Titans are in Town

by Tomislav Sunic

  Similar scenarios of the double-down game Held once observed as a young boy with his own Townspeople. Back before his Wild West escapade, back in old Town, he knew some local self-proclaimed Gods, serving as local henchmen who had praised to the skies their newly found Bolshoi beliefs. The religion of self-management and multiculturalism was then voguish in Town, given that this palaver best provided handsome perks for them. Now he could still see them in Town, albeit as human vestiges, all turning into tolerance preachers, always ready to cut a deal with the Saturnines beyond the hill.

  Soon that mimicry began contaminating everybody. Even Town’s Titans of yesteryear soon became the Saturns of tomorrow. And this was always the continuous and same pattern. When Titans were in short supply there were enough local residents pretending to be Gods, hollering around how they could never age and how the current System was the best of all possible worlds. Such was the belief in Town — a belief once known as Saturnine Titoism — which Held had to endure during his subprime years. When those once-upon-a-time Gods had appeared in Town under the guise of Tito’s commissars, all nice looking fellows began mimicking their mores, often proving to be nastier than Tito’s fellow travelers themselves.

  Yes, strange was the name of that local Saturn Tito whose pedigree nobody knew. He had even installed mass killing sprees of his own people for fear of having his stardom eclipsed by his lookalikes. Mass killing had become a new national sport, in which, as a rule, not the Titans, but (surprisingly) their well-groomed local Saturnine pretenders ran the best show in Town. This was the time when Held finally found out that his best friends are also his worst enemies. Then he also learned that he did not need any more friends at all. A life of solitude offered him the best possible friendship inasmuch as he could henceforth get mad at his own Self every morning, only to come to terms with his Self once again in the evening.

  Back in the Wild West all those quasi-honest friends had become traitors by then, and after the initial bliss of the new regime, they too discovered the pleasures of cozying up to the Saturns, wallowing in a grotesque mimicry of “it could have been better only if the right Gods had always been in charge.” The problem was that there were no more Gods left in Town — neither in Town nor elsewhere on Earth.

  Three hundred and fifty days of Wild Western sunshine, twenty-four hours of fun, had made Held forget that time had its inexorable flow and that his quick aging would eventually show on his decrepit face. The Wild West of never ending Elysian bliss, known back then as the Californian daydream, was a fake reflection of a fake and static universe on the Pacific Ocean, an air-conditioned Hell designed to exude the scent of paradise lost in the middle of Chaos. This carbon copy of the Californian dream was briefly mimicked during Town’s Transatlantic Lull until the storms started gathering, abruptly changing the flow of time. Old sounds of rock’n’roll were drowned by the new Saturnine silence beyond the peak of the nearby hill. The rules of military engagement had abruptly changed. Held saw how mores and customs and wishful thinking, contrary to what the savants said, could change in a matter of seconds. Well-pampered Townspeople learned after the first mortar fire that one cannot just smoke grass but, if and when needed, eat it too — and for a very long period of time. One upon a time his Town was a Bolshoi-prone universe, a Lotus eating lala-land where even the strongest Titans succumbed to the siren sounds of the Western glitz. And many indeed did. The Wild West and its Pacific epicenter back then were also far away from the Town’s tectonic torments. It used to be a land of White man’s political sunset, where the sun, alas, was supposed never to set. When it did, it brought in darkness for all.

  This time, by contrast, in his hollow and worn-out Town, at a different part of his planet, Held had no more time for high flying. Town emitted a putrid death smell in the air camouflaged with a foul perfume of post-history. It was the general condition here and everywhere, except that Held surprisingly still managed to lug around his own body, knowing full well that there were serial replicas of his Town’s fate all over what was once known as the glorious West. This was, after all, the prime motive for his primetime return to Town, which little by little was becoming the role model of decay for all towns he had once known in the Wild West. Saturns aren’t choosy, they can strike wherever they smell White flesh. When Held had returned to Town after years and years of static absence, it felt like dipping back into his prehistory and uncovering his own skeletons in his ancestral closet, way back to the primeval times of his long-forgotten lineage. He realized, to his amazement, that he was once, a long time ago, a little courier of Alexander the Great on his way to Persia. He once stumbled on an ancient Persian vase in the Town’s rubble of the nearby museum revealing the picture of a young Doric boy whose face bore the features that surprisingly looked like his own.

  Thereafter he had to shift his memory gears all the time in order to remember his past long-riding hours to the Hindu Kush. Oh yes, he could also sense his own death smell amidst the mingled corpses in the mass pits of that small lead-infested town of Bleiburg which soon became etched into his memory. Those were the Saturnine killing fields whose reenactment was now unfolding all over Town, stretching from the far north down to the extreme south into which the Gods from both sides of the globe had once thrown their progeny of Titans. His death at Bleiburg became part of his own cool souvenirs and cold memories. He was accustomed to engage with two, sometimes even three layers of memories: one regarding the profaned graves of those who had died prior to the arrival of his Titans; and then the other layer of times of those who came after the Titans had departed.

