Laertnom

‍ Not too far into the future, a city wrestles with problems that are both universal and specific to itself. Some things have changed, some have not. I was always mesmerized by future novels like "On the Beach" that predicted such dire consequences -- we sow the seeds of our demise today

©Patrick McDonnell 2002

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Spring arrived yesterday, and today it turned into summer. Only the day before yesterday, it was winter. This is how Laertnom experiences spring. If you take a nap, or stay in all day, you might miss it. Suddenly winter is over, bang, gone and the sun is out and it is warm. Not gradual, not softly or gently, no, it comes on with a passion, slapping you in the face. No one can ignore it, but many miss it. Blink and it is gone.

Here and there in dark corners remnants of snow piles lie melting, filled with the scum of dirt, carbon dioxide and dog droppings, they slowly are disintegrating revealing their winter detritus. This winter was mild, not many snow banks. Sometimes the parking lots are filled with a two-story hill of blackened snow that just melts away like the wicked witch in Oz. I remember heavy snow fall years, they just stay there like weird volcanic hills, reminding us of our cold sins. Winter grinds us down, slows our walk, grinds our spirits into mush, until we want to leave or we embrace it like the cold hag it is. Some wax eloquent on winter weather, lauding its virtues until they too have turned old and no longer go out, another winter victim. Give me spring any day.

Now spring is here and the streets fill with people who can hardly believe it, by the dazed expressions on their faces. Along with the buzzing of insects, let loose by the warm weather, women undo their jackets, shed their long coats revealing short skirts and sexy stockings. Mating season has arrived. Sex is in the air and on the ground. Green creeps into the grass, flowers shoot up overnight, blossoming quickly. Over a weekend, the trees will explode with green shoots, like a time lapse camera, they will fill from florescent green tuff, to dark green leaves. Flowers also will burst out in a rush. Northern spring is brutal, abrupt, let’s get it over with. Not like my Southern springs that are long slow and satisfying. Here in the North speed is of the essence.

A late snowstorm can surprise people who have already put away their boots, taken off their snow tires and transformed themselves mentally into warm weather creatures. Cold weather people are morose, quick, look internally, and have little time for others. With the warmth, they ooze friendliness, look at you hungrily, wondering if they will spend the few warm months with you, their summer lover? A buzz is in the air, the insects are mating, knowing the growing season is short. Time is of the essence. Women and men know it too, in their rush, they almost do it in the street, their urges overcoming them.

Look at the people. A few are prepared, they have been at tanning salons or on Caribbean cruises, or in Florida, and their tans show it. Others look morose, cadaverlike, loose skin, slug like, revealing their ugliness in short skirts or short shorts, men and women alike. By the end of summer they might be sun burned, but they will never look like they like the warmth. They are polar bears, will always be. The bums and older people are pathetic looking, wearing their winter coats long into summer, afraid to believe the heat and weather reports. Younger folks are already in T shirts, stifling hot, beautiful and muscular, looking for action. The rutting season. Spring time in Laertnom.

The newest fad for Laertonomean women was window pants, plastic rounds sewn where the hip pockets should have been. It was a natural progression from the previous fashion years, when women wore their blue jeans farther down on their hips and let their string underwear show. Now, no one could say they wore the old bloomers, not when you could see the flesh through the plastic windows. Where would fashion go next? Transparent cloths? Full nakedness? Laertnom prided itself on being the centre for new fashion technology. From its mills sprang teflon pants and bullet proof suits for politicians. Techno fashion was fast becoming its biggest industry, as the computer companies incorporated their devices into jewelry and clothing. Who would be seen now with an old cell phone, when a multi-function eye glasses did it all, telephone, TV, VR, weather warning, and who knows what else. The glasses could even let you see the true colours of people.

Ravillug loved spring, except for one thing. Colours. He was daltonian from birth, colour blind, so he could not distinguish between Red and Blue. Most Daltonians had trouble with red and green. He could see other things as well. Strange things that troubled him.

In Laertnom there was an unwritten code - rather it was written in their genetic code - that you could not associate the two colours. You were either one or the other or no one. When you were born, the high purple clad priests came by and established what colour you were. With their incense and their mumbling, they were a fearsome sight that struck terror in the hearts of post partum mothers. The father would sit stoically waiting for the verdict, or if he was with means, he would pass a few dollars to a friend, whisper in an ear about a contract and presto, the right colour was assigned. Later in life, since most priests held political office as well, the purple ones made sure that the colours stayed apart.

Ravillug did not know his colour, maybe he was in the grey area, amongst the immigrants who knew nothing of the customs of the county. He put on any colour, in his ignorance and to the ever lasting shame of his mother. In winter everyone wore ritual black for the death of the earth and to avoid the confusion of association. Then spring came, opening the doors of division. The spring time rituals meant that everyone displayed their true colours, people wore them proudly, no longer hidden underneath the uniform dark coats of winter.

In spring more fights broke out, more young toughs challenged each other. Already their hormones were surging in this rutting season provoked by women in revealing dress. So colour challenges were issued, duels were fought. Subtle. Sometimes in a glance or a nod, a loud word, a menacing look, a half checked kick, a push of a body against body.

An invitation

In the café terrace, he spied his buddies, a motley crew of half breeds, students like him who had rebelled against the colour code. Some worked, their father's money run out and some played at student, their father's money still good. Some were Castle crowd, Castle Town born and bred with strange accents and stranger manners. A few were intellectual geniuses, from South or North towns, who had fled their parent's houses and the dull life of suburbia.

