Category: Imaginary Cities: PC Bangs (page 7 of 8)

City of sleepy subways and swift downstrokes. City of empty apartments and overcrowded hostels. A city without inhabitants, only visitors. Disgruntled in their winter jackets, following memorised but outdated itineraries, tourists wander but do not take photographs. Information is posted on streetcorners but it has been superannuated. City of scripts and small change. Sweet rays emanating from prison blocks in the seaside suburbs, ships’ lights winking off the coast. Your journey here has been for nothing – trouble follows you daily and you sleep warily at night, expecting axe attacks. The fetid air of the abandoned fish markets only serves to further intensify your unease. Flags snap in the breeze. Random parties, initiated by means of short wave radio, continue until late in the morning. Conversations are limited to a few words of introduction: name, previous location, mission. Ladders lead to the decaying overpasses, where travelling merchants set up camp. All manner of currency cards on display at small tables, lit by halogen lamps. Over by the cable car station (also disused), a carnival splutters into life and then fades, inevitably. Ghost dogs have been known to frequent some of the more popular bars. Here the chairs recline alarmingly, as if the world was in perpetual ascent. Occasionally a signal flare from one of the colonies provides illumination. Coni carries on disintegrating like a hog left in the jungle to rot, filmed using high-speed photography, the maggots seeming to bustle about their work, though in slow-mo they are merely wriggling, squirming. Darkness at the edge of cardboard skyscrapers, the end nearing, someone sets the radio frequency to the emergency, concentrating attention and dismaying the patient clouds. Shredded loads of timber, once bound for the capital, lie wet and useless by the bay. Severance from Coni might take a week or even a year. In either case the rats have everyone’s number. Yours will be called momentarily. Mice, on the other hand, are now electric and emit pulsing light as red as a bloodshot eye, as loud as a catastrophe siren. Old foreign men sit in the alleys and play childish games, without irony. Something is very wrong here but you can’t see it for the crowds of moneychangers clutching black bags, whsipering market, market. This little piggy stays home.

First published in Softblow (Singapore), June 2006.

Downtown in the city of greige skylines: muskrats grope for cinnamon oranges in the shadows of a giant air-conditioning outlet. Who can see, who can ever tell. I yawned through the catalogue of an important import-export agency and then left the quiet surrounds of the riverside precinct for the subway station. Here, one finds the computing museum, decked out in industrial grey, drab as the hair of a dead willow in the rain. Visitors may inspect the pre-orwellian desktop devices, the shining racks of digital arcana and a real-life approximation of a c21 drone factory. Dust is a major issue here, causing all sorts of outages and re-routing work, work that will never be done. Outside, in the rusted evening, I enjoyed a performance of what someone claimed was an original folk-dance, all cyber can-can and goofish pule. The faint druzzling in my ears kept me enraptured throughout the performance. I became increasingly aware of the machinations of your heart, at its terminus, waiting to exhale. Our tickets slid through the machismo reader with all the fanfare of Buffy re-runs, chewed up and spat out, leaving us with the smoking stubs. Behold the concourse: the crowning achievement of Cloni’s previous administrator, now tanked up, waiting for cryogene. Similar sentiments erode the transports’ glamour, though our connection is swift and the port’s air is, at least, humid. Sausages glow in the dark alleys of the IT district, now a ghetto for ex-cardboard kings, mutual fund refugees and self-made bankrupts. Over all, the hairspray dusk. Whittlers find work in oxymoron workshops, while salads are tossed in the up-scale city market halls, a mere pretext for the more serious business of roosting. Imagine a full-scale, daylight savings hijack: terror in each eyeball, a flashlight for company and a fade-out pass to die for. Shudder in the path of the robot parades. Sanctify your glimpse of the pre-metal star. You’re not the only one praying for dawn.

