In the actinic light of September, pretense is stripped from the face of the city, and a grim truth is revealed: The city is failing. It is failing its first class of the new school year.
It is late for class, running breathless through a quadrangle among the inimical classicism of a hubris-laden patronage. Its pants fall off. It is wearing Mickey Mouse underwear. Micky and Minnie are doing it. Grim grim grim. The caretakers in their black Mao fashions and lidless eyes stare balefully at the city's Mickey Mouse underwear. They make mental notes on their mental clipboards, and their spit becomes even more acidic.
The city is still healthy enough to have a histamine level, to have a pulse and to create by-products. But it is running, in its shorts, without change for the vending machines.
Overhead, giant blimps move in lazy figure-8 patterns over the freeways, each blimp reflecting the traffic plexus below. In the sky, they make a three dimensional map of the freeway interchanges, like giant flaccid push pins indicating the distribution of gridlock among the withering neighborhoods. The conversation drifts to the blimps, with the assumption that the real "meaning" is about the traffic.
Grim people, who may be women, submit to surgery which removes their eyelids. In exchange for the tearless, blinkless condition they are given unlimited shopping rights and many, many lottery chances to win jobs.
Children ignore their expensive toys, and improvise the history of piracy and the opium trade with paper bags. Some of the paper bags have handles, some are shiney, all become punctured in the active play, but none ever are discarded.
Years later the same children are grown, but not committed to surgery. They bring their paper bags with them into the offices and classrooms, and force the powerless employees and students to write summaries of the bag's stories. To react to the bags, the employees and students must get drunk and violently ill. In the aftermath of the drinking bouts, the Great Fear seizes them, and thoughts of rebellion or impudence are banished. Later, they turn in their papers, and hope for positive attention, good grades, and/or the right to reproduce. The lucky few are allowed to reproduce without deformity. Some die.
Across the river, a green plain rolls forever toward a soft horizon. On the plain, bison stand motionless in the sunlight. They might be plaster. When it rains, the color is washed off the bison, and thier serial numbers can be read with the right optical equipment.
Giant paper plates are rolled out when it rains. They are dragged across the parts of the city not covered by the Mickey Mouse underwear. Inside the city's brain, the effort to form words is a constant source of conflict and dissatisfaction among the many neurons. They are not well trained for their jobs. Their supervisors resort to harassment and open derision to keep them in line. The effort to form words intensifies.
But the city is failing.
It is fall, and school is born from its own ashes again.
The people, some might be women, dress in lidless eyes and never stop swallowing things handed to them on small trays. The trays are everywhere, popping out of tree trunks, kiosks on the sidewalks, windows and delivery trucks. No one refuses the morsels. They keep lifting them with dainty fingers, tasting, chewing, constantly swallowing and never digesting. When they go to each other's homes for dinner, they cannot stop taking morsels off the importuning platters.
The real dinners are prepared by alarmed immigrants, who must make appointments to have their ears sewn shut, their fingers sewn together, their thighs sewn together, and their shoulder blades broken and reset at right angles. They must submit to these surgeries if they want to become citizens of the city. They are alarmed by the rites of citizenship. Some try to erase their features with dilute acid from the sap of plants that grow beside the city industries.
The real dinners sit untouched on the long beautiful tables. Eventually mold and flowers grow from them. Only the children, vexed by their bags and bored with the shallow perversity of piracy, enjoy the flowers.
Isn't it always like that?
What do the men do here?
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