Archive for the ‘Rudi Dornemann’ Category
Homecoming (mono no aware)
Tuesday, October 27th, 2009
Miguel came downhill through the ruins after midnight. Slow going; in the years since the fire, raspberry bushes, poplars and bushes had filled the lawns. Coydogs howled, but not too near. He felt forward with his walking stick to keep from falling into cellar holes or the cracked remains of inground pools.
Before dawn, the GPS said he’d found his old backyard — he wouldn’t have recognized it. Across the valley, the milky borealis of city sky-glow behind the dark of the hills and, nearer, the unburnt side of town with lighted houses warm yellow like paper lanterns.
Growing up, this had never felt like home. Coming back had always been awkward as wrong-fitting clothes.
He risked a light, found the trunk of the tire-swing tree, cinderwood glinting like beetles. Below, the old patio’s charred pavers. He counted squares in a chess knight’s move, and levered the stone up with his walking stick. Pill-bugs scurried; ants evacuated their exposed gallery. A few inches under the dirt, the metal box still there, heavier than expected.
He unzipped the lid: pressure hiss and a smell like stale cooking oil and burnt circuits. 30 petabytes of neural storage, a project from the summer of his first college year, a big wobbly cube of shadow-colored jello full of archived teenaged e-mail, backups of favorite games, the complete Louvre in ultra-high resolution, all the Wikipedia entries in eight languages — two decades out of date now — everything he could think of to test the capacity.
He had a couple of wires in his pocket. He could sink them in the gel, sync them to the leads in his fingertips, load it complete to the Q-memory in the phone that ticked at his throat in time to his pulse. The summer was in there, whole days, weeks, of everything he’d heard and seen.
He dumped it onto the patio with a shlupp. The ants would take care of whatever the coydogs left.
On the bottom of the box, sealed in a baggie, a photo. Steve, Oscar, Lili, and — what was his name? — Des, all holding up his sister Ana, a pixie in oversize sunglasses and a rainbow-striped swimsuit. Ana before the war, the crash, the medals; a completely different Ana, with a completely different smile.
Miguel peeled the photo up, put it in his pocket, continued downhill.
The Viennese Nights’ Entertainment
Thursday, October 15th, 2009
The story was, when the siege failed and the Turks retreated from the walls of Vienna, they left behind sacks of coffee that became the basis for the city’s coffee houses. A couple decades later, the most popular coffee houses traded on the exotic mystique of the beverage’s origins, with sumptuously cushioned benches surrounding mother-of-pearl inlaid tables and a room full of gurgling hookahs at the back. During the coldest months, they added storytellers to draw customers. The most popular were Iskander, at the Bachmann’s, and Mahmood, at the Royal Crest.
They were brothers — twins — and not actually Turkish, but Vienna-born sons of an Egyptian merchant. They’re best remembered for the story duel of January, 1702.
It began when Mahmood whiled away a sleety Monday evening with an impromptu tale involving three dwarves, a hippogriff, and a sieve that turned sand to gold. Iskander retold the story for the next day’s dinner crowd, with a fourth dwarf and the hippogriff changing to a gryphon. The sieve, now, turned sand to silver and silver to gold.
On Wednesday, Mahmood’s version of the story had six dwarves and a two-headed serpent in addition to the gryphon. The dwarves were royalty, three brothers and three sisters, and there was a grand wedding at the end. The sieve turned sand to silver to gold, etc., but it also turned gold back to sand.
Thursday, Iskander had a dozen dwarves wind up in a grander wedding after adventures involving a gryphon, a hydra, and a tortoise that had extra heads where its feet should have been. The sieve turned wind to the sweetest music. The story took all day to recount.
On Friday, the brothers prayed together at noontime and dined together in their father’s house at evening.
On Saturday morning, Mahmood began telling interlocking stories of a dozen dwarvish warrior-kings and the gryphons, rocs, sphinxes, orophants, hamadryads, and other wondrous creatures. Before he even got to the sieve, his brother began telling his version on the other side of the city, elaborating each thread of the story with feats more daring and creatures more wondrous. They continued non-stop, neither pausing to sleep, sustained by ever-stronger coffee and rolls nibbled between sentences. By midweek, the brothers dreamt aloud of giants, ghosts, djinni, clever maidens, untrustworthy tailors…
Their listeners shuttled between coffeeshops, wondering how the story — for the two tales wove now into one — would end. The brothers seemed to finish each others’ sentences, even though they were half a mile apart, telling of miserly stepfathers, unlucky grandmothers, spiderwebs wide as oceans, volcanoes spewing rubies, flocks of mechanical birds, winter queens…
Their listeners stumbled, half-sleepwalking, from one to the other, lost in worlds of summer kings, immortal mask-makers, courageous dwarves in hippogriff-hide cloaks, indigo gryphons weeping for unrequited love, sieves that sifted light from darkness, coffee from plain water, truth from coffeeshop tales…
…and woke in a city blank with new snow to find they’d each dreamt a different ending.