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starless and bible black
Mar. 19th, 2008 09:32 pmLike a sprite trapped inside the precariously suspended bauble that hangs over a Christmas morning panorama of a boy's toys spread out, incongruous, on a living room carpet, I survey the streets of tropical New York far below. The helicopter I'm riding in banks right, revealing the palms waving on the bowl of cliffs that contain the miniature waterfront of Manhattan, that simultaneously, in the way of dreams, could be Waikiki, Wellington, San Fransisco, Vancouver.
I am then earlier; driving in a car up the rise of a suspension bridge which humpbacks higher than the horizon and hides my path. My oldest friend speaks with me about our closest friend's younger, adult sister. "You know what She says?" She being a witch of our acquaintance, an older figure of authority. "She says that his sister is--" "A meteoromancer," I say. "Yeah."
My feeling is that it is somewhat later, or perhaps a moment from where there can't be any directions; unstuck in time. A long moment when progress towards change is no longer possible. A post-time*. Three of us walk, three men, over barren ground, the litter of red brick and drab nettles and air that stinks of broken engines. We walk towards the orphaned cabin from an old British Telecom van. A box with a footprint of several feet, made of fibreglass and metal with a full-sized door. It stands on its own like a portakabin, out of flush with the horizon, slanting slightly away from us, downwards. We're having a conversation about food. It's no longer a resource that can be made and has to be barreled like oil. Eagerly one of my companions opens a metal hatch set into the floor besides the cabin and a thick orange crude, rimed with dark fat heaves beneath it. I explain that things will keep longer if they are cool. I don't know if I'm being insulting to their intelligence, and can't tell from the looks I receive. So much has been forgotten. I am a spectator here, somehow.
We crest the humpback, and a cliff of water, impenetrably dense, azure like the miraculous shallows off white beaches, towers over us. It comes to me that the road beneath our wheels stretches vertically from the surge, and how it must appear that we ride the tail of the whale as it breeches, suspended, before the inevitable triumph of gravity sucks it all back down into the sea. This is not how it is, with the horizon nearly parallel to our eyes.
The bank turn completed, the tail of the helicopter moves rapidly in an arc, buffeting me with inertia as it completes its almost handbrake turn. I see the leviathan wave break, in streets and on buildings and it dashes on concrete. As tongues of foam slide through the streets like adders I realise that there's been no structural damage at all. The glass-sided towers and low streetlamps look back at me with flat, twinkling eyes. The heli heads along the waterfront, the not-Miami beside me, false, but immutable. A second wave, spreading away to every forward vanishing point, raises up, then deflates. Our flight takes us away, the sound of jets in my ears, and we start to climb. We reach a much higher altitude and turn around to point back downwards. The city lights, spread out on an archipelago of sister keys below, hang clear in a night's darkness that has advanced with equatorial speed. When we have the brightest of the lights below us, our pole star inverted, we begin to climb steeply and against the will of laws.
We climb past clouds, they fall behind us soon after and are gone. Somehow we continue to climb past the light of the moon, probing starless night. Nothing gleams before us as we pierce the thickening depths. The sense of being enfolded in crushing silence. The voice of the pilot is besides me; husky, female, American. She speaks words of explanation: an amniotic tour guide. There are no landmarks to indicate our attitude, this is darkness of the deepest trench. The soothing voice tells me that we are flying entirely on instruments, by the false horizon and the altimeter. I see superimposed primary colours, phosphorescent green on non-textural black. We are going down.
Being pulled down through nothing, from nothing. Shocked by a scream of pistons from a sudden golden bi-plane heading straight up, a degree past our nose as we fall straight down. Then we're back to nothing on all sides, Lance of Longinus hurled to earth. Here we exist for a time. A light, indeterminately far below, flares and falls away to our right. "I believe," the pilot says. "That was a commercial airliner." There is nothing to see. "I'd better start warming her up." There is a feeling of activity. The sound of someone straining, physically. Nothing breaks the sub-sea calm. The voice at my side begins to make warm coaxing noises, friendly platitudes, but there's nothing that will be coaxed.
