But what would they have aimed at?
Part of me wanted to hear shouting, the sounds of sirens wailing, and the general noises of panic to prove that it was all real. Without them, I didn’t know what to think. Whoever did this knew there was no way off the planet or out of the crater; they knew exactly where to strike and could successfully do so from orbit.
With the city still burning, Davion, Melanie and I watched as a large orb, a cacophonic mass of energy, descended into what was left of Sondranos-proper.
Understand that what I saw next only took a few seconds.
While I’d stopped just outside the façade of the Abbey, I felt like I was floating. My feet planted on the semi-solid patio gravel as if they’d rooted kilometres deep, but my body felt like it had taken to the sky. I was dizzy, unresponsive. ‘I shouldn’t be here,’ I thought. Then, callously, ‘not anymore.’
Melanie muttered something I didn’t hear while Davion remained silent.
The orb tumbled and plummeted towards where the tallest spire in Sondranos had been reduced to smoke. For all we knew, it could have been a drop of light. Why not? More impossible things have happened.
The light crumpled into itself as the dust engulfed it.
I thought of a lighthouse disintegrating into the ocean.
I blinked and could see the ghost image of Sondranos on my eyelids.
What followed was an implosion. The shockwave threw us against the doorway like a kick to the chest. I couldn’t breathe. During this, the ground trembled but, to the best of my memory, it wasn’t loud. It sounded like pebbles rolling down a hill, all muffled my an intense and red-hot ringing in my ears and behind my eyes. At the same time, the stained-glass windows in the Abbey erupted into shards, raining glass on the transepts and throughout the nave. Their sound was nothing more than a twittering of birdsong in the back of my mind.
Then, silence.
We all struggled to stand together, helping each other up, ignoring the soreness in our bodies. Within a blink, there were no more fires in Sondranos. All that remained of Sondranos was a cloud of grey stretching over the sky and dust as far as the eye could see. My eyes burned and my entire body threatened to collapse. But I couldn’t stop staring.
Again, I wished it was thunder.
I’ve been told, as part of the therapy I’m being asked to undergo, that life doesn’t flash before your eyes when you face death. You simply remember what you should. Those memories will drive you to survive or allow you to accept death. When I eventually die, the destruction of Sondranos will be one of those memories. Because of it, I’ll know if I’ve earned my death.
Davion pulled me into the façade by the sleeve of my shirt after coaxing Melanie inside. We shuffled blindly forward. He stopped me next to a pew just shy of Melanie. The sight of Sondranos vaporizing before us had burned a hollow, empty appearance into our features.
Davion returned to Melanie, whose eyes tuned to static.
She clung to a buttress as she nudged away a smattering of ruby coloured glass with the toes of her shoes. ‘Get it away’ and ‘That didn’t happen’, those nudges implied.
“Are you hurt?” Davion asked.
She responded with blank silence.
His eyes jumped around the nave looking for something – most likely he was looking for anyone else in the Abbey when the windows shattered. The young man had thankfully escaped, but to what I’d never know. I could sense there was something more from Davion. It seemed like he expected something to walk in and fix everything.
He then turned to me. “There’s a door through the gift shop which leads to the chapter house. Just beyond that is the entrance to the cellar – take Melanie.”
He didn’t wait for a response. “I will meet you there.”
He sensed my hesitation.
“How can you be so calm about this?” Melanie’s vacancy fractured as much as her voice; the angry Melanie from before started to peek through. “You saw what I saw, right?”
“Friend,” Davion ignored her for the moment. “I suggest we use what the Abbey provides until we can fully assess the situation.”
Davion walked close to her, treating the glass like sand on the carpet. The pieces were too small to crack under his heels, but his steps left them embedded into his footprints. He was cool and collected. This is the kind of man Daniel deserved, I thought. The kind of man who doesn’t run.
