Vast Faces

((How one becomes what one is))

Desmond is thrown around the metro as the rumbling train passes by another going at some frightful velocity through a narrow tunnel. He’s spent the better part of the underground trip asleep, lightly snoring, but now he’s awake because of some pearlescent white, complexly curvilinear phone with rosary-like anticancer charms dangling from its sides, ringing mightily with a tune that’s supposed to increase breast size through cognitive waves. As the opposite train’s maglev force ripples down through the car, coursing across his ribs and out his body, he steadies himself against a cold metal poll.

Bright thick lines of light whip by the train at a crazy momentum, the eyes of all the passengers lit up by a backwash of multispectral radiation. He looks around, hanging on, and sees people looking up at him, almost everyone in this car. One guy two meters down isn’t looking at Desmond though, rather, he’s looking up and down at himself, dressed in an electrosuit, covered head to toe in perfectly black electrofibers and whirring servos; blinking purple in the creases. He’s got a cane, leaning on it, and big black suede shoes elevate him almost a foot above the ground. He's old-school, this guy: fin de siècle Tokyo decadence. A nostalgia piece. He reaches into his collar, Desmond hears an almost inaudible click, and the electrofibers shimmer deep saucy pink.

Though, everyone else is looking up at Desmond, who feels very far from Toronto, from The Annex, from anything. One guy, sitting next to the uncomfortably angular seat Desmond was just sleeping on, has got a long, grizzly beard like dry straw, with small beady eyes magnified by archaic glasses with thick lenses and heavy black plastic frames. His face is a scowl. Across the car, a woman, a stylish young matron, cradles a baby resting in a nest of microtome comprising of millions of extremely thin sheets. She stares up at Desmond with the most accusing looks he’s ever seen. Like he’s about to steal her baby right out of her arms- which he doubts he could. The woman wears very expensive, very sheer black undergarments, and little else, save for some black outer layer - equally sheer, skintight, and microshort. She looks very unfriendly, the neon advertisements flashing on her angry-set eyes.

He looks around at the rest of the faces, amid the blurring colours and hallucinatory light outside, unrecognized, thinks that some of these faces could be right for him. Something about dreams, about the interface between the private and the consensual.

The train stops. he advertisements stop moving and remain still. The doors slide open, and the passengers are greeted with faceless, camera-eyed, paraplegic mannequins motioning for them to not block the doors and stop the constant lockstep flow of biomass. Deep breath- he injects himself into the evening’s tide of faces.

Desmond goes down into the station, guided by inert holograms and loud-speakers talking some poorly translated Japanese, flexible curtains of melon-pink plastic impossibly folding past him as luggage, mostly genetic materials and illegal hormones, are loaded onto the first-class trains by a Nipponese robotic arm.

He walks, moving along with all the others, flowing up through the ceramic foyer and down a long tiled hall connecting big parallel escalators, every known form of electronic advertising under a misting cloud of midday haze and smoke he cannot see but can smell, softening the commercials playing on façade screens of quite surreal width and clarity. One flashes, a wink with subliminal properties:

Praise to His Divine Grace AC Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada

Images of red vials, soy bars, and hospital-identification bracelet cutters burst into his mind, oscillating through his jaw, along the cerebral cortex, and gradually dissolving into a warm sensation in the upper lobes. Randomly overlapping media, a rising, turbulent storm of commerce of the savaged industrial-core. Grafted by Nipponese colonists disguised as entrepreneurs, retrofitting Canada with Japanese tissue, resulting in hybrid forms...

He steps on the escalator, bringing him up out of the neon depths of the electric metro. He looks back, sees them today, a view that doesn’t really count in the glow of those very big televisions reflected back at him through long expanse of black curving mirror. He wishes he were somewhere else. He doesn’t feel like he belongs in his own country.

Riding the escalator up and out onto the streets, Desmond scouts an archipelago of misplaced gaijins smoking around a pachinko parlor, surgically created epicanthic folds quivering as they quickly glance at passerbys, black lips pink at the center from cigarette filters. He gets off, absorbed into the crowd, merging into a single organism, and heads westward, leaving behind the sounds of powerful electrical charges turning the rails into electromagnets for the trains to ride like ice, resonating like depressurized steam.

And then, behind a facade of ballooning logos, he sees a rare blazing red maple leaf emblem amid the hoopla of cheap chrome shop-displays and glowing kanji. He cranes his neck to get a longer look, excited, but its already gone, lost in the thick, impenetrable crowd. He tries to search for it, but oversized shopping bags and jostling elbows push him on towards Apartment-Plus #31.

