UNDERGROUND VOICES MAGAZINE/JASON PRICE EVERETT


	UNDERGROUND VOICES: FICTION

JASON PRICE EVERETT

Cent ans apres l'exposition

He sat on the bed and smoked a Dunhill from the carton that he had purchased
in the duty-free zone. She extracted belongings from the room and put them into
a valise. He marked the jut of her collarbone; it seemed to glow like a bridge
cantilever in the dull light of the afternoon window.

"I don't think this can be salvaged," she said. Her fingers shuttled distractedly
along the smooth plastic contours of her Orthonovum dispenser.

"One less foreign national," he said. The situation resolved itself. She called the
concierge to arrange transportation to the airport.

The thud of tear gas canisters striking human flesh outside accompanied the transit
of her hips across the room. It was a burlesque of violence.

His order of battle was drawn upon his interior topography. His emotional revolution
was a series of military maneuvers recited to the chatter of Heckler & Koch MP-5
submachineguns in the Lionel-Groulx metro station. Recited to the unearthly beauty
of the songs of Brautigan's tigers as they devour Longueuil. Recited to the thunder
of flak above Mount Erebus. Recited to Laibach's "Geburt Einer Nation."

Three days of solid evening. The never-changing sky loomed in monochrome over the
city. Small showers were from time to time detached from this ominous canopy. These
fell with the sound of armored treads creeping slowly and stealthily over asphalt,
in harmony with the daily rounds of the enforcement squads.

He lay prone on the bed. His penis was in her mouth. She provided suction in an
ongoing series of repetitious motions. She approached oral sex as if it were
stenography. The semen of his ejaculation composed spermatozoid texts of
indecipherable content over her tongue. His ejaculation and the rain outside merged,
became indistinguishable.

She went to the sink and spat. She rinsed her mouth twice. He lit a Dunhill.

"How do you say 'thank you' in Turkish?" he asked.

"Tesekkur ederim," she said.

"Tesekkur ederim," he repeated. "How do you say 'good night?'"

"Iyi geceler."

"Iyi geceler."

Time spun out like the filaments of an intestinal parasite.

"How do you say 'I love you?'" he asked.

"Sinesevyorum," she answered vacantly.

"Sinesevyorum," he repeated.

He walked along the rue Ballard near the hotel. He smoked as he studied a
photograph. It was of her and himself at the barricaded checkpoint near the old
Insectarium. He thought he could detect the false promise of 1960's architecture in
her smile. The broken curve of the remains of the U.S. Pavilion traced the outer
circumference of her left breast, taut against the artificial fibers of her blouse.
All of these structures were artifacts of a future that would now never occur. The
hollow message still inherent in the remains of this obsolete future saddened him.
He thought of the Columbus space station, the Hermes shuttle, last year's violations
of the Antarctica Treaty. He longed in vain for the resurrection of the Cold War.

He stood on the balcony. Faint haze partially obscured the rotating fires over the
autoroute interchange near Brossard. Distance telescoped into blanketing sadness.
The elongated afternoon crept into night. He saw a vision of the gutted Parc
Olympique, the charred stadium a ravaged variant of his own half-erect penis; the
old velodrome was exposed to the sky, a civic chancre. The occupation rustled
faintly in the undergrowth of the dying city. Solitary figures stalked the
anachronisms of the Yellow Line. The cracked carapace of the U.S. Pavilion hovered
above a cheval-de-frise of trees shattered by rocket blasts. Antarctica burned.
Armored personnel carriers slid along the rue Notre-Dame. Eno's "Music for Airports"
played. He sensed her, her face superimposed over a map of the Dorval runways. Her
body shifted configuration as she put out her hand to dim the light. It was one
hundred years after the Exposition.