“Melanie,” his voice was stronger, louder even though he stood next to her. It forced her attention to him. “You are going to go with this young man as he leads you to safety. You are going to wait for me as I scout the area. I will arrive either with or without survivors. Then we will find out what we need. There is no sense in panicking. I have things under control. Do you understand?”
The first tears of desperation and fear fell from Melanie’s eyes and streaked the makeup that I hadn’t seen coating her face. It revealed a darker tone to her skin and implied a few blemishes.
She took Davion’s hand when he offered it again and nodded her compliance.
Davion strode towards me and whispered, “Hold on to your strength so that Melanie doesn’t lose hers. I know her well and I’m afraid she’ll need it soon enough. I don’t know you well enough to know but I hope you will prove my faith in you correct.”
“I can do that,” I lied. I could hardly believe he spoke that way: part rehearsed, as if he’d been planning for emergencies his entire life.
Davion left, crunching over the broken glass and out the front door. I walked over to Melanie and took her hand. She trembled.
“I was determined today,” she muttered. “I knew I was going to find him when I woke up.”
“I know,” I said. “Come on, we have to get to safety.”
She said more, but I didn’t hear it.
The exit sign blinked at us, half obscured by a dozen colourful streamers that once adorned the roof-tiles of the gift shop. I swallowed a deep breath of the air which had turned bitter, somewhat metallic. I looked back long enough to see the candles in the other nave blown out; thread-like wisps of smoke still ran from their wicks. Then, and only then, did I realize that running meant you had to accept whatever you ran into – and that not every new life is meant to be survived.
Chapter Two:
Dead
My name is Leon Bishop. I learned how to dance by walking two dogs on separate leads; my parents were amazing and convinced me to study what I loved instead of what everyone else only liked; as a teenager, I fell in love, lust, and into trouble as easily as anyone else. But what really matters right now is this:
I’m not dead.
Most importantly, I’m not going to tell you I’m dead.
Kenya Rothrock, the new director of Literature and Language at St. Michel’s – who also taught Postmodernism with a heart of sheet rock - couldn’t convince me to use that trope in telling what happened. Even now I can’t bring myself to do it because the act would effectively ruin the memory of those who’ll die in the following pages.
Even though it was a staple of the All-About-Me generation of Literature, my classes hardly ever understood why I disliked that trope. I can explain it now in a way I couldn’t before. Long ago, you couldn’t cross a bookshelf without seeing the line ‘this is how I died’ in one out of every three novels. Lauren Williams, a novelist of pulp romance hidden beneath an even thinner veil of mock self-discovery, had been the biggest offender. Rothrock threw the harlequin effigies of Williams in my face whenever she could. ‘It’s brilliant because it’s about a weapon-smith who hates weapons, so he dies metaphorically,’ she’d say.
I never got enthused by her passion.
Saying you’ve died in a first person narrative is a cheat. I would learn later, while the ashes of Sondranos still singed my sinuses, that living is always harder than dying. I imagine that’s why I wasn’t afraid when I led Melanie into the cellar of the Abbey. My body could have easily been strewn out in the plains, eviscerated by a then-unknown enemy
. The attack could have come mid-flight, or I could have been evaporated in the city limits.
To say I’d died would be cheating what waited. I write this from a scattered and fractured life, the kind of perch a bird would be insane to build a nest upon. My words, my thoughts – which are what this story is truly about – are the only comfort I have. Ironic, since these very words are ones I’ve used to betray so many others, including myself.
Rothrock would probably say, ‘Hell had better plans for me.’
Blanc de Noirs defined Sondranos cuisine after having been brought by the colonists, grown, and crafted over years of agricultural exchange. When we got to the cellar, I wasn’t surprised that the dusty cave was a storeroom for casks of the wine.
Two large buttresses introduced the way down while cobwebs acted like stabilizers. Some shook loose in the destruction. Dust sprinkled the remaining ones and caught the sunlight as I pulled the door behind us. I left the door ajar so a sliver of light could lead us down. Lines of plastic black grapes adorned the wall. Melanie touched a couple, picked one off, and crushed it in her fist.
