The Altonevers (28 page)

Of when sunlight beamed through the
canopy onto wetted branches of twisting moss clothed trees. How
they peeled the sunlight from the bark and leaves, thinking of how
it was dew soaked and slimy, like little holding oily cloths. The
taste of sour pastries and sweet tarts, that were neither sweet nor
sour. Though reminiscing of chunky peanut butter and ice cream,
which have been strange to find anywhere but home.

Remembering an Alto whose public
transportation is remarkably similar to the attractions of an
amusement park. Of their massive interconnecting merry go rounds
allowing a person to reach the other side of the city by hopping
from one to the next. Every person looked like a person from a
freak show, strong men, bearded women, tattoos, and piercings, and
every street was bustling with palm readers, mystics and crowds
clamoring around snake oil salesmen. How the thousands of Ferris
wheels were actually elevators, and how the tea cups and merry go
rounds seemed to be spinning as cogs of a much larger machine. They
called the factories haunted houses, and had the best house of
mirrors she’d ever been in. It was big enough to encompass every
surface of an entire borough in reflective glass. Being at a
convention displaying the technologies for the world of their
tomorrow, it so said on the banner anyway. A world squandered on
lavish comfort and vane convenience, while being a society on the
brink of discovering their own sensory serum, that will pacify them
like eucalyptus soothes koalas to usher them into an everlasting
spiritual ecstasy. The world’s fair of another was attacked by an
array of lasers during a valiant rebellion by the robots of a
different Alto, plotting to save the household appliances from
their displays.

Of the trolleys, trains and tunnels of
nights on top and days on the lamb, in hovels, and times when flush
with more cash and jewels than a holy man can carry. Of filthy the
faces and the gritted teeth of factory workers who only smiled at
the sight of their wives and children. Being in bell towers
towering overlooking living fields, and of counting sleeping sheep
under electric tree canopies. Becoming accustomed to waking up in a
different bed, a different circumstance when she opens her eyes.
Under different suns and stars after almost every other rise of her
head from sleep. Then thinking of purple suns and their blue
shadows shining through a neon lit nights, enlivened with sips from
psilocybin soda fountains and Dadaist planning.

Then coming to an Alto of
the evening news being broadcast on screens, anywhere you can fit a
screen big enough to see a picture there is one. A never ending
stream of thousands of television shows broadcast onto every
seeable surface. She particularly enjoyed when all the shows went
into intermission in unison and played the same orchestral sense
saturating synesthetic symphony strumming through her ears and
stroking her nervous system. Then back to the overwhelming flood,
drowning of media babble washing out the viewers thoughts and
making it almost impossible to think. After a while hearing things,
auditory hallucinations out of the thousands of speaking tongues,
and seeing abstract patterns instead of anything understandable to
be understood.
Some she thought, were
actually quite enjoyable when she was able to focus her sanity well
enough to navigate them. Learning to use the onslaught of media,
otherwise a diversion from her own intuition. You get the sense
it's useless nonsense unless you can focus in on the story enough
to see what you’re seeing when you look. On one of the channels
they've seen flashing yellow symbols, then themselves on the
InterAlto nightly news as wanted posters. Her face next to his is
of her gawking with open mouth, as though she’s watching an ice
cream cone fall from her hands, which she was when they took the
sneaky photograph.

“
That face?” she scolded
the screen, feeling undersold as a wanted woman by it. Cider teased
her about as a video of her knocking down an old man plays, and
replays in a loop. The news anchors repeatedly called her
villainous for it, but not for the deeds of living devilishly with
him, and hardly a mention of the smash and grab jewelry store heist
that she was actually fleeing from. With the caption “WANTED
'Carrots' of the notorious juicebox gang”. Showing Cider’s face
with a photo booth smile, and a lot of zeros under his name as the
bounty of his life or death. There were a few other wanted posters
that faded back into a frenzy of faces arguing over the actions of
the color yellow, and the shapes it chooses to be. Asking why are
bees yellow and not any trees. The debate then went unending for
several days until reaching the conclusion that trees are in fact
yellow, even more yellow than bees.

