Sweet Lethe, sing to me the glories of empire! The fingers of Corinea touch the shores of distant lands and even soon the bottom of the ocean. And I see it all in the cloud of smoke pushed between my lips, intersecting with the lamplight that so feebly fills the back room of my haunt.
On this night, Banderkrugge is a city on the edge of the sea, and the edge of revolution. Ash drifts out toward the water as the lights begin to flicker on, drawn out by a vivid purple from the setting sun. Lightning in the clouds to the South, and the wind yet to decide where to carry it. A stench hangs always in the air, the soot people drifting between the brick and cement from which they sprouted.
There is a tease of grit on his tongue as he makes his way through the alleys. The dockyards lie below the rest of the city due to the steep slope near the shore. The grit takes on a briny bite, and the wind picks up. The main roads are brick and old and crowded with traffic. Most of the streets are only wide enough for a bike or two. These streets are slowly accruing graffiti, more with each day he makes his way down to the docks. Prominent among the imagery is a grinning fellow with half his teeth knocked out, sometimes with a single hand protruding from his head giving a thumbs up. Supposedly a caricature of one Smiley D, kingpin of the Smileys, who was brutally beaten by a detachment of Trasheaters - rivals who'd been encroaching on Smiley turf near the docks. The missing teeth started showing up in tags as a dig, then the Smileys had reclaimed it as a badge of pride. But now the number of teeth in the smile was steadily decreasing month-by-month, as the Trasheaters grabbed more and more dockside turf. But so far, Smiley D is still smiling.
Just this morning, Harry was on his way to visit the home of an old professor of his. Eustace Krant had his front gate roped off, plainclothes and uniformed officers wandering the grounds. They said he'd hanged himself. An inspector stood with Harry by the fence, sipping coffee, looking sleepy. "These things happen," he said, stifling a yawn. He handed Krant's suicide note to Harry with a mumbled, "I'm sure he'd want you to have this." An odd thing to say, considering the inspector had no idea who Harry was.
Harry unfurled the paper right there in the morning mist and read. It was just a single line across the top of the page, in flawless cursive:
*I woud like it to be known that I am very disappointed with all of you.*
Banderkrugge is a city on fire. The chimneys of Findley Quarter are alight for the evening, hundreds of carbon streams bending toward the coast and joining the pillars of the foundries and shipyard to form a vast trunk of spent matter rising into the sky's foliage, dispersing amongst the stormclouds; their undersides glowing with the sun's last rays. Further up the coast, a bakery is burning to the ground, already half-demolished by a rocket attack , spreading its warmth to the surrounding neighborhood. A piece of the war has made its way home. It smells delicious. Henry sucks the acrid sweet of burning brioche deep into his lungs and runs a hand across the brickwork at the corner. The docks are only two blocks to his left, the rowd of The Horrible Hag already audible over the screeching of the gulls. Someone is banging a drum. In the opposite direction, a scream, cut off halfway through its arc.
Banderkrugge is a city of garbage. There is a great quantity of cannage in the gutters. Cans are the new thing and they are everywhere. Soup cans, oil cans, soda cans, cans of processed fish guts, canned hotdogs with grinning pigs on them. Crumpled, torn, pristine, tossed to the roadside. Piles of rotting garbage stacked next to the actual trash cans. Harry smokes profusely to kill off his nose buds.
Banderkrugge is seeing a recent surge in cigarette sales. Cigarettes are also new. They're like cigars only smaller, cheaper, easier to produce, easier to consume. All things that have resulted in universal popularity. Smoking them is a mild, repeatable event; an excellent distraction from the garbage, an excellent complement to the faceless piles of bricks.
Banderkrugge is a brutalist/modernist paradise. A history of architecture abounds, but growing up through and around it, the manufactories, the boarding houses without visage sprout and encroach like stone ivy scaled upward a thousand fold. Banderkrugge is made of brick and cement and an increasing quantity of iron. Iron comes from Elsewhere, more and more of it every day. The denizens, like Harry, who are not involved in the iron imports industry are blind to it, but not to the change it elicits in the landscape. The shapes themselves have morphed to match the material: twisting, elongating, rounding, adding additional stories with new methods of construction. Most especially, the smokestacks have increased in height.
Everyone in Banderkrugge will have a knife buried in the back of his neighbor. Harry already has his knife, just in his pocket for now. It is still shiny. It makes a satisfying snikt when he presses the button on the handle. He feels like a larger man when he has it, and like he's in the right neighborhood, which is why he bought it to begin with. One day, he will hurt someone who does not deserve it, just as he will not deserve the hurt done to him.
