Olympus

I was a soldier. The beginning of my tenure during Revelation was spent positioned on a mountain beneath the Saskatchewan Mortality Terminal. They performed surgeries on me, to augment upon my head a gas mask, and a control board on my left forearm. These were permanent augmentations. I was dressed in the standard dark trench coat, conveniently denoting of Nazi Officer attire. I had an adapted American M14 rifle, which was ideal of execution in more ways than one. No part of my flesh was to show; I was overwhelmed by utility and must have appeared inhuman to everyone.

I remember holding on to a tree on the side of that mountain, looking down at a turbine twenty feet ahead of me, which condensed flesh, bone, and organ into a fine mist that was expelled out the other side. People processed down the face of the mountain, without emotion in their face or inquiry in their actions in their minds, blindly walking face-first into this immense turbine. Occasionally, someone would simply ricochet off the fan blades at the forefront of the turbine and be thrown limply into the air, left to fall on the dead foliage and lie there, twitching. There was a breeze; it was a peaceful morning.

My job there was to maintain the fan and execute anyone to whom this happened. An old man and a young girl holding hands approach the fan; the old man is vaporized, whereas the girl is flung into the air, and she floated at the crest of her trajectory very gracefully before slamming into the ground again. I took my hand off the tree, picked up my rifle sluggishly, and began to lumber over to her. Along the way, a man grabbed my arm and said, “Come with us, brother.” I respond, “I’ll be there soon. Don’t worry.”
The girl was still ticking and twitching on the ground when I reached her. She had beautiful, golden hair and light skin. The flesh of her face was peeled halfway off, and I could see a deep groove in her skull where the bone was indented by the blade. I pointed the muzzle of my rifle at her head and stared down the outside of the barrel. I pulled the trigger, and her head exploded. The glass eyeholes and the attenuation of sound in my mask allowed me to refrain from blinking or wincing, so I watched it play out vividly. It’s strange, how tissue and dead foliage mixes.

With a good portion of strength, I picked the girl up off the ground and walked over to throw her in the turbine. Having done that, having heard the sick shaving sound of her body being torn up, I stepped aside and looked up the side of the mountain. A peppered procession carried on, comprising of people of both genders, of all ages, and of every race. They were all normal people, dressed in normal clothes, with absent countenances and a mindless inhibition to walk into the gyrating and consuming blades. A popular saying at the time, which I heard as I stood there on the hillside, was “I’ll see you in oblivion.”

The forest there was dead. The trees had long since passed and left their leaves on the ground. You could see the great plains through the bare canopy, a perfectly flat and beige expanse punctuated here and there by abandoned houses or barns, ruined metropolises, and skeletons of ancient villages. There are bands of people who still fight the genocide; sometimes, they hole up in a department store or hide in the basements of old houses, planning life on earth after they’ve been, as they believe they will be, “left alone.” Because of this, we have Colossi.

They’re two hundred feet tall walking alloy skeletons, but their machinery is condensed into a sleek growth symmetrically clumped around their upper torso, so that they have a hunched back and a head receding into their shoulders. Their limbs are very thin, and their legs end not at feet, but into very fine points that stab into the earth as they walk. They are completely silver and featureless, except for a black band across where their eyes should be and a red light on their head that blinks as they process syllables. Their voices are very deep and digital, and they can be heard for miles.

A week later, I was displaced to the Kitchen Sink, the first and original Genocide Machine. The center receptacle is comparatively a giant metal bowl, a hundred feet across. It contains various creatures and animals collected from the vicinity by Colossi, everything from mice to bears. They’re usually scrambling and screaming and crawling all over each other. At the press of a button, they are drained into what may be considered a giant garbage disposal machine. It’s funny to me, how cartoonish it is.

Around the sink are what seem to be four massive cheese graters, sloping down into the bowl. Drugged pedestrians are sat inside it so that their heads are sticking out of the holes, facing in at the bowl. Beneath the surface of the Grater is a grid of blades that is thrust forth to decapitate those seated inside. If they are to tall or short, they are either disposed otherwise or at the behest of misfortune to die inconveniently.

I was the one in the control booth, alongside a couple of other advisors, who were dressed in suits and gas masks similar to mine. As I saw each pedestrian had been placed adequately in their places, I hit a button to initiate the decapitation and dumping process. Their heads popped off and rolled into the bowl below, followed by their limp bodies below the grater. Robotic snipers from above killed any surviving humans, although the wild animals usually consumed them instantly.

I imagined for a moment that I was a survivor in the bowl – daydreaming, if you will. I managed to duck before the blades had cashunked me, and I slid into the bowl with the limp bodies. I must have been terribly horrified. But my horror would magnify as I’d get caught squirming amongst the beasts, fighting against wolverines and bobcats that had been mindlessly frenzied by the psychologically debasing drugs, which were sprayed upon them beforehand. Perhaps I would find a human arm caught in the deluge, and I would have to beat some creature to death to get it off of him. As well, I would need on my side the chance to survive the snipers. There would be skulls bursting all around me in the aftermath of a hellish crack from above. If I managed to survive that and climb down the ladder into the maintenance hall, what would I do? I would have no other choice but to shoot myself; the rest of the world would be, and is, dead. This is all assuming that I was still emotive; the pedestrians have been robbed of emotion or choice by the drugs.

As the snipers kill off the last of the survivors, I see one whom they had missed slip off the edge, securing his grip on the ladder and climbing down. The advisors don’t catch me; I let him go. There is no reason to waste one of our bullets on a man who will take care of himself.

I pull the red lever, which has been appropriately flaked of paint as if splattered with blood, and the rumbling comes. The crowd in the bowl recedes slowly and ominously down into the disposer, and the turbine processes all of it into a river, which pours from a drainage pipe into the plains. The thought of the survivor who escaped crossed my mind again.
A few hours later, my shift having been completed, I took me rifle and patrolled the halls of the compound. I came to the exit corridor and saw the survivor sitting on the floor with his back against the wall. His eyes were alive; I saw a tragedy within them, which gradually grew more vivid as I got closer to him. I stopped a few yards away from him and observed; he had an unkempt beard, scraggly hair, and tan skin. He was breathing inhumanly deep. I said to him,

“I will only kill you if you would prefer it. But out there,” I said, as I pointed to the broad light pouring in from the distant exit at the end of the corridor, “there is only death, and it shall bestow itself upon you far more horrifically than if I were to euthanize you here.”

The man looked up at me rather calmly, and his eyes now had in them a wild animal, a very raw emotion. He picked himself up from off the floor and said, “Horror is a tragic weakness; I prefer to walk in the vibrancies of life abreast and die horrifically than face the darkness of man’s creation, a symbol of superstition, as a dogmatic premonition of salvation. There are many flavors of life, my friend, but there is one death, and death shall come upon me by destiny; I should experience the vivid spectrum of life to its greatest extent before handing myself to an empty and inevitable singularity.” He set himself on his feet and walked out of the tunnel.

Who was to say he was not an intelligent elite? Perhaps I was only the most aware of the human advisors. If I wasn’t, I doubt I could arrive at such a conclusion. But I worked without contest regardless; I expected death like the rest of them. My later missions were the supervisions of the wasteland, or rather; making sure the humans had all died. I spent weeks walking deserts flatter than the earth should allow, happening occasionally upon villages that had resorted to mass suicide. Usually, there was a squad with me, and we would battle with rebel groups who had eluded the drugs. There are often very furious firefights in decrepit settlements, but I had yet to lose a single one of them. They were very serious about winning, but never thought it out enough. We knew how to outmaneuver and destroy them before we even got there.

When not with a squad, I would be traveling by foot between stations through the desert. Once, they told me a direction in which to walk, gave me supplies, and told me to go to the next station. I walked for miles on end before I understood the hopelessness of my cause. They hadn’t supplied me with sufficient water or nourishment. It was not surprising to me; I expected it. My feet carried me on in a haze of morbid hallucinations, of violence and the denial of human temperament. Slowly, I recounted to myself memories of what I had done, the pain I have brought upon a great portion of mankind. I was merely a pawn, but I was put behind the reins of a very great and evil machine. At that present time, I found it impossible to comprehend the concept of regret, a feeling that has yet to terminate.

I found myself walking straight at a Colossus, who had since begun to lumber towards me. I waited momentarily for my demise, contemplating what turgid eviscerations and dissipations I was about to endure. My feet stopped, and I heard it thump ominously onward, growing closer and closer. But as the thumping of its footsteps ceased, and my form was still of shape, I raised my eyes and saw that it had knelt upon one knees, and its right hand was pressed upon the ground facing upward, as if a child coaxing on a kitten. The red light blinked as it bellowed,

“I’m going to Olympus. I suggest you come with me.”

