kagablog

Three battered manta ray kites billowed against a turbulent grey sky. A monsoon was threatening to break over the port and the air was juicy with ionic interference. Three men in black polo necks and sunglasses smoked bananadine roll-ups on the dingy rooftops of the Nebula Shell Sea hotel. They had the kites rigged up to the little fingers of their left hands, reciting incantations to each other in dead languages while they tangled up the sky. The corpse of a zebra had been strung up on the television aerials some weeks ago but the parrots had pecked it to pieces. Now it’s guts hung like laundry, fluttering down the bricks of the old hotel, gathering flies, moths and inexplicably large beetles, which the natives ground up for medicine. The hotel itself was an ancient dinosaur of the downtown waterfront district. It was located in the septic end of the city where grimy warrens of microwave tenements cascaded drearily down to a gutted boardwalk. The streetlights gleamed like vulture stripped ribs while neon soaked in hazy pockets along the strip. Fast food clotted up the air vents. Rotting piers lay like skeletal remains in the hot, heaving sea. Jungle vagrants stalked these labyrinthine piers relentlessly, with spears and spiritual disorders, sometimes moving in packs like starving hyenas. The air was pierced by the ceaseless ululations of paranoid schizophrenics caught in torment beneath the boardwalk supports. The sky was rancid with rising effluvium and the sound of waves seethed like an electric storm along the waterfront. Its drone muffled the buzz of the city chaos, strangling it down to a barely acceptable ruckus. The decaying hulk of the Nebula Shell Sea stood overlooking this grim beachfront, looming like a tombstone; all sallow light, death-trap elevators, stringers in crash helmets hanging off fire escapes, ancient telephone booths, filthy checkerboard floors and stained walls. Enormous, electric blue monitor lizards nested in the tangle of wild palms outside the entrance. You had to watch for them at night as they sometimes made dashes for anyone they felt they could drag up into the trees. Children and skinny working girls were especially vulnerable to attack. Their corpses were at times found, bundled like filthy washing amongst the leaves and coconuts. Bones clustered in the gutters and dropped to the sidewalk at odd times. Above the portico of the hotel was a beaten, retro-chic sign from another era. It read: SHELL SEA HOTEL in carved stone. Above this legend, formed out of lurid green neon tubing, was the word NEBULA. The neon pulsed with a hallucinogenic throbbing, making the hotel easy to find no matter what high you happened to be on at the time. It pulsed like a beacon for the vagrants of the strip, shining over the dingy streets like a lighthouse for all the animals and sinking people.

Romeo the Dealer was leaning lean in the hallway of the Shell Sea. He was his usual razor-thin silhouette, zipped up into tight shiny leathers, corded muscles shifting like mercury beneath his fish-pale skin. He had a doughy complexion, glazed with light perspiration from the tropical heat. His short peroxide hair was spiky with static. Enormous bug-eye shades disguised half his clean-shaven face. He had never been seen to smile and had no lips to speak of in any case. His mouth was a postal slit from which words dropped like glass. He was waiting, checking his rubberized wristwatch at intervals. Movements which afforded rapid glimpses of the raygun he jockeyed, in a nylon fast-grab shoulder holster. A bandolier of loaded syringes hung close beneath his opposing arm. He tapped bright white tennis shoes on the pavement and clenched studded black cut-off gloves, seldom shifting position, but always somehow animated, never still. Somewhere within Romeo was an internal dynamo that was spinning so fast it was hardly seen to move. This made him exude a certain cold charge, a gravitational field, which caused most people to steer clear of him. Many weren’t sure if he was even human. He shifted position after a few minutes of watch checking, pulling out a yo-yo to kill time whilst waiting for the midget.

