by Dan Muenzer
Glance in those tinted windows and all you’ll spy is the reflection of a dirty cloud. Investigate any nearer and you’ll catch the crowd in a ring, elongated and polarized. They’ve arrived from all four corners of the park like ants toward a crumb. Solar noon flares on the hubcaps and trembles over asphalt. The limousine slouches over its burst wheel as though it were melting.
Did luxury lose itself on its way to the airport? Nothing here to buy or to see, just the carious jut of tenements and a few bodegas. Between here and the tourist sites the iterative blocks of anonymous living yawn vaster than deserts.
Is it dislodged from chronology as well? There’s something ancient about its showy chrome. That limo’s almost as long as four parking spots put together. It’ll take awhile to position the jack. In the meantime, let’s retreat into the shade. A little talk en route to revelation never hurt anyone.
Hand me that newspaper. Sagged over the bench it reminds me of one of Dali’s clocks. It’s so hot I swear the ink is about to run off the page.
SUSPECT CLAIMS KNOWLEDGE IN CONSPIRACY CASE
HIDDEN TRICKS OF THE UNKNOWN MILLIONAIRE
FUTURE ANXIETIES DRIVE YESTERDAY’S VOTES
More vagueness and paranoia. At the risk of sounding pedantic, let me bemoan the disappearance of the dateline. It used to be that events actually occurred, people were punctiliar, and places adhered to the rigid logic of geography. Now the stories fly at you from neverwhere, disappear into nothingville, then reiterate at intervals, having accrued new mutations in the irradiate abyss. The masthead will be next to vanish, followed by the op-ed. Then unmediated Zeitgeist itself, finally loosened from glove and hood, will emit the only cry to be heard between heaven and earth.
Rather quaint, isn’t it, that the City Times still prints its motto in Latin: Veritas numquam perit. Ironic as well, considering it’s the only newspaper left and its truth contradicts itself.
Forgive me, I’ll no longer keep incognito: I have a reason for pulling you aside beyond a desire to save you from the heat. It’s the pin on your messenger bag: you’re a journalism student. Greetings from an alumnus! Is old man Macaulay still around? Back when I matriculated, he was already so old you’d think he broke news of Mrs. O’Leary’s cow. Don’t be taken in by any glamor of integrity, his world has disappeared – the world of events, facts, happenings. Your social media feed is closer to today’s truth precisely in being further away; precisely in its tangential drift is it closer to the center of now.
Yes, I want to dissuade you from a career in investigative journalism. Forget the old correspondents, ditch the old verities. Raise a garden instead, eat your own carrots. Take up knitting and make yourself a shroud. Hold onto your own birth certificate to convince yourself you still exist.
The world has been in a state of paranoia so long you might think it was always that way. Not so, or not exactly. You might also think our distrust in facts is purely sociological – it is, but not exclusively. There is also a dark power afoot. It is ancient indeed, though its true dominion has only recently begun. It grows stronger by the day, and its apotheosis spells the end of rational thought.
Let my explanation take the form of a story – not about someone I know, but a friend of a friend. Since you never know who’s listening, let’s call the hero by a nom de guerre. “Pausanias” is improbable enough, you’ll agree.
My story takes place over a sweltering summer such as this. Our hero was a young man just like yourself, though maybe a couple years older. As a stringer for all of the major papers in town (with coffee privileges at most of the minor), he’d already led more than one city desk to an unspoiled corpse, and his instincts were generally held to be good for all manner of chicanery. It was only a matter of time before he made himself an indispensable man. In the meantime, he shunted about the whole southwestern side looking for that vaunting story that would scoop him straight into his own office. He’d rather freelance on bread and water, see, than settle for the moderate luxury of an entry-level desk. He was romantic that way.
Of course, even then the whole information ecosystem was in its final stages of dissolution, though some stalwarts still clung to old truths and printed facts. Pausanias was responding to a vibration from a world that no longer existed, just as the light from a dead star can kindle someone to love.
An ideal, after all, is just a more respectable kind of rumor.
