the conductor told us marks just another half-hour to the station.”
“It is,” Maya agreed with a distantly pleasant tone in her voice. A new hum made itself audible, a sound that–he thought–a heavy object might make if it was drawn over a grate. “We probably should be getting back to our seats, and get ready to leave.”
“I’d say so,” he said. He pulled his jacket down from his shoulders, towards his waist; just as his glass began to teeter close to the edge he made his hands jump out and hold it down against the table. “What will you be doing tomorrow?”
She turned away from the window suddenly, then, towards him. He pulled his jacket down again, with one hand this time. “I’ll be taking part in the protest,” she calmly said. “It will be beginning, before the parliament buildings, at 1 o’clock.”
“I see.” He paused again, and swallowed. “You have accommodations?”
“Yes, my roommates have kept my place in my apartment open. At least, I hope they did.” Maya laughed again; this time, he couldn’t help but think that her sound was more throaty. “And you?”
“I’ve got an agreement with a landlady for a three-room apartment,” he replied with a grin. The apartment–inexpensive, well-located, partly-furnished, an entirely adequate apartment for someone newly moved away–had been a wonderful find, and he let his satisfaction leak into his voice. “I don’t have to show up there until the day after tomorrow, though.” Quickly, he lifted his glass to his lips with one hand and gulped down the rest of the wine. “My job doesn’t begin for another week.”
“Really?” She looked directly at him from across the table, through the stray strands of hair. “I’ll be meeting one of my roommate at the station, and we’ll drive down to the apartment, but she isn’t staying–she’s got another project to do. A human-rights group, you know, another protest.”
“Ah.” At the end of the table, inconveniently close to the cold hard steel of the wall, was a kind of elastic slot into which something with a narrow base–like a wine glass, he supposed–could be inserted and held. “That’s a good thing to be involved with.”
“Yes, I’d suppose it is,” she nodded. There was still a centimetre or two of wine left, but she put her glass into the elastic slot without a last sip, and Maya began to crawl sideways out of the seat. “Would you like to meet her?”
“I would,” he nodded. He began to inch out of the seat, and he looked up to see her offer her right hand. He took it. “Very much.”
“Then,” she smiled, “let’s go.” And so, they walked down through the cars, between the clots of hurrying people in the narrow corridors, across the gritty and ridged metal connectors between cars, finally into their original car, and their own seats. Their daypacks were still sitting on the cheap synthetic-leather seats, where they had left them hours before, along with his own outdoors coat.
They sat next to each other in their seats in companionable silence. When the train stopped, they closed (she zippered, he buttoned) their coats up and took their luggage. Maya had taken onto the train only her carry-on bag, so she offered to carry his third bag for him, the one that held his magazines.
Their car had only a single exit, and they were far from it, so it was almost ten minutes before they were able to escape into the cool air above the concrete siding underground, and begin to walk towards the escalators. Back home, he might have had fun and tried to climb up the stairs as they ascended, but these escalators were too crowded, and besides he doubted that she’d like to run beside him, and so he stayed still on a single step as the step rose, through the floor of the station, to the elegant tiles at ground level, and the cathedral skylight high above, with the white light shining down on the debarkees.
“Follow me,” she told him as she stepped off of the escalator. “We’ll go to pick up your baggage, and get a cart. Do you want to take the baggage with you …” Her voice trailed off.
“Does the station have an overnight baggage check?” (His voice sounded small to him, and the noises so loud.)
“Yes, they do,” Maya smiled; she was walking ahead of him, but she had turned the corners of her mouth up, or at least the left corner that he could see trying to catch up to her. “Decent fees, too.”
“That’s good,” he’d said.
They came to the rubber conveyor belt, or at least something close enough to rubber. He watched curiously as all the baggage came down through the shredded black plastic strips hanging over the hole that led to the freight cars, all colours (most brown, black, or intermediate shades), shapes (usually a cube or a three-dimensional rectangle), sizes (most at least a half-metre long along their major axis). His baggage came as it had boarded the train at noon, all in a single cluster that fit handily on two carts.
“I’m going to meet her by the coffee shop,” she said as she led the way. “The baggage check is on the way, and you can leave it there. You have cash, right?”
“Oh, yes.” He patted his back pants pocket for comfort with a free hand; the cart momentarily veered to the right and nearly hit her ankles. His heart fluttered when he thought that he didn’t feel it, but a second later he did feel it. No pickpockets got me yet.
“Good.” Again, he saw the upturned corner of her mouth that showed she was smiling. “I think I’d like to show you the demonstration, among other things.”
Maya’s friend looked a bit like her, with Maya’s same oval face but a different colour of skin and a longer outdoors coat. Her friend had greeted Maya with a hug; her friend had greeted him with a polite glance and a handshake, and a passing comment that he didn’t quite catch.
Her friend’s car was parked in a multi-level parking garage that had been built next to the station, though at a lower height–the train station had been built, a century ago, on the last bit of high ground before the drop to sea level, and the parking garage was built on those same heights. He had read that in a tourist’s guide that he had ordered from one of the city government’s bureaux, long before he had left.
The car was small, and painted a uniform bright red. It was an import from one of the economic-miracle countries, a “lower-market-echelon car” if he remembered the magazine’s phrasing correctly. The car moved quickly, though; it made turns that were almost right angles, even at its owner’s preferred high speeds.
Oddly, the city wasn’t quite as impressive at night as he had thought from the pictures that he had seen before. The driver sat in front, like Maya, and the two women talked. He sat in the back seat, though, alongside the luggage, and he looked out of the triangular window to his right at the monoliths. The lights were on in the great glassy hulks, and he knew that if he was looking at this from a different angle–from the sea, from an airplane, from a penthouse–it would be impressive. The city still didn’t look like anything different from back home, though.
Maya’s apartment tower, all in grey concrete and surrounded by grass that looked half-dead even at night under the brilliant yellow parking lights that flooded the stopped car, didn’t look different. Her friend had stopped, embraced her, and waited just long enough for him to take his daypack and her one bag out of the back seat before she drove away. Carefully, they walked down the dark-grey (dark in moonlight) sidewalk of concrete panels, he behind her, until they came to the plate-glass door.
Maya opened it with a key that she took out of her jacket pocket, and stepped inside. She held open the plate-glass door with a single hand, standing behind the door, waiting for him to confidently stride in. He did, daypack in his left hand and the cool metal handle of the door in his right hand, and he walked beside her, past the potted plants and the tarnished metallic mailboxes, shoes hitting the floor, towards the elevator.
The elevator doors opened with a slight creak, and they stepped inside (she first). Slowly, the elevator car rose, and they chatted in the dim elevator lights about minor things–the latest pop records on the charts, a book that he had read, a album that she had bought–before the elevator came to a creaking halt, twenty-one stories up.
The doors opened, and the brown-carpeted corridor stretched out before them.
She went to the first door to the left, fumbled with her key, and opened it. She stood inside the apartment, waiting for him to come in. Just as he did, she turned on the lights.
It was a simple apartment, with a simple collection of used furniture (most covered in an out-of-date plaid or synthetic leather), oversized art prints and movie posters on the wall, and not too disorganized.
“Nice place,” he managed to say.
“Yes, isn’t it?”
After, in the early morning, he sat cross-legged in front of the television. She was in her room, sleeping. The television’s cathode-ray tube lit the front room–the bright whites and blues gave the most light, he noticed, the darker colours less.
Maya’s apartment had a videotape player. Maya had told him, after, that they were going to be playing some videos of selected post-apocalyptic districts, most Cambodian. “To give people an idea of what might happen,” she had said perched on her elbows in bed. “To let them know what’s at stake.”
Maya had pointed out the videos, before, all neatly labeled and lined in a row; she said that they were copies of the originals that were to be played at the demonstration, her personal copies. “You might want to take a look at one of them,” she had continued, under the dim lights, “They’re important.”
There is not much to see, he thought to himself, nothing but small temples, small marketplaces, legacies of the killing fields.
With a cinematist’s eye he noted that the camera swiveled around on its base.
There was a man, dressed in blindingly-white tourist garb, who was standing in the middle of a field–perhaps a drained rice field?–and fringed with palm trees, or coconut trees, or something else tropical. In the middle of that field, hard by the outstretched left hand and solemn face of the (rich, white, fat) tourist, sat a mountain of skulls.
He couldn’t remember whether the skulls showed any particular signs of decay, although he was sure that at least a few of the skulls that the video screen had shown in close-up might have had their temples caved in. (The loose shards of bone on the ground before the mound were suggestive.) He hated that mental images–all of those people (a fearful woman, a mercifully young child, a bourgeois who, all considered, might have been me) forced to kneel, perhaps held down by a human or animal (the categories were blurred), waiting for a single swift killing blow–If only not, if only a lie, an error.
