Titans are in Town

by Tomislav Sunic

  Heroine had quickly achieved the reputation of being a woman of character who refused to be taken for a ride by unknown suitors, let alone by former Bolshoi hacks. This made Held decide to stay in Town for good. Heroine was not willing to take off or flee her destiny; instead she decided to remain with Held even when the first bombs rained in on the roof of her cabaret. As the bombardment wore on she grew old and decrepit akin to a piece of flesh in shrunken skin, yet her mysterious eyes continued to exhale the sum-total of tragic Titanism. She was so much different from all passing wenches whom Held had met before.

  Since his return to Town, Held always had problems communicating with the locals. As a far-flung stranger in Town, and now as an Earth-bound native, he spoke the Town’s language fluently, although he was always viewed as a trespasser by the Townspeople. He could never convince the Townspeople about the true motives of his comeback. Everybody always looked upon him either with servility or hate. He remembered with bitterness his once-upon-a-time encounter with the local man Nobilo who had once upon a very, very distant time, that is when he was a member of the Bolshoi youth league, chased him out of Town. During the Transatlantic Lull, Nobilo became, just like all turncoat Townspeople, the Town’s chief prosecutor, of course, under a different verbal disguise and resorting to different slogans and different lies. Once upon a time he had used the same prosecuting function as the extended hand of the early Saturn system. Now he was pretending to be the best democratic spokesman against the Saturnine threat. The envy and disdain that showed on his face toward Held was basically the replica of the envy and disdain of all local turncoats for Held. When Held arrived in Town the feigned nicety of Nobilo and his ilk was meant to be a cover for hiding their own Saturnine and savage past.

  The one who taught Held the first ropes of survival was a local guy who went by the name of Alberich, a guy short of stature resembling the dwarf from the Nibelungen saga, a wealthy guy, yet a guy who had some character left. During the early Saturnine times, known in the official language as ex-Bolshoi times, he never ratted out on the better ones, never envied the better looking genes. During the Transatlantic Lull he never joined the global impostors and remained as critical towards the new class as he once was toward the Bolshoi class.

  “Held you must be out of your brains to land here! You émigré moron. You must be loaded with millions of megabucks, that’s how Townsfolks see you here. You are suspected of plotting to dislodge them from their socially guaranteed coffee with cream!”

  “No way José,” muttered Held to himself. “I am poor and debunked and destroyed by my constant travels. I have come to fight and die a glorious death. My father Frederic taught me once that a free man is a fighter.”

  “Frederic and all Wotans and Freyas my foot,” said Alberich. “Pack up and leave. Life is not worth the scum that resides here. Remember, the minute Saturns walk into Town they will drop their pants again and start singing welcoming praises, albeit of opposite rhymes and will become anew the best brownnosers to all the Saturns of the Earth.”

  How real and even surreal sounded Alberich’s words! How strange were all those turncoats, the Nobilos and hundreds of thousands of other Town low-lifes. They keep coming and going with every full cosmic moon. If tomorrow a new hoax spreads out, they will recite new buzzwords.

  Held knew that Townspeople would flock again to their turd-inspired Saturns. He has seen it millions of times in earlier eons. Back in old Rome when he functioned several times as Consul Marius, he had to get rid of his detractors who had claimed to be his best friends. He could have done it now several millennia later by neutralizing the Nobilos or simply by joining the Saturns beyond the hill. And yes, he saw Town’s fickleness best when he fought the Kebabs at Zenta in 1697. He saw how scores of Kebabs whom he had captured in Sarajevo quickly replaced their turbans with crosses, all becoming avowed Christians.

  But there was a big difference this time in Town. Time had not come to a stop yet. All beliefs were depleted, as there was nothing else to believe in. Preachers, Quakers, Antifa world improvers who had once infested Town with their palavers were long gone. In fact it became quite dangerous even to make a mild promise on how the weather might change tomorrow.

  Finally, the Townspeople learned the lesson that there was no use believing in anything, either in Gods or in people. The prime belief was how to make it to the next day and stay alive. The latter day Saturns now beyond the hill meant business and even for the most highly versed preacher handing out illusions about everlasting happiness, there was no more safety in Town. Other than the fact that the new preachers had a bit more of food and some clean water left.

