Discothèque

Content Warning: The story contains themes or mentions of physical violence, gore, and abuse

“I think I'll buy the flowers myself”, I say to absolutely no one, a tad loudly, a tad wired, chuckling sensibly to myself as I stitch my headphones in and leave my apartment.

On the news, a man says something about leaked reports from the International Space Station: several large objects, about the size of the station itself, materialized out of what is believed to be nowhere, and stand (or sit or lie) unmoving, some four hundred kilometers from earth. They haven’t attacked the station, or us, for which I’m sure we’re grateful. They seem to be just sitting there, watching.

It’s all very convoluted, and I still have my day to go about, so I switch to some music.

The weather’s alright, if a bit cold. The light is wonderful. The leaves in the tree in front of me are slowly moving in patches, catching the light just so, swish swishing around.

The building a bit further down has weird looking windows, ripe banana yellow, seemingly made of plastic. It’s otherwise quite austere, very large and brutal and dark, giving off a très sci-fi vibe.

Babies are crying, a man is yelling imprecations at the crowd at large. An aggressively white woman (™), dressed in a camel ensemble with large sunglasses, waltzes in with her freshly done balayage, carrying a fake smile like you’d carry a nine millimeter. She is unceremoniously rebuked by one of the security peeps, sent to the back of the line with the people she refuses to acknowledge.

Of course she’ll not have it.

A screaming match ensues, someone loses their headphones, a phone breaks. More screams, despair, weariness and general irritation permeate this wonderful moment in time.

The line is longer than I expected, even after all the warnings I’ve gotten from people who’ve had to inhabit them in the past, of them being hell on earth. I go back to the leaves, swaying listlessly, a swarm with no particular goal, hoping to take my mind off the kerfuffle.

Having massively benefited from the color of my skin up to this point, and my education, and the fact that my ancestors definitely colonized most of these people’s lands to get a little extra cash, a little spending money, I will never understand what these people go through, what their everyday struggles are. I try to make myself small, uncharacteristically, putting my hands in my expensive coat to warm them slightly as I try to occupy myself by looking at the poor sobs also here to get their residence permit.

A man’s eyelids are quite taught over his eyeballs, a little swollen and tender looking, and a few shades darker and redder than the rest of his face. I can't help but wonder what the color of his asshole is. Not obscenely, just out of curiosity. Another is wearing a peculiar coat, texture like rolled oolong - no way to know if it’s a thousand years old and has been worn and mended to no end, or if it’s an expensive designer piece.

Some kids, I'm assuming from a high school sports team by the way they’re being herded by a tall, gangly man wearing an ill-fitting red track suit, red face to match, have fuzz on their upper lip, like geranium leaves after a long day in the sun. Presumably they smell differently.

A distinguished lady, face beautifully made-up, wears an off-white turban with dozens of pearls like so many eyes, reminding me of a mythological creature, of a surveillance state.

As my entertainment of the moment threatens to sour, I switch gears and falter, a woman poping out of my blindspot unannounced. I swerve dangerously back into reality, impossible now to avoid engaging the fauna directly. I take a deep breath and ready a smile.

She’s really close, blaring an amiable visage, a hump on her back large enough to make gipsy princesses fall in love. She’s cleverly decorated it, the hump, with gaudy diamond-imitation brooches pinned to an aggressively fuschia sweater, something the Queen must have worn once, I’m sure, or Joan Rivers sometime in the ‘70s. Her bottom part is fully covered in a long, heavily embroidered skirt - I don't see her feet, I decide she must have none. Her lips are impressively painted with a cheap, cakey lipstick extended to her teeth. She smiles softly, kindly, a scent wafting from her petite figure musky and high pitched like a tobacco flower’s, or newly hatched roses, or apple-cidery piss. I’m sort of flabbergasted by the audacity of it all, barely noticing her pointing excitedly at the roof of the yellow-windowed building where a man stands, ready to jump.

And then he does.

He jumps.

The crowd of spectators gasps as one, the effect pretty impressive.

The man, for some reason, doesn't fall. He remains stuck in mid air.

Re-gasp from the crowd, then a pause. Then a scream of pure rage.

“It’s been happening more and more.” the woman says, either wincing or winking, hard to say with her complicated features. “No more gravity, it seems.”

Her cadence, when she speaks, is nothing if not painfully charming, honey dew to this otherwise acerbic day - a frank timber, not unlike a young Joni Mitchell’s. I avoid letting her know her last sentence made absolutely no sense, afraid it would open a Pandora’s box of what works and doesn’t work in this world, and I’m frankly just not equipped for that discussion right now. As she hobbles lightly (she may have feet after all!) the brooches on her lump catch the sun’s light and transform her briefly into a blinding disco ball, making me recoil, making this maybe the most interesting moment of her life.

