The Wake

On one side of an impassive avenue tall industry silos flower service roads
and lots filled with gravel, creeping vine, and light green weeds that
split into bunches of three seriated leaves clasping rust colored buds.
Between this avenue and a long river terminating in an enormous gulf many
latitudes away he observes a spacious dichromatic tableland. The river runs
a somnolent pace a dim blue color occasionally muddy. The ovate plateau
level with the avenue is a few comfortable stories above the river. In
defiance of what would be a weeded and bushy elm tree hazed ravine the
inhabitants have cleared flats and maintained turf with which they
appreciate the absolutely muddy beaches and associatively hued water.
Frequently food is hauled down. The meats are cooked over small heaps of
burning charcoal clumps. The fruit is diced or left whole to be eaten with
fingers. Most times though a sparse but noticeable population of men expose
their tanned bellies to the sun on secluded liminal bars of sand. Women
never do this down on the would-be ravine. They accept the sun’s exuberance
atop the plateau on more crafted turfs bordered by regimented buildings
primarily made of brick. Symbols and faces are carved into the cement
entablatures so that they read and watch the knolls. Inside these buildings
a daily tour of cloth and rubber clad feet busy themselves with scheduled
congregations where they voice familiar noises by agitating the air in
their throats. These noises have a prime value for the tableland because
they are studiously recorded by hand dictation, but ultimately it is this
dictation later compiled and printed in uniform texts that matter for it
captures these ephemeral voices for others.
At night in a cement quarter on the plateau where no grass grows other
brick and also wood buildings flower black asphalt lanes that autonomous
cars idle and move upon. They occasionally stop along these avenues. This
quarter is the market. The buildings bear no imperious entablatures like
the other quarter, but employ symbols in a more commercial fashion. The
symbols read on printed banners and the occasionally fastened wood letters
esoteric names that correspond to their building’s wares by an
understanding only gained from the initiation of entering them. At night
this quarter burns lights through a little understood electrical process
where sometimes a minute filament of tungsten or alloy is heated inside a
clear globe producing a fine conical brilliance. More pervasive are the
tubes filled with certain gases like neon that are agitated by electricity
to produce an ostentatious invitation. By these lights he knows that he
will be received inside by questions of ‘what do you want?’ which can
easily be parleyed by ‘what do you have”. In some he is promptly demanded
to proffer a paper currency that can be traded for wares and a plastic card
bearing his portrait and other symbols.
What is common to these buildings is an air of sounds similar to that other
imperious quarter. However these sounds repose comfortably inside the
buildings between groups of two, or three, or four. They are not taken
seriously and never recorded unless clandestinely scribed by a solitary one
not speaking. Although not fundamental to the population as the studious
congregations are, the carefree noises deserve the same fascination. Their
sonorous air compliments the patrons’ consumption of various liquids by a
reassurance and appreciation. Finally at a certain point in the electrical
light effaced darkness all quarters lose their people due to an unexplained
lack of interest, but the market is always last to close. Then when the
emptiness converges on silence the lights have no purpose and are shut off
for use again during the next darkness.
Yet despite the solemnity of the grassy quarter and its primacy in
architecture the lighted market seems more luxuriant. Its blinking symbols
and animated voices that spontaneously bark out into rifts of hilarity and
touching have a more insightful air. It is at least a more joyous reception
to impermanence than that other industrious oratory and oblivious
dictation.