Autumn in the city of snow-stolen leaves. City of donkey’s eggs. City of the never-sleeping conduits, of seasonal employment as a street-painter. Reporting for duty, I am issued with a broom and a facsimile of a work of art. I am told that I must re-create this work of art by sweeping selected leaves from the pavement. The wind plays havoc with my attempts to simulate Van Gogh. My swirls of sea and sky quickly become fuzzy, their edges jagged with sneaky leaf prints. By the time I have completed the outline, I must begin again. Old men interrupt their games of go to offer advice, or simply laugh. By the end of my shift I have managed to herd the offenders into a corner near a rubbish bin for disposal by my assistant. Our supervisor takes my broom and informs me that my services will no longer be needed. It’s something of a relief to walk home to my one-room apartment, under the avenues of dying trees, and to kick up the leaves as I go. There will be other jobs. By winter, the local council will be posting up “help wanted” signs of a different kind: this time, to sculpt snowdrifts into alluring Buddhist mandala patterns. I prefer this kind of work, though of course the days are colder and blizzards lend the task an air of stubborn futility. Still, there will be no leaves to contend with. I boil water, add sachets of herbs and survive. Most days I manage to find a stray green leaf on the ground near the market stalls. Once I was lucky enough to find a turnip. I didn’t bother boiling it, though I knew its rawness would send my stomach into rational spasms. It tasted good. It was, suffice to say, solid. The money I earn from my snow painting will be enough to buy rice, the odd slice of bread. Most people here do not eat bread. I can see why: its floury appearance reminds them of snow. Needless to say, only a few of us have any talent for painting. The rest simply hide in their frozen huts, praying for spring, when the rupturing of the earth will require diggers and shovellers. The silver buses will line up by the bus station, doors flung open, and a sea of amateur farmers will climb on board. None will ask his destination, thinking only of the evening meal, the small gritty specks of soil in the soup, and the tiny green leaves emerging on the limbs of the snow-blasted trees. As for myself, this is the season when I will learn to sing. Buskers earn more money in spring. Couples stroll under the avenues of greening trees, whispering lines of poetry, like thieves unhurried in the dark.

First published in Southerly (2007).

Lost city of the broken draft, Cadu is a pile of turnips rotting in the moonlight, begging for a trundle. Sagacious as a small pea, its typical inhabitant wears a crown upon his head to hold his mirrors in. While the powers of the crown have been disabled, still its physical properties bear mentioning. In another forum, perhaps. Sizzling with fury, the senile old junkyard presses home its non-existent advantage, tying up loose ends and splitting dead deals. Cadu has all the bonhomie of a prune. The days here are like auctions, randomly-announced, building towards their voyeuristic climax and then suddenly passed in, with an enormous boom from the thunder mallet of darkness. All of this has been written before. Only the names, places, dates, events and outcomes have been changed, to ensure the originality of our infinite oblivion. Even the end is intimate, here. Swallow the fermented juices of a sting-inducing weed, then bellow at the dogs waiting for scraps of conversation. Wheels? Who needs them? Of course, I’m making that up. The fruit stalls are like bullet trains, arriving at pre-meditated and occult destinations at some supposed time, their wheels a necessity should the pregnant skins of their products split before parturition (in the normal sense) and force the jettisoning of profits. Can you hear me, Cadu? Your days are numbered, beginning with eleven, and ending with three. There’s quite a crowd here. Queues form for the most basic of supplies, including regiments and cases for nuts. Come to think of it, I am a nut. Hey, we’re all nuts. Perishable, programmed and pissed-off. We have no outlet for our powers. Houses rot from the inside out. Yes, you rain, and while the sound of you on my roof may be appealing, I must live with the knowledge that once I step through that doorway of hope, it will pelt down on me too, without mercy, Cadu. All of this is tiddly-winks to you. Did I mention nuts? Blast.

Go back to Basi.

Get silly fresh.

Tidy your hair. Check that every memory you can recall is actually yours. You may not get another chance to protest at the passing of time with such rigour. In Basi, where all the men wear shoulder pads, hoaxes are committed on a daily basis. Don’t be worried, over-confident or fooled – you have already been defrauded. Smell the long wisps of a lie, coiled in the air just above your identification badge. Walk the streets and cross yourself off wanted lists. Graffiti is encouraged here. Custom dictates that women should be served first, whether it be a restaurant or a bureaucratic exam. Water pipes dispense a strange liquor. Bathing in this yellowish gooze is said to ward off many ailments, though those who make this claim are also said to be in the employ of one company or another. Did you forget your satchel? How, then, do you expect to gain entrance to our gentleman’s club? You will be forced to spend the next four hours in a cheap and dilapidated hof, throwing peanuts at the walls and lining up to urinate in a closet half your size. Don’t even think of initiating a bowel movement. Poetry evenings, while abounding, suffer from their organisers’ insistence upon playing syrupy background music during the recitals. You will one day experience the sad fate of mis-recognising your own words, pumped out of a loudspeaker, their meaning changed by the simple juxtaposition of violins or piano with your original intent. In this city, no one is allowed to clap hands. To do so would be to violate an unwritten law. You may sleep, but only under the neon moon. The weather is surprisingly mild at this time of year. The mopeds barely disturb most peoples’ slumber. But their dreams – ah! If only you could see them, feel a sleeping heart’s beat! When morning comes, be sure to keep a map beside you, if only to reassure your nocturnal half that Basi is real, just like the obscure system of pressure points that is said to lead to another most ordinary city, that of the smile.