  This at least is how rumor had it although, curiously, those who had deserted to the Saturns never reappeared; nobody ever heard from them again, whereas in Town the rumor was rampant that they served as a special meal to the Saturns. Human meat was widely used as a prime victual among Saturns, the custom gradually spreading out in Town and particularly among wogs and mischlings down beyond in the underworld.

  The new alimentary customs were also reflected in the remarkable appearance of the firmament which no longer had the same color as three hundred years ago. Clouds were sparse, and stars late at night were much larger than several decades ago. It rained once a year and basically all vegetation was gone. The big central park looked like a surface of the moon with only three trees left, with no branches on them. Grass, which had forever served as a playground for kids, was no longer there — all eaten by crows and rodents whose numbers approximated Town’s population.

  Not only that, but the sun was getting bigger as it was getting closer to Earth, giving the impression that it was going to fuse with Town. Alas the temperature was not rising, but quite the contrary. Days were becoming colder even though the light from the sun was piercing every nook and cranny of even the most hidden spot in Town, forcing Townspeople to wear sunglasses from early morning to late evening. The temperature in Town would sink rapidly, right after high noon. The days were getting colder and colder. Climatic changes were reflected in the behavior of Townspeople. Changing one’s worldview was getting less and less common because there was no longer any reason to believe in anything. The period of serial delusions and non-stop disappointments had already made Townspeople skeptical of every cantor, every priest, and every imam. Words like “honor” and “identity” had disappeared long ago, which at least spared Held from engaging in fruitless discussion about the meaning of life and death. Held knew too well that new converts such as the Nobilos were Saturns in disguise, although at this stage that did not make the slightest difference either to him or to anybody else in Town. Everybody had already gotten accustomed to routine lying. Of course, nobody ever used the word lying. Everybody was just mimicking each other and regurgitating empty slogans whatever the circumstances might be. Nobilo, just like most Townspeople, had once been a prime candidate to pack up and leave during the Transatlantic Lull, but the trouble was that with the approaching Titanic times he was smart enough to realize that there were no alternatives left anywhere else on Earth. Town’s fate, one way or another was taking place everywhere, south, north, east and west. All towns everywhere, or what remained of them after those climatic changes, were turning into a latter day Palmira, Persepolis or Timgad, all becoming surreal witnesses to the Titanic void of time.

  Back during the Transatlantic Lull, widely known in Town as the interregnum or the cold war that took place shortly before the armed Saturns had made their appearance beyond the hill, everybody in Town talked much about tolerance and respect. Curiously, those who most often signaled their tolerance were those who once kept Held out of Town. Those were the little Nobilos in disguise who kept resurfacing now and again in a new garb, realizing that one worn in earlier times could make them a good shooting target. Held could still remember the fate of his old man and sister who had ended in the small cavern in the underworld, courtesy of the Nobilo’s court decree, and him becoming again the chief man in charge of T
own’s jurisdiction. Held thought that he was again having another bad dream...

  Of course many other Townspeople thought and felt the same as the Nobilos. Town was comprised of a huge number of intellectual turncoats who once fraternized with the first local Saturns. They, too, were accustomed to changing their garb, and would do it again and again whenever a different Saturn came walking into Town with his new set of verities. However, the Nobilos he was meeting now never told him about their past into his face. Held therefore remained grateful to the dwarf Alberich for keeping him in the loop. Besides, Alberich had tons of gold stashed on the slopes of the nearby mountain where the new Saturns were deployed, although nobody but him knew the exact location of the treasure trove. This was an additional reason why the Saturns wanted to capture Town; they wanted to get hold of Alberich and pry the location of the gold out of him. Held never thought about this treasure trove, as it had never meant anything to him. Those about to die, and Held being slated to be the next one in the line, hardly crave for money. In fact it did not make sense even to have gold because one could not buy anything with it any longer in Town.

  When several years ago Town had been hit by enormous Saturnine missiles, it ceased to face the problem of its desperate housing shortage, which for years had been Town’s main predicament. Hundreds of thousands of self-proclaimed patriots began immediately packing up and leaving for the nearby safety of outposts in the Wild West, from which Held had just returned. Nobilo and other former Bolshoi hacks were ready to go, too, partly because of his former role as snitch-in-chief, yet he rapidly became aware that other towns in the periphery of the Wild West, where he had earlier dispatched his son, were facing the similar or the same Saturnine scenario. In fact Nobilo became extremely concerned about the fate of his son, whom he had not heard from ever since.