*Post-time! About half-past 11. Tsk, I remember when you used to be able to get the post before you went to work. Tsk tsk! I remember when the post used to be three times a day! Not like now.
I am then earlier; driving in a car up the rise of a suspension bridge which humpbacks higher than the horizon and hides my path. My oldest friend speaks with me about our closest friend's younger, adult sister. "You know what She says?" She being a witch of our acquaintance, an older figure of authority. "She says that his sister is--" "A meteoromancer," I say. "Yeah."
My feeling is that it is somewhat later, or perhaps a moment from where there can't be any directions; unstuck in time. A long moment when progress towards change is no longer possible. A post-time*. Three of us walk, three men, over barren ground, the litter of red brick and drab nettles and air that stinks of broken engines. We walk towards the orphaned cabin from an old British Telecom van. A box with a footprint of several feet, made of fibreglass and metal with a full-sized door. It stands on its own like a portakabin, out of flush with the horizon, slanting slightly away from us, downwards. We're having a conversation about food. It's no longer a resource that can be made and has to be barreled like oil. Eagerly one of my companions opens a metal hatch set into the floor besides the cabin and a thick orange crude, rimed with dark fat heaves beneath it. I explain that things will keep longer if they are cool. I don't know if I'm being insulting to their intelligence, and can't tell from the looks I receive. So much has been forgotten. I am a spectator here, somehow.
We crest the humpback, and a cliff of water, impenetrably dense, azure like the miraculous shallows off white beaches, towers over us. It comes to me that the road beneath our wheels stretches vertically from the surge, and how it must appear that we ride the tail of the whale as it breeches, suspended, before the inevitable triumph of gravity sucks it all back down into the sea. This is not how it is, with the horizon nearly parallel to our eyes.
The bank turn completed, the tail of the helicopter moves rapidly in an arc, buffeting me with inertia as it completes its almost handbrake turn. I see the leviathan wave break, in streets and on buildings and it dashes on concrete. As tongues of foam slide through the streets like adders I realise that there's been no structural damage at all. The glass-sided towers and low streetlamps look back at me with flat, twinkling eyes. The heli heads along the waterfront, the not-Miami beside me, false, but immutable. A second wave, spreading away to every forward vanishing point, raises up, then deflates. Our flight takes us away, the sound of jets in my ears, and we start to climb. We reach a much higher altitude and turn around to point back downwards. The city lights, spread out on an archipelago of sister keys below, hang clear in a night's darkness that has advanced with equatorial speed. When we have the brightest of the lights below us, our pole star inverted, we begin to climb steeply and against the will of laws.
We climb past clouds, they fall behind us soon after and are gone. Somehow we continue to climb past the light of the moon, probing starless night. Nothing gleams before us as we pierce the thickening depths. The sense of being enfolded in crushing silence. The voice of the pilot is besides me; husky, female, American. She speaks words of explanation: an amniotic tour guide. There are no landmarks to indicate our attitude, this is darkness of the deepest trench. The soothing voice tells me that we are flying entirely on instruments, by the false horizon and the altimeter. I see superimposed primary colours, phosphorescent green on non-textural black. We are going down.
Being pulled down through nothing, from nothing. Shocked by a scream of pistons from a sudden golden bi-plane heading straight up, a degree past our nose as we fall straight down. Then we're back to nothing on all sides, Lance of Longinus hurled to earth. Here we exist for a time. A light, indeterminately far below, flares and falls away to our right. "I believe," the pilot says. "That was a commercial airliner." There is nothing to see. "I'd better start warming her up." There is a feeling of activity. The sound of someone straining, physically. Nothing breaks the sub-sea calm. The voice at my side begins to make warm coaxing noises, friendly platitudes, but there's nothing that will be coaxed.
*Post-time! About half-past 11. Tsk, I remember when you used to be able to get the post before you went to work. Tsk tsk! I remember when the post used to be three times a day! Not like now.
