The Thin White Duke Returns

TW: Suicide and implied abuse

[This story was told to me by a man of 80 years who died three days after he told it. He said it was a true story in the tone of voice of someone who was perhaps a bit too manic for his age. The scars around his eyes and arms made me consider his story to have some merit and be worth telling here.]

It returned to the City on a Tuesday. It had wanted to return for very long time; the architecture of the City was once like a forest of steel and flesh, which reminded it of its home. It had lived in its home for a long time. For all time, it would say, which started when humans created it from cracked photographs, discarded tulpas, and other fifth dimensional materials. All previous times are a lie to give its home History. It longed for the foreign familiarity the City brought to its home. There were rules that prevented it from returning sooner. For all beings, it thought, there are rules. The Sasquatch, for example, could enter the City whenever it pleased, so long as he remained within the margins of dead end narratives or inside bookstores that solely sold cookbooks. Werewolves could only exist during a full moon. The Children were only able to enter the City after committing a blood sacrifice 300 yards away from City limits (though that had less to do with their species and more to do with an agreement they made with several high ranking members of the City [back when it was just a city]).

As for Humanity…  There is speculation on why it uses the pronoun “it.” (It was determined that “it” was its preferred pronoun when several literary critics attempted to analyze it using other pronouns such as “he,” “she,” “hir,” “they,” etc. Those who didn’t use the “it” pronoun were found in a field, sans their bones, organs, skin, and other non-fluid aspects of being. Suffice it to say, it was referred to as “it” from then on [a pity, as the one essay to accurately used the “it” pronoun was by far the weakest of the collection].) Some theorize that it simply likes the “tt” sound the pronoun makes while others believe it to be a literary reference, though the implications of it being aware of and referencing IT is frightening. But the most popular theory (which is to say the one that highlights Humanity’s need to be the center of attention) is that it despises Humanity and has embraced the dehumanizing aspects of the pronoun.

There are several coherent reasons to despise Humanity from their need to consume the world’s limited oxygen to the fact that they don’t follow any coherent rules of existence to the creation of Nickleback. Most highlight the inherent barbarism of Humanity to justify a disdain for the species, but that assumes any species could be inherently barbaric when in truth good and evil are social constructs. A society, for example, that views all people to be equal regardless of race, creed, sexuality, gender, or whatever else divides people and requires them to be treated as such would be considered evil by the society currently infesting certain corners of the City. Few consider the possibility that Humanity might just be too stupid to function, letting themselves get too bogged down by their virtues and repressing their vices. 

Whatever the reason it used the pronoun “it,” it did not change the fact that it could only enter the City once someone said its name. Long ago, back when the City had a different name, people said its name as if it had as much meaning as “Clark Kent” or “Bloody Mary” or “Robert Walpole.” It was just a set of meaningless letters randomized, and nothing more. But that was when names had such power. Now… Bloody Mary has met with 15 people in the past hour, her smile radiant and cruel. The lad who said its name would wish he said Mary’s name instead. It had so many plans for him… But then, perhaps the story of the man ought to be told before getting into speculating relative suffering.

The lad was named Jacob. He lived in the City for the majority of his short life (he was born five miles outside of the City in a long abandoned gas station. It was a miracle his mother survived the pregnancy), nearly 12 years (his fateful meeting with the Thin White Duke was less than a week before his birthday). For Jacob’s whole life, his father worked for the Fuzon Corporation as a janitor. They paid him enough to feed and house two people. His mother died when Jacob was 5. The apartment complex that they lived in had one of two types of rooms: too small or the Landlord’s. Theirs was a grey room, even though it was painted blue. There was one window in the bedroom, but it was angled in such a way as to awaken the person sleeping in the apartment’s single bed before anyone else in the City. The bathroom was not in the apartment.

The culture of the apartment complex was just as curt. There were no communal events, no whispers about how the guy in T8 is secretly eating missing dogs (he wasn’t, that was the family in J2), not even the basic decency of saying hello as you walk past one another. It was as if the apartment complex was built in such a way as to endear isolation. Shockingly, those who lived alone went mad. Only on the rare occasions where a fire broke out did those who lived in Jacob’s apartment complex realize there were other people in the building. Sure they assumed, but it wasn’t important enough in the grand scheme of things to retain such useless information.

There were exceptions of course. Children like Jacob tended to run into one another quite frequently and interacted as most children do. One notable instance was on a Tuesday. It was a muggy day outside, muggier than usual, as a storm had passed by the day before and shorted out the faulty air conditioning unit. Jacob went on a typical stroll through the hallways. (As Jacob unlocked the door, he made sure the keys to the apartment he secretly kept were carefully hidden on his person.) As Jacob wandered down the halls, the lights flickered with what little power they had. It was as if the building itself was blinking.