By then, Melanie had deafened herself to the destruction both physically and mentally. She might as well have been hiding from a thunderstorm.
The basement was coloured a woodgrain brown, matching the shades adorning the walls and the barrels around the room. Casks of wine lined the cellar, their presence hinted at with the scent of mock oak and mildew. Whoever designed the room kept a trio of empty casks in the centre, balanced on a crease in the pavement that could have served as a drain a long time ago. A system of stringed lights wires led from the stairwell; ovular bulbs lit up each barrel in a spotlight. Either the place was on a generator, or power was still on out here – for that we were grateful. Very distant and out of place was the sound of a barber shop quartet singing some nineteenth century tune. Their voices reverberated off the walls through speakers piped through the four corners of the cellar.
“Liars,” Melanie muttered.
It was the first she’d spoken since we’d left the Abbey’s gift shop. When I asked her to repeat what she’d said, she stopped on the last step and said, “Only one station on this entire planet plays music from Earth’s golden period – 97 Transistor Radio.”
“I’m not following you.”
On Sondranos, Melanie explained, all the transmissions relayed to a series of stations circling the crater of Sondranos. She fell easily into the role of teacher, moving her hands around her waist to emphasize points and maintaining eye contact. Eventually, she continued, the stations all moved to Crater’s Edge to keep the signal more efficient. The circumference of the crater treated the entire settlement like a giant, ancient satellite dish turned inwards. Her best guess was that the natural landscape allowed for optimal signal transmission when it wasn’t being bounced off another station.
“But, at the beginning of their broadcast every day, some advertisement says they never record their shows. ‘Why trust the rest when we’re the best’,” she smiled – it was a dark grin, concealed and coloured like the shadows of the fake grapes strung down the stairwell. She dropped the mock announcer voice to a quiver that shook the beginning of her next sentence. “Meaning they’re transmitting from the part of the city that doesn’t exist anymore.”
“I guess they’ll be in trouble.”
“I won’t be listening to them anymore,” Melanie laughed. It started soft and high-pitched. The laughter continued, awkwardly. She walked down the last step, letting her voice muffle to a groan and sat down on a nearby cask. Melanie cupped her face in her palms and began to weep as silently as she could, which wasn’t very quiet.
Instead of comforting her, I searched the room.
Two small bowls lay convex against the wall. I swabbed the inside of both bowls with my sleeve and made sure they were clean. After a second glance around, I found the most recently pegged barrel sitting on its side atop a triangle of more near the stairwell. That was when Melanie looked up and caught what I was doing. Her weeping stifled.
“Who are you here to visit?” she asked.
“Nobody.”
I placed a bowl below the spigot on the barrel and twisted, hoping something would come out. The instantaneous scent of Blanc de Noirs filled my sinuses. I’d once made a strawberry-rhubarb pie and, when the wine came pouring out of the cask, my mouth watered as if expecting that same dessert. The alcohol was barely there, an aftertaste for the senses.
“Then why Sondranos? Why come here?”
“I thought it would be a good holiday,” I responded quickly.
It was easier than the truth.
Trust me, I wanted to tell Melanie how I took the A8 to the airport, booked a flight to New York, picked up a few travel needs in Manhattan and then clipped my way south to Miami, where International Aeronautics offered hundreds of flights as part of the summer festival celebration sale. I even got a discount for being a teacher for more than five years. Of course, had I explained that, she would have wondered why I’d gone through so much trouble. I didn’t look like the ‘sudden adventure’ type of guy.
Instead of that, it was easier to follow with: “I just needed a change of scenery.”
I believe you can feel lies when they settle into your brain; you can feel them wanting to be the truth. You have this sort of ‘If someone else believes it, then it can be true mentality.’ If you don’t feel this, then lying has become too comfortable and you should re-consider speaking in public.
