Dopecentury V --- The Scum
This short fiction is part of Dopecentury, an experimental project where I attempt to channel the aural aesthetics of Dopesmoker into written text. (Dopesmoker is the legendary stoner-doom metal masterpiece by the band Sleep, of which it is said: “the monotony rarely becomes tedious.”) My plan is to listen to the single hour-long track of Dopesmoker while writing each of these “Dopecentury” entries. And repeat that 100 times. See the Dopecentury project page for more details.
The scum rises. It comes up on a tide pushed by the weight of the moon and piled on with the winds of the earth. It laps against our shoreline with long slow caressing strokes. It leaves bits of itself behind, staining our coastal cities, picked up in aerosol droplets and spread on gusty winds that whip through our canyon streets. The scum comes for us, and becomes us. We love it, consume it, and spread it around. It fills our thin and starved bellies. It pours back out of our pores, our earholes, and our tear ducts. Scum slides down our faces for the rest of the world to see. We make them lick it from our cheeks.
The scum burns. A lofted cigarette butt floats down onto the scum and ignites it. Not instantaneously, not in a giant fireball. The scum isn’t explosive, it moves slowly and creeps. The ignition takes a little while. Long enough that nobody notices it happening. The flame is pale blue and invisible in daylight. A clean flame rises from the scum, but only those who get burned notice the heat.
The scum floats, of course. It sits on top of our corrupted nature. It is a barrier we must dive through. It parts when we do, taking us into its loving embrace, only too happy to have us. But it always leaves some of itself behind. We emerge from the scum still coated, and shy away from people smoking lest they ignite us.
The scum smells: pungent and toxic. It burns the membranes and causes mucus to flow. (The tears mix with the scum that stains our faces, and slides down our cheeks.) Some cover their mouths and noses with cloth. Others grow to love the smell — it is admittedly intoxicating — and inhale it with great breaths, though often followed with a fit of cough and gasp. The smell travels far beyond where the scum lays on the surface of the water. Far up into the heights of the city, the breeze carries the smell (though only on certain days). The smell makes it impossible to deny the scum is there. Young children form memories attached to the smell that whenever they smell something akin to it later in their lives will return them to their youth and their waterfront of the city — the smell is so distinctive after all.
The scum is fought, mostly with money but also with fire hoses. An amount of money calculated to be the size of a small car if it were pressed into bills and stacked on the street has been thrown at the scum. For years, off-duty firefighters were paid time-and-a-half to be down at the waterfront, hoses in hand, spraying fresh water at the leading edge of the scum. If the tides were not strong, headway would be made, and sometimes the scum would be pushed back as far as the harbor entrance. There, great floating booms would be deployed to try to contain it. Other off-duty firefighters would come to the harbor entrance, light a rag inserted in a bottle of fuel and toss it out onto the scum to ignite it — the hope being that the scum would burn off. But always at the next high tide the scum would flow back in and fill the harbor. And at the next storm, it would slide up into the streets and coat the buildings and clog the sewers, which would cause the scum to flow even higher up into the city.
The scum was edible, insisted an old blind man who sat most days down at the docks on overturned milk crates. He had inhaled the smell for so long with such gusto that he became sure he could consume the scum. This he would do with a spoon from a bowl of heated sea water. “The better to release the aroma,” the old man said. Often a small crowd would gather, some would lay bets that he wouldn’t do it. But the old blind man would always eat the scum off the top, with apparent relish (usually he left the sea water behind). “Just because he ate it, doesn’t mean it’s edible,” said one observer, who went on to place a bet that the old blind man would be dead by the next day. But the old blind man was always there the next day.
The color of the scum was debated. Many said it was black, but others said it was gray. Or possibly grayish-yellow. On close inspection, there was an oily slick of rainbow colors that shifted in the light and left it so that those who conducted close inspections were less sure than those who refused to get too close to the stuff. A few insisted that the scum was white, as if all the colors of the rainbow were mixed together, though the more astute color theorists insisted that as a substance with pigment, the color was subtractive and not additive and so should be closer to black or gray than white. The synesthetes among the population insisted that the scum both smelled and sounded bright white.
The scum is exhausting. Those who live within sight or smell of it often mention the fatigue. The waterfront became a slow and sleepy place where not much was done or achieved. (The firefighters would often wear breathing apparatus when hosing down the scum, as a way to stave off the fatigue, becoming little bastions of business in a swamp of the languid.) Grades in schools near the scum dropped. Business productivity became nearly null. Some spiritualists took advantage of the slowness of the area, and opened retreats where the wealthy would stretch slowly on polished wooden floors in buildings with a wall open to the waterfront. Many swore these retreats were the most relaxing experiences of their lives. Anxiety and frustration melted away and blew out over the scum-filled harbor in the light and fragrant breeze.
The scum may be eternal. Experts took samples and applied various bacteria and microorganisms to it in an attempt to find something that would break the scum down. Some of the organisms died quickly when they came into contact with the scum. Others thrived on the scum. But none ate the scum. As explained earlier, it could be ignited, but the fumes that resulted, if gathered together, would cool and congeal, through some unlikely alchemical process, into yet more scum.
Maybe the scum is economical? Given the situation and the apparent inability to move the scum along to another location, the city leaders got the idea that perhaps the best way to get rid of the scum would be to sell it. The key would be to find an economical use for the scum. Samples were gathered and tested for various applications. It was found to be a decent industrial lubricant, but since most industrial lubricants were already so cheaply had as byproducts of the petroleum industry, the scum could not be profitably gathered and packaged for that uses. Some defense contractors tried to leverage its color properties as a way of camouflaging vehicles, but there seemed to be no way to get it ti adhere to the surfaces — it had a tendency to slide off things (see notes about lubricant possibilities above). Other defense contractors tested using the scum as a direct weapon — hurling it at the enemy, possibly ignited, to see what the results were. Effective, surely, but did not fill any defense gap not already covered more efficiently by bullets, was the verdict of the final report. A food company pursued the suggestion of the old blind man and attempted to convert the scum into a food additive — perhaps in just the right amounts (small enough to not be too toxic) it would add that particular piquant that would get consumers to buy food-like products. But it turned out again that the petroleum industry already had them beat on cost for all potential uses the scum might be put to in food.
In the end, the scum comes on, rising up on each tide, pushed up by the weight of the moon and piled on with accelerating winds that blew ashore. The city grew to love the scum, as a quirky local characteristic. Tourists arrived to see it, postcards were made, pictures were taken. Ceremonial ignitions would happen each weekend evening to the oohs and ahhs of the spectators. The city thrived and the scum grew deeper.