There was no reason to doubt that fact–all of the different news reports had confirmed that particular element. As he remembered them, the articles were written in a terse prose that, in other circumstances, might have been considered paradigms of literary style; as it was, the reports and their authors described in unimpeachable detail how, after the revolutionaries began to worry that they might begin to run out of bullets, they used pickaxes to execute the enemies of the people. When their exasperated neighbours had invaded, though, it seemed that they had apparently run out of bullets (and pickaxes, even) regardless of their laudable efforts at conservation. The video lit the room in an odd kind of way.
“At least most of the landmines have been removed,” the intermittent resonant-voiced narrator said as the tourist circled around the pile and almost tripped on a loose femur, “while decontamination proceeds apace– ”
The video screen focused in on the image of the man, showing him take a rain-cleaned white skull into his flabby hand, carefully gauge its weight, and lightly throw it into the air and catch it like a rubber ball. He had stared at that image, in this safe bourgeois room, and he felt his breath snag on his Adam’s apple. A bat now, perhaps a femur, perhaps B
It was then that he fled the apartment, without his daypack, without his outdoors coat, even without his other jacket. He went down on the elevator, and ran through the lobby (still the same potted plants) at high speed, to outside, just as day dawned.
He walked more slowly outside. The air wasn’t fresh–it seemed old to him, somehow musty.
As he passed the corner, he noticed that the sidewalks in very early morning light, here, seemed to have the same translucency as pearl, or porcelain.
***
He had come back to the apartment tower before the sun had risen. He had walked for a half-hour, down the white concrete panels of sidewalk, towards the sea.
There was dirt on the pavement, he noticed, much the same kind of dirt that littered sidewalks back home. As he scraped the soles of his shoes on the ground, he noticed that the dirt was streaked, that it had ran down the sidewalk. It had rained overnight; that, or morning dew was particularly heavy. He didn’t remember hearing rain the previous night with Maya, but then, there was something of a morning chill that he could feel through his thin white dress shirt, and he frankly doubted that the city’s latent heat–latent, he had to remind himself when the images of the skulls came to mind, from factories and cars and homes and black pavement’s absorption, and other ordinary things, not fire, not apocalypse–would allow for dew.
So, rain it was.
He hadn’t seen the street very well on the drive from the station; he had seen only enough, from the middle of the street, to know that towering apartment blocks lined the route. He had come, scarcely a few hundred metres away from Maya’s tower, to a three-way intersection not yet busied by early-morning commuter traffic, and he looked in the direction of the station. The dark-grey of concrete was visible, even in the faint light of dawn, stretching to the horizon.
It was in that instant that he decided to cross the street, to the corner store on the other side with its bright neon lights. He might not have crossed at all had he not squinted and seen the dim yellow store lights, partly obscured by what he thought must have been advertising placards of one sort or another but still extant. It wasn’t yet six o’clock, but then, the corner stores of metropoli were supposed to be open even at this early hour. What would it cost him to cross?
He pressed with his thumb a rubber button indented into the white machined metal of a traffic light pole, and looked up at the signs. He could still see that damnable red icon on the shoulder-height display before him, and for a moment he considered pressing the button again–his thumb was still on the button, and it wouldn’t have cost him anything to push it, but then he recalled from some distant corner of his memory the datum that these buttons effectively worked only once and halted.
It took only a minute, leaning though he was onto the chill metal pole and feeling his warmth seep out through his damnably thin shirt, for the light to change. As he passed over the white-painted striped pedestrian corridor, he looked to his left towards the apartment tower. As he trod across the street, he saw the tower to be just as serenely quiet as it was in the late evening, even as he walked across the uncracked rough surface of the pavement past the three vehicles B two automobiles and one truck, all of domestic make B that idled as the lone pedestrian crossed in front of them.
The air, he thought, still smelled old–perhaps it was already beginning to fill up with the fumes from a million motor vehicles and dozens of industrial plants, or it had never managed to purify itself over a night’s respite. He had smelled that same kind of vague corruption in the air back home only a few times, when there was a lot of fog and hardly any wind either to or from the sea. He’d have to get used to the smog here.
The red icon appeared at the traffic meter on the opposite side of the street just as he stepped onto the sidewalk here. Behind him, he heard the once-idling vehicles tear away from their forced halt, just as he saw that the corner store’s door was indeed marked with an open sign. He pressed down on the door handle and pushed the door open.
“Hello,” the clerk said. The clerk was an older man, with a thin fringe of white hair surrounded a pinkish face. He looked to be white, but his speech was lightly accented in a way that he didn’t recognize. “Can I help you?”
“Yes,” he fumbled. He craned his neck to look around at the cluttered interior B to his left were the aisles of groceries, to his right the dispensers of soda pop and snack foods, ahead, the counter with its assorted pens and breath mints in their holders and newspapers in their wire racks. He walked towards the counter, and reached for his wallet in his back pocket. Again he felt his heart leap as he didn’t immediately find it; again he felt its racing slow down as his fingers touched the leather. “Do you have any provincial newspapers?” he asked the clerk.
“Yes,” the clerk said as he took his right hand and rapped one of the wire racks, one that was almost as high as the clerk himself. “All of the out-of-city papers are in this rack. As for the provincial ones …” The man’s head ducked back behind the cash register. “We only have the Courier in–the other papers come in later.”
“Okay,” he said, “that’s fine.” He squatted down and began to examine the titles neatly embossed on the metal strips at the front of the racks. He craned his neck up, until he saw Provincial Courier and stood up and took a paper B a thick one, as was the Courier’s wont on weekends–from between the narrow gap of thin plastic-sheeted wires. He carefully placed that Courier on the smudged plastic counter, and reached over to another rack, to extract a couple of the local daily papers. These were even thicker.
“How much is it?” he asked the clerk. The clerk did not respond immediately; he simply tapped a few buttons on his new electronic cash register, and named the figure that appeared on the electronic screen. He put away his wallet, and rooted in his pocket for the change required. He placed it on the counter, and waited as the clerk counted it up.
“Thank you,” the foreigner finally said. “Please come again.”
He stood there dumbly for a moment; the clerk repeated, patiently, “Please come again.”
“Are there any motels around?” he suddenly asked. He felt the sweat bead on his palms. “Hotels, inns, anything?”
“Sorry,” the clerk frowned. “Nothing in walking distance. Why do you ask?”
The walk back to Maya’s apartment tower was quick, now that he knew his way. It was brighter outside, now B the light on the sidewalk seemed to be, despite the dirt, to be stronger. He glanced at the windshields of the cars, and he saw the sunlight refracted against the tinted glass. It was still cool, but he was quickly striding now B not running, as such ran the risk of scuffing his new shoes for the office, but walking with a metronomic stride towards her apartment building.
When he arrived at the tower’s outer doors, he pushed them open. He had tried to charge through the inner doors, but these were locked. It was then that he cursed his stupidity, and went looking at the panel of buttons. The panel was to his right, and filled with bright red buttons, buzzers that were placed below the numbers of different apartments and which were, in turn, arrayed around what must have been a speaker or a microphone covered by a metal grate.
He remembered her number, so he thought of a brief prayer and pressed her apartment’s button. “Hello,” he said awkwardly. He was almost leaning against the speaker, the newspapers awkwardly held by their edges in his left hand, her buzzer still depressed by his right pinkie.
The inner doors moved open position, and he sighed as he jumped through them, into the lobby. There had been track lights, the previous night, that had been set to shine dimly. Now, they were shining brightly as he walked towards the elevator; they shone with almost the same intensity as the noontime sun. The light hurt his eyes.
“I’d woke up just a few minutes after you had left,” Maya said pleasantly enough. “I’ve been waiting for my buzzer to sound.”
She was wearing what looked to be a comfortable terry-cloth bathrobe, coloured pink, and her short hair was still glistening from her shower. She had been waiting at the door for him; when she pulled the door open, he noticed the tell-tale reflections of the heap of skulls playing against the posters.
“Those images are powerful,” he shrugged. He looked down at his shoes, and he kicked at imaginary dirt on the carpet. “Are they two powerful?”
“They are,” she said seriously. She looked directly at him and continued, “That’s why they’re going to be shown. Cambodia is the closest we’ve come to an apocalypse B and we know that if it does happen, Cambodia will be paradise next to our country, or next to all of our neighbours.” She showed the tips of the teeth when she smiled. “It’s worthy inspiration.”
“So,” he nodded, “the rally is still scheduled for one o’clock?”
“It’s still going on,” she said confidently. “Unless I’ve been out of the loop, there’s only a dozen provincials coming,” she frowned briefly, “excluding you. There’s more than enough people from the city to fill the plaza. We were planning on a quarter-million people there B maybe more.”
“Wow,” he said as he blinked. (Do I mean that?)
“We’ve got everyone–writers, poets, journalists, musicians–there’s going to be an open-air concert. And you know, there’s even going to be a new poem read by your province’s leading poet. ‘It is far better, to be barren, than to abort. Do not live, knowing, what is lost. We need not …’ Maya turned her head and smiled at him. “How does it sound?”