It was then that I was faced with an evident conflict, the choice of life in eternity or death in eternity. As I had been endowed mentally with a psychological depression on temperament, the advent of progressive consideration had left me very confused. Rather than disregard the Colossus outright, I had taken a moment to think about its offer. My cognizance experienced a relapse; perhaps the depression was, to a small degree, broken or surmounted by the temptation to live in Olympus.

I walked towards him as I dropped my rifle. My footsteps broke the waves that ran on the surface of the sand, and the wind seemed to press against me furiously. But I stepped upon his palm, and suddenly, I began to rise. Fluidly, the distance between the horizons shrank, and the Colossus hummed, as it slowly stood upright. It stopped, and I surveyed the world for as far as I could see. There were only dark, desolate plains and plateaus, and the sky was particularly blue. But it was extremely quiet that high in the air; I wonder if, by some degeneration of self-restrain, I managed to transcend an instant of enjoyment at that time.

The giant moved me to its chest, and a small doorway opened in it. I walked in. The doors closed behind me, and I was left in a quaint space, surrounded by dark machines with blinking lights. I assumed they were computers. There was a low and quiet humming, which seemed to be everywhere. I moved on, having to duck slightly, and found stairs that twisted through the mess of computers and up into a circular room, in which was a ladder. As I climbed further up the ladder, I found that I was approaching a much lighter place, which was on the other side of a trap door.

I flung the trap door open and climbed into a place that was comparatively extremely bright. My eyes adjusted, and I saw that I had come to the cockpit. But it seemed only to be a room; on one side, there was a grand window punctuated by immense panes; on the other, just a wall, but the entire room was a dome. It appeared that the head of the Colossus was almost completely empty. At the center of the windows was a regal armchair, which looked Victorian, striped in gold and white. Before it was a very nondescriptly white control panel, studded with dials that were glowing blue. As I sat in the chair, the lights all went out but for one in the center, which was flashing. I pressed it, and the Colossus began moving.

Relaxation set in on me as I reclined in the armchair and began to undo straps in my uniform. The armchair was surprisingly comfortable. At that point, I was sure I was far from anxiety, which was the leading depression on my psychologically clarity. Suffice to say, the spell was broken. My ideologies were far behind me.

Since I have arrived at Olympus, I was educated for a time on astronomy and astrophysics, then granted a complex of my own to live in. There is a bedroom, a great hall, a library, a kitchen, and a bathroom. It is entirely Victorian, like the armchair, as well as generally very white. The great hall is endowed with very large windows, and it is completely subject to whatever I may want to place in it. Robots usually wheel out a chair and a coffee table, where I sit in the morning and have tea. In the library, which is also very much a study, there is a computer terminal where I might track the progress of an exploration satellite that had been gifted to me by the community. So far, some of the other Olympians have found mundane instances of life; I’ve merely been collecting data about planets that have already been discovered.
As I was sitting in front of the computer terminal one morning I saw something very interesting on the screen. My satellite had been floating from earth for a while, and I wondered what image I might conceive of if I were to turn it around and render an image of the earth. It was a very inconsiderably small dot, which was very strangely discolored, suspended in a beam of light. This was the miniscule point in the universe that harnessed everything that has ever been known or done. Perhaps the genocide of the ignorant wasn’t as serious a matter as I thought.

There are public places in Olympus. They’re primarily cafes and gardens, the latter commonly being extremely vibrant with plant life, styled by the Olympians and maintained by robots. One evening, after I had finished writing a few pages on the structure of 303’s atmosphere, I decided to have a carbonated beverage at the Northern garden. A man approached me and asked if he could sit with me, and I said it was fine. We were having a conversation about Neo-platonic philosophy when he denoted something that had happened to him. He said he had escaped from the Kitchen Sink.

At the time, I had been removed of my gas mask and control panel and augmented with a blank, white face and synthetic biological material; he couldn’t have recognized my face or my voice. The voice with which I spoke to him was also my natural voice, not a synthetic one. But as I got a better look at him, I noticed that he was, indeed, the man in the tunnel to whom I had spoken about death. He told me that he was picked up by a Colossus, and I said the same thing happened to me. When he asked me if I ever worked at the Kitchen Sink, I simply told him that I didn’t.

This is the whole of my life at the moment. I wear normal clothes, I exercise occasionally, and I quite like classical music and gardening. I enjoy refilling my bird feeder; because I was trained so rigorously, I walk very systematically, and so the birds feel safe in flocking upon me as I pour food into their feeder once or twice a week. Very often do I fancy sitting on the deck outside my study and watch the fog clear over the pine forest that covers the mountains like a blanket, and hearing the silence that shrouds it all. Life has begun again.

I do a lot of writing as well. Poetry is very interesting to me, I enjoy reading and speculating upon points in history, and the library is full of all kinds of classic literature, which I have yet to complete. Occasionally, the things I write are permeated by a very strange emotion influenced by the memories that exist from the old days. But that was the past, and it is gone, never to confront me again. We are a flawlessly intelligent race again, and we have been immortalized by nanobots, left to die only by means by which we had not foreseen. And even then, such unseen premonitions can often be remedied in the present. The Olympians harness in their hands the power of gods; it was no wonder they chose to discard of the ignorant in exchange for an endless moment at peace in the sky.

Prospekt's March - Chapters 1 & 2 Scrapped

Prospekt’s March

Version 1

Saturday, December 18^th, 2010

Acknowledgements:

Coldplay

J.R.R. Tolkien

Carl Sagan

Jacob Bronowski

Half Life 2

Mahiro Maeda

Hayao Miyazaki

1svaffel

Markorepairs

Boards of Canada

Crystal Castles

Life

Technicolor

Whereupon the summer has gone, and the air is due to chill, the frigid face of an old world looms again in a land far away, a land forgotten in time, in history, and in politics. It is the heart of the heart, the head of the spirit of mankind, and the last bastion of safety from the rigors bestowed by the commerce of human progress. This land is constituted by invigorations of dark woodlands, recessions of flowing downlands, and vast and abysmal plagues of wide wetlands. Here and there, in the pockets between ranges of mountains, at the foot of the foothills, one may find villages bustling with the old and weary, alive with the curious and young. Life is a rarity in this place; men are so few and far between that there is no conflict, there is no hardship, and there is always a place for someone to go, whether for privacy, or social relief, or perhaps just to venture into the majesty of this old and weathered world.

The woodlands are old – ancient, if you will. The arbors there have histories since before the presence of men, and therefore, man has come to learn from them. There are glades where progression ran free, sanctums where logs have compiled and maintained in accordance with the succession of smaller beings, of animals and fauna alike, where metropolises have grown strong and stable. Diversity rules; stability is natural; thought and outrage towards indignation are, for the moment, beyond the comprehension of these simple societies. Sometimes, they grow taller than they are strong, and they fall back to the ground. Populations of bacteria, microbes, amoebae, all the way up to squirrels, grow so great and vast in their quaint empires that nature has no choice but to knock them down. Phantoms walk through the corridors of history, there in the dark and ominous woods, phantoms of empires once mighty, then fallen in their own meager and unfortunate arrogance, an arrogance not to be discouraged, but indulged, so that another empire may come along one day and understand; for the woods are derived from succession.

There is a breeze that throngs the face of this weathered world; the fields of wheat sway, the trees in the foothills shiver, and the wind plays cold upon the dew-laden downs. The downs tell a blundering tale; they are always very deep, very wide, and avail expansive lengths by which they occur. Never a plane has flown over them, or a traveler passed by them, or many other people in the world lived, without understanding the dramas of these ancient and eviscerating delineations in the face of the earth. The kids call them canyons, and the men call them football training. At the top of them, you will find a very subtle lip, which crescendos fervently into the air, if only to fall and flow painfully, awkwardly, and horrifically into the plains below. The image of the trees and shrubberies falling down their faces may revere illustrations of gross chaos, and the brutal turbulence going down does well to inform of a time of anguish and horror in the history of this kingdom, the greatest of natural blunders that ever were.

Where there are no woods or mountains, and where the downlands have yet to strike, there is an unimaginably immense collection of flat and fertile ground. Puddles accumulate in colonnades the size of lakes; a soft, damp, and dark soil prevails where there are no plagues of wild grass; on the horizon you may see a few trees looming in the corner of your vision, swaying peacefully in the wind, straight and open in their freedom on the open plains. And in some places, you can see forever, for there are no hills or woods to behold, and the downs have a tendency to swallow up the horizon. There are no people here, there are no creatures, and there are no disturbances; harmony prevails in the wide wetlands of yore.

