Black-Out

by Fausto Cicciò

Dear Max, are you still alive? It has been three years since that fucking meteorite, or "magneto-asteroid" as they're calling it, started orbiting around the earth, obliterating the electrical energy and plunging New York, just like every other corner of the world, into a dark nightmare. Will there be any oil left? Only yesterday the American New Post newspaper (yes, we finally have a newspaper again) solemnly announced that they had managed to re-establish a correspondence service with Europe, thanks to old steamships they've restored. I wonder, though, how you in Sicily can receive any Post.

It would seem that three billion people have been exterminated, more through panic than through the "darkness epidemic", this incurable disease caused by that fucking asteroid.

Is it true that half of Europe has been ravaged by the plague? How have you reorganized yourselves over there? I'm sure that, after all, the situation must be less disastrous there than over here.

I imagine you have fled to the mountains, without batting an eyelid, to grow potatoes and tomatoes in Uncle Peppino's field. I can see you among the hens and the pigs, as filthy as in our youth, when we used to crawl inside the hen house. How many cocks we blew up by sticking firecrackers up their arses! Aren't children sadists?

Yes, it's true; there are many positive aspects to this step back in time. The silence is almost reassuring after that deafening century, which left deep scars in our DNA. Today, this very catastrophe, this laceration of the spirit, has highlighted the absurdity of the situation into which those blasted circuits and bits had thrown us. However, it would have been one thing to voluntarily choose a life away from all that commotion. It is quite another thing to be suddenly forced to see ourselves in our own void. The burden of absence and anguished nostalgia has revealed an unendurable emptiness.

After two years of complete anarchy, the prisons were transformed into madhouses. But now, there is no one left, even in there. We are all on the outside.

For eight months I was one of them. Fortunately, they couldn't sedate us with electroshocks. Instead, they injected us with mixtures of whatever psychiatric medications they could get their hands on. I won't deny that I started quite liking it. Sometimes I would feign a seizure, convulsing and foaming at the mouth like a man possessed, to get them to shoot that miraculous stuff up my veins. Those syringes helped estrange me from that colony of lunatics.

When the rats invaded, the leaders started offloading all sorts of drugs and poisons down the sewers. Billions of disgusting rats, large as cats, were devouring the city. Drugs were running out in the whole State. The number of madmen increased, overtaking the number of "sane" people, and so they abolished the "nursing homes".

I've set up a group of street performers. Just think, me, the king of web traders, I now recite Shakespeare and O'Neill on 5th Avenue, in Central Park, wherever. I manage to survive thanks to the alms of passers-by, even though competition is fierce. The spectators along the road multiply. The most popular acts are Chinese shadows, and certain nostalgic rubbish such as "TV quizzes" and "talk shows". Just think, there's a guy who, mimicking old Johnny Carson, sits on the pavement, in an improvised lounge, talking about this and that with a few "guests", about cinema, the economy, politics and what not ... as if nothing were the matter. The audience loves it. They all hang around spellbound, just like they used to sit in front of those dammed television sets (though to be honest I think I miss them). "Hamlet" too has its audience: "So long? Nay then, let the devil wear black, for I'll have a suit of sables. O heavens! Die two months ago, and not forgotten yet? Then there's hope a great man's memory may outlive his life half a year ... " And then everyone starts clapping, with no enthusiasm.

Landowners are the real lords of the city. I sold one of them my computer for 20 dollars. They collect "antiques". My lifeless PC is on display in the factory of a wealthy damned farmer! And here I am, sloth skull in hand, parodying "to be, or not to be" for a bit of fruit or a glass of milk.

I am currently seeing Jane. She's a bit mad, but she's a fabulous piece of skirt! You'd like her. She too has lost everything and everyone. She's all alone, like me. Or rather, we're both alone … together. I know I can tell you. I'm afraid. I do nothing but cry and sob when I'm sure nobody's watching.

It's all so absurd. This medieval age we've been hurled into has removed any chance I had of running away from myself, from my fears. Do you remember? Even during the holidays I frantically used to spend my hours between Wall Street and the endless commitments I used to get myself mixed up in. I spent hours and days without stopping to take breath. Of course, I wasn't happy, but at least I managed to trick unhappiness.

Here I am now, living an existence by candlelight, while a voice inside me whispers with unnerving slowness the unconfessable epic of my obsessions. Do you know what I miss most? The "roller coasters" of the digital market. Frantically following on the great network the rises and falls of stock market listings, zigzagging between the NASDAQ and the FTSE, between the DAX and the Nikkei. To leap from the certainty of a benchmark, to slam your face against a trade-off and in the end to explode in the black hole of an immense speculative bubble. Selling and Buying. Buy, Sell. Sell-Sell-Buy-Buy. Close long, close short. Enter long, enter short. Low-High. Scalping, dumping, round-tripping. To live day and night riding the Bull or caressing the Bear, my only friends here in America, without pause, without stopping to take breath. From my desk to a tax heaven, in a flow that purified my vital organs, like a perpetual dialysis. I was even reported for rigging the market, though luckily I was absolved.

Sorry for letting off steam with you like this. You're the only one I can talk to candidly. I hadn't used pen and paper since my childhood. After all, there is no one near me who is prepared to listen. Everyone here thinks he has a monopoly on depression.

