CITIES OF OBLIVION

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CITIES OF OBLIVION

BY STEPHEN BARBER

AN EBOOK

ISBN 978-1-909923-19-5

PUBLISHED BY ELEKTRON EBOOKS

COPYRIGHT 2013 ELEKTRON EBOOKS

www.elektron-ebooks.com

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a database or retrieval system, posted on any internet site, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright holders. Any such copyright infringement of this publication may result in civil prosecution

PROLOGUE

Once, there were cities.

By the time I had climbed the eighty-five flights of marble stairs to the summit of the Baiyoke Tower, night had fallen on the redundant megalopolis below.

Although the high-speed elevator had ceased to work at the time of the engulfing digital crash of four weeks earlier, the rotating observatory of the tower still functioned, propelled by an autonomous pulley-mechanism that made it invulnerable to the global malfunction which had arrested all computer-controlled machinery. At the top of the final stairway, I hesitated before stepping out onto the revolving wooden deck of the observatory, which creaked and wailed as it passed through its endlessly repeated circuits. While the rest of the tower had been constructed to maximal standards of precision-engineering and programming, the observatory itself appeared to have been assembled by last-minute improvisation, from an amalgam of untreated wood and raw steel. The observatory’s windows had no protective glass, and the shock of the megalopolis below immediately penetrated them and entered my eyes. As the windows passed by in their revolving sequence, I remembered a fragment of a book I had looked at earlier that night, in which the devices of the human technology known as ‘cinema’ had been catalogued. With only a scrap of one page remaining from the otherwise pulped book, it had been impossible to know whether those illustrations demonstrated the earliest inventions of that technology’s masters, or the final ones; in any case, those revolving windows of the Baiyoke Tower’s observatory triggered an involuntary memory of the sprocket-holes and image-frames of that now-vanished technology of the human species: ‘film’.

I finally stepped out onto the splintered surface of the observatory’s deck, towards its open-air windows, then peered through one of those gaping apertures into the megalopolis below. The first impacts of humid air-turbulence from an end-of-season typhoon were heading in from the south-east, and at first, I had to grip the rust-encrusted sides of the window in order to maintain my balance. Sheets of horizontal rainfall formed an intermediate layer of distortion between the tower’s summit and the face of the megalopolis, as though I were staring into the opacity of celluloid, and it took a while for my eyes to see through to ground-level. All the time, the observatory deck kept turning, performing its revolution in the span of ten minutes; soon, the typhoon was battering against the opposite side of the observatory, and I could begin to scan what remained of the megalopolis. Each of the thousands of great eighty-storey towers of that megalopolis’s heart had now been rendered inoperative, with only emergency generator-powered lighting still capable of illuminating a random scattering of each tower’s corporate spaces. That illumination now formed a skeletal configuration of light, wildly erratic as it rose up through the otherwise-darkened towers, towards the night sky, as though those convulsing towers had become experiments in the search for a new human anatomy. Every one of the immense digital image screens attached to the summits of those towers had now been terminally annulled, and their advertising image-sequences and corporate exclamations had instantly disintegrated into the air; all that remained visible now were the vast, gaping surfaces from which those images had once been transmitted. The rest of the megalopolis was calmly deliquescing, as it settled into its annulment. Void zones, each the size of a city in its own right, had opened out between that megalopolis’s arterial avenues, where a few cars of archaic vintage still operated their battery-powered headlights as they drove in futile trajectories from place to place, consuming their final fuel resources. But even from the deepest zones of darkness, the megalopolis still emanated a shimmering haze – a tenuous mirage of itself – as though its pixellated particles remained in the process of slow evanescence. That haze rose vertically from ground level, seemingly alive and formed of faintly glittering microbes, until its ascendant course collided with that of the horizontal rush of the typhoon; then, that digital debris dispersed into invisibility, beyond the scope of the human eye.