Maybe mine.

“... everything sucked out.” she mumbles, perhaps a witch.

Having been brought up properly-ish, I acquiesce politely, much obliged and all, trying to keep my attention on the non-falling man, now less enraged, now resolved.

“Oh!” she exclaims.

“What.” I reply drily, not looking at her.

“The blood, it’s showing!”

She’s staring at my hands, not in horror but in worry, like she wants to warn me of something caught in my teeth.

“Don’t show it”, she says meekly. Because I might benefit from it, in turn, is what I think she means, hoping for some trickle down privilege that’ll never come.

Police cars, ambulances and firetrucks are now all gathered around, rotating lights akimbo, getting rigs and ladders and very manly, mechanical looking things out of their vehicles, most probably to lower the now sadly whimpering man out of his uncomfortable predicament.

We’re being displaced to another line, a familiar feeling to a lot of my queueing colleagues. The infinite queue goes back to being uncivilized, testing my patience. I calm myself and remind myself that I don’t know the rage or restlessness or fear of needing papers to be able to work or live somewhere. Not truly, not really.

Our destination is not so much a line as it is a pen, with people standing up, pell mell, eyes staring into the void, cattle waiting to become burgers. The tableau is lit frankly by a cold sun, coating the haggard faces like an early Manet. I swear I can hear a church choir sing something overly dramatic.

Someone arrives at a very similar level of impatience as I imagine myself to have approached and throws a brick to a window, shattering it.

“They’re in there!” yells he. “We can take them, our papers are in there, we can…” I stop listening and put on some music quite loudly. It’s all become a bit much, I’ll hurry over tomorrow to stand on their corpses. Hopefully suicide boy will be down by then, maybe even put down if anyone has any mercy in this godforsaken world.

The woman wishes me farewell with a hundred deafening smiles. I barely catch one of the security guards saying, gloomily “I didn't sign up for this…” as he removes his fluorescent green-yellow vest and starts going towards what I imagine to be a better life. I follow suit, thinking of which colors of flowers I should get.

I don't really know, personally, how it feels to go into someone else's country and destabilize it voluntarily in order to steal its resources, or put in a more sympathetic regime (mainly for resources, keep up) and displace huge swathes of its population. But I do know how it feels to benefit from it all massively, and barely question why I have all of this, what the lion king showed his kid, all of it in the sun. The thought melts as quickly as a war torn country’s population, and I delve into the metro’s mouth, thinking of ways to spin this tale to make it interesting for my next brunch, for my next audience. I’ll surely conjugate it with a new allergy I’ve recently self-diagnosed, or perhaps with a sprinkle of adult ADHD. I go down a flight of stairs made of tiled white walls and ceilings, reflecting the harsh metro lighting in a way that makes it all sort of move like a giant, writhing white snake. I graze my knuckles on the tiles just to feel something. The skin shears, no blood, or very little - mainly pink skin on top of bone mounds.

The color is fascinating, like pink peonies. The pain is soothing, sharp - a companion for my ride home.

At the rails, on the TVs, the news is showing the space station and very agitated people. Everyone’s staring at the screens. They say the unidentified objects have all disappeared, all at once, and that one of them seems to have appeared in some city whose name I don’t catch. On the tickers, “God fell to earth” and “What does it want?” speed through, among other inane titles. A man starts crying as the train arrives.

A woman, tightly scrunched in a two-piece, secondhand dark-green suit, string-roasted with dreads on top and a loose yellow t-shirt, going to work, going IN the train, going places, to work, work, busy busy busy, tries to overtake me in the line, or what I thought to be a line. I try to block her with a raised arm and end up getting pushed violently to the ground. I'd like to say I turn back to spit in her face, or punch her or yell at her, but I do no such thing, soft as I am, weak as I am. I remain on the ground as she passes my limp, untoned body unceremoniously, calling me something that rhymes with baguette. I respond weakly with something bookended with “fucking” and “cunt”.

It's always the girls, in my experience, who lay the sneakiest violence. With dudes, you get punched in the face - there’s something clear about that. And a bit sexy, not gonna lie.

A man begs in the train, whining loudly about his life. It sounds fake. He’s got a cane and walks terribly submissively, in a pantomime of poorness. I wonder how I would cosplay as a poor, were I in a similar situation. I take out fifty cents and ask him if he’d blow me for it. He looks at me quizzically, starts whining again, and lunges for the cash money bling. I put it back in my pocket. Perhaps he starts crying, I don't know, I’ve already put my headphones back in, looking straight ahead, away from this distasteful transgression no witness bore - one of the few subtle pleasures of being alone in a crowd that actively tries to ignore every and all human interaction.