Yellow as was the massive standing sun
of the waterless Alto the two are presently in. With its caravels
floating in layers of atmosphere through Panama Canal sized
causeways between lighthouses lined up like skyscrapers to form the
cityscape's skyline. Each building is like an islet anchored to the
ground hundreds of feet below them. In an unpainted wood walled
room made up of planks of wood pilfered from ship wreckage. Staring
out from the thirtieth story with her head on the window sill and a
steady supply of opium for the last six weeks straight. Only while
her hand heals of course. Lucidly delusional as she watched the
largest ships sail highest in the air, tanker sized galleons with
cannons constantly blazing through days and nights of incessant
skirmishing and plundering. Engulfing the sky with the flashing
flame of constant cannon fire. Bursts of gun powder spill into
gusts and smearing across the bottoms of puffy pinkish clouds. Some
ships and lighthouses, and fortresses hold so many riches they
regularly rain jewels and precious metals from their windows when
swept by the currents of battle.

No structure is unblemished
by the cannons craters and char burns of the pirates constant
pilfering and savage sieges. Beneath are merchant ships and smaller
vessels of the common levels, and beneath them are the riff raff
surviving in the barnacled wreckage. Usually bobbing about,
scavenging on crude rafts made of anything they can salvage from
what sinks from above. Leather boots and brass buckles of black of
heart swashbucklers are everywhere, treading chalky white skies and
clouds of spent gunpowder. Grand chandeliers and pianos of the age
of discovery are strewn about the shanties and chateaus of this
society.
The ground is littered with and
built on the rotting barnacled wreckage of generations of fallen
plunderers who themselves had their lives plundered by their trade.
There are fish and squids and sharks and whales swimming freely
through the air everywhere she looks, whenever she looks. The air
is sweet and salty and always scented with garlic. Garlic keeps the
carnivorous zombie dolphins away from your person and dwelling.
Pearls are the most valuable things in existence here, of course
here it's also a slang for a woman. More accurately a
woman’s...clam.

Many tiered stone balconies battered
to broken teeth wrapped with burned overgrowth, always with guards,
watching with muskets out walls of battle scar and the bloodshed
stained wood and stone. A few times they ventured on row boat up to
the vermilion cannon thunder above to plunder fortresses and
churches in the heat of the fray, much for the thrill of it. Though
mostly she's puffing on an opium pipe and drinking peppermint
flavored poppy milk envisioning she's soaring through the skies.
Her imagination as the vessel for her senses to feel everything she
can suppose seeing clearly. Walking the plank and splashing into
her subconscious with each blink of her deeply intoxicated mind,
romanticizing the adventure the plunder of shiny things along with
the aspirations of a pirates life. All with their own muzzles and
sabers, weapons they have all have, and used to run the next man
through.

She drools for hours at a school of
illuminated flare bellied jelly fish rising through the atmosphere
like a volcanic eruption seen in time lapse through her blinking.
Though admiring most of all the nearly invisible atmosphere flowing
like waterfalls when one layer drips up or down into the next.
Reminding her of the skies they’ve soared through almost a month's
worth of days awake ago. The ceaseless rowing of oars through the
ether, always accompanied by a captain’s roars for morale, And of
pirate crews chanting, carries on forever through their air.
Sounding as natural to the ear as the salts of the sea that fill
your nose when close to the coast.

Fantasizing about what she would wear
if she were a swashbuckling pirate queen. Supposing she would have
a peg leg. Then that she would rather have both her legs and sea
weathered heavy brown leather boots that thump and shake the sand
from wood and the bones of her foes as she walks with commanding.
Of the glimmering metal riches and red cotton coat and black cross
bones across her hat and a noose around her neck from when she
jumped the gallows. Shouting from the captain’s deck of a mighty
oak caravel with a chain smoking Cider over her shoulder, as a
drunk indigo feathered parrot repeating her demands for more
treasure lads and lasses, more treasure!. Blue and white feathers
in her hair as Anna the pirate queen, no Carrots the chivalrous
they will call her, as she will be more civil than any knight,
though more savage than any conquistador. Seeing herself with a
heavy saber slashing heroically and shooting a blunderbuss while
villainously grimacing when blowing away other pirate
goons.