Having said that, don't think I am not trying to get organized! I have started reading all sorts of material like a madman. Oh, I nearly forgot the most important thing that has happened to me, a miracle. I've bought a gramophone. I've fixed it with a thin chip off an old plate and I can finally listen to some music. I watch those vinyl discs as the creaking notes fill the room, playing songs I never thought I would appreciate. As I am writing to you I am listening to an album by Charlie Parker. It cost me an arm and a leg (two bottles of wine). Shit, what poetry! I can remember when you became obsessed with "Out of nowhere": "Wonderful dreams, wonderful schemes from nowhere, made every hour sweet as a flower for me". What a wanker you were! An inveterate punk like you (a repentant ex-heavy-metal freak) couldn't shag without listening to a record by "Bird". And if she had the odd hair on her legs, what horror, you'd run away like a chicken. For a while I was more than convinced you were gay, though when you stole Francesca from me I had to change my mind. You bastard! That night, high on alcohol and pot, we yelled the same old song by Bauhaus for two hours into the old well outside the city: "I do get bored, I get bored, in the flat field".

Today, New York looks like a set for one of those seedy films by Romero: filthy, hunger-beaten survivors drag themselves with difficulty between the carcasses of cars and corpses. Everyone seems lost, aimless.

Jane thinks that we are about to end up like the dinosaurs. She says that back then too the extinction of those giants was caused by an asteroid, a gigantic "piece of shit dumped from the sky", which shook the feeble balance of the world. What infuriates me is that she and her whole gang laugh about this catastrophe. She isn't even slightly afraid! After all, she was only sixteen when that thing arrived (she already worked the streets), and she behaves as if life had always been like this. We've been together for months now. I met her by chance. I was looking for a couple of smuggled candles. Everything is illegal here. If I were to follow the new rules (no one knows by whom and when they were made), I'd have to queue for a candle a day, a litre of oil a month for light. I'd have to beg for a kilogram of coal, two pieces of wood and so on ...  A nightmare. Luckily, Jane is in the right racket. These "fire dealers" are real sons of bitches. They always have the police on their heels.

That evening the darkness was more oppressive than usual and it was cold. I defied the blackout. Yes, we even have a blackout in this abject war among the poor. When the hand crank sirens stopped croaking, I went out. I wandered as far as Prodigy Square, risking my very life. Someone called out to me through a grate. Trembling, my heart about to explode, I went closer and asked: "Do you have any fire for sale?" The voice replied: "What have you got to give me in return?" I only had some dried fruit and some lemon juice in a bottle. She burst out laughing and said: "Come in, you idiot. I'll give you some light". Yes, it was Jane. She took me by the hand. "He's with me," she told a two-metre tall black guy who was about to scorch my face with a torch. In the underground garages of a skyscraper, I was blinded by bold flames, multiplied to infinity by a string of metal sheets and mirrors. Undisturbed, we crossed an army of screaming drunkards, while a bloke with a guitar, dressed like Flint the buccaneer, sternly sang the notes to a yearning Portuguese song: "Eu quis ouvir as Cármina Burana / na hora da orgia prometida. ... "

We finally arrived in a sort of alcove, her "office". We shagged all night long, surrounded by hundreds of bright candles and torches, which emanated an inebriating acrid smell. Illuminated by the flames, her silky skin, her long petrol blue hair, her supple body shook between the purple sheets and veils lightly designed with strange symbols and hieroglyphics. Panting, she whispered incomprehensible sentences in her Negro-Portuguese dialect from Curaçao. Next to us, a copper brazier was gloved. I felt a devastating orgasm! For the first time since the Darkness fell, I felt alive again. If the police had found us, we would have risked being pilloried first, and then being sentenced to the gallows. Nor would it have been any better if we had been discovered by Gilbert Sagard, known as the "massacring lodger" due to the mess he made as a boy in 56th Avenue Square Condominium. There was blood and shreds of "neighbours" everywhere. He is the fire dealers' boss, and he is having an affair with Jane. Yes, Jane is a prostitute and the boss's woman, and I am in deep shit. She keeps assuring me it's normal, that the "monster", poor man, is not the jealous type ... You should see his face. He collects scars. The important thing is that I remain part of the "gang" and that, between shows, I deal candles and matchboxes to passers-by.

Why should I worry? On the one hand I have a rather shady "rival in love", who—if he ever smiled—would kill a hippopotamus with terror; and on the other I have the guru-martinets, a type of samurai-policemen armed with bludgeons and crossbars. These are the dammed followers of a Chinese nun, Ch'ang-O, a blind "guide" who likes to be known as Moon Goddess and rules like a queen, not only in New York. After the disaster, that slut started to preach: "Behold the two moons. God has come knocking at the door of our souls. In the stone of knowledge, it is God who calls us with his oppressive silence. Judgement day has arrived ... ". And other such crap.

I'm thinking of leaving New York. I'd like to go back home, if I still have one down there. I've decided to send this letter to all the addresses where I might find you. I'm convinced I'll receive a reply from you. I don't have the courage to ask you anything, nor do I want you to go into details. Just write: "Come", or "Stay there".

Copyright © Fausto Cicciò 2004