Student Reading

This is a snippet from an introductory ramble that I wrote as a way to get me geared up and finally working on one of my two Dystopian novels.  This particular novel takes place in a future very similar to ours (and perhaps just around the corner).  The idea itself has been percolating in my brain since I was in middle school or thereabouts.  I was not yet ready to write it back then, but perhaps I have enough life experience now, and literary experience, to take a rough stab at it.  In any event, here is the short snippet that I will be reading aloud to my classmates on Tuesday.

So let me start with this: I live in a city, a large metropolis type, you know the kind, with smoke stacks thickening the air until it feels like perpetual gravy, and coating the roads, the buildings, your glasses, with thick unctuous filth.  You get it all over your fingers when you have to touch something.  I want to wash my hands right now just thinking about it.  But washing doesn’t help.  Railing is the worst, though.  You can’t help but cling to that shit going up and down the stairs, and you feel like you’re making some sort of sexual exchange with the metal, like you’re somehow switching out your skin for little bits and pieces of all the other people who’ve touched it that day. 

Even now I think of my hands as belonging to others and not myself.  This pen that I’m using came from the front desk of the reception area and I can’t even start to think of how many railing tainted fingers must have touched it during its life and here it is now in my hand, having been pilfered sometime after dinner and then squirreled away to my room.  That’s what the whole city is like, though, festered little pieces of the boys and girls of industry, holding hands, holding beverages, holding the door open for you.  Factory residue and acid mist on every page and every strand of hair.  It’s on every bite of every burger, soaked into every doughnut, pooling like oil on every piece of pizza.  Sure as shit, we’re eating this city.  We’re intimate with it.  Hell, when people kiss they taste the smoke stacks before they taste their lover and aside from bathing and love making, I can’t imagine that anyone would want to be naked in this place. 

But still, there is a sun and sometimes it breaks through the smog long enough to color the scenery and warm the cement.  I would like to say that during those brief moments of eldritch light we can see once again an expansive reality greater than ourselves, but really the sunlight serves only as a temporary inconvenience to a population that has, for better or worse, survived without the need for sunscreen or parasols for the past several decades and are wholly unprepared for direct doses of what my psychiatrist would call excessive exposure.   I personally have mixed feelings when it comes to the sky.  It’s pretty enough, I suppose, when the veil cracks and splinters of faint corpuscular rays fan out like a peacock’s tail from behind a stubborn cloud, but, at the same time, it frustrates me.  Everything beautiful frustrates me.