“Lo, JJ,” said a voice behind him. Jacob did not know why people called him “JJ.” It wasn’t as if his last name started with a “J” (it would be odd to spell “Saulson” that way, but to each their own). Surely it would make more sense for the nickname to be “Jay” or “JS” or for people to just call him “Jacob.” But the name stuck and Jacob had to live with it for what little time he had left. The person the voice belonged to had the far more unique name of “Fred Free.” He liked it when people called him “FF,” but he always introduced himself as “Freddy.” He was an affable young lad, a year older than Jacob but you couldn’t tell from the look of him. Jacob was slightly tall for his age, which made little difference when it came to considering what that age was.

“Hello Fred,” said Jacob with a coldness that would freeze even the muggiest of days. Affability could only get him so far. “Shouldn’t you be out looking for a job?”

“Alas,” sighed Freddy with maudlin sincerity, “the job market just isn’t interested in me. I just lack the experience needed to be a novice. It’s a tough world out there and I wish I spent my time working when I was your age.”

“Ain’t never gonna happen.”

“What isn’t?”

“I ain’t gonna get a job.” To say Freddy was mortified by this simple sentence would be like saying a fish in an empty fish tank is wet. In Jacob’s defense, the traditional job market was limited for people with Jacob’s skill set of being nimble, dim, and angry. His brightest future would require his father to drop dead at that exact moment, the maintenance boss at the factory to be keen on keeping things within the family, and for Jacob to actually gain the skills to keep the floors, machines, and other things that are in a tech factory clean to the standards of “maybe has been used twice” within 4 hours. (The sad thing was Frank, the maintenance boss, pitied the Saulsons and hated his bosses enough to do just that, regardless of Jacob’s abilities.)

Freddy wanted to argue with Jacob about how what he claims isn’t work (despite requiring a lot of effort) is going to end up getting him killed. About how he can’t be lucky forever and his methods won’t be enough to feed himself, let alone anyone else. Maybe this was the moment Freddy told Jacob how much he wanted to go on walks with him, eat with him, have incredible sex with him. But sadly, Jacob decided to walk away as if he was a badass who just said a one liner that owned his opponent. Freddy just stammered. (Sometime later, Jacob would wonder if he could have avoided it had he not been such a smug prick to Freddy.)

Instead of admitting his own complex feelings towards Freddy, Jacob headed to one of the richer floors of the apartment complex. It should be noted that the term “richer” is relative in these circumstances as a person with one penny is certainly richer than a person with no pennies and that person is richer still than someone with no pants or pennies. In the case of the people on the richer floors, they had welcome mats. Sure, they were all the same welcome mat (a scratchy old thing that one could barely tell said “Come and See”. It didn’t even do its job of cleaning dirty shoes), but that’s enough for some people to talk in a snooty accent.

A new group of people had just moved in to one such apartment a week ago: Apartment A3, two doors down from the Landlord’s. They consisted of a pale man in a wheelchair who should never have moved into the City, his redheaded daughter who laughed like an idiot at the word “Pineapple” for reasons she never comprehended, and his bald son who would never shut up about how much better the last apartment they lived in was, as if that was somehow his father’s fault they had to move. They had lived in the City for a good couple of years, moving from apartment to apartment before finally being moved into this one. The son worked as an errand boy for the Fuzon corporation’s factory while the daughter was a secretary. The father was once a barber, but now spends his days slowly dying of heatstroke while his kids complain about it being too cold inside.

Jacob, for his part, stalked apartment A3 for a good hour before finally entering. He had to be sure the place was empty, as even the cleverest of thieves could be thwarted by a well-placed rube. The mechanisms for breaking into an apartment require a simple set of picks and keen eyesight, which Jacob sorely lacked. So instead, Jacob just nicked the extra skeleton key the Landlord kept in the maintenance closet three doors from Jacob’s apartment (many landlords in the City assumed people will assume they aren’t that dumb. They tend not to account for those who think “in the maintenance closet” is a clever place to hide a maintenance key).

When Jacob entered the room, he found that it was old and musty, much like a museum. Indeed, the main artifact of this miniature museum was a decayed old man, kept alive by technological marvels like a quarter-full oxygen tank, a feeding tub surgically inserted into the man’s throat, and a television that was kept on a channel full of static. Fortunately for Jacob, the old man was asleep. He didn’t snore or even make a noise. He was perfectly still, as if he never moved in his whole life. A twinge of sadness came to Jacob as he realized the old man was dead. That dissipated once the old man started to cough his lungs out before returning to his motionless slumber.

