Multi-column

Burning Chrome

Thoughts

Highlights

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THE GERNSBACK CONTINUUM
He brought along a very fashionably dressed young woman named Dialta Downes, who was virtually chinless and evidently a noted pop-art historian. In retrospect, I see her walking in beside Cohen under a floating neon sign that flashes THIS WAY LIES MADNESS in huge sans-serif capitals. ๐Ÿ”—

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I found myself remembering Sunday morning television in the Fifties.
Sometimes theyโ€™d run old eroded newsreels as filler on the local station. Youโ€™d sit there with a peanut butter sandwich and a glass of milk, and a static-ridden Hollywood baritone would tell you that there was A Flying Car in Your Future. And three Detroit engineers would putter around with this big old Nash with wings, and youโ€™d see it rumbling furiously down some deserted Michigan runway. You never actually saw it take off, but it flew away to Dialta Downesโ€™s never-never land, true home of a generation of completely uninhibited technophiles. She was talking about those odds and ends of "futuristic" Thirties and Forties architecture you pass daily in American cities without noticing; the movie marquees ribbed to radiate some mysterious energy, the dime stores faced with fluted aluminum, the chrome-tube chairs gathering dust in the lobbies of transient hotels. She saw these things as segments of a dreamworld, abandoned in the uncaring present; she wanted me to photograph them for her. ๐Ÿ”—

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Architectural photography can involve a lot of waiting; the building becomes a kind of sundial, while you wait for a shadow to crawl away from a detail you want, or for the mass and balance of the structure to reveal itself in a certain way. ๐Ÿ”—

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concrete.
"Think of it," Dialta Downes had said, "as a kind of alternate America: a 1980 that never happened. An architecture of broken dreams."
And that was my frame of mind as I made the stations of her convoluted socioarchitectural cross in my red Toyota as I gradually tuned in to her image of a shadowy America-that-wasnโ€™t, of Coca-Cola plants like beached submarines, and fifth-run movie houses like the temples of some lost sect that had worshiped blue mirrors and geometry. And as I moved among these secret ruins, I found myself wondering what the in-habitants of that lost future would think of the world I lived in. The Thirties dreamed white marble and slip-stream chrome, immortal crystal and burnished bronze, but the rockets on the covers of the Gernsback pulps had fallen on London in the dead of night, screaming. After the war, everyone had a car no wings for it and the promised superhighway to drive it down, so that the sky itself darkened, and the fumes ate the marble and pitted the miracle crystal . . . ๐Ÿ”—

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Merv Kihn, free-lance journalist with an extensive line in Texas pterodactyls, redneck UFO contactees, bush-league Loch Ness monsters, and the Top Ten conspiracy theories in the loonier reaches of the American mass mind. ๐Ÿ”—

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"If you want a classier explanation, Iโ€™d say you saw a semiotic ghost. All these contactee stories, for in-stance, are framed in a kind of sci-fi imagery that permeates our culture. I could buy aliens, but not aliens that look like Fiftiesโ€™ comic art. Theyโ€™re semiotic phantoms, bits of deep cultural imagery that have split off and taken on a life of their own, like the Jules Verne air-ships that those old Kansas farmers were always seeing. But you saw a different kind of ghost, thatโ€™s all. That plane was part of the mass unconscious, once. You picked up on that, somehow. The important thing is not to worry about it." ๐Ÿ”—

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They were the children of Dialta Downesโ€™s โ€˜80-that-wasnโ€™t; they were Heirs to the Dream. They were white, blond, and they probably had blue eyes. They were American. Dialta had said that the Future had come to America first, but had finally passed it by. But not here, in the heart of the Dream. Here, weโ€™d gone on and on, in a dream logic that knew nothing of pollution, the finite bounds of fossil fuel, or foreign wars it was possible to lose. They were smug, happy, and utterly content with themselves and their world. And in the Dream, it was their world. ๐Ÿ”—

