Juan S. Guse

Illuminated are the residential streets in the desolate city violently erected on tropical swampland. Where everything rests and wobbles atop millions of wooden stilts and reinforced concrete piles rammed into alluvial sand and mud by faceless workers years and decades ago. Under the houses and garages, under the mangrove preserves opened to attract tourists, under the corporate campuses and industrial parks, under the hotels, the retirement colonies and the batteries of thirty-story condominium buildings, under the white-paved cart paths, the bus stops, the supermarkets and art deco shopping malls eroded by the salty air, even under the shuttered pool supply stores, the marine biology research centers, the ghostly cruise ship terminals and the militarily organized police stations, under the nightclubs and the customerless car dealerships, under the enormous Rowdy Yates Complex in the northeast and the skyscrapers sinking slowly into the ground downtown and under the school basements full of black mold, the boiler rooms, the sewer systems, the power lines and fiber optic cables, the graveyards and the laboratories of tax-exempt enterprises: there lie the structural piles, upright and in rows, anchored in the earth in good faith. Their groans beneath the weight of the city and the stench of decay rush like the spirits of an obliterated past through the gaps, sidewalk cracks and manhole covers up to the surface, leak out and evaporate into the all-devouring night.

Most people are already in their cloistered houses, making love or sleeping, washing dishes, listening to music, getting up to look after a sick child, reading, making phone calls or drinking triple-filtered water. Even the father across the street refrains from falling into one of his notorious bouts of rage, which can be so loud and explicit that Robin has already thought a thousand times, this is it, this time he’s finally snapped for good, first he’s going to shoot his wife, who’s spent half her life in fear of this day, then with light footsteps and warm rifle in hand he’ll creep up the creaky staircase to his two stepdaughters, who are already on the phone with the police, and drag them by their hair out from the beds they’re hiding under, to execute them in tears one after another before finally turning the gun on himself. Instead: nothing, silence everywhere, eternal slumber. No mutts barking, no parrots squawking, no Wrestlers’ sirens wailing.

              Based on their ELO ratings, Robin and her opponent (username: mariamartha_89) may be roughly on par with one another, even though it’s been a while since she took the game seriously. She chooses the Byzantines for their vast technology tree and excellent counterplay. The Byzantine unique unit is the Cataphract, a heavily armored, mounted knight who’s bailed Robin’s ass out many times over. She wishes mariamartha_89 “glhf” before their 1v1 on the map called Arabia. The relative knowledge that — after a long day at the office at a job that makes her miserable, tired and vulnerable, because she’d rather spend her time further developing her own games — for the next thirty to sixty minutes of this game of AoE2, no one would disturb her, no sudden call from coworkers or from Threed or from the District Court to reschedule an appointment, no gnawing feeling of guilt brought on by social obligations, just her, her computer, a cold gallon of peach iced tea, the WiFi, a functional microwave next to her monitor, and her opponent, who has curiously chosen the Chinese as her civilization, and who based on her IP is sitting in front of her own monitor somewhere in Argentina. This knowledge lends her a remarkably comforting sense of concealment and indifference.

              A cool wind picks up across the residential districts.

              Next door, Robin’s eighteen-year-old cousin, Lint, sinks into the cushion of the armchair in front of his television. The rubber buttons on the remote control are hard to press, they like to stick sideways inside its plastic shell. He’s lowered the blinds. Lint has just — like almost every night — returned from the Congress on the north side of the city and stealthily slunk back into his room, so as not to wake up his parents. The Congress has just concluded. All the lecture halls and conference rooms are empty, all the food stands abandoned, the technical equipment locked away. Pigeons flit around under the lofty concrete ceilings and fight to the death in the ventilation shafts over an inch of territory. The power is switched off, the printers sit silent. Faucets drip in empty restrooms. Everything waiting until tomorrow’s eight hundred and twenty-fourth session. Only in the catacombs underneath the Congress a handful of militant spiritualists may sit formulating conspiratorial schemes and listening to sad songs, while Lint hunkers down in his room, exhausted but not tired enough to lie down and sleep. He can hear as his father drowsily stumbles into the bathroom below him. Unlike most of his acquaintances, Lint prefers to spend his free time being irradiated by his ancient television, rather than passing that time on the Internet — salvation from the tiresome responsibility of his own amusement, delivered by the arbitrariness of satellite TV programming.

Meanwhile, government zeppelins and hot-air balloons circle silently over Downtown, Miami Beach, and the desert east of the city. They hover cloudlike in the sky and watch over the neighborhoods, the traffic, the Congress, and the group-based lives of humans, from Little River and Shorecrest down to Coconut Grove, from Flagami over to Virginia Key. They’re significantly more cost-effective to operate, crash far less often than comparable solutions, and have long been seen as a new symbol of the city. During the day they’re used as advertising banners, for example for a new shampoo, local delivery services, or the customer-friendly terms of a credit institution.

              And in the numerous clubhouses distributed across all of Miami, Wrestlers sit alone before telephones, waiting on a call from a citizen in peril, or the subsequent relaying of such a call by understaffed emergency services. But no one usually calls this late, of course, so most Wrestlers spend their late shift on the web. Some search eBay and craigslist for used electronics, replacement parts for the club emergency response van, or for side gigs, others watch highlights from the latest Olympic games. The Ten Most Sensational Freestyle Throws, The Twenty Most Successful Olympians, The Finale in London. The vast majority play free in-browser Flash games on the side.

Robin feels good. She drinks some iced tea. In the microwave beside her monitor, a few strips of bacon rotate on a dish. Robin carefully places the hot bacon strips in her mouth. They’re soggy and salty. Her room is full of bookshelves piled with boxes, books and poorly sorted binders from her mother’s old apartment. Somehow her loft bed, the blocked-in desk and her own junk-packed bookshelves are able to fit between it all. Daria once said that the room reminds her of an extremely efficiently packed but non-operational firetruck. The lone decorative element in her room is a promotional poster. It hangs at the head of her mattress and advertises E.T. for the Atari 2600. Horacio gave it to her back in college as a sort of memento. She washes down the fatty film coating the insides of her cheeks with iced tea.