“A bit overwrought, perhaps, and will some of your more radical allies go along with that first line?” He quickly smiled. “It’s effective, though.”
“Yeah, I know–hat’s why we invited him. Here,” Maya happily said with the shock of recognition as she turned towards the counter and picked up a loose paper sheet. “I’ve got the entire poem here,” she smiled as she held out the paper. “Read it, will you?”
***
Appendix: 1
the sage Irishman
was wrong:
deprive one of
love and life
and you do mercy for he
whose love and
life are ended
it is far better
to be barren
than to abort
(do not live
knowing
what is lost)
we need not
swift wind
to melt our humble bones
let it end just once
there is no more need
the soft breath
of nuclear frost
the silent settling
of cities’ dust
the perpetual
deathly chill
fear not futurity:
it is not for us
grave’s silence is comfort
for all
needs are flesh
take our meat
Moloch’s
fine new food
his new children
let us be brief
children of hot light
***
After he read the poem, he was still in Maya’s apartment, sitting on the plaid couch in front of the television with her torso cradled in his arms, watching the skull heap video. The overly plump tourist was still strolling around the bleached white pile, occasionally bending down and picking up another skull to gaze Hamlet-like into the sockets, or to balance in the palm of his sweaty pale hand.
The video’s colours seemed off, now, he thought to himself, they seemed vaguely flatter or duller than the real thing–red was but a dark shade of pink, the tourist’s white T-shirt was gray, the bleached skulls seemed pale. He had thought about mentioning that to her, but he decided that it was just the video quality, here, and nothing more.
Maya had just gotten up from the couch, stretching her tired limbs, and she pulled a knitted sweater that lay on the kitchen table down over her bra when the buzzer sounded.
“It’s probably our driver,” she grinned as she turned back towards him, decent now. “She’s come to pick us up.” Maya strolled quickly towards the panel by the door, and pressed the button. His eyes followed her long tanned strong legs across the room.
“I’ll go into my room to finish getting dressed,” Maya called out, voice echoing from her bedroom into which she had darted. “Can you let her in when she comes in?”
“Sure,” he called back. He walked towards the cheap plastic kitchen table and picked up his black dress jacket off the chair back that he had left it the night before. He put his arms through the sleeves, and breathed silently in relief as he felt the warm dense fabric cover the chilled sleeves of his dress shirt. “No problem.”
He was smoothing down by hand the creases left in his black jacket when he heard the ping of the elevator’s opening through the thin apartment door. He heard her friend walking heavily down the thin-carpeted hallway in what must have been heavy clogs, and she knocked, hard, on the door.
When he opened the door, her hand was raised high in mid-knock, or in salute. For a moment, he fancied that she was about to bring her hand down on his head. There was a certain look in her eyes, perhaps something proprietary.
“Are you coming with us,” the driver said stiffly. “Or are you taking a taxi to wherever you’re going?”
He flashed a quick grin, what his friends (and at least one girlfriend) called his winning smile. “I’ll be coming down with you. After all, this is my world, too.”
It was then that Maya appeared out of the bedroom, brown plastic valise in hand and tan slacks on her legs. “Well, shall we get going?”
There was much more traffic on the road now, in mid-morning under the bright sunshine, than he saw in his early morning stroll, or even late the previous night. She sat in the back seat with him; the driver stared fixedly ahead, driving stolidly ahead.
He had kissed Maya’s cheek when the driver reached down to grasp a lever and signal that they were turning left. He thought that the driver saw his kiss B the rear-view mirror did look upon the back seat, and the unexpected surge of acceleration that had jolted her against him didn’t seem to have been caused by anything in the traffic.
He and Maya had kissed again–more romantically, this time, though at no slower speed than before–as the car barreled down the residential street. Carefully, he took her fingers from their grip on his lapel, and shifted his weight back towards his seat.
He turned to look out the passenger’s seat window to his right, and saw, through the triangular glass, all of the vehicles B the battered delivery vans with dirty mudflaps, small and shiny familiar imported compact cars, larger conservative family sedans in browns and greys, sleek gunmetal city buses B shifting forwards and backwards at seeming will on the pavement, past the buildings. There were more, now, than he had seen on his walk from her apartment.
This kind of rush hour traffic was not unfamiliar to him in most respects; it was unfamiliar to him only in its quantity. Maya, though, tapped his neck as he looked out and made him jump. When he craned his head back towards her, startled, he saw her smiling. “There’s a lot more travelers on the road, today, more than I’ve ever seen before. I’d bet you that everyone is heading for the plaza.” He saw through her passenger window a bus pass by. From what he could see, the bus passengers were uniformly young.
“The plaza,” he muttered. “That old scene?” She nodded; he continued.
“You know, there have been revolutions that began on that plaza, fairs held, going back for who knows how long … And now, this.” He shrugged. “Do you think that they’ll remember it for as long?”
“They will,” the driver interrupted. He started as the driver spoke in her calm steady voice from the front seat. “If they don’t, it’s because we’ll all have died and there won’t be anyone left to remember.”
He turned awkwardly away to look out the window, just in time to see a vast edifice of bleached concrete and glass pass. With a start, he recognized the building. How could he not, when so many photos had been taken of it and video filmed before it? He tried to look up, craning his face up against the passenger window, but he could see only the first few floors, not the unmistakable spire.
“You can’t see the tower from the ground,” Maya told him. “Even if you were outside, you just couldn’t–it’s too high.” She reached out and gently touched his left arm. “It’s difficult for someone provincial to get used to, isn’t it?”
“Swift wind to melt our humble bones,” the poet chanted, “let it end just once, there is no more need.”
Standing in the crowd not too far from the stage, he heard the poet’s deep voice resound, magnified, through the great loudspeakers positioned on the elevated stage via the microphone that he saw just in front of the poet. The man had a white fringe of a beard, and an annoying habit of pause to take a drink (of wine? water? beer? something more exotic?) or to puff a cigarette, or to do something with his mouth.
“The soft breath of nuclear frost, the silent settling of cities’ dust, the perpetual deathly chill,” the man continued after an annoying pause.
The voice echoed, off the sheer-faced towers that completely enclosed the plaza, off the flagstones and pavement that covered most of the plaza’s surface, and B so he fancied B off of the heads of the demonstrators, or concert-goers, or curiosity seekers, who filled the plaza. It certainly had to echo off of the hard body armor and plastic visors of the riot police who hemmed in the plaza from every side, standing stiff, at attention.
Maya had left him, after the driver had parked the car and the three had safely crossed the line of riot police. She had grasped him by the shoulders, as her driver looked on and the people kept milling through.
“I’ll see you after the demonstration is over,” she had said happily. “I’ll meet you at the café down the street, see, there.” She pointed towards the umbrellas wearing their printed insignia of various drinks, on the sidewalk barely visible through the crowds milling on that sidewalk and the adjacent street. “We’ll meet, we’ll talk–I’d be interested to know what you thought of that, and, well …” Maya had stopped talking then; she gave him a peck on the cheek and quickly walked off.
“Let us be brief children of hot light,” the poet grimly uttered. He saw the man step away from the microphone.
He clapped then, as was only polite, but he could not hear his own claps for the thunderstorm that surrounded him. He almost imagined that it was truly storming; certainly the white clouds that covered the sky and made the ground dark suggested that.
“And now,” the poet jumped hastily forward one last time, “time for music.”
The poet stepped back from the microphone just as a long note B electronic and high-pitched B sounded. He looked to the poet’s left, then to the poet’s right, and it was to the poet’s right that he saw two people. There was a long-haired tanned blonde in a costume with revealing cleavage standing in front of a synthesizer, which itself had a man dressed in what seemed to be black plastic standing behind it.
“This song,” the blonde said in a soft voice, “is one that we wrote especially for this occasion.” She turned and nodded at the man, and the music began.
The notes were electronic, all produced by synthesizers that were (he was almost sure) programmed by the musicians to delay each note’s fading. The beat was metronomic; the synthesized notes reverberated. The blonde’s soprano voice was high-pitched, and sounded frail; he knew, though, that this type of vocals was de rigeur for this genre of music.
“We’ll go nowhere, baby,” the vocalist chanted, “And I’m so scared.”
The speakers were all arrayed at chest level, and he imagined with a thrill that he could see the dense-packed sound waves rippling through the distorted atmosphere. He felt the metronomic beat thumping in his rib cage, pulsing in sync to his heart beat, or slightly off, his shirt vibrating. He had felt that thump from speakers before B at a graduate’s ball, in discothèques B but not once outside in the air, with a cool breeze blowing past high glass towers.
“We’ll fear the future, my love/It’s just not fair.”
Then, the music stopped abruptly, and he heard the others applauding all around him. He saw the vocalist bend in a bow over the concert-goers’ heads, and the thunderstorm began again.
“And now,” she said with a flourish of her hands, “time for the die-in.” It was then that she fell backwards, onto the painted black plywood that covered the stage, and it was then that the screams began.