The midget meanwhile had just pulled off the jungle flyover and entered the bridge-stricken streets of the warehouse district. The long black sedan was his car of choice when visiting the city, and he wore a miniature chauffeur’s uniform with brass buttons when driving it. An old melancholic number by Ishida Ayumi was blaring out of the sound system. The speaker system was rich with analog crackling while she sang out the words ‘Blue Light Yokohama’ over and over. Number Nun had the front passenger seat, her faintly glowing face reflected against the windscreen in a ghostly play of light. Taty had the backseat all to herself because the Sugar Twins were in the trunk. They were curled up on a very cramped mattress, the bones of their hips dovetailed like a car and a caravan, watching cartoons on a tiny television. The greenish glow of the tube illuminated the cramped and bucking insides of the trunk. It caught like oil on their matching gold lamé catsuits, ermine jackets and platinum Cleopatra wigs. It also caught in their dazed silver eyes, in which were reflected the crazed antics of animated cats and mice. Back on the backseat, Taty was adjusting her skirt,. She was perpetually stealing glimpses of her reflection in the shiny windows, quite proud of the ensemble she had managed to put together for the evening. Alphonse had let her run riot in the walk-in wardrobes because he was throwing a poll party and couldn’t have her looking like ‘a stray’. She set about prettying up something supreme for the party, and more importantly, for her first jaunt as a ghost girl. After much deliberation she had picked out a Paisley print one-piece polyester mini with long puffed sleeves, high collar and low cuffs. The patterning was faded gold with emerald highlights and copper trim. It fitted her like a glove and Number Nun had her hair treated and blow-waved to neaten her up for business hours. She had chosen gold heel-less slip-ons and huge tan sunglasses to complete the ensemble. The smooth metallic soles flapped lightly against her feet when she walked, and she loved the bird-like sound they made. A slim gold ankle bracelet glittered in the shadows beneath the seat and she would occasionally lift up her foot to study it. Her face was so pancaked she felt like a boiled sweet or a character in a Japanese play. Metallic green eye shadow caught her reflection each time she turned her head and the car was filled with the scent of the rich perfume she had selected. She had been at the house for a week now, living in one of the high bedrooms, avoiding crocodiles and watching cartoon reels in the private cinema. They gave her vanilla ice-cream on demand and twice a night she was made to go for treatments in the psychic generator. This was a huge old machine which resembled a tanning bed and was said to boost one’s psychic abilities. Copper pipes ran out of it, and it was covered in flashing lights. Alphonse said he got it wholesale off Doctor Dali when the mad scientist went underground. But that meant diddley-squat to Taty who hated the thing with a passion. She came out of the Genny each night with a bulging headache and the tingly feeling of being fried lightly in oil. Her dreams thereafter were wild and cluttered with visions of psychedelic, talking panthers and mountains of candyfloss. Nobody spoke to her and she ate a lot of popcorn. Come Friday they got her Barbie-d up and she was down at the pool with the others when the guests started crawling out of the woodwork. She was introduced to strange men with damp handshakes; tuxedo vipers who whispered things in Alphonse’s pointy ears without taking their eyes off her. Introductions were also made to some musicians and a trio of thin tribe girls with stringy jungle braids, but Taty could sense that she was the wafer in the sundae. She managed to escape at one point, sneaking behind one of the ice sculptures with an hors d’oeuvres platter before Number Nun sniffed her out and told her it was time to get to work. Within minutes she was in the back of a sedan heading for her first appointment.

“Is it true that the Shell Sea Hotel is made entirely of sea shells?” Taty yelled over the blaring song.

Number Nun glanced disapprovingly at her via the rear-view mirror.

“Not entirely my little sinner,” the Nun replied in her smoothly robotic and somehow overtly merciful voice.

Taty went back to examining the shadow-infested warehouses and low, dingy buildings. They flashed beyond the tinted glass, describing an immensity of desolation which numbed her somewhere deep inside. The monsoon broke as they entered the boardwalk districts. Storm gutters vomited and the gleaming tarmac steamed through its oil painting colours. Figures staggered like puppets in the solid sheets of roaring water. Sugary neon lit up the wet, clustered air and drunken sailors screamed like monkeys from high red windows. Taty saw cannibals with bones in their noses crouching beneath umbrellas and roving pods of mustachio’d soldiers in mirrored sunglasses. Giant rusted billboards heaved past, glowing in the rain, gilded with moth choked bulbs and swirly script. The midget eventually started laughing at something no-one else understood. He lit up a cigar which doused the cabin with bluish smoke. You could hear the Sugar Twins being tossed around each time they cornered.

The monsoon stopped abruptly. The sedan pulled up into the palm-infested courtyard of the Nebula Shell Sea and the whole world looked like it had just stepped out of a washing machine. The neon of the hotel was especially vivid and fizzy in Taty’s eyes. Romeo detached like a bat and swooped down out of the shadows, popping the trunk. Number Nun stepped out imperiously, lifting her habit above the wet tar, her naked porcelain feet lighting up the puddles like cheap religious paintings. She let Taty out while Romeo hefted the twins from the back. They hung lasciviously off him as he approached Taty to introduce himself.