Jacob had to be quick if he wanted to stay alive. In his time living at the apartment complex, Jacob knew that people kept their money in three locations: cracked safes, under the clothes pile, and on their person. But the occasional bit of loose change was typically kept in publicly displayed jars: on a mantelpiece or a kitchen counter or (in this case) on the windowsill. In some regards, Jacob had pity for these dopes that think this is a good place to keep something of such value (Jacob’s father kept his in the far sensible location of “above the fridge where Jacob can’t reach”). It isn’t that hard, Jacob thought, to just give the money to someone who needs it. If they did that, I wouldn’t have to steal it now would I? The amount in the jar was roughly $2.10 (a personal high for Jacob), which he shoved into his pocket, though he would never count it. Instead, Jacob would receive a blow to the back of his head, knocking him unconscious. Evidentially, Jacob never noticed the fourth person who lived in the house, a prematurely grey haired woman with a frying pan in her left hand. The jar shattered on the floor, cutting Jacob’s leg. Not that he noticed.

When Jacob came to, he found himself tied up. Four people were before him. One was sitting on a broken wheelchair whose wheels were too rusted to turn, tapping his left foot in the air. Another leaned back on the table with her fingernails facing Jacob, a cruel smile on her bloodied face. The other woman, with grey hair, was designing the room for her own purpose. And an old man was lying on the floor, dead for less time than Jacob was unconscious. Inexplicably, the money was still in his pocket.

“Ah, you’re awake,” said the man in the wheelchair. He didn’t speak like most people on the richer floors, with their affected posh accents and “Well, I Never” phrases. Rather, his accent was harsher, lacking in any of the artifice they say one needs to live in a “richer floor” in an apartment complex in the City. He spoke with the curtness of the poorer floors, the ruggedness of the homeless, and the sneer of the Spiders. “Forgive the ropes, but when someone kills your father… restraint is required.”

Though Jacob wasn’t the brightest person to live in the apartment, he was keenly aware of what these people had planned for him. Even the most sophisticated of the “richer” class wouldn’t stand for their father being murdered by some lowly thief. Especially a thief who was stupid enough to get caught by someone he didn’t even know existed. He also knew that, were he to call this out, no doubt the man before him would gloat about how no one would believe him, giving Jacob enough time to escape his binds.

But when Jacob tried this approach, the man, in a fit of fury, punched the young boy in the face. He started to cry blood. “HOW DARE YOU,” screamed the man, “YOU LITTLE SHIT! I LOVED MY FATHER! WE ARGUED ABOUT A LOT OF THINGS, BUT I WOULD-“ Instead of finishing that sentence, the man stomped on Jacob’s crotch. In response, Jacob let out a scream of pain… followed by an invocation of a religious figure he didn’t believe in.

“Francis, stop,” said the woman leaning on the table, now moving towards Francis, “he’s just a kid.”

“Just a- JUST A KID! HE MURDERED OUR FATHER! He probably murdered countless other people as well! You know what his kind are like.”

“I didn’t-“ but before Jacob could finish, Francis kicked him in the face.

“I DIDN’T ASK FOR YOUR OPINION!” screamed Francis, unaware of the text surrounding him. The woman with grey hair lit up a cigarette, hoping no one would notice her.  The other woman reached for Francis, but he pulled away from her. “I’m fine,” pleaded Francis, “I’m fine, Lucy.”

“Someone,” cried Jacob whilst Francis repressed tears of his own, “help me. Please help me.” In that moment of suffering, words came to Jacob. They started out with the familiar “Oh God, help me,” before transitioning to the obscure “Oh Orc, help me,” before, at last, reaching for words of symbolism and myth, thought lost to the existential desert of the post internet age. A pair of meaningless words that, in this age of pure meaning, combined into something terrible. Words it thought no one would ever say again… “Oh Slenderman, help me!” And it was in that moment, the Thin White Duke returned to the City. It didn’t walk into the City so much as appear in the doorway. The woman with grey hair was the first to notice it. She didn’t want to notice it; no one would ever want to notice it. But when her gaze came across its form, her mouth fell agape. Neither words nor sounds came out of her mouth, merely the scream of the mute. It stood in the doorway, perfectly still as if the apartment was built around it. Looking at each step, it appeared as if the apartment was moving as opposed to it.

And yet, there was fluidity to its movements… a creature living in an eternal ocean of air, its tendrils floating aimlessly. They were the only thing you could be sure were moving. The woman with grey hair was blinded by her tears, thinking of all the things she did right in the world, now revealed to be mere selfishness. The Thin White Duke revealed to her that she was never worth saving. If she could move, the floor would drown in her blood.

“Hey guys…” announced the Thin White Duke. Its voice was uncanny. There was a musical notation to its cadence, a harmonious unity of softness and alien strangeness. It was not a song that one would immediately recognize, nor even a song at all. But it was musical nonetheless. And yet, there was a dullness to the voice, as it was doing an impersonation of its least favorite friend. It still liked them and all, but it’s clear that it would have a livelier conversation with a bag of bricks and the only reason they still hang out is because he has a car.