  Well, by now everybody in Town knew that there were no more safe towns on the horizons and that sooner rather than later all of them were bound to face Chaos. This was just like death on the installment plan and reminded Held of his ex-friend, the eternal night voyager Ferdinand, who had coined that expression long before Held had begun using it. At that time, Held still harbored some illusions about good cowboys riding into towns and cleansing it of all Nobilos. “My, my, how time flies,” thought Held to himself.

  Chilling weather, no food, and whizzing bullets may explain why in recent times the underworld became so popular among Townspeople. Yes indeed, even in that twilight morass where Hades had ruled for eons, there were tiny portions of Elysian fields that offered temporary solace. Many Townspeople had heard about those places of respite and circulated their fairy tales in Town over and over again. Not because they believed in their tales, but simply because the rhythmic repetitions of their words made their underground tale more believable to them, to the point that even the most skeptical ones began reciting that “there, underneath there lies the heaven.” The more they told those tales, the more the beauty of the underworld was becoming plausible.

  Those talks were a daily menu of storytelling around the big bonfire in the center of Town where Townspeople entertained each other each night, exchanging alternative lies, just like they once did during the Transatlantic Lull, all of them raving and ranting about their newly discovered religion of the free market and the eternal bliss of the religion of never-ending Progress. But the only problem was that whoever decided to replace his abode in Town with the bottomless edge of the Elysian Fields never came back to Town. He or she would disappear into nothingness.

  The former elation following Town’s independence, which had been pried from the early Saturns just prior to the Transatlantic Lull and just days after Held’s arrival, disappeared in the darkness of the lighting horizon and the sun coming closer and closer. “Freedom, freedom,” that fancy prewar slogan was gone. “Freedom, my foot!” Alberich would retort. What counted now in the hyperreal lull of the post-Bolshoi Town was not a long-sought liberty and independence, but an intense appetite for transatlantic perishable commodities. In the face of the coming Titanic tornadoes even the Town’s big shots thought about dispatching their kids to distant outposts, for fear of having to send them to fight the approaching armies near at hand. Many, indeed, were ready to drop their expensive imported pants for a cheap Western residence card offered by some Western Samaritan. My, my, my, the Townfolks imagined that money grew on the Western tree and that it took only a few steps out of La Guardia to become the Morgans or the Rockefellers. Chaos had finally put a stop to those hallucinations. Many Wild West expats from Town began shortly thereafter to plan their return trip back to Town, being aware that Town’s fate offered a modicum of survivability.

  Just before the Titanic times had begun in full, the surreal dream of non-ageing and of eternal life of Townspeople had reached its outer limits. It therefore turned into the grotesque. Held knew well from the Wild West that the grotesque is always a mixture of the surreal, the tragic and the bizarre, which eventually leads to Chaos. The present mores in Town were different from the mores of other towns still spared from the Saturnine bullets. Countless culinary diplomats and countless foreign TV prime timers, visiting the last few years of Town’s subsistence, carried a patronizing posture towards Townspeople. They would talk to themselves in private. “No it cannot happen to us over there.” This was their adagio that Held must have overheard a million times. “No, it cannot happen here; it can only happen elsewhere.” Town’s brief and phony imitation of Western mores during the brief surreal Transatlantic Lull soon turned into a drowning death and despair. Town’s turn in Chaos had set in, just like other towns would be in the days and months to come...