There’s always a market for anti-tourist dispatches from places no one wants to live, let alone visit, but Pausanias preferred the living history beneath the shroud, so he prowled Marquette park, haunting the markets of Polish highlanders. Where the rivers once ran with bloody spume he trawled through the Back of the Yards, following up on unsolved disappearances. When trails ran cold, he worked up features on the gentrification of Archer Heights. He filled up his contact book with grocers, bookies, and flaneurs – not realizing that history itself lay dead as the old meatpacking industry.
In his apartment in the evenings he’d spread his notecards across a table, collate them into little piles. He’d wait for a shape to emerge, the limb of a scandal, some fixed expression beneath the protean traffic of fact. His desk resembled all the little desks of all the little men chasing after fate – Tribune scribblers hunting after Capone, Theodore Dreiser tracing the Furies to department store mannequins: myrmidons carrying off crumbs from the great Olympian picnic. What has become of that stalwart race, I wonder? What of the gods?
Listen long enough and I’ll tell you.
One afternoon a man in a clean, unmarked uniform devoid of insignia beckoned our hero into an alleyway.
The man whispered something into his ear: “A well-regarded establishment in New City makes its sausages from human flesh.” Then he continued on his way.
Anthropophagy is hardly uncommon in fable and song. We are always precariously close to devouring each other. Pausanias immediately imagined gangs roving nocturnal parks, wielding ritual blackjacks; familiar addicts disappearing from street corners, homeless vanished from Englewood; esoteric covens scouring the joints and bleaching the bones.
One occupational hazard of the newsman – or qualification, you might say – has always been a taste for the lurid. It might even be that news as we know it is only a rarefied form of sanguinary gossip, a peculiarly adapted offshoot from the great demotic trunk, the universal Babel wherein men, ghosts, and demons each has its say – and that this great game of whispers will continue unabated even after the world’s last newspaper has been wrapped around a dead fish.
Thus, even if he was too sober to pursue an urban legend, Pausanias couldn’t help but follow the lead the next time he found himself in New City, that neighborhood built about the bones of ancient butcheries. Sure enough, in Sherman Park, an adolescent on a red bicycle pedaled up to him, unsummoned, and claimed there were boogeymen in the bushes. “No one rides South Ashland after dark,” the boy said and pedaled away.
But on South Ashland, a nona in a kerchief muttered under starless night that “sin dines at Harold’s.”
Yet according to Harold's cashier, a “supernatural gentleman’s club” met weekly in an undisclosed culvert on the opposite end of the street.
At that opposite end, however, Pausanias was approached by a retired firefighter who darkly hinted that recent blazes across town had convinced him of el diablo.
In short, in inquiries from Midway to Kenwood, Pausanias was not slow in finding sinister corroborations of some great Something-or-Other. It was odd – had the streets always been so conspiratorial, the glances so haunted, the stories so confused? Was it the heat? Wherever he went now, people seemed to appear out of nowhere, drop a hint, then disappear. All the asphalt in the city melted into a single steaming pyroclast. Regional parks lay flattened and inert. Whole city blocks sweated like a common body wrapped up in shimmer. The stories themselves seemed to coagulate and merge, rising half-heard from the ambient radiation.
No, Pausanias told himself, this is how it had always been – only for some reason he couldn’t make the pieces fit like he used to. He was tired, overheated, in need of a break.
It might be helpful at this point to brush up on your Virgil.
Rumor, according to our Roman, is a wayward child of earth born to torment the heavens. Psychologically speaking, it is a type of the profligate disorientation unleashed on us by our interest – hence its duplicative appearance. Under each of its countless feathers stares an unblinking eye, and beneath each eye wags an unceasing tongue. The feathers are a perquisite of its flight, of course, and between eye and tongue is nothing but the instinct for amplification. Thus hideous Rumor flies ever in the mid-distance, shrieking the ceaseless contagion of its song. What it sings may be true, may be false, but most often is a mixture, in honor of its motley source.
Let’s just say that most stories turn out to be just such chimeras. The problem isn’t the facts themselves, each of which might be substantial as a paw or a snake's tail – it’s how they fit together that makes them fantastical.
From his initial hint – that of the cannibal market – Pausanias spawned a shadowy scrim of ambiguous evidence. The strange paranoia of the summer streets – the common, cowed furtiveness of everyone’s glances – had supplied integument enough: something somewhere was happening, surely, and imagination couldn’t fail to supply some tangible cause.
