Smoke and Mirrors

The lights went on in the school windows, one by one, making the violet sky seem darker than it was before, and the summer evening was gentle and quiet. At that time of year, the day lasts forever, and the night never really comes.

“I’d like to be a wolf. Not all the time. Just sometimes. In the dark. I would run through the forests as a wolf at night,” said Richard, mostly to himself. “I’d never hurt anyone. Not that kind of wolf. I’d just run and run forever in the moonlight, through the trees, and never get tired or out of breath, and never have to stop. That’s what I want to be when I grow up . . . ” He pulled up another long stalk of grass, expertly stripped the blades from it, and slowly began to chew the stem.

And the two children sat alone in the gray twilight, side by side, and waited for the future to start.

COLD COLORS

I.

Woken at nine o’clock by the postman,

who turns out not to be the postman but an itinerant seller of pigeons,

crying,

“Fat pigeons, pure pigeons, dove white, slate gray,

living, breathing pigeons,

none of your reanimated muck here, sir.”

I have pigeons and to spare and I tell him so.

He tells me he’s new in this business,

used to be part of a moderately successful

financial securities analysis company

but was laid off, replaced by a computer RS232’d to a quartz sphere.

“Still, mustn’t grumble, one door opens, another one slams,

got to keep up with the times, sir, got to keep up with the times.”

He thrusts me a free pigeon

(To attract new custom, sir,

once you’ve tried one of our pigeons, you’ll never look at another)

and struts down the stairs, singing,

“Pigeons alive-oh, alive alive-oh.”

Ten o’clock after I’ve bathed and shaved

(unguents of eternal youth and of certain sexual attraction applied from plastic vessels)

I take the pigeon into my study;

I refresh the chalk circle around my old Dell 310,

hang wards at each corner of the monitor,

and do what is needful with the pigeon.

Then I turn the computer to on: It chugs and hums,

inside it fans blow like storm winds on old oceans

ready to drown poor merchantmen.

Autoexec complete it bleeps:

I’ll do, I’ll do, I’ll do . . .

II.

Two o’clock and walking through familiar London

—or what was familiar London before the cursor deleted certain certainties—

I watch a suit and tie man giving suck

to the Psion Organizer lodged in his breast pocket,

its serial interface like a cool mouth hunting his chest for sustenance,

familiar feeling, and I’m watching my breath steam in the air.

Cold as a witch’s tit these days is London,

you’d never think it was November,

and from underground the sounds of trains rumble.

Mysterious: tube trains are almost legendary in these times,

stopping only for virgins and the pure of heart,

first stop Avalon, Lyonesse, or the Isles of the Blessed. Maybe

you get a postcard and maybe you don’t.

Anyway, looking down any chasm demonstrates conclusively

there is no room under London for subways;

I warm my hands at a pit.

Flames lick upward.

Far below a smiling demon spots me, waves, mouths carefully,

as one does to the deaf, or distant, or to foreigners.

Its sales performance is spotless: It mines a Dwarrow Clone,

mimes software beyond my wildest,

Albertus Magnus ARChived on three floppies,

Claviculae Solomon for VGA, CGA, four-color or monochrome,

mimes

and mimes

and mimes.

The tourists lean over the riftways to Hell,

staring at the damned

(perhaps the worst part of damnation;

eternal torture is bearable in noble silence, alone,

but an audience, eating crisps and chips and chestnuts,

an audience who aren’t even really that interested . . .

They must feel like something at the zoo,

the damned).

Pigeons flutter around Hell, dancing on the updrafts,

race memory perhaps telling them

that somewhere around here there should be four lions,

unfrozen water, one stone man above;

the tourists cluster around.

One does a deal with the demon: a ten-pack of blank floppies for his soul.

One has recognized a relative in the flames and is waving:

Coooee! Coooeee! Uncle Joseph! Look, Nerissa, it’s your Great-Uncle Joe

that died before you was born,

that’s him down there, in the Slough, up to his eyes in boiling scum

with the worms crawling in and out of his face.

Such a lovely man.

We all cried at his funeral.

Wave to your uncle, Nerissa, wave to your uncle.

The pigeon man lays limed twigs on the cracked paving stones,

then sprinkles breadcrumbs and waits.

He raises his cap to me.

“This morning’s pigeon, sir, I trust it was satisfactory?”

I allow that it was and toss him a golden shilling

(which he touches surreptitiously to the iron of his gauntlet,

checking for fairy gold, then palms).

Tuesdays, I tell him. Come on Tuesdays.

III.

Bird-legged cottages and huts crowd the London streets,

stepping spindly over the taxis, shitting embers over cyclists,

queuing in the streets behind the buses,

chuckchuckchuckchuckchuurck, they murmur.

Old women with iron teeth gaze out of the windows,

then return to their magic mirrors,