I have gone to North Korea on a work trip and am off on my own exploring. I somehow fly, planeless, into the sky and look down. On the west coast of the peninsula I can see a large wall made of segments shaped like pointed ovals stacked like giant Lego pieces. I land to go explore it and discover that it’s a border wall. There’s a chain-link fence behind me and the border wall before me, and beyond that is the countryside. In the spaces where the ovals’ points meet are alcoves with pits dug down about waist-deep, and as I walk between the border wall and the chain-link fence, I see that there are very old bodies in the pits – one or two desiccated bodies with stringy hair and tattered clothes. I explore more, and I realize that the ghosts of these bodies haunt the space. They call out for help, begging not to be left behind. Later, someone tells me that the border wall was put up to keep the rural folks from fleeing to the city during some catastrophe (famine? political unrest?). Apparently they didn’t get very far.
The apocalypse has come, and many things have changed, but much remains intact. I go to the university and although the lights flicker in the hallways, students mill around in classrooms, waiting for their final exams. I realize that all they want is some semblance of normality in their lives, though some of them are still there because they have nowhere else to go. They want to keep studying and taking exams. It relieves the anxiety of the apocalypse.
I go to where the new building was recently constructed and the maintenance crew is trying to figure out how the apartment with the moveable entrance works. I have the keys because someone (the construction foreman? a university administrator?) trusted me enough to give me possession of the space, so I try to explain it to them: there is a two-point operation for accessing the apartment. It consists of two small pylons on wheels, about five feet high, connected by an arm that bends at one point. The whole assembly can be moved, and strangely neither end is actually attached to the door of the outbuilding. They just have to be within ten (twenty? a hundred?) feet of the door in order to work. The actual lock is in the pylon farther away from the door.
I have yet to see the inside of the new building, so I go and check it out. Today, the pylons are inside the building, so I enter the dark, uninhabited space through a back door and look around. The hallway in which the apartment door stands is big and airy and utilitarian – a maintenance space behind and below the main areas of the building. The light here filters in through a few small windows lining the upper levels, making the hall feel cavernous. I test the pylon mechanism and the door opens for me. The apartment is tiny: you walk into a small kitchen with a small counter. There’s a small, old-school television on the counter. Beyond the kitchen is a dark living area. It all feels very den-like. As far as I can tell, this is the apartment for the building’s caretaker. I wonder why I was given the keys. Maybe they hadn’t found a person to do the job yet.
The rest of the building is apartments, maybe for students, maybe for faculty. I file this away for later reference and head home.
Back in the town where I live, people are gathering in houses and apartments in small groups, talking about the apocalypse, about how to survive it. Scouting and raiding parties are being organized because supplies are running low. I have a map of the area that shows all of the nearby towns. We circle the ones that look promising, put a line through the ones we’ve already visited.
Many people have disappeared from town, but it’s not clear where they’ve gone.
My wife and I visit some of our friends. They’re arguing about something, so we look it up on the internet – and it occurs to me how strange it is that the internet is still working, though it is slow and has clearly deteriorated since the apocalypse. The sites are all still there, but they’re slow to load and access isn’t always guaranteed. Somewhere on a shelf, a small radio is tuned to a local station. This much hasn’t changed: there’s still a DJ playing music, a familiar voice that cuts through the gloom to provide information that’s becoming scarcer as the days go on.
When my wife and I leave, I tell her about what’s happening at the university, so we go back. We walk through the halls where the classrooms are. Barack Obama is wandering them with the students, but no one seems to recognize him. He looks shrunken and defeated, forlorn and ghostlike. He knows he couldn’t have prevented the apocalypse – he was freshly out of office – but still he feels broken. We note his presence but decide not to bother him.
I take her to the new building. We stand outside. It’s strangely shaped, a modernist fabrication with a strange overhang and puckered windows, all built from blue concrete. Someone asks me how to enter the upstairs apartments, so I direct her into the cavernous hallway and toward the fire doors that lead to the stairs up. I guess some people plan on moving here after all.
I present this place as a possibility for us: a small concrete fortress, relatively uninhabited and easily defensible. The caretaker’s space could be the safest place left on Earth. She considers it.
I am wandering around the Dutch Reform church in my neighborhood, a newer, 19th century building that stands on the spot where the original church stood nearly four hundred years ago. But strangely it’s not in the city; there is a field that extends behind it toward a large hill, and in the front, where the churchyard and the road should be, the field continues.
As I explore the grounds, I notice that at the front of the church there’s a small metal cover (maybe about six inches long) in the ground, and at one corner there’s a hole. So I lift up the cover and flip it over and look down through the hole – and I see a tunnel about 10 or 15 feet down in which there’s an old railroad track that leads right past the front of the church. And on the track I see a coffin – no, several coffins, sitting right on the track. All of the coffins have crosses on their lids, and large stones have been set on top of them as if to keep them closed. I am astounded.