Is the price of human dignity fifty cents? Not the singer, the coin. The man wobbles away, reminding me of the woman from this morning. They might be siblings, in sorcery. He sobs in anguish, groans in agony, screams and shrieks and falls into a puddle of his own dirty tears.

On my way home, hard techno thundering in my ears, I imagine the rocks and twigs and used condoms under my feet to be the cadavers of the tens of hundreds of millions of women and children and men who’ve built this very city, my dancing feet crick cracking on their bones and dreams as I turn to the first store next to the station without thinking. Truly a luxury, not to check where you shop, not to think of prices. I pick up overpriced bananas and some nuts. I’d like to say I do this mindfully, this transaction, for some grand idea that if the people who can afford better quality food pay the heavier price, then higher demand should drive the prices down so that everyone can access it. I’ll definitely say that in polite conversation with friends, but I believe no such thing.

I know kindness exists, I've seen it in others. I lost mine when I was told it was probably my fault the world was going to shits, because I once put cardboard in the plastic recycling bin; when I was told, repeatedly, that there would be no money left for me when I wanted to retire, and that all the pollution in the water was caused by me when I peed that one time, in a lake in a remote village no one’s ever heard of. I’m sure at some point in time shame worked magic on people’s values, but for me it’s just made me care less and less, now everything a sort of game with no substance, feeling no actual connection to the world I’m supposed to be living in.

I wonder sometimes if I believe in anything at all.

The god has been found. That’s what we now call the structure, it being vaguely anthropomorphic. It seems to want to appear bipedal, from what I gather from the images projected to us, yet it keeps oscillating between states, making it look more like an assemblage of those packs of cigarettes with the disembodied body parts, you know the ones. It looks like it wants to communicate.

We’re shown images of the army surrounding it, with tanks and drones and other whatnots, and some priests and monks also gathered around in order to make sure it’s understood properly from all angles. The world holds its breath as it opens what is believed to be its mouth. The entire welcoming party is annihilated, camera crew included.

Of course, more people and more guns are sent to meet it.

It shrinks in size - from building size to house size, a small one, a bungalow. It tries again to speak, without a mouth this time, directly into people's minds. More and more people on the planet are hearing it, although it seems to be mainly gibberish.

I tap my debit card slightly impatiently, another luxury I partake in, to let yourself become visibly annoyed with service industry employees, and put my overpriced bananas in a plastic bag. The clerk, pimples on his chin I’d like to pop weren’t I so disgusted with the idea of touching people, isn’t looking at me, is looking at the news, mouth agape. I put my hand in his tip jar, unabashedly, and take out a few dollars. He notices absolutely nothing, to my great dissatisfaction.

I get home, finally, putting my keys and other paraphernalia on the commode next to my door like it’s an art exhibition. I like to believe that everything has to be arranged just so, spaced just so, so as to construct a magic circle, a dance of sorts, an incantation or protective spell continuously adjusted. I congratulate myself on having done absolutely nothing worthwhile all day and have a pastry as I run myself a bath.

The god finally speaks intelligibly, not in any particular language but we all understand it.

“i”

“bEAr”

“A seED”

Its skin is like bark eaten by weevils, like lungs open on a surgery table, lines going outwards in wing-like patterns made of nooks, made of the sculpted fabric of reality. It has no eyes, has a lot of teeth. I guess they could be horns, or just bad skin, but I don’t have time to think on it as the news just… stops.

My phone’s screen has gone black, reflecting my face, a dark mirror like a pond to its Narcissus. I turn on the TV, vestige of days gone - white noise, solely, somewhat beautifully, somewhat like a nostalgic, heavy snowfall.

My bath is warm, the windows are half opened, dragging in the crisp, cold spring air. A flower scented oil gives the overall experience a very tacky feel, yet I soak in it, luxuriantly, eating, munching, crunching on a canelé. No flowers bought today, perhaps tomorrow, perhaps never.

A car is burning just outside my apartment. People are running in the streets, some with backpacks and panic stricken children in tow, some with baseball bats already caked in others’ blood.

An alarm, city-wide, starts booming.

The world descends into chaos. I can now finally rest.

Look at the streets. Approximate fluorescent lines on the bitumen criss cross in a dance we’ll never understand, mainly because we’ll never have tried to give it sense - the dance of a city, with all its shapes and smells and colors amalgamated.

Zoom out. Further.

Out, out out.

Look at the totality of the world we live in, its four billion odd years. Do you see it? Now look at the light it emits, in pulses, scattered around its surface. You may think them bombs, destroying the world, but see them as a cell coming to life.

A lull, then a final pulse: a language. The cell extends to another, in what you may have once considered to be our solar system. But you now see, truly, what it is for what it is, as our planet, our cell, links itself to another. Then another.

Then a billion.

Something stirs in the night, and you think to yourself:

“I hate white people.”