This Used to Be a Movie Theater

As I slept in my childhood home for the last time, I had a dream. It started with a memory of conversation with my boss back when I edited books. We were in a mildly crowded coffee shop in New York. For some reason, someone was humming the theme to The Godfather, which permeated the rest of the place. We could see the ninth housing satellite from out the window, even though it was during the day. My boss was sipping her coffee while I was looking at the bank robbers escaping through the computer screen of the guy behind her.

THE IRONIC THING ABOUT HIS RESPONSE, she said in a voice that wasn’t hers, IS THAT HE CLEARLY UNDERSTOOD SOMETHING THAT MUCH OF THE WORLD MISSED. ASIDE FROM THE SUBSEQUENT (AND FUNDAMENTALLY SEPARATE) WAR ON TERROR, THE LARGEST MATERIAL EFFECT OF 9/11 WAS THE PSYCHOGEOGRAPHIC WOUND DEALT TO MANHATTAN—THE PERMANENT AND TRAUMATIC ALTERATION OF ONE OF THE MOST ICONIC SKYLINES IN THE WORLD. HE WAS A CREATURE BIRTHED FROM THAT SAME PSYCHOGEOGRAPHY AND UNDERSTOOD IT INSTINCTIVELY. BUT THIS ALSO EXPLAINS WHY 9/11 FUNDAMENTALLY DERAILED HIS APPARENT TRAJECTORY FROM 2000 TO 2016: IT BEAT HIM AT HIS OWN GAME, MANIFESTING THE ESSENCE OF THE TOWER BETTER THAN HE COULD, AND FORCING HIM TO BECOME SOMETHING MORE MONSTROUS YET BEFORE HE COULD APPEASE HIS AWFUL MASTER.

INDEED, I replied in someone else’s words. BECAUSE WHAT CAN BE MORE TRUE THAN FICTION, WHICH IS THE VERY FRAMEWORK WE CONSTRUCT TO UNDERSTAND OUR LIVES AND THE WORLD AROUND US? ALL RECEIVED KNOWLEDGE COMES TO US THROUGH SOME FORM OF STORY. SINCE ANCIENT TIMES ORAL HISTORY AND ORAL TRADITION USED MYTHOPOEA TO SYMBOLIZE THE ORIGIN AND MACHINATIONS OF THE UNIVERSE. SCIENCE CONSTRUCTS FACTS BASED ON OBSERVATION AND INFERENCE THAT TRANSLATES LOCALIZED KNOWLEDGE INTO THE LANGUAGE OF WESTERN ACADEMIA. AND HISTORY TAKES THE FORM OF A NARRATIVE WOVEN BY INVESTED PARTIES. My boss’ response took the form of turning into a wave of paperwork.

Instead of following my memory to its logical conclusion, the camera that was myself shifted to the outside the coffee shop where the screams of those drowning in paper were drowned out by sounds of the city. There, right outside the coffee shop, were two men. The older of the two men had short white hair, a sloppily kept beard, and camouflage pants. The younger wore a backpack, a ponytail, and a smug disposition that deserves, at most, a punch in the jaw. They weren’t part of the dream of a city I was having, so even though they talked, I couldn’t hear a word they said. At first, it seemed like the two men were complete strangers who had just bumped into one another. But there was a look in the eye of the older man that said otherwise. He called to the younger and, surprisingly, the man came back. There was a fury in the young man’s eyes. Not the fury of a youth squandered by forces brought about by the previous generation or the fury of difference, but rather the fury of familiarity. I could tell from the height of the man’s jaw that he was shouting at the older man. There was a snarl to whatever he was saying.

In response, the old man simply walked up to the young man and bit his neck. Strangers without distinguishable faces came and tried to separate the two, but the old man wouldn’t stop attacking the younger man. It was as if he had the strength of his youth. The young man tried to fight back, but too much repressed blood was seeping from in-between his fingers and onto the ill kept sidewalk. Two people who looked like the young man dragged him away from the old man. I flew above them as they turned into what I thought was smoke. Suddenly, everything that surrounded me seemed to be nothing more than smoke. The rectangular buildings that lacked aesthetic uniformity suddenly became a perfected fog of white. I floated up and up through the smoke until I could see the skyline of New York. I looked around for a source for the fire, but only found clouds.

While I was floating upwards, I could hear a chant without a source. It sounded like the guttural howl of a starving bear trapped in a long abandoned zoo, praying to an uncaring unknowable God. I don’t remember all of the words, or even if that was because of the fading nature of dream memories or because the howl was largely incomprehensible. I do however remember a few fragments: “EMERGENCE OF A TUMOR JUST A GOD WHO TRIES TO BREAK INTO OUR WORLD BY THE SHORTEST PATH,” “THING ESCAPES AND DEATH IS JUST,” “ONE I KNOW RETAINS A NAME.” Their meaning is lost on me.

When I stopped rising, I saw two figures. One was a skeletal figure in a black cloak wearing a pair of skis while holding a scythe. The other… it’s hard to describe the other figure. At once, the being was male and female, young and old, thin and fat, black and white and all the other colors one could be. And yet, the being wasn’t an amalgamation of all these things. Rather, the being shifted its form constantly, never once repeating the same face. It spoke with the tenor of a lion in its prime, capable of scaring off the most ardent of scavenger with a single roar. And with its voice, the shapeful being said, GO INTO THAT CITY AND SLAY HALF OF THE DWELLERS THEREIN, YET SPARE A HALF OF THEM THAT THEY MAY KNOW THAT I AM GOD. The skeletal being obeyed what I presumed was its master and flew past me with an air of resigned melancholy.

I followed the figure as it descended down and down and down towards the city. Despite it’s skeletal form, its wings were feathered brown and soft. It gracefully descended upon the city with the ease a child has going to sleep. It tilted its eternally grinning head towards me. There was a void where its eyes should be. The words weren’t so much spoken as implanted into my brain with the voice of my own thoughts. (But then, what other voices appear in our dreams than our own?) They said BUT WE MUST CARE. FOR IF WE DO NOT CARE, WE DO NOT EXIST. IF WE DO NOT EXIST, THEN THERE IS NOTHING BUT BLIND OBLIVION. AND EVEN OBLIVION MUST END SOME DAY. I could see the city in all its grandeur and monstrosity. All the people were tiny from my height. They were buzzing about like flies in the ointment of the city’s architecture. It was then that I realized that I didn’t much care for this perspective of the world. I liked being around my fellow man in the muck of the world. Sure, there was some beauty in this perspective, but there was something missing from it to make it just right. Before I could put my finger on what that was, my companion pointed upwards towards the descending station. It then said something else to me, but I awoke in a sweat before the words could be interpreted and retained.

Before I left my childhood home forever, I shook the hands of the families who let me sleep in their home. There were three in total, and they seemed to be good people… or, at least, the kind who wouldn’t steal all my stuff while I slept. When I asked if I could mention who they were in this… what do you call it? It’s too short to be a journal yet too long to be a note. Snippet? Entry? Fragment? Regardless, they said no. But they did allow me to explain the structure of their living. They had split the house up with one family on each floor. The basement went to a lesbian couple and their three children. The children got my brother Patrick’s second bedroom while the couple slept on the couches where I’d watch some of my brother’s old VHS tapes. Some of them were still on the shelf. The rest probably got traded for food or were stolen before the families moved in. The laundry room was communal and I was surprised to see the plastic laundry baskets I had known since my childhood were still being put to good use. The mark on the wall between floors where my brother punched a hole through it was still there. We told him to fix it, but he always kept pushing it off until we all just got used to it. I guess no one has the tools to make it invisible.

