know yourself. know your lies. know the way down the red street that binds the humans together here. this is our place. this is the wild slender green cage that makes us all weep and clatter. this is our place. make it ours.
let the museums and the dirty dead streets fill up with ghosts and samurai. let the tongues of world war one fighter planes lick up the juices from lost princess cunts. let the walls of the buildings rattle with jazz. let the people on the street shuffle and buy until the hammers claw closed. these people are your people. buy prawns! eat prawns! they’re tasty!
what have you got to lose on this street? is it lined with mud? do your feet get caught in the gutters and can’t climb out?
quicksand in the streets:
over the hundreds of years this city lay abandoned certain things went wrong with it. now it’s been repopulated, the citizens sometimes face small challenges. here’s one: the gutters are lined with quicksand. people with carriages push the poor peasants and scholars to the side of the road and they slowly sink down into the sand. of course, if you’re caught any deeper than the ankle, you can’t be helped up again. people have to stand around you and watch you slowly sink down. it’s a distressing way to die.
architecture:
on the plus side, the buildings are like elephants, and sometimes in the wet moonlight, they get to their feet, and crawl all over each other. the grinding of stone on stone is terrifying, as if the gods are crunching mountains in their teeth. always people die in these shuffles, someone falls out a window when their house clambers over another house, and then gets crushed to a smear under the slow slithering tracks of another. still, for the most part it is an exciting time, and the dawn climbs over the wet clouds to illuminate what seems like a whole new city.
medicine:
in these streets the doctors are sharp and their eyes whirr with chemical equations. lightning crashes behind their dry eyelids and their fingers stutter with unheard drumbeats. here they experiment with wild new surgery, and at night they shake and ripple in the jazz lounges, the electronic dancehalls, crackling through nights and dawns with an unending fever to do it all, finish it all before it all closes down for good...
royalty:
there is not enough food for anyone. even the kings and queens gnaw bones, rocking back and forth on the rooftops with their crazed teeth curled around antennas and sleeping in puddles. there is no shelter on the rooftops from the sun and when it is high overhead, the kings and queens grow insane and stand at the edge of the rooftops, howling down commandments and prophetic wisdom to the streets below. in those hot merciless hours, the people on the streets carry fashionable umbrellas tight around their heads to protect them from the insanity raining down from above.
agriculture:
food is grown out in the swamp by tiny withered children, their hands and feet unnaturally large. they pole their tiny barges through the reeds, catching frogs and watersnakes under the lily-pads, harvesting moss grown on special stone pillars in the water. some few children aggregate into tiny tribes to hunt crocodiles, hurling poisoned spears into their mouths.
history:
it is barely one generation since human beings returned to this ancient crumbled city. the stone crabs that crackled and curled through the city are not yet vanquished. every nine days, another human being is found in a basement or affixed to the inside of a well, mostly calcified into stone from the crabs’ creeping poisons. sometimes they are found still alive, but their mouths and tongues only turn around crab-talk. sometimes they are not found at all, and their family can only assume they have gone with the crabs to the ice-ridden glacier hills, to serve the crabs in their growing human army.
economics:
in the evenings, the sunset runs a gluey red and green down through the rooftops and the smoke from the street fires is tinged like rainbows in petrol. it is the street markets and the vendors here are all silent. there is none of the shouting and shrieking of other marketplaces – there is only a dull static fuzz that sits thickly on the ears and mutes every other noise. this artificial silence is generated by the huge electrical engines that spark and spit behind each stall, throwing a huge blanket which dampens noises into stillness. the silence is created to protect the wares of the vendors – the endless cages that line the streets, each one occupied by a single, fast-moving shape...
mysticism:
the fortune teller cooks salt pancakes from tiny sachets of cornflour imported into the city by red-eyed marijuana traders. on her stovetop she reads the future in the patterns that the batter takes. she serves up your future in a paper napkin and a spoonful of grey wasp-honey. when it rains, the water boils off the stove and forms patterns in the steam. the fortune teller is naked except for the newspaper which she wraps over all of her hair, from her pubes to her close-cropped scalp.
military:
there is a kind of sickness in the military. a few listless men and women lie sweating in hammocks strung below the zeppelin hanging limp above the docks. there is a fever that runs painfully through the cells in their body, dragging illness like a net through their veins. when they turn to each other to fight, their punches turn into caresses. their gambling games turn into long screeches like monkeys choking. when they shimmy down the ropes to patrol the city streets in twos and threes, they carry paper bags filled with new diseases, giving them out to the street urchins with eyedroppers and waterpipes. they wear helmets made of psychic netting, to protect them from the reptile vibes seeping from the jazz-halls. their hair sticks through the helmets in wild tufts, unwashed and slick with fever-sweat.
