Category: Smoke (page 3 of 6)

Zero Moon sits near the food stall, a bottle of soju and two glasses set before him. Around him the city powers down, OT steam blasting from small vents and holes in its skin. The sub-audible hum, capillaries of electricity fading out. Information still shuttles around, via its own networks deep in the air, almost a season. Zero pulls the small green cap from the bottle, twists the seal from its rim and watches it curl on the table top. He fills the two glasses with soju and waits for someone to arrive. He’s still waiting an hour later when his PCB goes off. The neon street is lit up like midday, so bright that it’s as if his corner of the shopfront is actually in the shade. Where soft blue lights fall on the soju bottle and the chopsticks. The little stories a bowl of kim chi might tell. Words a tongue loosened by soju might speak, if only for the want of hangul.

The next morning you crystal clear patch in over the PCB’s secure line, and I can sit with the headset cradled in my arm, watching the morning through Windows, podding your voice’s every urgent burst. Proposing an informational kind of messing with the static stations on OT. Old tech, or off-topic? Your missives, fired like test volleys over my bow. A kind of faint brownout over the airwaves. You talk of jet planes dumping fuel in Korean airspace, KTX saboteurs, the general mayhem. We interrupt each other, our voices pluming through an array. I admit I’ve taken an earworm tonic I bought by mistake at the convenience store. I actually say I’m listening to our records just like I’m hearing them for the first time. I mention geology, the grant. Then we’re breathing like it’s night and there’s no sound in the cradle. Bars drop and you are gone.

When you call I can hear a bug in the line, and not much else. Awoken at 2am by my PCB’s random koan. Finding it face-down by the lamp. Flicking its switch, I imagine you in an airport hotel, staring out the window with the headset held in one hand, a mouse in the other. A small can’s worth of dry ginger ale spraying the inside of a glass. Data chugging away merrily in the loungeroom space again while you, on the other side of the equator now, with your transmissions. Their soft pixellation and hum. Maybe a Cherry whirs in the background on Windows, or else you’ve opened one of the screens to the street’s humidity, the faint bleats of transit. It isn’t your voice, not yet – like a satellite coming within orbit of a planet or moon, it’s still just a twinkle. I say hello, hello. Hello, hello. Your response, a looped heartbeat of static noise, gristle on the line. I sign off and lie in the dark waiting for the bug to leave the room.

Jet Moon doesn’t have a ticket but she’ll ride on to the next station. She’ll get off, ride the escalator upwards, jump the turnstile and emerge onto the street. It’s raining in Jongno. She’ll pass by a comic book stand, plastic meals in a window. Rain sluices down the window. There is a bar on the street. Jet Moon doesn’t have any money but she goes into the bar. Jet Moon supersonically eyes off the window. She’ll be watching the rain sluicing down the window. She’ll be seeing exactly what she saw a moment ago outside, only in reverse. A woman entering a bar. Neon-coated raindrop on her brolley, thick clasp in her hair. A small mist of water released from there, when she turns.The bar slowly filling up with women. Women who sit themselves at the bar, stare out the window and watch as the next one comes through the door. From the door to the bar, then the window. Necks creak. Jet Moon won’t notice it at first. She’ll be watching the window. She’ll be seeing the rain sluicing down it. In the corner of the bar, a television.

Like a hawker trundling bananas up and down the laneways, the RFK broadcast begins, its strident rhetoric pock-marked with apaches of radio static. Blue days and green days, orange dawns and summer frosts; all part of the terraforming mandate. Unfurling fogs along the coastal waterways and islands, the mandate encompasses both canals and streamlets, giant hydro-powered works and pipes, radiant dikes and estuarine fisheries. In the city, the tanks of restaurants scramble with the product of this hyper efficiency, this sea dis-ease. I check the wireless updates for live feeds but find no point of interconnection, sitting in the bar’s steamy light. No switches anywhere, and no need, not even at night. Broadcasts that re-appear on Windows at dawn, backed by soft jazz. Pre-recorded night sounds and soft applause. Korean streets, stalls. Plastic money, plastic watches. Echoes of Buddhist teachings curling down a grimy laneway in reverse.