At that moment, my lie nestled at the base of my skull next to thoughts of how easy it was to convince myself I was fine and how hard it was to remember I was no longer back on Earth. I knew that every time I spoke to Melanie she would only think I was here for something trivial – a holiday. I liked that.
But next to these lies are moments that always live in the present. No matter when they happened or why, they’re the neighbours to our lies: present moments keep us from accepting that deceit is an easy task. Asking a friend about their Mother after attending the funeral two years prior; waking up to go to work, forgetting that work was destroyed a week ago.
My time on Sondranos was filled with Present Moment memories.
The best way to describe them is a sensory explosion that lasts less than a second, but feels like a lifetime. Go back to the past, flash forward to whatever your mind’s fixated on: you’re stuck in time and can’t do anything about it. All you’ll have left is the sensory ghost, a scent, a feeling, a headache, just a reminder that you’ve been hit and couldn’t stop the memory.
After lying to Melanie, this is the first memory that played out in my head:
On Earth, he is Arthur Leontes Bishop, Ph.D. and Professor and Director of Interstellar Literatures and Cultures. He stands before his class and clasps his hands together. Leon longs for the days when he can wear a jacket with leather patches on the elbows, but the parental supervisory board has strict regulations on clothing. As long as they aren’t placing blame on him for their children’s shortcomings, he’ll follow the regulations.
Eleven first-year students stare back at him. Some jot down notes with the graphite pens they got at the school store during orientation, while others soak in the information by listening. Not one of them knows the answer to his question. He laughs the feeling of unease away and starts towards the projector. He clicks it on where an image of Richter’s Guide to the Psychology of Selfish Symbology flashes and rotates slowly on the holographic screen.
“The correct answer,” Leon begins, “is the ‘All-About-Me Generation Literature of the early twenty-first century’. Novels like The Garden in the Brush, Delgado’s Union, and the Refuge of Albion are examples. These three novels show how the literary tool of postmodernism assumed the blame of society and translated it into a more subconscious, selfish level of thinking. But stop. Selfishness is not a bad thing, it’s just got a negative connotation. Sometimes you need to think about yourself, otherwise, how’d you survive?”
Leon watches as a
student in the front row scribbles POSTMOD = LITERARY TOOL on her notebook and Leon stifles a smile. Rothrock next door would have his hide if she knew he’d allowed that. She’d only gotten her PhD in postmodernist theory a year before it was written off as a period due to the inability for it to be proven under a single time constraint. That, and when the most a ‘period’ could do was offer a strange tone and a handful on conceits, then something had to change. If there was ever a war between the Literary periods, Leon was sure he and Rothrock would be on opposing sides, a fight to the death, even though he couldn’t even nail down the title of his own period. ‘All About Me’ Literature is just one of the many threads he used to tie them down.
But Leon is comfortable here; he is at home. There is nothing a student or professor or adjunct could say for which he wouldn’t have an answer or argument, and no attention seeking parents can strip him of his pride.
Leon turns to a male student in the front row.
“Mr. Bell,” he says. “Pick one of the titles I just mentioned to you.”
Jamie Bell stares back at him, open mouthed and eyes agape. Leon waits.
Eventually, Mr. Bell lets the words form on the tip of his tongue and he stammers, “The last one. The one about refuse.”
“Refuge of Albion, by Pierre Albert, published in June of 2023.”
The voice recognition system in the projector recognizes Leon’s tone. The key words and the rotating image of the class textbook shifts to another book – the cover showing a castle. In the reflection of the pond below it, the castle is decayed and destroyed. Below the author’s name is an MPAA sticker outdated by a few hundred years. Leon doubts anyone could find the film for the book since it was archaic by at least six or seven forms of data management crystals, but still listens for the clues that someone’s forgone the reading. Mostly, anyone who says that the book had some great acting is a dead give-away.
Sondranos: The Narrative of Leon Bishop Page 2