After, there were people lying contorted on the pavements. Most were silent; others moaned quiet inchoate noises; some had their hands held up to their eyes, to block the killing light.
The others were screaming. As he stumbled across the smooth polished stones, he heard the shrieks resounding from every direction. He saw a flock of birds rise into the air with barely audible flutters, startlingly dark against the shiny plate-glass towers and white clouds.
The others ran about him in an odd kind of crawl, lurching before him. A few of these fell at his feet.
“I can’t see! God, I can’t see!” one long-haired brunette dressed in a blue-jeans jacket screamed, her hands clawing through her bangs at her eyes as she keened and fell, trembling, onto grass.
He turned his head and looked towards the row of insectoid police dozens of metres away. He thought that he saw the eyes of one of the policemen B a tall fellow, with a paunch that was visible even through a ribbed bulletproof vest B piercing through the dusky plastic eyeguards. Was the policeman staring in anger? incomprehension? at the young with sympathy? at just him with sympathy?
Slowly, he thought that he saw the policeman turn away, to talk to another cop; he turned away himself, and began walking.
He took care not to step on anyone’s head, or outstretched limbs, or hair coronae; he didn’t feel quite right, and he thought that he might have been trembling as it was.
There were a few other people like him, wandering through the sea of fallen people, dazed. He didn’t try to talk to them; he didn’t feel like doing that, not now, not when there seemed to be so much.
When the screaming had begun, he had ran towards the front of the crowd, where he knew that she was. He did, miraculously, find Maya, lying on her back on the hard cobblestones, eyes closed, like all of the other people who had slumped to the ground before them. He had taken her by the shoulders and screamed at her.
“What’s going on,” he had yelled. Maya’s eyes opened, and her face squinted in recognition. “Is it a virus? Or …” He had stopped speaking then, overcome.
“It’s a demonstration,” Maya simply said. She pointed towards the cameras, a silent audience stationed on the stage behind the collapsed singers and the poet still standing uneasily behind the microphone, shifting his weight from one leg to another. “We’re showing them what it will be like.” It was then that she closed her eyes and began to scream piercingly.
The die-in had begun almost ten minutes ago, and his ears were ringing from the screams that had, by now, ceased. He felt exposed, dressed in his good black dress suit, standing erect, in the sea of T-shirts and fallen bodies that surrounded him. He felt light-headed, and he hated the shadows that he saw, cast by the buildings and the clouds, traced in their contours on the bodies of the fallen.
Ahead of him, there was a stretch of flagstones uncovered by even a single solitary limb. He kept walking there, and then, collapsed, falling backwards onto the calves of his legs. He felt his knees hard against the flagstones, and his knees hurt, but he didn’t mind the kneeling.
Looking up, he saw some of the white clouds beginning to break, to spread apart. He closed his eyes in anticipation just as the clouds broke, and the bright lights and the wonderful searing heat hit his exposed pink cheeks and nose.
It felt so good.
It's flawed--I can see that now, more clearly than when I wrote it. The language is stilted, the tone is a bit self-obsessed, and so on. Still, there's a lot here that's worthy, and the anti-war theme is interesting at this point.
Here it is.
***
He felt all of the people rushing around him; he saw clearly and distinctly only his parents standing before him.
“You’ll be going, now.”
His father clasped him on the shoulder, even as his mother folded her arms around her son’s torso. None of the three were crying, in public at the railway station amidst the crowds of busy people, but none of the three were clear-eyed.
“Remember to check out your apartment as soon as you get there,” his mother smiled as she carefully released her grip on her son’s shoulders. “They can cheat you, you know --” She stopped speaking, and she smiled faintly as she looked him in his eyes. “What a pity that your brother had exams and couldn’t get leave.”
“It’s fine,” he found himself saying. Each of his hands were full with the plastic grips of two of the three pieces of luggage, the leather strap of the third pulled hard against a shoulder, and his left foot was poised against the stainless-steel baggage cart that held his luggage. (His trunks had been taken to the freight cars one long hour before.) He felt comfortable in his clothes, and in his skin. “I said good-bye to him before he left for the bus, and, well, we can always talk on the phone, or write in letters. Or,” he continued, “talk in person when I come home on vacation.”
His father took placed his right hand on his son’s shoulder. His father’s hand, he knew, was creased only by age, not by manual labour; that, he realized, was indisputable evidence of his father’s prerogatives. “And you’ll do that, now.” His father inhaled again, and he saw that belly be drawn inwards, just as the whistle sounded.
“I have to go,” he said again. Quickly, he turned around and dropped the bags, the one after the other, upon the cart, and turned back again to his parents. “I guess that I’ll see you–I’ll phone to let you know when I get there.” He walked backwards a step, and he felt his fingers reach backwards to grasp the cart’s handle. “And so, see you later.”
He turned around again and repositioned his fingers about the handle, and quickly began to stride away from his parents, towards the passenger car with its door open and the ridged dirty metal stairs unfolded to the cement siding. There was a conductor standing by the door, who reached over to the cart and picked up the top suitcase.
“You’ll take the bottom bog,” the conductor said in an easy metropolitan accent, “and I’ll show you to your seat.” The conductor lifted the bag up, towards his breast, and he grunted quietly as he carefully climbed the narrow steps followed by the son (not any more) who tried, just as he got up to the top step, to turn and wave. It was a narrow corridor, though, that led to the passenger seats, and he could not turn around, so he simply had to keep on walking, following the bobbing blue-clothed back of the conductor through the rows of high-backed seats covered with imitation leather.
There were two seats to either side of the corridor, he noticed, and each pair of chairs was turned to face another pair to create a square of chairs. Most of the seats were filled, mostly with people his age, or perhaps somewhat older. In the middle of the car, he stopped for a moment and tried to bend down to look through the window to see if his parents were still out there, but that was the moment that the conductor chose to stop walking.
“Your seat, sir,” the conductor said as he planted the suitcase on top of one of the seats. The imitation leather on the seat seemed to be smoothly worn, and it reflected the light from the bulb overhead only dully. “Refreshments are three cars that way,” he pointed in the opposite direction, “and you’ll need to display your identity card to get served at the bar–if,” he emphasized with a grin, “you’re of legal age.” The conductor tipped the brim of his cap forward with his index finger and slowly began to turn around. “Anything else I can help you with?”
“No,” he said automatically. “You’ve been too kind, thank you–”
“I’ll help you put the luggage in the overhead compartments,” the conductor interrupted. He pivoted back towards the passenger and reached up with his hand (worn not like my father’s) to tap an odd little mechanical-looking clutch attached to a plastic panel. The conductor pressed down on the clutch, and the panel slowly rose towards the roof of the cab, carving out a quarter-circle in the air as it did so.
“You can only have one bag at a time outside of the overhead compartment–can you pass it to me,” the conductor while he carefully took the hard-sided traveler’s case from its spot on his seat and placed it in the open compartment.
“Um, sure,” he nodded dumbly. He quickly judged which of the two bags was more important–the one in his hand had the magazines he had taken to read on the trip, but the other by his shoulder contained a slim book of a foreigner’s translated poems that was less scandalously interesting than the magazines, but it was more impressive to passersby, so that one would stay–and passed the loser to the conductor.
“My thanks,” he said to the civil servant with a polite nod when the clutch snapped back into place and locked the compartment, and then, he took his seat and listened to the steps of the conductor move away.
It was not a window seat and he could not see his parents through the window, but then the window was so smudged that he likely couldn’t see them if they were standing dangerously close to the trimly-painted metal. Besides, someone was sitting in the seat between himself and the window. (Not on the seats across from him, though; it looked like no one would sit there.)
“Hello,” he said to the girl. Woman, he corrected himself; it was far better not to slip into the vernacular than to risk a miscommunication.
The girl–woman–took a moment to recognize him, perhaps because, he considered, she was deep in thought. She turned in her seat and smiled a genteel smile. “Hello yourself,” she said in her metropolitan accent as her left hand reached up and smoothed her short straight red hair. “I’m Maya.”
Maya had an oval face, he noticed in a moment, and eyes that were an interesting shade of deep blue framed by long eyelashes.
“When did you board the train,” he managed to say.
“A half-hour ago,” she replied. Maya smiled again, a friendly smile, what his father would call a man’s smile. “I wanted to make sure that no one would take my seat, and as it turned out, no one did.”
“That’s good,” he carefully said. He self-consciously ran his hand over his hair. “I just got on–I’m going to work, you see, intern in the capital. Officework, in legal.”
“Really?” she said with polite interest. “And the train is an inexpensive way to travel, besides which you get to see the parts of the countryside that you’d never see otherwise. Even if the seats,” she smiled briefly, “are stiff and uncomfortable.”
“Exactly,” he said. Carefully, he turned his torso towards her, placing his weight against the curve of his elbow on his armrest, just a quarter-metre away from her own–He shifted his weight in his seat and unobtrusively tried to flatten his rumpled tie. “And why are you traveling on the train? I mean, where are you travelling from?”