  This time, though, Town’s graves were not designed for meditations, but served instead as a low-level bulwark against low-flying missiles coming from the nearby mountains, as well as a barrier against the persistent threat of general disorder created by mischlings in the underworld. The mischlings however, were not bad creatures, but they behaved in a disorderly fashion. Held never trusted them simply because they were not trustworthy. They were often mild and servile but with no sense of self-confidence. During the brief Transatlantic Lull they were viewed by many Townspeople as role models for a new putative humanity, for a new rebirth of the planet Earth of perpetual peace. When Chaos started, the mischlings realized that surviving meant order, and that every political decision requires a modicum of intelligence. None of them had those prerequisites as they depended solely on the good will and whims of their White masters. Soon they gave up on their claims of racial quotas and began crying desperately for the return of their strict Gods and Titans. But there were no more Gods left in Town. Even Held, who had held to his integrity, could not refuse their outstretched hands when they supplicated him for victuals. He often had to mediate their inter-mischling disputes as to which one of them was more intelligent — a wog from the antipodes or the mischling from the sub-Sahara desert? Getting a spare ration of victuals required some semblance of order which was in short supply down in the underworld. A common practice among the mischlings was also to rat out each other in order to curry favor with Held, with everyone testifying to his own righteousness and the viciousness of others.

  Not that they all looked the same. Some bore inbred centaurian features, some looked like chimeras, indeed some were of exceptional facial ugliness. But the worst were those who looked like Held and could still pass for Titans in Town. It was then that Held realized that the more Titans were becoming similar to each other in their physical appearance the more they were causing death and destruction among themselves. The Saturns beyond the hill were the best example. He could vividly remember how most of his lookalikes in Town envied and hated each other. They were Titans in disguise, or even worse, they were strange creatures whose treacherousness could barely be detected by an outsider, except by Held. Yes, the most horrid thing was that their self-perception was wildly unlike Held’s perception of them. He knew that his lookalikes could become his mortal enemies, worse than all the mimicking mischlings or mongrels down under, o
r the repulsive Saturns beyond the hill.

  The new Saturns beyond the hill were not skilled attackers because they frequently used mischlings as cheap cannon fodder. This in fact provided Held with sufficient awareness that even if some day they managed to roll into Town, they wouldn’t last long. Soon they would become physically corrupted and succumb to the torments of internal interracial quarrels.

  True masters are always in short supply in troubled times. Coming to Town after years of long absence was for Held the moment of unrolling the old movie in his head, a movie he had once carefully stored away in his head during his Pacific daydreaming. Now, the unpleasant scenes of cross-bearing and the old Sisyphean task to reach the mountain peak provided him with a different intellectual outlook. Yes, the Third World Chaos has just begun.

  ***

  Oh, how Held missed those timeless days on the surreal Pacific beaches! The death wish of flying back in time to those crystal clean locations gripped his mind demonically, and while he nursed his mute metallic friend, whose name was Heckler and Koch, he was also thinking about the morbid zest of Western outlandishness in which he once received high awards, albeit by paying a heavy price. Why did his birth cast him in this unnamable, unmanageable timeframe of Town’s post history, which bore the seal of a new relocation everywhere he landed? These were back-peddling times, going back in time and facing off with a bad Xerox copy of what he had once learned by heart. Then the ecstasy on the Pacific shores; now the never-striking death. Then a static time, now the static lull awaiting a tornado of fire, but which for some reason never occurred. Over there, back then, there was no history at all; over here history was gaining momentum on several layers of time. Every time when warlike tornados swept into Town, Saturns would stop and go away, and would peter out afterwards. Held was getting accustomed to looking for a mental alibi for not being born once upon a time in a different fast-forward town.

  ***

  Boy. But what did Held really have to lose now? Whom to fear? One way or another, either he or some other Held, either Gods or Titans, either sooner or later, will pay his share, somewhere probably as a reeking Chandala, or a colossal Brahmin, or better yet as some secretive and philosophical amoeba clad in a different carapace, in a timeless river of billions of past and future destinies. The invisible enemy Saturns there behind the mountains, with multiple rocket launchers up somewhere in the South, were still unknown to him, which reminded him of his own due time and his own Titanic wrath. He guessed that this was an eternal question as to who benefits, cui bono, considering that Held’s most cherished dreams always lapsed into the opposite. He thought after the downfall of old Town and the first retreat of Titoistic Saturns that from then on all former snitches would be taken out for good and that they would never materialize again. His wishful thinking knew no bounds then. He thought about some good Titanic colleagues of his, some good marksmen who could remove one by one all local home-grown Saturns and drive their families off somewhere to the Antarctic amidst polar bears making more breathing room for the long-awaited Titans in Town. But the lull was deceiving, the new Titans were not in the offing, and the mimicry of scared local ex-Saturns was so persuasive that he honestly thought about their return to their Godly origins. When Town became the subject of Wild Western ukases for the setup of an alternative place for a multicultural dream and an incarnation of peace on earth, it soon became a breeding ground for heroes and Titans by default who had never earlier thought about Town becoming a sovereign entity. This was the standard adagio of all subsequent generations, quite in accordance with their timeframe and their current mental framework.

