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She wasn’t angry. You can’t get angry just because the world’s so much bigger than you and you’re stuck in it. That’s just the face of it, cookie. A poisoned earth, a sequined dress, a speculum you can play like the spoons. Sylvie wasn’t angry. She was silent. Her life was Mrs. Patterson’s life. People lived in all kinds of messes. She could make rum balls. And treat soil samples and graft cherry varieties and teach some future son or daughter Japanese three weeks a month where no one else could hear. She could look up Bouffant’s friend and buy her a stiff drink. She could enjoy the brief world of solitude and science and birth like red skies dawning. Maybe. She had time.
It was all shit, like that Polish kid who used to hang around the soda fountain kept saying. It was definitely all shit.
On Sunday she went out to the garage again. Vita-Pops and shadows. Clark slipped in like light through a crack. He had a canister of old war footage under his arm. Stalingrad, Berlin, Ottawa. Yellow shirt with green stripes. Nagasaki and Tokyo, vaporizing like hearts in a vast, wet chest. The first retaliation. Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles. Clark reached out and held her hand. She didn’t squeeze back. The silent detonations on the white sheet like sudden balloons, filling up and up and up. It looked like the inside of Sylvie.
“This is my last visit,” Clark said. “School year’s over.” His voice sounded far away, muffled, like he didn’t even know he was talking. “Car’s coming in the morning. Me and Grud are sharing a ride to Induction. I think we get a free lunch.”
Sylvie wanted to scream at him. She sucked down her pop, drowned the scream in bubbles.
“I love you,” whispered Clark Baker.
On the sheet, the Golden Gate Bridge vanished.
Sylvie rolled the reel back. They watched it over and over. A fleck of nothing dropping out of the sky and then, then the flash, a devouring, brain-boiling, half-sublime sheet of white that blossomed like a flower out of a dead rod, an infinite white everything that obliterated the screen.
Fade to black.
And over the black, a cheerful fat man giving the thumbs up to Sylvie, grinning:
Buy Freedom Brand Film! It’s A-OK!
Aeromaus
A Series of Informal Notes Compiled on Behalf of Visiting Foreigners by Córdoba Jandza, Yellow District, 4th Level, Freely, with Delight in Service, and Under No Duress in the Year 19—
First: Aerograd has always been occupied. In the grottoes, near the propellers rusted over with moss like verdigris, you might hear someone say otherwise. Crowded around an old gasoline barrel boiling up grey shrimp in oil-slicked water. You might hear someone say anything. Any sophisticated soul can sieve out such obvious lies. The shrimp bob up iridescent, green, purple, blue. I would recommend against eating them. They taste sweet, they taste like life and salt, but your system is not prepared for Aerograd yet. Should you have an allergic reaction to that aspic of petroleum and moss spores, your esophagus will very likely perforate and before your bowels have a chance to put an end to you. We would not like to lose you so soon and by accident.
/////: This is a cypher. I do not hold with simple word substitution. I have embedded information also in accent marks, punctuation, the angle of my penmanship on letters e, a, æ, o, h, n, l, and s. Whether or not I use the Oxford comma in a given phrase. Whether or not comma splices occur, prepositions positioned at the end of certain sentences. Under my paragraphs other paragraphs lie, levels up and down, like Aerograd itself. This is a cypher, but everything is a cypher. Everything can be substituted for something else. I believe that.
The truth is, it does not matter if Aerograd existed before the occupation. If we were ever other than we are we have forgotten it. Forgetting has been attached inside us like a second spleen. Memory is dispensed through official channels. Go to the market; stand in line; receive your ration of the history of the city. I do not speak in metaphor. Our dialect no longer allows such dissembling. You cannot say a thing is another thing. It is like another thing, perhaps, though even that smacks of a certain effete enervation of thought. But it cannot be another thing. That is an unworthy lie.
This is not a lie: Memory has the taste and texture of cooked meat. Eat it and live. Remember, but only what it is licit to remember.
In Aerograd, the words for meat and memory are the same.
Second: Aerograd was originally designed as an Academy Town, an experiment in isolation. Hundreds of pure, precise minds brought together and removed from the nation as a whole. From distraction, if not from oversight. We descend from the best and brightest of the Old World. On Phalarica Hill, rising greenly through the constant clouds, you will find the University, a wonder of revival design. Each year the University graduates clear-eyed, clear-minded students of the highest caliber. In the mist of Blue District, the Capital reflects the University in both architecture and intent: to govern with clear eyes and clear intellect.
