Dopecentury XLV --- The Rains
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 rains came, typically, in the fall, or maybe the late summer.
The rain came when, on one day the hot air pushing up the coast from the south might invert and lock down and let the city bake under clear skies and a cooking sun for a day or three; And then a colder air mass would thrust its way down from the north, somehow always drawn directly to the bite in the coast where the huge city was located; and that cold air would slam into the stationary mass of heat, like titans colliding in a turf war; the hot and the cold would grapple, twist turn, and the heat would be raised up and up taking a bunch of water vapor with it; water that would eventually find some particulate high in the atmosphere, some speck of dust climbing upward on a thermal jet emitted from one of the smokestacks lined up across the industrial region far below; and the water in the air would congeal around the speck of pollution gathering itself to itself, progressing from vapor to condensate to drop, until gravity began to assert itself on the mass of the water and suck at the liquid, drawing it down like a newborn sucking at its mother's teat, shaping the liquid to that the greatest mass of it pooled at the bottom, even as the air pushed back at the liquid and drew the drop to a drip, with a pointed hat on top.
The drip was not alone of course; it had comrades and compatriots all around; they banded together and followed the first few brave leaders downward in a suicide mission to attack the city; many armies of drops had followed this battle plan before, dashing themselves against the city in an effort to overcomes its defenses; in some rare instances those defenses were indeed entirely overwhelmed — on occasion the city had suffered incredible damage under the most ferocious attacks of the shoulder season rains; in most cases though the city's ample defenses prevailed; ultimately prevailed maybe, but not always without some somewhat dire outcomes.
For the drips would come down in a band, but the charge while in the sky would remain dispersed distinct and discrete, each drip it's own drop, each drip unique and desperately embracing its little piece of pollution.
But once on the ground, the drips would seek out their neighbors and not just band together, but bind together; they would bind with their neighbors, and find those that had gone before and bind with them, and welcome those that they knew would follow afterwards to also join in the bind; bind and bind and bind, and grow and flow and fill; on the ground but always still moving downwards, always trying to find a lower place, always sucked below even when forced to move tangentially (sometimes for great distances before finding some path or crack or crevice or pipe or outlet that would let them go farther below).
The rains would come down, and the water would bind and gather, and eventually, most importantly (from the perspective of the rain) pool; pooling was the indicator that the attack was going well; pooling was a slow-down, of course, but it was also a way to gather strength; more than that, it was the way to apply strength, pooling was wear all the damage could be done, and pooling was the first step toward flooding.
Flooding was the goal, of course: bind and gather and bind and pool until there was so much water that the rains could overrun the cities defenses, spread out and outward and across the areas that were supposed to remain immune to the will of the rains: take the streets, take the sidewalks, fill basements and plow through storefronts and turn parks into mud pits; in a typical attack of any force, some flooding was usually achieved, but the damage was often limited.
The minor victory that could be achieved with some regularity — say every two weeks on average — was to back up the sewers; for this old city had a single system (brilliant in its initial intention, engineering, and construction: they would get the water from storms off the streets by dumping it down into the sewer system they already had, hell the water was making its way to the sewer anyway, why not design the system to handle it?); But that single system suffered as the years passed under the weight and the mass and the increasing population load of the city — and then the storm got worse.
And now the rains came with enough forces that when the bulk of the storm water made its way to those old sewer pipes, it gather and bind, now not just with other drips from the sky, but with this powerful new weapon: raw sewage; and the gathering and binding and pooling — especially the pooling — would raise up that foulness from the depths it had been consigned to, up it would come carrying its pestilence, its stench of decay and disease and rot, molten with noisome miasma, and rising upwards, crawling upwards, pooling and gathering more, and not pulled downward by gravity so much any longer as it was forced upward by the sheer mass of the invading armies of the rains.
But what was this? The city retained yet one last defense against the onslaught of the rains and the rising sewage: the rising course of the sewage was sloughed off and redirected to the overflow pipes! Above the main sewer pipes, this failsafes waited for these days (that came more and more frequently) when the sewer pipes to the treatment plant could no longer take all the sewage and stormwater combined; but "$fie on the possibility of allowing the sewage to back up to the streets and the basements!" said the water managers of the city; better to allow it to run into the river.
So that was the partial victory the rains regularly achieved: gather, bind, pool with the raw sewage, rise again and attach again! but all too often fall back along the lines the city defenses laid out: down the overflow pipes into the river, and there to bind, gather and pool and grow and make a way out to the ocean, and bring along the found weapon of the raw sewage and deliver it to the ocean where maybe it is diluted and lost in the vastness.
Or maybe it gathers and binds there, and pools and bides its time before it rises up again.