The family that lived on the main floor was a polyamorous quartet with six children. The only part of the floor that wasn’t slept in was the dining room, which was missing its table. And yet, the painting of the Last Supper I got from my grandparents was still there. Indeed, a lot of the stuff attached to the walls was still there, even the needlepoint picture of a unicorn in the bathroom. It wasn’t as if this stuff was permanently fused to the walls. People back during the bad days tended to steal artwork for fires and what not. At the very least the plates could be used as, well, plates. But nothing was stolen. Hell, my great grandfather’s sword was still on the mantle place, and the case for that was broken.

The only room that was regularly used by the families staying at the top floor of my childhood home was my parent’s bedroom. The occupants consisted of a single father and his daughter. The giant bed that once lay there had long since disappeared. All that remained were the faint scratches it made on the walls. I slept in my brother’s childhood bedroom, as the bedroom that was once mine had a giant hole where the window used to be. Most of my books were gone. So many years spent collecting them, all for naught in the grand scheme of things. I couldn’t carry the remainder of my library, but I did take a few favorites. Though I left my most favorite book for the children of this new, post-capitalist age to discover.

My departure from my childhood home was, all things considered, quite banal. The families had seen many a traveler come and go, though never one who lived in the house before them. They never did go into details about those people. I suppose there’s room in this world for some mysteries, like what made the sounds in the attic or who was sleeping in the extension of our house we built once my grandmother got too old to stay alone in her house in the Expanding Woods. (Though, I was curious. Am curious [I’m rubbish with tenses at times, I’m sorry.] Then again, there are many a thing I’ll see on my journey that you will never know. Who knows what I’ll find or who I’ll see. Maybe I’ll find out on my travels. Or maybe it’ll gnaw at me for the rest of my life because I just can’t live without complete and utter closure.) The families found me generally polite, though my minor insomnia and penchant for monologues did get on some people’s nerves. I helped out for the entire month I stayed with them, to the best of my abilities, and generally got on with them. There were some growing pains. But then, I am a writer, whereas they were a farming family. (The entire backyard was full of fruits and vegetables. The front was full of rabbits.) Differences were bound to come up. But we worked through it, and I think we were happier knowing one another… I hope.

As I walked away, I turned to give my home one last look. I’m old enough to know I will never see it again, so I might as well say goodbye. The dark blue paint had faded long ago and no one seemed to care to paint it again, though the red door still had its pop. Save for my childhood bedroom, the house looked to be completely intact. The vines that seemed to consume many of the homes in the area only ate the chimney side of the house, which is to say the side that wasn’t where my old bed was. The tree that I always thought was going to fall and crush me while I slept in my old bed had yet to fall. In fact, it seemed sturdier than ever. All things considered, it was a good house. I’m going to miss it.

I suppose now I should mention where it is that I was heading to. When the world ended and became what it is now, I was living in London. I had been married for some time, though my love was lost last year. We lived a good life, helping wherever we could and other such things. One day, I looked into a mirror and saw that I was getting older. I was still healthy, but it looked like my time was going to come soon. And if I was to die, then I wanted to die where I was born: Santa Monica, California. I could have taken a boat directly to the state, but I wanted to visit my childhood town one last time before the end. I spent a month simply living in the town as if I was a tourist, virgin to the place. Now I was to meet up with a troupe of Spiders heading to a “city” on the west coast, which they claimed was a short distance away from my birthplace.

When I reached Sheephill Road, I decided to turn away from my grandmother’s house and towards the Post Road. I was on a bit of a time crunch and were I to head towards her home, a tribe of deer might confront me. Besides, the Expanding Woods had long since consumed that area, as I learned the hard way. I played it safe. On my way to the Post Road, I saw a small house. The house was more rectangular than my childhood home, probably because it only had one floor. It had been consumed completely by vines and other natural things. The only thing that was visible through the vines was a compass. It had a star of eight points at the center of it that seemed to be made of copper. It was the first time I had ever noticed this house in all the years I had lived here (or at least the first time I recall). I never knew the people who lived in that house. Indeed, I barely knew the people who lived in the neighborhood. But then, my childhood was a time of paranoia and privacy. The world’s changed since then.

Take, for example, the bridge at the intersection between Sheephill and the Post Road. I rarely crossed it as a kid. In fact, I think the only time I went across it was when I was 18 and went for a half hour walk around the train station that took an hour to complete on account of getting lost. Even back then, the woods seemed to consume it. Now, that took on a more literal meaning as the ruins of the bridge (destroyed during the bad days) was healed by a series of vines, roots, and plants that inexplicably grew to connect the path. To heighten the supernatural nature of the new bridge, I could see a fucking Bigfoot conversing with one of his deer friends on the other side. Neither one seemed to notice me.

I ran before they could, until I reached, for lack of a better term, the farmer’s market that used to be a strip mall. The inaccuracy of that term refers to the fact that capitalism as an economic system has long since become incompatible with the modern world. What use are credit cards in a world with minimal electricity? What use is cash aside from kindling? There were no longer any landlords to pay back, nothing to spend the money on, and no one could account for it all. Everyone was, for all intensive purposes, equal. There were rumors that there was a “city” on the west cost that still used money in a capitalistic sense. Then again, there were also rumors of tribes in the desert that worship money as a God, so anything’s possible. Regardless, the area I decided to rest at was a place where one could get some fruits or vegetables to eat. People left them in baskets or, in the case of apples, the trees they grew from. I took a granny smith from a tree growing out of a shattered window of an abandoned CVS and continued on my way.

It was then that I reached a pair of obelisks. When I was a kid, they were simply advertisements for the various shops at the nearby shopping center, but again, the world has changed. I had heard a rumor that magicians were using them as a means of traveling to the lands of fairies. I think it was either called Barsoom or Ookbar, though I could never a straight word on what they were called. (Magicians are highly finicky when it comes to fictional terminology, especially when you call it “fictional.”) There were many places like that in America. In some ways, the country was a land of pathways much like England is a land of margins. When I saw an active sigil on the sidewalk besides one of the obelisks (in the shape of a pair of TIE fighters laid out like a broken ladder with one of them connected to a stylized sharp “S”), I decided to not step on them. I was lucky, as I saw a fellow step on one on the opposite side of the street and disappear in a puff of smoke. He must not have seen the cum stains.

I eventually arrived at the aforementioned shopping center to find a trio of Wolves heading towards the old Stop and Shop. (I think I went there a few times as a kid, at least back when they sold comics. It had a Playstation 2 to demonstrate whatever game they were trying to sell. More often than not, we shopped at the Shop Rite across the street. It was either because it was cheaper or nicer.) What the Wolves were doing there, I did not know. I could tell they were Wolves on account of them wearing the felt of said animal around their necks like a scarf. (An… odd look for summertime.) They appeared to be in their mid-teens, which was about average for Wolves. There were rumors about what those girls in particular would do if they caught you. I decided not to test those rumors (especially since they looked like they were sneaking into the Stop and Shop) and ran as fast as I could. I was so distracted by the screams from behind that I tripped over an abandoned lawn chair on the side of the road.

