There is a crack in you, a gap your fingertips find when you strain your arms to the top of your back, you feel it just barely at the apogee of your reach, there is a cavity between skin and bone, you can feel its contours. There at the [crossroads—labyrinth] where Brain-Stem meets Spine, meets Nervous System, it is a crack through which unknown breezes blow, leaving in their passing the condensations of strange intention—forming, collecting, pooling.
Fishing
A line cast into the lake, the bobber lurks on the border of the visible, its motions are minute and arcane—a language you do not yet know. It hints in some way that you cannot yet decipher at unseen things below. The other man on the pier, whose eyes moments before had seemed so vacant and unknowing, he knows what it means.
Meowing
There is a discomfort in your throat as the sound slips out, nerve endings reaching out to actuate tiny muscles you don't possess.
The cat cocks its head aside as you loose the scratching call. There is a hint of familiarity in the way that it looks at you, followed by confusion, then pity.
It would seem that it understood something, though it is unclear exactly what.
Internal Polylogue
-Mycorrhizal. The life of the thing, the spirit of it, its function and its intent lay in roots, webs, and networks beneath the soil. What we see are its fruits alone — bodies, fingers, arms reaching up momentarily. Each of those fingers contains nothing of the whole, nothing of the thing itself. They are functions, emergent. They are all we see.
-What is a thing beyond its functions, it’s emergent, visible, and graspable properties? Is what is produced different from that which produces?
-[Am—are] [I—You—We] the thoughts that are had, the process of thinking, or the thing that grants the thoughts? Emergent, emerging or soil from which it emerges?
-One often feels that one does not have thoughts, but that one’s thoughts have them.
There is an old story in this frozen waste. One that dates at least to those who came before us, and perhaps to that which came before them. Whatever culture it is that it came from is lost to us in full, no sign remains but this tale that survives in spectral form. Even when almost none know it, as is the case today, the story survives in its symbols and its echoes. This place is a flat expanse, a straight two-dimensional plane — one cannot pierce through the permafrost, and one cannot build up for fear of the winds. But the legend of which I write is given life by the light of the stars and flows in the very roots of this place, in the networks below the permafrost. Those few who know the story still, see everywhere how its fruits and flowers bloom in the faces of neighbours and strangers alike, how the rhythm of its verse echoes in street corners, gunshots, and the eyes of lovers.
There is an old story in this frozen waste, this frozen waste upon which, as an insult to God and for no other identifiably rational reason, stands a city — our city, that here there was once an ancient kingdom bathed to every inch in ruby light. Then, the Bull rei(g)ned in the stars, and with His coming each season He remembered in exacting detail the way we had been last season, and in grief at the passage of time and at the futures He wished for us which had not come, He wept, and with His grief came warm rains, and the rains thawed the land and the flowers did bloom, and with His red gaze He watched over us, and for us He remembered.
This of course is not the tale itself, but merely the setting. The myth of which I speak regards the disappearance of this red kingdom, and the promise of its eventual return.
~~~
A fragment from the novel I am working on, tentatively titled "Under the Ruby Gaze." The project occupies a space between le Carré, Pynchon, and Robert W. Chambers. It follows a group of amateur revolutionaries masquerading as a cult. This part comes from the background work and may or may not be directly in the finished work.
I joined Martin at the overlook for the first time since we’d arrived. I hadn’t wanted to see the city, I wanted isolation, apart from it. The part of town nearest us was largely residential, middle-class, Liv’s family was still here. A gazebo was lit for no one in an otherwise empty park. In the centre of town lay the heart of bureaucracy; Ambrose Hall, then the Post Office, and a police that symbolised something else entirely to those who lived and worked on this end of town. If the banner had gone down on Ambrose Hall, I couldn’t see from here, not in this light. Somewhere further beyond Ambrose Hall lay an invisible boundary at which one sort of existence slipped into another. There, there was another kind of police station, then slums, then industry – an old industry of soot and brick. Further yet, beyond the town itself, bare steel towers heralded a new industry. One of plastic and steel, rather than flesh and stone, a clean cold flame that threatened to burn it all away.