All things flow into Banderkrugge and do not leave. Banderkrugge is the city that consumes all, but itself above all else. It gorges on the smorgasbord of the world yet remains emaciated. It has its share of tapeworms:
Banderkrugge is the city of towers. Iron and steel allow for previously impossible heights, cloisters for the moguls of the iron industry to stand smoking their cigarettes and dumping their garbage, feeling nothing but the slight pressure of future knives buried in their spines.
Banderkrugge is the city of business.
Banderkrugge would turn its citizens into gold if it could.
Banderkrugge is the home we all wish to escape from. Harry will maintain, as everyone does, that he lives in the greatest city on Earth, but when the chance comes to be anywhere else, he will take it.
Banderkrugge will be bombed into plasma. All things flow into Banderkrugge, including the war. The sweet ash of the bakery fire is not the first Harry has drawn into his tobacco-stained lungs, and it is far from the last.
Banderkruggians are lovers of music and imported traditions. The Scene has just recently discovered the scales of the Southlands, adapted to the local chord progressions, then run through amplifiers. The sound makes its way into every locale, a zeitgeist wave that Harry and his mates ride the crest of. Dark songs of fire, blood, gutters, and sticking knives in their neighbors.
Banderkrugge is the world's leading arms manufacturer. Having recently surpassed its Southern rivals, as the new manufactories glow and burn at full capacity. Automatic weapons, shiny artillery pieces, brand new floating fortresses lining up to be christened before being sent to the ocean floor.
Banderkrugge is the center of art and literature about how terrible Banderkrugge is, funded by Banderkrugge. The new music, the academics who write a novel before hanging themselves, all of it consumed by dock punks and iron moguls alike; nodding their heads, thinking yes, we are indeed awful.
If we were to flatten Banderkrugge's resonances onto a plane, we would see a map of the corridors of power. Boulevards extend out beyond their end and across the sea, becoming shipping lanes, becoming spheres of influence, becoming economic zones, becoming hegemonies of exchanges both cultural and violent, handshakes and salvoes. If we return along this axis, we rush down the boulevard and then between the crevices of an ontological framework - Harry, a self-described Ontologist, whose chief contribution to the discipline thus far is the active renunciation of these axes that tie him through the city to the seas beyond. He is at this very moment undergoing an act of brutal self-containment, as the horns of the warships sinking into the blue horizon drown out the strangled scream that he barely registered. As he basks in the smell of a bakery fire and smiles back at Smiley D. As he feels the wind that hits him at the corner arrive from foreign places but touch only him and then consign itself to nonexistence. This is an ontological seminar with an attendance of one, held in the hall of the flesh, whose walls are the skin. The attendant will ask a poignant question answered by the lecturer, and they will be in agreement with one another. They agree that they smell something quite nice, and are content to confine themselves to the minutiae of this wonderful smell.
Pull back slightly and we can see the exterior structure recognized as Harry, a crew cut young man in the act of cultivating his beard, failing but persevering. An act that summarizes the totality of our Henry quite well, and I think he would even agree with me on this point. He wears a patterned flannel shirt and aging trousers. He keeps a pack of smokes rolled up in his sleeve and one tucked into his belt. He knots his shoes improperly, and strolls in a particular manner to avoid stepping on his own shoelaces. Unusually white teeth mark him out as a stranger to the district, though a missing canine tells us he is more of an expat than a tourist. He goes on smiling at the bakery fire and the warships and the tragedy of the Smiley gang and makes his way on down to the Horrible Hag, where a different sort of seminar is just getting started.
The Hag was named by its owner, Caxton Brick, after his wife, a lovely woman by all accounts, who sleepwalked off the edge of the jetty one night. Her body was never recovered, and the neighborhood told tales of Jenny Brick, the horrible hag, who would drag drunken sailors to their death in the small hours of night, usually with some jokes about her fidelity thrown in. Caxton, being of a darker humor than the jokers, named his tavern after her when it opened. Indeed, the carving over the door was a loving rendition of Jenny beneath the waves, chained to the sea floor by kelp, her hair caught in a current. Just above it, an arc of neon gas proclaimed The Horrible Hag. The one-story building looked out onto the concrete geometries of the port, harboring the leviathans of the shipping lanes, pincushioned with masts and crates and cannonry. Windows foggy with moisture and old grease flank the door beneath the sign which Harry pushes open with the first two fingers of his right hand.
