A Very Poor Harper

TW: Suicide

[The following is an attempt to recreate the events of the night of the Spiders Performance at 12200 Art Sea Blvd. It was compiled out of witness testimony, surviving documentation, and interviews with those involved. The stories are probably not the ones told, as many conflict over who told which one.]

John did not know why they called themselves “Spiders.” Was it an invocation of a story long since forgotten? Was there some mystical symbolism that innately drew these storytellers to them? Was it because spiders weave webs in much the same way that the nomads weaved stories? Or was it just because the name sounded right? John considered these answers whenever he had the time, which was sadly growing more and more frequent. The City, unlike most other corners of the world he found, had no place for Spiders within it. It was a serious place on a serious world that had no need of fanciful stories. There were some pockets of people who knew the value of stories (mostly the dispossessed and a few people in power who’d much prefer people like John in a morgue), but not many.

But John was not thinking of the nature of Spiders at that moment. Nor was he thinking of the impending sense of dread oozing across the skyline of the City like the stench of a skunk in heat. Nor, for that matter, the disappearance of two of the other seven Spiders who inexplicably decided living in the City was good for their health (as opposed to the fifteen Spiders who had nowhere else to go, the four Spiders who lived there all their lives and didn’t want to leave, and the one Spider who was just passing though on his way to the ruins of Mexico).

No, what John was thinking in that moment was what story he was going to tell to his audience. It wasn’t that he was lacking in any ideas, his mind was brimming with ideas much in the same way the human body is brimming with blood. The problem with his ideas though was that they didn’t feel quite right for that day. This is not an uncommon occurrence with Spiders, as part of the art of good storytelling is being able to gauge a room to see which tale fits the mood. Most of his stories were optimistic fare with heroes overcoming great odds, wanderers discovering new territories and learning from those who lived there, and other such frivolities. But even the most jovial of the City’s residents wasn’t in the mood for such complex simplicity. They wanted something with a bit of… bite is perhaps the wrong word to use here, but it’s the closest to what they wanted.

John had one story that had that “bite” the City wanted. It wasn’t that good in his opinion. The characters were flat to the point of unlikability, the ending forced, and it was a bit too mean for his tastes. Indeed, the majority of Spiders John had told the story to outright refused to speak to him again for months afterwards. Even then, there was a glare of discomfort in their future encounters, as if John had sodomized their puppy in front of them. And yet, the people of the City who listened to tales of magic and wonder spun by the Spiders wanted such a tale. John could feel it in his bones. He spent the day working out the outline of the piece, each sentence a dagger to a different vital organ. (John never memorizes the outline; he just used the memory of writing it as a guide to tell his stories.)

When it was finally completed, John was completely drained. He felt like someone had striped him of all of his colors to the point where there wasn’t even an outline of the man, just a lurking presence with only the resemblance of sentience. It would take him months just to recover enough to say coherent sentences. Months he did not have, as the rent was due in a week and his landlord (a stout man with the grin of a shark and the hands of a butcher) was notorious for kicking an elderly woman out of her apartment just for being five minutes late with her rent. It’s said that she either died of cold on the streets of The City that very night or, more plausibly but less dramatically, she died a slow agonizing death in an “old folks home,” forgotten by even her closest relatives. And so, John pushed himself into the world and hoped he could tell the piece of shit trapped in his brain.

The venue of his performance was, once upon a time, a pizzeria, though you couldn’t tell from the look of it. The walls were bare and the tables had long since been discarded to the wastelands. It was rather small for such a restaurant; it only had room for 100 people. Not including John, there were only 75 people, a third of whom was there for John and all the other Spiders, a third needed a place to sleep, and the last third just wandered in there for no particular reason. They were mostly sitting on the floor while John stood precariously atop the last remaining counter, three inches away from where the sole cash register used to be. John didn’t even notice that he was rubbing the scab inflicted on his shoulder so many years ago. The anticipation wasn’t so much building in that moment as it was the doldrums of waiting for someone to get over their stage freight (most people were there more for comfort rather than inspiration). 