As the solstice approached and then receded, Pausanias found himself entangled in his leads. Each promising a story in itself led only to another that promised the same. Every step led onward but not further.
For example: the cook at a rib joint rubbed his blood-and-BBQ fingers on his apron. There was some “bad, unholy shit” going down by St. Mary’s after dark. Sure enough, within sight of the spire Pausanias encountered a trio dressed in unmarked dungarees, who interrupted their examination of a dead rat long enough to inform him of a congress that convened by the statue at Grant’s: “There’s something happening that will change everything, a revolution of love and joy.”
Waiting by the statue, damping his face with a rag, Pausanias outstared a long, heat-drunk afternoon. A bird with dirty wings pecked a straw’s shedded worm. Suddenly the sun-beaten buildings clicked into place in the light, forming a frame into which a woman wandered pushing a stroller. She paused by the statue, limply fanning herself. A fly buzzed around the baby’s bonnet and Pausanias cleared his throat.
“They’re going to knock it all down,” the woman finally said. “Just like they did the arena. Going to build a new factory.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know.” Then, after some thought: “The government, of course.”
“Does the government build factories?”
“I guess not. It’ll be the Chinese, then, to manufacture leaden toys.”
“Who told you the Chinese were building a factory?”
“My friend. But she never knows what’s going on. It must have been a traveling salesman told me.”
“You’re sure it’s a Chinese factory?”
“Maybe not. All I know is something is coming.”
As the woman unlocked the wheels of her carriage, the sun-lit frame dismantled itself. The baby looked up at Pausanias with preternaturally suspicious eyes as it wheeled away along the hedge.
Your attention is beginning to wander. Don’t you recognize in my story the beginnings of your own world? Remember what I told you about history? You’ll not ascertain anything from the man in the gray suit who’s stepped from the limousine. He has the universal and lapidary unconcern of all those anonymous functionaries of power. No truly human glance is forthcoming from those reflective sunglasses. He stands with his arms folded, superintending the man changing the tire. Now you wonder about the passenger who even now might be looking out at you from behind the glass. It might be a celebrity, a gangster, a governor. Maybe. But let me offer this up to you as an emblem of the times. What is it that draws our attention? A longer than usual chassis, shining wheels, a jar of polish, a few little curtains – nothing so remarkable. The crowd that still gathers is drawn by a symbol of power, yes, but whose? Would it matter even if the limo were empty? Would the function of the symbol be diminished? Or would people still gather around windows that would never open to watch a man in a gray suit supervise a tire being changed? There are so many people gathered around! Doesn’t it feel a bit strange? No one else is speaking. You’d think whoever was in that limo exercised some hypnotic appeal beyond the merely human. Let me draw the connection for you: the people standing here, hoping for a glimpse of the mystery, are the very same who populated our hero’s notecards. They hardly knew what they were saying, and still don’t. When not speaking they watch for they know not what. Don’t you recognize them? Do you remember how long it’s been since the datelines disappeared?
To continue: the further Pausanias pressed into the southwest, the vaguer the testimony became. His interlocutors would mix dates and details over the course of a single speech. When the slightest pressure was applied to their asseverations, they recanted and asserted the opposite. To Pausanias, it was as though the whole city were contracted into a single paranoid face masked behind street signs, pasted over with an architectural facade that felt about to crumble beneath the flexed muscle of some inscrutable expression. Each person on the street promised revelation, but of what Pausanias didn’t quite know. Sometimes it was revolution, sometimes involuted esoterica; sometimes his sources seemed animated by a sourceless glee, but more often they were irritable, vexed as at some invisible grit that chafed within their brains.
Every night Pausanias sweated in his garrett, poring over his notes, losing himself in self-involved scenarios. The air conditioning was broken and the heat made it difficult to think. Either none of the pieces fit or they all did: either they shattered like spit shards, brutally distinct, or they coagulated into a single, untitled portent. He thought of burning his contact book, drafting a bulletin of resignation, and returning to Peoria. He bounded around the streets like a maddened fly, brushed against transparencies grown suddenly vitreous, rolled like a wrapper about the feet of dirty buildings. He worried he might be going mad. He came to rest at the base of the old stock yard monument and thought he could still smell the blood of a million cows. He didn’t even need to approach them at all anymore, the people of the quarter accosted him of their own accord with their hints and monitions.