There was once a town called Kaden. It was nestled tight between the girths of two mountain ranges, in a valley deep and wide, which eventually became one with the wetlands. Kaden was the home of many a worthy scholars, of men and women who have seen the world outside and felt the rigors of true worth. They chose, in their later days, to live in a very quaint and complacent community together, a sanctuary for people like them. Houses there are made of wood; they are laden well and heavy with the brilliant warmth of hearths and lanterns studding domiciles inside and out. They glow in the sanctity of the night, like wells of hope for those passing by. No pirate, scoundrel, or criminal traveling in the night could resist the homeliness of this sacred place; they’d be drunken in the smell of the roasts, dazzled by the lights hanging over the porches and peering out from within, and galvanized by the smiles on the faces of its vibrant natives. It was a place that was, quite simply and for all intents and purposes, wonderful.

Even in the darkness of the world around them, in the commonality of dankness that prevails in the weatherly wetlands, the people of Kaden absolutely refuse to accept the simple idea of natural misery. They have markets on weekends, they feel eager enthusiasm to share a grin, and their culture is centered on festivity and feasts. Birthdays in this town simply do not occur unless everyone has made something to eat, tables have been placed here and there, and the succession of life is celebrated accordingly before the day is done. And when the birthday is gone, it will be spoken of for weeks afterwards, and they’ll laugh about it for years to come.

There’s always something cooking; there’s always someone laughing; there’s always someone working hard and thinking. Most of its inhabitants are deeply enthralled on the subject of philosophical discourse, for, in years of yore gone by, one finds little to do but contemplate the validities of life, and conjecture on the sanctity of peace and civility. Though they may live in what may be equated to routines, they would not be quick to discredit the importance of progress in light of the human species as a whole. A messenger comes by every now and then with a satchel full of newspapers from the nearby metropolis, at the behest of those who still wonder about the world outside. Some of them have radios, but there are only a couple channels that reach those parts. Still, the people of the town persist in consuming information about the world as it turns, and would stop at nothing to maintain their image of the real world as it is.

As many towns like this populate the whole country, many would consider the country to be known as the Land of Coffee Shops. Tea, coffee, and many other relaxing effects remain the highest priority in those corners of the world. Why should anyone grow uncomfortable? There is ample energy and vivid will to maintain a healthy view, minding to leave a little room for skepticism. But alas, there is always going to be something wrong, and the people of Kaden, like many others around the world, are always eager to see what is next to go wrong. Sometimes, it matters, but usually, it does not. There may be someone in town succumbing to social distress, or there may be a disgusting political upheaval. But there’s nothing that a good cup of tea can’t fix.

It is a town of people who know terror and bloodshed, of people who have seen the ugliness of life as it is, and have pressed on regardless. Many people in the metropolises, or in places slightly more populous, may find life to be a dark and depressing place with almost no hope for reform. Kaden is, contrarily, a place full of those who have seen this darkness, but they act quite differently than one might assume. There is a manner of grace about the town, a sincerity of thought and emotion that seems to prevail inexorably. There is always someone smiling, always someone thinking, and always someone enjoying life.

In this town there lived a family named the Makkonens: Mr. Makkonen was a highly esteemed professor, a veteran of one of the most incredible universities in the world. An artist of English he was, and a mastery of words he maintained for the rest of his life, never looking away from the importance of knowing exactly what to say. Mrs. Makkonen, on the other hand, was more of a worker; she hadn’t fared the privilege of attending school, and had nothing else to do but work instead. But she spent many hours per week in the library nearby, and by the time she was nineteen, she was generally more intelligent than anyone who may fancy themselves to be an over-achiever in the academic world. She graduated from college with a Masters degree in theology and went on to teach school in the city. Having found Mr. Makkonen, she decided that it was her duty to start and raise a family that would go forth and know a brighter life than what she had seen in her time.

Thus, they bore two sons: Karl and Marko. Karl was much older than Marko, and was a soldier from day one. His father read him ancient stories of the greatest heroes who ever lived, who fought and served through the darkest conflicts, and who saved the world from the worst tyranny that ever was. Karl often found himself running around the woods, shooting at invisible enemies, or slashing Saracens on the plains, which he imagined to be a sprawling desert. He was terribly fond of strict routines, and often drilled himself before he read the lesson for the day. He was the cleanest, strongest, most comprehensive boy in town, and was determined to become the greatest in the world.

Marko came later on. The boy was quiet, collected, and calculating at all times. He was schooled heavily on the importance of words, and became a master historian before he was ten winters old. Mr. Salminen next door, a professor of Classics, was often set back in awe at the knowledge that the poor, young boy could spew forth. He summarized the course of plagues in the matter of seconds and retained kingdoms of knowledge in the forefront of his mind. Very learned he was, and he was bound eternally to the bosom of a good book. The library that enclosed the living room in his home was always confused and discombobulated, as he would return books with which he wasn’t quite done, or deposit texts in haste, before he lost his train of thought on any one subject. Often did he switch between histories and rhetorical analyses, and often did he find himself reading things he didn’t quite understand. Everything would be clear as day before the day was done.  

They sat in a train station far away, off and deep into the city. Jaakko was mesmerized by this place: the platforms were heralded by the prefecture of steel and glass that enclosed the entire station, which resonated the sound of commerce, whether by chattered words, or the sound of footsteps, or the clanging of the steam engines. The prefecture itself was, as he could just barely recall, a dome. He managed as well to discern that the shapes of the steel bars were formed to be what looked like triangles, but seemed almost to be two sided. Alas, they must be diamonds!

He looked up at the man beside him on the bench and tugged on his sleeve, as he pleaded, “Uncle Philip, what are those shapes in the ceiling?”

The weathered man smiled heartily as he looked up and briefly surveyed the geodesic dome. He looked back down at Jaakko and responded, conclusively, “Those are called ‘rhombi.’”

“Rhombi?” the boy echoed.

“Rhombus. ‘Rhombi’ means there is more than one.”

“Is a rhombus just two triangles?” asked the boy.

Mr. Makkonen thought for a second. “They would be, yes. You’re correct.”

Jaakko laughed. As ever, he was always overjoyed to happen upon such striking nuances, and there was always, it seemed, something to earnestly intrigue him. But the train had yet to come for him, and he needed something else to keep his mind at ease. Very quickly, he found himself staring inexorably at the other steam engines sitting around, and all the people cycling in and out of the ornate machines. The people all wore dark clothes, like suits and skirts, and some of them wore wide-brimmed hats. They had purses, briefcases, shoes with big heels, and metal bands on their wrists. Uncle Phil had that same band on his wrist.

“Uncle Philip?” Jaakko entreated, looking up at the man beside him.

The man responded briefly and adequately, “Yes?”

“What’s that on your wrist?”

“This is a watch,” Philip responded.

The girl on the other side of him leaned over and barked, “You know what a watch is, Jaakko!”

“Come on now, Maria,” the man said: “It’s fine for him to explore.”

“Yeah, Maria,” Jaakko chirped. “I’m exploring.”

“You’re just dumb!” she shouted frivolously.

“Oh yeah?” Jaakko remarked. “Ask me anything!”

“Why do they call it a watch?” the girl asked patronizingly.

The boy was at a present loss. His countenance did not falter, and his emotion ran deep for a few moments. Philip smiled, and looked away, as if diverged from the conversation. Jaakko looked up and saw that all the people in the train station would persistently look at this mysterious band on their wrist very prudently, almost unnaturally so. They seemed anxious and worried about this strange thing. At last, he saw the great clock on an ornate beam in the platform between tracks as a train passed by. There were numbers on it: they were in a circle, and so he didn’t seem to understand the number at which they began. He could hardly differentiate one number from another. For a split second, he feared that he might have lost the battle at hand.

Then it hit him. There were numbers on the platform, and there were numbers on the clocks, and the clocks looked just like the watches. As Philip’s watch struck 6:30, so did the clock between the platforms, and a bell clamored. A crowd of people flooded the machine.

“Because they’re watching the time!” Jaakko shouted.

“That’s stupid!” Maria shouted impulsively.

“No,” Philip objected, as if by divine intervention, “he’s absolutely right. They’re clocks that one can wear on their wrist, so that everyone can have a good sense of the time when there wasn’t a big clock around. And, indeed, they are for watching time.”

“But he cheated,” she said; “He figured it out right before he answered!”

“Is there anything wrong with that?” Philip asked her, as he fashioned of a hearty smile.

Jaakko laughed. He was completely ecstatic about his new discovery. The people had new purpose, and so did the trains, and the bands on their wrists. Even the great circle on the ornate beam had its own place in this world. But his fascinations were not done; he was still curious, and the train had yet to come.

