Dopecentury IV --- Rise and Fall
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.
Those in the know gathered in the atrium of the museum. Three stories high and walls of blank bright white. The white above contrasted with the dark stone of the floor below, and the dark tints worn by those in the know.
There was milling about. There were drinks in hand. There were asymmetrically-cut frocks and dresses. There were handbags — large ones from last season, tiny ones from this season. The handbags turned this way and that, the large ones looking as if they were hunting for smaller ones to prey upon. There were considered shoes — some with sharp points from this season, some with bloated soles from last season. The points turned back and forth, looking as if they were seeking a bloated sole to puncture and deflate. And there was work done. So much work done. The faces carved up, pulled stretched and torn, and then discreetly sewn back together again. Or stuck with needles and filled with poisonous goo that inflamed the passions of the skin and gave it a new-found, if somewhat brittle, youth.
The sound of the conversation drifted upward and bounced off the empty walls.
The millers-about clung close to the walls, like the frothy film of a detergent clings to the water’s edge. This may have been from some comfort garnered by having one’s back to a wall, or the better to watch the crowd with little fear of missing the action. But the primary reason most millers-about avoided the center of the floor is that it was thoroughly occupied, apparently filled with danger.
Stacked up to ten feet high, the center of the atrium was filled with what appeared to be a conglomeration of rusting pieces of scrap steel. Mostly it was in the form of thin steel tubes, perhaps dropped at random on the floor, and then welded where they fell, like some enormous version of pick-up-sticks frozen permanently in place. But there were also more substantial bits: rusting diamond-plate cut and fitted to places on the frame, sheet steel hammered and welded to create geometric bodies and voids, bent rebar in huge curves that gave the feel of an organic body to all the lifeless metal. It was all metal, rickety and towering tall in the center of the atrium. Toward the center of the mass, a frame of steel tubes was welded around the diesel engine of a large boat.
Security men — almost all men, large men in dark tight-fitting suits — stood a tasteful but forceful distance apart in a circle around the center of the room, further discouraging the millers-about from milling toward the center of the space.
At the appointed time a curator got on the PA and called for silence. Attention was held, and the creator, without preamble, stepped past the ring of guards in among the towering metal. The creator climbed a few footholds, made a few final adjustments, and then pressed the starter for the diesel engine. With a whine and a choking exhale of poisonous black cloud, the diesels churned and fired, and the sound of it rattled off the bare walls and the ceiling. Many of the millers-about set their drinks on the floor and put their fingers into their ears, but squinted with close attention to the rattling and rolling diesel engine heart.
With the engine running smoothly, the creator stepped down, then leaned in, threw a lever and skipped backward out into the clear zone beyond the security ring.
The engine ran for another half a minute or so before there began to be a slow movement from the center of the pile of steel. At first, nothing more than a shift of weight and a shudder that passed through the whole frame. Then some huge thing rolled over in the center of the mass.
A minute after that, something akin to a head rose from the middle. A giant round mass of metal with a jaw that hung open and a steady drip of black oil that feel from its chin. The head climbed upward, maybe it was staring upward? Did it aim for the ceiling?
But the neck-like mass of tubes alone did not have the capacity to lift the massive head very far. The thing needed more to support it, and now a body of a sort, mostly composed of the frame surrounding the diesel engine, rose slowly beneath the head. And from the body an arm, thick with sinuous twisted rebar, and capped with a massive fist of diamond-plate that came down to the floor until its knuckles crunched with the weight it supported above.
And now, what could only be called a leg, formed and lifted to a kneeling position. With a frame of a body beneath it, the head moved upward steadily now, until it was within ten feet of the ceiling. The diesel was screaming now with the effort of driving the form and its kinetic action, soaking up fuel and streaming out hot exhaust that flowed upward, cooled, and settled back down to choke the crowd.
It all moved with the slow motion of a heavy mass getting up to speed. Slow and unrelenting motion forward, upward, and with more of the sculptural body revealing itself.
And then a critical strut in the leg snapped.
All the extra material welded on could not save it. The strut snapped, and a piece of steel tube flew across the space and embedded in the wall.
The leg collapsed on itself. The thing took on a precarious list. The head tilted over until it rested against a wall, and as it slowly lost its support the head slid down the wall leaving a black scar of oil and rust.
The structure lost its integrity. The body/diesel engine collapsed straight downward. But the arm twisted, turned, and snapped off at the elbow. Twenty feet of rebar twisted into a pillar ten feet thick snapped off under stress and tilted outward, leaned over, and came crashing down on the millers-about. Blood mixed with oil, and screams mixed with the diesel engine.
There was no kill switch. No emergency-off or evasive safety maneuver. The thing had to be left to run its course. While that course might to some of those in the room have seemed like it would destroy the museum, in a cold assessment of the event afterward, it was decided that most of what the thing was doing in those final moments was collapsing in on itself. That it groped with a few final gestures of destruction and casualty was to be expected, but as an event, insisted the experts, it should be understood as one of self-destruction. The thing had never been intended to complete its rise. It was to power up, form itself, climb, and fall before it even stood. The wounded were merely collateral damage in the process of creating art.