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Sep 8, 2016 04:53
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| # ¿ May 21, 2024 04:15 |
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The Saddest Rhino posted:Gonna do something different. Instead of closing submission calls I will throw out some combinations anyone can claim until close of submissions in two days time im spoiling a lame intro. this is a loveletter to a scene that is no longer with us. there are a million in-jokes and references and i rly dc. blood geis 3/3 Out of Memory 1929 words Legacy Trails “Where were you in ‘89?” the graffiti asks. It flows cursive over a landscape mural. Over a city at night, lights dense as stars that blur behind the building silhouettes. It loops in a spectrum of hot pinks, purples, oranges, and implores in cherry red. Xuan was six. She was born in 1983, the last year of the Dirty War, when the fascists decided their children would be next if they spared anyone who loved and cared. That year took her mother. Like the year was a space-time distortion that swallowed her out of memory. Now it’s a year into the echoes, twin slivers after the scifi dream. 11 minutes into the future. Xuan is 26. Later they will say that chiptune is dead, that by now it was dying. She will sit in her compressed cube apartment in Tokyo, another star in the cyberpunk sky. She’ll stretch against a window overlooking a sprawling square, and wonder why. She’ll drink from her thick plastic cup, and think it over. No matter how long her hair grows, no matter how many times she'll cut it off, she'll never truly know. But she'll know she left a piece of herself behind, a pixellated ghost calling from her past. She was six, probably listening to her father rant about how they all owed America money. Sometimes he’d cry, hug himself. He wouldn’t hug her. So she shrugs off the question, like she’d shrug off the night sky if she could. She has a different question for herself. A line she read once is looping in her head. I’ve seen your future and it doesn’t work. Does her future work? Does her future with Alec work? He’s somewhere inside Nadir, and she doesn’t know if she even wants to see him. She woke at his place, saw his cereal stash, and left so fast the wind hitting her breaker snapped her eyes wide open. She hasn’t eaten since then. It’s one of her bad days. Nadir Nadir is a club at the end of a dilapidated, industrialized street. That’s what makes it cool, that it’s just another warehouse but this one has all night chipraves. In theory. Actually, its nihilism aesthetic evaporates when the first thing you see entering is the front girl’s cleavage. A cheap table, the girl sitting down low, and Xuan likes boys but it's so plump she stares as her hand gets stamped. She doesn't see much more because there aren’t many girls. Chiptune is dying. And the dudes are all wearing trucker caps and pumping beer cans. Hunger is already making her feel a little faint, a little faded at the edges. She moves through bodies, can’t tell if the boys are ‘miring her hair or trying to bypass it in their fantasies. The opening act is low-grade and they haven’t put the visuals on yet. A few dancers cast bunnyhopping shadows on the blank white wall. Otherwise the floor is empty, dense around the sides with lurkers who can’t be bothered. Distracted, she bumps into a girl. She’s a waif with long black hair and a scared expression. Xuan gives her soft eyes as she moves to the bar. Trying to move gentle now, like she’s not a jerk. The bar is actually just a table near a kitchenette in the corner of the warehouse. There’s a fridge on one wall and a microwave above a sink on the other. The bar makes the area three sides of a rectangle. Alec is playing later tonight. He’s inside the VIP oblong, pouring himself whatever he wants. What he wanted was two cups of beer. This freaks her out. Yeah, he was expecting her to show up, but he isn’t psionic. How long has he been double clutching like that? When he sees her he grins wide. The lighting blasts red all over everything. It sets off whatever he’s drinking, gleaming in his teeth. “Ayo gurl,” he says, and the u makes her queasy, because it’s the pit of her stomach, the acid just burning skin. He gives her a cup, and she takes it, but doesn’t feel like drinking. Instead she hugs herself with her empty arm. 1989 sinks in and she tries to remember why that year is so important. Maybe they made the internet better. By like, a lot. Over here it didn’t even exist. So what are we? Like the Flintstones, and Japan is a country of Gazoos. We’ll always be on the outside looking in. We’ll always be chipbros. She watches the people lurking the edges of the floor, fuzzy through her hunger. Like shy ghosts. She wishes she could hug them all at once. But instead Alec wraps his arm around her, and his beer cup’s in her face, and he’s just a chipbro, and she’s just his chipgirl. Wallflower The AV people have got it together. They're visualizing retro screensavers, so old they’re just looping repeated sprites. Right now they’re sleeping cats blowing snot bubbles. She watches it while the guy at the laptop sequences three abrasive tones over and over and soon she hates cats, would kick one if she could get away with it. Being close to Alec was always quantum. Turns out being pressed into him like he owns her doesn’t feel good. So she’s happy when he kisses her neck, says he’s got to set up, and drifts back and to the right, to pass around everyone and move behind the speakers. The bar table digs into her back. She has to writhe to stay comfortable. She’s thinking about