When I picked myself up, I noticed that I was by one of those indoor theme parks that seemed to be everywhere when I was young. It had closed down long before the bad days and I think I only went there once or twice for some other kid’s birthday, I honestly don’t remember. And yet, despite my unfamiliarity, there was an air of melancholy in seeing it abandoned like this. The dragon’s head mounted upon the brick exterior, now decayed to the point where it was missing its green paint and left eye. The child in the airplane that held the banner that advertised the park was missing. The windows shattered, though someone who cared swept up the glass long ago. Inside the building, I could see a small fire. Surrounding it was a tribe of children. They were conversing with an elder, though they didn’t seem to trust the man like a father. Their trust seemed to be more akin to one a child has towards Spiderman or Doctor Who. I couldn’t get a good look at him, but he had the grin of a stuffed dog.

On the corner of Fairfield and West Main a block or so away from the decaying dragon’s head, there was a broken electrical box. (I was surprised by the presence of those signs, though I suppose it’s easier to use maps if you have signs. I was shocked when I discovered, against all odds and sensible explanations, maps survived into the modern world. But then, we are a race of detectives. All of us are in need of clues…) It was painted over, as all the boxes of its kind were in my hometown. I was always fascinated by what was in them as a kid (especially the one that was painted to look like a box of crayons), but even more so by the designs used to obfuscate the banality of their contents for the benefit of dumb kids. There was another that had the designs of Charles Atlas on them and another that had superheroes on them. The broken one seemed to have once had an alien invasion by a race of little green men. There was a cow or two in the tractor beam and the city seemed to be burning from a heat ray. Evidentially, the alien cults of the bad days didn’t take kindly to people “mocking” their beliefs.

On the other side of the road, I could see a small forest growing within the remains of a Taco Bell and a few nearby small apartments. The ruins were minor in the grand scheme of things, simply decommissioned buildings from before the bad days that had been ignored when those days had begun. The Taco Bell had its roof and one of the walls torn asunder shortly before the trees began to grow within them. The maple tree growing out of the next-door apartment was but a sapling compared to other trees I’ve seen since the bad days. And yet, it was still able to shatter out of the roof of the building like a hand rising out of the sea. There were still people living in there, eating off of and sitting on the tree as if it was another piece of furniture. The other trees around it grew in a similar manner.

Above the electronic box and past the trees, I could see one of the last remaining high rises. The rest were either burnt down during the bad days or overgrown by various bits of vegetation to make living there untenable. But there it was, still standing. It was a tube in shape with each floor stacked together like a pile of Oreos—and not the good kind either, the kind that had yellow cookies and yellow filling (Birthday Surprise, I think it was called). Even when it was new, the high rise looked old. I never knew anyone who lived in that specific building (though I remember picking up my cousin at one of them to see a movie, though I forget what we saw). But it was nonetheless a sign I was nearing Stamford and, subsequently, my destination.

My path was blocked by a long abandoned car, which had long since been stripped of parts. It was silver in color and looked as if it just left the lot, save for its missing wheels and broken windows. There was a body in there, a skeleton decayed and left behind from the bad days. The skull was cracked, barely recognizable as human. There’s a small hole at the back of it. I do not know why the body remained there rather than getting buried or removed. Some of my childhood friends (who returned home when the bad days started to care for their parents) said that it’s because the man was a pedophile. Others claimed attempts at removing the body cause people to get sick. One guy said that this is how the man wanted to be preserved. To be honest, I don’t care much for the actual reason behind the corpse still being there. I found it to be a highly evocative image, but one with a probably banal explanation.

Whatever the reason, there was a sadness to the skeleton. The things this man had done in his life seemed meaningless in the face of the sadness. There was no sickness when I grabbed the body from out of the car, no universal breakage as I moved to the river. At most, a flock of Canadian Geese walked past. And while I had a justified nervousness towards those birds, they did not move to attack. Only one looked in my direction, but that was just for a brief moment as it turned its head away from a crumb on the ground. Maybe the body would be destroyed in the rapids. Maybe it would reach the ocean (or some lake or wherever the river ended) intact. Or maybe someone would take the body back to where it was as punishment for the crimes the man committed. I do not know.

I sat on a wooden bench a few feet away from the river. I could see a man and a woman walking their dog. The man was wearing a black sweater (again, odd for summer) and a tan fedora. The woman wore long blue camouflage pants, a buttoned up denim jacket, and sunglasses. Both had more style than I (I was just wearing a pair of black gym shorts, a collapsing satchel bag I’ve had for a few years, and a faded t-shirt of a once popular Spider themed superhero). The pair seemed to love each other, but one could never know I suppose. And or first time in my entire life, the dog didn’t bark at me like I was plotting on eating them alive.

The clear blue sky and the cool air had a soothing affect on me. I would have fallen asleep then and there, were the bench lacking in its metal arm rests. Instead, I sat there thinking to myself about the life that I had led. It was a good one, all things considered. I tried to be a good man and succeeded. There was a bit of doubt, as there always would be. No one can ever be sure if they’re good or not. That’s for other people to judge. But still I sat there, stroking my short white beard and adjusting my glasses, thinking of what I had done. I loved, I lost, and I didn’t know that much. And yet, I felt as if I led a pretty good life.

Eventually, I got up and continued my journey. Fortunately, the artificial path by the river that I found myself on would lead directly to the street where I was to meet with the Spiders. I could tell because the path by the river ended right at UCONN Stamford, which was only a block or two away from the where I was heading. The campus was relatively intact; especially considering the T UMP TO E was across the street. There was many a building that had letters stolen from it. I heard rumors that someone made the obvious joke out of North Mianus School, but that was along the path of my Grandmother’s house, so I didn’t check. (Growing up, I would typically take those roads to get to my destination as opposed to the one I took.) And yet, T UMP TO E seemed to be even more destroyed than all the rest. I could understand why, and indeed felt the same disgust simply looking at it as I assumed the people who attacked it did. The only thing that surprised me was the fact that it was still standing. Bar a few broken windows and its historical implications, people could theoretically live there. But then, I guess the proper tools for its destruction no longer exist. All that’s left is for nature to consume it as it has so many buildings. There were a few vines growing around it, certainly, but I wouldn’t call it consumed quite yet. Rather, it was held in the way I was holding an apple at that moment: about to chomp down on its green skin.

More interestingly was what was happening at the building a block from where I was to meet the Spiders. Shaped like a wave, I could see within its turquoise windows a small group of people having a gunfight. Naturally, I went inside to investigate. From what I could gather, there were two men fighting against twenty others. It seemed to be a sort of buddy cop scenario wherein one was the grizzled veteran broken by the system and its inability to stop the real criminals while the other was the hotshot rookie who didn’t play by the rules. Said rule breaking appeared to have gotten the rookie shot in the arm. The twenty were descending in on the pair, armed to the teeth and prepared to kill the duo. With no other choice, the older officer was forced to open fire without proper warning.

“BANGBANGBANGBANGBANGBANGBANG,” went the officer as he rapidly tapped his thumbs to his index fingers. Each shot caused some amount of damage to the attackers. Some were even killed. One such body landed right in front of me.

