Discivilization and Its Contents

It was a leaning in three layers—the world, the city, and its people, all dripping with the weight of household objects in a late-career Van Gogh, sighing as they sunk down and out, eyes and windows and oceans glazed over, caught atop the languid shore between waking nightmare and fevered dream of home. And in another age the people would have fled from underneath the city’s towers, saving children and a few old photographs before they ran to gaze as their cubed homes collapsed; now they’re just too tired. The buildings settle in their abject comforts as they loom, unwilling to let go and fall; the people wander ‘round beneath the shadows, unseeing of the flames and nose blind to the slowly melting steel, trapped inside the warm geometries of youth they conjure in their heads. And of course the world itself falls to the past’s seduction, a romance green and tendrilled overtaking what was built.

Us three we sit around a fire of our own, a simple thing, all plastic and lighter fluid. It’s latest night or earliest morning, a time I always thought reserved for ghosts, but only bodies live here now; no moonlight for the spectral. The sky is seen in glimpses, an endless blanket of black cloud, not warm, but sickly, fevered, nauseating, a cotton suffocant that only tightens as the night wears on. Vaulted rolling caverns of a pitch so deep the eye plays tricks, escaping from the dark into old blotches on the retina, into old memories of the sun. Above the leaning city to the east it leaves a hellish halo, the oil-paint inferno reflected and recast among the clouds, a hollow glow of orange that flickers and crawls in textures of living death.

Ian taps his feet in random patterns, so fast it’s painful for the others to watch, up and down against the dirt, rattling his body as he squirms. Sam is statuesque and restful, eyes emotionless as they soak up the people and the city and the world, and send out nothing in return. Before, Emma would’ve looked and thought those eyes event horizons, one way mirrors, something with poetic wit, but now she cannot see them through her tears. Not sobs or even streams, just pools that blind with pathos.

“Please, can I just look,” she strains.

“We have to rest. We have to be alive for him to save us, after all,” Sam speaks as Sam has always spoken, a schoolteacher’s diction and a psychopath’s tone, childish and sadistic and absolute.

“It’s there, I know it is, please, let me go.”

Ian’s humming, guttural, the theme from an old film that played in youth. He gets it wrong, the cello whiny, the horns percussive, everything sung through a layer of black phlegm, louder and grotesque as he whips his head up and down, up and down.

“Be quiet, stop wasting your voice.” Sam’s half-monotone. Ian hears but barely decrescendos.

“If we get it he’ll love us more, he’ll know we remembered,” Emma whispers.

“That’s not how the story goes.”

The yes it is that follows is so faint it’s almost stolen by the wind, but of course Sam hears, of course Sam hears. A glance is all it takes, and Emma’s pulling in her limbs and sinking like the city they passed through. Ian’s louder still and Sam gives him the stare that always works, catches his eye and he hesitates, feet slowing, and considers for a moment staring her down, but even he knows that won’t work.

I don’t know the cause—maybe the temperature's ambivalence, or the smell of fear and flesh, or the sight of another plastic fire in the distance, with silhouettes not still but prancing and cavorting, killing and copulating—he breaks eye contact with his master for the first time since 19 and flings himself from off his seat. Sam doesn’t yell, but simply watches; Emma braves a glance but he’s already too far away to really see, a moving shadow in the debris, in this graveyard for the glass and plaster comforts of before. He growls and profanes in perfect echoes of Jim Morrison and Frank Booth, or some perverted marriage of them both. He kicks as he runs, picks up a frayed-tip metal rod and crushes all he can.

Emma sees him fly and finds a hopelessness inside, sees how broken her old world is now, when Ian flees from Sam. The string that pulled her taut grows slacker than it's ever been.

“It doesn’t matter then, if he won’t listen, why should I?”

Sam spins around but has nothing to say.

“I’m looking for the locket," Emma mutters.

“You’ll kill us.”

“I don't-I don't think that you remember how it really goes."

Emma gets up and starts to look, she knows, she knows it has to be here, that’s how it always goes, somewhere in this half-lucid memory of a place. She finds it and then everything’s okay.

“Celluloid black and red, hungry motherfucker,” Ian shouts between his yips.

The old world unfolds as she searches. Decaying VHS; a book with mold and yellowed pages; three tiers of a nesting doll, strewn out in equal measure from the other, the middle cracked and warped. Sam sits, still enough to be another lost attachment, only blinking, nothing else. Sam knows the locket isn’t significant, a peripheral symbol, nothing more. It was only in three shots, how could it mean much in the end? Sam knows he’ll come and they’ll be saved. Sam knows.

And Ian’s running wild again, dancing with his pole instead of smashing, edging closer to the flame with every spin, and Emma sees death in his face. She looks back down, and scans a pile of broken glass for heart-shaped gold. To see their faces again…

Beyond the wind and fire and Ian's another sound reaches her ears, and then she feels it—now just a gentle fall but one with promise of a tempest; the world’s nostalgia has turned angrier of late.

