At the bus terminal in Tubb’s Ferry, Eddy Sem and I sketched a picture of Thorpe on a pad of paper we traded for with a pack of Pyrite Pete cigarettes. Neither of us were particularly adept at drawing, so I’m not sure how close we got to capturing his likeness. If he had a moustache or a telltale scar, we observed, this would be a lot easier. But instead all we had to work with for this two man composite sketch was a two year old memory which, like the acumen of our minds, was slowly rusting over time.
“You think we should draw a mustache on him, on the off chance he’s grown one?” I suggested. Eddy Sem looked flatly at me over the arm rest. “Alright, fine, we won’t draw a mustache on him.”
We drew him as best we could: the gaunt face, thick eyebrows, look of self-assurance, and – we decided it would be better to include it than to leave it out – that stupid knit wool hat he always wore.
“Excuse us,” we would say as we walked up to passersby outside the bus terminal, “have you seen this person? No, you haven’t? Excuse me sir, have you seen this person? No? Well, he’s a friend of ours from a long time ago; we think he’s in this part of the world.”
The truth was we didn’t really know where he was. This was just the last place we knew he was going. He could have been in the city of Tubb’s Ferry, he could have been wandering around the surrounding desert, or he might not be in the area anymore. The idea to look for him had only occurred to us when we found out that the bus to the City of Gutters had a connector in Tubb’s Ferry. He certainly wasn’t important to our plans. We wanted to find him more out of curiosity, to tell him we missed him, and to tell him, yes, you are an asshole for not sending us so much as a postcard since you joined that religious compound.
We asked a man walking into the bus station who was handing out pamphlets explaining the Synchrokineticist philosophy. The title read “Submit to the Will of the Sapient Universe.”
“Listen,” said Eddy Sem, “we’ll take one of the pamphlets for your Sapient Universe if you give this picture a good hard look and tell me if you’ve even maybe seen this guy once.”
“The will of the universe is not that I help you find this man; it is only that I distribute these pamphlets to educate,” he said.
“Well your Sapient Universe told me it would be a big help if you did.”
“That’s not how it works, you’re not told, you’re simply moved to act.”
“That’s a load of crap,” I interjected. “Come on,” I said to Eddy Sem, “let’s not waste our time with this jackass.”
“There is no freewill!” he yelled as we walked away. “We’re only small moving parts of a single conscious entity! Accepting will ease the pain of existing within it!”
We kept walking.
The events leading to Thorpe’s disappearance began with the proposal of ostrich herding. The idea was to revitalize the Grakley River Valley’s ranching sector despite desertification. And they couldn’t do this with cattle because herding cattle in the full-blown dustbowl that the region was projected to become in a matter of years would be unfeasible. So the plan was to take after the nomads in the desert near Tubb’s Ferry and adopt extensive ostrich herding, with the idea of entirely displacing cattle.
Thorpe told us about this one night on Lazlo’s roof over a case of Bloater’s Lite. Three days a week he was taking work-study courses at the agricultural college about an hour away in Beslém, where the plan was hatched by scientists and a couple foolhardy entrepreneurs.
“The idea makes a lot of sense, when you think about it,” he told us. “Unlike most birds, they produce red meat, and they have the highest weight gain to feed ration of any land animal. Plus it’s in their nature to herd, and they can eat anything. I mean, anything, they can practically sustain themselves off dust. And the eggs are huge. And did I mention they can survive in heat and cold and –”
“Yeah but, they’re ostriches,” I told him. “They look funny.”
“And who’s going to buy one of those eggs?” asked Eddy Sem.
“And what about their poop?” asked Lazlo. “They probably poop a lot.”
“No more than cows,” said Thorpe, “but that’s not the point. The point is, everything is drying up here, and with that new hydroelectric dam they’re about to build upriver-”
“Wait,” I said, “what hydroelectric dam?”
“You know, the one they’re talking about on the news, the one that’s going to generate a jillion kilowatts and sling twelve rows of pylons over the town? It’ll be finished in a year or two?” Silence. “Not ringing any bells?”