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It had all the sinister fruitiness of Hitler Youth propaganda. ๐Ÿ”—

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"Hell of a world we live in, huh?" The proprietor was a thin black man with bad teeth and an obvious wig. I nodded, fishing in my jeans for change, anxious to find a park bench where I could submerge myself in hard evidence of the human near-dystopia we live in. "But it could be worse, huh?"
"Thatโ€™s right," I said, "or even worse, it could be perfect." ๐Ÿ”—

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He watched me as I headed down the street with my little bundle of condensed catastrophe. ๐Ÿ”—

Fragments of a Hologram Rose

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It had been recorded by a young blonde yogi with 20-20 vision and an abnormally acute color sense. ๐Ÿ”—

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Three in the morning.
Let yesterday arrange itself around you in flat schematic images. What you said what she said watching her pack dialing the cab. However you shuffle them they form the same printed circuit, hieroglyphs converging on a central component; you, standing in the rain, screaming at the cabby.
The rain was sour and acid, nearly the color of piss. The cabby called you an asshole; you still had to pay twice the fare. She had three pieces of luggage. In his respirator and goggles, the man looked like an ant. He pedaled away in the rain. She didnโ€™t look back.
The last you saw of her was a giant ant, giving you the finger. ๐Ÿ”—

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He arrived in California three days before the chaotic New Secessionist regime collapsed. In San Francisco, warring splinter groups hit and ran in the streets. One or another of four different "provisional" city governments had done such an efficient job of stockpiling food that almost none was available at street level. ๐Ÿ”—

โญ๏ธ The Belonging Kind

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The alleyโ€™s walls crawled with graffiti, its caged lights ticked with moths. ๐Ÿ”—

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But he could never talk to strangers in bars or at parties. He didnโ€™t go to many parties. He went to a lot of bars. ๐Ÿ”—

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He hadnโ€™t ever had a girl like the one who sat with her back arched slightly in the undersea light that splashed along the bar in the Backdoor. The same light was screwed into the lenses of the bartenderโ€™s glasses, wound into the necks of the rows of bottles, splashed dully across the mirror. In that light her dress was the green of young corn, like a husk half stripped away, showing back and cleavage and lots of thigh through the slits up the side. Her hair was coppery that night. And, that night, her eyes were green. ๐Ÿ”—

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Great, he screamed to himself, sheโ€™ll think youโ€™re hiding an erection. And he was startled to realize that he had one to hide. ๐Ÿ”—

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Um. He winced. Um. ๐Ÿ”—

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"The nameโ€™s Coretti," he said, his verbal poltergeist shifting abruptly to a totally unconvincing tough-guy mode, "Michael Coretti." ๐Ÿ”—

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She moved in perfect accord with the music, striking a series of poses; she went through the entire prescribed sequence, gracefully but not artfully, fitting in perfectly. Always, always fitting in perfectly. Her companion danced mechanically, moving through the ritual with effort.
When the dance ended, she turned abruptly and dived into the thick of the crowd. The shifting throng closed about her like something molten. ๐Ÿ”—

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And for the first time, Coretti knew what they were, what they must be. They were the kind you see in bars who seem to have grown there, who seem genuinely at home there. Not drunks, but human fixtures. Functions of the bar. The belonging kind. ๐Ÿ”—

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Third Avenue lost itself near the waterfront in a petrified snarl of brickwork. In the last block, bright vomit marked the pavement at intervals, and old men dozed in front of black-and-white TVs, sealed forever behind the fogged plate glass of faded hotels. ๐Ÿ”—

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He ached with jealousy: for the personification of conformity, this woman who was not a woman, this human wallpaper. Coretti gazed at the hotel and lost his nerve. He turned away. ๐Ÿ”—

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In the afternoon he slept, and dreamed of sheep-faced people reflected in mirrors behind rows of bottles. ๐Ÿ”—