Laughing to herself lowly, smoking,
with her eyes low and her mind slowed to feel what she sees
clearly. Wondering whether herself and he are just plain train cart
tramps drifting through the InterAltos, or the captains of their
own tides like she sees in her mind. Wondering of where they will
wash up next and of what she'll do when they get there.

Then drifting off into a tranquility
inside herself, thinking of the sense eclipsing sight of galaxies
when she was sitting on a wooden bench in the light of a park
brimming with life. Overlooking a cityscape of nightly nightmarish
orange lights rising from the inky blacktop beneath them as dots
and clusters resembling the stars shining through the sky above.
There were billions of suns in one glance at the star saturated
sky. Hole molecular clouds and star clusters smaller to the eye
than a grain of sand, colliding. Far enough away to see galactic
cannibalism unfold to its end in just a few hours. Only leaving the
comfort of the floating pirates paradise of treasure and lives
raining from sinking caravels, because of the aggressive lice and
sea sky faring foot long mice.

Passing time

She's been waking up in a new place
almost every time she opens her eyes, across so many Altos for so
long alarm clocks and time of day became irrelevant to her, eyes
closed and eating. Presently trying to be on time for a specific
train to catch, one of the InterAlto map’s multitude of rail lines
that will bring them closer to home, her home. It’s extremely
strenuous though, searching through the InterAlto rail map which
they’ve been doing now for days and nights with magnifying glass
and microscopes. Most of the stations are small enough to fit in
the pulp fibers of the paper they're printed on. The volumes of
webbing pastel pink stringing patterns of InterAlto rail paths are
almost indistinguishable from the papers thread. Every time she
fumbles enough to find a ride going their way, the train they're
looking for is pulling away from them by the time they're running
to catch it.

Hazily staring through the
steam rising off her morning coffee, stirring it and adding milk to
see it swirl. She likes to think of it as starting the a day with a
sip of stars swirling into a black hole. Anna eating a chocolate
chip marble muffin resembling the coffee trimmed marble cream
floors of the grand lobby they're presently sitting in. The dining
room is sparsely filled but for volumes of dust miming micro
molecular clouds gaseously glittering in yellowed morning light
pouring through the windows from the west. Just outside is a nest
of reddish breasted robins she enjoys spotting through the scene
she sees through the thick glass of arched windows.
Sitting across Cider sloppily feasting on a plate
of greasy eggs Benedict. She's been making a habit of having her
breakfast as early as she can, enjoying the ambiance of the Big Pig
hotel’s empty dining room. One of millions sprung up around a
pantime station that is a massive InterAlto hub with rows of
platforms stretching farther into the horizon than any sea she’s
ever seen. Every morning she asks the maitre de to open the heavy
twelve foot tall chocolate brown drapes to see the scenes of the
immeasurably big pinkish stone platforms stretching from one side
of the sky to the other.

Row after row of silver slivers look
like waves of a sea under sunlight stretching across the tops of
the polished trains as they sit and slide from their respective
platforms. Each train is up to thousands of cars long with a
shimmering seam shared between them. A thread of reflection spreads
across them as they incessantly slide in and out of the sun’s
light. Giving the illusion of being rolling waves of a silvery
ocean. Each retreating string of cars are is sunlit stippled with a
fractal glimmer, softening as they streak into atmospheric depth
until completely vanishing from view. She sits watching the droves
of countless societies rubbing shoulders as fellow travelers,
washing in and out of sight until Cider snaps her out of her daze
by snapping his fingers in her ear.