Everyone Can Live in the Building But the Architect

Paranoid, the Great Detective can trust no one, least of all himself. Who taught him to fear the Other, after all? What were they hiding about the Self? Who is he working for? Who is anyone working for? What does working mean in this instance? Who is a boss, and who is a laborer, when the only produced good is ephemeral information of, at best, dubious accuracy?

Still, and despite his best efforts, he lives in a society, if not quite a state. He speaks, because he is handed a microphone, and they listen, or at least stand on the grass in front of the podium; they cheer when he pauses, applaud when he stops for breath, laugh at what he is only dimly suspicious are jokes. He promises them anything that comes to mind: more freedom, more health, more money, more leisure; less fear, less surveillance, less linguistic drift. Progress is regression is progression, after all, like the wheel on a penny-farthing.

He tries to break away, and they are waiting with flags and banners with his face on them. He drinks himself into a stupor and tries to drown himself in a fountain, and when he awakes, face up in six inches of mondegreen water, the press is there on the pavement to get his latest statement. He plays along, and they quote him; breaks away and they cheer. When he is elected, he stabs buttons in a mania, desperate to find the one that shatters the system, that rains fire down upon this idyll.

False hope, as they all are: the power he was promised was always only ever contingent. The cap of the pyramid cannot escape the stones laid below.

Playing the Hits

Berry’s on foot, the late autumn sun beating down on his exposed head, digging its fingers into his scalp past his thinning hair. He’d kill a man for a drink of water, but instead he keeps plodding on next to the long empty strip of the highway, eyes mazed by heat shimmer off asphalt and a horizon line that stubbornly refuses to move.

Thirty miles it’s been, with twelve more to go before he comes to Bombay, deep in the Chihuahua desert. Lousy name, some remnant of an orientalizing real estate promoter with delusions that the California sprawl would reach across three states, or that the fad for yoga, dry air, and dark skies would overcome the commitment of an eight hour drive. Berry gets madder just thinking about it.

It’s a mission of love; there’s a brown eyed handsome man waiting for him in Bombay, with snake hips and chest hair curled tight as wool. He’s holding the take from the job in Wilcox, hopefully, but until Berry gets there he can’t be sure. The letters promised a lot, a new life over the border and the opportunity to square his shoulders and breathe in fully for once in his life, but Berry knows from long experience that a dollar of talk will get you one penny of action.

Lowering Skies

Everyone thinks they’re the one: the one that won’t get clipped, the one that will make the jump, the one that will hold on just that little bit longer. The burn won’t burn, the ice won’t sear. The bear will glance aside on a moonless night. There must have been a time when Judith felt that way, but she can’t remember when; just one more indulgence a professional can’t afford. Young whores are brave; old whores cultivate cowardice. Knives cut, fire burns, smoke smothers: don’t wait to find out if you’re special.

She’s been planet-hopping for a while now, unhappy with everything on offer. Stratus is the best of a bad lot, densely settled, heterogeneous, oceans the deep purple of a three day bruise. Sex sells well enough; she’s not starving anyway. She opens a second house, then a third, could see herself settling down long term. It’s all good enough.

But she’s got an ear to the ground and when the first rumbles come—the anti-intellectualism, the fear of difference, the doublespeak—she doesn’t waste time mourning, just ups stakes and departs for sunnier climes. She paid her dues in blood long ago; let others carry the sword now.

Katabasis

In the Stingaree they stand on their soapboxes and preach revolution: socialism, single tax, salvation, Christ and Marx running together in an uneasy blend to the winos, the workers, and the whores, in English, Mandarin, Spanish, Chinook, Creole. A better world to come, or a better world in this one, if you’ll convert, repent, organize, strike!

A fight’s been brewing for weeks, ever since the cops raided Wobbly Hall on Haymarket Day. The wobs won’t take that lying down, and the call’s gone out for bodies to swarm the city. Arrest one, arrest all, until the jails swell and burst, until the merchants throw up their hands and turn vigilante, until newspaper publishers drive their cars into protests, until the city forbids speaking on the street, until the governor sends a special investigator to try to corral the horsewhip boys back into line, until the cops burn down the Stingaree and drive speakers and listeners both out into the waste places. Or try to, anyway: block the roads, search the trains, drag the rivers, the Wobblies will slip in to organize.

But that’s all in the future. Now it’s just a tense, searing atmosphere that hangs over the neighborhood, hot and dry and dangerous as a Santa Ana wind. There’s nowhere to go and nothing to do but hunker down, cling tight to each other, and brace against the fires yet to come.

Wet Season, Dry Season

In the seventh year of the siege and a traveler comes up from the south, a refugee of sorts, fleeing sorrow. “They came out of the desert,” he says, and then has to stop and explain more about what he means. Children of a green land, they have seen the sea, the winedark sea, and they have heard of Egypt, of course, and the spreading sands, but after seven years the geography of everything except the area around Wilusa has gotten fuzzy. But he’s a good speaker, so there’s not a fire that isn’t happy to share a meal with him and listen to his story at the end of another day’s fighting.

“They came out of the desert,” says he, “and crossed the river. The city’s gates were closed against them—” a bitter laugh from the crowd— “but they tramped around the city—” another laugh, this one even more edged— “for seven days and nights. The music they played! A wild thing, all ram’s horns and reed flutes, the pounding of their feet keeping time. Like a voice speaking out of a whirlwind. Time seemed to slow, then stand still, then run backward. The sun blazed motionless in the sky, one day, two, three, and the walls quaked and fell and they came in among the houses with fire and sword. Men they killed, and women, and children; blood for blood, they said. We ran, from the river to the sea, we ran, and along the coast toward stranger lands. What can you do when the gods have shut their eyes to your suffering?”

The bitterest laugh of all.