Rolled the car
Seemingly an appropriate way
Way to start
.
And my feet hurt
And my lungs hurt
But not when I stand up
.
There are so many songs
Baby songs
About erasing someone’s memory
Making everything better
Everything better in the moutains and the scrub
Scrub out there
The invisible scrub
.
Erase my memories
The clouds parted and the sun was cast over the island. The grass flowed with the winds from the clouds, the seas were still pitch with the anger of the storm. Limping in from the ocean, exhausted, having slept most of the four-month storm, minds punished with dreams of being consumed by the waves, the sharks, our toes nibbled by fish, we were returned once more.
Dear Home,
We are all but lost now. I find it incredible that I received correspondence from you, the tanker crew held their word and delivered home our letters and photos. I can’t say I didn’t expect them to refuse our request to take us back, the ridiculousness of this situation has dissolved whatever resolve I used to have, I don’t hate them.
When I look at the coastline now, when I look at the city lights, I feel nothing, none of my previous magnetic attraction for the mainland, to be with you, to eat real food. My stomach is somehow important to mention.
We’ve lived day-to-day since I last wrote you all. All the small things I could mention could be pieced together and would make an unimpressive paint-by-numbers picture, something cold and grey. Forgive the metaphor, all of this is very forced.
Like I said, there is a lot of food here, it arrives every day, men in orange unload it and women with ever-changing hairstyles prepare it for us. Its fairly civilised here. Almost everyone is dead.
Thank you for the shoes. No-one has any real shoes anymore. These were almost stolen off me while I was sleeping. I protested to exiling the girl to the West End, but what can you do. When something picks up over here its as good as done. I suppose the parties ended in earnest six years ago, but interesting things happen often enough to keep people sane. I heard one story about a guy who woke up in someone’s bed, someone unknown to him, and a song was playing on a stereo across the road, or in the kitchen, or somewhere, and ever since he has never been able to move the tune from his foremost thoughts. Whenever he’s in a room of people and it becomes quiet, he hums the song. I think I met him once. I can’t remember.
Another is that there was a man who drank all the beer in his house and still wanted more to drink. So he drank all the spirits. Once he’d done that, he considered it only logical to drink all the tomato sauce from the kitchen. I don’t think this story is true.
The island is full of this, things remembered worth forgetting. Actually I’m not so sure anymore. I’d rather remember a story about a man who drank some tomato sauce that some of my other memories.
We bury bottles. We bury them starting at the bicycle paths, so that the flat bottoms of the bottles just emerge from the sand, making a foot path inwards and outwards from the rings of cement around the island. We hold parades on them every now and then. People wear bedclothes as togas and clothes they convert into obscene uniforms. Generally people move behind these journeys to the West End to exile people for lack of anything else to do. The clubes make fires with the spirits and the gas tanks, we sing songs and drink until we forget, the people exiled to the frothin mess of the West End stare out into the INdian Ocean, eating what we sneak them. Some people cry. I think I would cry. The rocks are more friendly when you’re forced to live with them. Some people say they’re inviting. I don’t see too many parties on the rocks.
I go to the West End every now and then, I borrow a red bicycle of a friend of mine. Riding there is always difficult, the water and the wind buffett me, pushing me back towards the settlement. Once I get there, exhausted and dazed from the numbness, I see the fires. The small fires of the huddled groups of exiles, the infidels, the predators, the irrationally aggressive.
I don’t know where they get their clothes from. No-one I know sneaks them clothes. After the fires and moving people, the ocean drowns out everything else. I’m invited to dine with the ocean every time I visit the West End. The churning, black-and-white blankets licking the shelter just before the rocks says nothing, and showers me, and I look back around and all the poor West End people disappear.
The houses are warm. You don’t want to hear about the wind and the water. I don’t know who changes the gas bottles, we’re always using heaters in winter, I fight with the people I live with over the heater settings. When I look at the heaters in everyone’s houses, I imagine someone somewhere turning on the gas to everyone’s heaters, and everyone getting gassed. They’re all identical, black and rectangular, I need them to stay warm – but the window showing the fake wooden logs on the heaters seems like a big mouth gaping fire at me. A chilly thought.
I wasn’t on the raft back home. It was freezing that night. It was strange because it had been blisteringly hot all day, everyone had been cooking in their underwear. I heard they went in a full circle while out there in the ocean, everyone suddenly becoming blind as Perth turned off all its lights, sending them out to their doom. I think its incredible they survived. They don’t talk about it, everyone’s at a total loss about why they didn’t eat each other. Some say they actually went to Perth and lived there for most of the time, but were caught and sent back, but that doesn’t explain what we all saw. I saw the sores and sunburn.
“Sven.”
Sven sat with a controller in his hand.
“Sven!”
“Fuck! What is it? What do you want! I’m on level freaking twenty four and I’m this“, here Sven looked away from the television, pinching the air. “close to kicking the crap out of Cortex with gems.”
Red sat down on the couch to his left, staring blankly at a ‘GAME OVER’ screen.
“Dude where’s your mum?”
“I was so close too… you hungry?”
“Not really.”
“I’m making dim sims, last chance.”
“I’m not hungry, Sven, where’s your Mum?”
The house was low, very very low. They had dug into the rock below the sands and the grain to make the room so expansive. Hovering directly above the green carpets and deep wooden desks was the Parliament’s roof, mostly glass, the sky blanketting everything.