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They drank and drank, and went laughing laughing just the right sort of laughter out into the rain. A cab was waiting, its wipers duplicating the beat of Corettiโ€™s heart. ๐Ÿ”—

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No wallet bulged there, and no pocket. But a kind of slit widened. It opened as the manโ€™s fingers poised over it, and it disgorged money. Three bills, folded, were extruded smoothly from the slit. The money was slightly damp. It dried, as the man unfolded it, like the wings of a moth just emerging from the chrysalis. ๐Ÿ”—

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The driver muttered into his hand mike, changed gears, and they flowed away into the rain and the darkened streets. The cityscape made no impression on Coretti, who, looking inwardly, was seeing the cab stop, the gray man and the laughing woman pushing him out and pointing, smiling, to the gate of a mental hospital. Or: the cab stopping, the couple turning, sadly shaking their heads. And a dozen times he seemed to see the cab stopping in an empty side street where they methodically throttled him. Coretti left dead in the rain. Because he was an outsider.
But they arrived at Corettiโ€™s hotel. ๐Ÿ”—

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Hotels, late at night, are never still. The corridors are never entirely silent. There are countless barely audible sighs, the rustling of sheets, and muffled voices speaking fragments out of sleep. But in the ninth-floor corridor, Coretti seemed to move through a perfect vacuum, soundless, his shoes making no sound at all on the colorless carpet and even the beating of his outsiderโ€™s heart sucked away into the vague pattern that decorated the wallpaper. ๐Ÿ”—

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His couple seated themselves on the edge of the Formica countertop in the kitchenette, and Coretti hesitated in the middle of the empty carpet. Light-years of that carpet seemed to separate him from the others, but something called to him across the distance, promising rest and peace and belonging. And still he hesitated, shaking with an indecision that seemed to rise from the genetic core of his bodyโ€™s every cell.
Until they opened their eyes, all of them simultaneously, the membranes sliding sideways to reveal the alien calm of dwellers in the oceanโ€™s darkest trench.
Coretti screamed, and ran away, and fled along corridors and down echoing concrete stairwells to cool rain and the nearly empty streets. ๐Ÿ”—

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Sometimes, at dawn, perched on the edge of his unmade bed, drifting into sleep he never slept lying down, now he thought about her. Antoinette. And them. The belonging kind. Sometimes he speculated dreamily . . . Perhaps they were like house mice, the sort of small animal evolved to live only in the walls of man-made structures.
A kind of animal that lives only on alcoholic beverages. With peculiar metabolisms they convert the alcohol and the various proteins from mixed drinks and wine and beers into everything they need. And they can change outwardly, like a chameleon or a rockfish, for protection. So they can live among us. And maybe, Coretti thought, they grow in stages. In the early stages seeming like humans, eating the food humans eat, sensing their difference only in a vague disquiet of being an outsider.
A kind of animal with its own cunning, its own special set of urban instincts. And the ability to know its own kind when theyโ€™re near. Maybe.
And maybe not. ๐Ÿ”—

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After the third margarita their hips were touching, and something was spreading through him in slow orgasmic waves. It was sticky where they were touching; an area the size of the heel of his thumb where the cloth had parted. He was two men: the one inside fusing with her in total cellular communion, and the shell who sat casually on a stool at the bar, elbows on either side of his drink, fingers toying with a swizzle stick. Smiling benignly into space. Calm in the cool dimness.
And once, but only once, some distant worrisome part of him made Coretti glance down to where soft-ruby tubes pulsed, tendrils tipped with sharp lips worked in the shadows between them. Like the joining tentacles of two strange anemones.
They were mating, and no one knew.
And the bartender, when he brought the next drink, offered his tired smile and said, "Raininโ€™ out now, innit? Just wonโ€™t let up."
"Been like that all goddamn week," Coretti answered. "Raininโ€™ to beat the band."
And he said it right. Like a real human being. ๐Ÿ”—