He had heard stories of races with illegal gasoline non eco-cars, late night gang fights. Here in the city, no such things happened openly. The vigils were everywhere, and video cameras spied on you. Every-night they showed citizens who had strayed, caught pissing in elevators, spitting in public, and even lewd behaviour at the public beaches. The TV show had the highest ratings. The public bath room segment was considered the best entertainment to be had. Voyerism had risen because of the internet and by the use of miniature cameras. The public reaction was to either bare it all, or to take up Easterb dress styles.

They were buzzing like the bees on the blooming flowers. "Did you get invited? Only the really blue people get to go, no reds allowed."

Jonathan, a red man, replied with his usual peeved air, "What can you expect from the king of toilettes, more BS? If he had class he would do a colourless evening, or a white night, so that everyone could go. Not just the chosen few, like you."

The man they refereed to, Mr Clapper, had started importing Japanese urinals and bidets that analyzed urine to give out sugar content and other medical information; like all new gadgets, it had become the rage and now all the Castletowner and Blue towners had one in their lous.

"Do you have the coordinates? We could all crash the party in disguise?" Julie introjected this zinger. She was always trying to get the boys to go farther, even know she probably was carrying around their future progeny after a night of wild partying. Her question was received in silent embarrassment. Mixing amongst themselves was OK, but mixing with their parents, their paying parents, made them have second thoughts. John broke the silence by turning up his music man, he played them a new song from satellite radio, the number one song in Hong Kong. They all started to sway in synch. Julie sucked face with John, her hands inching down south as the others took different substances.

Bill, the blue man started the conversation, waved Ravillug over to his side and whispered in his ear, "you have to try this Green Fairy they just got in from Franca, it is so good going down, and she makes you feel like you can eat the moon."

Ravillug usually didn't take any hard stuff, since soft drugs were legal anyway, but today he felt spring rising in his legs, bursting into his head, so that his usual inhibitions were gone. Bill ordered one for him and it came in this fluted glass, shaped like a Lilly with beautiful young girls with wings etched into the surface, as if they were encased in it. The liquid came out green, with the addition of mineral water, it fluoresced, glowing on the table like a new sun. His first sip was bitter sweet, like Julie after three men, but he continued drinking it, with increasing pleasure, like Julie after an all nighter, when she was loose as a goose.

Not even noon and he was stoned on Absinthe.

His friends continued to talk, even though it sometimes wasn't coherent. The Yid families that passed looked at them with disdain, left overs from a different age, walking out some old Rembrandt print. Bumpkins from the country sometimes would try to come cut off their curls, but the local vigils had put a stop to that, so everyone just ignored them as grey people, the non existent immigrants. Meanwhile Japanese tourist buses passed by, flat noses and cameras pushed against the he-metrically sealed windows, and Julie obliged them fingers and sometimes showed the other parts of her shaved anatomy. Her tattoos sent the connoisseurs into a frenzy of digital imagery; no doubt her tiger, the one that started under her breasts and whose head ended up at her pubis, would be all over the net tonight if not earlier. Julie, Julie. She had been at a convent school in Castletown, but like all her sisterhood, drugs, sex and rock and roll hormones had taken her down a different path. She told anyone who would listen that she had been "date raped" by someone putting stuff in her water; her taste for alcohol put a lie to that tall tale, even if it was true. Now she had gone over to the other side; she was a "bad" girl and loved it.

As he consumed the green liquor, he noticed a strange phenomena, he hardly believed his eyes, because little flames appeared above his friend's heads. They looked like the pilot lights on heaters, the old ones that were now banned by the eco-terrorists. Weirder still, was they seem to have colour and intensity variations. He thought he could see blues and reds, something he had never seen in is life. He tried to tell his friends that their hair was on fire, but they ignored him, knowing the effects of Absinthe varied. They were consumed with their own drugs and selves, so he was just laughed at.

Julie's flame was the strangest. It seemed to flare brighter every time see sucked face. After awhile he even imaged her face like one of the cheap Chianti fleisch bottles with a multi-colored candle stuck in to the top and left to drip down to make an ugly decoration statement. He imaged that her face looked like a Bakkue goddess, wax running down her nose onto to her perky breasts with their ringed nipples. She had them put in for the Olympics, all over her body in different places, for her lovers to find. He remembered one evening she even kept cards numbered zero to ten, and she rated her lovers, to the delight of all, and to some embarrassment of a few unlucky ones. Like himself. He wasn't very good at performing in public.

John also had a flame and it too seem to eat the other's pilot lights. After a while the other's flames went down and almost disappeared, just ghost lights. How strange, he thought. He must be going mad or having a religious experience. His mother would be happy, and his father. She had made him kneel naked and pray to the holly Mary for forgiveness for being male. His father even went so far as to flagellate himself nightly before going to strip bars. Every year on Blue day, he put on his cone shaped penitent hat and joined the masses in the parade through town. They walked on the crushed roses left over from the Red parade. They left their own blue irises behind to be eaten by the dogs. A strange symmetry occurred in the summer parades. Each of the tribes ignoring each other but out of the corner of their eyes, they still kept close watch on what was going on. Take this invitation. 'Castle town was a Red dominated enclave, and across the valley, Blue hill put up its own replicas of the older red's castle houses. They mirrored each other, in more ways than one. Yet they thought themselves different.

To be continued?

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