Francis and Lucy turned towards the intruder. Jacob would’ve as well, but he was tied up at the moment. Francis focused on the shape of the being. It was extremely thin, even by the City’s standards, as if food had never entered its form. It was unnaturally shaped like a person in that it had the general outline of a typical man of 25 in a black suit with a black tie, but there was something off about it. Francis would never figure out why this was wrong, even as the answer was staring him in the face. It came to Lucy rather easily: it had no face. Its voice was not muffled, and yet it had no face. It could see her with rapturous fury, yet it had no eyes. She could feel the contempt it exuded, and yet it had no means of expressing itself. Other details flung into her mind. The suit was flesh, growing its fibers of cotton and dye from its unnaturally white skin. The tendrils were an aura that only looked like tendrils; they had no substance. Yet she was sure they would kill her in the end.

Instinct took over the denizens of Apartment A3 as Francis tried to flee from the apartment; not realizing the only escape was through the Thin White Duke. He instantly collapsed into a puddle of flesh and misery. His eyes were gouged out by human fingers, his stomach cut to pieces by a nearby knife. None of these things killed him. It felt nothing after this. Lucy took the saner option and dropped to her knees in prayer. The tendrils did the rest. It felt nothing after this. The woman with grey hair was allowed to her own devices. It felt nothing after this.

As for Jacob… terrified Jacob… guilty Jacob… young Jacob… wrapped up like a gift Jacob… it looked at his body, and a smile was felt on the mouthless face.

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Fragment

“Did you see the girl?”

“The one with her throat slit? Yeah, I saw her.”

“Did you know she was murdered?”

“Whaaat?”

“Saw it myself.”

“I thought it happened three weeks ago. And I damn well know you were-“

[Sounds of a riot]

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The Art of the Sextons

TW: Implied rape

[I met the artist a few months after the City died. I was told by a few friends of my brother that he lived a few blocks away from the place where we were resting before leaving the City. He was one of the last people I encountered while researching the events surrounding the City’s fall. I found him in, for lack of a better term, his studio working on a sculpture of three kids playing a game of tag. None of the children looked to be relatives to one another, but they had a sibling’s fondness for each other. And yet, there was an air of sadness to the statue, as there was in all of his work. He was taking a short break when I asked if I could interview him for something I was working on. What follows are his predominately words. I have removed myself from the narration as best as possible, though I do make myself known once or twice. His only request was that I not only redact his name, but also all the others involved.]

It was about five years back. Maybe ten. I forget. Time was a bit difficult to parse back in the bad years. I know, I know you think the bad years ended a lot earlier than ten years. It was longer in the City.

I was young when I started. Maybe 10. Maybe 15. I was just about a young adult then, thrust into a world I didn’t quite understand that felt hostility for the way I look. Sometimes I wonder if things would have been better for us if we were white. Probably not, given we still wouldn’t have been the right kind of white.

I buried my mom outside the City.

I had never been outside the City before that day. It was raining softly, like a cool wind on your face when you go to the north side of the City during the fall. The sky was a Technicolor ballet seen behind cloudy fingers. I never knew my dad.

My mom worked on the streets for a living. Better than most people, I suppose. She made enough for the pair of us to live in one of the nicer apartment buildings with actual beds and landlords and cockroaches. I slept on the floor.

I met one of my neighbors once. He was a lean fellow with a gold ball for an eye. He would sneer at me with his white face about not belonging here. He would laugh at his own jokes and get upset when I didn’t. I knew him very well.

I buried my mom outside the City.

I was the only one who was there to bury her. Her parents died before the bad years. Her sister died during them. My sister was gone. I never knew my dad.

People from outside the City saw me bury her. Some offered to help me out. They were odd people, these non-City folk. They were plumper and older, yet younger and healthier. They had smiles on their faces, not because they were happy. They smiled because they wanted me to be happy. A tan hand offered me a shovel and a pale one offered me a rag. I refused both.

The fellow with the gold ball for an eye offered to help me out. He said he felt pity on my mother for having to work such a terrible job with a child all alone. He never said anything about me. I was a prop in my mother’s tragedy, an albatross, an anchor on a ship. A crutch.

I buried my mom outside the City.

When the hole was finished, the sky opened up. There was a rainbow at the heart of it. My mom had a rainbow tattoo on her left shoulder. She said she got it after my sister died. They found her body two weeks after my mother died.

We knew that she was dead. Few people her age survive in the City long on their own. She was just a kid, my mom would say. Just seven years old. They had an argument before she left. It was over a boy she was dating. I never knew him.

They were in love, she said. They were going to be together whether she liked it or not. My mother did not. She howled about the boy being another mouth to feed. About what his father would say. About what his father would do if he approved of their union. My sister looked at my mother with her cold blue eyes and stormed out of our little home.

The apartment was a fine one, though not necessarily the best one in the complex we lived in. It had enough room for two beds and one table, so long as no one slept in both of those beds. I slept on the floor. My sister slept on one of the beds. My mother slept with in other people’s beds.

A man came over to where I lived once. He had a cloth covering one of his eyes. It was still bleeding. He said he was the father of one of the boys in the apartment. He said that a girl had taken the boy from him. He said she stabbed him in the eye and needed some help.

