The Altonevers (36 page)

“
Oh relax dear. We’re only
just coming up to the edge of the Brights now,” Daisy says eyeing
Anna in the rear view mirror.

“
There’s more?” Anna
asks.

“
Hahaha, it's fuuun,” Cider
slurs with his head dangling, drooling the last of his parched
mouth out the window.

“
Yes of course. It's a bit
much if you haven’t been here before. You'll get used to it, I’m
sure. We call it dim sickness, gonna have to tough it out kid,”
Daisy says then gulping from a wine glass.

“
How? how can it be this
bright?” Anna strains to ask. The scorching orange sands are
already searing her sight, and staining the backs of her eyelids
when her eyes are closed. She blinks while having her hands on her
face, and the colors still show a brighter red blur then any red
she's ever seen before.

“
How? because of the boss
lady of course,” Daisy says.

“
The boss lady?”

“
He didn’t tell you about
the boss?” Daisy says sneering at the color struck Cider, as Anna
nods no.

“
What a jerk! Leaving the
girl in the dark like that,” The vixen sneers, slapping the dazed
Cider across his shoulder.

“
We have all this, thanks
to the good fortune of her Vividness, the lord high Baroness
Vivian. The Valiant purveyor of all vividity, and the most powerful
studio boss of all the syndicates. My boss and my mentor, we run
this city through and through,” Daisy says boastfully. Her bubbly
persona percolating as she speaks with reverence of her
boss.

“
But how?” she
asks.

“
Let me see, it's been so
long since I had to say, since Cider actually. She's big, real big
where I come from, where we’re going. Everybody knows who she is,
everybody's auditioning for one thing or another and she rules over
the whole of the Alto. Before the Baroness was around it was all
called the Bleaks. It was cold like the Drabs everywhere but worse,
like a tundra they say. There was not a blue in the whole of the
sea or a shred of green in any of the leaves of palm trees.
There was nothing but endless grays, and
endlessly dull lives. People didn’t even know what a rose really
looked like, or of their family and lover's faces. The colors of
each other’s hair was an utter mystery. Not a single soul even knew
that color existed. They were just mining folk, slack jaws who set
up a tent city seeking gold in the hills. Things were hardly even
defined, blurred and with terrible, terrible lighting. Everything
you heard had the rasp of a scratched vinyl record. It was always
cold and the people were empty of compassion or heart, just cold
and clinical, monotone through and through. Vice was rampant. When
the miners struck it rich they usually blew it all in town, on the
night girls and drinks. Breeding a culture of blood lust and greed
over the generations.

Until a tent of a traveling
circus came by on their wayward way of following the InterAlto rail
like a river to make a meager living. Striking their own gold in
entertaining the miners, and rising in size as the city rose around
them. Tents and carnivals showed up by the dozen, until they
outnumbered the miners ten to one. Then the gold rush flushed out,
and the people of the big tents were left to themselves with no one
to entertain but each other. The structures of the circus became
the structure of government, they were, are power.
Each big topped tent has been in fierce
competition with any of the other. Very violent stuff, the troupe’s
shooting at each other in the street and on the stage and screen.
Under the command of the ringmasters of course, and later the
playwrights and directors, until the streets and the stage were
indistinguishable from each other. Where no one is who they are,
only thinking of themselves as actors playing the role of their own
lives.

The boss was born to the carnival
folk, a vagabond family. She wasn't like the rest of the children,
her beauty and brilliance was exceptional, unmatched since birth.
They didn’t know, and no one could figure out why she seemed to
stand out from the crowd, but she did, she always did. It was
because she had something no one had ever seen.”

“
Color?” Anna barely says
with her mind and eyes now boiling.

“
Yes,” Daisy says, “she was
put on a stage, a star from her very first performance. She fell in
love with a magician and became his assistant, a good one too.
Drawing huge crowds like no other spectacle in a city of stage
performers. She was a young woman, and her lover, the magician was
growing envious, as all men do of her. Knowing the applause, the
crowds and cheers were not for him, but for her instead. He started
berating her and drinking until he would black out and beat on her,
she would hide her bruises, for the show of course. Then one day
she got a call from out of the blue, from above. By that time the
studios were forming from the ashes of the old vice gunslingers and
tent entertainers into vicious criminal syndicates.
Her lover, the magician was on thin ice, and an
executive promised her everything her heart desires if only she
would ice him.”

