Paragenesis: Stories of the Dawn of Wraeththu (2 page)

¹
Guilbert, John M.
and Charles F. Park, 1986,
The Geology of Ore Deposits
, pp.
210-217, Freeman, ISBN 0-7167-1456-6

Klein, Cornelis and Cornelius
Hurlbut, Jr. (1985)
Manual of Mineralogy,
Wiley, 20th ed.,
ISBN 0-471-80580-7

Paragenesis

Storm Constantine

I have scars upon my left hand,
but not upon my right. If I hold my hands up to the eternal sun,
light shines through the flesh. But there is no flesh. I am idea,
essence. I am the flash of sunlight off chrome; I am the seasons; I
am the shadow beneath the eaves; I am a scrap of litter scratching
across cracked asphalt. No, I am bones and blood. I am crude and
heavy. I am what I am.

When I was sixteen, I ran away
from my leaf-shrouded home in the enclave for the rich, about
twelve miles from the city centre. Perhaps it began as a suicide
bid. All I did was move my limbs, without conscious volition,
toward the wilderness of stone and glass that circled the city
itself like a plague. It was the hinterland of decay, spreading
both outward and inward, threatening city core and enclave alike.
People could lose themselves there, and I wanted to be lost.

I remember that day, she was
standing at the kitchen sink with her back to me. She could always
sense when I walked into the room. I’d see her spine tense beneath
its dress of cotton, its caul of skin. How cruel had Mother Nature
been to make her spawn a child she could only fear? Blessed was the
day when she no longer had to touch me; when I could feed and bathe
myself, tie my own laces, rub my own hurts. I could not despise
her, for I shared her bewilderment, her bitterness. When I’d been
born, no doubt she’d decided to make the best of it. I was a
beautiful child, but for those hidden abnormalities. Later, she
probably realised that even monsters could be beautiful. My father
was a non-entity, consumed by work. We rarely saw him. Our home
always seemed empty when she and I were in it together. The spaces
between us were too great, and as I grew older, they became
gulfs.

On that final day, I could not
bear to see that stiffening spine any longer. She had birthed me
and raised me; now her responsibility was over. I turned around and
walked away; out of the shady house into the sunlight; past the
bike lying on the tarmac, where a few red leaves had drifted down;
past the rope that hung from the old willow, still swinging and
where I never played. The street was devoid of children; empty.
Empty. This had never been my home.

On the horizon, a grey green
cloud hung above the city. It was a walk of about four hours to
reach it along the main highway. Sometimes, a bus might come,
rattling and armoured, but not very often. People with eyes like
pebbles rode the bus; not coming from anywhere, going nowhere, just
riding. Perhaps they thought time would stop for them in that way.
I would not ride the buses, for I was afraid that if I did, I would
be absorbed into that shadow community and never leave it. Another
freak on the back seat.

It was mid-morning when I left
the enclave, and already the sun was fierce in the late summer sky.
At the high metal gates, the eyes of the guards were hidden behind
black glass. They stood motionless, like automatons. I passed
between them, showed my id card, and the gates slid open. A minute
later, someone else might come by, and the guards would come alive.
They’d touch their helmets, grin to show their white teeth and
utter a pleasantry. But not for me. After I’d gone, one would say,
‘That’s the weird kid from Acacia’, and the others would sneer.

I walked along the slip road
that led to the highway. It seemed hotter beyond the enclave, and
the air shimmered about me. Vigilantes had strung someone from a
pole. I could see the body dangling on the other side of the road,
surrounded by trees. A cloud of flies danced around it. Beneath it,
someone had left some artificial flowers. Perhaps the enclave
guards, high up on the gates and watchtowers, had seen it
happen.

