Titans are in Town

by Tomislav Sunic

  All of Town was surrounded by deadly little plastic toys which left many wannabe Titans crippled. The mine field was full of rotting human corpses, remains of charred dogs, cats, and other little disfigured beasts. How many times did the Townspeople wake up in fear after hearing thundering noise at night. Decoy toys kept exploding, self-firing machine guns perched high on the poles were spitting crossfire of microscopic bullets, thus keeping everybody wide awake. Everybody thought then about the invading Saturns who had probably made it this time over the hill. But these were only stray little cats in search of food, becoming in turn food for other scavengers, like rodents or bugs on the same minefield, and so on and on in a chain reaction and in a circular fashion of being and becoming, of life and death, of love and hate, of eternal life and return. He remembered his companion Benn, whose hookers down under lived off livers and kidneys of dead people, drinking their cold blood only to become themselves prey to cannibal mischlings who had adopted the same nutritional practice. “What a fine childhood!” That was the poem Benn once wrote. Since water was so scarce, hydropolitics became a major issue on the Town Council agenda and there was henceforth little debate in Town about someone’s religion or washing habits. Once or twice a month a bucket of water was passed by the Town Council around Town, usually designed for a multitude of purposes. The seawater was salty and contaminated with toxic pollutants — a far cry from the Art Deco watercolor it once was when it served as a pleasure destination for skinny dipping tourists.

  There was no time for makeshift cemeteries, because there was no need for them. The acrid liquid which laced the incoming Saturn bullets soon dislocated all corpses, stripping them of all organic smells and leaving only bare bones in the scorching sun. Many subterranean mischlings eagerly used the bones for a stew. Somewhere Held was sure there was a stretch of land in the minefield waiting for him, somewhere he could already see his converted thin legs and his decomposed skull waiting to be studied by some Saturnine savant or rolled over in a soccer game by future mischling kids in some future playground down in the future Town. He remembered the now barren place in which he and Heroine, upon his arrival from the Wild West had met; now it served as a cemetery for Town’s young Titans who did not need funeral rites. Small wonder that the ranks of subterranean species kept increasing each day. During some brief lulls, some senile white species surfaced, only to show that they were still there. Slowly they would lift off huge lids from their Platonic caves in which they dwelt nights and days for weeks and months. They all protruded their swollen heads which displayed broken glasses, broken language, broken hearts all in search of potable water, water. “Water, water, water,” Wasser, voda, flotte!, this was their only sigh and only cry. Making their appearance in the arid open air was reminiscent of countless movie scenes bearing traits of a never-ending Potemkin scenario. This time, however, every subterranean species looked large as life with no face behind him or in front of him. There was little water left and those lips which made it to the bucket … turned out to be Town’s Tantaluses.

  The frightened white subterranean creatures had decided recently to sign up to defend Town, yet the whole situation appeared so grotesque that it reminded Held of the social disease called the Vukovar town. True, he thought, Town’s disease consists now of survivalism on the one hand, while on the other, next door, not far from Town, a carrousel of the utmost fun was spinning around. The heads in the underground of what had become Town’s Styx Sewage System were all willing to fight. But to what avail? The younger ones, except for those about to die on the surface, had more or less all fled from Town and settled in across the Ocean where they could partake in the dying lights of the still ongoing light show. The older subterranean leftovers could barely hold their bodies up, let alone hold guns in their hands. Of course they all projected themselves stratospherically into the shining glitter of heroes, braving the never-ending disaster as if their wishful thinking could make up for the absence of Town’s reality.

  Three dozen younger ones, those who had decided to remain in Town in order to conduct the cleanup operation, were frequently in disarray, and Held, after millions of minutes, still had problems learning their names by heart. He knew Tom, Fabrice, Baba Roga, Harold, Kevin, or Krampus — names which were easier for him to remember. Their real names he had forgotten long ago as they did not serve any civic purpose now. Now all of them started decorating themselves with different fancy names, mostly nicknames from antiquity or from old Germanic sagas. The minute he would come across his companions it took him a while to recall their nicknames, and instead he preferred the “hey you!” interpellation. This allowed him at long last to hear the name from the mouth of the interlocutor. He could never do it promptly, because most of these lone fighters were nameless creatures carrying either a cross or a runic sign on their foreheads, each showing a sign of his imminent death somewhere on the minefield. If not tomorrow, then next year, or possibly the rapidly-approaching next century. Not that they were all born fighters. They had just learned to shoot because that was the only job left in Town. He wished he could project himself into the itinerant destiny of these species still of solid character and warlike stamina. Other than moving up fast to the minefield, they were also good scavengers, ready to pick up bones and body parts of different animals and humans lying out on the outskirts of Town. What the scorching sun could not accomplish nor, for that matter wild magpies from above, they did in their cleansing operations.

  The duel between one’s Self and his Double also played havoc among younger Titans, and Held knew well what was running through their heads. Had it not been for nearby light shows overseas, the Town could have extracted many more legions to fight and die. These were the last ones. Thus, in a supreme irony of history, Town’s old senile species showed more willingness to offer their flesh to incoming Saturnine bullets than many younger ones. But Held did not have much use for senile species either. In fact they were more of a burden than a help, frequently exposing themselves to incoming fire and making it more difficult for younger ones to respond with counter-fire in the direction of the hidden Saturns.