If time still existed, almost a month had now passed since the all-consuming calamity which had annulled every computer-powered technology and object in every city of the world. The world itself had been near-erased by that disaster, since those technologies had become inseparably integral to its urban fabric and to the corporeal life of its inhabitants. Cities themselves had almost disappeared, and megalopolises even more acutely so. Most of the world’s urban inhabitants had simply fled their cities and were now trying to re-build a rural existence in the planet’s long-contaminated wildernesses, as far from the cities as they could reach. A few die-hards remained in the city, out of obstinacy or aberrance. But life was no longer tenable in the city. All that had survived the digital crash were a few scarce and eroding urban fragments, infinitely precious in the face of the void around them.

Worse still, the memory of the cities of the world, and of their histories, had vanished in the instant of the digital crash – all knowledge, all images of cities had gone, transformed into cyber-ash, and cast into oblivion. And the power of human memory itself had been irreparably shredded in that instant.

I have a good memory, and I made my livelihood through it, before the digital crash. What exactly I did, I have no memory. But on the twenty-seventh night after the calamity, I was assigned my mission.

After an evening of wandering in the near-deserted alleyways of the megalopolis, I returned to my room.

The door had been forced open, but since the room contained almost nothing, no trace of disturbance was evident. Nothing had gone, but something had been left – a small jute sack had been propped against a chair, and had toppled over, spilling its contents across the floor. I picked up the scraps of brittle paper – pages torn from books that had become redundant. I realised that I held in my hands everything that survived of the world’s paper-based knowledge of cities – and now, with the utter erasure of all digitised knowledge, those fragments held the entirety of the knowledge of cities: the history and memory of cities. A note had been pinned to the sack. The scrawl in squid-ink was the work of someone inhabituated to handwriting, and it took some minutes to decipher the first few lines of black marks. Finally, I read: ‘Read all this, then incinerate it. Then see the silent woman, 3am, Murnau Club, Alley 33’. The last line remained obscure.

I sat on the floor and looked through the surviving pages of the books of cities. Those pages appeared to have been ripped-out at random from now-vanished books. Some pages had been torn, crushed, screwed-up or holed, as though traversed by match-flames held beneath the paper, while others had been simply rolled in dirt. Those pages were in many languages, but each language had been subjected to the same damage. Over the space of two hours of reading, I acquired the entirety of the extant knowledge, memory and history of cities. It quickly became clear that the human species had possessed an urgent obsession to write accounts of its cities, as though aware that those cities would soon elude the act of writing, or had already done so. But, each time I began to grasp what each writer of cities had to say, the fragment ended and the lettering disappeared into thin-air, over the edge of the page. Some writers had denounced the cities in which they lived, and called for the creation of utopian cities, or else the resuscitation of glorious cities of the past, that would supplant the cities that had fallen under malediction.

Other writers acknowledged that their cities had become blighted, or wounded by incessant conflict, but argued that those wounds of the city could be sutured, by one means or another, over time. And other writers appeared to have become strangely attached to the blight of their cities, and defended it, as though it were a salutary source of exhilaration or desire. One or two writers of an omniscient disposition seemed even to be accurately anticipating the erasure of their habitat, perhaps with the aim of generating new visions of the megalopolis, but it remained unclear; as soon as they had worked themselves into a state of delirious excitement about the annulling of their accursed megalopolises, the fragment abruptly ended. It was a struggle to get through the entire sackful of pages, and my eyes began to ache. In the end, I grew exasperated, and cast aside the last handful of pages – though later, I was haunted by the sensation that those few unread pages might have been precisely the ones that could have revealed to me an authentic account of the city, and thereby helped me with my mission.

Together with those pages, I had found a single page on the technologies of the medium of cinema, mixed-up by error with the accounts of the city.

I took the mass of pages in my arms and crammed them all back into the jute sack, then clenched my fist around the opening and sent the sack spinning round, so that those fragments blurred, scrambled over one another, in their darkness. Then I went down into the alley, lit a match and set the sack on fire; it burned in the darkness for a minute or two, until its entire contents had been incinerated and the final ashes were dispersing upwards into the pixel-filled sky over the megalopolis.