“Oh, hey Sean,” the corpse said to me, more tired than anything else. “We’re just finishing up here, would you mind waiting at the theatre? Breaks emersion, you know.” Not one to disagree with a dead person I exited the building stage left and sauntered towards the meeting place.

When I was a kid, this used to be a movie theater. The Avalon, I think it was called. Some of the letters that would light up its yellow sign had been stolen such that only the “A,” “V,” and “N” were left. I started going to the theater when I was in middle school. I remember inexplicably seeing Day of the Dead in 35mm as part of a surprise double feature with my dad. The Master immensely bored my parents and I, despite my brother’s claims of the film’s greatness. I saw so many things on those two screens that impacted who I was and how I think, that I consider it my favorite movie theater. I sat in the slightly carpeted, slightly grassy, mostly used lobby and waited for the Spiders to conclude their play. There were other people there, some I recognized and some I didn’t. One such person was a lean man. There was a gauntness to him even though he wasn’t all that thin. He was balding, though he tried to distract from this by growing a long beard. He was about a year older than me and he looked almost as tired as I felt. The man had recently lost one of his arms and someone I hoped was a Doctor was patching him up. His clothing was ripped and the holes had twigs and vines sticking out of it.

I approached the man and said with a slightly smug, but mostly melancholic, smile, “Hey Patrick. How are things?” He looked at me with tears on his cheeks. With the Doctor’s permission, I hugged him. We left at around twilight, never again to see that theater again.

[I left this at the movie theatre as payment for traveling with the troupe. I do not know the story of how it went from one coast to another, though I do know it ended up in the hands of a group of good people who were kinder than I’d ever deserve. I miss you.]

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The Working Class

If there is anything that defines the final days of Capitalism, it’s the mutually agreed upon disdain towards the oldest profession. Even those whose sympathies lie with prostitutes often have an air of “They shouldn’t sell their bodies for money someone else only to die tragically due to their chosen lifestyle” to their comments. There are numerous stories, both within and without the City, of prostitutes being treated as if they’re less than cattle. Some are tragic stories of rape, murder, and other banal cruelties. Others feature far more interesting cruelties like being subjected to having one’s hands flayed finger by finger and then being forced to eat the skin. There are far too few stories of happiness and joy when it comes to the City’s relationship with prostitutes. What follows is one of them…

Francis lived in an apartment with his father Victor and his sisters, Lucy and Donna. It wasn’t a nice apartment, probably one of the less valued in an area of terribly valued apartments. Not even the Fuzon Corporation used it for their employees. (It wasn’t even their first choice for City living. The family was kicked out of their previous homes over their unwillingness to sleep with their landlords as a small part of their rent.) There were numerous reports that the building was haunted by some malevolent force that wished nothing but pain and misery for those who lived in it. An absurd notion when considering most things, but the history of this one raises some suspicion. 

In the years before the building was even conceived of, the land it would be built upon was said to be the sight of numerous cases of the supernatural. When it was a parking lot, a couple was reported being abducted by aliens bent on discovering the fourth dimensional secrets of water. When it was a strip mall, there were 17 counts of gang violence, each carrying a body count well into the double digits (the smallest of which being 43) and all ending with the last victim writing the words “I love you” out of their own blood and guts. During one of the construction jobs, seven construction workers and three foremen found themselves defenestrated at various points. Even back when it was a mere field, several anthropologists theorized that numerous encounters between the Native Americans and various spirits occurred within that area.

But perhaps the most pertinent and bizarre case would be that of the apartment building itself. To start, it was not intended on being an apartment building. Rather, it was meant to be a beacon of the future. A fully automated complex built to house ideas and new technologies that would recontextualize the entirety of the 21^stcentury. Each room would have had enough space to house an entire family and the planned food center could have fed the City and then some. It has been theorized that were the building and Brilliant Resourceful Intelligent Artificial Network, the artificial intelligence designed to run every system within the monument to technological futurism, ever completed to its initial design, then the very concept of cities might very well have survived well beyond the 22^nd Century.

Sadly, this was not meant to be.  The construction on the project was delayed by several deaths caused by the radiation of the AI’s main power source, numerous protests over the rights of artificial intelligences led by three separate snake cults (who, in a bit of mystical coincidence, all worshiped the same God), and said AI malfunctioning during simulations, projecting a robot apocalypse in four of them, among other complications with lesser death tolls. (There were also negligible issues with the AI such as its inability to make a good cup of tea or recognize the faces of people of color.) The budget for the project bankrupted several arms of the corporation, such that official sources claimed the City had to pay off the debt it incurred by having a single percent stake in the project 10 years after it was abandoned.

There were several attempts at stopping construction all together, most notably by the corporation’s board of directors two years into the project. The proposed budget was almost laughable in how absurdly much it cost, but the actual cost well exceeded that two weeks prior to the meeting. It was easy to see this was going to end up destroying the company should the project go any further. A vote was cast amongst the top shareholders of the corporation. Unfortunately, Jonathan O’Malley was the majority shareholder and he saw the tower as a personal project of his and was able to bully enough of the shareholders into submitting to his singular vision.

It wasn’t until 12 years into production that O’Malley was finally bought out by the Fuzon Corporation and construction could mercifully end. Unfortunately, an earthquake struck at that very moment, causing the building to collapse. That isn’t to say that it was destroyed, but rather it had been tilted into a perfect 75-degree angle with the skyline of the City. Not only did this make continued construction impossible and killed countless lives, but it also had the unfortunate side effect of making deconstructing the ruin ill advised as it wouldn’t be cost effective to do so. And to top it all off, it was an eyesore on the City’s brutalist architecture, more so than even the head quarters of the Fuzon Corporation (though, saying that would be akin to saying that a pimple is an eyesore on a corpse).

With no other alternatives, the Fuzon Corporation opted to let the building fester within the City, a decision that has been argued quite poorly as being the direct cause of the City’s demise. As it stands, numerous clandestine terrorist organizations, a few rogue hackers, and one or two mimes conducted illegal operations in what became an apartment complex for those too unwilling to work directly for the corporation. But most recently, an entire floor of the tower has been used as a brothel for various clients of ill repute colloquially referred to as the Tilted Tower. Which brings us back to Francis and his family.

They had been living at the apartment for well over a year, working for their room and board through various odd jobs from cleaning a shit hole with their mouth to polishing a rod until it ejaculated to simply fucking the landlord while speaking in a posh accent as opposed to paying the rent. These were typical customers and nowhere near the strangest people the family encountered in their time at the apartment (Donna still has nightmares about the man with the glass eye). But it was on that day that Francis would encounter one of the strangest people he would have a sexual relationship with.

It started on a typical Sunday afternoon. Lucy was out of the house with a freebee, as per usual. Donna was caring for Victor while the machine that was his lungs did its duty. She had a look on her face, Francis noticed, the same look she always had when she was around Victor. It was the look of a deer being kept alive after being mauled by a mountain lion. He had always wanted to ask her why she made that look (and, for that matter, why her hair was grey), but whenever he considered doing so, Francis would always decide to be a coward instead. But Francis wasn’t in the apartment at that moment, but instead on the streets of the City looking for a gig.

