Sunspot Jungle

by Bill Campbell

  Ana looked up at Julia and her yellow-grey flute.

  “I have go back onstage now,” Rico said.

  “Okay,” Ana said.

  “Hide,” he said.

  “Okay.”

  He went back onstage. Julia finished her solo, and Rico sang. He was good.

  Ana thought she saw her backpack scamper between someone’s hooves. She followed. Then she saw Garth, or at least she assumed it was Garth. He had started to eat people near the Western Arch.

  “Crap,” Ana said. He was distracting the crowd. Some of them weren’t dancing anymore.

  She ran back to the arch and slipped through. She looked everywhere, kicking up leaves. She found her walking stick and used it to poke through the leaves that were dark and wet and sticky. Then she found one golden gauntlet. Blood pooled underneath it. A small, silver tusk sat in its palm.

  She picked up the silver. It was very sharp. She ran back through the arch and followed the screaming.

  Garth was gnawing on a severed antler with his long wolf muzzle. Some things in the crowd were shouting; and more were laughing, and most were still dancing but not all of them were.

  “Hey, perro muerto,” Ana said. She threw her walking stick at him. It got his attention. He dropped the antler, bounded forward, and knocked her to the ground, slavering.

  Ana grabbed one of his furry ears with her left hand and shoved the tusk through it with her right. The skin of his ear resisted, stretching a little before the silver broke through.

  Garth rolled over and howled. Ana got to her feet and looked around her. The crowd danced. Even those who were bleeding from the fight with Garth were dancing again. She took a deep breath, but she didn’t get a chance to let it out all the way before someone’s hand took her by the elbow and pulled her towards the stage.

  She looked up at the arm attached to the hand. It had green and red letters tattooed all up and down its length.

  Rico, Julia, and Nick bowed to the sound of applause and unearthly cries. The sky began to lighten above the branches, grey and rose-colored and pale.

  The owner of the green and red arm pushed Ana forward in front of Rico. “What’s this?” Rico asked.

  “Your last initiation,” said a very deep voice behind Ana. She didn’t want to turn around. She looked straight ahead at her brother. “Sing her to sleep. Let her sleep for a thousand years, or at least until another glacier passes this way.”

  “I’ve already finished my initiation,” Rico said. “They all danced until dawn.”

  “Yes,” said the voice. “You held them, most of them, and they were deer in headlights high-beamed by your song. Those you lost, you gained again as they danced, bleeding. It was good. But it was not your last task. The last requires a ten-year-old.”

  “Crap,” said Ana.

  Rico took her hand, pulled her closer, and tossed red and green colors into the air between them and the crowd. Colors settled into the shape of his tag. Ana still couldn’t read it.

  “Home,” Rico said. “I’ll follow when I can.”

  “You have to tell me what it says,” Ana told him, but he just smiled and pushed her through.

  Their parents were as frantic as one might expect. Ana managed to slip into her brother’s room. She found green and red spray paint hidden behind the couch before her mother and father and Deputy Chad came in to look for clues to Rico’s whereabouts. Ana kept the spray paint hidden under her own bed.

  It took a long time for Ana to get back to the high school because her parents kept closer tabs on her after Rico disappeared. Bertha had already sandblasted the graffiti; and Ana couldn’t find the forest path, and she didn’t know where Garth was. She hoped he wasn’t dead or something very close to dead. She walked home and listened to three nervous phone messages from her mother on the answering machine. Ana called her back and told her she was home and that everything was fine even though it wasn’t really.

  She went up to her room and found her backpack sitting on her bed. She gave it a hug. It purred when she scratched behind its ears. “I’m really, really angry at you for leaving,” she said. It kept purring.

  Inside she found three pages torn from her notebook. They were folded in half together with “Ana” written on the front.

  The first page was in Rico’s handwriting. I’ll see you as soon as I find a way out of a hundred years of servitude, it said. Don’t worry, I’ll manage. DO NOT COME LOOKING FOR ME. Keep a pinch of salt in your pocket at all times and stay out of the woods and DO NOT keep following me around. I’m serious.