When John tried to tell his monstrous story, all that escaped his mouth was a gasp of hot air: a scream of incandescent implications, the howl that of the 21^st century. Something within him was forcing the story to the dark recesses of his mind. Be this John’s conscious or some alien force was neither here nor there. What mattered was that John was unable to tell the story. All things considered, it was a fine story (if one assumes ethics are not a part of aesthetics). But because of those ethical concerns (be it on John’s part or someone else’s), John was incapable of telling his tale. The audience wasn’t starting to get bored, but then one has to not be bored to start getting bored. Faced with this situation, he did what any sensible storyteller would do: adlib and hope for the best.

The Devil and The Last Man

There was a War in Utopia, John began with the camp of thunder, between the Gods of old and the Children of the future. It was a war for the future, be it an end in blood and death or one where Omelas births a new generation of children. It was a brutal war that seemed to never end, a war without even the most baseline meaning wars try to have. It was a time when life merely wished to see other lives burn, to die agonizingly in pain for the sole crime of existing. There was no hope in this time, less so than even now. It was a time of uncertainty and this went on for quite some time, long enough for John to actually craft a story. In this time, there was a young man in a small beach city. Perhaps “city” is the wrong word here, but that was what the area he lived in called itself. He was an unnaturally lean man with messy hair as brown as clay, a lazy eye blue with sadness drenched into its core, and hands built for a more peaceful time. For a while, the man was alone. Not by choice or by his demeanor. In many regards, he was a compassionate man who was always willing to lend an ear and a hand, should the need arise. But the people of his world were long gone; the man was alone. It was as if a piece of the world was... (John couldn’t think of the right word to use in this instance. He hoped no one noticed his missing word.) It had been years since the man had said a word to a fellow being, or at least it felt like it. Because of this, the man had completely forgotten his name. He wasn’t sure about the time either, not since the clocks stopped. Evidently, many clocks require electricity to function and sadly, the young man opted for the more “pragmatic” profession of banking. He passed the time, what little he had, wandering his small city. It was his by right after all, much in the same way a child belongs to their parents or a person can own the apartments they don’t live in. For a long-

(At this point, a “wealthy” landlord, who was there because his boyfriend was into this nonsense, threw a shoe at John. The shoe barely missed him. Spiders tend to have these moments in their stories to suss out rude people within their audience. The boyfriend knew this, and what his lover would do when such a moment arose. The landlord was found three months later in a ditch a block or so from the local jail by a drunk. The boyfriend was reported to have ended up with enough money to “leave” the City. The Fuzon Corporation bought the apartment complex for employee housing. It was expected that those who weren’t employees would forced to fend for themselves. Most were assumed not to be able to survive the year. Three other landlords were found that night.)