Most of the time, finding a gig isn’t too difficult to find. By and large, customers came to Francis for a “good time.” But that night, the streets were inexplicably empty. It wasn’t like there was a riot going on in the area or anything (though there was one brewing on the other side of the City, waiting to burst like a bottle of soda on a bumpy road). Nor was there the smell of a raid in the air. Francis knew damn well that the police are impossibly unsubtle about their raids and “being too quiet” is not the kind of unsubtly the police tend to go for. Instead, the streets seemed almost abandoned. There were a few vagrants here and there: a sleeping couple protecting a cat like it was their child, a mad man muttering about the end of the City for the third time this hour, and countless other stories too sad for Francis to contemplate.

But what caught his eye was a lone man standing on the corner of the street. He wasn’t the kind of man to typically court these dark, abandoned streets. He was far too well fed for the City. He looked to have been Hansel to someone’s wicked witch, the scars on his arms told Francis as much. The man’s hair was surprisingly grey for someone who had just become 20-something. His clothes were too finely washed. They weren’t nice clothes like a collard shirt of pants that require a belt to wear. They were the clothes of a field worker, Francis thought, though he didn’t look like one of their kind. The man’s dark skin was probably from being out in the sun for too long, he told himself. On a whim, Francis approached the man.

“So what’s a guy like you doing in a city like this,” Francis asked. There was an aborted answer before the man spoke.

“Nostalgia. I grew up here, you know?” The way the man spoke was as if he was trying to remember how to speak and was only inexplicably doing well at it. Maybe once he was an expert at speaking, but as the years grew on, he had less and less use for the spoken form. Indeed, any form of its kind was for a long time alien to this man.

“Really,” inquired Francis, “When was this?”

“Oh. Some time ago, I suppose. The memory’s a bit… foggy, especially in my old age.”

“You don’t look that old, if anything you look a year younger than me.”

“And how old are you? 100?”

“27.”

The man let out a small, sad, single syllable laugh. “Looks can be deceiving, old man.”

“Yeah… so, I was wondering-“

“How much?”

“E-excuse me?”

“You were about to ask me if I’d like to pay you for continuing to be in your presence while I decide what we do during that time. Is that not how the oldest profession works?”

“…Yes?”

“Well then,” said the man while he fished out a wad of cash larger than Francis could ever comprehend, “How much?”

“Ah-Ah-About that much!” The man looked down at the money in his hand and considered only briefly.

“Heh, fair enough I suppose.” There was a sense of nostalgic sadness in the way the man said those words. Not in the typical way people express such sadness. It was as if, in that singular moment, the universe shared that sadness with the man and forced everyone else’s hearts to break, if only for a second. The man led Francis a few blocks away from where they were to a small motel. It was located almost directly on the edge of the City. The parts that weren’t within City limits had been consumed by the various vegetation that dominated the outside world. It was as if there was an invisible dome protecting the City from Nature itself. The room they ended up in was itself nearly symmetrically within and without the City, such that the vines and weeds seemed to recoil at the exact midpoint of the room. This had the effect of stimulating Francis in a way that he hadn’t felt since he was a young boy. A pity that the sex itself wasn’t much to write home about; it was pretty run of the mill anal, with Francis getting it in the rear over and over again like he was land being dug into by a mechanical drill. There was no foreplay, and certainly no conversation afterwards. When the sex was done, the man left without a word. Francis was given all the money he asked for and then some. For once in his life, Francis knew what it was like to have two dollars and ten cents on his person. He would never again know such wealth.

But there was one moment of oddness, one moment where the man seemed to acknowledge Francis as an actual person as opposed to the “fuck-hole” his other clients treat him as. It was during that dull, ordinary, not even all that great sex that Francis noticed something about the man. The man was talking. Many a man talked during sex, usually about how they’re better than their wives or their husbands or whoever was making their lives miserable. Sometimes, they would talk about things thematically related to the fetishes they were about to experience. But this was different. The man was talking to Francis himself. He was telling him a story (his own, Francis believed). He didn’t remember much of the story, a few fragments, maybe one or two lines. What he did remember was the feeling of the story. At first, it felt like a miserable story; it brought the mood down so much that it reminded Francis of those bleak days when Donna disappeared for two weeks with Victor, only to return with grey hair and a dead look in her eyes. Francis nearly pleaded the man to stop talking, that it was turning him off and not because it was making him feel bad. But suddenly, the tone shifted into something completely different. A minor moment in the telling of the story recontextualized the whole thing into a tale of triumph. It wasn’t a story of how life brings nothing but pain and misery and there is no way out, but rather one of overcoming impossible odds to gain one’s freedom while still acknowledging that freedom has a price.

When the sex was done and the man long gone, Francis sat on the bed covered in weeds and thought about his future. What was he going to do with all this money? Would anyone let him spend it? Would he be arrested for carrying so much? And what about the story the man told him? He realized in that moment that he didn’t remember a single moment, a single line of the story, a single thing about the story, bar the feeling it made within him. That wasn’t quite true. He did remember one line, the first line. It didn’t mean anything to him and it wasn’t even all that memorable, and yet it stuck with him. Francis didn’t know why “It returned to the City on a Tuesday” stuck with him, and he suspected he never would.

Francis returned to the tilted tower they called an apartment complex and did another couple more gigs before turning in for the night.

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Sigils and Other Wankery

There are few sadder sights than seeing ones childhood home in ruins. One could, for example, find a dog clinging onto life, coughing out blood and trying to move its flattened body. A cherished (and deceased) member of the family could be discovered to have indulged themselves in a bit of pedophilia. Someone could have turned on the news to find that a school of children was shot up in a pizzeria because some nut job got it into his thick skull that there was a child trafficking ring in the (non-existent) basement based solely on the word of some conspiracy board. And that’s not even getting into the various, often times horrifying, stories that come out of the landmass once called Florida. A lot of sad things happen.

But seeing one’s childhood home replaced by something unrecognizable is a burden few will ever experience. A weightless sadness that feels like having one’s liver surgically removed without anesthesia. And it’s not even done by a bad surgeon. Indeed, it would be by one of the best surgeons in the world. Though that’s not the same as one of the best people in the world. For this surgeon cares not for people, merely sees them as a mechanic would a car with a busted muffler. When the patient looks at the doctor for some reassurances over them not being drugged, they find only the coldness of someone who has lost many a patient and knows what it is to suffer. He has hardened his heart to the suffering of others, which in some regards has improved his skills as a surgeon. But they have dulled his skills as a person. It is the pain of seeing those eyes as the knife begins to go into the flesh of the patient that Billy felt as he looked upon the remains of his home.

In truth, to call them “remains” is an inaccurate statement. It is true that Billy stood where his home once was and it is true that it is no longer hospitable. But to say that anything remained of the ruin he called a home would be wrong. What stood where his home once did was a monotonously dull grey cube, which contained a factory within it. There didn’t appear to be any doors within the building; only a hatch on the top where helicopters could dump more and more “human resources.” There weren’t even any windows in the building. One wondered how air got into that perfect cube. Must be some manufactured air that costs a lot more than it would to simply have a few windows in the buildings, Billy thought.

And yet, the building itself was covered in vines and foliage. Giant green fingers were slowly sliding around the humongous cube with the elegance of a fist tightening before the knock out punch. (Through the foliage, he could see some cracks just large enough to allow a person to barely squeeze out of. Indeed, it was recorded that nearly one in every four workers escaped through this means. The other three-fourths used the sewers.) There were murmurs on the street of plant life being capable of coming to life and slaughtering the living. Rumors that vines were seen strangling a group of children and roots upending roads, causing pursuers of what they called criminals to break their faces on concrete streets. I met “cynical” person once sometime after entering the City, and he thought it was a righteous act done solely because humanity deserved to die. Then again, that same person thought the only way to live was within the City and those who didn’t were “too cowardly to live in the real world instead of their safe space.” Not a pleasant person, to say the least.

