North by Northwest, Feb.15 (The Spinx and Her Lover)

/

AN: Inspired by L'Enigme by Gustave Dore, far too much apocalyptic online fiction and a rainy day.

/

This is how one-one-hundredth of it really happened: the bombs explode on a Tuesday, forty-two minutes after the third hour at ground zero – a butter-churning little village one hundred and forty three miles from the nearest metropolis and smack dab in the middle of nowhere. Traced back, the bomb’s detonations move the 1-4-3 units of distance back, back under the grey city. One crossed wire, nothing more than that, friction, proximity, rodents and years and years and years of dust-languishing stillness. Hilariously: a mistake.

Not so hilariously: three thousand people dead in fifteen seconds, with the appropriate nuclear backlash to invert atoms for at least a four dozen-mile radius. One invisible energy stamp that will likely last the upside of fifty years. And that’s the optimistic estimate.

Stop. Re-cycle images.

Part two: the political fallout is typically immense.

Whether it be gradual or sudden, punctuated with frustrated attempts at placation, treaty, compromise or else coming about like the sudden turn of tide, these matters inevitably turn to war. It’s the blood-quota, calling again.

It is arguable where it really begun, but everyone knows that the power-pushers were hot around the collar then, pressed to violent action by time, the inevitable mistress, and their numerous social contracts. Mostly young, mostly smart, charming and logical, universally unaware they were growing up schizophrenic, xenophobic, paranoid, teeming with parasites and subject to the various monstrosities of nature.

Siege guns, trench mortar, napalm, flaK 37s and panzerschrecks. This happened once before your time, of course, but this is now like then was then – history is the softest spoken lesson and hard-cut time never challenges this theory. This is now, in the present tense: air supremacy, Internet prophets, active electronic attacks, proxy wars and 4GW. Panic sweeps the nation like a heat wave, rolls over the populace through suitable propaganda, sloppy noises from the airwaves sharpening the edges of an invisibly constant state of anxiety. La raison c'est la folie du plus fort. La raison du moins fort c'est de la folie.

That song, the only one you remember, it went something like this:

… a bridge, like a bridge over

But bridges aren’t over when you look closer – they are under, too, incomplete representations of themselves, the sky-facing other halves. Like rainbows aren’t arcs, are really circles. Everywhere, you’ve known for a while, is the undeniable proof of circularity in existence – a notion set to perfectly conform to the imperfect mind (not that we were any warmer to the concept of mortality, but that’s a whole different can of worms).

Nothing dissipates, energy is constant. Never forget.

The sky’s on fire.

An eerie backdrop fills the other half of the far-away picture, tawny comet-streaks lapping upward at the dizzyingly radioactive heights, lace with each other, curl away. It’s been fourteen years and three months since the last time Etienne has seen the stars, but this way it’s better – at least there’s still something up there to watch for.

No, that’s a lie. He’d be watching anyway.

The ground isn’t a location proper anymore – anyone with eyes can see that the horizon is burning, a smoky haze smudging the exact spot where skyline melts into sky. (Anyone with eyes. Well, that’s the issue, isn’t it?) Bold, streaking letters, almost instantaneously wiped away like words on a whiteboard.

“How long does your lucky streak last, Etienne?” Her fingers, delicate in memory, blurred around the edges and tucked into the pockets of his ancient wool coat.

Walking now, dancing almost, flickering in and out through the expanses of reminiscence like a delicately fluttering insect. Here, limbs still intact and rashless, unhalted by amputation or intravenous devices; the green is four times the summer, the blue fives times the evening. Her steps, two-four, two-four where the light appears and disappears almost simultaneously in the radiated air.

Tread softly now, he bids her, watching where phantom toes edge his burned-down shadow.

So and so many dimensions away, a gentleman thoughtfully taps a blue PenSof 2008 against his bearded bottom lip – the new, ergonomic streamlined design, pronged ends and lightweight polymer jelly combining to offer a new writing experience for the calloused fingers of the masses.

“No, over here,” another pen indicates a chunk of painting and picture from a healthy distance, delicate as these pieces tend to be. “Come now, it’s foolproof symbolism. The burning horizon, the macabre litter of bodies. The sphinx, the angel – a imploration on behalf of, you know, humanity/mankind and then her unspoken riddle in the midst of it all. Why, why not, etc. She looks regal, divine and separated from this kind of thing – doesn’t like to get her hands dirty. Paws.” A phlegmy snicker. “But look out the expression on his face, right here. Almost more than imploration.” A pause. “Kind of… exquisite, you know? If you’re into that sort of thing. ”

The words drift into the next room with their flippant speaker, who’s already gathered up his latest lightweight Toshiba laptop and quadruple-shot latte (“Less foam this way. That’s the important part.”) and moved onto the next room. The gentleman lingers for a moment, pen to top-right lip corner, cocks his head to the side.

Exquisite – he thinks and moves away, pen tapping, heels clicking, thinking of the bruised expanse looming above the relative entropy. The city killed the stars, the people killed the city, and then everything burns up in sub-atomic nuclear stardust – a loop is drawn with the kind of purpose subtlety permits. The kind of drama it does not.

He bends to his pad of paper: date, piece, artist. Foolproof symbolism, he writes in bold-stroked letters, above the raindrop-curled speckles from where the outside world melted around bus windows and flowed in through an unsealable crack.

At the end of the world, she turns with a terrible sort of smile on her face, a hard-set comprehension in wide-set eyes. She’s always been like this: a little high-strung, a little gone, a little weathered to old tricks, old heartbeats. But it’s the smile that’s maybe different, and if you could, you would take a photograph of the half-dimple, slanted canines, the chipped incisor, lopsided tilt of lips so as not to forget the very first time you've ever seen her display that sort of sadness.

It’s a tradition never really framed concretely in the mind, it exists for that island of time alone: she saw this coming from a mile away, you didn’t. You never do.

“Maybe it’s the last time,” she offers. Hands out, beseechingly, you reach out and crush soft fur to your breast away from the direction of the terrible fire, and she’s smiling that sort of sorrowful smile like it’s over, but it’s not – merely the beginning: time veers the hairpin curve of the lemniscate as she presses her lips against your hair and breathes deeply, eternity banks steeply and somehow you know everything will still be the same when you open your eyes.

Eugène Ionesco - Reason is the madness of the strong. The reason of the weak is madness.