“No.” We all shook our heads.
“Well anyway, this place is turning into a desert, and faster than we think. So, that’s why I’m going to Tubb’s Ferry to help out with this study that could maybe revitalize our economy.”
I couldn’t tell if I was more bothered, in that instant, by the way he told us he was leaving, or the fact that he was obviously regurgitating a line –“revitalize our economy” – which had been cooked up by the ideas backers.
“Hold on a sec, what do you mean?” asked Lazlo.
“Yeah, about that. I was trying to think of a good way to tell you guys but I couldn’t. Basically, as part of this study or business venture or whatever you want to call it, I’m going to be working on a farm somewhere near Tubb’s Ferry, raising ostrich. And then in a year I’m going to come back here and try to start a ranch, an ostrich ranch, right here in Chipichango. I’ll only be gone a year.”
“Come on,” I said, “you don’t actually think this is going to work? And besides, you’ll be out in the desert, that place is the armpit of the world.”
“Well actually,” interjected Eddy Sem, “I think we can safely say that the City of Gutters is the armpit of the world. It’s literally built on top of a swamp.”
“Wouldn’t that technically make it the sweaty ballsack?” asked Lazlo.
“Oh, and Chipichango is any nicer?” said Thorpe. After having been to the City of Gutters, I realized that he did have a very valid point. “Maybe you guys should think about doing something with your lives too.” Did he really have to go there?
“Well,” said Eddy Sem, “Lazlo here fixes up cars pretty good and me and Mosh, the paint we mix is excellent, I don’t think anyone can beat it. Plus we’re really good at looking busy.”
“Look,” said Thorpe, “I shouldn’t have put it that way. I’ll only be gone for a year and when I get back maybe we can even ride around on the ostriches. That would be cool, right?”
We finished our respective beers in agreement. Riding an ostrich through town would be pretty cool.
But instead, over two years later, here we were riding a cramped bus through the desert to what was either the world’s armpit or its sweaty ballsack. There were at least ten more people in the bus than there were seats and Eddy Sem’s frame took up two so I was squatting in the aisle.
We passed our sketch of Thorpe up and down the bus. On it, we wrote “We are looking for this man. His last confirmed whereabouts were somewhere in Tubb’s Ferry two years ago. He may be affiliated with a Korgarian monastic order. Please pass this around the bus and if you know anything, talk to the big guy with the red beard. You can’t miss him.” We passed it to the back of the bus first, and then when it cycled back to us, we passed it up to the front. It only got three rows up before someone turned it into a paper airplane.
I got up and snatched it out of the air, nearly falling on my face as I tripped over a passenger then decided it would be easier to just make an announcement to the entire bus. Everyone was so loud that no one past the first few rows heard me, and then after I got done other passengers on the bus decided that it would be fair game for anyone to go to the front of the bus and make a speech. First a man got up and gave an impassioned speech denouncing cultural imperialism from the Sphere of the Municipality. Then the same man we ran into at the bus station who was handing out pamphlets for Synchrokineticism walked up to the front, and gave a half-hour long sermon on the benefits and simple joys of accepting our lack of free will and how it would bring meaning and harmony to both our lives and the Universe. It turned into four hours of what was essentially open mic night on a hot, sweaty, overcrowded bus.
Two hours in Eddy Sem tapped me on the shoulder. “Don’t look now, but I think the woman two rows behind us is about to give birth.”
I waited a second before looking back. “Well she’s not about to anymore. She’s having the damn thing.”
“Great, just what we need, another passenger.”
“Is this… normal?” I asked.
“I don’t think that’s a question we can ask ourselves anymore. A lot of weird things have happened.”
The bus driver seemed to think it was normal. When I waded through the aisle and tapped him on the shoulder to tell him that maybe he should consider pulling over and contacting some paramedics, he first told me not to talk to the bus driver because it was very distracting, and when I persisted, he told me that he had a schedule to keep. I walked back to my squatting spot in the aisle. Eddy Sem was right. We left the realm of normal a long time ago.