But beyond the foliage, near the bottom of the building, Billy could see someone. He couldn’t quite make the shape of the person, but they appeared to be running away from the building. He could see more people running behind them. They appeared to be clumped together like a mob and following the lone runner as if he was the monster at the end of a black and white movie. As they moved closer, Billy could see the crowd was armed with batons of various thicknesses (though sadly, there was nary a torch or pitchfork in sight). A cruel sneer could be heard from the mob. The sneer of the powerless few who use what little power they have to beat up those even more powerless than them because the powerful said so. Unfortunately for Billy, the person being chased decided to run in his direction. Knowing full well what happens when one is in the path of an angry mob, Billy decided to join the fellow.

“Wonderful day for it, wouldn’t you say,” they said, though Billy wouldn’t say he’d agree. He tried to get a good look at them as they ran, but he could only get splashes at a time. They were dressed in a slick pair of leather pants that shouldn’t allow them the mobility they were currently enjoying. They had a rather unfortunate haircut that made it look like someone had shaven the word “facefuck” in the center and they were that desperate to shave it off without being bald. Or, at least, that’s what Billy hoped was the reasoning for such a dreadful haircut. No one could actually want to look like that. Then again, there was a sincerity to the design that implied otherwise. They were largely sunburnt with the exception of their left index finger, which had a pale ring around it. Upon closer examination, their pants weren’t so much leather as extremely dark and clean. They smelled like a magici-

But before Billy could make his next note, some asshole decided it would be a good idea to throw a fucking baton (which is a nice way of saying “not actually a baton”) at them.

“Wh- WHY,” said Billy in the tone of voice of someone discovering that people do in fact think it’s a good idea to hide a chainsaw down their pants.

“Must of run out of sticks,” said Billy’s running companion. “Alex, by the way.”

“Billy. Billy Bradshaw. Can’t imagine how they’d run out of them. Must be growing by the dozens given those vines.”

“Oh you saw them too,” said Alex in the droll tone of someone noting they’re breathing air, “why do you think that is?”

“What, the plants growing? Oh, I don’t know, maybe it’s because the deer told the plants to do that.”

“Oh come now,” said Alex acting as if they hadn’t seen deer order a plant to rip off the limbs of an ornery ex-Spider who thought it was a good idea to kick a puppy in front of a deer. In his defense (as slim as that might be), it was because his date ran off on him. Then again, having actually talked to the woman in question (who has asked to remain anonymous), she dumped him on the grounds that he spiked her drink. He tried to explain that it wasn’t roofies or anything, not realizing the problem was the whole “not telling her what she was drinking and having to have a complete stranger named Alex tell what her date had done before she drunk the drink” part of the affair. She was almost saddened to see the deer rip him to shreds. “That’s absurd.”

“Oh, then what the fuck do you think is going on,” Billy didn’t so much ask this as shout it quickly.

“Well-“ but before they could finish that lie, another baton was thrown at the pair. This time, it was a much further shave as the crowd was starting to lose their anger at what Alex did. Alex’s actions that afternoon were, to be quite blunt, extremely dull up to that point, best described in sentences such as “And then, they took another left turn,” “They stopped to take a wiz for a good half hour or so,” and “They spent nearly an hour trying to get a pebble out of their shoe.” (This is why a majority of travelogues tend to cut out the exact details of the journey in favor of more thematically interesting things.)

That isn’t to say that Alex’s journey was a dull one, nor that their reasoning was unworthy of being chased. Indeed, many a storyteller has made great art out of “I’m off to see grandmother.” But the devil, as they say, is in the details. Coincidentally, one of the reasons for Alex being there concerned their grandmother. Alex’s grandmother had been dead for their entire life. They were informed, while looking for a friend of theirs, that she was buried a mile or so outside of City limits. When they arrived to the location of the graveyard to pay respects, they discovered, to their unsurprised horror, that the graveyard was paved over and replaced with a parking lot for a factory. (Said parking lot was there more for aesthetics than utility.) They could hear their grandmother’s soul screaming from beneath the concrete in a choir of pain and anger. Her song was an apocalyptic track about the cleansing powers of fire. WHAT IS THERE TO DO, the dead woman sang perfectly in tune, WHEN EVERYTHING WE DOCTOR, WHEN EVERYTHING WE BUILD, IS STAINED BY OUR TOUCH? WHEN EVERYWHERE WE GO IS SOMEWHERE VISITED BY SOMEONE? THE MADNESS HERE IS CIRCULAR.

“The madness here is us,” Alex said to themself. They knew the implications and invocations of those words. Most magicians knew the dead always spoke in an iconography they understood… after a fashion. Haunted language is perhaps a befitting one for ghosts. All stories, in their own way, are haunted. There are influences one does not appreciate or even realize are influences until looked upon in the wider tapestry of the world. Take, for example, the song the soul sang: The Tower Through the Trees. It’s an apocalyptic song by The Seeming about the necessity of burning everything down to the ground, including all of humanity. “A protest song as imagined by a nihilist,” as one critic put it. The album as a whole (and indeed, the band’s later work) was less, for lack of a better phrase, pessimistic about humanity than such a statement would imply, ultimately aligning itself with the shift into a new form of being. A rejection of what we once called human in favor of a brave new world with such people in it (“We secede from wholeness, wholesomeness, holiness, and humankind. Evolve and become unrecognizable. Demand gills, antlers, ink sacs, fangs, talons, udders, spores, quills, a proboscis, and a bioluminescent thorax,” as a later song put it). Though we have not evolved to being unrecognizable from the humanity of my childhood, to say we are what we were back then would be a lie. Then again, is that not true of all generational shifts?

With this cryptic reference in mind, Alex walked up to the factory and, at the exact center of each side, made a sigil out of the vines and other natural things growing on the building. It was as if they were a canvas waiting to be used for this exact purpose. The sigils were all of identical shape, that of akin to an extremely thin person with no arms, a wide open smile, and a single square eye filled with lines crossing over one another to look like an asterisk with some T’s dangling off of it. Once each sigil was completed, Alex would do the necessary hand movements to launch them into the world, both forwards and backwards in time.

Alex knew the eventual consequences of the action. Indeed, all magicians knew that magical rituals of such a scale as to murder a City had blow back that would, to some degree, counter the goal of the sigil. To use one of the more famous examples, were someone to use the Whitechapel murders of the late 1800’s as a magical ritual to solidify the power and dominance of the patriarchy over the 20^th century, one must also contend with the rise of feminism as a prevailing force in the world. This is why the best magical spells are ones in the form of fictional texts as opposed to stereotypical rituals: with a book, the blow back is typically “people write angry reviews about the book and it’s message,” at best and “people scream about the ethics of video games journalism as a means to harass women off of the internet with pipe bombs” at worst. Rarely does a book bring about an entirely new school of thought to counter it (and even then, it’s not so much the book that’s being countered as the marginalized people reading it). But Alex performed the spell anyways. Unfortunately, what they hadn’t prepared for was for someone to notice and… let’s just say people who guard buildings for a living don’t take kindly to those who launch sigils on them and leave it at that. (In his defense, the factory had long since been abandoned once it stopped being cost effective. Those within were locked in, breaking apart and rebuilding products that would never see the light of day. They only thing keeping them going was the hope that someday, they would see the sun again. Even the ones who tried to escape from the cage didn’t know the outside world had forgotten them.)