“Irregularities in the census…an October surprise…obscure codicils soon to be in effect…as seen in leaked footage…a locked door without keys…and they were never seen again.”
What’s that? No, I don’t mind if you answer, one expects dividedness of attention these days. I’ll keep watch over your limousine – it seems something’s amiss other than the burst tire…
So, one of your contacts? Nothing’s changed, as you can see. Do you think the very important passenger is getting impatient? What about the small audience gathered here, wilting in the heat? They know as well as I do that the window isn’t rolling down, that no glimpse will be given. The atmosphere of speculation attracts them nonetheless. I’d wager that they even prefer not to know, since certainty would put an end to the game. As for the passenger…I’m beginning to think the route was deliberate. The contrast is striking: every other car around here is rust-eaten, if not cinder-blocked. The limousine has the appearance of an emperor’s chariot on an inspection of the provinces.
Do you mind if I see your device for a moment, just to illustrate a point? I no longer keep one of my own. Just as I thought: look at this newsfeed. Not only no datelines, but no authors as well.
I’m not saying news no longer exists or that there aren’t tangible forces eating away at the earth. I’m saying that we’re no longer able to face history directly, either due to our own incapacity or some…obstructing force. For example, picture the construction of some new sporting arena. In the days of events, reporters would cover the angles, investigate zoning, trace vested interests, interview stakeholders and compare statements with data. But now every report is filed by the man in the street, and the view stays street level. As the big earth movers file in, one person likens the ominous rumble to Thor’s thunder; another sees the encroachment of the machines as universal allegory; another, building on purely private associations, links the presence of the foreman to his overbearing father; another knows by name the chief financier and grows obsessed with tabloid lore, seeing in the steel skeletons now arising incidental adjuncts, mere background to whispered insinuations of ill-hidden family secrets. In the end, the building stands and no one knows how it got there. The great powers still move and the small delude themselves with stories.
The natural evolution, of course, is for there to be no building at all.
Pausanias belonged to the last generation: by which I don’t mean previous, but really the last. We of the fourth estate were timekeepers, contemporary sextons ringing the changes. Change requires substance but your newsfeed has swallowed it.
It was only when he saw the rumors themselves as the events that Pausanias made any progress. He had begun to group his notecards by theme rather than plot: Fear, Sudden Sedition, Doubt, Empty Hope. But still the fragments wouldn’t take anchor, and reshuffling would produce just as persuasive a congeries. As he gathered up his notes once more, minded to rip them to shreds, it idly occurred to him to attempt a one more sortition. Breakthroughs often wait until something is broken.
On the table he unfolded a large map of the city. With a pencil he asterisked each park, avenue, and market that had furnished him with a clue. He reticulated the map, slowly overlaying the geography with shingles of surmise, hints in his slanted strokes shadowing neighborhoods. He found that though he had been unconscious of any method, the marks arranged themselves not in any random scatter but in spoke-like ley lines. With a regularity that belied chance, radii of rumor shot at intervals from a central point, bypassing some neighborhoods entirely and neatly bisecting others in their extension toward a perimeter that lay beyond the map.
They all converged on a hillside in Beverly.
Some power had landed in the city and was disordering people’s brains. Whatever sheathed together the separate strands of paranoia that spread through the streets, it lay at a square inch of map in Little Ireland.
I’ve kept you longer than you wish, but there’s not much more to tell. What follows is strange, I admit. Take it for the beginning, not the end – the start of something that cannot be reversed. Take Pausanias as a sign of what we all will encounter and his discovery as a warning against your chosen profession.
Why is it happening now? Check the vibration in your pocket. Check your habits of consumption.