“Oh,” she began carelessly, “I was at the university, helping them out with their anti-war movement, the anti-nuclear movement. I was helping the local organization select the posters and the delegations to send in–a few students, ten or so,” Maya briefly frowned, “are driving in a caravan to the city. Now that I’m done, I’m traveling alone.”
“The anti-nuclear movement?” He blinked for a moment. “What is that like?”
“It can be scary,” Maya confessed. “To know what would happen if one, well, went off. It was nice, you know, to be in a province for a month that isn’t on the top of the targeting lists. At least, not the lists that we know about.”
He arched his eyebrows. “Odd, I haven’t thought of the province like that.”
“And you’re lucky,” she said emphatically. “The city, now, if it’s targeted, will be razed if even a single one hits. They say, you know, that the terrain here can serve as protection against all but the largest blasts.” She tapped the window, just as he felt the train begin to move forward on the track, and the smudged landscape outside blurred further.
“I didn’t know that,” he found himself saying to her. “I didn’t know, to be honest, how big the blast radii are.”
“Most people don’t,” she said with a grimace. She didn’t slosh her red wine around in the glass; rather, the train shuddered briefly as its body hit some obstruction in the tracks and her glass rattled along with it, leaving the inertia of the cheap but effective vintage to create the illusion of the liquid sloshing about in its cup. When they had both had ordered red wine from the bartender–a poor fellow tending towards middle age with a thin beard that did nothing to conceal his multiple chins–the man had warned them about it the train’s nasty habit of shaking moveable objects down onto the floor. “But then, we don’t want to think about that.”
The train bar was cheap-looking and made almost entirely out of shiny stainless steel, save for the synthetics that covered the bar stools, but the overhead lights had dimmed and the glare was less. After the bartender had given them their tall glasses they went to one of the window seats, with two modern-styled metal chairs mounted to the floor of the car and to either side of a table that folded out from the wall of the cab, just below a plate-glass window.
After that, Maya began to talk about her life. It was true that she came from a good stolid bourgeois family, and that she herself had been stolidly bourgeois and content with aspirations for a professional career. It was only when she saw a diorama of the city dissected by a nuclear blast that Maya changed her mind about all that and looked up the campus chapter of the anti-nuclear front. From that one involvement, she shamelessly confessed, she had gone on to try to become someone important in that movement, which she plainly felt that she did.
“We live in a world that can end, quickly, over a single night, if someone wants to,” Maya passionately said over the hum of the train over rails. “We live in a world that can be made a nightmare if the wrong people get in power. We want to deny that, but if we do, we’ll be doomed.”
“You know,” he slowly said, “even before I got on this train, I knew that people don’t want to think about what would happen if the bombs fell. We don’t want to think about after,” he said as he looked out of the window. Only now had night begun to fall, and in the distance, ahead of the next bend in the tracks, he could see the city’s lights shining above the horizon. “You’ve got it absolutely right.”
“Yes.” Maya looked at him kindly from across the table, and despite the distracting distant rattle below them. “When I saw you come on board, with your expensive business suit and gelled hair, I was half-expecting you to be a brainless whelp of a businessman who’d prefer nuclear craziness to dialogue.” Suddenly, Maya laughed. “If I had not seen you reading that Czech’s poems, I’d never have known that you had a sensitive mind of your own.”
“Why,” he cried out with a hand above his heart (and inside his jacket, but outside his dress shirt), “such a cruel thing to say to such a new friend!” They laughed a bit at that, so much that he almost spilled his wine on his jacket when the train hit a bump and his off-guard hand almost didn’t clench in time to hold the glass firmly to the table’s surface. “But a fair assessment, I suppose.”
“Yes. It was a relief, you know, to see you reading that Czech’s poetry,” Maya replied. “It was nice to know that you thought them to be human beings.”
“I respect genius wherever it is found,” he said with a flourish of his hand (that hand not holding down the glass). That book–or to be more precise, eleven poems from that book–had been assigned to him in one of his undergraduate courses, and at the time he had read only the dozen poems that he and his fellow students had been assigned. Since then, on occasion he had taken the book down off of its perch and read a poem to pass an idle moment, but he had never finished the book. No matter that it had been proclaimed to him a collection that he must read, he always had better things to do. He never felt guilty about that lack.
He knew–as Maya apparently did not–that the Czech was indeed from an enemy nation, but said man had the luck to defect at a relatively early age. He now taught his homeland’s literature in one of the sunny campuses by the warm blue sea and the bleached sand. The poet was a half-enemy, at very best, he knew, and he knew that she didn’t know, not for sure; he hadn’t felt the need to correct her initial impression when he let her hand fall on his in surprise, when she glanced at the book cover.
Between Maya and the wine, he didn’t have a chance yet to set to reading the poems. Feeling the vibrations of the train, he found that he didn’t particularly care.
“I do feel that way, too,” Maya said. The train began to go around the bend, the final bend before they arrived at the outskirts of the great city, and for a moment her eyes reflected the city lights. The city shone brightly just as evening came to an end, and the sunset’s red light was everywhere. “That’s why I’m in the anti-nuclear movement–I don’t want to die, I don’t want any of us to die, and I don’t want any of them to die.”
“That’s a very humane sentiment,” he said to her. “I agree with that.”
“It is sad,” she continued as her eyes met his and she lifted her glass to her lips, “that our generation–the generation that knows the truth about the universality of humanity, about the vast and varied accomplishments of our past and our contemporaries–might be the one that sees its own extermination. We deserve much better than that.”
“I agree with that, too,” he whispered. “I deserve better, you deserve better–we’re just starting out.”
“Yes.” She paused for a moment, and looked down at the three-quarters-empty glass of wine. Idly, she hit her index finger against the glass’ base; he fancied that he could hear its high tinkle. “We are, aren’t we?”
“Quite.” Just as he turned away from her face’s elegant oval to look out the window, a high concrete wall suddenly appeared before him and moved, features blurring at incredible speed as it expanded to cover the entire scene. “This is the wall, I take it, that the conductor told us marks just another half-hour to the station.”
“It is,” Maya agreed with a distantly pleasant tone in her voice. A new hum made itself audible, a sound that–he thought–a heavy object might make if it was drawn over a grate. “We probably should be getting back to our seats, and get ready to leave.”
“I’d say so,” he said. He pulled his jacket down from his shoulders, towards his waist; just as his glass began to teeter close to the edge he made his hands jump out and hold it down against the table. “What will you be doing tomorrow?”
She turned away from the window suddenly, then, towards him. He pulled his jacket down again, with one hand this time. “I’ll be taking part in the protest,” she calmly said. “It will be beginning, before the parliament buildings, at 1 o’clock.”
“I see.” He paused again, and swallowed. “You have accommodations?”
“Yes, my roommates have kept my place in my apartment open. At least, I hope they did.” Maya laughed again; this time, he couldn’t help but think that her sound was more throaty. “And you?”
“I’ve got an agreement with a landlady for a three-room apartment,” he replied with a grin. The apartment–inexpensive, well-located, partly-furnished, an entirely adequate apartment for someone newly moved away–had been a wonderful find, and he let his satisfaction leak into his voice. “I don’t have to show up there until the day after tomorrow, though.” Quickly, he lifted his glass to his lips with one hand and gulped down the rest of the wine. “My job doesn’t begin for another week.”
“Really?” She looked directly at him from across the table, through the stray strands of hair. “I’ll be meeting one of my roommate at the station, and we’ll drive down to the apartment, but she isn’t staying–she’s got another project to do. A human-rights group, you know, another protest.”
“Ah.” At the end of the table, inconveniently close to the cold hard steel of the wall, was a kind of elastic slot into which something with a narrow base–like a wine glass, he supposed–could be inserted and held. “That’s a good thing to be involved with.”
“Yes, I’d suppose it is,” she nodded. There was still a centimetre or two of wine left, but she put her glass into the elastic slot without a last sip, and Maya began to crawl sideways out of the seat. “Would you like to meet her?”
“I would,” he nodded. He began to inch out of the seat, and he looked up to see her offer her right hand. He took it. “Very much.”
“Then,” she smiled, “let’s go.” And so, they walked down through the cars, between the clots of hurrying people in the narrow corridors, across the gritty and ridged metal connectors between cars, finally into their original car, and their own seats. Their daypacks were still sitting on the cheap synthetic-leather seats, where they had left them hours before, along with his own outdoors coat.
They sat next to each other in their seats in companionable silence. When the train stopped, they closed (she zippered, he buttoned) their coats up and took their luggage. Maya had taken onto the train only her carry-on bag, so she offered to carry his third bag for him, the one that held his magazines.
Their car had only a single exit, and they were far from it, so it was almost ten minutes before they were able to escape into the cool air above the concrete siding underground, and begin to walk towards the escalators. Back home, he might have had fun and tried to climb up the stairs as they ascended, but these escalators were too crowded, and besides he doubted that she’d like to run beside him, and so he stayed still on a single step as the step rose, through the floor of the station, to the elegant tiles at ground level, and the cathedral skylight high above, with the white light shining down on the debarkees.