In the USPS Processing and Distribution Center in Flagami, on the west side of Miami, hundreds of mail sorters work in a gigantic hangar where warships were manufactured in times past. The women and men stand before a wall of shelves labeled with street names. People feel appreciated, they feel sympathy and solidarity for one another, they’re unionized. Overplayed classic rock flows from an old radio by the window. A light breeze blows through. Some are conversing about the future of their job and the automation of the facility, others about dangerous illnesses children can catch at school. Many have neck pains from constantly glancing upwards. Business is booming, as all the termination letters, farewell messages, threats and overdue notices – every hardship captured in writing – are still sent through the mail, now as ever before. Some of the people here have a guilty conscience about this because they profit from the misery of others. “Diphtheria,” says one, a lot of kids are getting that. “Whooping cough,” says another, “or a Hemophilus influenzae type B infection.” And everyone laughs.

            In the converted garage beneath Robin’s bedroom, where it still reeks of melted cables despite all the scented candles, her housemate David DeCoil, who grew up bilingual on U.S. military bases in and around Kaiserslautern, Germany, is overcome by a powerful thirst. He slips into the kitchen and sips from a half gallon of milk. Soft human voices can be heard emanating from the sink, which bizarrely has the same resonance frequency as that of the radio station WPP2. David listens for a moment, then goes back into the garage. Since he usually has trouble going back to sleep once he’s gotten up in the night, he grabs Pessoa and reads. “I don’t know why, but sometimes I feel touched by a premonition of death. Maybe it’s just a vague malaise which, because it does not manifest itself as pain, tends to become spiritualized, or else it’s a weariness that calls for a sleep so deep that no amount of sleep could satisfy it.” David tells himself that tomorrow he won’t take any breaks from writing his novel, he won’t let himself get distracted. Not by books, not by the internet, not by his own self.

Southeast of Miami, a group of pilgrims armed with pincers slips under the Coast Guard’s third barricade and away. Nine people thereby cross the former shoreline and march into the darkness. They’re wearing expensive hiking gear from trusted brands, carrying about two weeks’ worth of provisions and fearing nothing in the world more than searchlight beams from above. The group is embarking on the perilous journey to the mountains beyond the Bahamas. They follow in the footsteps of Levin Cops, whose diaries they’ve exegetically debated at the Congress. For two of them, it’s not the first time. After crossing the barricade, there’s no going back. In the coming hours or days they will either be captured by the Coast Guard or run into one of the two desert tribes, or they’ll remain unseen and make it to the valley that begins between the Berry and Abaco islands. Seven hours of marching lay ahead of them before they reach the first waystation, left behind by earlier pilgrims, which is believed to be relatively safe. Their headlamps stay switched off. From here on out it’s a matter of sheer luck whether they make it through. They whisper Cops quotes to themselves to gather their courage and wear reflective foil over their clothing to be invisible to thermal imaging cameras. It’s blustery, and the sand makes walking a challenge. One of them wears a night-vision device that she bought at an army surplus store. They pray that the Coast Guard won’t find them. They pray not to be discovered by merchants or the Japanese. And if so, they pray that they can be bribed. Just a few more hours of walking. Everything is going to be all right.

              Congressional Active Participant Ana O. Boltanski climbs back into her red coupe. Her latest customers gave her a pathetic tip. A young couple dressed exactly alike and standing together in the doorway. She isn’t sure what annoys her more. Ana O. has two deliveries left before she has to go back to the West Branch to fill her car with another batch of fresh pizzas. The traffic is unruly but not dangerous, lots of city busses and scooters. She veers off at a busy intersection and takes a shortcut through an empty parking garage, shooting out of the exit onto the street behind it, thus shaving a couple seconds off her journey to the next customer, who must receive his delivery within the next seven minutes or else get his money back. On left-hand turns Ana O. can feel that her front axle must have taken some damage. She’ll leave the car with the mechanics at the Main Branch and have them give her a new one. She won’t be paid for the downtime. Her shift today is far from over. It’s her fourth this week. Six minutes left on the delivery. Tomatoes, mozzarella, anchovies. Pineapple, ham, onions.

An aging motel operator in Hialeah paces back and forth in his bedroom. He feels lonely and asks himself what the point of it all is. The next week, the next quarter, the whole next winter. He thinks of the wife who left him and wonders what she’s doing right now. He thinks of the people he led to ruin. Until now, he’d only ever seriously toyed with the idea of hanging himself one time. He’d even gone to the hardware store and let a saleswoman explain all the different types of rope materials to him, what advantages and disadvantages they have. But then he was too much of a coward.

You’ve got to be an orthopedist these days, or a surgeon, thinks a cab driver ferrying four drunken businesspeople from the exhibition grounds into the city. After a day full of meetings and shipping-container-related conversations, two Dutchwomen have gotten plastered with two American business partners in a bar at the trade fair. They’re all horribly loud and showing each other pictures on their cellphones. The Americans tell the Europeans horror stories about life in Miami and how the rest of the country looks down at this uniquely damaged place. The foreigners urge the cab driver to verify these claims. Orthopedist or surgeon, orthopedist or surgeon.

The researchers from around the globe: the archaeologists, the geologists, the ethnologists, the marine biologists and botanists, the anthropologists, the sociologists and political scientists, the psychologists, the statisticians, the Good Governance people, the microeconomists, the architects and city planners, the sports and media and religious studies scholars, the people from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe and from DC, who have all traveled to measure and comprehend every last inch of Miami and its inhabitants, at this moment they’re either lying in their bedrooms near UM’s campus or partying in the still-surviving, overflowing nightclubs on the east side and sending pictures back to their incredulous homelands.

Robin goes to type “gg” when she hears a hiss and her monitor goes dark. The lights are out. Same in all the other rooms, it’s dark everywhere. The fan on her PC keeps spinning for a moment before it stops. Robin stands up and goes to the window. A brown sky drapes Miami. The same brown sky as always. She can see clear to Cooper Park from here, where depressive academics wearing headlamps jog winding laps to lengthen their lifespans. In some of the surrounding houses she can see frantic flashlight beams blinking through the rooms. Most of the buildings are one-story, affordable bungalows. They look like they’re ready to take off. Military drills can be heard coming from somewhere. Sometimes that’s just how it is.