I buried my mom outside the City.

There was to be no marker on her grave. She didn’t have anything that could represent who she was to me. She was the words she spoke, the tone she spoke them in. Even my thoughts of her voice don’t do it justice.

A boy was found in the river a month before my mother died. He was a year younger than I was at the time, a year older than my sister when she ran away four years prior. Was this the boy she ran away with, I wondered? I asked the fellow with a gold ball for an eye if it was, and he said he didn’t have a son. The people who found the body dumped it on the streets with the rest.

My mom worked for most of the time. When she was gone, I’d look for work of my own. In the early days of the bad years, work was easy to find. Steal “X” for “Person,” punch “Y,” burn “house.” All basic stuff. But the bad years in their twilight decade sucked out the possibilities for work. Sucked out the possibilities for anything, for that matter. All there was left was silence.

The factory was not an option.

My mom once told me a story about my dad. It was a lie, so I won’t tell you. But I liked the story and it brought me comfort.

I tried to stay out of the apartment complex when my mom was working. There was a fellow with a golden ball for an eye there.

I overheard my mom talk to the fellow with the golden ball for an eye about shipping me off to the factory. I needed some work under me, and it would remove a mouth to feed. Two mouths are, after all, better than three. I ran away from them as fast as I could.

I stopped on a hill just outside the City. It had a good view of the brutalist grey landscape. The starless sky seemed to fade out perfectly into the sky of the rest of the world like paint on a canvas or blood in a river. They said the boy was murdered. Nobody cared enough to look into it.

My mom would sing to me when I was little. Mostly nonsense words that make sense to a baby and are nostalgic to an adult. I would fall asleep every time she sung to me no matter how uncomfortable the floor was. No matter how many bugs were in the walls. No matter how sad I was feeling.

My mom never knew my dad. He was just another gig.

I returned home to find my mom dead. Her throat had been slit into a weary smile. Her mouth was agape, like a dove’s when it chokes on a nut. The man with a golden ball for an eye was nowhere to be seen.

I buried my mom outside the City. At least, that was the plan. The hill I stood on was a beautiful place where my thought felt clearer, more refined. It was the perfect place to bury her.

The week after my sister ran away, I talked to the man with one eye. He had found a ball painted gold to replace it with. At least, it looked like a ball. It wasn’t a perfect fit, but it did fit.

He smiled at me like he would my mother. They had been talking before my sister ran away, he claimed. He said they were in love. He said a lot of things that weren’t true. The only time he would tell the truth was when he’d sneer at me with his white face, saying I didn’t belong with them. At least that was a half-truth.

The man with a gold ball for an eye held me down.

He…

[The artist has asked me to keep only the implication of this part. He has told me the whole of it: the shame, the denial, the guilt, the anger, the lies told both to himself and to his mother. I understand his reasoning, though I have other reasons for not telling it. There are some stories that I am the only one who can tell, be they my own stories or being ones only I care enough to tell them. But there are others best left to the work of other artists in their preferred form. Ones I lack the experience and understanding to tell fully. When I asked him if he had done art about the subject, he described his second statue. I smiled a sympathetic smile.]

I buried my mom outside the City. At least, that was the plan. When I saw her in the hole I had made, she looked wrong. Her arms were contorted inwardly, like discarded yarn. I couldn’t leave her like that. Nor could I just leave her lying on some street corner waiting to decompose.

It took three days for me to hit upon my revelation. Three days of watching my mom slowly decay while hoping none of the people playing cop saw me. The eternally night sky echoed through the remains of her eyes. The moon looked down upon us like the mirror of an ex-lover who had just escaped a bad relationship. Her throat wouldn’t stop smiling, even when it was closed. The flies were starting to drink from her. I was cold. I couldn’t go back. Wouldn’t go back. We were alone. I barely knew how to live on my own. I was just 10 or 15, just barely an adult living on his own in the City. I missed her so much. I missed my sister. I missed my dad, or at least the dreams I had of him. I wanted to hear my mom’s voice again, that stupid inane song she used to sing to me when I needed to sleep. It was then that the idea came to me.

I took her outside of where I was sleeping and stood her up by the miserable tree. It was sturdy enough to hold her up while I began my design. But even when I moved her away from the tree, she remained upright. Rigor mortis had long since passed. It was as if the universe was being guided by my design.

When I finished, she was no longer my mother. She was an opera singer performing to an audience. A tribute to a world that had died long ago. She was singing an aria from… [He pauses for some time trying to remember his mother’s favorite album, where the aria comes from. He never does.]

Over the next couple of days, people begin talking about the statue I had made. There was an exhilaration to the anonymity. To being known and unknown by everyone. It didn’t solve my homelessness/hunger problems, but it did warm my heart a bit. Shame it couldn’t the rest of my body.