Hundreds of people behind desks stood as a slow procession moved towards the centre of the house, to a circular table in the middle. All the desks and people and carpets spiralled out from this centre, where the sun was darkest. More people decked the galleries, silent, watching the people behind a caped woman move towards the centre, spiralling closer and closer. Swords, animals, vessels of red sand, sceptres and fading ancient scrolls, symbols of kings, queens, revolutionaries, ideas past followed the cape, to be joined in the centre.
This was the third house. On either side of this house rested the second and first, carpets of red and blue. The third house was where both the Nelen and Jousen could sit, the most powerful of all the houses.
After all the gift bearers had left, and all had been seated, the house was cast in silence. The giant wooden doors on the south opened, throwing a long, thin shadow through the circle’s middle. Through the south, and only isle through the circle to the middle a suited man walked, bearing no colours, gifts or obvious significance. He paced to the centre table, which immediately found their feet, the rest of the house sitting in confusion. There was no chair for this man, at the table. All eyes on him, he turned to the southern door, still open, a chair was carried in for him.
Roggs Mallow and Mister Sherpie sat in the gallery.
“This seems a bit disturbing.”
“The missing chair?”
“The whole thing, Roggs.”
“One day we’re talking about war, the next we’re giving people their free choice?”
“It’s being forced upon everyone. The war, freedom, I doubt any of this is anyone’s free choice, its like Jardenia just gets pulled this way one moment, this way the other, like it was all planned, all written out and everyone’s tortured accordingly.”
“Have you been converted, Sherpie?”
“It’s just a thought I had, that’s all. It’s not like I believe it, but if you had asked me two years ago that this would be the way things are changing, I would have had you committed.”
“I get that all the time.”
“Not you, you idiot Roggs…”
The first assembly of the Malasrionese Parliament since Ragzin’s dictatorship noted a lack of a Confederate executive, and nominated Humphries. The nomination was obvious to all concerned, it had been the first thought on their minds for weeks since Humphries called fresh elections almost immediately after Malasrion’s successful recapture of the Plains of Qruv. Humphries was now considered to be the perfect choice for a bastion of Malasrionese democracy – the Parliament felt a great gratitude towards her request to the Minister. The Minister had immediately obliged, and Humphries was called to the Third Chamber of the Parliament and was sworn in within hours of the first sitting.
To the Jousen it was a national day of celebration. The Jou downed-tools and stood straight in their fields in honour of their new national hero, the protector of the rights of their race. They faced the sun, the men who flew high with the clouds in their airships sang choruses for the Jousen Commune’s long life.
The victory was bitter-sweet. Ticker tape ran in Nelen streets for a war. Humphries had ordered the press be free, the ability for groups to peacefully assemble and for a person’s right to speak their mind, but these orders revealed the true nature of Nela’s last eleven years. The details of the Gremanese discovery were unearthed, and the secret campaign that had been waged for the last month in the Great Plains were splashed across every publication that anyone with a printing press could produce.
It seemed like Nela was rubbing off the spell of the sandman. The smoke spilling from every stack in sight didn’t seem so noxious, but the last ten years had been a dream land. It was now public knowledge that the Gremanese weren’t exactly their kindred brothers of ancient civilisations past, and a very real threat to the Nelen way of life had surfaced. Strange, but chilling was the prediction of a new Proskut that had emerged deep in the Jousen desert of a long and bloody war ahead.
The Minister of Malasrion had accrued de-facto dictatorship of Nela in Ragzin’s place, but his reign was to be a matter of weeks, the papers and the speaker-tubes ran. Five High Judges were appointed to the National Bench, answerable only to the Parliament straddling the divide between the roads and the desert, it was declared that the Confederacy was to be no more, Malasrion was to be a nation in itself. Despite this, the Minister of Malasrion still retained his absolute power over all Malasrionese issues. It didn’t matter that Malasrionese affairs were no longer a government portfolio assigned by Nelen authorities, the Malasrionese Parliament saw it fit to double-up executive power. Such was Nelen tradition, anyhow.
It was soon called that the ranks of the Malasrionese Army were to be drawn. Proskut was to be found, the rumour had spread too far and wide to be ignored – costly secret intelligence had revealed the existence of great Gremanese weapons primed against the North, it was believed that the mysterious Jousen demi-god would hold the key to gaining an advantage over these threats.
“Foolio gets his cigarettes, though -”
“Foolio doesn’t go crying to his little girlfriend every time he has a fit after a mission.”
Harkoff bent over and pulled the rifle from the dead man’s hands, opening the bolt to see if it was loaded.
“Put it down!”
Harkoff pointed it at Shrendig.
“Put the goddamn rifle down, you’re going to get us all killed!”
“I’m not walking off into the desert without a firearm. We’re gonna walk right in there, fifteen of those green bastards are going to up against one of us, we’re going to do this my way.”
“Over my dead mother,” Shrendig raged. “Its too heavy. You’re going to fight like a man.”
**
The three silhouettes scaled the giant dunes of the desert, Harkoff carrying his heavy rifle. They had driven as far as they could in the truck used to deliver them to the ruins, the driver never making it back to the city, murdered. The radiator had predictably boiled over, the engine suffocating in its own waste heat. The night froze the desert froze over within minutes of the truck breaking down, the enormous moon peering over the horizon casting its ethereal glow over the three while they made their trek on foot.
***
Bertrina Humphries had become the new Nelen Chancellor the moment the Malasrionese Parliament had re-assembled, representatives passing a motion [continued]