I go around to the back of the church, and I see another hole in the ground, so I get down on my belly to look through it. Sure enough, there’s another tunnel and more tracks, and more coffins with stones on them. Here, though, the tracks lead in several directions, right from the back of the church, as though the church basement had served as the station. If I squint just right, I can see an old signboard showing destination and departure time. I keep trying to take a photo from my phone, but everything is too blurry, my hand shakes too much, my phone is almost full.
As I lay there, trying to document this incredible find, a man walks into the tunnel and looks up at me. He says he’s going to explore it. I beg him not to do it alone. What I really want to say is, “Don’t go without me.”
I work at a shop in town, one of those little spots that’s half a floor below ground. It’s late on a Sunday and I’m closing up alone. Outside, it’s cold and wintery and already dark at 7 pm. I lock up and start walking down the snowy sidewalk, past a few cars parked in parallel.
As I approach the main street that will take me to my place, I notice that there are several pairs of eyes peeking out from under some cars up ahead. I take out my phone and turn on the flashlight, and sure enough there is a pack of stray dogs there. They remind me of the strays in Istanbul – old, arthritic, tame, unbothered by the presence of people. I mull this over as I turn onto the main street. One of the dogs gets up and crosses my path, wanders off to do god knows what in the night.
The sidewalk along the main street is full of packed snow. It’s as though someone has taken a front-end loader and piled all the snow from the street onto the sidewalk, then tamped it down – all while I was at work. I barely recognize the landscape.
A little perplexed, I climb up what I think is the path and keep walking toward my place. Minutes into my walk I realize that something feels different under my feet. The crunch of snow has changed; my footing feels a little more solid.
I stop walking and look – and it’s a good thing, too: I’m standing on the roof of a house, beside the little pipes and small chimneys at the peak. The snow has led me here. I’m inches away from falling two or three stories to the ground and I don’t understand how this happened. I turn around and try to work my way back and downward, but for some reason I can’t find the path that led me here. I walk, but I only end up on top of another roof, this one barn-shaped.
I look around. There’s no way down. I can’t even see the bridge that got me from the last roof to this one. A calm terror washes over me.
I might still be on that roof right now.
1. Old neighborhood
I am walking through a semi-familiar city, one where I lived many years ago. Everything is gray and grimy – the sky, the buildings, the road itself. The road that I’m walking ends, taking me to the very edge of the neighborhood. I look out through a great clear dome, a protective bubble over this part of the city. Below, the rest of the city spreads before me, dim lights in crumbling brownstones and twisted skyscrapers. I turn back to my immediate surroundings. A few people mill around. There’s a row of eateries here to my left, one of them sporting an old and faded yellow sign, the kind meant to glow from lightbulbs inside. I remember this place I’ve been here before. I used eat at this place. I think about calling my friend who lived here with me, telling her where I am.
2. Revolutionary
I am in a classroom with lab tables. The police are coming for me. There is an older woman here, a teacher. We know that the police are coming for me, even though there are others in the room. I’m some kind of fugitive, a free-thinker, a minor revolutionary. The teacher is willing to stand up for me, to protect me. The police crash through the door and descend upon me, but before they reach me the scene replays itself – three, four times maybe. Each time I know a little more, but they always find me.
3. Lawnmower
I am in a suburban neighborhood, modest and clean. The sun is shining and the sky is a brilliant blue. I’m outside contemplating the lawn with a friend of mine. Our wives are inside the house.
Three punk witches amble down the street wearing torn black clothes. One of them looks like Joan Jett, black lipstick and all. They stop and offer to sell us lawn equipment; they take out a catalogue with machines and spells alike in it. For some reason their insistence angers me. Maybe it’s because they’re peddling suburban perfection.
My friend is uninterested but unbothered by the witches, but I stand in the street and argue with them. The wives come out of the house, watch us from the lawn. Frustrated, I finally tell the witches what I want: “I want a lawnmower,” I snarl, holding out my hands to mimic the motions of using an old-style reel lawnmower, the kind that you have to push again and again. “I want a manual lawnmower with sharp fucking blades."
The witches are afraid.
…and the channel changes and there’s a house on the screen, somewhere in New York City, and I’m at the house with someone else. The owners’ enemies have arrived – large Russian men bearing a massive black leather couch. They deliver it as though it’s some kind of peace offering but it is clear that the gesture is a false one.