λ λ λ

On a highly rated local morning show, a spokesman for the Miami-Dade County Water & Sewer Authority trying hard to win confidence reported that hundreds of these converted oil tankers would begin driving into the city daily to provide people with water, one of many such successful government programs. Superimposed images showed men in short sleeves waving from semi-truck cabins. He explained that they’d been collaborating from the start with Miami’s own Ryder Systems Group on the procurement of these trucks and were constantly expanding their fleet. They had also relied on massive financial support from other large U.S. states, in the general manner in which they’d been generously supported in the past. Financially, infrastructurally, organizationally.

              “And the incidence of armed attacks on these water tankers has, thank God, been significantly reduced since the introduction of new security measures.”

              “Significantly,” echoed the anchorwoman.

              The spokesman clarified that now as ever, certain private investors would push for the construction of a pipeline, following the example set by Las Vegas, to begin in the southwest of Florida and supply all twenty-five of the peninsula’s parallels with fresh water. These plans were very real and in no sense off the table. It would certainly be a bitter pill to swallow after decades of billion-dollar investments in drainage and pump systems intended to push the rising water back out to sea, but those wouldn’t be any help now. At that moment, he noted, the natural cycle of the groundwater had yet to come to a complete halt — the Atlantic Ocean was of course not completely gone, and the Gulf of Mexico was unchanged, still crisscrossed by homemade submarines smuggling drugs for delivery to the American middle class — “nevertheless, the amount of water circulating above and below the ground has dropped dramatically. That we must admit, and for proof you need only look at the water line on Lake Okeechobee.”

              Right during those first weeks and months the authorities couldn’t pump enough water into the city, and thus advised all citizens to drastically reduce their private consumption, otherwise they would have to forcibly throttle it via emergency ordinance. Yet all the warnings and measures didn’t help. Front lawns, parks and highway median vegetation dried up, palms lost their crowns, and the streets were clogged with honking cars full of panic buyers. There were protests, and daily altercations broke out in the beverage aisles of supermarkets, spilling out into the parking lots, wherein neighbors, acquaintances, strangers and relatives bludgeoned one another over their groceries.

              “I think we all remember the early days well, and how no one seemed to know what had just happened or how to move forward. But a lot has been done and a whole lot is still being done, and we should be confident in that, yes.”

              On the topic of other attempts to provide Miami with water, the spokesman, who seemed to derive genuine pleasure from his job, referred back to a rumor that had long circulated online which was in fact mostly true, namely the tale of the fire department air unit from Cherokee National Park. During their shift, having seen the shocking images of a desiccated Miami on TV, the very same hour several units on duty had climbed into their specially constructed propeller planes and set course for the state capital. Nine planes took off in total. Each of the machines carried about two thousand tons of seawater, as well as hundreds of sea bass, carp and other fish, inside their bowed fuselages.

              “The squadron then reached Miami around two in the afternoon in V formation and delivered their payloads from an altitude of about five thousand feet.”

              There were approximately one thousand reported traffic accidents due to people stepping out of their vehicles to gawk incredulously up at the aircraft. Particularly tragically, one of the planes had dipped far too low while unloading its water. The forceful impact of the payload not only ripped shingles from several residential roofs, and took one aerospace enthusiast’s eyesight, but also tore a group of homebound children from their bicycles. The County nevertheless stuck with this controversial method of providing water, said the spokesman, not because they were convinced it was a sustainable way to gain control over the water shortage, but rather because they still believed in the soothing effects of rainfall, which had once been so characteristic of Miami.

              “Since then, famously, thirty aircraft of similar construction have flown over the city twice daily. Once at ten in the morning, once at eight in the evening.”

              The local morning show anchorwoman nodded. On the low coffee table between her and the spokesman sat a tray holding two green coffee cups, a jar of bramble jam and croissants. She seemed distant, as if she were looking straight through her guest. He continued on, explaining that at a certain point it was no longer the water shortage, the high unemployment or the crackpot Congress participants that worried authorities most, but the amassing reports from people who extensively began showing symptoms that could possibly trace back to the groundwater. Among others, these included bad posture, loss of orientation particularly in enclosed spaces, problems recognizing faces, sudden collapses in the morning, loss of the ability to handle defeat and setbacks, uncontrollable fits of rage behind the wheel, disproportionate fatigue, a highly developed to the point of hallucinogenic imagination, profound sadness when standing at the register, unbearable boredom, problems managing money, as well as respiratory ailments and terrible stomachaches.

              “I believe that was a point at which many people asked: What else?” said the haggard spokesman with the friendly face.

              Meanwhile, on the video screen situated between the spokesman and the anchorwoman, placards and PSAs flashed by in which state authorities urged citizens not to drink tap water for the time being, nor use it to prepare food, and instead to switch to the consumption of bottled water or soft drinks as much as possible, which is believed to have been an extremely successful campaign.

              “So are bodily care and household cleaning still safe, per scientific knowledge?”

              “Bodily care and household cleaning are still quite safe, per scientific knowledge. Just last month we reconfirmed that. We perform daily and weekly tests. Nevertheless, we all have to keep our eyes peeled.”

              “Yes.”

              “People who have consumed large quantities of tap water in the past or who know persons close to them who may have done so should be wary of changes in themselves or those around them.”

              Images of water tanks were displayed, sent in by viewers across the state. Some of the tanks were wrapped in barbed wire, others were jacked up on stilts. Sometimes there was a person standing in front of them waving into the camera or holding a flag and giving a thumbs-up.

              “What many people don’t know is that Miami was formerly the city with the lowest restrooms per square mile in the United States. Now we have even fewer toilets, granted there are also less people, since those who could afford it have moved north.”

              It’s more than a little ironic, added the anchorwoman while shuffling her index cards, that this affected Miami-Dade County, where in years past the fear was always the rising water level and the city sinking into the ocean, as a result of which in neighborhoods like Little Haiti, which was situated higher above sea level, there was such an increase in property values that residents were driven from their homes.

              “Because we thought, in the future, this is where the beach will be!”

              “There was also more and more frequent flooding. On Miami Beach it only took a light rain, some wind and the moon being in the wrong spot. Of course we already mentioned the drainage and pump systems. Today that all seems incredibly distant. Instead of an archipelago of high-rises, now we have the corroding Carnival Breeze, balancing on its hull, unable to make it into the harbor, lying two miles from Miami on dry land.”

