Work Text:
The northern shore calls like a dark beacon in the night. In its folds, it cradles a mystery, hidden and heavy under the earth.
There is a door there, jammed shut. A steel chain curls itself outside, broken, around the rusted mechanisms of a failed revolution. There are walls. Between those walls, thick enough that a knock wouldn’t carry its vibration from one side all the way to the other, away from the world, the mystery breathes. It beckons, it tosses and turns in the darkness.
At two in the morning, when all of Revachol is asleep, Inland Empire leaves on a pilgrimage. He prowls in Jamrock’s shadows along the riverside, following the sixth distributary of the Esperance like a lifeline. He slithers north, following the low beat of this call, through the wooden undergrowth of the asphalt forest that is Eminent Domain, a maze of concrete pillars raising the ramps of the 8/81 to blot out the sky. North across Martinaise’s drawbridge, and who cares if it is still raised: this is a dream. A possibility. A longing.
Inland Empire’s path turns into sand, and snow, and a sludge that is made of both sprinkled with the first spasms of spring. At last, past the church and the old market, under a brilliant full moon, the supply depot looms against the coast. The sand dune lapping against its useless broken door feels as soft as a cloud, like the sky, too, had come down to pay its respects to this sacred place. Inland Empire rests against it and waits.
At 2:53 the miracle happens. One moment the door is closed shut, the next it has never been there and the supply depot opens its innards to pilgrims and wanderers. In the darkness, there is a ramp of stairs (steep, steel, antecentennial) leading down into a small sanctuary. A single light is kept burning inside, bathing in its liquid orange glow none other than the cocaine skull. Cocaine skull! Real and pristine, discovered at last by the wise, the patient and the believers. O sweet powder overflowing from its bony cavities like a horn of plenty! What gentle white swirls it traces on the ground, like ancient symbols drawn when the faintest gust of wind has disturbed its decades-long rest. Inland Empire bows down to pay respects and perhaps get a whiff, but as he leans to reach it the minute is gone, the miracle is over, and he finds himself again resting against the jammed steel door, cushioned by the sand.
“My brethren, I returned to Martinaise and saw a miracle on the shore,” Inland Empire announces when he slides back under the covers of Harry’s bed.
“Imbecile. You dreamt it,” says Logic.
“Khm,” says Shivers and rustles in the leaves of a nearby chestnut tree, a tremor that reaches down to the roots and dreams of spring. They have nothing more to add.
“You comatose net-less hoop, you call that a lap? Take five and do it again, but this time fast,” says Physical Instrument, somewhat missing the point of the whole endeavour.
And yet those words hang in the air: do it again. Go back, bask in it. Ponder. All considered, it is not too bad as far as Coach’s suggestions go. Inland Empire rests for the day, letting the events of Harry’s life go by in their listless processional – the man can afford a bout of boredom. Then, as Jamrock at last lulls itself to sleep, he leaves for the shore.
At Land’s End, he waits as the stars disappear for a spell under a veil of clouds or faraway ionospheric pale (remember: clouds do not exist. Rain is a drip of filtered old regrets). The grey cover lifts. The night is bright again. It is 2.53. In a heartbeat, the door opens, slammed outwards in a silent explosion: it could not contain the wild unbridled stampede of feral giraffes. The animals rush out of the shelter bending their long necks along the low ceiling as their hooves slip against the staircase, their legs tremble but they cannot fall backwards when they are being pushed by more and more giraffes, dozens and dozens of them and they thrust and jostle and rush until there are giraffes everywhere, an outburst of giraffes, their mantle glowing under the moonlight. They gallop along the coast in an inebriating parade. Then the minute is gone and the beach is clear.
On the following day, Inland Empire can say with absolute certainty that the treasure that is hidden inside the supply depot is the missing journal of Ignus Nilsen, famous among theoreticians of hypothetical items. Its inevitable existence has been debated for half a century, triangulating its position and contents from the use of commas in his letters to Dobreva, the paragraph structure in the founding statute of the SRV, semiotic chicanery, the angle of the point of his boots.
They all got the position wrong. The fundamental question of Communism – are women bourgeois? – is safely enshrined in Martinaise.
The week after that, the door opens on a storehouse filled with rows of pinball machines themed after all periods in history, from the Seraseolitic migrations to the suzerainty of the Pale. One ball is in play, far away. Bumpers and targets light up to beep a wistful tune as the directionless ball keeps going and going in the dark.
Or it is the roof of the depot that opens. Like a present unwrapped in the dark of the night, it reveals the growing white mass of an aerostatic’s balloon, which swells up in the crisp spring air until it fills the sky.
The depot does not change from one visit to the next. The walls, the rust, the stripped paint, these are all the same protections housing the same mystery that is forever turning in the deep, overflowing, rearranging itself, thoughts of atoms clicking together like a kaleidoscope in an ever-growing array of possibilities. It is a potted basil, a mite of dust, an overwritten reel of tape, an albino narwhal, someone’s favourite ladle, a lingering scent of apricots, the colour of the sky on a Tuesday at 4PM. It is true. All of it. It always has been.
“Not much use, all that, if we can’t open. the. door.” says Interfacing in the end, as self-appointed superintendent dishing out his indisputable final judgement on all things depot.
“IT HAS ITS USE.” At that interjection, the bedroom falls into a reverent silence. They wait with bated breath until the cold voice continues: “WHEN THE BOMB FALLS, IT WILL STAND. IT WILL EXIST.”
Authority speaks up. His voice sounds small and hollow, but someone had to ask. “Then… what?”
“I CANNOT SEE THAT FAR,” She says, and wails. “I cannot see that far,” Shivers repeats in a cracked voice.
“I cannot see that far,” says Esprit de Corps, in a mournful solidarity that is all that he can offer.
“I cannot see that far,” says Inland Empire.
“No shit,” says Half Light. “There will be nothing to see. Did you all hit our head and forget about the Gloaming? Greatest spectacle in history and not a witness left,” he adds with nihilistic fondness. “Why do you think they call it the Enemy of Matter? Behold the great army of nothingness as it comes in from the coast to swallow this place whole...”
“But as the tide flows...” Conceptualization stops in his tracks, this is a long trail to the end of this thought and he fears that he will get lost on a strange shore before making it back home.
Eventually, he perseveres. “...by the same forces that put it in motion... it will ebb. Picture the world swallowed by the pale – picture that great mistake, life, a thing of the past. With nothing to sustain it, the great evaporator itself dissipates. Starting from here. This place will remember. Waves of matter crashing at last against the sines and azimuths, remembering what it was to be basalt, basil, the colour of an afternoon. A new beginning. Giraffes galloping on a new shore, the world again.”
Far away, on the coast, a possibility shivers in the darkness.
Volition breaks the silence. “Oh, go to sleep, you lot. Alarm’s at seven. Tomorrow is another day.”