“
Did she?” Anna
asks.

“
The boss called him to her
room to tell him of the plot, so they may fight them together, but
he was drunk, and belligerent and began beating her again. She shot
him with his own pistol in the struggle, and fled to the new
executives who were waiting in a car outside. Close enough to hear
the lone gunshot that took her heart from her chest. She drove away
with them, becoming one of the first superstars of the newly
emerging medium of film,” Daisy says to accentuate the events by
animatedly narrating the story of her bosses glory days, “Vivifying
every silver screen with her radiance, and warming the hearts of
the people with even the coolest of her hues. The colors of her
films were crisp and clean while others were still in black and
white. As she grew in fame and power the colors splashed off of her
and onto ground and walls, into the air itself. Everything she
touched turned to breathtaking mind pleasing color, like king
Midas, but a queen of more colors than can be portrayed in the
pinks of her pinky nail alone.

She never really wanted to
be a performer, she had bigger plans than to sell herself on the
silver screen. She used her fame and notoriety to lead her fellow
performers into forming her own clique, her own studio. The
Vaudevs, who went onto to become the most powerful of all studios.
She lead them to an overwhelming victory in the decades long studio
wars. Her grace spread, brightening the Alto as her power, her hold
over the Alto grew through bloodshed, the blood became that much
more red. She brightened the streets and skies, and lightened the
hearts and minds of the people.
She
succeeded in rising to supremacy over the whole of the city, and
reigning as the most ruthless of studio bosses. A few of the
studios were allowed by her to continue their operations, making
the rest merge into larger, centralized studios that she can more
easily combat if ever need be. Forcing them all to sign contracts
granting her full control of their lives, and their allegiance to
her alone. She took pleasure in personally executing the executives
that she met on the day she killed her lover. Some say she lost
something of herself that day, but who knows ya know, Carrots”
Daisy says “the daughter of vagabond immigrants who was the only
baby ever born in color. Becoming a magician's assistant that rose
to become the most powerful person, more than a person, an entity,
by her chosen fate, free,” Daisy says, adding affectionately,
“almost free,” while wiping a tear from her eye, worried of it
ruining her eyeliner.

“
When she started her
studio she just wanted to unite the artists and performers, for a
place to feel home, like she had with the freaks of the carnival as
a child. Now all the colors in the rainbow and more, so much more,
are lifting the smiles of all the people of the entire Alto.
Coloring their lives, their souls with her grace,” Daisy says, and
Anna’s curiosity spurs her ask “You call her graces the color that
she spreads?”

“
Yeah. By her graces we see
the beauty of what’s always been brightly all around us,” Daisy
says and sighs blithely.

“
And?” Anna
says.

“
Huh,” Daisy says, awoken
from a seconds long daydream at the wheel.

“
Sorry, but I was just
wondering what you meant by they're all actors?”

“
Everybody in town's an
actor, most under contract to the boss or a rival studio. Everyone,
even the governor, or a plumber, an anchor woman, the waitress,
that cop back there, the commissioner, you name it. They aren’t
actually those things but portraying a lifelong role as the person
they were born as, being those things, acting through the lives
that they actually have. All pining for some of the gold in the
hills of their own, not dug from the ground but plastered through
the drive-ins on date night. Though mostly shattered souls serving
the fortunate, who are playing the roles in life which they wish
they were cast. The City, the spectrum is the set.”

“
That’s a touching tale of
a life. She must be a wonderful woman,” Anna says, wiping a tear
from her stinging red eyes.

“
Beautiful, majestic,
timeless, strong. I wish I was there then, when she used to rule
the theatre stages, then the screen. Now the Baroness of everything
from the streets to the sky above and higher,” Daisy sighs, “that
was before my time, the golden age of the silver screen, to be a
dame then was really to be a dame”

“
Shouldn’t you play your
own role?” Cider snarks.