  [Clears throat] For a long time, the man thought he would never see anyone ever again. Then one day, the Devil walked into town to do the job all Devils do. The Devil had the shape of a man, indeed were it not for one small detail, the Devil would be indistinguishable from a man. But that one detail made all the difference. The man, having been alone for so long, welcomed the Devil in like an old friend. He was aware of why the Devil was there and concealed a knife accordingly. (The voice John used for the Devil had a harshness to it. Not the harshness of a stern parent or a fascist police officer, but the harshness of the voice in your head that claims existence would be better off without you.) “Hello,” said the Devil, “may I come in?” Having been alone for so long, the man let the Devil into his city. “Before we begin,” the Devil inquired, “I must ask… what year is it?” (For the man, John spoke with a forced Iambic Pentameter.) “The calendar on the wall,” said the man without even looking, “claims it’s December 1998.” “Then,” retorted the Devil, “it is December 1998. Tell me man, when was the last time you saw one of your fellows?” The man paused. “It was December 1998 some years back. I was but a child then. He was a lean man, blind and strong. His hair went white when he was too young to know the meaning of words like Love and Fellowship and Death. He held those words close to his being. He said that those were the words that made up humanity.” “Do you think those are the words of humanity?” “No. I don’t think there are words for humanity. Words are static by their nature. They can be interpreted in a multitude of ways, certainly. But those meanings are limited to the word’s definition. Humanity is limitless in what it can and cannot be.” The Devil sighed. “When was the last time you’ were out of this… city?” “Never.” “Never?” “Never.” “So then, you know nothing of the world outside?” “Oh, I know the world. How could I not? The world has been infecting the city for some time. Strange birds long thought to be myth fly across the broken buildings speaking in human tongues. Horses with horns on their head sneer with their snouts and trample with their legs. The flies of your world have grown a taste for blood. Why, just recently, the Devil walked into my home and asked me what year it was. (For a brief moment, John performed a bitter shit-eating grin.) I know of the world, and I wish no part in its monster factory.” (An old man in the crowd laughed in his mind and then grew nostalgic for his childhood whimsies before falling into an endless sleep. His dreams all had happy middles and nary an ending or beginning in sight.) The Devil ignored the explanation. “So you have nary a desire to leave?” “Correct,” said the man (in the tone of voice of someone who has been listening to their grandfather go on and on for five hours about an anecdote about his time in the war that isn’t going to go anywhere), “but what do you desire.” “What I desire? Only to provide what you don’t have. What you… want.” “Wants and needs are two different things.” “Yes, that’s true. But you need to want. Without desire, we are but mindless dullards walking our way towards oblivion. What is the point of being without wanting something we don’t have.” “I get by without “wanting.”” “Do you?” The Devil looked around the part of the city they were in. It was a house built for five, back when that meant twenty-five. The brickwork on the intrusive chimney had begun to crumble, the colors of the walls had long since died, and the bed the man slept on day in and day out was just a blanket covering a set of springs. There were children in this house once upon a time. Now there are only ghosts. “Tell me,” the Devil asked, “do you miss people?” There was a pause. It seemed to go on forever. “No.” (Another pause, this one on John’s part. Some of the audience thought this was the end and clapped out of what they called politeness rather than genuine enjoyment. John held his hand to the audience, and they stopped.) “People were always asking me to do things for them. Tell me what color the sky is. Can you fetch me my kid’s fish? Can’t we just cuddle? I grew weary of them as soon as December 1998, ten years ago. When they all left, I was thrilled. I love being able to walk the streets without nary a person in sight. I’m happy. I’m happy. I. Am. Happy.” The Devil smiled, knowing where to go next. “Then why did you let me in so easily? Surely you know who I am and what I want? Surely you know what these things mean.” The Devil pointed to his forehead. The man’s face shifted from mania to a resigned spitefulness. “Yes, I know what those things mean. I know what you can offer me,” The man said as he revealed his knife, “But what I want to know is… what don’t you want to offer me?” This wasn’t the first time the Devil had a knife pointed at him. It was part of the process of these things. The mortals would try to make a last ditch effort to kill the Devil out of religious fervor or want for power or something typically banal. The Devil assumed this to be no different and played along. This is how it’s always been and always will be, thought the Devil. In the end, the mortals would always say yes and he would be victorious. It was his game after all, the mortals just lost it. “There is nothing that I don’t want to give you.” “Nothing?” “Nothing but…” (John dramatically covered his mouth with both hands.) “But?” “Nothing.” The man looked at the Devil incredulously. “Well, there is one thing. But it’s not out of malice, nor out of deception. People don’t want it, and I don’t offer what people don’t want.” There was a smile in the Devil’s… “Soul” is most certainly the wrong word here, but it’s as close as I can make. On the surface, the Devil was stone. But within, he was giddy. The hooks were in the man’s chest, waiting to tear him apart. “What is it?” A smile appeared on the Devil’s face. “I have your name.” The man said nothing for a long time. Finally, a curt smile appeared on his face. He was looking directly into the Devil’s eyes. Did he understand in that moment? Could he understand the implications of what the man was about to do? Or was the Devil merely a lost soul, walking blindly through his role like everyone else. “I had a name,” quoted the man, “but nevermind.” The man then slit his wrists and bled for some time. When the bleeding stopped and the man was long since limp, the sun closed itself from the city. There was no moon either. All echoes of the War had grown silent. The smells of frightened dogs descented from their corpses. The corpses of humanity had been removed from the streets. Even the man’s corpse was nowhere to be found. Language was removing itself from existence, as time had long ago. Soon the stones and plants would remove themselves. The Devil was alone in the city. The world had moved on without him.