  Ana snorted and turned the page. It was her seventh drawing with a note written underneath: This is my name, dumbass.

  She turned to the last page.

  This is yours.

  Ana looked at it and saw that it was.

  She took out her Magic Markers and practiced marking her territory on the back wall of her closet.

  Flush

  Francesco Verso

  translated by Georgia Emma Gili

  When I tried it the first time, I didn’t know what to expect. Disappearing, maybe dying and then reappearing, but where and, above all, as what?

  No one knew anything about it. Or rather, no one talked about it without losing track of themselves in grumblings and stumblings. Including those who swore they had survived the most terrifying experience of their life. From the faces they were making, they passed it off as conclusive proof: they were stronger because they were still alive.

  So why did I want to do it? Why did I want to subject myself to such torture?

  I check the time, then the club sign and say to myself: Simon, are you sure it’s worth it?

  The trance music making the blood pump in your veins follows its own beat at 150 rpm. It rebounds outside along the chipped walls of the alleyway dripping with humidity and fluorescent paints.

  Some shady figures are haggling in the shadows. Everything is competing to distract me.

  My clothing is unlikely: beige trousers from when I weighed 90 kilos, a light blue shirt which I didn’t know I had, and some old, brown, inveterate tourist sandals.

  I switch off my smartphone so as not to be wed to some overly invasive urban application.

  The place where I have the appointment, the Lair of the White Noise, is not an establishment that you would want to attract attention in. It’s a suburb club haunted by ear-splitting volume fanatics with the type of din that distracts you and can make you change your mind every three minutes. Even less, if you’re with someone who’ll be your sound box.

  Maybe that’s why I made up my mind. To drop myself into the “well” and slip into the Lair of Noise. Not very differently from those who had dropped in beforehand and would have done so afterwards. From outside, the Lair looks worse than a hole dug in the ground. The entrance is a leaning metal sheet attached to thick hinges sunk into stone. Beyond that, you plunge into a tunnel lit only by oblique candlelight. The air is moved both by the vibrations of the music and by the large air ducts.

  In one wide stretch, a dusty cave serves as a dance floor and around it are set out some nailed boards painted red. Wallowing in a ripped VIRGIN AIRLINES seat is an olive-skinned guy in a paramilitary jumpsuit.

  I approach him with a nod, and he offers me a crooked smile and a jeweller’s shop set of teeth.

  My contact, Charlie Four Fingers, had been a good go-between. Maybe he had asked his girlfriend, a chiquita brazileira, to perform a lap-a-samba for the bloke. Maybe she had been good at making him forget a wretched day. As a matter of fact, Tony has agreed to meet me. He lifts a bony hand and beckons me to follow him.

  “In the toilets. In a minute. I go in first.”

  But he doesn’t say anything else. Is there a right way of doing this? Are there any precautions to follow? What should you avoid to keep yourself out of harm’s way?

  I’ve eaten a spring roll and drunk two beers. Maybe I should wait. Or maybe I’m hesitating because I’m not convinced.

  In spite of t
hings, I’ve let myself be influenced by the voices going round, those on the air that turns into strings in your head, black holes in your understanding and vortices of alienation.

  Absurd voices that talk of decompression voids in your soul and mirror-thoughts from the memories of others. Mental boxes inside other boxes.

  Illusions so unpleasant and disturbing as to make you lose your sense of direction and lucidity. Shit, how many versions of the same thing exist?

  Okay, it’s a subjective fact, something that all of us live by ourselves and for ourselves, but surely there must be a common denominator, something that can only be associated with the phenomenon of the Flush.

  The Flush or the Whirlpool is the experience in question’s nom de guerre: The Silencer, on the other hand, is the name that half the authorities around the planet have used to ban it.

  Nothing remains but for me to discover the reason for this choice of name.