The next statue I made was a bit more… experimental. I decided to use a male form to avoid criticisms of sexism. It was a bit of an angrier, cruder design. Both of his hands were shoved up his butt. I cut off his mouth and parts of his cheeks to give him a terrified smile. I removed his penis and put it into one of his eye sockets, which was previously missing an eye. Also, I cut off his nose and put it into his left pocket.

From there, the designs varied from corpse to corpse. Some were simple parents teaching their children of many skin tones how to count. Others were more complex cut ups. I didn’t do those that often. Most people preferred the former to the latter, myself included.

Not everyone liked it. I remember hearing some rumblings from the “cops” claiming it was a disgrace, especially after the satirical cut up I did of the former commissioner. They always said they were going to hunt me down, but they never even tried to investigate me. Other things must’ve gotten in the way.

A few weeks after everything changed, a nice guy with red hair confronted me. He said he knew I was the one doing the statues, and he wanted to know if I’d be willing to work on some statues for him. Naturally, I said yes.

[I show him an artistic drawing of the remains of employee 7877. He smiles and slightly chuckles at the image.]

Oh yeah, I remember her, one of my more… crude designs. I found her lying on the walls of the factory like an abandoned teddy bear in a train station. Her throat was slit like my mother’s, though unlike her this cut was self-inflicted.

[How could you tell, I asked.]

This was a few years into doing statues. I’ve seen loads of death and brutality and cruelty in that time. I know what a self-inflicted throat slitting looks like. There’s a distinct angle at the end of the cut where the person flicks their wrist go get the knife out that’s different than when it’s done by someone else.

She was already naked when I found her. Some cold girl must have stolen her clothes or something. She was filthy and not even a day dead. Her teeth were yellow with dismay. Her eyes dead longer than she was.

I decided to do something rather crude with her body. This was shortly after I heard about the “police’s” plans to “arrest” me. It was at the right center point between the police station and the miserable tree. One was a landmark of the City, a crooked broken thing that no one cared about. The other was a tree I liked.

I raised her left hand to her face, scrubbing the pores and grime out of it. Her right hand was between her legs, scrubbing down there for more pleasurable reasons. At the time, I thought I was being clever and ironic by having her be aroused by all the awfulness around her. In practice, I was being an ass.

There was one person who it resonated with for reasons besides the crudity. I was lurking some distance away when he approached. He was a lean guy like many of us were back then. He seemed transfixed by the image I had scrawled with her corpse. As if she reminded him of someone he knew.

[I asked the artist if he did know her.]

I don’t know. Didn’t get the chance since I saw a “cop” behind him.  He was holding a gun, so I bolted. I don’t know what happened to either of them since that moment, but I heard gunshots. I have heard rumors that the non-cop was seen running around with a Sasquatch. The world we live in is quite strange.

[One last question, I asked, have you ever done any deer statues?]

Are you fucking nuts? Like I’d want to risk my life over such small time gains. Now then, I know you didn’t come here just to chat. What do you want me to make for you?

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The Great Man of History

The stars did not return to the City until the week it died. That isn’t to say that they left the world entirely, for the world is an interesting place to watch grow and shift and other things a world is known for doing. Rather, it was the City itself that was dull and lifeless in frankly uninteresting ways. For the majority of the citizens, life could be summed up as a series of “And then” with nary a “Suddenly” or “But then” or even an “Oh no, not again with these” in sight.

There were things of note happening in the City preceding the week it died. A deer was seen wandering the remains of the zoo like a vigil to a long forgotten grave. A group of young adults were murdered for frankly no good reason. A mysterious black creature that had been lurking the City streets like a serial killer had finally escaped from that cage along with a pair of ladies. Then there was a fire that broke out three blocks away from the headquarters of the Fuzon Corporation, which killed five people and maimed twenty. And of course some idiot decided that it would be a good idea to let the Thin White Duke back into the City.

But none of these events were what brought the stars back to the City. What brought them back was much, much smaller. Only one other person witnessed it: inexplicably, it was Billy. Not much is known about Billy. It is assumed that he was born sometime during the bad years three miles away from the City in a minor city whose name was lost to time. But there is a prevailing theory that, if nothing else, has thematic weight that he was born in the City on the exact first second of the bad years. That the sole piece of evidence supporting this theory is that it sounds interesting is most likely complete rubbish as it sounds like a sodding cliché in a way that real life never reflects. (Realistic clichés tend to take the form of egomaniacal jerks who want to take over the world for vaguely explained reasons that probably have more to do with compensating for something they lack than actual ambition, people trying to help others when everything seems lost, or other things that fit within that thematic framework.)