“Follow me,” she told him as she stepped off of the escalator. “We’ll go to pick up your baggage, and get a cart. Do you want to take the baggage with you …” Her voice trailed off.
“Does the station have an overnight baggage check?” (His voice sounded small to him, and the noises so loud.)
“Yes, they do,” Maya smiled; she was walking ahead of him, but she had turned the corners of her mouth up, or at least the left corner that he could see trying to catch up to her. “Decent fees, too.”
“That’s good,” he’d said.
They came to the rubber conveyor belt, or at least something close enough to rubber. He watched curiously as all the baggage came down through the shredded black plastic strips hanging over the hole that led to the freight cars, all colours (most brown, black, or intermediate shades), shapes (usually a cube or a three-dimensional rectangle), sizes (most at least a half-metre long along their major axis). His baggage came as it had boarded the train at noon, all in a single cluster that fit handily on two carts.
“I’m going to meet her by the coffee shop,” she said as she led the way. “The baggage check is on the way, and you can leave it there. You have cash, right?”
“Oh, yes.” He patted his back pants pocket for comfort with a free hand; the cart momentarily veered to the right and nearly hit her ankles. His heart fluttered when he thought that he didn’t feel it, but a second later he did feel it. No pickpockets got me yet.
“Good.” Again, he saw the upturned corner of her mouth that showed she was smiling. “I think I’d like to show you the demonstration, among other things.”
Maya’s friend looked a bit like her, with Maya’s same oval face but a different colour of skin and a longer outdoors coat. Her friend had greeted Maya with a hug; her friend had greeted him with a polite glance and a handshake, and a passing comment that he didn’t quite catch.
Her friend’s car was parked in a multi-level parking garage that had been built next to the station, though at a lower height–the train station had been built, a century ago, on the last bit of high ground before the drop to sea level, and the parking garage was built on those same heights. He had read that in a tourist’s guide that he had ordered from one of the city government’s bureaux, long before he had left.
The car was small, and painted a uniform bright red. It was an import from one of the economic-miracle countries, a “lower-market-echelon car” if he remembered the magazine’s phrasing correctly. The car moved quickly, though; it made turns that were almost right angles, even at its owner’s preferred high speeds.
Oddly, the city wasn’t quite as impressive at night as he had thought from the pictures that he had seen before. The driver sat in front, like Maya, and the two women talked. He sat in the back seat, though, alongside the luggage, and he looked out of the triangular window to his right at the monoliths. The lights were on in the great glassy hulks, and he knew that if he was looking at this from a different angle–from the sea, from an airplane, from a penthouse–it would be impressive. The city still didn’t look like anything different from back home, though.
Maya’s apartment tower, all in grey concrete and surrounded by grass that looked half-dead even at night under the brilliant yellow parking lights that flooded the stopped car, didn’t look different. Her friend had stopped, embraced her, and waited just long enough for him to take his daypack and her one bag out of the back seat before she drove away. Carefully, they walked down the dark-grey (dark in moonlight) sidewalk of concrete panels, he behind her, until they came to the plate-glass door.
Maya opened it with a key that she took out of her jacket pocket, and stepped inside. She held open the plate-glass door with a single hand, standing behind the door, waiting for him to confidently stride in. He did, daypack in his left hand and the cool metal handle of the door in his right hand, and he walked beside her, past the potted plants and the tarnished metallic mailboxes, shoes hitting the floor, towards the elevator.
The elevator doors opened with a slight creak, and they stepped inside (she first). Slowly, the elevator car rose, and they chatted in the dim elevator lights about minor things–the latest pop records on the charts, a book that he had read, a album that she had bought–before the elevator came to a creaking halt, twenty-one stories up.
The doors opened, and the brown-carpeted corridor stretched out before them.
She went to the first door to the left, fumbled with her key, and opened it. She stood inside the apartment, waiting for him to come in. Just as he did, she turned on the lights.
It was a simple apartment, with a simple collection of used furniture (most covered in an out-of-date plaid or synthetic leather), oversized art prints and movie posters on the wall, and not too disorganized.
“Nice place,” he managed to say.
“Yes, isn’t it?”
After, in the early morning, he sat cross-legged in front of the television. She was in her room, sleeping. The television’s cathode-ray tube lit the front room–the bright whites and blues gave the most light, he noticed, the darker colours less.
Maya’s apartment had a videotape player. Maya had told him, after, that they were going to be playing some videos of selected post-apocalyptic districts, most Cambodian. “To give people an idea of what might happen,” she had said perched on her elbows in bed. “To let them know what’s at stake.”
Maya had pointed out the videos, before, all neatly labeled and lined in a row; she said that they were copies of the originals that were to be played at the demonstration, her personal copies. “You might want to take a look at one of them,” she had continued, under the dim lights, “They’re important.”
There is not much to see, he thought to himself, nothing but small temples, small marketplaces, legacies of the killing fields.
With a cinematist’s eye he noted that the camera swiveled around on its base.
There was a man, dressed in blindingly-white tourist garb, who was standing in the middle of a field–perhaps a drained rice field?–and fringed with palm trees, or coconut trees, or something else tropical. In the middle of that field, hard by the outstretched left hand and solemn face of the (rich, white, fat) tourist, sat a mountain of skulls.
He couldn’t remember whether the skulls showed any particular signs of decay, although he was sure that at least a few of the skulls that the video screen had shown in close-up might have had their temples caved in. (The loose shards of bone on the ground before the mound were suggestive.) He hated that mental images–all of those people (a fearful woman, a mercifully young child, a bourgeois who, all considered, might have been me) forced to kneel, perhaps held down by a human or animal (the categories were blurred), waiting for a single swift killing blow–If only not, if only a lie, an error.
There was no reason to doubt that fact–all of the different news reports had confirmed that particular element. As he remembered them, the articles were written in a terse prose that, in other circumstances, might have been considered paradigms of literary style; as it was, the reports and their authors described in unimpeachable detail how, after the revolutionaries began to worry that they might begin to run out of bullets, they used pickaxes to execute the enemies of the people. When their exasperated neighbours had invaded, though, it seemed that they had apparently run out of bullets (and pickaxes, even) regardless of their laudable efforts at conservation. The video lit the room in an odd kind of way.
“At least most of the landmines have been removed,” the intermittent resonant-voiced narrator said as the tourist circled around the pile and almost tripped on a loose femur, “while decontamination proceeds apace– ”
The video screen focused in on the image of the man, showing him take a rain-cleaned white skull into his flabby hand, carefully gauge its weight, and lightly throw it into the air and catch it like a rubber ball. He had stared at that image, in this safe bourgeois room, and he felt his breath snag on his Adam’s apple. A bat now, perhaps a femur, perhaps B
It was then that he fled the apartment, without his daypack, without his outdoors coat, even without his other jacket. He went down on the elevator, and ran through the lobby (still the same potted plants) at high speed, to outside, just as day dawned.
He walked more slowly outside. The air wasn’t fresh–it seemed old to him, somehow musty.
As he passed the corner, he noticed that the sidewalks in very early morning light, here, seemed to have the same translucency as pearl, or porcelain.
***
He had come back to the apartment tower before the sun had risen. He had walked for a half-hour, down the white concrete panels of sidewalk, towards the sea.
There was dirt on the pavement, he noticed, much the same kind of dirt that littered sidewalks back home. As he scraped the soles of his shoes on the ground, he noticed that the dirt was streaked, that it had ran down the sidewalk. It had rained overnight; that, or morning dew was particularly heavy. He didn’t remember hearing rain the previous night with Maya, but then, there was something of a morning chill that he could feel through his thin white dress shirt, and he frankly doubted that the city’s latent heat–latent, he had to remind himself when the images of the skulls came to mind, from factories and cars and homes and black pavement’s absorption, and other ordinary things, not fire, not apocalypse–would allow for dew.
So, rain it was.
He hadn’t seen the street very well on the drive from the station; he had seen only enough, from the middle of the street, to know that towering apartment blocks lined the route. He had come, scarcely a few hundred metres away from Maya’s tower, to a three-way intersection not yet busied by early-morning commuter traffic, and he looked in the direction of the station. The dark-grey of concrete was visible, even in the faint light of dawn, stretching to the horizon.
It was in that instant that he decided to cross the street, to the corner store on the other side with its bright neon lights. He might not have crossed at all had he not squinted and seen the dim yellow store lights, partly obscured by what he thought must have been advertising placards of one sort or another but still extant. It wasn’t yet six o’clock, but then, the corner stores of metropoli were supposed to be open even at this early hour. What would it cost him to cross?