How does one attack such a thing? An industry without need of us. Each visible fruiting body that sprouts from the ground is less than a single hair to the whole of its body. It cannot be sabotaged, its workers too few and far between to co-ordinate in any meaningful way, each of its parts is expendable, reproducible, interchangeable, and non-essential. It is a great beast that encircles the world yet has no material body. No heart to stake.
And so we don’t attack it. We attack its beneficiaries, or are they handlers? Subjects? Co-conspirators? Its flock? Victims? Those who by strength of their belief bring it into being. Those who it feeds upon, and who feed upon it in turn.
I can’t do away with that word – victim – I know that they too are victims on some level. Who labour under a new constellation that lies below the celestial sphere of old, so close that we cannot see it, cannot read, interpret, or tell stories about it. A constellation so all-encompassing that it blocks out all the others. For a time, the trees had no roots, they were lines guiding the eyes upwards, converging on an empty black sky. Not the black of the endless void of space, but that of a ceiling above that one cannot see in a pitch black room. At that moment I felt dizzy. I had lost track of the ground. Martin still stood by me, if he noticed my presence he didn’t indicate it. His hands were behind his back, his eyes were low, focused intensely on the town itself.
~~~
A fragment from the novel I am working on, tentatively titled "Under the Ruby Gaze." The project occupies a space between le Carré, Pynchon, and Robert W. Chambers. It follows a group of amateur revolutionaries masquerading as a cult.
Karin worked at the lock slowly and awkwardly; the weight of the banner that was pressed against her and wrapped around her injured arm did not lend itself to precise and finicky work. Finally, she felt the last tumbler click into place, and with a twist the door was open. As they stepped out onto the roof Avery watched as his breath turned to mist before him. They made their way to the edge, and Karin sat on the low wall. ‘Right. Let me get that for you.’ Avery said as he knelt before her and slowly unwrapped the makeshift bandage from her arm.
Her arm was covered in her blood, sticky and coagulated – the bleeding had slowed somewhat. He let the end of the banner fall, and she loosened her grip on the rest of it, allowing the heavy bundle to fall to the floor. He then took off his scarf and wrapped it tightly around her arm, not very sanitary but better than nothing. She winced but did not complain. ‘Feeling alright, Kay?’ He said as he looked up, meeting her eyes – they’d always just been brown to him, but there was a touch of green in them, somehow more visible in the dark. ‘Dizzy? Nauseous?’
‘I’m fine.’ She said, picking up one end of the banner as she stood. ‘Thank you. Let’s get on with it.’
Avery took the other end of the banner, and they each walked to the far end of the building.
‘Make sure it’s the right way up,’ she called.
They fastened the ropes at either end to the bases of the flagpoles adorning the corners of the building and with some effort draped the banner over the front of the Ambrose Hall, obscuring its bourgeois neoclassical affectation in a blanket of red. Avery straightened himself up. From the roof he could see the low hill where they’d be meeting the others, it was the highest point for miles around. He couldn’t tell if anyone was there yet, it was far too dark. Behind him, on the opposite side, the skyline was defined by smokestacks, and further out like flags of the coming world, were gas flares whose flames stood in for the stars they obscured. Somewhere between the two, they heard the cry of a siren.
‘No way that’s for us already, but we should get moving anyway.’ They made for the door and closed it behind them. Kay hurriedly re-locked it, and then jammed the keyhole with some kind of clay, using her pick to push it further in. As she did so, Avery taped a yellowed slip of paper to the door. On it was a constellation. They made their way out the same way they came in, this time preferring haste to stealth.