Something very surreal began to dawn upon him. He looked at his hands, and he recalled the things that he had done with his hands up to that point; he had made some sand castles on the beach, he potted plants with his parents on their balcony, and he even went fishing once. However, he wasn’t all that great at any of these things. Persistently, his father scrambled with graceful laughter to correct him. And whenever something went hopelessly wrong, the two of them would laugh until they were fresh out of breath. As his fishing pole would fall into the pond, they’d laugh, and his dad would teach him with only one rod; as a plant would fall on the floor of the balcony, it would remain there, for they would build around it a mound of potting soil, and it would grow to be luscious and strong; as his sand castles fell, and the fruits of his labors came crashing down, his sister would come along and help him rebuild it again. But he never could do anything right on his own.

Thus, he was drawn sensationally to the trains. They were brazen with excessively complex patterns that depicted, like on the clock between the platforms, ornate intricacies of what looked like plants, as a plant might be formed into some kind of recurring pattern. He noticed as well that the trains were very strong, and could hold many people, and they would always get going very fast. As well, he couldn’t possibly imagine trying to pick one up; there was so much metal in it that it must have been incredibly heavy. Perplexed he was, for he could hardly grasp how it was that this amazing machine may have come into being. Who made it? How did they make it? And why? He immediately threw out the idea that it was made with hands, because he knew how fallible hands could be. Sometimes he does bad things with them, and sometimes they were good, but he could never imagine putting together something as magnificent as a steam engine. There were too many thoughts, and he simply couldn’t grasp anything if he tried.

He tugged on his uncle’s sleeve again and asked, “Uncle Philip, how do they make trains?”

The grey man smiled again, as he was always enthralled to do, and his face welled up with wrinkles as he responded, “They make them in great factories. They’re buildings that sit far away from the cities, near the beaches, and always in the heart of the grasslands.”
“But how do they make them?” Jaakko asked, as if perturbed that he had yet to receive an answer.

“Ah, I see,” Mr. Makkonen exhaled. “Usually, they have machines. The machines do things automatically, and they can make trains far faster than these, that can get to places in shorter time. But these trains here, I’m sure, were probably all hand-made in an old industrial workshop.”

Jaakko’s mind exploded. “Really?” he exclaimed, gazing at his uncle with eyes wider than the sky.

“Really,” the man confirmed, shaking his head and laughing only a little bit.

Jaakko looked at his hands again. Thoughts ran like furious rivers in his head. It must have taken a lot of people to make them, and it must have taken them a long time, and it must have been extremely hard. He tried dearly to imagine the craftsmanship that had been devoted to the assembly of those incredible machines; they breathed steam like dragons from the stories he had read, and they were studded with brilliant patterns that he could hardly understand, no matter how long he stared at them. Doors opened in his mind in a grand procession, as if he saw life through a whole new set of apertures, in colors he had never known before, under the assumption of possibilities he could not have imagined before, in sunshine unlike anything he had ever seen before, pouring through the rhombi embedded in the girth of the dome of steel and glass. He looked at his hands, and he thought about making something wonderful with them.

Somewhere far off, in the corner of his peripheral consciousness, he heard that familiar whistle, like that which rang as the people began to board the trains. Uncle Phil patted the children on the shoulder and said, “Come on now, we’ve got a train to catch. Grab your things, and make sure you have your passports.” The boy and the girl retrieved booklets from their pockets and showed them to the tall, lanky man who had stood up beside them. Philip himself wore a burgundy corduroy jacket that was densely populated in and out by pockets that had been haggardly fashioned onto them long after their production, retrieving from them the incorrect effects, until he finally came upon his passport in his back pocket. “Do we all have them?” he asked: “Good.”

Jaakko noticed there weren’t many people coming to board his train. Some came in, and some actually went as well, and the conductor would occasionally shake hands and laugh with one of them walking on. The conductor was short, apparently loved to laugh, and held an evident repose like nothing the children had ever seen before; they could hardly imagine that anyone could stand as straight and reserved as he did. He wore big and round glasses, had a dark and massive mustache, and wore white gloves like they had always seen in their picture books. His apparel was navy blue; there was a distinct hat on his head, and dark, shiny shoes on his feet. As the three of them approached, his smile died, and he glared menacingly at Philip. Philip seemed unconcerned; he retrieved the passports from the children and handed them over, as the cartoonish little conductor furrowed his mustache and gave them evil eyes here and there. A true and honest terror grew upon the children.

The conductor announced, having reviewed the passports, “Jaakko Juhola, Maria Juhola, and Philip Makkonen. Why, something must be wrong here – what’s wrong with your name, Phil?”

Philip smiled slightly and looked at him sternly. “I’m not sure,” he replied. “What’s wrong, indeed?”

“What kinda name is ‘Makkonen’?” the conductor asked. “Why don’t you have a pretty name, like Juhola?”

“The passports are forged,” Mr. Makkonen replied. “I tried my hardest to formulate of something uglier than the sight of you, and it seems that I have failed.” The conductor laughed, followed by the laughter of Mr. Makkonen, and they shook hands like true gentlemen.

“It’s good to see you again, man,” the conductor said. “You going back home?”

“Indeed,” Mr. Makkonen responded. “Karl’s coming home from military academy, and I’m horribly homesick.”

“Well,” the conductor said, handing back their passports, “tell Jillian to send me a slice of her meringue sometime. I’ll be eternally indebted to you.”

Duly noted!” Mr. Makkonen declared. “Now, have yourself a wonderful evening, and good luck.”

“Good luck, Phil.”

Jaakko noticed this train was much nicer than the others. It was cleaner, quieter, and more luxurious. Some things about it seemed newer, or more advanced, and the compartments were far more spacious. There were electric lights in this one, and it was generally white and gold on the inside, again, in ornate and intricate designs. As well, there weren’t as many people boarding this one. The boy asked,

“Why aren’t there as many people on here?”

“This is an upper-class train,” Philip replied, as they filed down the corridor. “It’s also reserved for people like me, professors and scholars.”

“Are we special or something?” Maria asked.

“Hardly!” Philip declared. “This train was designed for people like me, by people like me. We are enthusiastic about life, and so we take trains manufactured by those who are enthusiastic about making trains. Those callous malcontents outside can make and enjoy their own trains, for they are hardly any more careful of making them, and they will be accordingly less enthused about the ordeal as a whole.”

Jaakko didn’t quite understand his response, but he accepted it regardless. They found their compartment, which was actually very bright, even though their window faced the inside of the station, and the curtains were closed. The boy set his bags on the floor and walked over to draw the curtains, under the blind assumption that doing so would make anything better. But he had a curious assumption that it would. He became careless to the politics at work in the train around him, and waited to see what would happen through that window. The train started up, the whistle blew, and the show began.

 The world outside began to move, but only slightly. The dark people with purses and briefcases, who shuffled here and there inexorably, swiftly sailed away to the right. The train station went with them. Sounds of clanging and banging resounded sequentially from below as the train station disappeared, and there was only the city. He saw shops that were alive with all kinds of fruits and edible effects, people bustling about diversely, he saw parks, statues, squares, and the university on the hill far away. But eventually, the grey of the metropolis grew scarce, and they descended into darkness. A stream of lights flickered on and off into the compartment from above, and the flickering grew so fast that it simply became constant. It seemed they continued to gain speed, almost at an alarming rate, and Jaakko began to grow at least a little scared, for he had never gone that fast in his life. Then, it happened.

The tunnel disappeared, and there were only fields as far as his eyes allowed. They were golden, like honey, and they sat upon occasional foothills that were spotted with clouds moving graciously overhead. He could see the ocean far off, into the distance, beyond the foothills. He stared, and he didn’t seem very intent on looking away. Eventually, the plains faded away, and there was only blue, whether in the sky, or in the sea. A cloud or two might drift by above, and its shadow would loom over the water, but this only happened every now in then. Before he realized it, he was asleep, and soon he had fallen over to lie on the seat. Maria and Philip just laughed.

By the time he had awoken again, they were in a very different place. The sea and the skies of blue were gone from the window; there was, instead, orange in the sky, and a procession of dark mountains blocked the view of anything beyond an immediate valley. He had never seen a place like this before, where there were black mountains and orange clouds. Philip handed him a mug of tea, which he had ordered from the trolley. The boy was trapped in a haze, not completely comprehending what was going on; nonetheless, he sipped his tea and relaxed indulgingly in his seat. His uncle grabbed the mug before it fell to the floor, and he dozed off the sleep again.

The whistle blew. It was pitch black outside, and he couldn’t see anything out the window. Philip said, “I’ll grab you bag, Jaakko – you just take my hand and stay on your feet.” For a few minutes, they shuffled along the dark corridor between the compartments, bumping into people beside them, and Jaakko felt as though he was about to fall over. It was all too much for him. And then, there were the lights.