  I breathe in and start walking towards the flashing toilet symbol.

  To reach it I have to keep an eye out for those getting off to the rhythm of a beat interspliced with cannon booms.

  If they call them “schizophonics,” there’s a reason …

  I’ve never sniffed happy dust in all my life. Skunk spliffs and hash cakes, some glue fumes and at the very most some subliminal dosers. But I’ve never touched coke, “H,” mescaline, amphetamines, or LSD. I like communing with nature, so to speak. And yet, for the Flush I’m ready to break this rule.

  Whatever it was, this experience would circulate inside me, it would flow in my veins or into any other organ it could spread to.

  I cross the threshold of the bathroom after having exited the acoustic treatment of the dance floor unscathed.

  My ears are whistling and regurgitate excess peaks of melody. Inside, I’m stunned by the thunderous noise from all the taps running, vomiting up a thick, greenish liquid. What they had taught us to use with caution since we were kids: that greenish fluid with a vaguely minty smell (no one is able to tell you the taste without copping a stomach pump) is to be blamed on the chemical agent used to exterminate any noxious substances.

  If they call it “preventive hygiene,” there’s a reason …

  Lying in wait behind the door like a feline, Tony swiftly hangs a sign outside saying OUT OF ORDER and then locks us in. I have almost two minutes before the hunt for a free urinal kicks off.

  “Are you Simon?”

  “Yes, that’s me, Four Fingers’ friend.”

  I go to take out an identity card, but he blocks me.

  “I’ll take your word for it. In any case, I need to see the money first.”

  “Wait, I want to try it out. How do I know you’re not fobbing me off with some low frequency crap?”

  The bloke knits his brows: if I’m coming out with bollocks like that it means it’s my first time. And so he starts to treat me like a junkie, like any old schizophonic, greedy for novelties to get off on.

  “You’ll have to trust me, mate. I can’t let you sample this stuff.”

  I shut up. The mystery of the Flush has tricked me at its outset. Nothing remains but to open my hand and offer him the agreed payment.

  He reaches out his arm and takes my credits.

  Then he smiles sardonically and opens the other cupped hand.

  “Have fun and keep shtum. If they catch you, swallow them. They’re biodegradable. They won’t show up in a feces test. They’d have to open up your stomach within half an hour to nail you.”

  That said, Tony leaps Siamese cat-style onto the basin and slides through the opening in the top window. He never uses the same door twice.

  Before he disappears off into the alleyway, he hisses towards me.

  “Mate, take the sign down if you don’t want them to smash the door to smithereens for starters and then you.”

  For a second I’m frozen, doubtful about having lightened myself of a few credits for nothing. Then I lower my gaze to my palm and see what I’ve bought for the equivalent of two months’ rent.

  A pair of fucking earphones? Two paltry earplugs?

  I can’t believe it. They dare to raise these lowly contrivances to the rank of synthetic drug? I flip them over in my hand, intent on digging out a deeper meaning, when threatening blows against the door wake me from the hypnosis of a rip-off. I stick the earphones in my pocket and run out, dodging a couple of wild men whose bursting bladders are the cause of my salvation.

  Simple bitchin’ in my direction won’t hurt me very much. I go back through the tunnel, this time upwards. I pant and gasp for breath.

  The smoke blocks my sight and ravages my sense of smell, the incessant noise makes mincemeat of what’s left. I shake my head, trying to get a grip. Even just an arm hold to guide me back out. I stagger and reel from one shoulder to the next. Banging into strangers who scoff or round on me angrily.

  I count the number of turns and fix my eyes on the walls to make out where I am. The air shakes and rumbles with the echoes of a bass that cuts through your flesh, crackles in your ears, gets absorbed, and is only partly deadened.

  I catch sight of the emergency strip lighting in the distance. It has to show the way to the surface.

  I have double vision, and blood is trickling from my ears. It feels white hot like the sound frequency. I grab a rail there where every night countless people pass out.

