213: Glorious

The monitor is showing a recording from yesterday, but later today it’ll be a live feed. Each day at high tide, a synthetic saltline appears, marking the sides of all tall buildings and land features within the seven mile radius of the Hub. Luminescent and pulsating. Residents of the city have an hour and ten to scramble to a point above the salt line. Or they are eliminated.

Empty. The Hub at the city centre is all but abandoned, save for the two baristas at the counter, staring into the abyss, and the remnants of gaunt survivors. Most of the seating radiating from the centre has been upturned, violently scattered at useless distances from the floor-bolted tables, broken seats flung and forgotten, resting on their sides or backs, caked in salt and sand. A battered speaker hanging on frayed wires by the till rattles through a late-twenties playlist, like the bleating tannoy of a derailed funicular, repeating the stuttering announcement of the final stop at which it lies in wreck: The Imaginarium of the Past.

A dissolving aluminum step-ladder, straddling a brushless combi-drill, some rawl plugs and compatible screws, a half-drunk tea in disposable cup, teabag wrung dry next to the spare battery. Creeping ivy swaddling the ladder’s rungs. Is this from now, or is this from then? And why do they put on this show, why do they show up, these fallow and flaking dried-up baristas, why do they crawl out of their concrete cylinder every morning, limping and staggering over miles upon miles of barren featureless coastland, just to tend to the “glorious vision” of the “chrome device” -- to “serve coffee” to “customers” in this poor replica of a joyless charade: The coffee cups, the saucers, the wheezing twenties music, the salvaged and put-right furniture – all ecstatic relics, fragmented embers from a razed world long put-out. Sure, assembled with much consideration, a careful eye, a thoughtful mind, but… wildly off the mark. The last of the coffee substitute substitute dried up decades ago, but still the leftovers drag themselves to the tables. Even the sun bears down expectantly, hoping to reclaim its place in the wreckage as the fiery redeemer, finally shedding its reputation as the hellwrecker. But, the Hub, overrun with weeds, baking in its own ruination, is untended, save for the two lowing baristas.

An old couple, grey-green, have been sitting for years at the table overlooking the ash pit. They begin to get up to leave. The man, newspaper under arm, rises first to help his wife from her chair, planting her walking stick in her gloved right hand. Here, don’t forget your bag. She takes it for a second and then hands it back to him: give those boys a good tip. They begin to walk, and when in line with the monitor, he faces it to say, It's the only time I get my hands on any money, raising the bag to his chin. Coffee’s exorbitant these days, tariffs apparently, passing the cost on to the middle class addict, tsk!. In the control room, we laugh, as we’re supposed to. Good luck, we mutter among ourselves. Did we want this one to be our father or grandfather or our son?

We follow them past the blacked stalks of scorched wheatfields to the hatch in the yellowing earth, down the escalator, through the barriers, through security scanners, into the airlock, into the sanitisation chamber. And then, one after the other, they are blasted out into space. It’s for their own good.

Will there be a winter lady? Says the boy. Of course there will, darling, says his mother. The summer lady had left for uni. The boy missed her reassuring face, lolling from the body trussed up there in the rafters, in that otherwise formless dark and cold patch of ceiling where the mystery pipes snake around. The boy will grow into the Turbo Dandy. Walking, with stick and umbrella for the first time since the accident, he’ll realise his pace is not only augmented with these crutches propelling him along, it’s turbo-charged. He’ll start overtaking pedestrians 30 years his junior. Which means he’ll unfortunately be first on scene for certain distressing events, crimes and disturbances — such as when the police chief’s daughter gets knocked unconscious by a wayward rock hurled her way during a game of Coffin Knocker in the schoolyard. All the other children were pre-warned to wear helmets. The injured girl lying on the playground, head resting on mother’s lap, the latter, firearm drawn, taking potshots at the other kids, and the massing parents locked streetside…