This is the Ossuary. It is where they turn laws into bones.
The mist in the Capital is uniform, curling like fleece. It is opaque, pearlescent, unchanging. It does not part, not at morning nor at night. Even inside the gilded buildings it is so thick and silver and soft you could not see an elephant if she sat down beside you. Water drips from the carved metal columns. This is how virtuous government is performed—good ideas are accepted with joy, without personal prejudice, no matter who’s mouth they emerge from, for it could be anyone’s mouth. Your mouth, mine. Even Our Lady’s.
/////: I remember the first time I saw Our Lady. I am allowed to remember that, why not? She processed through Yellow District, walking as I have been told she always does, to show that she is like us, she is one of us, no better or worse. Her tigers went before her, long and bright in the unceasing cloudfog. Where they breathed and snapped their garnet-colored jaws, pools of clear air appeared. They ate the clouds, so that we could see her. I was afraid. My mother pushed me forward, in case Our Lady should glimpse me and bestow some minor favor. So I watched without obstruction. She processed, very tall, very straight, bald, dew pearling on her cheeks. In her silver government dress, with the blue sash indicating her endless duty to Aerograd. Her skin was a
fiery opal violence, terrible glittering colors, hard and slick with vapor condensing and rolling down the gem of her skull. Our Lady appeared as though she was crying. I tried not to look at her hands. I knew what they would look like. My primer had an algebraic game based on them. I could not be prepared. At the sopping ends of her buttered lace sleeves, fifty graceful, strong, ringless hands hung like garlands of awful flowers. The hundred hands of Our Lady. Hands in every part of the city, able to seize anything and anyone, hands around every heart, not squeezing yet, but soon. It seemed an unbearable weight for her to carry with those thin arms. When she clasped her fingers together, they became a huge single fist. Our Lady wore no shoes. Her feet clacked hard on the wet pavement, stone striking stone. Behind her black giraffes followed, dancing, winding and unwinding their necks.
No one else in the city looks like her. I have seen old pictures of tigers and none are that color. She is a dream we all have at the same time. I do not think any meat tells where she came from. She has always been here, like the occupation. But she cannot have been, for nothing in Aerograd is built for fifty hands. She is the occupation. But that is not true. We are all the occupation. We occupy each other and save work for the tigers. We are afraid of her and her animals. We do not even know her real name. We speak of her and God using the same words.
Our Lady did see me. She turned the glitter-black and hot ochre cups of her empty eyes toward me. I felt nothing. On the inside I too was a cloud. Our Lady looked up at my mother and said something. Her voice sounded like a propeller winding up.
What Our Lady said was: “You do not exist.”
And she didn’t.
My mother simply wasn’t there anymore. Her workplace had not heard of her. My father was not married and never had been. Her things no longer cluttered the house. Even her smell winked out. I felt her evaporate from my hands. But these days I have to chew memory to think of her at all.
Third: A necessary digression on the weather systems here. There are places in Aerograd where the sun can be reliably seen. Some the size of a golden pin; some blanketing half a district. These are holy ground, tended by a congregation of biodomes, herbaria and hydrofarming. You are unlikely to receive a permit to cast shadow there. Everywhere else, we dwell in cloud. Mist, fog, cirrus, gloam, cumulus. We have a complex nepheline vocabulary. The clouds never clear, but with practice you can find your way surely enough, except in the Capital. Move through the world as through a labyrinth; pick your path between clouds like monstrous, ephemeral whales. When you pass by, the crackle of snow like electricity will raise the hairs on your skin. You will feel awake, as we do. On the verge of something forever.
Because you are foreign and do not know any better, you will not be able to see the subtlety of the cloud cover as locals do. Ugh, you will exclaim, it’s thick as hair out here. What a dreary, grey mess. It is sad for you. Each person has their personal vocabulary of condensation. The Aerograder dialect is malleable and opportunistic. Many times the Ossuary has released an official chart of terms and grammar to be used when discussing the weather. In this small thing and only this, no Aerograder obeys. Clouds are constant, they are personal, they are ours. Should you have an interest in linguistics, you might amass a considerable collection of private cloud-dialects in one trip to the city.