And that’s not even getting into the contradictions of the man. Some sources with extensive amount of research claim that he worked for the Fuzon Corporation for close to a decade before finding himself homeless over a dispute with a foreman. Other equally valid sources who did just as much research claim that he had never worked for the Fuzon Corporation and spent that decade scrounging for food and basic living conditions, but ultimately ended up squatting in various abandoned tenements and street corners. Even asking people who should, in theory, know what Billy was doing in that ten year period of his life, in practice, only knew that he was around. In my own research, I could not confirm either one of these views and have discovered five other contradictory takes on the man. This might very well be because of the lack of paperwork done in the City over the course of its post bad years era.

If I were to hazard a guess as to the nature of Billy’s life at that time, I would say that he was doing what everyone else in the City was doing: surviving and nothing more.

What is known about Billy was this: he was a black man of middle age. Were he to survive the week, he would have been somewhere between 22-25 in a month. He had a scar on his left thigh from a knife wound. The cause of that wound was most likely from a bar fight, though it could have been an accident. What is known about the wound is that it was not self-inflicted. He had a birthmark on his shoulder in the shape of the remains of a hastily erased dot. He was born within 30 miles of the City and only knew the world through the lens of the bad years. He had been, for lack of a better word, incarcerated only once in his life and escaped under circumstances that shall be discussed later. His mother died before his father and his father died before him. Like many who lived in the City, he was starving, only kept alive by the barest of necessities. (There are some horror stories told of those who survived in the City when the food ran out. These are tragedies of people locked in a cage some of them call freedom. As someone once scrawled on the body of another, “It’s better to be outside in the rain.” A pity it was a flood. But then again, there are crocodiles.) And he never told any one his last name.

This might sound like an odd thing to focus on, but his last name is perhaps one of the most controversial talking points in this whole sodding affair. In my time researching the various events, characters, and locations surrounding Billy, I have discovered fifteen different last names. Included in these are “Denton,” “Snapp,” “Mann,” “Fucks” (rhymes with tarboosh), and “Lincoln.” But perhaps the name most of my contemporaries desperately want it to be, like a member of a cult aching for today to be the day they move into the desert to wait out the apocalypse, was “Blake.”

If my simile did not make it clear, I am not one of those people. I understand the temptation, I really do. To have one of the major players in the fall of the City be named “Billy Blake” is one of those things that a historian begs to be true much in the same way one wants to be the second coming of Jesus: in theory, it sounds great. But stop and think about it for a second, and all those pesky implications and cruelties come to light. And then there’s the responsibility of such a status. To look people in the eye and say “You will not be saved.” And that’s not even getting into the theological implications of Billy being a Blake. 

When I have brought this up to my contemporaries, the best I’ve gotten was a self-congratulatory bemusement at my silly assumptions with the patronizing tone of a babysitter being asked to put on something the kid actually wants to watch rather than what they think the kid wants to watch. Sadly, these were a minority of situations. More often, I would be violently beaten for daring to go against the grain on this subject. The last time I considered bringing up my concerns prior to this telling ended with me losing an eye and him an arm. I haven’t slept well since that night.

I’m currently writing this chapter next to him. The doctors say he should be fine. They’re good at their job, as my brother has told me time and time again. The man’s arm can be replaced, the Doctor with blonde hair died blue tells me. She says it should take about a month to build, but it can be done. They did what they could for my eye, but I will never see through it again. Still, I’m grateful to her and the staff that kept him alive. He’s good people, despite this one bad incident. Shortly after I finished this chapter, I asked him if it would be fine if I named him in this moment and went more in-depth about the matter than I am. He politely declined for several sympathetic reasons. One he said I could use was that this is a bit tangential and I should return to the story.

It was a dark sky that the City had gotten used to in its boring years. The clouds were parting, though you couldn’t notice in the featureless sky. Billy was lying on the concrete surface of the City streets. He was cold and dressed in clothing he wore for the past year. The air was percolated with the stench of the unwashed masses. His fellow homeless were making the noise all humans make when they haven’t had any dreams since they were five, which sounds almost like a moan of defeat, but with the hint of a sigh of sadness. In short, Billy could not get any sleep. Inexplicably, he was the only one who couldn’t.

Which made it all the more fitting that he was the first one who saw her. What follows is purely speculation on my part. I did not know Billy nor do I know what his thought process was at the time. This is based on the experiences of those who survived the City’s final days. As such, I feel this reality of my honest story needs mentioning only once. Sometimes honesty isn’t about the facts as it is about the feelings of the world around you. I do not think he thought she was real at first. Illuminated in the flickering electronic glow of the City streets, she would have looked like an angel to the malnourished Billy.

He approached her moments after first seeing her, forgetting the need to sleep as many do within the City. It didn’t take him long to see that she was merely a work of art made out of the remains of a long dead person. Not too long dead to begin decay but long enough to know that they aren’t actually sleeping. And yet, Billy still approached her. He looked upon her form in all its strangeness. He probably couldn’t see the words etched on the ground beneath her remains, them having been long since discarded by the wind. Nor could he know what sad life she led prior to being remixed into a statue.

