It’s a crash derby. It’s a cop’s story. Down here on the ground, our car hovers over poxed pavement and wasted land. The bombs fall through rudescent clouds. She’s circling above the clouds in her DeHavilland DH-4. We have radio contact. We are her eyes through the danger explosions and smoke, though it seems she should be the one to see for us. She disappears into a burst of fiery light. How long until it’s safe? I ask him.
I was pulled down; I crashed on the hard ground in a terrible place of paranoid delusion called Warminster, called Warminster. After the crash landing quite some time passed before I was able to get my instructions. I felt like a shade myself, suspended in the smoky background with only a memory of a city that used to exist, of a person that used to live here.
Eventually, the snow becomes so thick that we lose the road. We drive on anyway, determined to look in all the usual places.
The blind woman’s flat has flies and a savvy cat and a husband circling. We burst in snapping Polaroids. After a time, the old man gets used to us and stops his nervous laughter and goes back to his NEWSPRESS. The back yard is full up with a fence and a washing line, and there is no secret way of leaving except for the cat and the flies who seem interested only the fruit bowl.
Where is she? I ask him.
Icy silence. The sound ice cubes make in a glass, as they crack in descending pools of aqueous fog. When he talks to us his voice cracks, sounds tinny and trapped in a mine. Just an echo of old thoughts and the effort of speech annoying.
Living in a dark world dominated by a single man, a single idea, a single spark that has ignited the world for centuries to come. He dominates every single action, has taken over like a cancer, parasite, a vine wrapping its slow tendrils around us all. Before this happened I was an idiot carrying around my feelings on a sign. Now I’m more secretive ... busy just cutting wood and keeping warm. All the time, the horrendous smell of the red tide. The water is full of bodies drifted over and by now half rotten from Cuba. Skeleton spines and rib cages and empty-socketed heads wash up. The new revolution has not been so kind. At night the horizon doesn’t just fade away. There’s an end. It’s a bright line of lights; of course there’s a black hole in the middle which is the Thames leaning on London, the Channel lapping France. If I could, I’d cover the sea with life rafts. And to those children who cannot swim, how unusual the sea must seem, especially if it is the only sea they’ve ever seen.
Sirens are in the distance. Helicopters too. Helicópteros. Sounds of thrashing blades produce anxiety on the faces that watch. From down the street, somewhat overheated, we approach. Dazed from the walk, or from being flung to the pavement by the invisible hand of our employer, we appear in a thick haze of summertime. And none too soon.
Wilson unpacks the Polaroid from its slip cover. TV trucks are already parked and more parking. Photojournalists’ lenses aim inside the barricade. Our tape recorders, our note pads, all media churn. The long antenna of the Channel News telescopes out to make contact with its friends in space. The heat is unbearable, perhaps the whole city is under glass. Motley residents perch along the steep steps that abut the sidewalk, and they watch with narrow eyes. For a better camera angle, Wilson drifts under the tape into the quiet of the barricade. Plumes of smoke filter around his face. In this way, he becomes a ghost among the living, live among ghosts.
When no one’s looking I examine the corpses. I look at the blue chapped lips where the edges blur into the rest of the face, but I don’t have much time for that now. My instructions are complex. Being unobtrusive is a full time job, and every day after their coffee, the troops commute to Warminster. My flat is so dusty, gaping, too desolate even for an arachnid; and all I have left to remind me of my last life is the breeze that comes thick off the ocean, carrying sounds of waves crashing in the deep North Sea.
BB