her mother. Her mother is quantum. Maybe she was loving. Maybe she was sad. Her heart sings a broken song. She’s thinking about how she loved these bleeps and bloops once, and if she could love them again. She loved them because they looked back to a time that was special to people. Not special to her, but special to others, and everyone made of the same star stuff in the end. Liking chiptune was liking another reality, but maybe there are no other realities. Just this one, where she’s waking her life next to someone she doesn’t like. Maybe there’s no scene that makes up for people being gone. For sorrow looking out through your eyes, never becoming you. She’s hungry. She’s dazed. She imagines the beer hitting her stomach crater and screaming. Then she sees the girl drenched in fake blood. Cool Pizza The fake blood glimmers in the strobelights. The floor dancers are trancing out to the bit shifter but she caught the girl mid whirl. Her black hair waves past her bloody face as she dances, the ends dripping dark. Xuan sees rivulets float away slow, like in zero gravity. Circe, she thinks. A magic goddess. Holding her beer automatic, she starts moving. The threshold to the dance floor is liminal though it’s a micrometre high. The dancers are carving out spaces and she has to twist to the bleeps to get by. She still hates them. She remembers when they sequenced songs like the spring breeze. Now it’s all noise to her. But blood splattered Circe is worth the crossing. As she approaches she feels a blush work from the corners of her mouth, embers behind her cheeks. The girl’s face is still lost behind her hair. But are those the whites of her teeth she sees, shining in the strobes, pure like space? As Xuan gets near her dancing slows and she brushes the tangle. Xuan can see one eye now, ocean blue. Then everything goes wrong. The screensaver shifts and she looks at it. It’s row over row of pizza slices, the pixels squaring the pepperoni. Her lungs empty out. Gasping, Xuan shoves her beer cup in the girl’s face. She’s so confused it hurts to look. But she takes it and Xuan spins for the bathroom way past everyone. All the dancers around her move in sharp fractals. She smashes into them, ruining the patterns, glitching them out. She still feels eyes on her in the back shadows of the warehouse. She rams through the door of the solitary bathroom and barricades herself in a stall. But the beast is growing stronger. Porcelain Porcelain never seemed real to her. Like she could phase through it. It’s too sterile. Life isn’t sterile, she thinks. People blooden it. She used to think if everyone listened to chiptune there’d be no wars. She can hear it now, through the walls. The tones are binary harsh. They’re heaven and hell and tight cymbal shifts. She wants to hush them away. She remembers her father saying her mother was quantum. She’s not sure about the year. Post-1986. She walked free, explored every space of their dirty gray apartment. Her father showed her a photograph. It’s a woman with big eyes, hair draping her shoulders, and a floral dress. Her mouth danced at the corners. “Is that mother?” she asked. “I’m not telling you,” he said. “You don’t know, understand? You’ll never know her. She’s gone and she’s not coming back. That’s what matters.” He had dark spaces under his eyes, she remembers. Waves rushing to their shore. “She’s quantum. This could be her. Or it’s someone else, some photo I found. She's beautiful. But maybe I don’t fall in love with looks.” “I want to know,” she said. “A photograph is someone’s skin,” he said. “That’s not enough to know anything.” He held the photo close. In front of her eyes, already welling with tears, he tore it slow. She remembers this as someone calls from the other side. A liquid voice. “I miss you.” She hears the sound of running water. She stands up, away from the porcelain, and opens the stall door to find her Circe. Solange She’s filled the cup with water. She hands it to Xuan. Xuan drinks deep. Circe pulls something from her dress. Fake blood is glooping onto it, the stain hued dark. “Water and cigarettes,” she says. “Then we’ll get you to food.” “I can’t eat,” Xuan says. Circe sparks the cigarette. Her eyes are calm in the bathroom light. “I have Soylent at home,” she says. “You’ll love it. It’s the future of nutrition.” She laughs, gives it to her. Xuan pulls it. Circe was right. The beast is drowsing. Circe pulls her through the crowd. Alec is playing now. She sees his eyes on her as the two move flat against the warehouse wall. He looks angry. The people are nodding solemn, but she can’t tell if it’s to his dirge melodies, or the two of them, making spirit tracks to the girl at the front and her cleavage. Outside the graffiti still wants to know her. But she keeps her face to her Circe. She's dizzy again. But Circe pulls her close. Rubs fake blood into the back of her neck. It explodes white light through her eyes. Circe walks her to the all night bus stop. Her real name is Solange. It doesn’t work. But it’s better than what she knew before. She learns to let go of the quantum. You can find closure in the modern world. The distance of Tokyo helps things with her father. They talk about her mother over video calls. The spaces under his eyes disappear, call by call. Chiptune is dead. In Japan they move on. They make programs that sing songs for them. Holographic girls with big eyes. Somewhere in the future, somewhere in Tokyo, Xuan raises her cup to her lips, and slurps more Soylent.
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Sep 12, 2016 07:54
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