Pausanias spent the next day wandering among churches and pubs. Almost everyone in plain clothes in Beverly is an off-duty officer. They come and go at all hours, starting and ending shifts, issuing out of their enclave with badges and clubs to circulate through the violence and returning in flashing cars, carrying with them the weight of a thousand stories. On this particular day, the streets were molten and supine. A stray dog loped from awning to awning, and from the amber cool of the pubs came the occasional clink of a glass and television drone. By a kind of pressure in the center of his skull Pausanias knew he was approaching the visionary nexus. It was as though his head were a dead antenna pulsing invisibly in the beating of the waves.
No one talked to him anymore. He stopped a kid in high-top sneakers, a woman carrying a bag of onions, a heavyset man already stumbling out of shadow mid-morning – each pretended not to hear. Whatever news that had had passed beyond words. They all had eyes slow with watching, heavy lidded, sullen and distrustful. Don’t you recognize them?
Oppressed by the close silence, Pausanias detoured into the shade of a church. It was an odd enough place for him to be frequenting. He pushed aside one of the slightly ajar doors, and as his eyes adjusted the nave telescoped into melting shadow. In a small room by the font a dark shadow hunched over a staticky television, watching ribbons of fuzz band and disperse. It had been years since Pausanias had seen genuine rabbit ears. Only after he stood and turned did Pausanias note that the man was a priest.
“You’ve come about the demon, then,” the priest said.
“I have.”
The priest never let his attention wander too long from the screen, as though afraid of missing the one needful thing.
“This is how it communicates,” he said. “Its presence interferes, but there’s a pattern to the distortion.”
Pausanias couldn’t tell which program was playing beneath the interference. Faces and furniture broke into coherence then united into nonsense. The sound warbled and hissed. Periodically a fat band would ripple from the top to the bottom of the screen. The church’s emptiness received the echoes and faceless saints receded in gloom.
“There,” the priest, pointing into the fuzz. “It makes some kind of alphabet.” They stared at the screen for several minutes. It occurred to Pausanias that the static formed an abstract, almost musical rendition of his own recent investigation.
“Do you know where it comes from?” he asked.
“I do, but I can’t go myself. The sense is going to break any minute now. I must keep watch.”
For the first time, Pausanias noticed the scribbled notecards clustering in piles across the table, results of the priest’s own investigation.
The priest directed his guest to the location that for years – not weeks – had brooded at the center of local rumors. It was an old hangar made of brick and metal that for as long as living memory reached stood at the crest of the highest hill in Highwater. Already in the childhoods of some of his parishioners it had an evil reputation. Here in this pocket of poverty amid relative ease the buildings of an earlier generation had been left to grow old together. Shadows of the eternal poor gazed mutely out their windows. While the city around it groped forward into a new century, this half block, shielded by a heterogeneous palisade of rusted fences and trees, still harbored the tumid atmosphere of the stockyard. The frozen district slumped over half the hillside in the form of a peninsula, bordered on three sides by public land overseen and forgotten by some defunct commission. At the top of the hill, surrounded by broken bottles and littered shrubs, stood the building of ill repute: the source and foundation, Pausanias was now convinced, of all the disparate stories he’d been chasing – stories that really had been promises of stories, fingers pointing to some vacant shape in the dark that otherwise failed to unite them into anything other than a shared sense of unease.
His walk took him up a steady incline. As he climbed, he felt almost like a mountaineer: the slight change in elevation went straight to his blood. Almost dizzy, he turned back to see the city he had left behind – a few houses tucked behind trees, slumbering in the heat, and far beyond, the blocks unrolling into hazy distances.
By the time he reached the source of the contagion, his ears beat to his exertion and black splotches spread through his eyes like spilled ink. It had all passed just as the priest had said – first the thinning out of the present, then the old decay; the sallow eyes staring through blinds, then the littered fence. The old warehouse stood deceptively defenseless, its manifold doors and windows gaping without plank or pane. The winds entered from every side, mingled whirlingly in the hollow interior, then blew out from another chink. They had the smell of metal and blood, cutting through the afternoon like flexible razors. Pausanias rested against one of the thresholds, caught in a sheet of light shed from metal siding. Within, small sounds mingled like bees in a hive. Pausanias was even more certain that every portentous fancy, every whispered insinuation, every bit of conspiratorial tattle that had crossed his path these past several weeks had issued from some madman’s dream at the heart of the building.
