Dopecentury II --- What happens in the low places in the City
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 great city descends as it moves northward, sloping gradually as it approaches the bay. The neglected waterfront winds back and forth among a series of coves and inlets, and these windings create isolated pockets of neighborhood. Few live in these enclaves though, so neighborhood may not be the correct word. Instead they are places of machine shops, industrial workings and repairs. Economies of collusion, but the work comes in to these places, is carried out, and then moves on.
The streets are used for storage. Huge wheeled machines line them, left there for a night, for many nights, for weeks on end. In many places parked bumper-to-bumper to maximize the storage capacity of the street. In many places, the machines look like they have been abandoned. Rust stains their sides. Black pools of oil form in the depressions of the roadway beneath them. Glass is cracked. Tired are flattened. Markings are sprayed on their sides.
The machines won’t move today. You won’t see them move, or anyone standing around contemplating their move. But the machines have value, and someone in one of the many brick buildings that line the streets with their small windows (if any at all) is concerned about the machines, in most cases.
For though on any given day a visitor might not see the machines move, might not see any other humans on the street, if that visitor came back every day and took a photo, and compiled the photos of a month or two or three together, and then browsed them sequentially — then it would be clear how often the machines move. Any one machine might be moved only once in a week, and might be moved at any time day or night at that. But given the quantity of the machines, that means the movement on the streets is nearly perpetual. These streets just move much more slowly than the rest of the city. Somewhat glacially or geologically. These streets don’t move for the individual observer. They move for the economy.
Because these streets are committed to these machines, there are few who care about the aesthetic qualities of the streets themselves. They may have been paved once, but the decades of heavy equipment rolling over them has ground them up. They are pocked and eroded. In places, sluiceways run down the sides of the streets where the gutters once were. The streets are perpetually wet, if not from the rains, then from the tides. For the land is very low here, and saturated by the sea. When the seas are high, the water in the ground seeps up and forms puddles — in some places vast, difficult to cross lakes. The streets turn to mud, retaining their carrying capacity only from the vast quantities of grit and rock stirred into the mud. The sun bakes the mud and it turns to cement-hard ruts, and the heavy machines crawl across them tamping the whole admixture down.
When the rains do come, the gutters fill, back, and then pour out into the bay. All too often, the pipes to the bay fill, and the gutters back up further, and all the muck and waste flushed into the sewers by the industrial concerns of the area flows up into the street. The streets become chutes of industrial chemicals mixed with untreated sewage. The base color is brown, but the brave, attentive observer will see iridescent greens and blues, shining oil-slick rainbows, and churning flecks of gray sludge moving beneath the filmy surface. The stench scares off the birds.
When the rains move on, the pipes usually clear eventually, and the water drains away. The sun comes back out and bakes the toxic stew into the mud and grit of the streets. And the heavy machines roll over it, and tamp it all back down. Layers form over the years. A core could be drilled, and from it a timeline could be made that showed when each major storm happened, and perhaps — from an analysis of the organic chemicals present — which industries moved into the area since the previous storm. A whole economic study might be made, though to what purpose I have no idea.
At the very bottom of one of these streets is a large steel-roofed, concrete-block building, standing half on land and half on pylons, out over the water. From the street side, there is only a door and a few small block-glass windows high up in the walls. Rotting boardwalks run out along the sides of the building. The door is steel, and perpetually closed, but there’s no gate to the boardwalks, and like many places where wooden walks are built over water, there’s a sense of openness — it may be inappropriate to board someone else’s boat, but to walk along the dock it is tied to feels like public space to most (even when privately owned).
A visitor who explores this boardwalk will find that the rear end of the building consists of a huge roll-up door. Unlike the small front door, the roll-up water-side door is often open. Unlike so many of the buildings in this neighborhood, where their business is shut up so secretly inside — excepting the occasional loading dock — here, the business of the building is obvious: it is to shelter the construction of watercraft. Beyond the rolled-up door, the water flows into the darkness of the building. Inside can be seen rows of workbenches and large pieces of equipment mounted on heavy steel carts with thick compact wheels. There is a large gantry, splayed wide and standing on huge inflatable wheels that run in tracks along the sides of the building. Across the center of the gantry are slung heavy webbed straps, and sitting in the straps is the current project: a small submarine.
Little more than a steel tube, many inches thick, with a blank steel domed cap welded on one end, and the flower petals of a prop on the other.
“It’s a submarine? Where are the windows?”
“A submarine has no call for windows. It finds it’s way by sound. It listens silently and carefully for other objects in the water, or otherwise feels its way along in the darkness muscular sonic fingers.”
“But why build such a thing? Is this for a military contract?”
“It has no features any military would be interested in, no weapons, no subterfuge. I built it because I could. And because I want to go and listen to the dark places in the world. The sun never reaches those places.”
“But there’s explorer submarines, with portholes and lights…”
“The dark places are darker than you can imagine. No matter how powerful they are, light can only penetrate a short distance. The darkness pushes back, and pushes back mightily. Sound, on the other hand, the darkness has no beef with. The darkness is perfectly willing to allow sound to pass. To swim back and forth through its realm. I can’t tell you why that’s so, but it is.”
“What do you expect to hear down there?”
“Who can tell? Anything and nothing, maybe. First though, I’ll be able to navigate by sound. That alone is a mechanical feat that will provide me with a kind of mechanical satisfaction. And a sensory satisfaction as well, since it is akin to seeing with one’s ears. Beyond that, there are also other sounds in the darkness. Things that nobody knows what they are. I want to go listen.”
“And figure out where they come from?”
“Perhaps. But more than that, I just want to hear things no one else has heard. Fresh sounds, new musics, pure creation from out of the dark of the unknown. Where else could creativity comes from, if not from the darkness? The dark of the deep is maybe like the dark inside your skull — it will always be pure dark in your skull. No light is likely to enter there until after you are dead. While you are living, the darkness is where your thoughts, your creativity, where you come from, if your mind is you, which mostly it is. Maybe in the dark of the world is where some larger creativity, some larger mind could come from. If so, the only way we’ll ever know is by listening for it, since sound is permitted to pass freely, and light is not. I am going to go listen.”