Someone who seemed competent enough to be a doctor stepped over me and attended to the woman. He lay her down on one of the seats and threw a blanket over her. I had no intention of looking back and witnessing the miracle of life, but I sure as hell could smell it. After an hour and a half a little screaming new passenger came out, announcing his presence to everyone. There was a frantic call to see if anyone had plastic shopping bags, and when he found some he bagged the afterbirth solids, tied them up, and tossed them out the window. As for the liquids, he sacrificed his own flannel to mop them up, which he tied up in a third plastic bag.
For some reason, all I could really think about was the fact that there were two bags of afterbirth lying on the shoulder of the road. And woe betide anyone who bothered to see what was inside.
Thorpe left on a Wednesday. I remember this because the night before he left was the night of his one-hit-wonder bowling career. Although I am probably a little biased, Chipichango once had the best damn bowling alley in the Upper Grakley Valley. Unfortunately, it has since closed down after an incident following a lawsuit in the early days of the stray current when a bowling ball was shot out of the ball returning machine at an alarming velocity and broke a woman’s back, nearly paralyzing her. Every Tuesday night, they would have Two Dollar Tuesdays, where you could get three games, a pair of shoes, and a bottomless soda for two dollars. Pitchers of Bloater’s Lite were an additional two dollars, meaning each of us would end up spending about six bucks.
Since this was a weekly event, we were all really good, except for Thorpe, who, when you look at how much experience he had, was terrible. Even Lazlo, the clunky handed one, could consistently bowl over 175, and got his share of wins. Eddy Sem and I would break 200 on a semi-regular basis. But Thorpe was just awful. At least awful for how often we played. He would break 100 maybe one in six games, and a score below 70 wasn’t unheard of. But even though he didn’t play like one, he took it like a champ. Every time he threw a gutter ball or shot it straight through the middle of a seven ten split, he would just shake his head and force a smile as he walked back to his seat. Meanwhile Eddy Sem and I would be draining strikes and Lazlo would at least be picking up spares. We never joined a league, never played anyone else, we just kept the game between the four of us, for three games, every Tuesday night.
On Thorpe’s last night, we played the standard three games for two dollars. The first game went as expected. Eddy Sem won in 214, Lazlo took second in 191 and I took a close third in 188. Thorpe bowled a 90.
Then on the first frame of his second game, he bowled a strike. Nothing unusual. But then he got another one, and a third to get himself a turkey. I had never seen his face look so focused or seen him move with such technical perfection. I don’t know where it came from, but underneath the awkward and inept bowler that was Thorpe had emerged this fine athletic specimen.
He ended up bowling a 275. “Alright guys,” he said after he hit a strike on the last frame, turning around before the ball even hit the pins, “I’m going for it. This game, it’s going to be a perfect game.” And I really thought he could do it. But, judging from his almost-spare in the first frame, it was going to be one of Thorpe’s typical adventures in mediocrity.
He bowled an 88.
“Well,” Eddy Sem told him as we walked out to the parking lot, “you had a moment with greatness, and it decided you weren’t good enough to keep around.” He patted Thorpe on the back. “Good luck out there. Bring me back an ostrich skull.”
“I’ll bring back a whole herd. And I’ll have the biggest ranch in Chipichango.”
“Yeah we’ll see about that.” We all shook his hand right there in the parking lot and then he drove off. It was the last time we would see him for a long time.
When we got off the bus in the City of Gutters we realized that for the time being, we weren’t going to find Thorpe. It was a long shot anyway and we had other business to attend to. According to the information we had from Gampo, at 3575 Vitamin Street, Unit #2202, were the Klokwerk twins, supposedly distant relatives of mine and Lazlo’s, who knew the schematics for how the Ohmforcers were put together and how they could shut down the grid, permanently. And that was all we knew. Here we were, now in a second endless, sprawling city on the far side of the world, and we didn’t even have a map.
