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1. Cindy marks her existence in red. She belongs in this uncaring place, this city that spat her out, this century that’s a slo-mo train wreck she won’t even see the good parts of. You hear that? That’s Cindy the fucking SKULL, and she exists, here and now.
(No one listens. No one ever does.)
Gunshots ring over the street. Cindy curses under her breath and drags her wounded leg to crouch behind a fountain jutting out of an old stone wall: it’s a poor hiding spot, but the Mazda didn’t see her turn this corner and she can’t make it further anyway. It’ll have to do. The fountain’s dried up, they don’t do fountains in Couron these days, letting its carved angels watch over a bed of fallen leaves and cigarette butts.
Cindy grabs one of the stone figures like a handle to hoist herself up and get a better look at the street. Not a banger in sight. As she flops back to the ground, she sees that her bloodied hand has left a print over the angel’s own. In the feverish clarity of blood loss, it strikes her as funny.
“No take-backsies, loser. We’re blood sisters now,” she whispers to the city in a defeated chuckle, and stares blankly at Revachol’s grey sky.
Fucking wound must be getting infected. For a moment, it’s like she’s got stone in her veins, and leaves and cigarette butts, exhaust pipe gas, sodium, chatter, black paper, asphalt, and the sea.
2. There was a cry Roy heard once as he was waist-deep in the river Esperance’s radioactive mud, and mind you this was weeks past any hope for survivors, it was a thankless job that had to be done and so they were doing it, their own lives be damned. So this cry, it was lucid, total somehow. It said, once, as a finite statement: “I CANNOT DIE.”
And since then Roy has kept hearing it, once in a while. He doesn’t think it’s weird, really – it goes with the vibes of the whole place, by which he thinks he means Revachol overall, it matches the energy. Maybe it’s the drugs. Could be, pyrholidon carving paths across his brain and hitting the same memory every once in a while like a tongue over an aching tooth, but make it bittersweet. Could be a quirk of entroponetics, there was this Archer whistleblower, short-lived fella that he was, who shared a list of the crosstalk they got up in the air, with their high-end machinery. His projector’s no government radio but it might catch some things, you know? Or it could be that Roy’s life is stuck, and what happens with no future is that the past comes up again and again until it’s all that’s left, that’s just how it is.
Anyway. He doesn’t mind. It keeps him company, and that’s all he can ask for.
3. Soona is standing alone in the middle of the church. A cold lament fills her ears, echoing against the wooden walls. This tells her rational mind that she is dreaming, as the only lament in this place should rightfully be her own kvetching against the infernal noise those four whippersnappers and their friends call music. This is… unusual: if you asked her, Soona would say she doesn’t dream. Yet here she is, standing under the hole in the world, looking up. There is another world beyond that singular opening up in the air, one where her life’s grand achievement can still be compiled and where she can rid herself of this guilt and yearning. With the certainty of dreams, she knows that she can reach it. So she gets to work. A spiralling tower grows in the nave of the church, made of pulpits, altars, lecterns, lamps, tabernacles, amplifiers, cables, beams, a turntable, strobe lights, tapes. Her arms hurt, in the dream. The spire stretches into the heavens and so does her monument, rising up inside the church’s walls. The lament swirls around her creation as she climbs again, impossibly high, carrying a wooden stepladder.
She fits it on a plank. The lament is so loud, up here. A trick of the acoustics? Does it flow from the hole, from that other world that holds all promises? Soona climbs her final steps; the tower creaks and ripples, but holds. Her ambition now lies within reach. As she stands face to face with the grain of nothing that is her ticket out of the nonsense of her life, as she readies herself for pushing her hand through it (the action checks out in the dream) and grabbing what is hers, she sees at once that the lament comes from the air, the living breathing entity that is Revachol as it is punctured by the hole, the being and the wound. Her prize would come at a price. She raises her arm. The city’s pain is already insufferable. What’s a filament more? Soona breathes out and sees her breath join the wailing. Her hand trembles.
Soona wakes up in a sweat on her cot inside the church. There is no lament she can hear. There is the hole, silent, impossible, absolute, and there is no choice for her to make. She sighs in relief and goes about her day.
4. The night is warm and alive, dotted in white lights, and Steban, hunched on the corner of a crumbling statue’s pedestal, is drunk with love for the world. Taking a drag out of his cigarette, he takes in Revachol’s glorious existence unfold before him in the form of an old couple, three strays, a worker hurrying to her late shift, a sleepy pigeon, the unseen ruckus unfolding inside a nearby bar. He raises his cigarette to his city in a boy’s approximation of a seductive offer, lets the thin line of smoke be taken by the wind and, laughing softly to himself, he says: “Want to get into the extra-physical branches of communism, my dear?”
“NO THANKS. I QUIT,” comes a voice as sharp as a blizzard. Steban jolts awake. There is a clicking of heels disappearing into the alley behind him. As he turns around and leans to squint at the passer-by, a seagull swoops down, brushing his hair, and steals the cigarette off his hand.
5. “ROUGH BAD ON THE CASE, I WANNA HIT YOUR FACE!” belts out Egg Head in the emptiness of the church, as if it weren’t barely ten in the morning with seven hours of sleep between the four of them combined. But that one’s got his own batteries and his own rhythms, and so he yells, like Revachol’s most dedicated, hungover rooster.
“MUSIC THAT’S THE LAW, WE’RE GONNA ROCK THE PLACE!”
“COME ON! WE START IT RIGHT, SO POSSE HOLD ON TIGHT!” he adds. He has scooted over to his console, flipping through bases until he finds something that will work with this. A thumping bass fills the space.
“NOW THAT’S THE SCORE, SO CAN YOU SEE THE LIGHT?”
“YEAH!” he states with evident satisfaction.
In the chapel the quartet elected as their living quarters, Acele elbows Noid, who might as well stop pretending to be still asleep. “You hear that?” she says.
“Maybe in Yekokataa they don’t.” He sits up, unconvinced. “Are we doing basic philosophy of perception? The real problem of perception on this fine morning is it’s too fucking loud.”
“That too. But shouldn’t some of that rhyme at some point? He follows ‘I wanna hit your face’ with an empty bar and ‘so posse hold on tight’? That’s weird.”
“That’s Egg.”
Acele can’t argue with that.
???. “YOU ARE STILL HERE?”
“You’re a real bad habit,” the woman laughs, blond hair covering her face as a gust twirls around her. “It is so very hard to quit you, honey.”
“SIX YEARS YOU LET THE WIND RISE OVER THE DELTA WITHOUT BEING BROKEN BY YOUR FORM.”
She lights herself a cigarette, staring deep into the horizon, where pale amasses on reality’s threshold.
“NOW YOU SAY NOTHING. SILENT AS STAINED GLASS, LUNGS FOREVER GLOWING IN LIGHT AND PIGMENT, BUT THAT TOO CAN SING. WITH A STORM, A BULLET, THE UNDOING THAT COMES WITH A RENOVATION.”
“I made you,” she says. Maybe there is nothing else to say. “Now I breathe you again, and you partake of me in turn, our atoms entwined,” she adds anyway.
“I LOVE YOU. I HAVE RISEN ABOVE YOU.”
“Show me.”
“WATCH.”