He looks back, but all he sees are hurrying briefcases and black suits, kicking up a cloud of reddish dusty haze like a herd of buffalo charging the plains. The bright leaf is burning.

He walks up some concrete slab steps, the building’s walls steel corrugate, and is greeted by an android, half-finished, internal machines visible. Its face is ghost-white, its arms brass, its body comprising of photoelectric cells and shiny transistors. It’s brain box is located behind two empty, black Nipponese eyes.

“Your Passport please.” It’s head tilts sideways, fibreoptics connecting to the security computer a hundred feet below the building. It fingers flutter.

Desmond hands it over. The Andy takes it, a laser attached to each finger reading the black mirror square on the front. Desmond’s name, personal data, and mug shots are digitally transferred into the system database, and the Android hands it back, bows, and lets Desmond enter. This is a real pain in the ass: his apartment being the only one in the district with an Andy doorman. Seconds later he’s on the communal loading docks, and in an instant he’s flying down a maze of massive silicon pathways, cylindrical, going to his little space. Pulsing Nipponese dub plays. He buys a coffee, offered to him by a row of smudged identical vending-machines. In this building, in this town, individuality is obsolete: all the rooms are the same, all the tenants similar.

The dock slams up to his door, number 3014. Upstairs, his neighbor, the Syrian gypsy, is wailing away at his buzuq. The boys below smoking. He steps off the dock just in time, unlocking the front door with his retina pattern, and turns, shutting it, the rumbling lift pounding off, catching some unregistered faces watching him leave just as it takes off in a puff of steam.

Bliksem, his dog, gets up from his canine position on the dull brown floor and comes wiggling over to him, making anxious friendly noises, smelling of dog food. He looks down at it, half-interested, and walks over to the kitchen, a small alcove built into the granular brick walls, an old-transistor radio softly playing something full of static. He hadn’t fixed it entirely, and all it got was mariachi and jazz with bad reception, but it still made him feel melancholy. Another nostalgia piece, the roots running deep. It made him think of the Maple Leaf as he walks over to the fridge, getting out some disgusting saki. Bliksem follows eagerly, wagging his tail furiously.

He pours himself a glass, sipping it with a sour face. You can’t get any other drink near here, so he just has to suck it up, but its so hard. He travels across the room, disappearing into a small dim room winking with red diode from one of its many machines. Cold in there.

He’s holding a circular tray, polycarbonate glass, with a dozen fat half-orange, half-black pills floating around in it. The glass behind the pills reflects the walls of animated light, twisting towards the sky. The neon coming in off the streets through the window, vast faces filling the grand screens, icons of beauty made terrible in their enormity. He shakes his head a little.

Desmond sits on a Microtomed sofa as the transistor radio blares at midnight in his room, looking out his window at the darkened horizon of the city streets. Bliksem sleeps at his feet. He hears the party outside, drunken people stumbling out of the pink stucco facade of a place called, once translated, The Tropical Bubblegum Pub. He takes a pull on the bottle, and lets it roll around in his mouth. He then picks up one of this pills from the tray, and swallows it along with the saki.

Desmond inserts a homemade tape into a big pile of sound-recording equipment he’s brought out. He presses PLAY BACK.

A system of dust-furred speakers positioned all around the apartment starts to play an almost inaudible tune. Positive brainwashing, Desmond called it. Cognitive sound, just like what that cell-phone back in the metro was playing, but this his own homebrew concoction.

Those people back on the Maglev are unearthing deep within his mind, the mediated faces on the crystal-display screens are now becoming apart of him. His gut reduces, courtesy of the fashionable matron, and gets a short brittle stubble beard, thanks to the old man. The chameleon punk affects his facial structure, tightening, becoming more angular.

The Halloween pills and soft fuzzy sounds coming from his speakers reset the code of his DNA.

Desmond can feel his body contracting from it. He needs it, though. The faces he’s seen today, leaving their own little subliminal imprint, are now coming out inside of him, registering into his misshapen identity. His gut reduces, very slowly, and his lips become smoother. His ears become more pointed, his forehead growing larger. The fake white face of the doorman Andy...

He arrives at a suitable appearance.

He wonders. Memory. Loss. Flesh-ghost of his condition. The Maple leaf riding above the subliminal glow of business, the suppressed symbol, spelled out on some cheap moving screen, replaced quickly by Mitsubishi or some other company. He turns the pill tray, twisting the neon beyond the window, and it comes to Desmond that this is the light in which he voyages under, his identity spelled out under the artificial constellations.