“We should give Lazlo a call, tell him we got here,” said Eddy Sem.
I reached into my bag and pulled out Lazlo’s right shoe and held it up to my ear. I visualized somewhere on the other side of the world, his left shoe emitting a barely audible hum, and the connection these two shoes had. Then I heard his voice.
“Mosh! How’s it going? You get there alright?”
“Yeah, a couple of cramped and sweaty bus rides later, we’re here, about to go looking for the Klokwerk twins.”
“Great, great, yeah, hopefully they can do something, because right now I don’t think Leyna and her friends can.”
“Wait,” I said, “you found Leyna?”
“Yeah, she’s right here, actually, you want to talk to her?”
“No, I really don’t. In fact, I could give you a long list of other things I would rather do.” I pulled the shoe phone away. “He’s with Leyna,” I said to Eddy Sem, who rolled his eyes in disapproval.
“How did you find them? Or, I guess, where did you find them?”
“They’re just over the border in Noyo, living in an abandoned power plant. I got a tip from a travelling shaman to go in that direction and then she actually found me. She found my truck too. She and her crew are trying to figure out what to do next to find the rest of their people. I’m a little incapacitated right now though, but let me know anything you find out, right away, so I can tell her.”
“What happened to you? You step on a thumbtack or something?”
“Well, actually, if you really want to know, I got shot.”
“What the hell have you been up to? She didn’t shoot you, did she?”
“No, Leyna is taking care of me, fixed me up as best she could. There was a bit of a border conflict going on and I guess I got in the middle of it. But I’m fine. I’ll be walking in a month or so.”
“You can’t trust her. If you don’t remember, she knocked us out with a rifle butt and left us bound and gagged in the middle of a cornfield.”
“Yeah, but she could have shot us if she wanted. She’s just doing what’s best for us.”
“Well that makes me feel a whole lot better. I’ll tell you what we find out and I’ll trust you use discretion in what you tell her.”
“Good luck.”
“Hey, you need it more than I do, with the company you’re keeping.”
“Goodbye Mosh.”
“Goodbye you crazy barefoot freak,” I said. But I think he had already hung up, if you can call it that.
While I was on the shoe, Eddy Sem had a chance to look at a map. We were a good forty blocks from Vitamin Street. The address we were looking for was apparently deep in the Ghetto. We decided we had enough busses for one lifetime and walked the whole way.
The city lived up to its name. On either side of the street, there were two-foot wide gutters, flowing with greenish-brown, foul smelling water that poured into fetid cisterns or shallow sunken canals every few blocks. This was, apparently, to keep the city from sinking into the swamp atop which it was built.
But people were coming from all over, to this city that could only have been built on a dare. Once you ignored the sewage and swamp gas in the streets, it was an intriguing city, with open air markets and beautiful architecture spanning millennia.
This city is the oldest continually inhabited settlement in the known world, with archaeologists dating settlement back eight thousand years. There are some freestanding structures thought to predate the last apocalypse, when this area was grassland and not a swamp surrounded by desert.
The swamp this city is built upon is the result of the Arrienga River terminating in the middle of an arid basin, forming a massive inland delta. The first settlements were built on an island in the northwest portion of the delta. As it expanded, its inhabitants gradually reclaimed the marsh, building their city on increasingly unstable ground until it was only thanks to the miracle of engineering that was the gutters that the buildings didn’t sink right into the mud.
As we approached the old city from the west you could see all of history slammed together in the architecture. We passed through the gate of the old city, which was wide enough to accommodate a four lane road, complete with the ever present gutters, passing through the middle. These walls had withstood fifteen years of siege in the protracted conflict that halted the Burzati Empire’s expansion, where all of Ergatchi III’s army was eventually driven into the swamps and routed. Fifty years later the city would be the center of its own empire, which would swallow up the fragments of the Burzati Empire and expand as far as the Sombelhos Mountains. It was also atop these walls that the great spy Aronnis Kellik was executed by firing squad. According to the story, the hole in the wall four hundred feet north of the main gate is where the execution was carried out. Kellik’s blood seeped into the stone and couldn’t be removed by any means, so the Governor Commandant ordered it to be blown up.