The route they had planned meant they wouldn’t get to see their banner. Avery hoped it’d gone down right, hadn’t snagged, was readable. As they made their way through the back streets Karin dreamed of it. In her mind it was grand, a deep crimson symbolising the blood of those who had come before her, and much to her joy, soaked in her own. It dominated the building, recast it. Regardless of the actual words written on it, in which she had little interest, she knew what it really meant. It wasn’t Martin’s omen, it was her promise, a great shining Fuck You and the promise to follow through on it.
~~~
A fragment from the novel I am working on, tentatively titled "Under the Ruby Gaze." The project occupies a space between le Carré, Pynchon, and Robert W. Chambers. It follows a group of amateur revolutionaries masquerading as a cult.
Two figures walking on a darkened snow-covered street, the first ahead of the other, a tall man with long stride and the posture of an aged authority figure who could no longer keep his back quite so straight. The second, behind, a shorter figure straining to keep pace and to keep her footsteps quiet and synchronised with his, a closed figure, that of a child who knows he has done wrong and waits to be admonished. The man wore a black overcoat of a military fashion with the patches stripped off. If it was his from the war he had since outgrown it. At his side he carried a briefcase, a shoddy thing with an ugly faded greenish tartan.
She couldn’t know for sure if she was on the right man, simply had to keep pace and hope she hadn’t fucked it up. Wait for an opportunity to confirm, to get a proper look at his face. She had burned the photograph into her mind, couldn’t possibly fuck it up, as long as she got a chance to look at him.
They continued walking, some distance apart, the shop windows spoke to her as she walked by. [CLOSING DOWN SALE.] [EVERYTHING MUST GO.] [WE BUY GOLD, SILVER, JEWELLERY.] A mostly scraped away poster for a meeting of “fellow citizens concerned about the future of their community” from six months ago. Graffiti over boarded up windows with tags, expletives, slurs, and calls to action in equal measure. All of it screamed to her, something is going to happen, something has to happen, she knew it, felt the pressure of it in her skull.
In an instant he stopped and turned to his right, peering through the window of a brightly lit and near empty pub as though looking for someone. She continued her forward pace; he would hear her now. She felt inside her coat pocket, the metal was cold, rough, un-polished, but it was there. A dead weight. She pressed it against her body, stopping her coat from swaying. He glanced toward her, curious at the sound. A fat face, heavy with age, smiling at her politely — obliviously. It was him. Maybe. Probably. It has to be him. She had to act, to give him no opportunity to think, to move or speak. No opportunity to etch her into memory. She struggled with the gun in her pocket, grip rough against her palm, her finger hesitating, unwilling to slip into the gap between the trigger and the guard, fearful that the slightest contact would set the thing off, and fuck the whole thing up.
As she fumbled, he turned in full, expression quizzical, straightening his back and shifting his body to face her head on. It was him. Fuck. She drew her hand from her pocket - empty. He watched her walk right by.
She couldn’t steady her breath as she walked away, her mind raced with fear as much as guilt as much as relief. Had he recognised her, had he realised? She’d fucked it up. She knew she was going to fuck it up. They all knew she was going to fuck it up. Why did they let her do this? How could she possibly explain it? She asked herself the same questions she knew they would. Did he see you? Yes. Did he recognise you? I don’t know. What went wrong? I don’t know. Why didn’t you turn around and try again? I don’t know. Why did you think you could do this alone? I don’t know. Why did you think you could do this? I don’t know. She pictured Martin’s sweet condescending smile: ‘It’s okay Liv.’ He would say. ‘It can happen tomorrow. You’ve identified him, we know his routine now. This is good intel. You did well.’ With the tone of a kindergarten teacher. But his eyes would not match the tone of his voice. Even he had known she wasn’t ready for this, he knew as well as she did that she was going to fuck it up. He would take the gun from her, and he would never trust her again. He would tell the others. She wouldn’t have to face them.
She made her way to the meeting point on the hill, watching the moment in her mind on repeat, until the sound of her footsteps grew so loud, so disjointed that she realised they were not hers alone. Just out of sync with her own and growing louder was a second set of footsteps. An alley lay ahead, a blind corner. She only had to make it that far.
