Re: Emud 003 Kids Dance Revolution 2 Free 20
Towanda Tuning
The train sits for hours. The cold is distinctly emanating from the floor. Bored, he bums a cigarette and empties the tobacco onto a page; he restuffs the tube with kif and leans out the window to smoke. Later in the corridor he talks in sign language with a Gypsy about Toronto. Toby declines the carpet.
Grim, motley faces share black tobacco cigarettes. They type into calculators and hold wads of worthless dinar. They cut up curtains for their shoes. They sniff at rinds of cheese and tangerine, the remains of his lunch.
The train makes ineluctable progress. Troops, tanks and artillery move on a road. They slip over bridges of rusty pig iron. Communist stars are riveted into the trusses. Wood and coal smoke shroud the passing valleys. Villages are shrouded in icy fog. A highway has no traffic except for Mercedes-Benzes. Orchards of plum pose on the hills.
They eke onward. Shanties of mud and cardboard: thin children, thin horses, thin men. Then brown streets of oil and grime. Forlorn windy figures queue for transport. Slabs of apartments, black. Two rivers appear not to move at all. A fortress. Church domes. Belgrade, blacked out with doom, held by ghouls.
A few missiles rain down on the capital. Not just anywhere but in the main square. They skitter across the harlequin paving stones into the pedestal of an old bronze revolutionary. The real fighting is close, but now bombs have fallen in the capital. People once confident that they could go about in security now go in uncertainty.
Slippers, skirts and scarves. Everyone shares the same deep wrinkles of outdoor physical labor callused with shell-shocked expressions of indifference. Plaid polyester bags, the shells of seeds and skins of sausages are strewn among them. Police and troops harass the people fearful of making eye contact. No mercy.
At the frontline are the detours and inconveniences of moving territory. The road bristles with antitank defenses. Streets are wrapped in sandbags. Tiles and bricks litter the area. The soldiers disembark, pool together their kuna, organize a case of beer.
Convoys of munitions and relief clog the passes in the mountains; they sweep along the edges. The bus plunges past convoys, tucking between the trucks when necessary. The bus barrels onward, passes the switchbacking trucks.
The black coast road reduces to a pontoon bridge guarded by troops. The fighting has touched the lagoon; the remains of the predecessor are visible, won back. Squads of soldiers are on each side, protected by sandbags and wire, busy securing the area.
They have red and white guts of plaster and brick like spiders. Graffiti acknowledges whoever vanquished the ground. Shrapnel is punched into the road. Burned cars. Fires burn still. Skids of blood lead into the scrub. The bodies, cleared away. Each side gathers a strange harvest of ordnance and skeletons.
He turns into the jumble of colonnades, arcades and facades hewn together. The shade is greasy with the odor of doughnuts. Clippers buzz in a barbershop and a radio fades into the calls of fishmongers. Hercules balances on a huge bronze toe bestowed with wishes. A Gypsy woman chants and stares at her puffy slippers. The stone tablets : salt, sugar, soil, grape.
He changes under a juniper. He hobbles into the water, cool as juniper. His body tentacles behind him. He cannot see the dark bottom, but the white city and grim mountains appear. He undulates back to the shallows. He spots the fellow from the bus.
Outboards putter out to sea. Ferry exhaust overwhelms the harbor. Debris dries and the beach warms. Cicadas loop in the trees. White islands glimmer in the haze. The kids are piled under a juniper, asleep.
Televisions on the two main decks rerun footage of infantry breaking a siege. Soldiers storm an enclave, gather and shoot people. The troops wear counterfeit sport brands. Everyone watches: surely, victory.
The sea smoothes when the ship bends into the bay. The port city is wrapped around it. Small craft bob in the marinas. Birds cry over the sun. Marco Polo maneuvers with her throbbing engines; miniscule men fasten Marco to the dock.
A tiny brown kid embraces an accordion. Old men wear yokes of artichoke and fava. The gauche set mingles over gelato and pancakes. Merchants tend their gold leather. Everyone is waiting for war to go away.
A morose couple is amorous in stairways, empty lots, alleys, toilets. In the sea. Along a road. Between dunes. In the backseat of a bus. On stones. In the grass. On a train, a fire escape, a tree trunk, a balcony. On a bed, the peacock bed, the peacock bed that moves with the moment he wants to forget.
He drinks with the lumberjacks until a man and a woman in leisure suits greet him. They smoke cigarettes in rapid secession, kiss intermittently and turn up the stereo as the car goes up the curves. His ears pop in his throat.