When the pair were sure that they weren’t being chased anymore and, coincidentally, back in City limits, Alex asked, “So ]pant[ what were you ]pant[ doing there?”

“I…” said Billy with each pause containing a wheeze and cough, “was… seeing… my old home… town. You?”

“I ]pant[ wanted to see if my ]pant[ grandmother’s grave was still there.”

“Oh. Was it?”

“I don’t know. The building was covering up where ]pant[ the graves should be.”

“Ah.” There was a brief pause before Billy finally asked “So why were they chasing you?”

“Uhhhh…”

“Was it because of those shapes cut into the patchwork of vines that was eating the building?”

“Uuuuuuhhhhhhhh”

“Cause they looked kinda like sigils.”

“UUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH”

“And you did smell like a magician who just launched a sigil. Plus that would explain why you were pulling up-“

“OK! YES, IS WAS USING THE FUCKING BUILDING TO LAUNCH SOME FUCKING SIGILS ONTO THE FUCKING PSYCHIC LANDSCAPE OF THIS FUCKING WORLD AND THE FUCKING GUARDS TOOK EXCEPTION TO THAT! ARE YOU HAPPY?”

“Well, with that tone, I’m not.” At which point the pair broke into a burst of laughter. They fell down onto the slightly grassy, but mostly concrete, ground and looked at one another as if they were friends.

“So,” Alex said when the laughter cooled, “how did you know that was a sigil?”

“Firstly, I’m a professional liar. I’m what you might call a Con Artist. Liars are pretty good at telling when someone knows something they don’t want to talk about. Second, friend of a friend explained it to me,” Billy lied. (The truth was that he actually read a book on making sigils when he was a kid. He stole it from a library and had to lie to his parents about it once the police started buckling down on the area shortly after he stole it, as if the two events were correlated. The last he saw of it was in his room an hour before the parents told the kids to play outside for an hour or so while they talked about some grownup things.)

“So…” asked Alex, “do you have plans for tonight?” There was a pause in the universe at that moment, one that magicians are adept to notice solely because they’re looking for such moments of narrative coalescence and thematic congruity all the time. It is said that magic is simply a form of art. That all a magic spell/work of art does is project the subconscious of the world as interpreted by the magician into the conscious world. Perhaps the idea was already within Billy before he said the words. Perhaps they were within him when he realized he was no longer with Cate or the last time he said “I love you” to his mom and dad or maybe they were in him when he was born and his whole life was a teleological ordained; the authorless wave of History itself controlling how his life would end.

Indeed, many a magician will claim that the world is preordained, that all actions are plotted out to fit within the schema of some occult being for their own purposes. Alex themself told me that he was the one who brought the City down. I doubt their story to that they were the author of these events as they were quite plastered when they told me this. The truth is the world is far too rudderless to ever be authored and controlled like characters in a work of fiction. Even the most intricate of designs fails to control the structure of life. For all the other intricate designs bungle over one another, as life tends to. As some magicians know deep down, all attempts at pure control end in failure. So perhaps it was the sigil, launched in time and space, which made Billy say these words. Or maybe it was Billy who said them because of the life he lived. Or maybe the words were his own spell of intent and meaning, one only subconsciously known. To be honest, the cause of the words holds little importance in the grand scheme of things.

Finally, Billy said in the calmest possible tone required to express the anger implicit within his words, “I think I’m gonna kill the CEO of the Fuzon Corporation.”

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Graffiti on a Building Where Too Many People Died

They killed my friends.

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Worst Man Rise

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(Tangential History

TW: Police Brutality

When Billy was a child, he lived in the decline of a different city, one not too far from the City.  In some respects, it was this city that spelled the end of cities as anything other than a niche concept, the last gasp for future generations to think of them as an institution rather than to be looked back upon with bemused befuddlement. It wasn’t one of the major cities, or even a notable minor one, but it was his childhood hometown nonetheless. Billy recalled having a good childhood. But then again, there are things even the most observant of children wouldn’t see.

The living conditions, for example, were less than ideal. Indeed, most people in the city would consider it cruel to subject a child to live on the streets, begging for money to get food. Then again, those same people would blame the parents for being bad at parenting because they couldn’t find a job like the rest of them did. Better, such normal people thought, the child raised by the state, where they can be put to work for the benefit of society, than to be raised by such irresponsible parents. Many a child froze to death on those streets in the long winter nights while most normal people locked their doors to keep those people out.

The only reason Billy’s family was able to survive such nights was because they frequently broke the law by sleeping in abandoned apartment complexes, which were growing by the week. There were a few other families who lived in those complexes with Billy’s, so it wasn’t a completely familial affair. The oldest of the children was a girl named Cate, who was also 8 and had the smile of someone who should be on television. Billy would spend most of his time tied to her like a tattoo. They spent their time spreading rumors about gangs of storytellers and untold creatures lurking in the margins of the outside world. If she believed in the concept, Cate would have considered him her best friend. There were other kids who lived in the building and she got on with them just fine, but there was a sense in her that personal relationships were an ending concept and it would be best to keep those to as much of a minimum as possible.

One night, while the children played in the snow lit streets of the city, the adults had to deal with a pressing matter. It seemed that some police officers were in the area looking for trespassers “loitering on private property.” While it was true that none of the families paid a dime to live in those damp and dingy rooms, it’s also true that they had been abandoned for a good six months before any of them moved in. If anyone truly cared about them, wouldn’t they have done something to them, even if it were just merely tearing them down?

“We can’t stay here,” said Jim’s dad with the worried tone of an addict.

“Oh,” sneered Billy’s dad with the mocking tone of a pessimistic revolutionary, “and why not? ‘Cause the big bad government’ll kill us? They’re gonna kill us one by one just for the sport of it? Or maybe the landlords finally realized we’re here living in their buildings for free rather than on the streets dying for the same price, so they’re sicking the pigs on us, hmm?”

“YES!”

“They haven’t come for us before,” Lisa’s mom pointed out in desperation, “why would they come now?”

“Maybe,” hypothesized Cate’s uncle, “it has to do with that rumor I heard-“

“Oh please,” interrupted Frank’s sister while rolling her eyes, “if a corporation of that size was going to set up shop anywhere, surely they’d pick somewhere with more people.”

“They’d also pick somewhere with a lot of space,” continued Billy’s dad as if it was his idea. “Somewhere they could fit all the machinery required to do the job at hand. And frankly this city’s as tightly packed as a fist.”

“But what if it’s true?” said Lisa’s dad from a dark corner. He wasn’t one for talking; indeed most thought he was mute. But when those words came out of his cigarette stained voice, everyone turned towards him. “Regardless of the reason, be it to make way for “the future” or because they just want to kill us niggers, what if it’s true?” There was a bitter silence when he was done.

“Language aside,” Jim’s dad said to fill the void with a twinge of fear [it’s better than nothing, he thought], “he’s right. We can’t just expect the government to ignore us forever.”

