This city falls through a
fragile sleep. It is a place of vivid
dreams, and streets that are like coral canyons, nooklike, in a
warm sea heaving
and flowing with people. The tropical heat forces dark green weeds and
lush
grasses to burst through the brick and concrete, filtering up
like
insurgents through colonising stone slabs. Fruit trees,
wild
and untamed, stand along the long and straight roads that lead into the
city, opposing old colonial lamposts that
flake black paint along the
empty paths. The city itself is surrounded by a vast orange scrubland,
and the fruit of the trees
droops down unpicked into the short yellow grass by the side of the
road, melting and deforming under the humid sun like the skin and
bones on a corpse left to rot.
Inhabitants drift down the
footworn
streets with dead eyes, trailing vortices of musty smells that mix in
the wind. Living here means understanding existence and death as less a
mere certainty giving room for wilful ignorance, but just a long way
off. Life becomes nothing more than a process gone grey along the
way of lain down tarmac, the soles of your feet grinding slowly as you
shuffle
out of your house, along that relentless pavement conveyer belt, until
you reach the end of
the road, the self checkout, life support beeping again and again, over
and over, tolling like a bell for all your worthy achievements are worth
until death herself packs you and carries you away
in a big black plastic sack for life.
But then there are those with wild eyes and swaying step who cross the road, down off the pavement, into dirty alleys on the outskirts of town, where each footfall lands almost silent, a dull tap that reverberates around on towering buildings that creep up into the sky and hem in any wanderer or traveller. Looking up at the dusty bricks that tower up high, a one can see spiral of lush tendrils, pockmarked here and there with delicate star shaped flowers. Dark purple petals and waxy green leaves curl towards the sun. And down on the ground, as you walk, very occasionally a glint of one the many lords of the city catches your eye as a random copper coins. A coin first spent so long ago, spent for you, indebting you to this city even before you’re dragged out screaming into this unforgiving world. Born into a life of debt but nevertheless feeling the dry air on your wet skin lighting up your nerves like a blanket of ice, eyes wide and bloodshot, your gumless screams stifled by scratchy blankets covering your new nude body, trailing umbilical all over the shop until the doctor finally comes to decide if you’re an innie or an outie, your bellybutton sealed like your fate.
Most people in this city are poor, living on these outskirts. Here the streets have no signs, each twist and turn designed in absentia- a secondary effect of the decision to build homes so desperately needed by a burgeoning population. The blocks separated by dirt covered paths cross over each other like tree roots exposed by the rain. Together the children of this shanty play, chasing eachother, dry smears of dirt settling into the crags of their palms as they laugh and scrabble like feral little magpies for any shiny flake by the side of the copper coloured houses. Each house is topped by its own patchwork of corrugated rust, and the walls slant into the ground, at different angles, sinking back into the earth. Within each thin home lives a large family, so close to the next that they can hear the life next door. Screams of anguish, moans of pleasure, laughter, arguments and everyday conversations seeping through the cracks in plasterboard just as privacy relents to mold. And as the sun goes down you can catch glimpses of soft, wind dried limbs through stained linen blinds that gently waver in the breeze.
The roots lead to central area of the city where tall white and blue glass skyscrapers hang. At a certain point the curved dirt paths give way to planned streets, each polished building casting a shadow and cooling the pavement. Every cornerstone and angle looks to be so heavily designed and ordered by architechs looking down from cold, dry, air conditioned offices. Black cars careen down wide silver highways lined with trees trimmed so perfectly by unseen hands. On weekends the city is paralysed, and warm winds flow through the square streets, the only sounds around being the gentle clatter of some thin plastic wrapping dancing down the alleys, before it disappears from view. The dull roar of the motorway that feeds the centre of the city is hushed for now. And as the work week begins the air begins to fill with a chorus of intermittent horns in harmony, distant sirens grow to scream on top of cars that careen like speeding violins towards their targets and out of earshot. And people in black suits appear out of nowhere to walk purposefully, their heeled tapping shoes crackling together and their heads bobbing up and down as they flood into their buildings hurriedly, to sit at their desks, plugging in letters transformed into demands and sentiments sent hurtling out the aeriels wobbling at the top of the buildings to other headquarters around the world, codified, encrypted, reaching satellites that perform handshakes with the reams of data beaming between computers, beaming down to be transformed back into light that appear again reflected, on the dead eyes of the ones who read it.
