Everlasting Dystopia

 Everlasting Dystopia

Graham Swanson

                                                                          5 of Pentacles

A bright rainbow cut across the blackened sky. Its colorful blades sliced apart the murky clouds and evaporated the dewy gloom settling over the spike atop Dougar City’s greatest towers. Clean water flowed under the cramped bridges and down ravines where the homeless slept and fought with daggers and shards of glass. Lovers with arms outstretched held each other in a muddy field before the arena shining like a musical chalice. Boys and girls got out of their mom’s trucks and frolicked among the shops, t shirt stands, and beer gardens. Smoke from pens scented the air with spiced fruits and candied tarts plumed between every young man in a black hat and lady with tattoos. Everyone shared links of sausage and silver flasks of moonshine.

The mother drove her son Hans and his friend Stomp to the concert because he just turned 15 and he begged her for a chance to get out of their small town for his birthday, and share his celebration with the reckless resolve of the city. She took no joy finding a place to drop him off because she saw no one his age around. At her age, water pipes were made of lead, the paint was made of lead, and kids smoked cigarettes, pointed knives at each other, and met up with men far older than them. She stopped the car, and let him know. “If anything happens to you, I will throw myself off a bridge. You stay safe, keep your phone on you, and come right home when this is over. Get into no one’s car. Go to no one’s house. Please obey your mother.”

The field of people slowly marched inside of the arena. Rainbows splintered and shocked the birds. Despite the late season, bugs crawled up light posts. Ice cold puddles steamed over warm air. Flooded lots turned to curtains of ice and fog. The wind blew it over the heads of the 20,000 revelers and they hailed the starry lights and magnetic worlds revealed by the rainbow of ever changing colors.

The boys felt hungry and thirsty once they smelled the grills and Styrofoam. People happily fed them from plates with no charge, and gave them drinks from pop bottles. Their shoes stuck to the floor of the arena. The deafening blasts from the sound system shook the ground. Three pink pyramids gleamed from the neon stage. Steel cables and hovering platforms swung overhead like guillotine blades. Everyone held a wand in their hand.

These wands emitted a pale light, showed them maps, answers to riddles, naked people, whatever they wished, with the tap of their fingers. Pink mist and cyan feathers blew in cyclones around their wands. With magic lenses they recorded everything happening. Under the spell of the event they awaited, they never wanted to lose the blast of serotonin and sweet smells, pretty people, and contagious invisible germs.

In the crowd arrived all kinds of people. Men fresh out of jail at the bottom of society. Former celebrities who lost their fame and fortune. Women living in buses who dreamed of having an Onlyfans for their own. Outcasts who just found silver coins on the street. They pooled their money together for tickets and rides, gifts, and apartments along the river. They kept each other warm with body heat as snowflakes climbed on their shoulders.

The singer arrived singing into a candlestick and seduced the crowd with synthronics and electric mirages. Women undressed and hurled their clothes on stage as men spat at him in envy. With each splatter that touched his face, the singer pointed and called on the crowd to destroy them. With each call, he danced the robot, and drew them closer, surging onto the cusp of the state where bodyguards struggled to keep them out from their bunker. Photographers snapped photos and listened to the wind howl. The furious crowd closed in more and more, and they only made phone calls before the hypnotic dance moves drove the peaceful people into a blood-thirsty craze.

An Uber driver named Shift took the wheel in the depressing gloom of Dougar City listening to weather reports of snow in the early morning. Body counts climbed high. 88 people dead within two hours. From the parking lot in which he awaited the boy who hailed his car the huge arena parking lot lit up under an orb of pale gas. The stranger wore a motley gown and leather belts. Rain dripped from the bells on the tails of his funny hat. He gave the driver forty dollars to keep waiting.

In the meantime, the medic police beat the crown of 20,000 back with electric batons and fireproof shields as paramedics fought to resuscitate some of the wounded. Many screamed and rose their hands but most fell into the wash of eyes and sweaty backs. The dying person struggled to gasp as blood filled his mouth. Boot heels stamped his shirt and cracked his skull. Neck veins strained and whistles blew but fell limp under the curtains of joyous screams, rescue workers storming the stage, falling away from a rising platform as the singer moved like a robot as the throbbing blood bath of weary and masked fans took their revenge on the night.

