ZIVILISATIONBRUSCH

Though Malayuka Arnutskyah scored high on all her examinations, that could not help her overcome the quotas. Even though she was raised by the destitute and muddle-headed and had read all of Isaac Babel by age seven, that did not help. Even though she recently published an essay in Architectural Digest — demonstrating how the past is smaller than the present and the future bigger still; how biology creates novelty by mining the vast what-might-be, increasing complexity (which may be thought of as anti-gravity) and proving the Second Law to be inviolable only when observing the what-has-been — that too, apparently, did not help. So, instead of attending school, Malayuka was sent to ah-Ssedo to live with her aunts. One aunt was a surgeon and the other a midwife. They lived in the Swedish Quarter, on Tillbergskaya, number 999; light grey house, grey door, dark grey roof.

For Malayuka, perhaps only Malayuka, Tillbergskaya and all of ah-Ssedo were worlds of poverty. Each one was a whole in itself, determined from initial conditions and inviting only predictability. Where were the factories, the makings, the buildings, she wondered? On every street, walls and doors and windows were boarded up, concealing lost grocery stores and garment shops and a whole lot of nobody-could-remember-what. From a distance, everything in-between reeked with confused colours and a sickly un-design. Up close, there was a sweet rot Malayuka discovered with disturbing regularity seeping from, seemingly, every crack and seam here and there and everywhere, as though nearly all hid a festering, a suppurated sphacelation behind the soggy cladding and peeling wallpaper, below the worn shingles and the softening floorboards.

Everywhere, here and there, there was offered a pair of free daily papers: ah-Ssedo Alyawm and The ah-Ssedo Now. “Competing”, both insisted. One had a green logo and banner while the other was red. You see, different. Each found a way, every single day, to remind you of the ever-booming economy and also of how bad you were as a person. And each and every day a new voice would explain how no volume of treasure (or contribution of artillery or surface-to-air missiles, main battle tanks or drones) could possibly ever be enough support for key allies engaged in so many recurring and very present (and yet so very far-off) wars. On Tuesdays and Thursdays the same authors would offer additional offerings [if you catch my drift], re-articulating why each year required an expansion of, and thus ever-swelling funding for, programs of drug-production, drug-promotion, drug-distribution, and drug-use. With 800,001 now dead from safe, doctor-prescribed pharmaceuticals, the only order from officials was more of the same (but, of course, at far higher cost.) This was, so the telling went, the only ethical and possible course offering any potential for remedy. On the reverse page, naturally, the authors’ LongShot-mate would rotate through arguments of all the ways in which, at any cost, light or high-speed rail, affordable housing or subsidized daycare, public dental care or guaranteed employment, each alone, were just a little too costly for the system, any system, to bear.

Inevitably, just a door or two down from every paper stand and rack would sit a drawerless blood-red chest (or a burned-out mustard-yellow chaise lounge or half a battleship-grey pick-up truck) occupying the middle of the sidewalk. On top, inevitably, an unopened can of smoked oysters and a broken jar of double-smoked olives in a cloudy anchovy brine (or an empty jar of peanut-free peanut butter or a tray of still-frozen microwave lasagna.) A young man would drink not-vodka from the spout of a cracked enamelled teapot, one the colour of dragonflies. Spilling the remainder of his future drunkness, he would pluck the leather whip from his hip (or a machete fashioned from a lawnmower blade or a gun stolen from a cop) and swirl to his feet. Going nowhere, he would stand in a pair of bright orange, knee-high rubber work boots with the steel toes missing. Bent at the waist, the young man would rock and swivel but would, most certainly, go nowhere. Nowhere all day. He would do the same all night. And more of that every day and every night. And there he would be joined by all his friends (and colleagues and partners and mentors and teachers and kin.) And every street, north and south, saw similar scenes.