“
I do, and as should you
Anna. It's the only way to live,” Daisy says as though passing
wisdom.

“
With him it's been a
lesson I learned well enough,” she answers.

“
Enjoyably times I hope,”
he says.

“
We're almost home. Where
fantasies fill the screens and stages, and the viewers live
vicariously through the actors, though the actors are living
vicariously through them,” Daisy says with a hint of wonder that
softens to a somber tone.

Rolling down the freeway
straddling a high ridge as fast as the suped-up hot rod saoutchik
Sally will take them. The two sit stupefied in the throes of dim
sickness unable to be thrown by each jerking swerve the car makes.
The two are nauseated to nearly vomiting in their own mouths at the
sight overlooking the brilliantly luster and lacquered
poly-chromatism of an expansive art deco designed metropolis.
Seeing the pigmentation of any single thing that can touch her
sense of sight as brimming and beaming so brightly it radiates
prismatisms that permeate through the air like the wavering heat of
an oasis.
Even when seen from miles away
in the light of broad day, the raw unbounded chromatism easily
eclipses the brightest stars Anna had ever seen. The scene
displaying an Alto of pupil saturating shades, that are endlessly
intensifying as the three descend toward the splendorous color
spectrum's supreme source. To the Vivids, anything around the
living embodiment of vividity, Vivian the Baroness.

“
Welcome Anna, Carrots. I
like Carrots for you, to the land of high definition, high quality,
high resolution, high color, high contrast, that we here call The
Brights. Soon we’ll be next to her, in vivid definition, or the
Vivids for short,” Daisy says, while sailing with ambivalence for
anyone else on the roads or sidewalks. Speeding and weaving through
the blocks and avenues of this art deco architect's paradise lined
with palm trees, wide streets and filled with early and future
looking cars, overflowing with countless theatres and
stages.

The starlet rolls the ragtop down,
gleefully giggling, to see Anna and Cider fully immersed in the
cities full spectrum of sense over saturating shades. Of hues so
rich they seem to be moving, swimming in themselves, enriching and
intensifying with every passing inch as Daisy whips around town at
a hundred miles per hour. Everything from the people’s passing
faces, to the pavement, storefronts and palm trees looks beyond
pristine, exuding their own colors entirely new to her, with even
the dullest cement looking like chrome freshly glazed in wet candy
paints. The mind blinding ruby of a candy apple in the hand of
child on the sidewalk casting bows of garnet light darker than
itself, are astonishing Anna to a mouth opening drool.

“
I want one of those?”
drips from her drooling mouth.

“
Of what honey?” Daisy
asks, “anything you like?”
It takes all of
Anna's concentration to gaze at the blaring half eaten red apple,
she's spinning on a stick in her fingers seconds later.

“
How's the apple?” Cider
asks.

“
Delicious,” she slurs in
awe of its aureate flesh aglow on her clothes and skin reddening
the cream white leather interior of the Daisy's ride. By the third
stop light Daisy blows through the spectrum of even a single color
becomes so numerous, so severe and of unquenchable succulence to
Anna's sight, she can’t blink her eyes away from drinking in the
pupil sizzling scene. The stimulation is as irresistibly sweet to
their sense of sight as nectar is to a bee.

“
Oh poor thing, you'll
shake it off,” Daisy says to Anna though not to Cider, who’s
drooling with his face on the dashboard, licking it and muttering
on about taffy. While Anna’s seeing fireworks bursting throughout
her field of view, her mind is lost in a sea of flashing color and
the rapidly snapping synapses of her nervous system crashing. Her
brain is crackling as though pop rock candy is flooding her frontal
lobes, dripping down her brain stem and seeping through her spine.
With each drop feeling like the shock of a defibrillator jolting
through her entire body. Paralyzed, gritting her teeth while the
drips and drops turn from a dose to a dousing, then a cascade of
crashing waves of visual stimulation. She nearly seizures as her
sensory system red lines from the continually intensifying
technicolor bliss that everywhere she can look.