  Many of those who decided to remain in Town did not physically disappear, but preferred instead to desert their selves. The vicarious pleasure captured on their transmitters or paltry TV screens made many of them believe in the futility of fighting for Town’s post history. Infectious hope was just a terrible disease which most of them preferred to wallow in. All of them, all Townspeople envied Held for his brief life parenthesis in the Wild West, all thinking to themselves that he was just a plain old moron bent on a suicidal enterprise. And Held also knew well what was crossing their mind. He knew well that had they all been born in his hide, they would have left Town long ago. They would be living their suspended lives in the Wild West, ignoring that their time would inevitably come. At first Held tried to explain that the rock’n’roll Wild West was just their wild imagination, but they never believed him. They just thought that true history had come to an end in the Wild West and that with Town’s hopeful liberation everybody would henceforth live happily ever after. Much of their mind just functioned on the different layers of the time flow, imagining that there were still placid corners or niches of peace on the continent where one could weather the cosmic storm and remain protected forever from the incoming Saturns.

  Held had encountered thousands and met scores of those would-be vicarious Titans, or as they called themselves, white nationalists, back across the Ocean in what was once Sydney, San Francisco or Santiago, and whose views of historical time stretched out only in a brief illusory time span of fun and joy. These were mostly wannabe patriots who went by strange names such as Crowats with most of them lingering on their projected memories of the past or conditional Town’s life, in a vicarious feel good manner. Those wannabe patriot expatriates, who had remained in the Wild West yammered constantly about the flawed Town defense system while prudently declining to come back and defend Town. He had long discussions with the
m just a few months prior to Chaos, their highest intellectual skill being the rhyme of a strange guttural tune of some song known as ganga and the sound of the musical instrument tamburitza, or wild dances of kolo, all spiced up with their bragging about their utmost Titanic patriotism. It was interesting to observe the train of thought of those vicarious would-be Townspeople who were living and trespassing on Town’s tragedy via their computer screens, or who constantly narrated in the conditional tense about “how real Town should look like.” This singular layer of a thought process, within one single horizontal timespan, made Held sick, and he soon stopped talking on the phone or on the screen to these people altogether. There were of course still some computer devices in Town, so he could detect their virtual faces thousands of miles away from Town, but as the computer devices started eroding, and as the source of energy was becoming extinct, everything gradually went out of control. Town started to display an anachronistic picture of a combination of a medieval site and hypermodern wireless location, with the latter becoming more dysfunctional by the day.

  Held was considered insane by many Townspeople. Once in a while Held could capture the glimpse of his physique on the broken windows down Town and yes, his physique stubbornly refused to be placed in the context of Town. His thin clumsy legs, hair that had begun to recede, eyes that were expressionless, boots that were rotten, and his old hands holding a rusty gun — this is what his image was in the eyes of his Townspeople. Held knew well what was crossing the minds of Townspeople or, as he used to call them, “residents,” and how those residents talked to each other behind his back. “Held is a son of a bitch,” and “it’s him who got us into this mess, it is him who plays games and pretends to be another Hero. Look at this bastard who aspires to be something in our sea of nothingness, a filthy man who has squandered away our future and our money. Held is just a piece of shit whose spiritual opaqueness only bodes continuing disaster. Before he had landed here among us, we had such fun with the nearby mountain Saturns who had always been kind and fine to us, and who loved us more than we loved them. They are so handsome and nice because they are not the Saturns, they are our Gods!”

  Millions of times Held questioned himself about the hidden veracity of his own peoples’ speculations that were taking place behind his back and sometimes in the backbones of his armed fellow Titans. And what if they were right? What, after all, if he was wrong? He never knew the answer; he had his version of the truth which defied the expectations of his detractors, be it down under, be in the enlightened Wild West, be it here in his proverbial Town.

  Held and Heroine were the only fellow travelers of the Titanic times keeping eternal watch in the sea of the unknown, in the sea of their cherished ideals. Held and Heroine looked like the last Roman soldiers at Pompeii standing guard in front of the Vesuvian lava. They were the only species left to brave the universally approaching death and another eon of gloom and yes, an eon of the new darkness at noon. The Townspeople he knew were too stupid to grasp these cosmic motions and they would have likely found some other Held had he not dropped down in Town from the thin air and the blue skies of the Wild West. But as it turned out, a set of cosmic circumstances had merged together and brought him now into Town. Never under starry sky had Held imagined that one of these days he would be putting his signature to the post-history of his own Titanic times.