After he combs the mountains, walks as far and fast as he can, far from the resort and cluster of hotels, far from the kids, past the ski runs now high with summer grass, nettle, bramble. Some alpine berries grow on the rim of mountains. Mushrooms dot the forests. The chef turns them into a nice stew.
The kids go mad and the counselors soon lose control. Kids jump from bunk to bunk. Kids drink liters of pop. Kids bathe in snails and frogs and mud. Kids wrestle, strangle, punch. Kids elect other kids to be their victims. They cannot follow any sporting rules.
People jabber among themselves as the blue bus moves along a cratered road flanked by shattered houses, trenches, the maze. Burned out tower blocks and other bombed buildings form the skyline. People walk the streets.
Brutus drives through a long obstacle-laced tunnel to the pass. The Landrover follows a stone-strewn river. UN patrols are posted along the road. Past the unrecognized border halfway up the valley, there are none.
People step through the prefabricated door. A man arrives with his contrabass and two bottles of slivovic. A woman comes with a violin and lifts up her sweater. She flashes her breasts from under her cardigan and starts to sing in a husky language of love.
With effort, Dmitry wheels in a piano from another room of the L-shaped flat; he commences to hit some atonal high among the bottles, ashtrays, foil packets of grass and pitchers of poppy tea. The violinist wiggles out of her pants and cardigan while playing. The bass plugs at the strings, maintaining a line of David Bowie.
Dmitry is banging on the piano again. The piano is changing keys and be-bopping into the night; the blitzed keys follow the chord progressions from hot duets to languid jams. The violinist falls around an imaginary pole. She sings in her rich, husky voice and makes barely moving loops on her violin.
Bijoux dons stilts, dances and juggles airborne. The bass player pulls together some funky ethno-jazz for the sound system. People huddle over the tables, sagging from the bottles, ashtrays and snacks. The fare is vital life support.
Boys play half-court basketball on this blustery but sunny day. They whimsically smile at the henchmen who guard the dark mansions well off the leafy drives, homes secured by gates, cameras and barking dogs. They all keep in mind that no precaution is enough when a hireling is no longer useful.
An empty plinth rests in front of the white building, what appears to be a mausoleum or museum. The police are gathered in a smoky hall. Empty glass displays fill the dusty foyer. An irritable porter rises from the entrance
No one has a ticket, but Toby is singled out for a penalty from the inspector. The trolley, like a giant cockroach, antenna clacking and sparking overhead, bursts at intervals to deposit its eggs, pauses at another cockroach carapace. The brown roaches can proceed no further than the edge of a demonstration rounding a red church set in a plaza.
Excited by the eye candy, Dmitry and Charlie fool around with the instruments and tools. The collaboration devolves into a punching contest. Berserk, they roll from floor to ceiling. Charlie finally cedes a few macho points as Dmitry sucker punches Charlie in the kidneys.
The rooms smell like mould. The first one is filled with personal effects: a beaver-skin top hat and a silver-handled cane, telegrams that speak about a Nobel Prize, manuscripts and sketches marked up with the language of physics. What follows are mock-ups of early electric devices demonstrating one electrical principle or another. A portrait and biography of the creators (volts, amps, faradays) is underneath.
He gives Toby a calendar illustrated with other weird machines, including one that even harvests the energy waves of the earth. Kindness beams from the caretaker who simply smiles before he switches off the rest of the exhibition.
News anchors relay the chaos to the world from the perimeter. Toby runs among the running people not knowing when the putsch is going to happen. Hushed, palpable tension fills in the lull of people diffusing away from the police, who have failed in hemming in the protestors and delivering the blows they have been waiting with relish for.
Humanitarians keep the peace. Humanitarians work in offices that specialize in water, food, tents, medicine and schools. With them comes a local rise in rents, rarely in pay. They splash their international salaries on pirate software, counterfeit goods and birth control. They drive in brigades from one lavish restaurant to another. They blunder after the local females. They fall prey to nightclubs and whorish urges. But upon returning to their dormitories they dream of their careers and benefits in the aid hierarchy. They satisfy themselves with memories of Carla in Cincinnati or Michele in Arns, some failed liaison, probably what prompted them to find fortune in humanitarian work in the first place.
The passengers smell too human, like piss, alcohol and ass. They disburse before the line that demarks passport control. An entire Chinese military band arrives. Pale faces enclosed in olive uniforms. They gesture amusedly among themselves as the officers make order.
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