Inside the gate was one of the City of Gutters great market squares. Again, two streets had been awkwardly fitted through the middle of the square, and met at a roundabout in the middle, where cars, colorful busses, bicyclists and rickshaws all competed for the right of way. The crowd seemed to be composed not of individuals but of a colorful current, flowing through the square with a single driving force, eddying around market stands and picking up momentum in the thoroughfares, faces surfacing for an instant and then once again being pulled under. Casting a shadow over it all was the senate building, which had been where a senate of some sort had convened since the Gutters Empire when it was seat of what was the world’s largest superpower for almost five hundred years, and now housed the legislature for the Gutters Municipal Sphere. On the top was the golden statue of Kocho the Great, first emperor of the Gutters Empire, riding his chariot drawn by six war moose. The buildings lining the square had once been the scene for a vibrant culture of bohemian artists, musicians and poets, but they were slowly being taken over by offices of the bureaucracy. Yet still, extravagant frescoes covered their walls. There were angels as depicted in both the Retro-Aveyenism and Korgarian traditions, interacting with heroes of old and cultural figures of the last century. Some were covered in layers of graffiti and some were oddly pristine. There was St. Arrploé being tarred and feathered while Suaxzok, the old god of livestock, watched with a sinister grin. Strange.
We passed the temple of Tiehnaqt, the iteration of one of the most important members the One Thousand and Twenty Three who accompanied Kirk Korgarian on his pilgrimages. It was here that he had been killed after he refused to kneel before the emperor. Two hundred years later, after Korgarianism had become, if not mainstream in this part of the world, at least tolerated, this temple was erected on the site. I had always found it strange that he even let the imperial guard seize him. The man was skilled in the Dynamo tradition. He could reportedly turn his beard into snakes and cause explosions larger than what is capable with our greatest weapons simply by clapping his hands. But instead, all he is reported to have done was “in a single instant where my toe touches the Earth, it feels more greatness than you could ever hope to achieve. I only wish to help you understand.” He then allegedly planted his staff into the ground and put his hands up, and was then restrained by the imperial guards and decapitated on the spot. Although it was planted in what appears to be stone, his staff sprouted into a tree. The temple had no roof – it was simply four walls enclosing a courtyard in which the tree still stands. But the most miraculous part of this story is that the next day, the emperor took off his shoes and never put them back on again. He devoted much of his energy to studying the Dynamo School and even invited prominent Dynamo Monks to the court. This was, unfortunately, energy that should have been spent ruling the empire, and it was during his reign that the empire began its long, slow decline.
Only a few blocks later was the Retro-Aveyenism Holy See, with a string of pilgrims entering, some on all fours, all wearing a rainbow of turbans and cloaks, all throat singing to remind themselves of the harmony they sought to achieve with themselves and the universe. This was a far cry from the Reboot-Aveyenists we saw in the west, who, in addition to being less common in general, dressed conservatively, usually in drab suits, only hummed for worship, and eschewed the complex meditation practices for simpler forms of meditation. It was oddly haunting, this square full of people all throat singing, the resonance of their vocal chords bouncing off one another as they trilled their third, fourth, or sometimes even fifth level of harmonics, their eyes closed, shaking in spiritual ecstasy.
We passed the Cromatsos Theater, home to the world’s largest pipe organ, where Jeremiah Omeros gave the only performance of his third concerto. The music was so difficult that he allegedly suffered a heart attack on the final cadenza. Since then, no violinist has ever come close to even playing it proficiently. But according to written accounts, it was one of the most beautiful things ever to be experienced by sentient beings. If Jimmy Jangles had anything to learn from Omeros, it’s that he probably should have died at the end of the last take on the last track of his album.