“I’m Romeo…”

“…The Dealer!” the midget butted in, finishing his sentence with a cackling cough.

“I’m…” Taty began.

“Working,” Number Nun interjected primly. “Now hush Childbride.”

Romeo regarded her seriously and Taty could see that he was almost always serious, even with the Sugar Twins draped like absurd fur coats around his lean shoulders.

“Well sisters,” he announced expressionlessly. “Lets get it on.”

It must have looked comical, seeing them all squeezed together into the rat-trap elevator. Romeo cut the mechanism between floors and jerked aside the rusted grate. He uncapped a hidden airlock and they disembarked on a high and secret floor, entering into a maze of dingy red velvet corridors. Some of the hotel doors were chinked and Taty caught glimpses of strange scenes. One of the rooms was piled high with acoustic guitars. The broken instruments made dunes of themselves in the otherwise barren space. Another room saw men in scuba gear, berets and white goatees paying ferocious games of ping pong against one another. Yellowed paperbacks lay everywhere along the corridors and sometime just walking through the hotel was like pushing your nose into a sun faded second-hand novel. One room even saw tribal figures in grass skirts dancing around a fire of paperbacks. They had on oversized Tiki masks and fed cheap novels to the flames without pause. Number Nun put a firm hand on Taty’s shoulder, nudging her on each time loitered to look.

Romeo unlocked a sliding metal shutter and ushered them into a spacious concrete chamber. The lights were down and outlandish costume racks clustered, cattle-like in the spaces. The backstage atmosphere was further enhanced by the many props and stacked racks of lighting equipment. Taty immediately sensed that she should be quiet, as though a performance were being enacted just beyond a nearby, as yet unseen curtain. And as she tiptoed deeper in, following after the soundless gliding figure of Number Nun, she eventually saw the illuminated ‘stage’. It was the only light source in the ambiguous chamber; a long aquarium window, which looked into a dingy, yet well lit hotel room. Number Nun ghosted close toward the one-way glass, speaking to Romeo in hushed tones.

“Is that an astronaut?” Taty heard her ask.

She drew alongside Number Nun and peered into a faded red room hung with framed prints of tropical flowers. Old wallpaper bulged with damp, sagging from the upper areas along the ceiling skirting. A tactless bed had been dropped in the corner, beneath a tiny window. A formica topped dresser brooded in the opposite corner, decked with a large beaded lampshade. Two diffuse spotlights had been placed on either side of the mirror glass, on the inside the room. They faced in and washed the space with a surgical glare. The hotel room had the staged, tableau-like look of an old record cover. Dust roved; a thousand stars in the light, orbiting the incongruous figure of an astronaut. The astronaut himself stood beside the bed, clad in a bulky spacesuit befitted with many snug straps and attachments. The suit had once been white but now appeared seedy, soiled by the city. Parts of it were singed by what must have been an immensity of heat. A gold visor disguised the face of the astronaut and pipes ran from the heavy helmet to a back-borne life-support system. Despite the worn quality of the suit, its holistic integrity appeared to be intact and the astronaut functioned as a visitor on an alien world.

“He told Martha he piloted a lunar module around the moon,” Romeo whispered to Number Nun, plugging in a series of cables.

“Now I think he just plays chess in the park.”

He moved quietly toward a bank of levers, leaving the light of the window.

“He still wears the suit?” Number Nun muttered drily after him.

