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

Auda, city of burnt grass and black limousines. City of nudes and spider lilies. How the grass stands up even though it is on fire, whistling a harvest tune. By the railway lines, entropy rules: jagged weeds and mystery melons scramble for space, riddling the rails, disguising the sleepers with their fantastic tendrils. Like a smoker’s signal, brave and futile. Trains slice these ribbons into tendons, timetabling history, scattering seeds, accelerating some abstract chaos. Trampled soccer balls like snakeskins or leather on the shining road. As inspectors, we climb the stainless steel stairs, pass the plastic clinic and the coffee mall, then enter the machine room. Here the rumble of traffic is merely a shiver in your bowels, increasing anxiety but barely shaking the keys. Predicting story arcs is what it’s all about. Prisoners, good deeds and friendships betrayed. The studios will be eating out of our hands. Privately, we model alternate scenarios: the prisoner escapes; the can of boiled beef falls from the adjutant’s hand; a friendship is consummated in a bloody latrine scene. Here, the streets are viewed as if through the screenshots of an amateur photographer: the perspectives slightly skewed, casting one’s eye off balance. Jets scramble overhead, but no one notices. The flags of a thousand federations burst into the blue sky, unfurling like false spring. The sound of trickling water consumes bus drivers and cart pullers alike. Insanity is the key, although mistakes are sometimes made. Usually, these thoughts disappear. Slowly, a city comes to know itself by the bend of a river, the argument of a steel canal. Behind us, mountains; ahead, cartwheels of conversation, opening.

This city with no streets but networks of amputated limbs. This officious city of criminal investigations and inquests whose soul is a square of cheap, grey carpet and a water dispenser. The tinkle of pachinko, the sudden sirens of attack. Those women with the hand bills, so stubborn and intent upon their mission, invading the bodyspace of the factory workers like influenza. Sheets of steel carried by a dozen men at a time towards the railhead. Rain, in bursts of noise upon their heads. Somewhere here there is a map of the city’s improvements but no one I speak with has seen it. Wheelchair-bound ladies protest at the new constructions rising up around them in terrifying spirals. No-one is allowed to see them. Behind their riot shields, the police men are only boys. Some of them wear white sneakers, as if they have been called in from basketball practice. Sleeping street people curled up like scraps of paper on the subway stairs, trusting that the spirits of Atro will protect their small change, their street salaries. Mandarin peels in the gutters. Sewer smells that hit the face like a nervous pigeon, with the frightful proximity to disease that experience entails. A hollow city, stained with sad skirmishes and pickled fistfights. Gouged-out eyes that speak. Tables hoarded under orange shelters. Old men dancing in parks for citizens, while citizens peer out at the sky like lost kittens in bamboo. Squeals. Drums. Discarded cloths, blood-stained. News of another seperatist attack filters through stale cups of coffee, cigarette butts neatly stacked like garbage bullets. A simulated odyssey through virtual historical battles gains popularity in the parlours. No one speaks of it; these things require no advertisements. Beware the reconstituted cutlets of crumbed meat. That way annihilation lies. Pull back the tarpaulin to reveal today’s wares – a rack of twisted and burnt squid, dried suckers and flattened jerky. Remove hospital identification barcode. Shoulder arms.

A city of terminals. Crashing cymbals greet the slapping match contestants. Skies rain down grey, metallic drops of thunder. Manners are loose. At the station, hawkers sell second-hand saucepans and yesterday’s newspapers. Here the time is digital but everything else succumbs to the analogue of winter. Only one species of tree has been planted here. Nevertheless, each tree sheds its skin at a different rate, the pixellated leaves shimmering in the haze of pre-nitrogen fuel emissions. There is a river here, known as “the snake” in the strange, unpunctuated language of its people. They crowd the banks, shaded by the giant overpasses and rusted cantilever bridges. Once there was a port here but the river has silted over the years and is now so shallow children can walk across it, unimpeded. Shopping bags inhabit the water as the jellyfish once did. Smoke from plastic fires stings the eye. Banners have been hung between the tallest trees, demanding celebrations. Wearied, the streetwalkers refrain. Here and there in the quiet spaces, women with small babies shelter from the sunlight. Old men read unbound books without covers, passing the leaves from hand to hand. Pages from the lunar calendar litter the pavements. Awash with alien capital, anti — makes the most of the boom, erecting mirrors on street corners to satisfy the woman’s vacuousness, the man’s thirst for the perfect haircut. Nobody speaks, least of all to strangers. When you leave, someone will sweep your footprints into the gutter and they will remain there, homeless, until the time of the next pavement cleaning. Teenage boys make their fortunes this way, eradicating foreigners from the bitumen shores. Night comes, and the neon day begins.