  Held also taught for a while that a negative cycle of history had begun and that a new dawn of Titanic times would never break in. In his long lifespan he waited for the Titanic dawn countless times, foolishly forgetting that one swallow does not make a summer. Great expectations firstly, moments of bliss secondly, and then again the ultimate despair. It took him a while to learn by heart the old Schopenhauer’s adagio that in the footsteps of each awaited ecstasy lurks always severe sorrow and depression.

  ***

  The incoming chaos in Town looked indeed like a hundred-years strife perched on the barren universe, like a fake simulacrum of the long gone Troy. The chaos did not end in a month; it did not end in a year — will it ever end? The country by the name of France once, during the so called Hundred Years War, experienced the prelude to Chaos, as did central Europe for a long time after its thirty years of turbulence and tremor. Now of course, it was the time of post-historical Town, slated to bear the burden of its recalcitrant past. This has been going on for eons, although the Transatlantic Lull had managed to convince many that time could eventually come to a stop.

  Held’s reminiscence of Chaos fell short of past catastrophes as his Town now looked like a grotesque rerun of all accumulated war histories. As a speck on Mother Earth, it meant nothing in the flow of eternity. And everything in Town just seemed like a rapid reenactment of Held’s converged melodramas, ever since the day when local and global Saturns had announced their arrival from the top of the hill. But Held had known well the nature of those strayed-away Titans and their later Saturnine metamorphosis given that he used to meet many of them when they were once clad in a different garb. They had once had red stars on their caps, only to replace them later with pederast rainbow flags. For some reasons he always thought that this was just another beginning for a new people he met, although these newbies soon turned out to be the oldies and as bad and ugly as ever. They were not Titans but feigned to be ones. Held was getting tired of the burden of their time.

  Chapter V: Dialogue of the Dead

  Heroine came by with another age wrinkle to her accumulated past. Her eyes were glowing and her black hair contrasted with her shrunken Dinaric forehead announcing also the fast-forward shrinking of her own lifespan. This time Heroine looked like a piece of walking dead meat ready to be baked for hungry subterranean species or thrown to hungry mischlings, or to some remnants of half-centaurs down in the labyrinthine underworld.

  “Might it be, Held, that we shall keep living any longer? I am deadly tired of this lively chaos.”

  “Nope,” answered Held with no emotion: “We are surrounded by the grateful dead who fear us more than we fear them. We are eternal navigators in the sea of the unpredictable; we are raftsmen looking for our Drunken Boat. Remember Rimbaud: “I myself have truly seen everything, from wild Indians, to cotton galleys, to huge Saturns now on the nearby hill.” My own expectations have always become disappointments; the bigger my cravings were, the more depressions I had to endure. We were taught in school that men had to be sober and stoically shoulder their life. But listen Heroine, my shoulders are aching and they can barely hold this heavy gun, let alone your legs around my shoulders.”

  The idea of his posturing in monologues has never quite quit Held’s mind. Scenes from his past lives that he revived and relived over and over again would always end up in a labyrinthine despair. Why? Most of his past experiences from his thick layers of memories were bitter, embarrassing, and made him look like a fool to himself. Now, this time, when pondering over his past encounters with those evil Saturns, he thought he was to be the one destined to lay out the new scenario and the final denouement. Those bastards who had lied to him in history classes in school, half a century ago, were now drawing the shorter straw. Millions of mendacities regarding their first body counts he could now fend off easily with his own body armor. Except that he was alone. Was it him talking aloud to Heroine, or was it his avatars of past memories spinning out in the déjà vu monologues? Why did he meet Heroine in the first place, why not in the second place? He would have likely given the same answer even to a stray dog if it asked him for an answer. But you can’t teach the old dog new tricks. He was a dog himself. This time the once-upon-a-time Big Lie was replaced by another Big Lie doctored up by his Townspeople, by his own White species. Heroine had only managed to pluck him out temporarily from some
other woman’s destiny and someone else’s warm embrace, and made him forget the lies for a while.

  “Millions of eons have gone by,” went on Held, “and we are just reenacting our old destines. To hell with living. If peace breaks out tomorrow, most likely I will again suffer from phobia, bad stool, bad indigestion, let alone that I will be again surrounded by crooks and phonies from my own tribesmen.”

  “To hell with you, you jerkovich,” exclaimed Heroine. “It all started with you, and you know how Townsfolks hate you. You are the bad omen; you are a portent of Town’s chaos.”

  Under different times in a different town, Held could have negotiated a more amicable destiny with some portable female company, somewhere on a different speck of the planet Earth. Ah, those endless strolls along the Seine, his ancient sunbathing with blond fairies on the sand of the Pacific beaches kept coming to his mind every time he spotted Heroine. His life of constant travelling and rumination ended abruptly when he exchanged his agoraphobic destiny with that of his claustrophobic cabaret Heroine. Now he was stuck with one and only one Heroine, be it for good or for bad, be it in the first or in the second place. Alas, Town’s flow of time was unfolding now in accelerated motion, yet always in a frozen static history which endlessly continued with the same patterns of repetitiveness, always leaving him with the same answers and no decisions.