As he watched his feet step down and out of the bustling train, he looked up and beheld a dazzling sight. There were lanterns lining a street straight ahead, and they were all yellow and golden and lighting up the night like fire. Some of them were hung from the archway leading out of the station, and they grew out of the gardens like fungus. They lined were in the balconies, in the windows, hanging off benches, and sometimes just lying around on the ground. There was music here and the smell of roasts there. Men and women, girls and boys, the old and the young alike all flurried around each other, laughing and smiling and handing out drinks. No longer did his eyes yearn for a deeper respite; they were alive.

As they descended into the deluge of the festivities, he found his eyes darting from person to person, spectacle to spectacle, trying to take in everything he could before he moved on. There was an old man strumming furiously at a guitar, sitting on a stool in front of the pub, and he played for an audience of young men and women. Strings of bare light bulbs spanned the length of the street above his head. Children yelled things at him festively as they ran by. Philip stopped them all at a table in front of the bakery for a moment, and they were all treated to the most ambrosial buttered rolls he had ever tasted. All along the brilliant corridor, they stopped occasionally to pick up another delicacy, each just as preposterously intoxicating as the last. There were wooden goblets of apple cider, tabletops teeming with pyramids of the most delectable vanilla cupcakes, butterscotch muffins, cobblers and pies, cuts of beef so juicy they were shimmering, great cauldrons of steamed vegetables, every manner of preparation for potatoes that dare discernment, and every kind of cabbage under the sun.

At last, they grew aloof from the festivities, and wandered into a quieter part of town. Philip asked the children, “What do you think?”

Jaakko was still consuming a cut of corned beef as he heaved out the words, “It’s amazing!” The two children flurried around him and shouted out their excitement at the top of their lungs, and Philip just smiled and let youth run its course. They went on about the brilliance of the lights, the fury of the string players, and the satanic ecstasy of the food on display. Jaakko rejoined in his joy, “I feel like one of those people in Technicolor films, who go to those huge parties and stuff!”

Philip replied simply, “You’re living life in Technicolor now.”

They came to a house raised upon a small mound, which was in the corner of the whole town, overlooking the wetlands. It was rather large and rather dark, but it was laden quite heavily with lanterns, not unlike the porchfronts of the rest of the town. They ascended a brief flight of steps, and then Philip stepped forth to open the door. The smell of flowers dominated, and the whole of the interior was glowing with brown and red and burgundy, and you could see from one side of the house to the other through the hallway directly through the front door, at the other end of which was the roaring hearth staring back at you. Uncle Phil placed the bags by the steps and hustled the children through the labyrinth of his warm abode, until they came upon the kitchen.

“Oh, Philip!” shouted Mrs. Makkonen at the sink, who was scrubbing away the grime of her dish for the festival. “I can’t believe you’ve made it back so fast!”

They embraced, and with a smile Philip remarked, “Well, we did ride first class, didn’t we, kids?”

“Yeah!” Jaakko exclaimed. “We sat in this really nice train, and I watched the clouds go by over the sea!”

But his enthusiasm was trifled as Mrs. Makkonen knelt down to hug the young ones, and she exulted her good-to-see-you-again’s. “Marko,” she said as she stood up, looking over at the boy at the table, “Say hello to Jaakko and Maria Juhola. They’re going to be living with us from now on!”

Formally and earnestly did the boy, who was a couple years older than them, turn and wave “Hello.” The two did the same as the adults took to the countertop and went about their mysterious business there, rearranging things and slapping things around. Philip took to his usual routine of unloading the absurd number of pockets on his corduroy jacket in the corner of the kitchen, which were all stitched on long after its initial production. He had a pocket watch, loose change, an army knife, a notepad, a jubilee of extravagant pens, a small leather-bound book, folded-up pieces of paper, a watch that he meant to have fixed, a small bag of coffee grounds and, at last, his passport.

“How was your trip, dear?” Mrs. Makkonen asked.

“Oh, swift and smooth as ever,” he replied. “The city’s alright, and the taxation’s taken a short recess. I think this is the best it’s ever been, since there were people killing each other.”

“Well, good, I suppose,” she said. “And what else have you heard from there?”

“There’ve been protests,” the man replied, as he began blasting white tea mugs with cold water from the sink until they were pristine. “There were people walking down the street shaking, probably because they lived through some riot control gas. It’s really inhumane, the way they treat their own citizens. There was a man at the tavern who said they’d been tossing corpses in the river, of all places. I know there are a lot of angry leaders around here who want it to stop. There’s a cold war coming, on the radio I heard.”

“Darling,” the woman remarked, “it’s a violent world.”

The boy sitting at the table had black hair, and wore a dark button shirt and dark pants. It was not that he appeared obtrusive in any way, but rather, that he was easily distinguishable. The book over which he pored was almost as wide as the table it sat on. There was a candle next to it, flickering the breeze that wafted through the windows of the bright kitchen. The two new missionaries from the metropolis sat beside him on the floor, prudently waiting for something fun to happen. Jaakko asked the boy at last,

“What’s your name?”

“Marko,” the boy at the table replied, looking down.

“My name is Jaakko,” Jaakko replied. “Some people called me ‘Jacko,’ but it’s pronounced ‘Yahko.’”

“I see,” said Marko.

“Are you Uncle Phil’s son?” Maria asked.

“Yes,” Marko replied.

“You look a lot like him!” Jaakko shouted.

“I think you’re right,” said Marko.

“You don’t sound very excited,” Jaakko said. “Why’s that?”

“I don’t know,” Marko replied.

“That festival out there is amazing,” Maria said. “They don’t even have Independence Day parties like that in the city.”

“People have things to do in the city,” Marko remarked. “Here, we just eat and drink.”

The boy’s parents laughed at what he had said. “Good point,” his father said, before leaving to hang his coat up at last. He yelled from the next room, “You’ll find Marko to be a very dry sort of jokester.”

“What’s that?” Jaakko asked.

“It’s complicated,” Phil told him, entering the kitchen again. “You probably won’t have to worry about it.”

Jaakko’s mind was idle for a moment, then he looked at Marko and said, “Today I figured out what a watch is.”

“Oh, really?” Marko said, introspectively. “What is it?”

“It’s a way to watch time!” he shouted, following immediately after with a hearty round of laughter.

Mom, dad, and Maria all joined in with him. But Marko was rather perplexed by this; he was never really one to laugh. As he looked back over at the book on the table, he seemed to disconnect from the present circumstances. He was lost in a discourse on the obsoleteness of hegemony as a whole. Later on, he heard his father say, “Oh, he’s in his own world now. No use in trying to tear him away from that book. He doesn’t like to be torn away from his studies, no matter what.”

The party wound down, and eventually they all set out upon the festivities in town. Philip and Jillian reconvened with their friends from the neighborhood, and Philip spoke of his journey to the city; Marko reconvened with his friends from school, and told them of his opinion on the necessity of political deprecation on grounds of merely making them feel bad; Jaakko and Maria convened with new faces, and learned of the local social politics. Pork, beef, whole chickens and turkeys circumnavigated the table regularly. There was always someone asking for a roll, or the pepper or salt, and everyone wanted to get their hands on the gravy. They had steamed vegetables hinted in wisps of butter, a veritable library of different preparations for cabbage, as with potatoes, and whole baskets of bread were depleted in a matter of moments. All the while there were minstrels playing songs of the marshes, or of love, or of the city lights. They were all men who had seen better and worse, but mostly worse. You could tell in the wrinkles in their faces, the fervor with which they strummed their guitars, and the sensations in their voices, that they had a reason to play whatever it was they were playing.

There was a dining table at the foot of every storefront in the main marketplace, and they were all packed to the brim with divine delectability. Quite literally everyone and their relatives were there; some traveled from different parts of the country, and a few came from the other side of the world. Just about everyone had everything to say to everyone else, whether they knew them or not, whether on the subject of personal endeavors or the deliciousness of the bread. Those eating had just as hard a time as those playing music or serving food, because it was truly a laborious task to consume such a vast quantity of food in such a small amount of time. Most of the diners wagered that such a bounty of food would take years to consume; to their amazement, they managed to do it in a matter of a few hours.

Near the end of the nightly events, the whole of the crowd began to disperse. Gaggles of kids would help store the tables away in the grand facility storage at the end of the street. Workers from the city meticulously collected the silverware, plates, napkins and goblets so as to neatly organize them upon a cart that was kept in the basement of Mr. Einio’s house, the man who took it upon himself to organize such festivities, which he did on scraps of paper in his spare time. The Makkonens and the Juholas stumbled back home, practically drunk in the fervor of the feast, clearly content with themselves and ready to go to bed. As they entered through the front door, Mr. Makkonen took the two new members of the house to their rooms upstairs, and Marko grabbed his immense textbook from off the kitchen table. He said good night to his mother and lugged the daunting text up to his bedroom.

But as he lay in bed, he heard a commotion from downstairs. Jaakko and Maria were up and stirring, sometime later in the night. As he walked down the steps, he saw them talking to each other around the ottoman by the divan. He asked them from the hallway,

“What are you guys doing up?”