“Please, Sam, can you help me? Th-the rain is coming, and I know you think I’m stupid, but can you just do it for me?”

Her voice is more desperate than she expects, and the sinking starts again. The rain is calm enough to dream.

“You’re exhausting yourself, Emma, please just come sit down.”

The rain mixes with her newfound tears, and it would be a poetic scene, if the former wasn’t acrid with the old world's decadence.

“You child of a whore, I’d leave and cast my lot with the Onanites before I’d listen,” Ian half-shouts and half-hisses. “How many years I’ve trembled in your cold fluorescent gaze, your bureaucrat-bred hands, your shrink-wrapped life and are you even fucking alive? Do you know what it is to be a flame and touch the dark, you hack, you mole on a pig’s ass?”

Before his master can respond the cruel Neanderthal lifts back his pole and strikes like Emma’s never seen, and can’t unsee, an endless moment up and down, a light show in the cold orange dark of blood and sweat and tears. I feel myself disintegrate, not like an addict but an actor who forgets an early role. Emma runs and hides among the wreckage, sinks into herself again. The early morning’s come; it’s not quite brighter, but the dark isn’t as deep, a hellish phosphorescence glowing in the shrapnel fields. She sees a hollow outline of herself gaze back when she looks up, reflected in the curvature of an old television set. This isn’t how it’s supposed to go. This isn’t how it’s supposed to. Ian can’t kill Sam. This isn’t how it’s supposed to go.

Unable to move her legs, she looks around for the locket again, going over the same spots ten, twenty, thirty times, the pit in her stomach sinking deeper with each glance. More broken glass, a bigger pile, close enough to touch. She reaches and sifts through, fingers often slipping from the rain, faster till she cuts both palms and can’t see through the tears.

Dawn takes shape, perverted by the clouds, not orange enough for nightmare and not gray enough for dream. Ian comes, a Jackson Pollock of only red, and finds her in a ball next to the glass. He’s calmer and more lucid than he’s ever been.

“It’s just like in the film,” he says.

“No it isn’t.”

“No? When the animals killed god?”

“Ian never killed Sam.”

“That was a movie, not real life, silly goose.”

“You’re insane.”

“...”

“Why did you do that?”

“It’s in my blood.”

“You’ve never killed anyone before.”

“Exactly. You don’t remember what grandpa Siggy said, do you?”

“Why are you talking like Sam?”

“Why aren’t you looking for the locket?”

“I thought you didn’t care, didn’t care about us, didn’t care about the way it’s supposed to go.”

"It isn’t supposed to go anywhere. You know this.”

“But I still feel it. I feel it in my bones. I should be looking, why aren’t I looking? I just want to see them, one more time, and once I see them then he’ll come, and save us-”

“A father Christ figure in a post-apocalypse film, rusty nails through hands and all, white-washed and bearded and how fucking stupid can you be, of course it’s how you see the world now that it’s ended, you watched it every day-”

“You didn’t let me finish. I know it’s not real-”

“-you watched it every day and saw infinities of home and love and comfort in that locket, the one with the mom and the dad inside, the one Emma would find and lose and find again until at last she held it close and then he came-”

“I don’t even care-”

“-and everything was fine-”

“-I don’t even want him anymore-”

“-but of course there’s no such panacea here, when the TV’s black.”

“...I just want her. I just want mom.”

“We all have Stockholm Syndrome with the past. It’s torments and inescapabilities more lovely with each passing year.”

“Fuck you, and your hollow profundity.”

“That wasn’t me, that was the movie.”

“Really?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t remember that at all.”

“Emma’s the one who said it.”

“...oh.”

The tempest never comes, or if it does it hits another broken trio. The rain falls gentler; the flames burn brighter; the light that seemed to seep from every object is revealed as the sun. We go our separate ways, he to find another wanderer to mate and lie with as he dies, and she to watch the world’s city’s people’s lean turn to a fall. He thinks we look so cool, desperate lost half-silhouettes against the cold inferno, a pink sunrise behind the black so faint we barely notice, just a little touch for realism. I hate him more than ever.

“I don’t want to disappear,” she whispers to the rain.

I don’t know what she is now, without the other two, a fraction maybe, or a purer version of myself.

“I’m so old and I’m so tired, please don’t let me disappear.”

A boy walks by, he looks into my eyes and I see death and heaven both. No television there, no curvature of lens or light projected, only life. Those eyes are too old, too old and too all-knowing. He looks away, leans down, picks up a doll. He laughs and throws it in the air, up and down and up and down again. I catch a glimpse of gold light on the television glass, turn and sink when I see it’s only the reflection of a tower, engulfed in flame, it’s sigh grown to a scream as it collapses with the rest. The young boy watches, the old woman weeps, and all the lovers fuck.