If it were a mix-tape, it would start with an ambient song, something process oriented, building on itself until its reason became clear in the contrast between the rich ending and the sparse beginning. If it were a movie, the hero would deliver an opening monologue, crying and bloody on some Liverpool street—having given up hope, despite the reversal afforded him by the laws of Drama. If it were a car, it would be a thing of beauty, fast and gleaming with promise, and at seventy-eight miles per hour all of its perfection would be interrupted by a single steel pole, unobserved, anchored in concrete. If it were a hammer, it would be a hammer of god, subtle cracks along its wooden handle, evidence on its weathered head of endless nails driven. If it were a question, it would be “how?” If it were a time, it would be—

Raising his hands to the sides of his head, the engineer said, “Now.”

The building, though distant, collapsed in response. A cloud of dust rose from the new, neat pile of debris and mixed with the air. Car alarms sounded an improvised take on Butterfield’s Lullaby, monotone and shrill but, on some level, beautiful. A newsman was there, Crash Olafson. In a live feed to the afternoon broadcast on WHFA he reported, “It’s quite difficult to see in this, but I’m told the air should be clear before the afternoon commute.” Through his studio feed he heard the anchor say, “Thanks, Crash. Stay safe out there. Up next, city planner Eileen Gross will talk to us about what this demolition will mean for downtown’s Promenade district.”

On his side in the street, bent in half and half once more, a surprised man sheltered his head. Unobserved and ignorant, he’d come too near the demolition zone. Deaf, now, and blinded by the dust in the air, and breathing that same dusty air and finally understanding the final, unending moments in the lives of elephants, he rose. Hands outstretched in the palpable darkness, he proceeded toward the ringing that he believed came from someplace to the left of his head.

Silently turning lefts at varying intervals, the man had no sense that he might be heard. The ringing was the thing—the only thing. He didn’t imagine he’d be heard, and, likewise, he didn’t hear. He didn’t hear the muffled voice of the choking girl whose leg had been pinned beneath the side of her fallen horse. Random debris, so random, had coupled with the now too familiar ignorance earlier described and had led to something of a brutal equine decapitation.

It had been so quick, she would have said if rescued, that she’d only heard a crack at the edge of the boom, had only seen a glint of something at the edge of her eye, had only felt the hot on the edge of her skin of the horse’s blood before seeing what had become of its neck, and that she’d deciphered none of these things before the explosive punch that knocked mount and master to the ground.

Ignorant to her cries, the wandering man did nothing to help the rider live. Instead, he turned left.

He cried as he walked, knowing he’d been crying before the blast and wondering at what he now cried. His tears worked away his blindness, though, revealing a world of swirling dust and sometimes feet, though seldom more.

A parade of the city’s finest rats, too low to be bothered by the dust, too high and cocksure to postpone a well-planned festivity, made its way through the alleys of the once great promenade district. They gave no pause at the site of the suffocating and sobbing figure that hunched as it turned limp lefts ahead. Instead, they marched along their route, perfectly keeping time with the footfalls of their neighbors, waving gracefully toward the pup rats held high by the parental rats that held them. Crumbs and teeth and scraps of copper wire were tossed lovingly to the throng of spectators as the spectacle marched by, unnoticed by the man.

But what remained to be noticed? There were some maelstroms with greater definition than the others. He noticed these, sometimes spinning in counter to the standard minute-hand movements of the rest. The lolling tongue of a dismantled horse, rolled out royally for bands of ants: he had seen this, too, though not the challenge of the ant brigands which later came to wrest away the rights of discovery. History failed to note the same; so, sadly, despite the vast importance of that horse-head territory eventually called Scrum by its memory keepers, little is left to be handed to those who might benefit most from an understanding of its lessons. He noticed, also, the gang of children who had, that day, chosen to drink dark things from the locked closet of their building’s super, having grown weary of the offerings of television and church, and having lost hope in the dull and dead eyes of the parents who’d long since stopped noticing them. He saw their aftermaths, at least, but saw nothing significant beyond the general saddening sickening their little blue faces inspired in his gut. At the end of one street—Harper, he supposed, though it could have just as easily been Dixon or Magistrate—he saw the last man who’d done him an unfair turn, the boss of the hardware shop, sitting face-in-hand on the stoop of one of the city’s last brownstones.

“Where you been,” said the old boss.

“Out walking,” said the crying man.

“Still crying, I see,” said the old boss.

“Yeah,” said the crying man.

“Looks like we’ll probably die out here,” said the old boss. “Can’t see how it’d hurt if you wanted a go at me.”

“Naw,” said the crying man. “I can’t hear you anyhow” He waved his hands to the sides of his ears, indicating the deafness, hearing only that leftward ring.

“Figured,” said the old boss, before politely vanishing into the dust.

He survived his way to Karnass and Eighth, though he’d probably made it passed that same intersection some fifteen times before deciding he was done. He arrived in time to see the final, improvised trick of the abandoned circus seal, the one where it balanced on its side until it forgot how terrible things had become in its life, the one where its eyes went from teary pools to glassy balls to crude exes on paper. He clapped at the sight of it and wondered at how quickly his own tears had stopped. He took account of himself, felt his head…eyed his hands. He listened for the ringing that had led him this far.

Silence.

So he sat on the curb, there. He sat in the dust and silence, unsure but satisfied, and waited. Whether he waited for death or salvation seemed a trifling question, and, as such, he refused to give it a second thought.

High above, the engineer sipped champagne and accepted grand congratulations from the finest of the city’s tenders. And higher still—each imagined in his own turn and special way—God smiled down on their field of great works, satisfied in man’s argument against cessation, and allowed his monstrous hammer to rest yet another day on its burgundy pillow. And so, below god, staring out at the dust of a city’s progress, the men, too, smiled.

Timestamp: 06.21.07 at 12:21 PM. Filed under: Fiction.