“We’re just talking,” Maria replied.

“You should keep it down a little,” Marko advised. “My parents are good at hearing this kind of stuff.”

“Okay, we will,” Jaakko said, surprisingly rather quietly. “Hey, Marko?”

“Yes?”

“Where’s the bathroom?”

“It’s on the other side of the steps,” Marko replied, “in the alcove between the library and the living room.”

“Okay, thank you,” he said as he awkwardly jumped to his feet and hurried off.

Marko was slightly perturbed about something. He sat down in the divan and asked Maria, “Is there something wrong with Jaakko?”

“He’s kind of stupid,” Maria told him. “He was born with a problem in his brain.”

“I see,” said Marko.

“You seem like the opposite of him,” Maria told him. “I really don’t know how you’re tolerating him!”

“No, I’m fine,” Marko told her, but the emotions showed themselves inside him. He admitted that, during the course of the night, he had become slightly annoyed by his cousin. He asked, “Why did you guys have to move here?”

Maria did not respond immediately. She looked around at the floor and formulated something to say. “Phil said our parents had to leave, but they’re dead.”

Marko was hesitant to respond, slightly horrified. “I’m really sorry,” he said. “Aren’t you sad?”

“Yes,” she replied. “But we’ll be alright. Phil just told us we shouldn’t cry unless we really need to.”

But before long, she was crying, and Marko had knelt down to embrace her. She tried very hard to retain the noise, but some emotions couldn’t help but come out. Marko looked up and saw Jaakko standing in the doorway. For the first time in his life, he wore a sullen face. His feet took him to Maria, and he joined in trying to calm her down. At last, the dark haired boy had the presence of mind to beseech of them, “Please, forgive me for bringing this up. I had no idea.”

Jaakko said, “It’s okay. We’re not going to cry again after this.”

After some reckoning, the children conceded to go back to bed. But Marko did not drift off immediately; he could do little but stare at his ceiling and revel in what he had done. He didn’t quite know how to treat it. His last thought before falling asleep was, “Begin at Book II, Hegemonic Democracies.”

Postcards

The folds in his downy bedcover were gone; Marko had entrenched himself utterly into the fjords of his bed, and was completely neglecting of the outside world. Mornings like these made him very self-centered in the first few minutes of his day, as he would indulge relentlessly on the few moments of twilight after waking up. His heart was warm, his joints were at ease, and he was at the behest of no worldly inhibition, dazed into no delusion. At last, he opened his eyes, and saw the grey sunshine that so often touched down upon the countryside there. The things on his desk – his pen rack, his textbook, and his stacks of papers – seemed at ease in genuine despair, but at the same time, in hope of a brilliant light. So lavishing was the idea of staying in bed. After all, he had nothing to do, and it was such a perfect day.

He heard piano. It was not the kind of piano that father would play on the record player, or the kind of piano his mother would play to practice, but something much more sacred. He felt something stirring in the rungs of his heart as the pianist played his song. Somewhere within him, a dirge played in the streets, and the horns blew from deep within the kingdoms of his consciousness; the revolution began. Eagerly did his bones twitch awake beneath the oppression of the heavy blankets. He heaved his limbs out from under its immense wake and hit the soles of his feet upon the hardwood floors of his bedroom.

His hands grabbed at a pair of bed pants, a button shirt, and some socks from out of his dresser. He sloppily assumed the casual apparel and rushed out of his bedroom, down the corridor, and down the stairs. His feet took him into the living room, but his ears brought him to the storage room beneath the stairs. He came to an abrupt stop as he saw his brother sitting there on the piano, and his parents were standing aside, watching him play a beautiful song. Karl stopped playing, and he ran at his brother, who wore a furious joy on his face, and they embraced for the first time in years.

“Goodness gracious,” Karl said, looking his brother over. “You’ve grown like hell. You look like you’re as old as mom and dad.”

“And you sure don’t look like that bum who left home six years ago,” Marko remarked.

Indeed, Karl had changed. Then, he had scraggly hair and worn clothes, but was a survivor and a genius by heart. Now, he had clean-cut hair, a suit of fatigues, black boots and a mannerism about the way he did everything that seemed unreal. As Marko sat down beside him on the piano and he watched his brother play, he noticed in his hands that there was a magical carefulness for the way he performed, such that he seemed to show respectable regard for things even as simple as the piano keys. The way his fingers hit the keys was careful, but sure; the force which he would strike them was gentle but efficacious; he could manipulate the sound of the keys like they were within his hands, rather than beneath his fingers, and he moved like a machine. As well, he hadn’t played anything that beautiful in a very long time. Karl played the low octaves, and Marko played the high. The ivory was illuminated in the grey sunshine. This was a special day for Marko.

“Where’ve the kids gone to?” Mrs. Makkonen asked her husband.

“I think they’re out playing,” he replied. “I told them not to wander off.”

“I’ll go round them up.”

Philip remained there in the storage room and watched his sons play piano. They operated calculatingly, and quietly, and never really faced each other to communicate the rhythm. The song ended, and Philip commenced to a bout of clapping.

“Wonderful,” he said. “Now get dressed, Marko. We’ve got to attend a gala this evening.”

They took the train to Poppyfields. Jaakko looked out at the honey-fields again, only to find they had become rather faded with grey. As well, the see was grey, and the sky was white. For a few hours, Jaakko watched the world go by, Maria was half asleep, and Marko was deeply enthralled by a book about the life of Alexander the Great. Some people flustered in the hallway. The train clacked mathematically along the tracks. Phil, Jillian, and Karl were in the next compartment, talking about the lodge where the gala would take place, a conversation that diverged into the subject of a famous writer.

The train stopped in the city, and some people got on, as others got off. Jaakko looked at all the clocks and smiled, bewildered that there would be so many in one place. He looked at all the people in suits, and 

The train picked up again, after the ringing of the second bell, and they found themselves in a different terrain. Here, there were lots of hills. They were continually snaking in and out of tunnels, around bends, and through the woods. Sometimes, branches scraped across the window and carried on down the train. Marko could glimpse that they were coming upon a marsh of some kind. It kept getting warmer, as they drew further south, and they moved so fast that it was becoming noticeable. Having completed the book in his lap, he closed it, and dozed off.

The bell rang at the next station, and everyone popped awake. The children scrambled for their bags and reconstituted themselves as Philip knocked on their door. After a few minutes of filing through the corridor, they found themselves in a very strange place. There were plants everywhere; there was life growing out of the benches, through the cracks in the walkway, hanging from the awning, crawling up the walls, and snaking in vines up the pillars. And every inch of the train station was vibrant and vivid, exploding with the diversity of the visible spectrum. There were immense, violet and yellow buds glowing in the light of the fluorescent bulbs that were strung about, like at the festival. The lot of them shuffled through a narrow hallway leading out of the station before finding themselves in what appeared to be the middle of nowhere, although Philip and Jillian knew the way by heart. They walked through a brush that was as high as their knees and on paths that had long since grown over, all through a dark and misty corridor in the woods, as sounds of the marsh resonated here and there. Lights twinkled in the distance, and they grew ever closer.

At last, the family came to the town. There wasn’t much going on; few people were in the street, and many were in the taverns. It was a generally average night. But the family pressed on until they came upon the neighborhood of houses. The houses there seemed to be one with the environment; everything, like the train station, was overgrown with a vibrant display of complex flora. Everything was lit up, as well; there was music coming from some houses, and laughter emanating from all around. “A whole town of drunks,” Philip said. “I wonder why he loves living here so much.”

At last, they came upon the house of Philip’s oldest friend, Anthony Uronen. It was a grand masterpiece of minimalist design, as though something out of a magazine from the city. It was very dark, as it was constructed of old oak, and it was rather noticeably square. It hung over the marsh, but there were no railings on the porches, because the designer found railings would duly detract from the house aesthetically. A short man with long hair, who was dressed in the most bourgeois finery, met the family at the door. This was Anthony. Alive, enthusiastic, and animated he was. And his house was, to say the least, enigmatically clean. The interior was pristinely white, and its effects were all profoundly geometric. Most of the furniture was primarily quadrilateral, such as how the armchairs were essentially cubes with places to sit cut out of them. It also doubled as a lodge, because this was one of many houses he owned, and so he would occasionally rent it out to organizations. In this case, he accepted to host a gala for the graduates of the metropolitan military academy division.

The pianist in the corner of the lodge played music that sounded like the rain, a swift melody in the higher octaves reverberating with the lower, more powerful chords. For a long time, the family spent time wandering around, reconciling with old friends; the kids had taken to the corner of the main hall by the fireplace, where they puzzled over a massive book they had taken off the shelf.