We set the couch in the living room and the hardwood gleams in afternoon sunlight. We sit but something is off, so I look down, underneath the couch. There are two jade tablets standing up, propped against the underside of the couch. I reach down and remove them. They are cold and weighty and smooth and rough all at once. They are about the size of a large iPad, but thicker. There is a Mayan text inscribed on the tablets in relief. I recognize some of the characters from my studies long ago.*
We look at each other and realize that the couch was a kind of Trojan horse. We need to get these tablets to a museum or the Russians will come for the owners of the house. I wrap them up in in white tissue paper, put on my big black coat and my hat, tuck the tablets under the crook of my arm. We decide to walk to the museum: a cab ride is dangerous since the Russians could be the drivers, and subways leave no hope for escape if we’re discovered. The walk is only about forty short blocks and we’ve been there before. We just need to get there without being seen, but our coats are heavy and should hide us well.
For once I’m grateful it’s winter.
[*Editor’s note: I briefly did graduate studies in Mesoamerican archaeology many years ago. The characters I saw on the tablets were definitely Mayan.]
[Editor’s note: I haven’t had a dream worthy of recording here in months. I suspect the fact that I’ve been finishing up my degree has something to do with it; the constant stress of high-stakes writing, rewriting, and defending combined with the everyday stresses of being underemployed has kept my mind from wandering into the vivid, cinematic nighttime realms the way it used to. So these are long and rambling, but it’s almost a relief to post them.]
1. Soldiers
I am getting a tattoo. The shop is at the top of a skyscraper. It’s a slick office with large windows overlooking the city and a number of paintings on the walls. The artist is part Native, well respected, charges a lot. Tells me his birth name is Eldon but he uses Seldon as an artist.
As I stand in the shop, I’m looking at the paintings. One of the smaller ones attracts my attention. There’s something alluring about it, though I’m hard pressed to say what it is. I ask him the price, thinking that if it’s within reason I could get it as a graduation gift for myself. An image of my thesis advisor looms at the edge of my consciousness as I think about this.
He tells me it’s $900. Undeniably out of range.
I look out the window. It is dark outside – not because of the time of day, but because there are huge thick dark clouds everywhere; they extend downward into a kind of haze or fog. There’s a sinister and gritty quality to this city. I finish up my business in the clean, bright office and leave.
Outside, I am standing on the little manmade plateau that houses the university campus. It’s a very urban space, though a conventionally nicer one than the city below. Toward the edge of the plateau, near some of the student buildings I see smoke pouring into the sky, merging with the clouds. Gunfire lights it up with firework reds. There’s fighting going on. I see police/military (there’s no difference between the two in this world) in heavy gear, firing into the smoke. There’s a student uprising.
As I walk toward the fighting, I realize I’m a soldier, wearing the pixellated light-colored camouflage of our military, a solid pack on my back, helmet under my arm. I move closer and my CO tells me we have to jump, that I need to get with him to the plane? helicopter?
I go; we jump. A second or two down we pull our cords and parachute to the ground. I’ve never jumped before, but it doesn’t faze me. None of it does. As we near the ground he tells me to run; it will help break the fall.
Safely on the ground, the smoke and gunfire above us now, I turn to my CO and the other soldier from my unit. The CO – short and ginger-haired with a muscled build and a youthful, oblong chin – tells us he’s sending us home. This fighting, he says, is wrong and he won’t have his best men involved.
We’re in a dilapidated part of town (which part of this town isn’t?), near an abandoned subway station. There’s a cab stand in the back. We make our way there to hail a cab. As we cross the street from the back of the subway station, a woman in a huge truck pulls up. It’s a rusty old thing, maroon with a wide beige stripe down the side, huge tires – one of which looks low. The CO asks if she needs a hand with the tire, points out that it’s low. She politely refuses so we continue along the back of the building.
It’s brighter here. Still gloomy, but somehow it seems that more sunlight has filtered through. I look at my companions: the ginger CO, all-American; my other comrade is taller, broader, looks like the tattoo artist. And then there’s me, the short thick transman whose facial hair still struggles to make a five o'clock shadow.
But they don’t question me. I am one of them.
We walk toward the cab stand.
2. Bush
I am in a hotel somewhere in sub-Saharan Africa. The hallways are broad and the ceiling is cut out so that the upper level overlooks the lower level, like in an indoor shopping mall.
I have been driving a large Jeep-like vehicle with no top through the lower hallway. My friend Jim [editor’s note: an online friend whom I have never met in person] is in the passenger seat. As I drive, we discuss the trip I’m supposed to be taking that evening into the bush, to camp out alone so that I can observe something (a group of bandits? a shy nocturnal animal? the stars? – my memory is hazy on this). I have secret orders from someone; it’s serious business. I need to get to the other side of the hotel and meet with my handler to pack my gear and go over protocol.