~~~
A fragment from the novel I am working on, tentatively titled "Under the Ruby Gaze." The project occupies a space between le Carré, Pynchon, and Robert W. Chambers. It follows a group of amateur revolutionaries masquerading as a cult.
an early fragment of a story from a flat cold place
Martin struck a match, he lit mine first and lingered, paying no mind as the flame crawled towards his fingers. ‘I like it up here.’ He said, as he cast his eyes around the clearing, ‘You can see the whole town from the ridge. I don’t understand why nobody else comes up here.’ He wasn’t really looking so much as showing me that he was looking, an invitation to bask in the place with him.
‘It makes me uncomfortable. Everything else here is so flat, but up here… it feels exposed.’ I watched his eyes as I spoke, he didn’t flinch at the rejection.
The small red flame was so close to his fingers. ‘We’re the first back anyway, as expected.’ His eyes were a cold blue in the fire. Finally, he lit his cigarette and dropped the match in the snow. Content gave way to form as the gun tucked awkwardly under his coat disappeared into the familiar silhouette of my friend, and I knew that each sign of this moment on myself was dissolving away too. For a moment I felt safe enough to smile, before the nausea of reality slipped back in.
~~~
A fragment from the novel I am working on, tentatively titled "Under the Ruby Gaze." The project occupies a space between le Carré, Pynchon, and Robert W. Chambers. It follows a group of amateur revolutionaries masquerading as a cult.
We have been trapped in here for four days, in absolute darkness for two. At least that is our best estimate. We are lucky to have a decent stockpile of food, at least another week worth if we ration well, and a constant source of running (though certainly not clean) water. We do have some small amount of lamp oil remaining, which we agreed to preserve for any future emergency. We can hear nothing beyond the cave-in, and have no reason to believe that anyone is trying to dig us out.
I have been on the other side of this before; I have seen wives, children, parents, and brothers wailing in the village, begging for aid. On the occasions that they are able to amass a small force of sympathisers to dig their loved ones out, most disband before they break through. Even when they do make through, it is never in time. The harsh reality of our position here is that in order to organise a rescue - which may not even be possible, as those trapped in the mines may have died in the collapse itself - would require the cessation of almost all work in the rest of the mines for days. Such a cost is simply not an option. Even if we wanted it, it would not be permitted.
“It wasn’t long before that, that in the forest outside the village, the boy and I-” I can hear his clothes shuffle, I presume gesturing towards Rodrigo, a young slave boy that he had taken in some years ago. He treated him like something between a son and a servant. “-we found a shrine. Hidden behind dense brush, we cut-” I hear him make another useless gesture in the darkness. “-the branches away. The shrine was a simple thing, stone piled upon stone to form a small pedestal, and on it were the remnants of some burned out wax and a small wood figure of a woman. We-”
Rodrigo coughs violently for what may have been a minute - or three. We say nothing. Moreno does not continue his story.
I do not know how long it has been. I am on the mountain over the village. The sun is overwhelming. I take off my shirt and tie it around my waist and continue my ascent, sweat dripping.
I am shaken, in darkness again. “Moreno is gone.” It is Rodrigo, his voice is hoarse.
We decide to follow the stream as it trickles down further into the darkness, we pack our things in silence and set off slowly. We walk in the water, making occasional sounds to let the other know we are still nearby.
On the surface Moreno sits by the ocean, he is cooled by the breeze. On the water, a small distance away, floats a plank of wood. On it stands a small figure of a woman in a sheer yellow dress. She is bone dry.
The boy whistles an unfamiliar tune as we descend; it is cast forward and downward, and in small fragments it is returned to us. From Rodrigo the sound is harsh and shrill, from the cave it is a momentous song. We continue towards it. I imagine that somewhere down there, wherever Rodrigo’s song ends up, all the bum notes and broken whistles and all the words which we do not speak to one another are amassing. Drawn down by gravity, collecting into some grand and beautiful pool.