Now I arrive at the most incredible part of my story. Before you turn unbelieving away, ask yourself how many other things you take on credit that have traveled to you from much further away – how many facts you’ve retained that might be mere rumors about kings or millennia-old feuds.
Upon entering the building, all of the voices stilled – for that’s what they were, voices, young and old, male and female, chasing each other with invisible teeth and merging into the wind. The interior was bare as a catacomb and for a moment the silence of a church descended from the rafters. In that moment, hard fingers of light pressed the dirt against the floor, leaving the intervals of shadow to recede as though sucked into a grate. In the motionlessness Pausanias thought he could feel something swirling above him, a shapeless thing just at the edge of vision. He saw nothing, but felt its circle, and a placeless tickling migrated from the empty space into his brain.
Then all at once the voices resumed, riding the transverse winds that blew through all the contrary apertures of the building.
“I heard…you know…it must be the case…didn’t hear it from me…an open secret…any day now…threw away the key.”
In the melee, Pausanias could parse out a medley of accents, a gallimaufry of emotions and tones – separate stops on the human instrument combined to form a single, discordant chord: the untempered suspicion that had sounded note-for-note along the streets and back alleys of the city. Amid it all a single feather, floating, floating.
Then it dropped from the ceiling – the beast of legend. The ageless creature that served as the epicenter of that endless tirade. All equilibrium snapped and space itself started to whirl.
“Made of human flesh…the census…blood sausage…the government, of course.”
Pausanias fell to the ground as the whole room began to spin. The creature shuttled across his vision as though caught on a reel.
It was just as Virgil had described it.
Under each of its long gray feathers nestled a tongue, and above each tongue an unblinking eye. Pausanias saw the winnowing of a row of dorsal down, and a row of tongues, twitching like flagella, unleashed a fusillade of murmurs. Within the disjointed polyphony, he could make out snatches from his notecards. Another file of feathers ruffled beneath the rise of tongues, and a great blast of paranoid politics hurtled against the walls. Within that civic cacophony resided problems without solutions, slogans without meaning, and slanders without target. Yet more winglets beat the air and the register changed, grew more personal – intimate confessions relayed themselves to ciphers before dissolving without issue, and gossip washed about unseen figures, outlining itself against effigies of vacancy.
The monster’s eyes glowed with the light of a thousand screens.
Here, one might be tempted to say, history ended as it began, ebbing away into the chaos of myth. But something important, Pausanias knew, had happened in the interim, some non-reversible entropy of substance, a hollowing of the real until nothing was left but an endless trace: the Kingdom of Rumor come at last upon the earth.
That was years ago and some of the old verities still stand – worm-eaten, however, and waiting only a push. Try not to be around when they collapse: for history has ended, as I’ve said, despite any appearance to the contrary. How can these streets still hold together, you ask? A chicken can dance for some time after the guillotine. A mind can have dreams divorced from its head. There are still eyes, ears, and tongues but nothing to make them cohere.
It wasn’t the story Pausanias had been looking for. It wasn’t saleable – it was hardly even writable. The appropriate medium appeared to be oral transmission, here and there, to whoever might have a vacant ear.
What’s that?
So you’re not a journalism student after all. You found the bag at a resale shop with university insignia attached. That makes a lot of sense. Those old men are all dead. The school’s been closed a long time.
Which brings me back to the limousine. The engine’s turning over and the tailpipe is smoking. Soon it will roll off on its new wheel, leaving behind nothing but an issueless perturbation. Surely you expected nothing more? I told you the window would stay up, no vision vouchsafed. Will you take my advice and let it all drop? Retire to a cell and plug up your ears. Notch your days against the wall. Keep careful watch and – who knows? – the sun might even continue to rise.
But a new power has ascended, and its imperium has just begun. Its duplicate can be found in every city, every town. It can nest just about anywhere. The gods themselves it has already broken into stories, and now it’s working on autobiography. Surely you can’t blame it, upon its accession, for indulging in a little pomp.
Rumor flies, it is true – but it has also been known to triumph on wheels.
Dan Muenzer is an educator from Honolulu, Hawaii.
Comments