  Outside the Lair of the White Noise, I get my breath back.

  In the midst of the muffled sounds in the alleyway, with blinded eyes and anaesthetized ears, I am tempted to try the Flush effect right there and then.

  I clock two din-armed geezers and three sylphs in a groupette protected by an aura of defensive music. So I give up on the idea. I wouldn’t want them to attack me with some unknown sound.

  Yet, thinking about it, what could happen to me that could be so horrendous if even plain old earplugs are on the drug blacklist?

  I think back to Tony who, at this point, must be knocking back a drink in my name.

  With the earplugs in my pocket, I start walking stealthily with bated breath. I turn into Columbus Avenue and while, on the one hand, the Doppler effect emitted by the high-powered muscle cars doesn’t bother me very much; on the other, it’s a nuisance: I’m carrying illegal stuff and anyone could get out of a car, point a “double-bad sound” at me, and force me to undergo an on-the-spot body search.

  The pavement on the stretch of highway where they’ve unveiled a 24x7 HyperStore is teeming with nocturnals, young and not so young people, with easy banter and One-Man-Sound intent on selling insults and exchangeable pick-up lines.

  Right now, my ears hurt all the time if I don’t wear my Sennheiser padded headphones to isolate me from sounds, using other sounds. I was fool to leave them at home. Sounds to drive away sounds: if they call it “low-satisfaction therapy,” there’s a reason …

  I look around for a quiet spot, a park, a garage, or any other disused place where a truce could be offered, even momentarily, from the relentlessness noise, from the spirals that are clogging up my ears.

  After all, we all want to escape. Those who escape into the TV or by shopping or at football stadiums or clubs. And no one wants to be anywhere else at that moment in time.

  Those who shut themselves off inside apparent escape mechanisms are simply acknowledging illusory flights from reality. Prisons inside other prisons. Sounds inside other sounds. With only a worsening effect over time.

  Those who really flee don’t come back. They don’t change channel or go looking for an alternative shop. They don’t change political party or join the latest club. Those in flight aren’t really looking for something, they’ve already found it.

  My soundproof barrier, made out of two lobe-shaped prongs of my ears, has stopped oscillating. It’s my dowser’s way of finding the X-spot, where sounds can’t reach me or entangle me in a web of distractions.

  Where I am there’s no need to make a commotion to be heard. I glance back in both directions.

/>   The seesawing breeze between the isolated branches continues to require the smallest fraction of my attention.

  To compensate, the nearest human being is at least 100 yards away. Such a gap as to reassure me and nudge me into getting the earplugs out of my pocket.

  I set myself down on a bench along the tree-lined path. In full control of the neighbourhood sound spectrum, I look at the day’s purchases: long, cone-shaped, in a skin-camouflage tone. They’re covered in a spongy material that I don’t recognise. They’re not made of plastic or cork or rubber.

  Who knows how the molecules that surround us are shaken in the everyday items that we use?

  The more I look at them, the more they seem alien to me, pervaded with a mix of anger about Tony’s prohibitively rip-off pricing and curiosity towards an object that, at least in theory, promises to give me a unique experience in return.

  I shake them to and fro.

  The discussion forums that I took part in before coming to a decision didn’t give any advice or tips. Maybe there aren’t any. Maybe it’s a question of instinct.

  Then I run into an obvious fact: such simple objects can’t possibly transmit such complex experiences. So I separate the earplugs and hold them up at eye level. I observe the cones pointing at each other, ideally.

  In the middle, I’m the one keeping the circuit open. Which is what prompts me. I understand the mystery, but I daren’t make the leap.

  Slowly as a monk preparing tea, I bring the earplugs up to my ears. I look right, then left. I can’t understand if I’m putting myself between them or if they’re working through me.

  In unison, I bring my hands near one another and let the ambiguous consistency of the wedge-shaped material slip into my ear canal and mould itself to the shape of my eardrum.