              “Once more to the ramifications for citizens: in order to become independent from tap water, many households have been outfitted with exactly the types of plastic tanks we see here, where they can collect mineral water or other liquids.”

              “Correct. They’re mostly located in backyards or on balconies and roofs. I personally had a little wooden hut built around mine. In any case, the whole thing is financially sponsored by the state, same as the outfitting of diesel generators. The respective application forms for the Miami Resurrection sponsorship fund can be found on our website at www.miami-resurrection.org.”

              The anchorwoman nodded continuously. She seemed uncertain, as though she were waiting on a signal from her producer to save her. Maybe she was thinking about the possibility of being fired in the station’s upcoming layoffs, and that this could have already been her last broadcast. Maybe she was thinking — as the spokesman rattled on about the various financing options for water tanks and the continual expansion of water treatment plants — that she wouldn’t be able to pay off the loan she’d taken out on her apartment, that she would have to ask her sister to give back the money she’d lent her and move back to her hometown. Maybe at any moment she’d draw a revolver like Christine Chubbuck and annihilate herself on live television. Then again, maybe she was just terribly worn out.

λ λ λ

It was nearly 10:30 when we reached our final destination after a tedious ride from the airport on public transit. It didn’t seem to surprise anyone but me that it was still night out, which I attributed to the general mood among the five of us: exhausted & slightly tense. We all had to pay for the entire undertaking ourselves & couldn’t count on winning the tournament, after all we were anything but well-practiced or experienced with our strategic build-up, & besides that, Hannek as well as Juan had had problems from the outset with financing the flight, so I had found us a truly dirt-cheap motel outside of the actual metropolitan area, in the back of beyond, northwest of the city, in Hialeah, by one of the Metrorail stops near the interstate which — according to some of the online reviews — you could hear roaring all night long despite the buffering row of palms in front of the windows. One of the reviews read:

Over three days in the city we saw a young lady vomiting on the
sidewalk, people camping in the streets […] two old men with shopping
carts in a duel, one swinging an icepick and the other a hunting knife.
The people here wring their hands and curse out their crying children
with fists pressed to their temples. But there were also lots of nice parts
and the fruit was fresh pretty much everywhere.

I thought I could remember Fichte mentioning Hialeah somewhere in Petersilie; I think it had something to do with parrots & African American induction rites.

              Heinrich’s Dorm was a two-story building shaped like a horseshoe with parking spaces & a little fenced-in pool in the middle. The whole thing bore a somewhat filmic quality. Overall I had imagined the motel would be worse. For maybe the first time, I was actually looking forward to the coming days. Only Rafi gave the impression of being somewhat disappointed by the look & location of the motel, though he never reproached me; he was far too modest & proper to do that. Rafi was someone who arrived at his office every morning & started the workday by updating the date stamper on the corner of his desk.

              The motel’s eponymous owner/operator was an old man (I would guess sixty) who always wore sunglasses, even in enclosed spaces. We encountered him in the ground-floor reception area. From the walls hung these semispherical glass light fixtures in which dead flies, beetles, etc. were collecting. As I derived from the rubber gloves tucked into his belt, Heinrich apparently operated the motel alone. He handed us our keys & a few forms & told us how to find our rooms on the second floor of the motel’s left wing. Hannek & I were sharing a room with Juan; Simon & Rafi were lodged directly next door. Heinrich offered these two (who could just as easily have been father & son) the option of subletting the unclaimed single bed in their room to a third guest, thereby saving on their stays, which neither were interested in doing, least of all Rafi who was after all the only one of us with a decent income & a permanent position in the sales department of a midsized company called Herder-Ignis, which produced highly valuable waste incinerators in Germany & sold them in Africa & Asia.

              We later discovered that at the same time as the CS tournament, an international trade fair for container ships was taking place in Miami, which was why the city was full of Asian & European businesspeople, & consequently the few remnant hotels/motels were overbooked. Furthermore — as mentioned — there were always the arriving teams of researchers who’d spent years transforming the city into a massive archaeological dig. My colleague from the socio-ethnological institute had told me that most of them were far from finished with their projects & they were mostly living in small groups near the university campus, out of which they swarmed by day to conduct their research. In the city there was even a growing number of abandoned properties, plenty enough to house all of these people, but no one wanted to sleep in the empty houses from which the previous occupants had fled.

              Before he said goodbye to us, Heinrich gave us each an info pamphlet that warned about the risks of a run-in with the native alligators (Alligator mississippiensis) & listed some tips about how to behave in case of such an encounter. The telephone nos. of the “Official Registry of Wrestlers’ Clubs of Miami-Dade” were also printed there alongside several images depicting several things crossed out by a red line, inter alia, some children hitting an alligator with a stick, or trying to ride on its back. “You are not Crocodile Dundee — You are mortal,” it read. There was another phone number at which the so-called “Public Hotline” could be reached in order to report any “anomalies or abnormalities in everyday life” to the authorities. The brochure ended with clip art of a small human body hanging across the jaws of a reptile, beneath which a red puddle had formed. “There is no hope without fear and no fear without hope. Signed, the Governor of Florida.”

              Heinrich, having seemingly registered Rafi’s & my nervous facial expressions, explained that Miami had been suffering a plague of alligators since the withdrawal of the Atlantic, which had caused the number of gator sightings in the city to eclipse the number reported over the previous decades by a long shot; such an unprecedented explosion of population that now as ever no one could explain, “except those folks at the Congress,” said Heinrich.

              “A lot of them think it’s got something to do with the interruption of the water cycle, like that the animals are confused. Like beached whales. Others say it’s a specter of the once exterminated jungle still haunting Miami, but those people are dumbasses.”

              Over time — as legislation on species conservation & hunting actually promoted — it was no longer necessary to capture & transport the alligators to the nearest swamp, but rather permitted by emergency ordinance that they be shot without prejudice in broad daylight, by police &/or citizens, or that they be run over, bludgeoned, hacked apart, mutilated, impaled or killed in any other way & subsequently placed in specially-labeled trash bags, available at supermarkets & gas stations, to be disposed of alongside regular household waste.

