Archive for the ‘Rudi Dornemann’ Category
The Urban Mechanism
Monday, September 8th, 2008
The mechanism was running down. It had no moving parts. Its gears were graffiti runes painted on walls and rooftops on a dozen buildings throughout the city. One of them must have slipped, and there was an aetheric grinding where there should have been smooth turning in time with the tides, the days, the moons, the seasons. No one noticed when it worked; everyone knew when it didn’t.
The mage-engineers couldn’t agree on a cure. Three days of chanting might do it. Or goat’s blood spattered on street corners. Or using nothing but wooden coins for money. Or four days of rain, during which we’d all have to dance everywhere we went. Nothing sounded practical.
The lake receded. Prices rose in the malls, fell in the stock market. Sparks were seen in corners of the twilight sky by those who knew how to look. It was getting serious.
All the mage-engineers tried all their cures. All the cures failed. A flock of three-winged pigeons nested on the cathedral dome. Throngs of finger-sized lizards spilled up through the storm drains. A greenish haze curdled on the sidewalks and clung around our ankles.
The evacuation began. One suitcase each. Residents of odd-numbered houses got the streets in odd-numbered hours, then it was the evens’ turn.
A numb quiet hung in the air and the echoes of our footsteps didn’t come back right. When we crossed the bridge, we saw the river burning with ghostly flames just below the surface.
That’s when the vigilante-magi made their attempt, with perfect coordination of rituals in a dozen neighborhoods. The sky rang like a china teacup struck with a spoon. It turned out they’d done the wrong thing — who knows how badly things could have gone if they hadn’t done it so well.
The city was gone. Where the streets had been, lines of evacuees through fields. We walked toward the hills. Every bead of dew hanging from the grass reflected the buildings, plazas, avenues, shops — the home — we’d lost.
Even now that we’ve begun rebuilding, every puddle, soup bowl, and bathtub reflects what we barely remember anymore. We found the mechanism’s runes patterned in flowers here and there across the fields. We’ve made those places garden parks which we leave alone except for the occasional watering and the even rarer, very careful weeding.
A Winter Walk
Thursday, August 28th, 2008
When another hour passed without word, and the automatic voice that answered for his lawyer still repeated the generic message that meant it either didn’t recognize the caller or it did, but didn’t have any news he’d want to hear, Javad Azaizeh decided to go out for a walk. He wrapped the scarf around his neck, turned up the collar of his jacket, and pulled on his warmest hat. It would be ironic to have made it unscathed through half a Kharbarovsk winter only to catch a cold just when he might be back in front of crowds who wanted to hear his voice.
Javad’s ears popped as he door of his building shut behind him. The light, filtered by the blue plastic of the snow tunnel walls, was twilight-colored and noon-bright.
A scrap of paper, scuttled along by the wind, stayed just ahead of his feet. Midway through the second block, words appeared, lines in Korean script. A menu, to judge by the pictures of bulgogi and bibimbap — smart paper, a page set for a local frequency, that had come loose of wherever it had been posted originally. Another three steps, and the menu faded to a flyer for the jewelry store Javad was passing, then to a teaser for that day’s Tikhookyeanskaya Zvyezda. For a few seconds, under the concrete arch of a bike lane, the scrap showed nothing but crawl-scrolling gray-pink snow.
He followed the page, even when the tunnel wind took it off his usual route. Flickering false-3D ads melted into handwritten daily special lists, which morphed into tables of apartment dwellers meant to accompany banks of buzzer-buttons. Javad forgot the courtroom in Brussels, the message he hadn’t gotten. When he passed a school where a chorus must have been practicing, a few staves of whatever the folk song they sang sketched themselves across the wrinkled, dirt-smeared paper, and, before he could catch himself, he hummed the first notes.
He felt the vocal lock tighten in his throat. The lawyer must not have been successful; Javad still didn’t own the performance copyright to his own voice.
Wincing with shame more than pain, he leaned against the wall, feeling the chill of hard-packed snow through the plastic. He took thin breaths and let the paper continue tumble and change without him.
There’d be a message now, one telling him about the fine he’d just incurred.