Outside the old city we walked through streets built in the last century and a half – first through office buildings then abandoned factories, then a neighborhood of older looking shops and apartments before hitting a fully fledged strip mall. We walked by Archell Tyler Plaza, named for the reformer who, with the help of the Army of Irregulars and a militia of his own, overthrew the Salazar Dynasty and instituted the first of the twenty seven republican governments this nation had before arriving on this equally dysfunctional and probably just as unstable one. Part of the lore in Chipichango goes that the surviving members of Valens’ ragtag band of adventurers who enlisted in the Army of Irregulars once their war was over were here for the coup, after having fought in five separate wars in their journey all the way across the continent. We were about to learn this was almost entirely true, but with one key fact that everyone had got a little wrong. But that will come soon enough.
We bought tacos from a street vendor and, despite my fears that they would taste like it was made from swamp algae, they were pretty damn delicious. The sky was clear and it felt great to move our legs again, even if it was for forty blocks. The people, the traffic, even the streetlights all seemed to be part of one collective consciousness. From the intricate flow of the gutters to the street sweepers and streetcars to the people hawking wares on street corners and the complex dance of the pedestrians, all in this radically improbable city, made me wonder if maybe there really was some credence to be leant to Synchrokineticisim.
And then we hit Vitamin Street. The gutters got twice as wide and twice as foul smelling, the buildings were dilapidating and covered in soot, and there seemed to be police sirens coming from every direction. A rat scurried down a drainpipe and then leapt at me, grabbing the last bite of my taco in one fell swoop before running down a storm drain. Nice place. Exactly the kind of place we would end up.
Two months after he left, we got a letter from Thrope saying that he had decided to leave the ostrich ranch where he had been working. It wasn’t clear exactly what had happened, but it sounded like he had been fired. We even speculated that he had intentionally done something to warrant this, force his hand in a decision on which he had been vacillating, whether to stay or leave. Getting fired would have made that easier. Whatever the case was, he told us he planned to stay out there for a while, bumming around the desert. Made it sound like he was trying to find some kind of fulfillment he could only find out there.
The next and last letter we got from him was postmarked from Tubb’s Ferry, giving us his last known location. He also alluded to some kind of spiritual awakening and a “rededication to the ideals of the Prophet Kirk Korgarian.” He also said that he might not be able to write to us for a while, and that he would be “going off the grid for a little bit.” That little bit had turned into over two years.
We suspected he was living in some sort of compound but that was all just speculation. Even if we did find him, would we even recognize him? The people running those places get inside your head, they change you, and the Thorpe we knew wouldn’t be the same Thorpe that came out of whatever spiritual awakening he had. There was a story of some fanatical Korgarians performing a mass immolation, and another about a militant Korgarian group attacking what it called “structures of encasing the physical aspect,” mostly shopping malls and office buildings. There were another dozen or so that were on the Municipality’s list of confirmed terrorist groups. The only one of these organizations we knew by name was called the Order of St. Willitz, and none of us could find any information about it, let alone if Thorpe was at all affiliated. But whatever the case, just like the Chipichango we knew, the Thorpe we knew was probably gone forever.
We walked another twelve blocks lined with drab brownstones with rusty fire escapes and boarded up windows, vacant shops, rats scurrying through the streets, junkies, and hopelessly lost ice cream trucks. We saw a man with no legs pushing himself down the opposite side of the street on a skateboard. There were barely any cars in the street, and the ones that did had doors missing or were covered in rust and sounded like they were about to explode.
Then we came to it, 3575 Vitamin Street, a brownstone, identical to all the hundreds of others like it on the street. There was a sign on the elevator saying it was out of order so we took the stairs, which made loud metallic clanking that reverberated up and down the stairwell with every step, to the second floor. The hallway made it feel like we were in the insides of a fish that used to live in the swamps where this city now stood. We walked to the end of the hall. “2202” was scratched into the wooden doorframe. There was music coming from inside.
“Well, this it it,” said Eddy Sem, “shall I do the honors?”
“Please do.”
He knocked. We waited.