  There, some distance across the narrow ocean, at some place called America or Cartago, or name it as you will, life was still going on in a festive fashion; in the glitter, glamour and glory of the final hours and in a dying splendor of mass stupidity. Young human species were still having utmost fun, picturing themselves in a vicarious bravery unrecorded by their time. Their imagination went further beyond the reality of Held’s own Town, which had made Held, after all, opt for its own fate in his own Town. He was just plain sick of that virtual reality of the Wild West and preferred instead facing death in the now decapitated Town. Held knew about this make-believe game of the Wild West and he prided himself on his real force and vicarious empathy toward his fast approaching death. Townspeople did not know it, although all signs of their demise were there in plain sight too. It was certainly no accident that humans or bipeds invented that stupid rhetorical question: “Would it have happened had I known this?” But they all knew Chaos was bound to occur, yet continued to wallow in trivial hopes of afterlife. Held had learned long ago that after the battle of Stalingrad, the time was no longer right for glory and that henceforth all towns on the globe would embrace the replica of his own post-Titanic Town. He had experienced all of this and he knew that destiny could not be circumvented, however strong one’s willpower might be. The word “glory” has also disappeared from his vocabulary because everybody had used it up on mobile phones over and over again to the point that it had lost its original meaning. Now it became a cussword, a word of derision one would use in depicting a friend’s death. But everybody’s turn must come, said Held to himself, every little creature, be it a cat, or dog or man overseas, must pay the price sooner rather than later and play their role of a little Brahmin or a small Chandala.

  The Saturns were approaching now from all sides, ready to dish out new role models to each surviving species that breathed in Town. And then even the last lyre of the Greek chorus would cease to emit sounds.

  Chapter VIII: Nobilo’s Eternal Return

  Endless rumination was Held’s expertise. Traveling back in time for Held meant traveling back to old Towns. Once upon a time, when Townspeople had made a huge westward trek across the Ocean, they had to shift gears, from the first to the fifth. Speed does not always kill. Arriving at the post-modern world, known as America, they had to adjust their gears. When Held had decided to return to his pre-chaotic Town, he did not know that he would have to thrive again and again in neutral. Nothing, except for the absence of the old Bolshoi iconography had really changed. At the Town Airport the welcome sign read: “Held, do not touch our cognacs, our coffees, and our cutting corners!” Surely, old Town customs die hard, and what took a minute to solve for him in the Wild West, took him a year to tackle in Town. The decades-long contamination of the homo sovieticus syndrome had rendered Town’s habits of the heart difficult to cure, be it the usage of Townspeople’s epic mouth, be it in the employment of their lyrical and lachrymose heart. Upon his arrival, everybody in Town regurgitated words like “tolerance,” “democracy,” and “hard work,” but few knew what those words really stood for. They all mimicked and feigned hard work, but nobody worked at all.

  Back in those days before the rapid Saturns’ fire had started, everything was, indeed, surreal in Town. Many affluent Townspeople imagined themselves something else, just like Alice in front of the huge concave mirror which embellished and inflated her ego. Alas, the new-born, so-called democratic Town was still thriving in the diplomatic no-man’s-land which bore already the first traits of incoming Chaos. In the streets of high flying Town, Held could see numerous pets and pedestrians walking side by side, with a massive inflation of passing wogs and mischlings. The former projected themselves into the surreal world of shopping malls; the latter gloated over their new piece of paradise found.

  Just twenty airborne miles south of Town, one could already spot from the aerial cameras the Saturn manned tanks and rocket launchers. Yet, in surreal Town, everybody pretended that some EU foreign ukase, or a distant Samaritan decree, would prevent them from coming closer. Everybody lived on the installment plan, not knowing that their death on credit was slowly taking its course and its curse. Heroine, whom he had just encountered, danced herself to death, amused herself to a comatose state, and all Town girls enjoyed themselves in passing time away in Town’s pleasures. Nobody talked guns; everybody talked roses. Boy, every other lady in the streets of Town wore some type of animal on her shoulders, be it a huge Persian fox or distant polar bear. The Town displayed more glitter and glamour than all the glorious Wild West combined. The perfume of Nina Ricci, the odor of Givenchy, the taste of choco
late Lindt, made every youngster forget the approaching and nearby Chaos. In those long forgotten years, in local Town cafes youngsters pretended to be high on grass. They twisted their lips and rolled their eyes, as if to suggest their deep intellectual involvement with a surreal world of the unknown. “Oh,” thought Held, “how poorly they mimicked Western decadence! When they pompously light up their joints, they do it so clumsily that they either burn their fingers, or end up bogarting one another’s drag.” Where were those times when he rolled up his joints on Pacific beaches? All women in Town, except for Heroine, loved to plaster huge layers of makeup on their cheeks which, of course, required Held to use a portable spade to clean it off before any serious necking. It was then that Held met Heroine for good; a smart intelligent woman with mysterious eyes of a femme fatale allure. Her tone of voice was so enchanting that it quickly disarmed Held from searching for any other earthly pleasure. She was sexy as Brunhild and revengeful as Kriemhild. He saw with his own eyes how she killed an ex-communist snitch in her cabaret, simply by shoving a broken glass bottle into his loins. There was a terrible scene as the snitch started screaming with blood gushing from his underbelly all over the floor. And nobody paid much attention to it. It was the usual scenario, with many former communist collaborators starting to decorate Town’s lighting poles. Those were still the days of the beautiful Transatlantic Lull, known officially in the Town’s script as the “The Governance,” a strange regime in which all Town sycophants were geared up to carry out any ukase of the distant banksters overseas, forgetting to pay attention to the increasing level of wog violence in Town’s streets.