I cannot remember feeling
anything then. I just walked, kicking up dust that smelled of metal
and age, buffeted by the searing wind of passing vehicles. After an
hour, a truck stopped to offer me a lift. The back was filled with
people, crammed together like pigs on the way to a slaughterhouse.
They were probably just crop-pickers, returning to the city. My
feet were aching, so I hopped up into the back. Certain people
always picked up on my strangeness, and this occasion was no
different. My fellow travellers were like frightened animals: I saw
furtive shuffling, and nervous eye movements. I didn’t say
anything. Eventually, one of the men offered me a cigarette and I
smoked it, looking out through the truck canopy at the passing
road. My mother will have missed me by now. Her relief will fill
the silent house, washed by waves of shame. She will grip the edge
of the sink and blink at the garden, where the sprinkler slowly
turns on the lawn.

I did not resent being born
different. The resentment came from other people’s reactions. I was
so ordinary in most respects. Dogs had never liked me; we could
never keep one. Sometimes, things happened around me over which I
had no control. It wasn’t my fault. It was the look in her eyes. I
made the saucepans fly once, but not toward her. She just screamed,
her hands pressed to her face, staring at the mess on the floor.
Other kids didn’t like me very much, despite my parents efforts to
find me friends. I didn’t mind being alone. I’d tell my mother
things she thought were her private thoughts, and then her mouth
would compress into two white lines. Later, I’d hear her telling my
father about it: ‘He must
listen
to us, for God’s sake! Do
something!’ I didn’t listen. I just knew. It was like she told me
things herself without words.

It was the doctors I hated the
most. There was nothing wrong with me; I wasn’t ill. But my mother
kept taking me back to that neat office that smelled of nothing,
and let the white coats prod at me. I said, ‘just let me be’, and
they would smile tolerantly, spreading my legs on the table for
another look. They must have taken a hundred photographs. ‘It isn’t
Froehlich’s syndrome,’ I heard a doctor say to my mother, ‘because
apart from the genital abnormalities, there are no other physical
deformities.’

Her reply: ‘Then what is it?
Can you operate?’

‘That is a decision your son
will have to make for himself later on. We have counsellors...’

She thought I should have been
twins: a boy and a girl. But it wasn’t that.

I got out of the truck on the
outskirts of the city, in an area called the Longhills. Once, it
would have been a thriving neighbourhood; now a ruin and an ideal
place to hide, to think, to do whatever would come next. Tall
buildings with broken crowns reached towards the veil of evil cloud
that always hangs above the city. I think it is the city’s aura, an
expression of its soul, soiled and poisonous. The people who live
in that place are barely human, but then I had been taught to think
that neither was I. Perhaps this was the place where I belonged. I
wanted to cast off the trappings of affluence and live close the
edge of survival. Discomfort did not bother me.

I walked as best I could along
the sidewalks, avoiding debris, bundles of cloth that may have been
corpses and the smouldering remains of fires. What did people burn
here? Sometimes, it seemed they burned their own possessions. I saw
fragments of books, jewellery and crockery blackened among the
embers. The smoke was toxic. Someone had burned a wasps’ nest. A
substance like syrup leaked from its collapsed mass. I saw few
people. They kept out of the sun during the day. They slept then.
Welfare trucks occasionally slid across an intersection ahead of
me. They might contain bodies or miscreants or supplies. Perhaps
all three at once.

At three o’clock in the
afternoon, when the sun was at its most vehement, I stood in the
centre of a street and looked up at the sky. Buildings loomed over
me, derelict and rotting. I wondered what the point of it all was.
Why do we continue to live? What drives us to survive in an
environment so hostile to life, an environment we have made for
ourselves? Civilisation was a Leviathan whose limbs were too weak
to support it. Now it sank to its knees, bones cracking beneath its
weight. And all who rode the Leviathan were tumbling down, their
screams thin like that of insects. My difference was just one more
symptom of this fall. Our purity was mangled and dysfunctional. In
those moments, I saw myself as the avatar of the world’s
destruction, a cruel joke in the distorted form of the primal
human. I could do as I pleased, for it did not matter what would
happen to me.