I reached the Murnau Club, in Alley 33, just before 3am. The golden-neon sign over the entrance to the bar was still working, powered by an emergency generator. But the club was empty, and its clientele had fled. Although I could remember only one previous visit, the proprietor welcomed me as though I had spent a lifetime of nights there. I asked him: ‘Do you have someone who is silent working here now?’ He pointed to a tall woman of eighteen or nineteen in a midnight blue evening dress, with waist-length, jet-black hair, who stood behind the bar, as though stranded, staring straight ahead, and dancing in minute movements, from side to side:

‘She’s from Naples, from the peripheries of Naples. Or, at least, I think so: she hasn’t spoken a word for the entire time she’s been here. She arrived at the exact moment of the calamity – it must have taken away her power of speech, and seared her retinas too. But who wants to say anything or see anything now, anyway? I’ll introduce you.’

The woman seemed oblivious to the presence and words of the proprietor. She was beautiful, shockingly so. In the end, the proprietor had to pour a beer for me himself. Finally, I looked into the eyes of the silent woman. As the proprietor had said, her retinas had been seared in some way, and now compulsively emanated iridescent images of cities that transformed, meshed and mutated from moment to moment – those near-black surfaces seemed to carry a profound transmission, as though all of the now-vanished cities of the world had impacted themselves into those eyes, intact, at the precise instant before the digital crash, and held their sole existence there: their only remaining point of communication with the annulled contemporary world. But I could look for only a few seconds, before my gaze disintegrated, and I turned away.

I drank down the Angkor beer and told the proprietor I would return the next night. The woman remained where she was, still minutely dancing, her eyes brilliantly inflamed with the images of the city.

Then I stood outside, in the light of the club’s neon-sign, and tried again to decipher the scrawled note I had found pinned to the sack of pages. This time, in that acetylene glare, I thought I could make out the last line: ‘…try to remember, to remember the city…’. I headed for the Baiyoke Tower.

1

Even without memory, the image survives, the body survives, and obsession survives.

At 3am the following morning, I left my empty room and headed for Alley 33 and the Murnau Club.

I walked under the triple-layered concrete overpasses that had once carried the megalopolis’s dense traffic and mass-transit trains, and had now fallen almost silent, the once-virulent warning screens high above the carriageways still bleeding a digital slick from their void surfaces. At ground level, a few lost souls still moved on foot among the alleyways, their eyes scanning the walls of buildings and the faces of other wanderers, but when they encountered one another and stared into each other’s faces, they saw nothing and recognised nothing, like empty facades clashing and cancelling one another out. It seemed as though the digital crash of four weeks earlier had violently jarred their consciousness out of synch, with an irreparable impact, so that it was now suspended beyond the spatial parameters of their heads, floating a foot or so off to one side, or propelled into some parallel universe in which everything was still functioning perfectly, the digital and the human in optimum unison within the city.

The neon sign above the Murnau Club had fused and extinguished itself, the last remaining life in the emergency generator used-up on the previous night.

But inside, a few flickering light-bulbs and candles illuminated the space. The woman in the midnight blue evening dress still stood behind the bar, dancing as before, in minute convulsions, side to side. All that had changed was that her lips had been painted vermilion, one shade deeper in intensity than her dress. Again, the club was empty apart from its dispirited proprietor, and the woman was just as oblivious to my presence as on the previous night, as I sat on a bar stool, at eye level with her; again, the proprietor poured the contents of an Angkor beer-bottle for me, muttering as he did so.

The woman’s eyes remained permanently open, unless the interval of their blinking was so rapid, infinitely faster than any lens, that their blur eluded my gaze – but I could imagine that the hidden surface of her eyelids bore a peripheral imprint of the searing that her retinas had endured, at the instant when the surviving traces of the vanished cities of the world had been marked upon those retinas; the delicate skin under her eyelashes carried a few minuscule black spots of damage inflicted by