              When Rafi asked whether there were any alligators in the vicinity of the motel, Heinrich paused for a moment, pushed his sunglasses up onto the top of his head, revealing the chemical-green eyes that had been hiding beneath them, & replied: “They’re like pigeons.” He said they were everywhere, you couldn’t hide from them, not even on the beach or in a plaza or in the shade of the high-rise banking towers, not in the Cuban groceries, at kindergartners’ backyard birthday parties, in the middle of the street, in open floorplan office spaces, they were lying behind every shrub. Just that day two more huge specimens had crept through that very door we’d just walked in through. In case of such occurrences, he always kept a bit of old pork or chicken in the minifridge behind the counter, so that he could lure them back outside, “on account of the mess they make otherwise.” I glanced at the minifridge and pictured the way a critical mass of salmonella overpowers human stomach acid, permeating the intestinal mucosa & releasing its cytotoxins. As we stood there & Heinrich told us about some especially large gators he’d killed, I thought of several stories by North American authors that I’d read during my undergraduate literature studies, which all began with foreigners visiting a town where something just wasn’t right & ended with them finding themselves chained to a water heater in a basement.

              It was strange, Heinrich continued, that the gators had lost all fear of humans, which was why this summer dozens, possibly even thousands of fatalities had occurred, many of which were of course Wrestlers. He said nobody had the courage left to take count & “apprise” the situation; by now it was as if they’d given up belief that the thing could be brought back under control.

              “People hate the authorities, at least most people. Why wouldn’t they? There’s no more trust left after so many years of failure. They abandoned the people! And they’re faking the numbers, of course. For example, no one really knows how many sex offenders are allowed to roam around freely, exactly how many death squads there really are, how high the unemployment rate actually is, how high the level of corruption goes or what the Coast Guard are really getting up to. We don’t even know how many people have moved away over the last few years. And out in the boonies, they stuff empty trains full of dressed-up scarecrows and send them on their rounds to make it look like life is still proceeding as normal, you don’t need to hide, everything will be ok!”

              Heinrich said that he, too, had already gotten used to the idea that the reptiles were there to stay. He said that was why he wasn’t a member of one of these spiritualist assemblies who, amid the nonstop flood of alligators & everything else, wanted to find a higher meaning, “to which none of us — tired as we are — rightly know what to say, if only because, well, we don’t really understand what the hell they’re talking about.” In any case, he went on, we didn’t have to worry about “waking up to a Missi at the foot of the bed.” At least, it had never happened before that one of his guests had gotten hurt. But if we did run into one of these creatures, he said we just had to stay calm, follow the behavior tips in the pamphlet & “holler” for him.

              “Until when do we have the room booked?”

              “Until Monday.”

              “Great. Seven days off, that alone is a lot for most people. Then back to a life that no one wants.”

              I couldn’t think of anything else to say. No one quite wanted to reach for Heinrich’s outstretched hand bidding farewell, which he drew back ashamedly, as Rafi then reached his hand out after all & also drew it back, having noticed that Heinrich had already retracted his hand, whereupon Heinrich once again stretched his hand out, & so on. It was awful. We had hardly turned around when I heard him loudly sigh & finally begin vacuuming.

λ λ λ

My mom works in Customer Service at Home Depot and every day she wears an orange apron.

It is just a couple blocks away from our house.

At her job you can buy lots of things that you need to build or fix a house, and also for the yard and the toilet.

The store is big and there are lots of shelves.

And there is always plenty to do at work.

Sometimes my mom has to help people who are looking for things.

Then she stands around and waits, and people come up to her and ask her, and she tells them where the things are, for example the shower heads.

She has to remember where the things are because people never remember anything when they come to Home Depot.

There is always grown-up music playing in the background.

That is annoying.

Sometimes my mom also has to stand at the register and the people have to give her money for the things they want to buy, and they are all usually in a bad mood when they give her the money, because they do not have unlimited money.

But my mom does not get to keep the money, it does not belong to her, it belongs to Home Depot and Home Depot pays my mom money every month so that she will work there, but I do not know what Home Depot does with the money that is left over, because there is definitely some left over.

I think many people that shop there are incredibly sad.

They look down at the floor a lot.

One time a man at the register said that he was buying a lot of cement because he wanted to build a moat between him and his neighbors, even though nobody asked him why he was buying so much cement.

That was pretty cool though and I would have liked to see it.

Then a young woman came in and bought a chainsaw and also a bag of cement and soil for flowers.

I whispered over my mom’s shoulder that maybe she wanted to go into the Everglades to cut the branches off a tree and then build a house and then open a flower shop.

My mom laughed at that and gave me a kiss while the girl typed in her PIN number.

My favorite place at Home Depot is in the back with the people who cut the wood.

They remind me of my Aunt Glenda and her apartment full of inventions and machines.

But sometimes it is dangerous here at work and so I have to stay close to my mom and I am not allowed to go off alone because it is so dangerous.

One of the ladies who works with my mom told me that she fell off a ladder one time and then a heavy box fell on her, and now she can talk to ghosts and only has to work a couple times a week because she thinks worms are eating her insides and other horrible thoughts.

She also said that one time a man cut his arm off while sawing wood and an ambulance had to come.

I told my mom that she needs to be careful, and she gave me another kiss.

Overall, I do not like her job very much because it is the same every day.

The lady told me that too.

She said that she never talks to the ghosts about creepy ghost stories, but only ever about how stupid she thinks her job is and how it hurts to be eaten inside by worms.

Only sometimes she talks to the ghosts about things from TV and the radio, but you can just do that with people, I think.

One thing that is cool, though, is that my mom can buy things from Home Depot for cheaper than normal because she works there.

Everyone who works there can do that.

She brought home some batteries for my big sister.

I got a new ceiling lamp.

For my dad she bought a garden hose.

He was very happy.

THE END

Ballard Junior High School, Miami

λ λ λ

Despite all of the events that had permanently disfigured the city, much was still business as usual, to a downright pathological extent. The fact that standing before the front doors of hundreds, probably even thousands of dock workers was a mailbox overflowing with letters that no life partner or family member dared crack open indicated a remarkable amount of denial of reality which seemed to have befallen a non-insignificant portion of the population.