But occasionally something did happen. Occasionally a friend would stalk the line-up at an eleventh-wave coffee shop, eventually penetrating the skull of an international student (or a pregnant mother of four or letter carrier or a three-legged chocolate lab puppy) with a mechanical broadhead (or a length of rebar or a broken marble) shot from a military-grade hunting bow (or a medieval crossbow or a slingshot made from a wild pig’s hip bone.) And then, as true as day, he would get off due to insanity. Alternatively, stealing a quarter pineapple (or a stack of pirated Michael Jackson CDs or 16 grams of free, government-issued LSD) would occasionally land another friend a war crimes conviction and the requisite public hanging followed by his racking and disembowelment (the remainder of which would be placed into a large blown glass urn and taken out to sea where it would be thrown overboard in some kind of ritual.) Alas.

And with all that, the place reliably won “best city” recognitions year after year after year. In part that was because, alas, the locals writing about the place were now based elsewhere. Those who owned everything were elsewhere, too. Alas. Oh, and the businesses occupying all the square footage belonging to the owners-from-elsewhere were, themselves, from there as well. Alas. And when everything became permitted and everything else taboo, theft, vandalism, and the steady inundation by sleep-walkers made business impossible. Alas. And, as it turned out, business-impossible was bad for business. And yet, owners-from-elsewhere were perfectly content to see businesses-from-elsewhere go. Alas. And that’s how, yes, alas, 'sitting empty' became the new 'bustling', as holding on to one’s investments (which were not in the peoples or places but in the book value of the land) became the only conceivable aim. Alas. And yet, as intended, with a portfolio sufficiently large and diverse, any plot of land could have only so much tangible value. Alas.

But if you walked away, far enough: a dark green sea. Far enough in the other direction: a dark green sea of trees. And many did walk away. Most didn't, though. Those who didn’t, built higher and higher. They seldom or never went out onto the street; instead, the cars they increasingly no longer drove whisked them from B to A and back again. Those who walked the streets tended to do so for sport or as a public statement (always documented) of their solidarity with decision-makers and their life- and society-deranging levels of pan-civic substance use. (“Use” was the recent rebranding of “abuse”. Many, you see, worried about hypothetical concerns of a theoretical threat of the vaguely plausible conjecture, however abstract and remote, that a drug company, any one, could potentially see something approximating a momentary pause or decline in their ever-record sales. So six trips a week to hospital and jail, for six years: "use". Dying on your seventy-seventh overdose on clean, government-mandated "medicine": also "use". Losing your licence and car and house and job and family and friends due to "use": most certainly not anything like "abuse".) Alas.

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It was morning. The sky was blood-orange. Tillbergskaya was as busy as ever. Samsonsson’s brothel, for example, two doors down, at 995½, saw at this hour an each-and-everyday procession of fleeing gangsters and tricksters and pharmaceutical reps. Like hummingbirds in fine, flashy jackets, each slipped away into her own onyx Bentley (each custom built to look like a Merc 770 and each one costing precisely 2,655,421 NeuRyksmarks, before taxes.) 

Being a Wednesday, Malayuka didn’t have to follow them to know they were on their way to the “Liberation” at city hall. The hummingbirds would be changing their costumes on the way. Suits and heels for worn and torn army surplus. They would be participants in “The Freeze”, enabling, enacting, and then celebrating someone else’s self-immolation. It was the always-well-attended twice-weekly other-immolation in recognition of insufficient levels of scapegoating and collective punishment.

Mornings that were not occupied by anti-violent counter-occupations were spent in combinations of sensory deprivation, flotation tanks, ice baths, and saunas. Stress release? Stress making? Confirmation they were still alive? Confirmation they were dead inside? Who could possibly know? But what they did with the rest of their time, Malayuka also did not know. There were rumours the hummingbirds built schools and hospitals for the children of the Lords: the heads of Costa Rican and Panamanian cartels and the generals of the armies of Liberia, Iran, and Uzbekistan. Others said they just traded tech stocks or bought and sold each others’ shipping and construction companies. Some said they parasitized the world's sovereign wealth funds. But no one really knew. That said, what Malayuka Arnutskyah did with her day was unknown and many-rumoured, too.