John snapped his fingers and ended the tale. If one assumes politics not to be part of a work’s aesthetics, then the tale John told was not as good as the one he went there to tell. Some members of the audience read the story as having the same message as his initial story and came out thinking humanity was incapable of changing anything, a typical centrist message for “realistic” times (in particular, a perpetually angry woman with pink hair sitting next to someone who seemed to John like he was willingly on the leash of someone else’s narrative). But there were many listening that night, mostly Spiders, who knew what John was actually saying. In truth, John would’ve loved to tell the story without the subterfuge, for everyone to hear his meanings and implications without the young thinking him a monster. But you can’t tell stories about escaping a cage in a place that doesn’t want to hear them. You have to pay the bills somehow.

[The identity of the woman was Lucile Fredrickson, who had recently escaped from the Fuzon Corporation’s factory. She was employee #212121. She had been living on the streets for the past week and had time and time again experienced black outs and periods of lost time. It has been said that when she murdered John, a fellow former “employee” of the Fuzon Corporation (#13428), she was not totally there, but rather working from instinct. The identity of the man next to her was evidentally Billy, who left the performance shortly after the murder, which occurred as the next story was told.]

It was on that day that Jane had realized that she was now older than her mother. Jane never knew her mother’s name. She had died in childbirth, so her father claimed. Her father, who was a stern man who didn’t like to “spoil the child” as the saying goes, said that she just lost the will to live. Jane wondered sometimes if the same would happen to her if she ever got pregnant. Does giving birth to children mean one has to give up their own life to create something new? The thoughts of a child, Jane realized later in life. And yet, creation does take something out of you. Even a storyteller must give up time to tell their story.

Jane was ten when she escaped from her father to live with the Spiders. She had been telling stories with them for a good ten years when she met John. He was a shy kid, didn’t say much. He had the potential to do something interesting, but he had the tendency of second guessing himself. She had found a piece of parchment on the floor by his bed one night, all covered in doodles and sketches of a fantasy realm built on the ruins of a cyberpunk world. She never got the chance to ask him what it was about.

What Keeps Mankind Alive?

I shall now tell you of the world that was. It was the world of my father and my mother. It was not my world. This is not the story of my father, for it happened before he was born. The year was ’13. The place has no name. His name was Frank Smart. He was 12 when he decided to run away from his family. They were a lovin’ family, but he wasn’ a lovin’ son. I suppose that’s why he left them a present of fire as he ran away. He fled on a train headin’ to a place without a name. When he arrived, he found there to be no one on the streets, which made sense since it was early in the mornin’ when the sun was a risin’ up and back then, people didn’t like to be up that early. But as the day went on, people still didn’ show. That suited Frank’s purposes just fine, as that made it easier for him to steal their valuables. The houses seemed abandoned, the stores unmanned, and the banks ripe for the takin’. But Frank didn’ start with the banks or the stores or even the houses. No, he started with the church. There was a sayin’ he made up in his youth: they’ll never suspect you if you steal from the church. The logic of that phrase, I’ll never understand. Perhaps he meant that those within the church are above reproach, as they are the ones most likely to steal from the church. Or maybe he meant that those who steal from the just are most likely to be forgiven and not punished. Or maybe Frank was a stupid bastard who thought it sounded clever. I do not know. Regardless, he went to the church. Only, the church looked as if it had already been ransacked. The cross had been torn down and shattered. The glass windows smashed. Even the alter had been burnt. Frank wondered, “Who would destroy such expensive things?” But before he could think of that any more, a cry came from the confessional. A woman’s cry. Frank opened the door to find a woman in black. A nun, he thought. Must’ve gotten attacked by whoever-

[Her story was interrupted by the sounds of Lucile Fredrickson murdering John. She had confronted John over her view of the quality, which, in her words, was a “SHIT FUCKING WASTE OF TIME!” John, rather than acting like a mature adult of 11 years (or, at least, acting like what children are told mature adults are supposed to act like), lunged at the adult woman of 13 years. He proceeded to slam the back her head on the floor while she jammed her thumb into his eye. They howled like starving dogs fighting over the last scrap of meat. People tried to get away from the fight, or at the very least stop it. But the best those closest to the fight could do was trip over the pair. The Spider tore out the woman’s short pink hair while she burrowed her foot into his ass. With each blow, the fight grew more and more brutal. Teeth were irreparably destroyed, flesh scared deeper than the reach of a suicidal person’s blade, the human canvas surrounding the fight became akin to a red Convergence ill begot of Pollack’s intent.  The sounds grew into a guttural choir of relief and were just as swiftly silenced by the inevitable conclusion of their conflict. The two were dead.