“The Normans invaded England in 1066,” said Marko. “You should remember that. They saw the people who lived in England, and really didn’t like them; however, a lot of the soldiers liked the British women, and pleaded to stay there to live with them. But the French courts would absolutely not allow their beautiful language to be harnessed by people like the English, who were very dirty, and spoke a terrible language, and so the soldiers would have a hard time talking to their English wives. All they were allowed to do was talk to their wives normally, until they kind of understood each other. That’s how English came to be; it’s some kind of German mixed with French.”

“So am I speaking French right now?” Jaakko asked.

“No,” Marko replied. “Those were all German words. A French word would be repertoire, or interrogate, or hemorrhage.”

“How do you know all this?” Jaakko asked.

“I read a lot of books,” Marko replied. “It’s taken me a very long time.”

Maria had become presently interested in something else; she brought her hand into the group and said, “Look at this,” indicating that one of her fingers had been evidently covered in wax. Marko looked over at the great candle on the coffee table.

“Oh yeah,” he said. “Melted wax does that. Be careful, though.”

For the next few minutes, the children were enthralled by the idea of a perfectly adjusting material formulating around their minor appendages. They made webs in it, stuck fingers together, and drew faces with them in their palms. Curiously, Marko grabbed a pawn from off the nearby marble chess set and dipped it in to see how well the wax formed around the grooves.

“Hey, don’t do that!” Maria objected. “That’s probably expensive.”

“I can peel it off,” Marko said, which he did.

“But how do you think the chess piece feels about it?” Maria asked, sarcastically.

“It’s just a pawn.”

Dinner ensued, but the Makkonens and the Juholas ate modestly, because of how full they still were from the night before. They all sat at long tables in the grand dining hall, and there was a stage at the end of the room, where military officials gave speeches. The entire far wall was glass, about forty feet high and fifty feet across.  The kids paid no attention; Maria was bored, Jaakko was darting his attention around the room, and Marko was busy staring out the window beside him, at the algae accumulated in the bog. Again, he found himself lost in thought. There was something much more fascinating about the science of the swamp. They’re very diverse and densely populated places; perhaps the swamps have politics like the real world. For a moment, he lapsed back into the present, but found it to be much less interesting. He soon came to contemplate why it was that Maria asked him how the pawn felt about being dipped in wax. It was just a pawn.

Later on, the speeches concluded, and the gala grew casual again. He was walking around the porch that hung over the marsh. The lights outside showed him images of the branches on the trees in the darkness. They hung over the porch longingly, as if the house itself was a cruelty on nature. Some birds fluttered around out in the night. He took another sip of the cola he had taken from the ice bowl as footsteps approached him, and he could tell they belonged to Jaakko.

“Is this called a bog, a marsh, or a swamp?” the blond haired boy asked.

 “They’re all the same thing,” he replied.

“Why are there so many names?” Jaakko asked.

“They’re in many places around the world,” Marko replied. “Different kinds of people call them different things. In fact, the people in North Country call it a ‘moor.’”

“Why are there so many different people?” Jaakko asked.

“They used to be in one place,” Marko replied. “But they moved out, then their numbers grew, and they kept moving.”

“How do they get to be so different?” Jaakko asked.

Marko faltered. He looked through the windows in the side of the house and formulated an answer. He responded, “Do you see how everyone in that room is in a different place?”

“Yeah,” Jaakko said.

“The people standing by the fireplace,” Marko explained, “are very used to being near the fireplace. They know that they can’t get too close to the fire, that it’s a comfortable place to be around, and that they’re in a warmer climate. The people by the punch bowl, however, are in a different state. They’re used to having lots of food and drink. The people by the fire are different than the people by the punch bowl because they react to their environment differently; they have different things, and have grown used to them, so they enjoy different things.”

Jaakko took a moment for it all to process. Then the idea began to manifest itself, and he understood. “I get it,” he said. “So we’re out here…so we’re near the moor…and we can hear those bugs chirping.”

“That’s right,” said Marko. “The other people inside can’t hear them as well as we can.”

“And it’s really hot out here,” Jaakko went on. “And I don’t have anything to drink. So that’s why I want something to drink more than anyone else in there.”

“There might be a couple people in there who have a reason,” Marko explained. “But besides that, yeah.”

“Why would there be a couple people?” Jaakko asked.

“It’s just safe to be uncertain,” Marko replied.

“Uncertain?”

“It means,” Marko explained, “you shouldn’t act like you know everything completely. No one actually knows anything. People do some bad stuff when they think they know things.”

“What do you mean they don’t know things?” Jaakko asked. “I know a lot of things. Like, I know it’s hot out.”

“You know, sure,” Marko said. “But only in a way you can tell. Maybe it’s not all that warm out. And even then, what does warm mean? It just means we’re colder. The people inside, by the fire, will come outside and probably hardly notice a difference. The people by the punch bowl will find it to be warmer. What does it really mean?”

Jaakko was fascinated. He had never heard such a discourse in his life. He began to wonder more and more, but didn’t know what to ask. But at last he felt inclined to ask, “Why do people do bad things when they think they know things?”

“Because,” Marko replied, “they think they know other things based on what they know right now. If someone thinks it’s warm in one part of the room, they might say it’s warm in the other parts of the room. That would be wrong, because it’s not as warm by the ice bowl or the punch bowl. But that’s very harmless. What if someone is born in a very bad part of the world, and it’s very hard to live peacefully, and they think the whole world is like that? Will they kill themselves? Or will they try to make it better?”

But as Marko looked over, he found that Jaakko had wandered off aimlessly and knelt over the edge of the porch to paw something in the water. It was a lotus.

“That’s a lotus,” Marko informed. “It’s an Egyptian lotus.”

The gala faded away into the night. Because it was so late, and the Makkonens lived so far away, Anthony insisted that they stay the night. In the morning, they were greeted with a grand breakfast in the main hall, prepared by the lodge servers, whom he was paying overtime that morning. Marko got up the earliest, and walked downstairs to find a bright and bountiful feast on a long table, a very familiar sight to him now, as Anthony played a song on the piano in the background.

“Good morning,” he called over. The man’s hair was everywhere, and he was wearing a robe.

“Good morning,” Marko said. “Did you do this all for us?”

“My girls in the kitchen did,” he replied. “Please, sit down, enjoy.”

“You’re extremely gracious,” Marko commented.

“Not at all,” the man objected; “I’ve just got a lot of money and I just buy stuff. It gets really boring buying stuff for no one but yourself after a while.”

Marko poured himself a cup of coffee from the silver kettle and added a careful dash of cream. Having tasted it, he discerned that it was the best coffee he’d ever had. The trees through the windows were alive with vibrant sunshine; the sunlight poured in colonnades through the panes, which fell in dark crosses on the floor. Anthony played a song like the sound of rain, as his fingers fluttered on the higher octaves. Marko reckoned it was a good day. He sat down and fashioned onto his plate a banana, an orange, an apple, some sausage, and a cut of buttered toast. For a few moments, he sat back, and beheld the beauty of the food on his plate. Then, he took the banana and peeled its flesh, laying waste to whatever was inside. He left the peel on the edge of his plate, practically falling into the gutter below. It was the most symbolic breakfast he ever had.

As he ate, the rest of his family joined him, one by one. He finished long before anyone else, though, and spent a majority of the breakfast staring out the window, listening to Anthony, who was shouting sarcastic things here and there as he played his beautiful music.

“Oh yeah,” he’d say. “My wife just doesn’t care. I’d come home at three in the morning drunk, and she’d come up to me all angry and tell me that she was banging someone else. I mean, at least we’re on the same level.”

After breakfast, the family reformed themselves, and was off for the train station. It was, surprisingly, a very bright and wonderful day. There were, it appeared, flowers and plants of all kinds coming out of the woodwork of the little town, and there was always someone watering something. Taverns at night became cafes in the day. Most of the inhabitants of the town were outside, sitting on the patios and porches, watching the day play out, talking of unserious matters. The Makkonens found their way to the train station and boarded as soon as they arrived, nearly missing the train.

Again, the kids had their own compartment. Maria and Jaakko ended up sitting together as they commenced to discuss things off the top of their heads, whereas Marko preferred to sit by the window and stare. His eyes met with the sky, which was very wide and blue that day. But he saw the clouds of his home country looming in the distance, and prepared for a gloomier resolve. For the moment, he wanted nothing more than to admire the day as it was then.