But he did know the feeling of her, the sadness that her malnourished body evoked. The cruelties the barcode on her left arm signified. The urges her right arm expressed. The lonely smile on her face that not even the winds of history could remove. Her fingernails consumed like her left eye. Her feet, mere stumps. He would never know her voice, but he could tell that it was beautiful. No recordings of who this woman was exist. Her past was consumed by the loss of the old future. Deleted by those who didn’t want to see her as a person. All we have left of her is an employee number: 7877.

I visited the ruins of the factory she spent the last years of her life once. Even when it wasn’t a ruin, it was a desolate place. A monument of brutality and brutalism fitting within the barest definition of “livable.” Room 7.8.77 was barren. No sign of life or even what remains when someone moves out of a childhood home. Not even dust percolated the air. The banalities of the room are well reported. A chill went down my spine as I inspected her bed for any sign of someone sleeping in it. There wasn’t even an absence.

I wonder sometimes about what they did to make the rooms like that. All the rooms were the same: the same brutalism, the same barrenness, the same lack of absence. Who could have done such a thing to those rooms? How could they have removed all evidence that anyone was ever there? There are cameras, but we don’t know where the footage is or how to retrieve it. All we have of any evidence that she did work here is a barcode and a number. Everything else is absence lost to the either like clouds on a windy day. My unconscious companion awoke as I wrote that line. He dreamed of popping clouds in a hot air balloon and finding people inside them like candy in an Easter egg. I wonder if there’s any significance to that.

As Billy stroked the body’s face, wondering about someone he cared for no doubt, the sun began to rise.

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The Tower Through the Trees (Introduction)

While working on Fearful Symmetry, I was also writing a book. I was hoping to publish the book physically. However, other priorities have come to pass, making serializing it digitally more preferable. What follows is a solarpunk novel written by someone who's rather unfamiliar with the genre. There are parts of this story that are... triggering. If I recall correctly, there is at least one instance of implied rape, some homophobia and racism, and suicide. I've done my best to censor the slurs in the blog version of the book. I wouldn't say this is my best work, but I feel proud enough about it to publish it to you. A full uncensored PDF version of the story will be made available to my Patrons. I hope you enjoy it.

To Alex.

Please don’t sue.

“One day when we’re all gone, the creatures who come after us’ll find these old steel skeletons marching across the desert wastes or tropical swamplands. Think how mysterious they’ll appear, like the old stones are to us. The new caretakers of the Earth will wonder if these pylons were built to mark highways of unknown and forgotten power.”
-Grant Morrison

“Sometimes reality is too complex for oral communication. But legend embodies it in a form which enables it to spread all over the world.”
-Jorge Luis Borges

“I have been trying, for some time now, to find dignity in my loneliness. I have been finding this had to do. It is easier, of course, to find dignity in one’s solitude. Loneliness is solitude with a problem.”
-Maggie Nelson

There are many a story to be told of the City. Indeed, there are many a story to be told of its end. What follows is not the Historical account of what transpired in those final days. For History has a hermetic tendency of forming itself away from honesty. Honesty is a contradictory thing that never fully coalesces into coherency. But the coherency of History requires one to ignore the rudderless nature of humanity. All lives are stories in the end, with their own arcs and implications. They all just bungle into one another like a maw of cats in a room with a single ball of string. To call that cavalcade of cuteness coherent would be quite clueless. So instead, I shall tell the honest tales of what occurred that fateful time when the last of the Cities died…

I had wanted to end this bit with that ellipsis, but I had just used the first person in that last sentence, so I suppose I should explain myself. In truth, I am not a character in this story. Sure, I appear in it once or twice (and even then as a minor cameo), but I do not affect the story. I wasn’t even in the City for a large majority of this story. I didn’t even think I’d live long enough to be able to just miss such a story. I was lucky that I lived in one of the coastal places and was thus able to escape the ruins of America for slightly more stable shores (this being a metaphor, as I lived on a boat during the bad years. The less said about that, the better).

Once those years were done, I wandered the landmass calling itself Europe for a few years. But though I had a fondness for its ruins and the stitched together narratives it created, I found myself yearning for my homeland… the place where I was born. I’m old, you see. My hair has gone white like the snow of old (as opposed to modern snow, which is just now light enough to be black). I look like my grandfather. He died a while before the bad years.

But this is not my story. I am not ready to tell my story in full. I suspect that were such a tale to be told, it would be found scattered across the world in journals and margins like human dust on a windy day. This is the story of the way the world I grew up in ended. Of how all that exists will inevitably decay, but with that decay comes new life and new possibilities. It tells of sad lonely people coming together in the dark. It tells of other things as well. Things I, your humble servant, will never know. For though this is an honest story, it is still nonetheless a story. And storytellers rarely, if ever, know what they’re talking about. I know enough though. 

It ends with a bang, though it felt like a whimper. It begins on the streets of the City, one typically quiet night, as something inexplicable begins to happen…

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