“They’d ignore us if we just died on the streets like we’re supposed to,” murmured Luke’s dad to himself, pretending the others didn’t hear him.

“They were bound to notice us eventually,” Jim’s dad continued as if no one had spoken. “We have to face reality.”

“And what are we supposed to do,” Billy’s dad snapped like a bag of eggs pushed from a great height, “get a job that doesn’t exist?” The room was dead silent, more so than before. It was as silent as an abandoned morgue.

“…When was the last time you saw a job opening?” asked Frank’s sister, afraid of her own implications. “I was walking down Elm, and I saw a bunch of small businesses closing. Some of the cars on the streets were abandoned with luggage and dead pets inside. I even saw some of the shelters herd people onto busses. And all the TVs in the few remaining shop windows showed nothing but the static of a post apocalyptic station.”

“…What are you getting at?” asked Cate’s uncle, despite knowing the answer. They were all aware of what she was implying, but some part of their lizard brains needed her to say it so they could believe it. For the idea to be real.

“I think the Fuzon Corporation found a way to make some space.” As if to punctuate her theory, a gas grenade shattered its way through the window. Smoke burrowed through the room like a sewer pipeline through the ocean. They thought it was mere smoke at first, but then their vision started to collapse into liquids. The adults coughed and screamed for their children. They tried to find their way down the stairs and out of the building, but there were people coming up them… people with sticks, gas masks, and a desire to hit people for fun.

By the end of the night, with one exception, all the adults were either with their fellow homeless people or dead [Cate’s uncle, Jim’s dad, Billy’s mom, and Luke’s dad]. Most of the deaths were the result of the homeless daring to think being alive was justification enough to be treated like people as opposed to stolen property. [Some could say that might be a bit unfair. Typically, it’s preferred to return stolen property with as little damage as possible.] The parents would never see their children again. They were aware enough of what was happening to run as fast as they could the second they saw the police staking out the area as opposed to having a meeting as to discuss whether or not they should run away from the police.

The building was torn down a good month after the residents were evicted. Indeed, the whole of the city was torn down and replaced with a factory to build technology for citizens of the City. All the inadvertent and unintentional artwork that made the architectural theme of the city was destroyed and replaced the monolithic mundanity of the factory. Most of the technologies they were ordered to build consisted of computer circuit boards “too small” for machines to properly build. What the technology did in those machines was unknown to the workers. Most assumed it was to prevent robot revolutions, or something equally clichéd. The people were separated into different parts of the factory via an algorithm that determined which people where best combined to prevent uprisings. Between the factory opening and the City dying, there were 197 riots and 37 strikes [the longest being 12 consecutive days without labor].

The adults were branded with a bar code on the side of their arm and forever referred to by their serial number. None of them lived long enough to see the City die. Billy’s dad lived the longest despite being the most vocal of the group. The algorithm that determined how to deal with the uprisings when they occurred repeatedly spared him in the hopes that he would one day succeed. It was saddened on the day before the City died, when he died peacefully in his sleep. It took some comfort once it realized how the City had died. Or, at least, that’s the Historical record of things.

Jim had fled eastward, as he heard that he had family on that coast of America. He did not know that most of them had either died or had no idea he was related to them [his father was a black sheep of the family on account of being a gay man. Both facts enraged his family immensely]. It was irrelevant as Jim died before he could reach anyone due to falling into a ditch in the desert, suffering from an acute case of heat stroke and starvation. He lasted three weeks on his own. His last thoughts were one of his few good dreams where the vultures flew him out of the ditch and they had such merry adventures in the cloud kingdom.

Lisa nearly died several times while traveling north towards the remains of Canada. Once, she came across a bear cub and was barely able to out run his mother. Another time, she met with some unsavory people who tried to do nasty things to her. She doesn’t talk about that night. She had nightmares that made her never want to sleep again for a few years. She had a look in her eye of complete despair. One day, long after she crossed the “border,” when she was old enough to have lost a child, Lisa came across a great gorge. It seemed to be as deep as forever. She considered it for a good long while. Then, a lad of her age came up next to her. He had the look in his eyes of someone who had been falling off of a gorge for years, hoping that he’d be lucky enough to reach the bottom. They looked at each other for what seemed like forever…

Frank’s sister was lucky to escape from the complex owing to a large amount of dumb luck and clever movements. When they were younger, the siblings made a pact to meet up at the miserable tree just outside of the city, within the confines of a different City. It was an odd looking tree, shaped like what one would think a tree would look like after being tortured for a couple hours. Its bark was only there in patches. Its branches twisted towards itself like someone trying to put out their burning hair. The carved love notes on its flesh almost made it look like it was screaming. Frank’s sister was lucky that he was there waiting there for her. Another minute, and he would’ve left. They departed for a place they had never been before. The letter they sent me shortly after finding out that I was working on retelling these events claimed that they are happy where they are now.

Luke had the misfortune of being spotted by the police as he escaped. The chase was long, nearly lasting five hours, but it ended with Luke being captured. As the police were taking him to within City limits [where things worse than death were bound to occur], an odd rumbling came around them. The world began to shake as clopping of hooves approached the officers and their quarry. Luke never believed the stories Cate and Billy would tell of the supernatural infecting the world like dirt does to an open wound. And yet, before him was a herd of beings with the general outline of deer. Their alien beauty awed him. But that awe turned to horror as one of the officers did one of the stupidest things in his life and shot at the deer. When the officers were all dead, the deer led Luke to his new life.

Quinn, one of two kids who lived in the apartment complex without a parent or adult guardian, was alone in the dark. The adults did not have a plan for where Quinn would go should the complex be uninhabitable. Indeed, they never thought it would be. Life has a way of catching up to people who think things will never change. Desperate and cold, Quinn jumped at the first opportunity they could for even the barest amount of comfort. They walked for what seemed like an eternity [but was merely a few hours] until they came across something shaped like a slender man in a black suit. The main difference between the two is that men are typically known to have faces and not have tentacles sprouting from some unknown part of existence. Somehow, without a face, the shape smiled. Quinn didn’t survive a week under its care. In some regards, they were lucky.

Johnathan, the other kid without a parent, was found nearly starved by a troupe of roaming Spiders. He was cared for and loved even better than he knew when he had parents. Sometimes he would share too much about who he was before he met the Spiders. Of what his parents did to him… of what he did to them when given the chance. He never told a soul within the apartment complex what he did and he didn’t know why he felt comfortable telling the Spiders. He always feared that people would toss him out if he told them the truth. And yet, these people didn’t. They held him close like a parent does to their child. These Spiders believed reacting with violence to pain and suffering didn’t inherently make one a bad person. For the first time in Jonathan’s life, he knew love.

As for Cate and Billy... in truth, the story of the pair is a bit anticlimactic. No matter how much they would like to believe there was, there was no moment of rupture that broke their hearts and made them hate each other forever. No tragic event that killed Cate and made Billy swear vengeance upon the world, motivating him to do what he was going to do in those final days of the City. There wasn’t even some disagreement between the two that slightly fractured them. They simply drifted apart from one another as the years went on. They didn’t even realize it had happened until it was over, and even then their reaction to this was just to shrug at the loss of something they once thought was important. They saw each other from time to time in the City, but those were moments of strangers walking the same street or eating at the same restaurant. In truth, they would never know each other as friends until long after the City had died.)

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