He pressed with his thumb a rubber button indented into the white machined metal of a traffic light pole, and looked up at the signs. He could still see that damnable red icon on the shoulder-height display before him, and for a moment he considered pressing the button again–his thumb was still on the button, and it wouldn’t have cost him anything to push it, but then he recalled from some distant corner of his memory the datum that these buttons effectively worked only once and halted.
It took only a minute, leaning though he was onto the chill metal pole and feeling his warmth seep out through his damnably thin shirt, for the light to change. As he passed over the white-painted striped pedestrian corridor, he looked to his left towards the apartment tower. As he trod across the street, he saw the tower to be just as serenely quiet as it was in the late evening, even as he walked across the uncracked rough surface of the pavement past the three vehicles B two automobiles and one truck, all of domestic make B that idled as the lone pedestrian crossed in front of them.
The air, he thought, still smelled old–perhaps it was already beginning to fill up with the fumes from a million motor vehicles and dozens of industrial plants, or it had never managed to purify itself over a night’s respite. He had smelled that same kind of vague corruption in the air back home only a few times, when there was a lot of fog and hardly any wind either to or from the sea. He’d have to get used to the smog here.
The red icon appeared at the traffic meter on the opposite side of the street just as he stepped onto the sidewalk here. Behind him, he heard the once-idling vehicles tear away from their forced halt, just as he saw that the corner store’s door was indeed marked with an open sign. He pressed down on the door handle and pushed the door open.
“Hello,” the clerk said. The clerk was an older man, with a thin fringe of white hair surrounded a pinkish face. He looked to be white, but his speech was lightly accented in a way that he didn’t recognize. “Can I help you?”
“Yes,” he fumbled. He craned his neck to look around at the cluttered interior B to his left were the aisles of groceries, to his right the dispensers of soda pop and snack foods, ahead, the counter with its assorted pens and breath mints in their holders and newspapers in their wire racks. He walked towards the counter, and reached for his wallet in his back pocket. Again he felt his heart leap as he didn’t immediately find it; again he felt its racing slow down as his fingers touched the leather. “Do you have any provincial newspapers?” he asked the clerk.
“Yes,” the clerk said as he took his right hand and rapped one of the wire racks, one that was almost as high as the clerk himself. “All of the out-of-city papers are in this rack. As for the provincial ones …” The man’s head ducked back behind the cash register. “We only have the Courier in–the other papers come in later.”
“Okay,” he said, “that’s fine.” He squatted down and began to examine the titles neatly embossed on the metal strips at the front of the racks. He craned his neck up, until he saw Provincial Courier and stood up and took a paper B a thick one, as was the Courier’s wont on weekends–from between the narrow gap of thin plastic-sheeted wires. He carefully placed that Courier on the smudged plastic counter, and reached over to another rack, to extract a couple of the local daily papers. These were even thicker.
“How much is it?” he asked the clerk. The clerk did not respond immediately; he simply tapped a few buttons on his new electronic cash register, and named the figure that appeared on the electronic screen. He put away his wallet, and rooted in his pocket for the change required. He placed it on the counter, and waited as the clerk counted it up.
“Thank you,” the foreigner finally said. “Please come again.”
He stood there dumbly for a moment; the clerk repeated, patiently, “Please come again.”
“Are there any motels around?” he suddenly asked. He felt the sweat bead on his palms. “Hotels, inns, anything?”
“Sorry,” the clerk frowned. “Nothing in walking distance. Why do you ask?”
The walk back to Maya’s apartment tower was quick, now that he knew his way. It was brighter outside, now B the light on the sidewalk seemed to be, despite the dirt, to be stronger. He glanced at the windshields of the cars, and he saw the sunlight refracted against the tinted glass. It was still cool, but he was quickly striding now B not running, as such ran the risk of scuffing his new shoes for the office, but walking with a metronomic stride towards her apartment building.
When he arrived at the tower’s outer doors, he pushed them open. He had tried to charge through the inner doors, but these were locked. It was then that he cursed his stupidity, and went looking at the panel of buttons. The panel was to his right, and filled with bright red buttons, buzzers that were placed below the numbers of different apartments and which were, in turn, arrayed around what must have been a speaker or a microphone covered by a metal grate.
He remembered her number, so he thought of a brief prayer and pressed her apartment’s button. “Hello,” he said awkwardly. He was almost leaning against the speaker, the newspapers awkwardly held by their edges in his left hand, her buzzer still depressed by his right pinkie.
The inner doors moved open position, and he sighed as he jumped through them, into the lobby. There had been track lights, the previous night, that had been set to shine dimly. Now, they were shining brightly as he walked towards the elevator; they shone with almost the same intensity as the noontime sun. The light hurt his eyes.
“I’d woke up just a few minutes after you had left,” Maya said pleasantly enough. “I’ve been waiting for my buzzer to sound.”
She was wearing what looked to be a comfortable terry-cloth bathrobe, coloured pink, and her short hair was still glistening from her shower. She had been waiting at the door for him; when she pulled the door open, he noticed the tell-tale reflections of the heap of skulls playing against the posters.
“Those images are powerful,” he shrugged. He looked down at his shoes, and he kicked at imaginary dirt on the carpet. “Are they two powerful?”
“They are,” she said seriously. She looked directly at him and continued, “That’s why they’re going to be shown. Cambodia is the closest we’ve come to an apocalypse B and we know that if it does happen, Cambodia will be paradise next to our country, or next to all of our neighbours.” She showed the tips of the teeth when she smiled. “It’s worthy inspiration.”
“So,” he nodded, “the rally is still scheduled for one o’clock?”
“It’s still going on,” she said confidently. “Unless I’ve been out of the loop, there’s only a dozen provincials coming,” she frowned briefly, “excluding you. There’s more than enough people from the city to fill the plaza. We were planning on a quarter-million people there B maybe more.”
“Wow,” he said as he blinked. (Do I mean that?)
“We’ve got everyone–writers, poets, journalists, musicians–there’s going to be an open-air concert. And you know, there’s even going to be a new poem read by your province’s leading poet. ‘It is far better, to be barren, than to abort. Do not live, knowing, what is lost. We need not …’ Maya turned her head and smiled at him. “How does it sound?”
“A bit overwrought, perhaps, and will some of your more radical allies go along with that first line?” He quickly smiled. “It’s effective, though.”
“Yeah, I know–hat’s why we invited him. Here,” Maya happily said with the shock of recognition as she turned towards the counter and picked up a loose paper sheet. “I’ve got the entire poem here,” she smiled as she held out the paper. “Read it, will you?”
***
Appendix: 1
the sage Irishman
was wrong:
deprive one of
love and life
and you do mercy for he
whose love and
life are ended
it is far better
to be barren
than to abort
(do not live
knowing
what is lost)
we need not
swift wind
to melt our humble bones
let it end just once
there is no more need
the soft breath
of nuclear frost
the silent settling
of cities’ dust
the perpetual
deathly chill
fear not futurity:
it is not for us
grave’s silence is comfort
for all
needs are flesh
take our meat
Moloch’s
fine new food
his new children
let us be brief
children of hot light
***
After he read the poem, he was still in Maya’s apartment, sitting on the plaid couch in front of the television with her torso cradled in his arms, watching the skull heap video. The overly plump tourist was still strolling around the bleached white pile, occasionally bending down and picking up another skull to gaze Hamlet-like into the sockets, or to balance in the palm of his sweaty pale hand.
The video’s colours seemed off, now, he thought to himself, they seemed vaguely flatter or duller than the real thing–red was but a dark shade of pink, the tourist’s white T-shirt was gray, the bleached skulls seemed pale. He had thought about mentioning that to her, but he decided that it was just the video quality, here, and nothing more.
Maya had just gotten up from the couch, stretching her tired limbs, and she pulled a knitted sweater that lay on the kitchen table down over her bra when the buzzer sounded.
“It’s probably our driver,” she grinned as she turned back towards him, decent now. “She’s come to pick us up.” Maya strolled quickly towards the panel by the door, and pressed the button. His eyes followed her long tanned strong legs across the room.
“I’ll go into my room to finish getting dressed,” Maya called out, voice echoing from her bedroom into which she had darted. “Can you let her in when she comes in?”
“Sure,” he called back. He walked towards the cheap plastic kitchen table and picked up his black dress jacket off the chair back that he had left it the night before. He put his arms through the sleeves, and breathed silently in relief as he felt the warm dense fabric cover the chilled sleeves of his dress shirt. “No problem.”
He was smoothing down by hand the creases left in his black jacket when he heard the ping of the elevator’s opening through the thin apartment door. He heard her friend walking heavily down the thin-carpeted hallway in what must have been heavy clogs, and she knocked, hard, on the door.
When he opened the door, her hand was raised high in mid-knock, or in salute. For a moment, he fancied that she was about to bring her hand down on his head. There was a certain look in her eyes, perhaps something proprietary.
“Are you coming with us,” the driver said stiffly. “Or are you taking a taxi to wherever you’re going?”
He flashed a quick grin, what his friends (and at least one girlfriend) called his winning smile. “I’ll be coming down with you. After all, this is my world, too.”