The Sugar Twins had by now slunk up to the window. They nuzzled the glass like cats, the plastic strands of their wigs trailing in the foggy areas their breath created. The mechanical corneas of Number Nun’s eyes flowered open with a subdued hum. A quicksilver patina gleamed within her porcelain skull, punctuated by the internalized flickering of many, tiny glowing panels. Her spectral filter activated, shifting her vision. It caused the room beyond the glass to appear all of a sudden translucent and wavy to her. Objects were encased in a sort of X-ray jelly, rendering them gelatinous and somewhat immaterial. The skeletal system of the astronaut flexed like a crab beneath a glassy chrysalis of suit and flesh. The internal structure of the bed shone like an undersea sponge. But the X-ray quality of her vision lacked the crispness of airport detector units. It was instead cellular and microbial. Each image quivered, flickering like the flaws on old celluloid. A parade of quasi-bacterial forms suddenly crossed her line of sight, passing through the room as though it were just one bubble within a vast matrix of bubbles. Energy signatures fluttered like tapeworms, flexing and freezing in the air. A ghost was even discernable beside the tiny bathroom’s entrance. It sat heavy as damage; the shade of some elderly gentleman in a vintage suit, repeating movements like old video tape, phasing in and out of existence. Number Nun ignored all these extraneous details, focusing instead on the astronaut. A sno-globe of swirling emanations encapsuled his gelid form, forming an entrancing sphere. The energies at work in this sphere were more than just unique to the astronaut. In effect they were the astronaut; fizzing in filaments, flooding rivulets about his body mirage like sap through vines. Various bulges of colour and textured energy build-ups mirrored shifting emotional states, slicking around him like oil on water. Number Nun’s vision locked into a portion of the sno-globe running parallel to the astronaut’s lower back. Sensory data fluttered and collapsed like a thousand butterflies in her artificial mind, causing her to zoom in on a strange ganglion of energy which throbbed and pulsated behind the astronauts spine.

“I see his trip-switch,” she announced to the Sugar Twins.

Taty glanced at the twins, realizing that they served some mysterious function other than ornamentation. She wondered what this was, observing with interest.

“It’s in the lower spinal atmosphere,” Number Nun informed them. “Four and a quarter fingers west of the ventral narthex, adjoined to his sum-jism by a tiny clutch of diamond ecto.”

Number Nun turned to face the twns, who stared rapturously in at the astronaut.

“Do you see how to trip it?” she asked.

Taty craned closer, hanging onto Number Nun’s robes like a nervous child. She saw that the twin’s eyes had milked over and that their bodies were convulsing lightly. Their vision had also apparently altered, though the processes at work were chemical and the outward effects more dramatic than those of Number Nun. There was in fact a marked difference in the way they saw the room, attuned as they were to a different set of spectral frequencies. There was also an X-ray quality to their vision, though the resolution was far sharper than Number Nun’s. The objects in the scope of their vision were diamond-edged and candy-like. They appeared to shimmer with neon aura hazes and internal structures glowed, as though viewed through packages of garish syrup and crystallized sugar. Instead of the ghostly microbial forms which clotted Number Nun’s synthetic filters, the twins saw bursts of fibrous electricity and fast forward time reflections cascading like chimes throughout space. Their perception of the astronaut’s sno-globe was also glittery and constellated; a gravitational spinning of tightly meshed and idiosyncratic energies. The Sugar Twins moved their heads in a synchronized fashion, bee-stung lips leaking milky drool, focusing on the area Number Nun had indicated. After a while they seemed to find what it was she was describing and took several moments to study the anomaly, nodding their heads in response to supernatural stimulus. Then suddenly, without warning, their eyes became silvery again and they stopped shaking. Number Nun daubed at their mouths with a napkin whilst they flexed their waists. Taty saw the jutting bones of their hips dislodge with a slippery click. They fell apart and immediately flanked Romeo. One began to whisper intently into his left ear while the other whispered into his right. Taty couldn’t make out what it was they were saying but it sounded inhuman; the rushed twittering of birds or snakes. Romeo nodded every so often, ballpointing notes onto stack of lumo post-its. When the twins had ceased their sibilant whispering they seemed to somehow deactivate, lapsing back into the luxuriant aloofness which seemed their natural state. They drifted to the door, bumping into things, huddled in their ermine furs. Romeo thumbed through the pad of scribbled notes and turned to Number Nun.

“You can take them down to the diner for a milkshake and fries,” he announced in a tone of confirmation. “I’ve got it gift-wrapped.”

Number Nun shot Taty a sharp look and gently dislodged her clutched fingers from her cassock.

“Back in a tic-tic,” she said before sweeping off.

She ushered the Sugar Twins into the corridor outside and Taty watched the metal shutter close, feeling suddenly abandoned and unsure of her situation. She fidgeted with her dress in the darkness, clicking the heels of her slip-ons together. Romeo was too busy rummaging in drawers and arranging things to notice her nervous tics, but he seemed to sense her discomfort. He put a cold hand on her shoulder at one point.

“Don’t fret cupcake,” he whispered supportively. “It’s a little like drowning goldfish – everything you need is already there, all you got to do is shake it up.”

Taty nodded nervously while he returned to his preparations, her eyes glued to the astronaut in the other room.