              These unread letters continuously piling up in the mailboxes functioned like geological sedimentary layers. Based on these letters, one could reconstruct the private economic ruin of some of the individuals directly affected by the ocean’s withdrawal. But nobody ever opened them, of course, these mailboxes, no one angrily scattered the letters across the kitchen table to lay out the extent of the whole thing for all to see. If someone were to take on the contents of one such mailbox, like the one standing in front of Lint’s parents’ house, and to work through its layers of paper, they would be able to interpret the recent history of a person who had tragically ended up among the victims. At the very bottom, in the mailbox’s sediment, one would first find cautioning, portentous and then confidently worded newsletters about the distinctly difficult, tense economic situation in which the given tradition-rich logistics, manufacturing or travel company found itself, then assurances in the very same paragraph that no one should have any serious concerns at the current point in time, since they were a great big family and nobody would simply be left to fend for themselves. They would say that they’d “find the ways and means” to come out of this unprecedented crisis unscathed, or perhaps even stronger than before, and that they believed unshakably in the return of the Atlantic.

              Stacked on top of those first letters rested a thick layer of similar messages, in which a less certain tone and a somewhat more nationalistic diction precipitated. Even the board chairpersons’ embossed blue signatures seemed notably smaller and more tightly squeezed onto the page. In these letters it was repeatedly stated that different scenarios were being played out at the moment, and various scopes of action were being weighed, no hasty decisions were being made for now, until finally — around the middle of this second layer — the phrases “optional unplanned vacation,” “reduced working hours” and “each of us will have to tolerate small to middling losses for a brief or extended period” began to appear.

              Things continued in this way for a while longer, a definite half dozen of such cautionary letters followed until, in the third sedimentary layer, the company finally declared to have been operating in the red for months, since not a single container had been brought into the harbor, not a single ship had been launched and not so much as one European cruise liner had arrived since that calamitous day, in the wake of which virtually all income streams had broken down and the company had been enduring mounting liquidity issues, because they continued paying their employees’ salaries, of course, as well as paying rent and service loans, to the point where it could regrettably no longer be avoided that steps towards “redundancy eliminations” may potentially need to be taken, although firstly: these would only amount to the absolute minimum number of firings necessary and secondly: these would be more like technical firings, since the given tradition-rich logistics, manufacturing or travel company would naturally require such engaged and hardworking men and women as yourselves again, the workforce, as soon as the waters of the immortal Atlantic should return, and of course they wouldn’t hire anyone new before all those fired were asked whether they were interested in building this tradition-rich company back to what it had once been; worth mentioning here was how heavily the metaphor of a severe illness befalling the company (“we can’t go on any longer,” “the healing process may be quite protracted,” “patients,” “an injection of liquidity,” “the accounting department looks pale,” “we’re lying in bed and some part of our body is in pain, for example in the back of our skull, where it’s pressing on our brain in such an odd way, and we don’t know why and naturally assume the worst and fear that it might be cancer, against which we are powerless”) had found its way into the letters.

              Despite this, the numbers of pending terminations was raised from ten to twenty percent semiweekly. Then finally, at the end of the third layer, a fat, really distinctly fat envelope made of expensive cardstock appeared for everyone who’d yet to be fired, which separated every letter previously received into a before and an after, and in which people like Loyd Green were told: They were ashamed. They were ashamed to an immeasurable extent, literally ashamed, lock, stock and barrel, ashamed through the Earth’s surface and the upper mantle and the molten rock, ashamed right down into the iron and nickel core, ashamed to have to take a job away from such a person as him, after all the years of self-sacrifice, the shared successes and defeats, the Christmas parties, the friendly nicknames bestowed and shouted across the company premises, and after all the lunch break discussions of personal wishes for the future of your children or the pros and cons of homeowner’s insurance. They could never imagine what that must mean to someone like him, and what sort of worries would plague him now, because in the end we all have bills to pay and maybe even a family to feed. For that reason their thoughts were also with his relatives, who could hopefully give some consolation and remind him that he was intelligent, optimistic and positive like hardly any other person, and it would only be a matter of time before he found another job even though, as the company warned in the lone footnote to this four-page letter, Miami could possibly be the wrong place to do so, where the combined economic turnover had dropped by seventy percent, tax revenue by eighty percent, and this would wreak havoc, plus scientists and government officials alike were giving little reason to hope for an imminent return of the sea. Most of all they were ashamed that they were only able to offer him the laughably paltry sum of one thousand dollars as severance, at least to carry him through the coming weeks. Nevertheless, they believed that “we will all pass this difficult test and come out the other side stronger than before,” and they wished for God to bless his family and the United States of America.

              And even though the person responsible for composing this letter had really made an effort to pour their heart and soul out so that this letter would sound human, dignified and sympathetic, and each sentence and every word were carefully chosen, this letter and many thousands like it never saw the light of day, but lay buried in the long-overflowing mailboxes among the fourth and fifth layers of various correspondences that consisted of overdue notices from banks, energy companies and television and internet providers, which had been crumpled by the now necessarily violent manner in which the mail carrier had to stuff them into the box and soaked through by the humidity.

The laid-off coworkers to whom the bursting mailboxes belonged suffered from grave denial. Every day they refused to check the mail again, whereupon they of course didn’t say, “Today I am once again refusing to get the mail because I have a deep-seated fear of humiliation and financial woes, and also because it’s all the same to me that the mailbox has been overflowing for weeks and birds have started picking strips from the paper sticking out of it to build their nests.” Instead they furtively crept around the thing every day as if it didn’t exist. If their neighbors asked them about it, they immediately began tying their shoes, took a phone call or disappeared beneath the nearest parked car as they suddenly felt the need to dismantle its tailpipe. Others affected, who just as well wanted nothing to do with the mail but who couldn’t stand the sight of a front yard littered with paper, made do by building an even larger mailbox around the original, or a second one beside it, or by paying neighborhood kids to hang out the windows of their cars and take care of it on a baseball bat smashing rampage.

              In light of these efforts, it only seemed natural that the affected people continue going into work every day, setting their alarms in the evenings like always, buttering toast in the mornings, trudging through inner-city traffic, listening to morning radio, searching for a parking spot, hurrying to their workplaces and speaking to their coworkers — who were in reality also unemployed — about the Dolphins’ preseason, about politicians’ scandals, about the weather, about upcoming tax reforms. As if nothing had happened, as if when they looked out at where the ocean had once been, where the ships carrying prosperity neared the harbor, they wouldn’t see a vast desert of sand dunes at the end of which awaited chasms and mountains, in which pilgrims had reportedly started founding villages, the ones told of in Levin Cops’ writings. For Lint it was almost reasonable, in a way, that the operators kept craning their containers from point A to point B, from point B to point C and then from C back to A, because after all a container let on nothing about its contents when viewed from outside, and you could imagine anything at all was inside it. Same with the forklift operators who kept on stacking things. But the fact that even the ship guides, which included Loyd, would file into the empty harbor basin every day for the start of their shift, walk to their vessels sitting on the dry land and sit in them for eight hours — that exceeded his imagination.