At the top of my mountain is the sun. I have not had water in the weeks that I’ve been climbing, and still sweat pours from me — a river forming in my trail. I know that I am nearing the sun, and I pray that she will welcome me.
Behind me I hear Rodrigo begin to fall. The small, sharp, wet stones on which he walks slip out from beneath him and he tumbles. Listening for him, I turn and leap towards the sound. I miss him. And I hear him continue to fall as more and more stones break loose to join him. I grab the lamp from my pack and light it, shining it down the passage. He is gone. I resolve simply to continue my descent, and as I go, I whistle a tune.
Atop the mountain, on a cairn of sand I find him again. He is asleep, I tell myself. In his grasp is a small figure of a woman. I close his eyes and set him adrift on the still blue water there. It glows. His form is a shadow on its surface. In my hand is the sun, and I turn away, making my way back up, out from the depths and back to the surface. As I begin the climb, I hear the song of a bird. I am weightless.
~~~
Of all of my writing from this brief period I think this one holds up the best. It's a little clumsier and a bit abstract, but I like the way things move and come together in it. Of the three descents I wrote back then, this was the one that got the flattest response, however it's the one I'm most compelled to return to and feel myself turning away from the least.
My home is on the fourth storey. My bed, a simple mattress on the floor in what ought to be the living room, is by the fireplace. What ought to have been the bedroom sits at a much more extreme angle than the rest of the flat and isn’t of much use for anything other than storage. My bed is by the fireplace; I don’t light fires there, the chimney has never been good. At night when sleep refuses me my ears tune into frequencies that must have always been there. Head by the chimney I hear the building breathing. Straining. I suspect it might be asthmatic. Sometimes a little pebble runs down into my fireplace, with a clink it hits the bottles that line the blackened stone there.
I must see Simone tomorrow – perhaps she would like to drink with me.
I must wash my clothes first – Mother has not been well.
My clothes sit on a table by my bed. I prefer to have them visible, a chest of drawers becomes a mess within weeks and I haven’t the patience to reorganise, I prefer to have them visible, all laid out side to side. Thankfully I do not have many clothes.
My home is on the third storey. The bottles have outgrown the fireplace. Simone got a job at the store, she bought me a small gas burner – I have to buy the canisters from her store, that means I see her often. I have a little cassoulet left, I’m hungry, but hesitant to eat it. Mother used to cook for me. I would see her once if not twice a week, I would bring her my clothes and I would leave with at least half a week of dinner. My clothes sit piled by the bed - what I’ve just worn hangs by the door, airing out. Sitting here perched on the end of my mattress considering whether to eat, I hear the walls grumble around me. There is a crack in the wall over the fireplace where the stone is tearing itself apart.
I wonder if Simone knows how to cook – I mean really cook.
I hope she does not notice the way my clothes smell.
My home is on the second storey. I have to let my neighbours pass through, the door on the first floor is blocked by rubble. I have had to move into the other room, it’s easier to just leave the door and window unlocked and let them come and go. They pass right through the entrance, by where the fireplace used to be, and out the back window. Louis fashioned a staircase down out of rubble – he says he will shovel the pile away as to keep up with the window. In the other room, my mattress sits at the lowest point, against the wall. I brace myself as I sleep, heels flush with the wall to keep from falling. It is not an unpleasant way to sleep. Closer to the ground the groaning of the building is near constant, I find myself drifting away with it – in and out, back and forth, down, down, down.
Simone brings me food sometimes - other times I go to her store and she has some ready for me to take. I have given her some of my mother’s old recipes. Of course I can’t cook here. At this angle the gas burner won’t even stay lit. Sometimes a little pebble rolls down along the floorboard by my bed, in near silence it will join the others against the wall. I wonder if I were to bring in enough sand, rubble, or dirt, whether I could fashion a small level floor down here.
