Astrea’s Heirs

They were not meant to be left so long alone, the Ladies, nor the war to drag on so long. Greeted as liberators, was the hope, a sprightly little springtime war, but somehow the months turn into years and the years into decades and the front lines do not move more than six inches in a year and the horizon turns black with the swarms of uncountable flies. You cannot move through the trenches without wading hip deep in blood, or so they speculate; it has been so long since any word has come back to them, the distant thunder of the guns is the only reassurance they have that the war continues.

But life goes on: the sun rises and sets, just as it ever did, and if the city is empty of everyone but themselves, well, what of it? Do the Ladies not contain a nation within themselves? They work the factories, they till the fields, they write the songs and the novels and the plays; they are artists and artisans, servants and politicians, baseball players and cigar smokers. They form gangs in the bottomlands, pull knives on each other in the alleys, spin straw into gold and blood into oil. The empire cannot fall while they live, or so they hope.

When, through chance or misfortune, this or that soldier finds his way into their city, they raise their ears at the unaccustomed sound of a boot, drop to the ground and slink out of the darkness, coyotes from the storm drains. They value their privacy, their own society, do the Ladies, and immigrants are welcome but settlers are not.

William Fitzgerald Turns the Page

He’d been hired to find the husband, an ex-writer supposedly taking some kind of dipso cure at a dilapidated ranch, and William Fitzgerald had done it, watched the light drain back into his eyes as the opiates let go, but he wasn’t happy about it; hopheads gave him the itch. The reunion went as expected, back on the bottle as soon as he walked in, the wife’s long hair not quite covering the week-old bruise on her face, William Fitzgerald an unnoticed grotesque against the faded yellow wallpaper.

They pay him off before the screaming starts in earnest and he’s gone.

Two weeks later he reads with bored disinterest of the husband’s death by suicide and the wife’s disappearance, a lot of tumult for a rich artist’s colony, and the second in as many months. One of their neighbors along the beach had beaten his wife to death and fled the country, killed himself or been killed in a town on the west coast of Mexico. The only thing that summons a flicker of attention, for the novelty, if nothing else, is the sidebar about the matriarchal societies that still flourish in the area. William Fitzgerald has an ophidian sense of sociology at most, but somehow he doubts he’d be much appreciated in a matriarchy.

Double Business Bound

In the factories and the fields, the Gentlemen are strangers to each other. In newspaper offices and business meetings they rub elbows, trade barbs, make weekend plans, empty rituals against prying ears. The parks around the canyons and water towers are dark and anonymous after the last bus has rumbled away, and while starlight and a sliver of moon might catch on an eye, a belt buckle, a flash of teeth, what can be made of that?

But in the bars they discover each other. Fellow workers see each other for the first time in the Red Door or Cherokee House, and cross the room to grip arms, shoulders, touch knees, laugh together freely. The lighting is poor but sufficient; if the floor is sticky and the beer watered down, so be it. The owners are unmoved by talk. They police themselves, keep an eye on the door and the end of the alley, but otherwise breathe together, respire, conspire.

Out of this tumult is formed the order of the clowns. Out there, in the city under occupation, it has a grander name, pretensions toward history; but here in the yeasty womb that birthed it, the Gentlemen hold the truth close, and whisper jolly poison into every unguarded royal ear.

Season of Winds

Day 7,722

There was a fire somewhere out on the west side this week that broke free of the hoses and spread and spread through what must have been miles of empty warehouses. The sky was red and furious with smoke for days, the sun a malevolent dim orb glaring through the unbreathable air. It was the first time I’ve had all the windows shut in years, and I’ll tell you I suffered, sweltered, and sweated. The lights of firetrucks flickered up the sides of the urban canyons evening and morning for three days, and for a while I feared it might reach to my tower. Would I have to leave? Could I? I haven’t spoken to another person for so long, I have forgotten the trick of being human. Better, perhaps, to burn?

A needless worry, as it turned out; the fires were beaten down, and the sky cleared, and life went on. The cranes are up already, busy with activity in the blue haze of the summer, and in a few months, a year at most, there won’t be any sign of the buildings that burned. It has happened before, it will happen again; people, no less than ants, will rebuild and rebuild as long as they remain. In that sense we are still connected, I suppose.

When I opened the windows again today, it felt like breathing out, like this building and I stood that much straighter. The city below is green and blue, and from the lake below I can just make out the singing of the imported gondoliers.

The Baths of Saint Gellert

There’s a river that winds its way between the two cities, but the last time Cedar saw it was when she first arrived. It’s been weeks, and she must have crossed over it a dozen times or more, because the road signs change, the colors of the streetlights change, the paving stones changes, but she hasn’t seen anything but stone and brick and frosted glass underfoot. In the cafes and bars and libraries and public baths, she hears running water; the air is everywhere heavy and vibrant with moisture, but there’s no end to the concrete she can find.

She remembers bridges, but only in retrospect; when she turns back on herself to find them, they’re gone, hidden behind another gently curving row of buildings. She climbs to sit among the rooftop gardens with the birds, and off in the distance she sees the shifting reflection of sunlight on water, but each street she takes toward it curves back on itself or is shuttered by a rusted gate, a collapsed building, a pile of unmoving maintenance equipment.

The longer she looks, the fewer people she sees. When she arrived, the streets were choked with bodies, faces obscure behind upturned collars and downturned hats, eyes shining in the evening with malice or desire or good humor, but now? The streets are empty of everything save the wind, the sound of leaves against the pavement, the ghost of the river. Her footsteps echo off the buildings, double and triple themselves. Every door she tries is locked, every business newly closed.