              The people on the sidewalks carried groceries, children walked their dogs. Lint pictured his father sitting in his tugboat, smoking and listening to the radio, talking to dock management on the shortwave, and how Loyd even imitated the noises his ship’s motor used to make. A young woman got on the bus and sat down next to Lint. She was typing out a text: “The times have gotten tougher, the dreams humbler ;-)”.

              Nearly everything stayed its course in this way. At the Port of Miami everything circulated and seemed to live on unbridled whenever Loyd talked about it over dinner. There were monthly income statements, applications for time off, meetings of the staff council, the acquisition of smaller equipment, jammed printers, sexual intercourse in the conference rooms, transfers to different departments and the emptying of breakroom ashtrays. There were even unexpected occurrences. These ranged from simple things like incorrectly sorted containers, stolen coffee mugs, the appearance of a stray dog (dubbed Slobber) who became a beloved mascot, to the failure of a crane, unannounced customs inspections and the introduction of a new logistics software, all the way up to complex scenarios like an intricate network of extramarital affairs or the disturbing discovery of a family from Haiti whom someone had found in one of the containers, setting off fiery debates among the workers about how it should be handled, whether they should report them or bring them into the city, which ended in a brawl between unionists and non-unionists, resulting in the immediate pendingly-pending firing of many of the participants. Loyd had come home with a black eye.

              This had all become a part of the system of the docks, which functioned based on the sheer number of firings. Because not only the workers, welders, crane operators, loading agents, inspectors, ship guides and cleaning staff had lost their jobs, but so had the data analysts, managers and people from the admin, who set the daily tempo of work. This resulted in an almost gapless net in which everyone had something to do and not a single container left the harbor. And since parts of the security services had been fired as well, they continued giving their old colleagues access to the premises, so that from start of shift in the early morning until deep in the night, a closed circuit had formed, forever and always.

              Those who hadn’t been fired and who had tried to address this insanity and begin processing the firings soon came to realize that when faced with such attempts, their colleagues reproachfully asked why they were trying to put their lives down, why they thought they were better than them and what exactly their problem was anyway, doing so at such length and so vehemently until it simply didn’t make sense to continue, because they were talking past each other, to the point where the few who hadn’t been fired lost all their courage and finally gave in to the management game of the fired, like adults bowing to the dogma of playing children.

              Lint and his mother called this phenomenon “the Sleep.” Loyd Green had long been lost in it already, and Lint was convinced that his father simply didn’t know any better. Lint was surprised that their thousands of relatives hadn’t managed to form a resistance community in solidarity with those afflicted with the Sleep, with the support of whom the whole thing could be dealt with, and instead they all surrendered to their respective individual fates. Every man for himself in his house of wood, pressboard and plaster. He’d often wondered what would happen if he were to visit Loyd at work. Whether they’d throw life preservers to him if he climbed down into the dried-out harbor basin, or if they would think he could walk on water, or just ignore him. His mother had made one such attempt, which ended with Loyd screaming down at her from the harbor area and not wasting a single word on it at the dinner table.

              There was only this one time, when Lint and Loyd ran into one another by chance at the bathroom door, that for a moment he believed he was speaking with his conscious father again, the man who had once so greatly enjoyed mowing the lawn and who taught him how to throw a ball. Lint waited in front of the bathroom and listened to his father’s urine stream stirring up the toilet water. Loyd opened the door and saw Lint wearing a half-tired expression, laid a hand on his shoulder and said in passing, “You won’t recognize our beloved Miami. The people that strut up and down the sidewalks. It’s like everything’s been replaced,” and disappeared through the hallway into his bedroom. There is perhaps no more frightening discovery than the fact that your own father is just a human.

              The extent to which the Sleep had parasitically spread from the harbor was a hotly debated topic at the Congress as well, on which regular presentations were held. It was certain that the phenomenon repeatedly came up against things that threatened its stability. It was imaginable, for instance, that a truck driver for a hauler who depended on goods from the port had himself slipped into the Sleep without noticing. On the day when he arrived at the harbor at his regular time and was presented with empty boxes, some voice within him would have to decide whether he should accept these boxes, just like he’d done for the last twelve years, or whether he should call his boss and tell her that everyone there had lost their minds. Should he choose the former, why couldn’t it then be carried further by him, to his boss, from her to the truck manufacturer from whom the hauler made annual purchases, and so on? Could it not be that in this way, the Sleep had spread unnoticed across all of Miami? Was it possible that the University had long been closed, and Horacio’s secondhand shop bankrupt, and even the Congress and the Wrestlers’ Clubs and everything that Lint knew, even Line 41, the bus he was sitting on, were only held together by shame? In an insightful presentation on precisely this question just weeks prior, a Congress speaker had stated that the Sleep could be imagined as a colony of ants from which individuals were constantly breaking off, most of whom would then starve or be eaten by predators. How unique this phenomenon was, she said, also revealed itself in Port Everglades, the largest container port on the East Coast, where ten thousand people had also lost their jobs and exhibited none of this sort of behavior.

              When the bus finally reached Lint’s stop, he was already so close to Rowdy Yates that he couldn’t see it in its entirety. The building complex looked like it could launch into motion at any moment, like giant rotary excavators in brown coal mining regions. At first glance you could mistake the prefabricated concrete structure for an abandoned ruin. But then you saw flowers and plants sitting on balconies and decorations hanging in windows. There were people in there. Rowdy Yates would have looked out of place anywhere else in the world. The huge towers and their adjoining skyways. The DIY extensions. The concrete. Illuminated and dark windows. Taut cables. The crowns of the trees in the parks. The broad front of the plateau. The parking decks. The concrete. It always seemed as if you were standing too close to it. Only from the sky could you see the whole complex at once. Such images were very popular on postcards among young, cynical European tourists, and sold out rapidly in souvenir shops.