As the pair’s flesh cooled into nothingness, the crowd dispersed with a bit of thankfulness that would be forgotten by the next day. The Spiders looked at their fallen compatriot with dismay. He showed such promise, especially for a first timer.  A Spider, a young girl no older than six with brown eyes and blonde pigtails named Mary, went up to the pair of corpses and drew a spider into the void of blood. In the end, the people disengaged from the decaying conclusion and left the building. The Spiders too would leave, having the understandably wrong belief that the police would arrive to collect the bodies. As if the police cared. Eventually, all that was left of the people in the building was Billy. The reason why Billy remained in the building is unknown. Maybe he wanted to be sure of what he saw in the man’s eyes. Maybe even what he thought he heard in the woman’s voice. And so, like a vulture in the desert, Billy rummaged through their pockets. When he found what the pair shared, he understood far too well.

In the times to come, Billy would ponder the relationship of the pair. Initially, he believed them to be romantically involved: a suicide pact between lovers with the artifice of hatred. For they were smiling when they had their final look at each other. But what language and tone they shared with Billy as they died lacked the tone of love, not even the lack of love once held. Perhaps they were siblings. Despite their differing skin tones and lack of familial faces, it was possible that the two were adopted. No, thought Billy, they didn’t smile like siblings. Their final smile had an air of selfishness to it. Not a dual experience but a solitary one shared.

This became all too clear when he turned them to their side and saw what they really shared: both had a tattoo of a barcode on their shoulder: 212121 for the Spider and 13428 for the member of the audience. And then he remembered and, subsequently, understood the look of content on the woman with the barcode 7877 on her body. He walked out the building and headed for the last place anyone would willingly go.

I met with Jane on a summer evening. We were in her garden, which she started shortly after meeting her wife. Anne was a kind woman, by Jane’s own admission, kinder than she deserved. They had met shortly after the City died in an abandoned restaurant where Jane was looking for medical supplies for a Spider who had broken hir leg and Anne was looking for her canine companion, who had run int. Her smile felt like eating strawberries for the first time. Her naturally blue hair dazzled on the evening sky and complemented Jane’s fiery red hair. She wasn’t there with us at the time, busy working with a troupe of Spiders on a more collaborative piece for their anniversary. She hasn’t finished it at the time of my writings, but what I’ve seen of it looks interesting. But then, you can never love the parts outside of the whole.

I asked Jane what had happened in the rest of her story that night. She sadly told me that she didn’t remember. “Probably ended with my dad dyin’,” she guessed. “All my stories back then were about my dad dyin’ in some way. I was a bit obsessed with the bastard until I met Anne. Probably have one more story about him in me. Maybe if I ever see him again.”

“Do you want to,” I asked. She looked out at the setting sun.

“You’re wrong about John, you know.”

“I am?”

“Yeah. I looked into him a while back. After all of this started.” She wasn’t referring to her garden. She was looking at the garden that had birthed itself from the ruins of the City. Once the greenery was merely an intrusive force on the brutalism of the remains. Now the green was like a piece of skin, a thread in the tapestry of the world. “It turns out that he wasn’ some employee of the factory.”

“He wasn’t?”

“No. He was a foreman. John Callimanti the Fifth. He was worth somethin’ in the old world. Got broke in one of the crashes, but had some friends within Fuzon that he didn’ fall too far. Lucy must’ve figured that out and…” I didn’t say anything for a while.

“Not that many friends, I suppose.”

“Why are you suppose’n that?”

“He was barcoded. Everyone says so.”

“Heh. Well, just because everyone says somethin’, doesn’ mean it’s true.” We talked a bit more about unrelated things. I left Jane Smart on good terms, and we talk from time to time.]

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