  No music, no sound, no noise. Silence was Held’s only pleasure, and he thoroughly enjoyed it while taking long tours along Town’s perimeters. His gun was slung behind his shoulders, providing him with a sense of false security. He knew it was false. It did not make much difference, because if the Saturns wanted to take him out, they could have done it long ago, or they could do it now, or any other time thereafter. In fact, Held knew the contingent, accidental part of history and how just a small particle of a derailed eon could bring about the happy ending of death. His brief life span taught him that when a system borders on the grotesque, it signs its own death warrant. Proof? What destroyed the old Town that he once fled were not the guns of the Saturnines, but its own home-grown surreal mendacity. Back then numerous Town scribes had ceased to believe in their self-styled truth, their democratic regurgitation notwithstanding. The old Saturn-run Town came apart not because of the proverbial bad Saturns who were in charge of the municipality back then, but because of the ideological recycling that had earlier taken place among them. Millions of moments earlier, before Held had even made his reappearance in Town, Townsfolks, as well as countless ex-watchdog commissars had decided to replace the patchwork of their political pathology with vicarious Wild-Western fantasies. Moreover, the overseas glitter looked so near and so dear that it drove even the Town’s old true believers out of their half-witted minds.

  Held had for decades lived in different towns and projected upon his return a rosy picture into his now newly tormented Town. This picture was full of pastoral pleasures in a perfect world of the Titans in Town. For decades he had mused about Town’s independence and freedom only to uncover the same ugly Saturnine nuisance. Oh, where are those times when young Helds came to fight against Cronus? As an old traveler he had projected for years a fanciful picture of Town’s future; a picture of commitment and fight. The mistake that Held made was that he could not put himself into this perspective; Town was more pathetic than his own pathetic arrival. He knew that he was Siegfried, but alas he did not have the cloak of invisibility, nor the Tarnkappe to cover up his naked soul, nor a crocodile hide to make Townspeople understand who he really was or was not. He also suffered from bad headaches and his legs were getting heavier and heavier by the day, while his breathing was getting more erratic by the hour. He did his best to help out the besieged Town only to rea
lize that his idea of Town’s future did not match the ideas of his Townspeople. Those few who had provided the first batch of Titans in town were all gone by now, simple boys from the suburbs who once danced erratically on the minefields. They managed to stave off, however, the first onslaught of the Saturns, first with their shoulders and then with their hearts, but they were reckless with their braggadocios. The best are those who are never afraid of dying, and who know that to live means to kill or to get killed. O yes, Friedrich was right when he said that a free man must be a fighter. But Friedrich was by now the very last man and his best Titans were by now all gone.

  Chapter IX: Fabrice’s Tale

  Held’s alter ego Fabrice was a man living in Tower, a place which once functioned as Town’s church. A bizarre man with strange allures who reminded Held of his late friend the now deceased Venner. Not a fighter but a thinker, a man of great wisdom, something similar to the dwarf Alberich except that he was dirt poor and had no gold to offer for ransom. He monitored Held’s moves and gave him directions as to how to stay spiritually alive and how to survive the future Hell. Yes, Held did have some foreboding about Hell, a wretched underground place in whose replica he had once briefly resided. But could this outlandish Hell on the horizon be any worse than the one he was living in now? In the morning before his duels with the Saturns, along the minefield parameters, Held would stop by Fabrice’s Tower for a cup of coffee and some cigarettes and would ask about Town’s future, and the meaning of death and dying. Today, as some curious light was gleaming from the red skies above Town, Fabrice’s watchtower looked ablaze as if on fire. This was always the case around the time of the solstice which made the sun look gigantic and closing in on Town. As he walked upstairs to the second floor of Tower, two flights of steps with some missing, he was wondering if Fabrice had stopped ageing. He always looked the same. Time must have really bypassed him. Fabrice was a bald man wearing thick glasses and usually walking on his tiptoes as if the heels on his espadrilles were missing, just like those of the Huns whose crummy horsebound feet he had once observed in the Pannonian fields when visiting Etzel’s court. In fact Fabrice did not even have soles on any of his shoes, which made Held wonder how he survived the freezing cold of the staircases during cold and soulless nights. Fabrice was of course a source not just of Held’s information, but also a source of inspiration, although people in Town did not pay much attention to him. For them Fabrice was a local weirdo who survived by catching and eating bugs picked up near the waterfront, a man so thin and so fragile that one wondered how he could even stand up and walk on his crummy legs with no solid feet to support them. Some unspoken far away glitter in his bespectacled eyes shined the second he saw Held as he was holding the rail and uttered: “Hello, salut!” Fabrice immediately began to talk as they walked into his apartment, without even bothering to ask Held if he wanted some water for his dry throat.