Category: Smoke (page 5 of 6)

Surrounded by rain. Nowhere to go. Rain sheets all evening. Loose laces in my boots. The sirens stop at about the same time as the feed dies out. I take a shower then, in the dark, and leave the extraction fan off. Great clouds of steam bloom in the recess and the mirror. Raining myself clean, deleting transience. The urban heat falls from me, and ceases its attentions. I’m standing in the bathroom drying my hair with one of your blue towels. You’d packed the other one, along with your boots. The way you stood there that morning, drying yourself in the bedroom, deciding which jacket to wear. The hooded parka, standard issue. All-weather boots, and a studded belt. Electric. The glint of subway animators in your shades, in the hot blast interior of the shuttle. Just then the power went off too. I stand breathing there, in the curfew of long distance desire.

By the time I get back to the flat it’s dark. My PCB’s almost powered up. Only old Cherries and Devomail anyway, including that missive, the Arts letter. Flicking through the softcopy as fresh wireless data chugs through the air, I remember again the eerie sensation of slow-motion I felt when I first scanned the lines. We are happy to inform you … successful application … appropriate acknowledgement of our funding for your project … every success. Attached, the e-scan for a direct account credit. Project expenses. Some figure I’d plucked from the air, now made real. Breakdowns of rental expenses, food, utilities, transport, everything. All just a flickwand away now. The faux radium digits of my spring watch flash the countdown to dusk, and the official curfew. Safe inside my subsidised dream, a suburban capsule hurtling towards the void.

At about 5pm I take the umbrella out again and walk down to the markets in my rubber boots, sloshing through the sudden laneway cascades, thinking of our new house. I’m trying to remember what it looked like on the day of the inspection. Certainly nothing like this. Then I land on a strip of Asian noddle joints, no Anglo menus in any of them, all equally safe and anonymous. A kind of typhoon season electricity in the air, the avenue of markets producing a steamed tunnel effect, each of the noodle joints shielded by corrugated iron, their front street-sides open, bustling with heat and soup and gristle at practically any time of the day. With its proximity to the wharves, and increases in trans-Asian migrations, Aramis is now a brimming mini-city building itself up, storey by storey, laneway by street, one external air conditioning unit at a time. Proximity, too, to the Western Metropoles, the steel ways and the Free Cities, their rich detritus.

After testing that the thermal pulse has also been connected, I affix our little coffee exploder to the burner, and very soon I’m sipping the speedy brown stuff, looking at the boxes on the door/table in the loungeroom, their wooden surfaces slightly sprayed by spacedust. I’ve forgotten to buy sugar, but I’m enjoying the bitterness of the coffee anyway, its caffeine undercurrent slowly increasing as I sit there, by the empty burner space, scrolling through downloads on our reader, searching for a wire, interconnection. Signals missing, like airport arrivals boards, flickering in the irradiated impact of your Avalon departure. Deep rain impact as I scramble three short notepad macros, one to you, another to me and the third to, simply, us. I let the battery burn low, thinking of the cover of Daydream Nation, Richter’s burning candle melting down to nothing. The grounds in my cup glowing there, on the table, next to the first air-pressed crates of LPs. Afternoon dark. Another cassette storm. Smoke.

At 9am the crates arrive, secure and solid packed, eight of them in all, one for each room, with two more for the loungeroom. The delivery scanner nods briefly when I open the screen door to him, and we unpallet the load together without further comment. When he leaves I farm the boxes out to their rooms and they sit there, claiming ownership. The record collection, the books, the players. I take down the door separating the loungeroom from the hall and place it on two trestles, again courtesy of that shed. No lights to speak of, though my PCB glows restlessly in its cradle, awaiting power-up. Things power up around noon. The rain doesn’t stop. At about the time we’d usually be having lunch, I run down to the Korean convenience store, warm and full of the scent of steamed buns, coffee and sugar. I’m buying a couple of energy tonics, some hydrated milk and espresso explosions and an umbrella, making the walk home more pleasant. I set my little bed up at the back of the loungeroom.