Soon, I began to feel hungry,
but willed the pangs away. I could see no way to feed myself. It
was cleansing to be able to step aside from human needs. I felt
excoriated, but also renewed. For a while, I sat inside a broken
building, where the walls were black. I listened for sounds: the
faraway throb of rotor blades, the occasional human cry, cut off
short, and once the distant bark of a dog. I watched the sun slide
down behind the splintered towers, and thought how in the enclave,
the day would be drawing to a close. Men would be emerging from the
units in the nearby industrial park. They would climb into their
sleek transporters, hail a manly good-night to the guards on the
wall, and drive the short distance up the tower-studded avenue to
the gates of the enclave. Here, wives who sought to enact the
rituals of a past Golden Age would be waiting in kitchens that were
devoid of stain. The women wore aprons and smiled at their
children, keeping back the pain, the fear, the utter chaos that
massed on the horizon of their fantasy world. None of it was real,
but then I had never really conspired in my parents’ dream. My very
existence cracked its fragile shell.

At dusk, a gang of girls stole
in through the windows of my sanctuary. They saw me crouching in
the rubble, which I quickly realised was
their
rubble, and
began to snarl at me and utter strange ululating cries, their
bodies dipping and rising like snakes. Their leader rushed at me a
couple of times, brandishing a knife near my body, but I sat as
still as I could, looking at her face. Presently, she came to a
decision and gestured for her minions to get on with their
business. They unfolded loot from tattered sacks, and set about
dividing it amongst themselves. The leader flicked glances at me
occasionally. I recognised something within her that later I
identified as the indomitable human spirit. Society no longer
existed for her, yet she continued to thrive, albeit in a debased
fashion. The girls ate and laughed together, handing round a
plastic bottle of murky liquid. After an hour or so, their leader
offered it to me. It was a vile, base alcohol that left a trail of
fire in my throat and tasted only of chemicals. The girls asked me
nothing about myself, even though they must have made judgements
about my cleanliness, my neat clothes. They were separatist females
who hated men. They could have killed me, perhaps, but it seemed
they recognised something within me with which they felt
comfortable and could accept. I ran with them for a week or so,
raking over the ruins, pillaging the debris. They seemed to repel
rival male gangs by the strength of their voices alone, using a
repertoire of chilling screams and cries. Boys would lope away from
them like chastened dogs. Often, the leader would climb to the
highest, most precarious point around and stand there with arms
outflung, uttering a world-filling shriek of anger. They did not
know about despair. I envied them.

In the asphalt wilderness of
Longhills, there were few adults. Perhaps they had wisely moved
away, or else been killed. Sometimes, choppers would drone over the
streets and emit a stinging spray, which the girls told me was
supposed to kill disease. Why would the city authorities bother? I
didn’t believe it. The spray probably just killed fertility.

I felt more at one with the
desperadoes of the wilderness than any of the people who hid within
the enclave. It was because these outsiders expected nothing and
gave little in return. They did not make demands upon one another.
Co-existence, and therefore a certain amount of co-operation, were
the only remaining aspects of community. Pleasure was without
contrivance: a good find among the rubbish; a chance meeting with a
group who had something to barter; a basement found untouched, like
an unopened tomb full of treasure; an abandoned welfare truck still
laden with vitamin-enriched gruel. We were grave-robbers, really,
for most of humanity had already died in that place. But I liked
the simplicity and honesty of their lives, the fact they did not
judge me.

One day, one of the gang was
shot by a sniper and the leader told us we would have to move area.
A sixth sense told her this was the beginning of something bad. So
we gathered up what little we had and left Longhills behind,
burrowing off through the darkness, and into another decayed sector
called Coldwater Valley. It must have been an industrial complex at
one time, and here the survivors were older and hostile to
strangers. We prowled carefully between the arching metal
structures that were now smothered with tendrils of quick-growing
vines. Echoes were strangely muffled by the vegetation. Any human
group we came across yelled and threw things to repel us; we were
not welcome. Finally, one group, crazier than the rest, directed a
fire cannon on us and killed all but five of us. Our leader was
among the fallen; a blackened crisp in the road. How quickly life
can be expunged. It seemed inconceivable that what was left of our
companions had ever housed souls. We, the survivors, went back the
way we had come, but it was the end of our group. We split up, and
I went alone deeper into the madness of the ruined land that
surrounded the desperate core of the shrinking metropolis. Its
towers seemed to have huddled together, as if in fear.