A few days after returning home, Karl had to leave again. However, this time, he was to serve real time for the military. He was stationed in the more riotous parts of the nearest city, and would be fighting to keep the peace starting on day one. Marko and his parents worried at all times of the day. Before he left, Philip had embraced him for a long time, and told him of how proud he was of his sons. He was growing older, and there wasn’t much he asked for, although the things for which he did ask were very fragile. Marko often found himself playing the piano in his spare time. In particular, he played the song his brother had written for school when he was younger, which made some of the teachers cry as he presented it in the talent show. Sometimes, Philip would ask him to stop, because it would simply make him too sad to carry on through the day. Karl said it was a song about going to war, a song about sending postcards back home. Philip and Jillian’s worries were eased, however, whenever Marko played this song; for they knew, when they heard him play, that their sons were gifted, and that Karl would always remember them, and work hard.

As it was summer, Marko spent most of his time during the day playing outside with Jaakko and Maria. The sky cleared into holes occasionally, and let through a few bars of light, which would pass over momentarily, and illuminate small spaces here and there. There were always taverns bustling, and there were always people laughing in the streets. You could hear them from the fields, where the children spent most of their time. They ran through the tall grass and fell down and took naps out there, because there were no insects in that part of the country, and so there were no ticks. When it would rain, they would sit inside in the warmth of the living room, and Philip would tell them stories, or Marko would tell them about the world.

At last, an envelope from the city came in the mail. It was a postcard and a letter from Karl. Everyone was truly relieved. He spoke of how peaceful it’s becoming there, and how the riots are beginning to become less frequent. He really hates the riots, he says, because he always has to beat people or throw gas at them. But he’s learned to exert force appropriately, and must use it sometimes, especially when there are people being obtrusively offensive, albeit to authorities. At night, in his bunk, he dreams about being at home again, and he remembers his mom’s pot roasts. He makes tea for his barracks every night, and headquarters endorses it. The best operations, he says, are escorting officers through the massive, fancy government buildings. He once spent two hours with the Harold Elsila, the Prime Minister, in the garden, just as a bodyguard. Mr. Elsila told him of the crushes he had as a teenager, his favorite books, and his favorite music. Karl told him he played piano, and Mr. Elsila said he’d love to hear him play sometime.

Having reviewed the postcard, Philip set it on the kitchen table and sat down in the living room, where he tried in vain to choke back his tears. “I’m so happy,” he said. “I’m very relieved to know that my boy is doing just fine.” Marko wouldn’t play piano then; his father simply wouldn’t be able to handle it. Instead, he would go up to his room and read, or he would go outside and tell Jaakko and Maria about things. But he never could watch his father cry, because it made him feel capable of doing just as much.

The weeks went on, and there was no other postcard. There were bills from the city utility suppliers, advertisements, and mail from relatives catching up on this and that. Philip and Jillian always put on a happy face in public, or in their letters, because they knew there was no reason being sad about things around other people, or else they’d just become sad as well. Occasionally, while the kids were playing out in the field, a plane would fly by overhead, and Jaakko would act like he was shooting it down with an invisible rifle. He’d turn to Marko and say something like, “That’s just like that war, the one with the gas and the trenches. They had planes then, right?”

Maria was never completely involved in the politics of the Makkonen household. She was central to Jaakko, or to herself, and did most things with him. She didn’t look anything like him, though, despite being his sister by blood; their mother was from far away, and their father was born and raised in the country in which they stood. Never was there a moment of difficulty in explaining why they were so different. They could always grasp that their parents were just very different from each other. And then, they would usually grasp that their parents were gone. That’s when they’d stop thinking about it. Fortunately, Jaakko suffered no long-term emotional distress.

Another postcard came in the mail the next month. Marko had begun school again, and didn’t see it until he got home that day. Karl went on about how he had been promoted to officer, and that the violence was truly beginning to let up. He spoke of how he rejoiced when he heard of the repeal on superfluous taxation in the slums, which indicated definite relief to the authorities. But then he would speak of the violence he had seen, and of the things he’s had to do. There have been apartments in the slums where whole families had starved to death, robbed to the bone of all they’re worth. Every day, they compiled a barrow of dead infants, and buried them in shallow graves out in the fields with a short prayer. The bodies of the adults, and the children, were taken away hastily, and brought to a brand new graveyard outside the city. There, he says, the soil is completely dark, because it is so fertile, and the coffins and corpses will be decomposed quickly. He hopes this is all done soon.

And he played piano for the Prime Minister. Mr. Elsila asked him personally to attend the royal ambassador’s gala two weeks ago, and play piano for them. He attended, he said, and they all watched him play for upwards of an hour, while he played the best songs he knew, and even the song he made when he was younger. This was what got him the promotion, he says. Since then, he has had little to do other than deskwork, and he is extremely grateful. He works hard, for he doesn’t want to go back to being a street worker and he wants the violence to stop, but there are some who aren’t even happy with what the department of civility is doing. And in thirteen months, he says, he’ll be back home, and he’ll make tea for them.

Philip didn’t cry this time, but was, instead, very clearly happy. When he finished the letter, he hugged Jillian like they were teenagers again, and Marko smiled. That was a good day; there were holes in the clouds again outside, and the children were constantly buzzing with things to keep them occupied when they weren’t at school. Jaakko, of course, stayed at home, and eventually started working at an apple orchard on the other side of town, which was owned by Mr. Aaltonen. Every day the boy woke up ecstatic for the day to come, and was still ecstatic by the time he got back. Marko was less enthused at school, but that was just Marko. Maria seemed to be getting along just fine with her classmates.

One day, Philip was taking a stroll through town, when he saw a commotion in the street. There was a crowd of people gathered around a single radio, which had been cranked up as high as it would go, and they were listening to a report about the political health of the city. He rushed over, eager to hear the news, and was granted a front row seat on account of his son being stationed there. “The civil landscape of Domania,” the radio said, “is presently undergoing what may be considered in the least a peaceful recess, and the daily riots that once plagued the streets have died out in the last week. The last seven days have been completely peaceful, and leaders of old political mobs are coming forth to hand themselves in.”

The man practically screamed with joy. He ran home immediately and shared the news with everyone. He was in a veritable euphoria that day, relieved endlessly at the prospect of one day seeing his boy again. And, as well, they received another letter from Karl the following month. It was nothing short of the most reassuring of letters he had since sent out. He said that there have been parties in the streets celebrating the ensuing peace, and there hasn’t been any inappropriate outbreak in almost ten weeks, apart from the obligatory crime of the city. The mortality rate in the city per month has drastically decreased, and they’re beginning to regret founding the new graveyard. Since his promotion, he says, he’s been living a very peaceful life.

His father did not react with energy this time; he sat peacefully in his armchair by the fire and sipped his morning tea, illustrating in his mind the day when Karl will come home again next. He was duly at ease for the first time in many months, finally in relief of a long period of desperate anxiety. There was little that truly plagued him after that letter; he walked in a very peaceful and complacent air, never worked up about anything, and never really worrying about the day to come. In the earlier months, he would usually sit in the living room after breakfast and worry. After the letter, he went directly to his study, and took to writing papers without hesitation. On Saturdays, he would take the papers to the mail to be shipped off to his secretary at a university in the next province, and he’d ask if he’d gotten any mail from Domania. But he never did.

It was November when they were sitting in the kitchen, listening to the radio, and Marko delivered to them a very interesting letter he had found in the mail. It was very plain, very moderate, and it was stamped with the royal seal; the Prime Minister himself must have sent it. Jillian opened it, and inside she found a letter in a similar color to the envelope, written in very bold, black ink. But as she reviewed it, she eventually slammed it upon the table, and ran from the room. Philip was frozen. He stared at the letter sitting on the table. A very sick, uneasy feeling pervade over him, and he didn’t quite know what to think. The radio was relaying something about civil unrest resuming in the city, of a recent raid of the department of civility. Philip picked up the letter and read it.

The man on the radio rejoined, “Three days ago, the Department of Civility was raided by an organized group of rebels on a suicide mission to execute as many officials as possible before the day was out. All of them were dead before the next morning, and twenty-six government officers had been killed.”

There were no feelings that Philip could express. He did not cry, he did not falter, and he did not shake. The emotions within him spun too fast to be comprehended or expressed adequately. Marko was sitting in the living room. He saw his father, and the joy was soon wrested from him. Very slowly and mechanically, Philip rose from his seat and lumbered gradually into the next room. He sat in his chair and stared into nothing. Marko had since entered the kitchen and picked up the letter. Karl was dead. The radio lost its signal momentarily.

“Marko,” his father said from the other room, “I want you to go into the cupboard beneath the stairs and play the piano. I want you to play Karl’s song. You know which one that is. I want to be sure that there will be one child of mine who shall go on to do beautiful things.”

Without a hesitation or a second thought, lost in a deluge of dark contemplation, Marko followed his orders, and entered the closet beneath the stairs. He pulled the bench up to the piano and stared down, blinking, trying to feel it inside of him. His fingers hovered over the keys, and he could feel Karl playing this song, for he could see his fingers moving gracefully along the ivory. He played his song, of postcards, of war, and of the persistence of life thereafter.