It was then that Maya appeared out of the bedroom, brown plastic valise in hand and tan slacks on her legs. “Well, shall we get going?”
There was much more traffic on the road now, in mid-morning under the bright sunshine, than he saw in his early morning stroll, or even late the previous night. She sat in the back seat with him; the driver stared fixedly ahead, driving stolidly ahead.
He had kissed Maya’s cheek when the driver reached down to grasp a lever and signal that they were turning left. He thought that the driver saw his kiss B the rear-view mirror did look upon the back seat, and the unexpected surge of acceleration that had jolted her against him didn’t seem to have been caused by anything in the traffic.
He and Maya had kissed again–more romantically, this time, though at no slower speed than before–as the car barreled down the residential street. Carefully, he took her fingers from their grip on his lapel, and shifted his weight back towards his seat.
He turned to look out the passenger’s seat window to his right, and saw, through the triangular glass, all of the vehicles B the battered delivery vans with dirty mudflaps, small and shiny familiar imported compact cars, larger conservative family sedans in browns and greys, sleek gunmetal city buses B shifting forwards and backwards at seeming will on the pavement, past the buildings. There were more, now, than he had seen on his walk from her apartment.
This kind of rush hour traffic was not unfamiliar to him in most respects; it was unfamiliar to him only in its quantity. Maya, though, tapped his neck as he looked out and made him jump. When he craned his head back towards her, startled, he saw her smiling. “There’s a lot more travelers on the road, today, more than I’ve ever seen before. I’d bet you that everyone is heading for the plaza.” He saw through her passenger window a bus pass by. From what he could see, the bus passengers were uniformly young.
“The plaza,” he muttered. “That old scene?” She nodded; he continued.
“You know, there have been revolutions that began on that plaza, fairs held, going back for who knows how long … And now, this.” He shrugged. “Do you think that they’ll remember it for as long?”
“They will,” the driver interrupted. He started as the driver spoke in her calm steady voice from the front seat. “If they don’t, it’s because we’ll all have died and there won’t be anyone left to remember.”
He turned awkwardly away to look out the window, just in time to see a vast edifice of bleached concrete and glass pass. With a start, he recognized the building. How could he not, when so many photos had been taken of it and video filmed before it? He tried to look up, craning his face up against the passenger window, but he could see only the first few floors, not the unmistakable spire.
“You can’t see the tower from the ground,” Maya told him. “Even if you were outside, you just couldn’t–it’s too high.” She reached out and gently touched his left arm. “It’s difficult for someone provincial to get used to, isn’t it?”
“Swift wind to melt our humble bones,” the poet chanted, “let it end just once, there is no more need.”
Standing in the crowd not too far from the stage, he heard the poet’s deep voice resound, magnified, through the great loudspeakers positioned on the elevated stage via the microphone that he saw just in front of the poet. The man had a white fringe of a beard, and an annoying habit of pause to take a drink (of wine? water? beer? something more exotic?) or to puff a cigarette, or to do something with his mouth.
“The soft breath of nuclear frost, the silent settling of cities’ dust, the perpetual deathly chill,” the man continued after an annoying pause.
The voice echoed, off the sheer-faced towers that completely enclosed the plaza, off the flagstones and pavement that covered most of the plaza’s surface, and B so he fancied B off of the heads of the demonstrators, or concert-goers, or curiosity seekers, who filled the plaza. It certainly had to echo off of the hard body armor and plastic visors of the riot police who hemmed in the plaza from every side, standing stiff, at attention.
Maya had left him, after the driver had parked the car and the three had safely crossed the line of riot police. She had grasped him by the shoulders, as her driver looked on and the people kept milling through.
“I’ll see you after the demonstration is over,” she had said happily. “I’ll meet you at the café down the street, see, there.” She pointed towards the umbrellas wearing their printed insignia of various drinks, on the sidewalk barely visible through the crowds milling on that sidewalk and the adjacent street. “We’ll meet, we’ll talk–I’d be interested to know what you thought of that, and, well …” Maya had stopped talking then; she gave him a peck on the cheek and quickly walked off.
“Let us be brief children of hot light,” the poet grimly uttered. He saw the man step away from the microphone.
He clapped then, as was only polite, but he could not hear his own claps for the thunderstorm that surrounded him. He almost imagined that it was truly storming; certainly the white clouds that covered the sky and made the ground dark suggested that.
“And now,” the poet jumped hastily forward one last time, “time for music.”
The poet stepped back from the microphone just as a long note B electronic and high-pitched B sounded. He looked to the poet’s left, then to the poet’s right, and it was to the poet’s right that he saw two people. There was a long-haired tanned blonde in a costume with revealing cleavage standing in front of a synthesizer, which itself had a man dressed in what seemed to be black plastic standing behind it.
“This song,” the blonde said in a soft voice, “is one that we wrote especially for this occasion.” She turned and nodded at the man, and the music began.
The notes were electronic, all produced by synthesizers that were (he was almost sure) programmed by the musicians to delay each note’s fading. The beat was metronomic; the synthesized notes reverberated. The blonde’s soprano voice was high-pitched, and sounded frail; he knew, though, that this type of vocals was de rigeur for this genre of music.
“We’ll go nowhere, baby,” the vocalist chanted, “And I’m so scared.”
The speakers were all arrayed at chest level, and he imagined with a thrill that he could see the dense-packed sound waves rippling through the distorted atmosphere. He felt the metronomic beat thumping in his rib cage, pulsing in sync to his heart beat, or slightly off, his shirt vibrating. He had felt that thump from speakers before B at a graduate’s ball, in discothèques B but not once outside in the air, with a cool breeze blowing past high glass towers.
“We’ll fear the future, my love/It’s just not fair.”
Then, the music stopped abruptly, and he heard the others applauding all around him. He saw the vocalist bend in a bow over the concert-goers’ heads, and the thunderstorm began again.
“And now,” she said with a flourish of her hands, “time for the die-in.” It was then that she fell backwards, onto the painted black plywood that covered the stage, and it was then that the screams began.
After, there were people lying contorted on the pavements. Most were silent; others moaned quiet inchoate noises; some had their hands held up to their eyes, to block the killing light.
The others were screaming. As he stumbled across the smooth polished stones, he heard the shrieks resounding from every direction. He saw a flock of birds rise into the air with barely audible flutters, startlingly dark against the shiny plate-glass towers and white clouds.
The others ran about him in an odd kind of crawl, lurching before him. A few of these fell at his feet.
“I can’t see! God, I can’t see!” one long-haired brunette dressed in a blue-jeans jacket screamed, her hands clawing through her bangs at her eyes as she keened and fell, trembling, onto grass.
He turned his head and looked towards the row of insectoid police dozens of metres away. He thought that he saw the eyes of one of the policemen B a tall fellow, with a paunch that was visible even through a ribbed bulletproof vest B piercing through the dusky plastic eyeguards. Was the policeman staring in anger? incomprehension? at the young with sympathy? at just him with sympathy?
Slowly, he thought that he saw the policeman turn away, to talk to another cop; he turned away himself, and began walking.
He took care not to step on anyone’s head, or outstretched limbs, or hair coronae; he didn’t feel quite right, and he thought that he might have been trembling as it was.
There were a few other people like him, wandering through the sea of fallen people, dazed. He didn’t try to talk to them; he didn’t feel like doing that, not now, not when there seemed to be so much.
When the screaming had begun, he had ran towards the front of the crowd, where he knew that she was. He did, miraculously, find Maya, lying on her back on the hard cobblestones, eyes closed, like all of the other people who had slumped to the ground before them. He had taken her by the shoulders and screamed at her.
“What’s going on,” he had yelled. Maya’s eyes opened, and her face squinted in recognition. “Is it a virus? Or …” He had stopped speaking then, overcome.
“It’s a demonstration,” Maya simply said. She pointed towards the cameras, a silent audience stationed on the stage behind the collapsed singers and the poet still standing uneasily behind the microphone, shifting his weight from one leg to another. “We’re showing them what it will be like.” It was then that she closed her eyes and began to scream piercingly.
The die-in had begun almost ten minutes ago, and his ears were ringing from the screams that had, by now, ceased. He felt exposed, dressed in his good black dress suit, standing erect, in the sea of T-shirts and fallen bodies that surrounded him. He felt light-headed, and he hated the shadows that he saw, cast by the buildings and the clouds, traced in their contours on the bodies of the fallen.
Ahead of him, there was a stretch of flagstones uncovered by even a single solitary limb. He kept walking there, and then, collapsed, falling backwards onto the calves of his legs. He felt his knees hard against the flagstones, and his knees hurt, but he didn’t mind the kneeling.
Looking up, he saw some of the white clouds beginning to break, to spread apart. He closed his eyes in anticipation just as the clouds broke, and the bright lights and the wonderful searing heat hit his exposed pink cheeks and nose.
It felt so good.
