Dopecentury XXIV --- Flip Flops
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 heat was almost unbearable. We made our way up the center of the street. The tar laid down to patch cracks in the roadway melted, and stuck to our shoes. Well, my shoes, she was wearing flip-flops. “You should have put on better footwear.”
“There was no time. …It might not matter for much longer anyway.”
At moments, it seemed like her flip-flops were the only sound I could hear: pfft, pfft, pfft, pfft. Right, left, right, left, right. The sound sliced up the pace of our travel. But then I would awake from my reverie and become aware of the sirens in the distance, from every direction, accompanied by the faint screams. Here and there a house or an apartment building along the street was burning. Left to burn, I should say — no fire crews in sight.
The sky glowed bright white. The ground glowed a faint reddish color. We passed a large old church, and the heavy weight of the stone of the building has caused it to subside into the no-longer firm ground. It leaned at a precarious angle. Nearby, the earth was rent open and a chasm had split for half a mile along the road that ran next to the church. I was glad we had no need to cross that direction.
Other people were in the street, walking or running or hobbling in whatever way was befitting to them. No gas or electric powered vehicle ran any longer. Occasionally a bicycle would pass, but usually going slowly, the rider wobbling like an inverted pendulum. Whatever small concentration required to ride a bicycle was apparently lacking.
pfft pfft pfft pfft pfft pfft.
“Which way should we go?”
“I think it’s unlikely to matter at this point.”
“Should we even continue to walk, then?”
“Yes. Let’s find somewhere more pleasant than this.”
A screeching crack split the sky overhead and everyone in the street crouched down out of involuntary fear for a moment as the deafening sound passed over. Slowly the regained their full stature and plodded on.
pfft pfft pfft pfft pfft pfft.
The people in the streets were not wandering around aimlessly, most seemed headed vaguely in the direction of the river, though I could hardly see what sense there was in that. However we too moved in that direction, compelled to school from some deep evolutionary sense of protection perhaps.
We soon approached a major thoroughfare, and artery the crossed the whole city, and swiped almost directly across perpendicular to our path. It was split down the middle by another chasm.
“Should we try to get across this somehow?”
“I don’t really see how. And let’s not spend huge amounts of time trying to find a way, there’s probably not too much time left now, and I would like to find something pretty and pleasant to look at.”
So we turned down a smaller side street that ran parallel to the thoroughfare and its newly-form chasm feature for some way. Here, the row houses were burning on one side, burning as one long blaze like they were all of one building instead of separate homes. Blazes lit most of the windows, and acrid black smoke ballooned upward and drifted across the street. Somehow the other side of the street remained entirely unharmed, with their expensive facades of brown or white stone, and still planted out front with small green gardens behind low cast-iron fencing. I stopped to stare, contemplating the contrast of the ruin on one side to the vision of what life had been like here on the other.
“We have to keep going,” she said.
pfft pfft pfft pfft pfft pfft.
We made our way down a slight hill that descended gently for maybe a mile or so. Everywhere, people were moving, but very few with purpose. We came out of the burning neighborhood and upon the place where the raised highway had been. It had fully collapsed on itself, bringing low its river of cars and trucks, which now lay in smoldering ruins among the crushed concrete, rebar, and massive and twisted steel support beams.
“We can’t get across this either.”
“No. Still, we should keep going, I don’t want this to be where we stop.”
We turned and took an avenue covered in glass from the shattered curtain-walls of the high-rises that lined the street. Most of those buildings were burning, like a row of birthday candles sending their black smoke up into the white sky.
We soon reached the point where the thoroughfare with its chasm crossed ahead of us again. And there we would have had to turn around since it intersected with the collapsed highway, except that by some chance of engineering the on-ramp from the thoroughfare to the highway was still in tact. We walked up the on-ramp and crossed the wreckage of the highway, and down the approach ramp of the other side.
“Maybe we can get up on the bridge over the river? That might provide whatever sight it is you feel like you need right now.”
“Maybe,” she said. But as we turned the corner and got around some of the taller buildings blocking the view of the river, we could see that was not going to be an option.
The old bridge had collapsed, the suspension cables un-slung and drooping, the roadway disappeared into the river below. All that was left was the old twin stone support towers.
“So much for that idea. Where else could we go?”
pfft pfft pfft pfft pfft pfft.
This denser part of the city had more officials. Some places were wrapped with yellow “do not cross” tape, though it was broken in many places. People in uniform stood about in clusters on corners, but with no functional vehicles or radios, there was little they could do. One or two would occasionally wave a group of pedestrians across the street, as if it were the only way they had to show the remnant of their rapidly dwindling authority. Others were pestered by confused people with questions about what to do, but there was little response beyond slow head-shaking.
We reached the river. The water was black and flowing swiftly inland, since it was actually a tidal estuary and the time was headed toward high tide. The promenade along the waterfront had cracked and mostly fallen into the water. But the ferry dock was still whole, and there were two ferries still docked there.
“What about those?”
“Perhaps.”
We made our way out onto the ferry dock, and I began to undo the lines securing it.
“It won’t start of course.”
“I know. But why would we need it to?”
A few other wanderers noticed that I was undoing the lines of the ferry. They came and asked to join us. We shrugged and said we did not feel like we had any authority to refuse them. By the time I had the ferry entirely untied, there were maybe a dozen or so people aboard.
We all made our way to the upper deck. The flow of of the river was such that it almost immediately pushed the ferry away from the dock. We were soon out in the middle of the river, drifting. The sky blazed white above us, lined by the smoking black teeth of the tall buildings on either side. The ground glowed hot and redly below them.
We watched the city shrink and the ferry floated impotently upriver. It was completely silent. I realized I missed the sound of her flip flops.
“Hold my hand,” she said to me.