Archive for the ‘Jason Erik Lundberg’ Category
Dragging the Frame
Friday, March 20th, 2009
The young woman at the bus stop told me she was my daughter. She was attractive, Eurasian, had dark brown hair and blue eyes, but only looked to be ten years younger than me, and I told her so. I couldn’t have fathered her at the age of ten, could I?
“Time travel,” she said.
“Oh come on.” Much as I’d fantasized about time travel, especially to correct the mistakes of my youth, deep down I was a nonbeliever. “Einstein said it was impossible, and Mallett has said travel to the past is extremely limited. You can’t go earlier than when the machine is switched on. And I haven’t heard anything about a time machine having been successfully invented today.”
“It happened about two hours ago,” she said. “You always were a skeptic. And you made my life hell, you know.”
The thought of confrontation with a future daughter, which seemed impossible as my wife wasn’t even pregnant yet, twisted my insides a bit. Had I slapped down her dreams? Abused her?
“No, but you disapproved of every decision I ever made. We yelled and fought for most of my childhood. Nothing I did was right in your eyes. I left home at 18, and we’ve hardly spoken since then.”
“So, saying for a second that this is true, why are you here?”
She looked over my shoulder and I turned; the 171 was approaching from down the road. My bus.
“I just wanted to tell you to ease up. Trust your daughter’s decisions. Have some faith in her. Don’t be such a prick.”
I exhaled a quiet laugh to myself. It was impossible, it was stupid. This young woman was off her nut. Best just to ignore her. At least it would make an amusing anecdote later. For a brief moment, I’d been afraid she was going to say that she was here to kill me or something.
The bus was only about ten meters away, brakes already hissing, when I said, “You don’t have to be a man to be a prick, you know. Best of luck to you back at the asylum.”
I felt a hard push from behind and I tumbled into the road as the bus arrived.
Lion City Daikaiju
Wednesday, February 25th, 2009
That night, Singapore’s landmarks declared war: the Merlion lurched off its concrete pedestal and flooded the riverfront with its eternally gushing masticatory fountain, catching untold numbers of tourists unawares, forced to leave behind their $20 mixed drinks and plates of tapas; the Raffles Hotel, in all its colonial splendor, leapfrogged across the downtown area, knocking over bank buildings and squashing flat petrol tankers and cars plastered with adverts; the twin metallic durians of the Esplanade curled into spiny balls of hedgehog lethality, and rolled over and through every upscale mall they could find, taking especial care to utterly demolish the shopping district on Orchard Road; the National Library took flight and glided to the MediaCorp building, dropping barrages of encyclopedias and folios onto transmissions towers and backup generators, destroying the link between the viewing public and the badly acted and written serial dramas that filled the broadcast airwaves; the twin statues of the country’s patron saint, Sir Stamford Raffles, one dark bronze and one white polymarble, lay seige to every construction crane in evidence, leaping nimbly from structure to structure, leaving bright yellow wreckage in their wake.
Who was to blame, the people cried, why has this happened, could it be Jemaah Islamiyah and that terrorist who escaped, or was it resurgent aggression from Japan, or could it be an intelligent group-mind of dengue-carrying mosquitos, or revenge-seeking Americans with outrage and the image of a public caning in their minds, why oh why is this happening to us, and the people fled in terror, at this revolt by the reminders of the nation’s greatness, as those selfsame landmarks reduced to rubble every symbol of progress, sign of homogenized inclusion with the globalized world, and showing of shallow flash and glam over depth and culture and tradition, and when the sun rose over the tropical island the next morning it was all over, the assault had stopped, the landmarks as still and inert as their previous states, the country no longer globally competitive, but the people did not despair, because as they buried and cremated their dead and began the rebuilding process, they remembered that they had endured the British occupiers, and the tyranny of the Japanese military, and they had arisen to become a global corporate power, and that they would now reinvent themselves into something new and bright and shining, a jewel of the future world, a unique visage of identity.