The singer’s shirt gleamed like diamonds under starless night between a beam of white violet and pink lasers. He did the moves he learned to summon great magic. In the modern eyes of the secular youth, he carried on some relic from the previous generation by pretending to move like a machine, not a man. In the wiser minds he practiced the Ai Sa ritual taught to him by the lost children who employed his contract. His men charged the rescue workers and swept them from the stage as police ordered the show be halted. They tried to cut the power, they tried to disperse the crowd with poison, yet the power stayed on, the three pyramids changed color, the droning choruses of music stayed on, and the singer remained on his platform dancing the robot, the forsaken Ai Sa known merely to old dead priests of a long forbidden brotherhood.

Fans hurled severed legs into the air.

The surge trapped police and sucked them into the chaos as large men fought behind aluminum batons to carry dying boys and women on their backs to the ambulances on the other side of the arena. Often they came too late, and the victims died on their shoulders, on the stretcher, or on the threshold of the ambulance door. Still the singer danced the robot as his shoes soaked in the blood of nearly a hundred. He left these tracks from platform to platform.

As the uber driver spun his wheel, his back tires skidded off, the singer felt a cable break. He kept dancing the robot over a crowd of fans pressing on with the pyramids gleaming in their eyes. Red tails whipped in the air as golden ribbons fell from the clouds. The eye of ISIS closed, and the rainbow changed direction. The platform dropped into the crowd, and the singer fell with the candlestick in his grasp. He dangled from the cable for a short time but the cold wetness slid down his wrist, and he dropped from the top of the arena onto the pointed top of the pyramid.

In his final gasps of life, high above the masses crushing, stomping, suffocating each other, as his blood poured down the sides of the pyramid and evaporate to smoke, he kept doing the robot. The anger dissipated as everyone looked at the blood on their hands. One by one, weeping in sorrow and regret, they climbed up the glowing pyramids to pry the sacred candlestick from his dead hand, then venture out to take their sorrow into the streets. It got colder, dustier, and they felt exhausted from their injuries, from the late hour, and from the plagues they breathed in. Hundreds of dead bodies lay beaten to pulps like ruby jelly.

The two teenagers waited outside. Their money lost, their phones lost, bruised, and left in the cold. Hans worried about his mother as his friend Stomp went back inside to recover their items. Hans stood there alone in the cold in the echos of the violent night. The music continued, people started to leave, turning down the parking lot and joining the distant catacombs of light. The vampires came out to stand over burning barrels of diamonds and beckon the furloughed to come join them.

Hans waited and waited, but Stomp never came out. He thought about what his mother told him and feared he’d never see her again. He took off down the highway, into the frozen casino parking lots, past abandoned restaurants towards salty hotels. Then from the darkness of a curved road, a yellow car appeared. It stopped, and inside Hans saw a driver and a man in motley in the back. The back door opened, the man in motley held out a wand and smiled through the dark mask over his face. His eyes leaked like an overflowing cup. “Need a ride home?”

The snow numbed his ears and he felt the sweat cool on his back turn to ice. He looked around but didn’t see Stomp or anyone else for miles except for the shady men waiting outside capsized boxcars by the rails. At close to, 4am he just wanted to eat junk food and be home. He got into the yellow car and relaxed at once under the spray of hot air. He listened to the bells on the motley man’s hat as the car hit the highway and sped out of town. Under the jacket and belts, he saw the man wearing a golden dagger with a crossguard shaped like the head of a lion.

"Did you kill him? Why?" Hans asked.

The man in motley shrugged and shook his head so the bells made music. He contorted his hands to create the Eye of Isis and snickered. "Didn't you enjoy the show?" The car left the lights of the city and entered the foggy darkness. The road curved under bridges and across the river to the place where trees don't lose leaves and the moon devours rainbows. Hans thought they passed the road home, but when he tried to speak up the car sped up.

Bells jingled all night long.