From the hallway above, a police officer sees me driving through the hotel and calls down that I need to stop and wait for him. I stop, turn off the engine, put it in neutral. Jim and I wait for a few minutes but the cop doesn’t show. Just for fun I rock the Jeep – and to my surprise, the heavy tank-like thing moves forward.
I go along with it, steering quietly through the hallway. We’re getting closer to the lobby now and there are more people around. They move aside as though it’s common for someone to be driving such a large vehicle down the hall.
The place where I’m supposed to meet my handler is off to the right, past the front desk and down another hallway, but I continue to go forward and end up in a weird vehicle testing room. The room is large and covered in tight, dark blue astroturf. There are artificial hills in here, and openings in the floor that lead downward – it would be very easy to drive into one of them and fall to my death.
I’m certain there’s an elevator in this room; I feel like I’ve been here before or at least heard about it. Along the edges, in some little corners and nooks there are glass tables, little observation platforms. I maneuver the Jeep through the room as carefully as I can, picking up speed on the downslopes but careful not to drive over the edges. No elevator in sight, I drive back to the entrance, back to the hallway, to the left – the direction that would take me into the bush.
The Jeep comes to a halt. The police officer has caught up with us. He’s giving me a ticket for $154 or $156 (why so precise, I wonder), for driving through the hotel. I hope my handler won’t be so angry as to yank me off the job. As the cop leaves, I am still thinking ahead to my upcoming adventure.
I’ve been published in Cleaver Magazine! I am pleased to announce that my story “Magic Trick” made Issue #7 (September 2014). Here’s the link: http://www.cleavermagazine.com/magic-trick-by-circus/. It’s a great magazine with lots of great talent. Go check out the issue!
I’ve been posting bits of short fiction, dreams, and poems here now for about three and a half years (I can’t believe it’s been this long), and I just today realized that I haven’t ever taken the time to introduce myself. So here’s a little about me. Take it as a footnote to the rest of what’s here.
I’m Circus. I’ve been writing stories since I could hold a pencil. In the early days they consisted of comic book adventures. In middle school they were all high fantasy. College brought me to a delightful combination of Gaiman, Borges, and Pavic, which opened up the door to entire new worlds of writing. My interests are too broad to fit comfortably into any one genre, but I see this as a good thing: life is big, and words are small, and there’s plenty of room for all kinds of ideas.
Other things: I moved a lot during my childhood and never quite settled down anywhere, though I currently live in New York’s Mid-Hudson Valley. I draw inspiration from the feeling of being a perpetual outsider-observer. I like exploring cities. I like a good bourbon. I believe three o'clock was made for pie and coffee at a diner. I think Charles Mingus was one of the greatest composers (of any musical style) ever to have walked the earth. I think they don’t make movies like they used to. I think they don’t make much of anything like they used to. I believe in guerrilla art.
I write for myself, but I like it when other people like my stuff. So if you like what you see here, let me know. If you like a particular piece, share it with someone else. If something you read here inspires an idea in you, tell me about it. And in the meantime, keep watching.
It is around 4 am and I’ve woken up because I can see the strobing of police lights through my bedroom window. I stumble into the living room in my boxers and A-shirt, and open the front door. Outside, the sky is a sickly predawn gray. A number of firefighters and men in yellow vests stand in the street, and I realize there’s quite a lot of traffic for this time of morning.
In the middle of Washington Ave, right in front of my house, two police cars sit at strange angles, their tops peeled back and jagged-edged as though someone has taken a giant can opener to them. An ambulance is off to the right somewhere, near a third roofless police car, and there are bodies waiting to be taken away. The workers move about in silence. They don’t want anyone to know about the police chase. They don’t want anyone to know that it was because the officers were bored, racing each other in the night, inept bastards.
Others are watching from their porches as well – the neighbors across the street, the neighbors down at the corner who always come outside when the power goes out.
As one of the functioning emergency vehicles pulls away, I decide to follow it down Washington. The street suddenly slopes downward right about where the sinkhole should be – and I realize the bluestone sidewalk has turned into stairs made of pink polished granite. I follow them down the hill, past the little corner store, downward until the hill bottoms out and the road curves off to the right somewhere.
My girlfriend has come looking for me, so we walk back together, up the hill, past the corner store, up the granite stairs. As we reach the top of one set, the landing branches off – we continue along until we realize that we’re walking on the countertop of a little diner built into the slope. Behind the counter a young waiter prepares to open. He’s friendly to us, even though we’re standing on the counter – happens all the time, he explains. It’s the stairs up the hill. He directs us back to the landing, to the second flight up. Since he’s not really open yet, we thank him by buying a newspaper. Maybe it will have something about the morning’s police chase.