He enters to the evening, the last light of day having been pushed out to sea by the coast, leaving a dark warmth within the Hag, making its own lines through the cigarette smoke and kitchen steam. Caxton himself appears without having moved from his position behind the bar, somehow cleaning two glasses at once with no supporting surface but his own palms. He is glancing at the drummer on the little corner stage bashing his half-open high hat. Caxton, or Cat to his patrons because it's easier to say, keeps his hair in a ragged fan at the far end of his head that curves down into a massive set of mutton chops that have turned the color of goose down near the tips. Cat rotates his mutton chops to bring his eyes in line with the opening door and half-grins at Harry. "Harry! Pull up a stool, Harry. Shake off the brine air and that stupid look on your face. How's the world of Ontology?"
"Ever-present."
"Harhar. You useless bastard. Sticking around for the noise tonight?"
"Of course."
Cat points with his pint glasses at the drummer. "Dank wants to murder that set."
"So I heard. From down the block." They sit and listen to Dank stabbing the ride symbol until his drumstick splits down the middle. "What's his problem?"
"Dunno, but he's been at it all day."
"Ah."
"Maybe he needs an Ontologist?"
Henry is too poised for his pint to respond. It becomes his hand when Cat sets it down, and the frost on its surface becomes him. He moves like a melting polar cap between the tables to the stage, where Dank is using his remaining drumstick like a knife. He stabs it right into the snare, pushing its head against the blister on his thumb.. He pulls the stick out and examines it, tosses it aside, and gets busy replacing the snare head. "How's it hangin' Dank?"
"I'm good." He is clearly not. But Harry knows Dank is a man of relative happiness. Meaning happiness for him is relative.
"You're not. You look glum, chum."
"Feck off." Another drumstick split, this time by sticking it through the clamps on the snare and twisting. He has extras. Dank is small and built as if he were made of amphetamines. His skin should be naturally dark but carries a dayless pallor that highlights his veins, already like rusted copper cords twisting down his forearms. His hair is buzzed, his scalp like an angry peach. Unlike Harry, he's an actual Findley local with some passing resemblance to Smiley D, though he would've been a Trasheater if he weren't tied up with the band and insulated by the Hag crowd. There's a hint of trash about his flesh, about his carriage.
Harry shrugs and glances around the bandstand. He's not about to risk a Dank attack. The other instruments are abandoned on their stands, the guitar especially looking as if it were calling out for a friend: "Turn my shiny knobs, fret me, shred me," it says. He shrugs again. "I don't know how to play you, baby." "You could learn," it says. Nah. Harry's more interested in the cold leeching into his fingers from the pint glass, that wonderful energy. "The man who does pick you up will play you right." There is a soft sobbing behind him as he turns back to take a seat at the bar.
Cat is still scrubbing glasses two at a time. "So. What's Dank's deal?"
"Who knows? Fuck 'im." Harry chugs and taps the pint on the polished wood of the counter. There's already another waiting for him. "What's the word, Cax?" The bar is wet, and he can see his face in it, indistinct as if from a distance. He grins and likes the look of his missing tooth.
Cat spits in his old glass and gets to scrubbing. "Rocket landed uptown this afternoon. Heard it was a bad one."
"Yeah, well it smells delicious."
"14 dead, said the radio."
"Someone oughtta napalm those continental fucks into paste."
Caxton laughed. "We already do." He stows the glasses under the bartop, rests his elbows on it and starts stroking the tips of his mutton chops. "Say, Harry, I don't think you believe that, right? Belief isn't your style."
Harry chugs again, but has to stop halfway to take a breath and make room for the bile in his throat. "Just parroting, I guess. It's fun to say, though."
"Yeah. Fun."
The crowd is crowding in now; the locals, the tourists, the sailors on leave, the sailors still waiting for the yards to christen the floating fortress that takes them away from here. Occasional pilots who like to wear their uniform scarves over a leather vest, or keep a pair of goggles hanging around the neck. Or the other sort, who just drape themselves with army surplus, confused vestments for a nameless religion that hasn't received its commandments yet.
This Dank fellow is still at the drumset, waiting for his time to shine. He's been there all day, taking steady infusions from Caxton, but mostly just playing. People come and go, some look at him some don't, but he's got a barricade between himself and them, one that makes loud noises if he needs to drive them away. He begins to sing, the new lyrics that he and Harry wrote last week:
dead creepy baby dolls
piled against the wall!
taran-tula monsters
waiting in the hall!
tell me how much longer
you will stall!
a minute or an hour in this room
la la la la la la la laaaaaaaa!!!
I can hear him from the back room. If I had to guess, I'd say the song is about me. But I'm too high to register any meaning in the noise beyond whatever is inherent in the vibrations themselves.