Simone will bring me food tomorrow – it will be just like I remember.
A boy I spoke to, accosting me for what little change I had, said he had seen them once. Somewhere under the city through tunnels, caves, and ruins – in the absolute black, a glowing, like the light through a crystal cup. He would not tell me how to find them myself, though had I more coin to offer, I’m sure he would have. I’ve not seen the boy since, but it’s rare to see the same beggar twice, caught in a constant flow of motion as they are. The children, orphans mostly, are the ones to seek out if you need something from beneath the city; the younger they are, the less fear they have and the easier it is for them to slip between rents in the stone walls of the catacombs. Of course, too young and they’ve no sense of direction nor the strength to free themselves if trapped. There is a sweet spot to be struck. The older beggars move slowly along the main arteries of the city, moving their carts at night, and peddling what the children bring up by day. Their carts are teeming with all manner of the last era’s detritus: fragments of pottery, cuttings from carpets and tapestries, broaches, combs, glasses and copper cups. Much of it might be of some genuine value were it not in such abundance.
What would be of true worth, if there are any remaining (or if they were ever to be found at all), are the flowers. In the depths beneath the city are what remains of the Vasari Chateau Complex, a series of manors and gardens which dotted the map of the old city, themselves connected by a network of corridors[1] raised above the ground, and which ran directly through the upper floors of the buildings of the city, enabling the nobility to move around the city without having to mingle with the commoners. The manors have largely been looted and much of the Vasari Corridors have either collapsed or are utterly inaccessible. But the gardens, accessible only via the corridors supposedly, still remain. Grand formal gardens, hidden between the walls of the city. A scant few claim to have seen them; the thought is that the flora of the gardens have somehow (the cause is as likely to be claimed as a miracle as it is to be fraud or alchemy) adapted to survive in the pitch black beneath the city. It is said that they shine with a light like those rays of sunlight that break through the forest canopy.
For a while, when I was myself a child, there was a frenzy of charlatans claiming to have found the gardens and with them some great secret — to have water blessed by them to sell, aspiring inventors and natural philosophers seeking the means by which they produce their light. But little came of it, save for a litany of men gone missing below ground and a significant sum of money spent destroying swathes of the old city in the vain hope of uncovering a garden or at least a way into the corridors. Since then the frenzy has quieted; every now and then some fanatic claims to have found something, but none can produce a shred of evidence, in every case claiming some excuse or other: “I plucked a flower, but it melted in the sunlight above ground.” “I saw a garden, but when I returned the next day, it had vanished in its entirety.”
But, the boy I spoke to claims he descended (he would not tell me from where they entered) with a girl, though I noted she was not with him at the time, and that as they turned to make their return to the surface with what little they had scavenged, they found that the way had collapsed behind them. And so they wandered. Not overly panicked, as such happenings were not uncommon, and according to the boy there are numerous ways in and out — if only you know how to look for them (and on this point he insisted that he knows very well how to do so). But he had no such luck. Here I must emphasise that this is merely what he has told me and that I would not like to speculate on the reliability of the boy’s testimony, but I do believe that he believed he was telling the truth. It was only minutes after the lamp they shared had ran out of fuel, and they had been reduced to feeling their way along the rough brick walls in the blackness, that there came a glow in the miniscule gap between the roof of some crumbling building and the ragged stone ceiling above it. It being their only available landmark, they made their way stepping slowly and with care on the damp cobbled street — towards that building from behind which the light seemed to emanate.
[1] This appears to reference our own Vasari Corridor, which was designed and built by Giorgio Vasari in Florence in 1565, for duke Cosimo I de’ Medici. The passageway is a raised corridor passing directly through the centre of the city and through numerous buildings including the Uffizi Gallery, linking Cosimo’s own residence, the Palazzo Pitti, to the government palace, the Palazzo Vecchio.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
a brief fragmentary thing, unlikely to be continued, i see much i would do differently now