              Half the bus got off with Lint. There were hardly any stars to be seen in the sky. The Earth is about twenty-five trillion miles from the next known solar system. The bus driver would be out for another hour before quitting time. He’d steer the vehicle back to the depot, wave at the other drivers still lingering around there, take off his uniform in the locker room, shower, change clothes, get in his car and drive home. Then he would sleep, just to get up a few hours later and do the whole thing over again. Lint walked up the stairs at the edge of the complex and followed the other people streaming in from all directions, rushing up the great staircase like an orderly evacuation. They were on their way to the Congress, to the eight hundred and twenty-fourth session.

λ λ λ

“Because, well, it’s not as though the water just evaporated all of a sudden. Nonsense. The overwhelming majority of available eyewitness reports from night janitors, couples secretly screwing on the beach, foreign and domestic ships’ crews as well as taxi drivers refer to a quote ‘gradual, but then suddenly rapid disappearance into the darkness’ end quote. So the ocean contracted like an old, torn-off piece of flesh, and now it lies an estimated three hundred miles away, where it continues to roar undisturbed in the nothingness. This is actually the image the Coast Guard has confirmed to us multiple times over the past few days. We’re still waiting in vain for a worldwide increase of sea levels or other global consequences, however. We’ll see. The notion that this delay only results from the time difference becomes less likely with each passing hour. By the way, the information I’m referring to can be found in the bibliography of the lecture notes for this presentation. I’d be happy to print them out again and hand them out later, if that works. Is that all right? Jeremy? Would that maybe work? Jer- that’s okay? Okay, great, thanks, yeah — what I’m trying to say is that nobody on the West Coast of Europe or in Brooklyn or Cuba seem worried about the fact that a global phenomenon has taken place here, and that’s exactly what should scare us, because all our models fail to grasp it in any way, which is why we so desperately need new approaches to explaining this. Right now it’s all very isolated, which goes against our knowledge and the law that water always finds its level, that it distributes evenly no matter the underlying surface. And even though it’s only reasonable to not venture onto the beach for now — with Miami Beach being rigorously patrolled by Jeeps and all, of course, because the authorities can’t guarantee that the water won’t suddenly come roaring back and bury everything in its path. And yes, the problems are so overwhelming and the clues we’ve been left with so dubious and flimsy, the past so irretrievable within them and the foundations of our speculations so precarious that even their slightest examination staggers us, because we know that the essence is probably lost for good. The night we’re fumbling our way through is still too dark for us to so much as comment on it, let alone to say whether it’ll last forever. But that doesn’t mean — and this is the point! But that doesn’t mean that we, the people, have to stay silent about the whole thing. Quite the contrary! It is of the utmost importance that we start asking questions now, start exchanging with one another, that we get to the bottom of this together, that we get answers about what’s happening to our city. It’s often said that only a limited set of people are drawn to theorizing, to working with ideas, to the fabrication of worldviews. But in the end, we all share in that knowledge. And precisely that is the spirit of these meetings, the spirit of knowledge and research and energy that we’re always talking about here. And that’s why we’re here today, at the now fifth session on the fifth consecutive day. And that’s why it makes me so happy, too, that even more participants have shown up than last week, that — okay. Yes. Jeremy, yeah, thank you, exactly, yes. Exactly, that’s fine, yeah — now I’ve lost my train of thought. Anyway, that’s the most astounding thing about all this: the regionality, the confinement of this quote-unquote ‘Great Absence,’ as McSullivan dubbed it in his speech yesterday, the transcript of which I can only recommend each of you read. Meaning the fact that this is a phenomenon which has not affected, for instance, Haiti and the Dominican Republic. There the saltwater still washes mussels and little pieces of plastic ashore like nothing ever happened. We still don’t have word about the exact placement of the new maritime boundary, but measured data about that may emerge in the coming days. Conjecture that this will take the form of a circular arc cannot be confirmed. And the absence otherwise brought to light the remarkable fact that we’ve been living on a mountain this entire time. And — I mean, sure, the ocean is absolutely a great mystery, less than one percent of its floor has been explored. In any case. Some of the people who have spoken on this stage in the past days would have it, in fact they believe, that the answers to all our questions lie right down there, buried somewhere in a deep trench. And yes, astonishing things are surfacing there in the quote-unquote ‘desert,’ among the bay’s dried out coral reefs or in the quote-unquote ‘black scrags,’ meaning the seamounts. The wreckage of cars, ships, airplanes and tanks, crashed bombers from the world wars, sunken battleships, jewels, concrete blocks, ruins of unknown civilizations, aborted tunnel projects and of course the fish, my God, how they’ve been stinking the past few days, what a stench came floating on the wind, you only ever saw people out in patchouli-soaked scarves and disposable masks. But now the way is clear, and nothing brings the people greater joy than archaeology, the rediscovery of the dead. Everything is full of clues. Discarded weapons, glass bottles, but also books and other documents that you’d think the saltwater would eat away in the briefest time. Everyone talks about the plastic garbage patches floating in the ocean and laughs, but nobody talks about all the objects and machines that people have left behind, useless apparatuses and artifacts, impossibly functioning machines. And that’s why it makes me so happy, too, that little groups of archaeologists have already formed. In the coming weeks we want to invite a geologist to speak who’ll clarify things from her perspective, that will certainly be illuminating. And we’ll go over the history of the Bermuda Triangle once more, which of course starts in Miami. So, yeah. On it goes. Actually, no — this here is just the beginning. The beginning of a connecting of all our loose threads. A permanent Congress. We’re tackling the issues and we’re growing. Miami was always a city of open wounds, of explosive politics and emotions, at least since Cuba. We are united by the sense that something is changing and that the truth will not remain hidden. Just in the next few months y’all aren’t going to recognize this space. Because there’s so much to discuss, so much that’s been withheld from us. In the Bahamas it’s gone too, that much has become clear by now. The Bahamas are also lying on dry land, on a little plateau surrounded by gorges. But the people there can still see the water, at least when the weather’s good enough, if they look out their windows with binoculars. We must not forget that it’s still out there. It’s lying somewhere to the East, beyond the exposed seamounts’ hostile rock formations, this unreal landscape of stone, images of which play on a loop on every news channel, and that is our reality now.”