Monday, January 01, 2007

Against the Blog: 2-20

Up, up, and...further up. But still in the general vicinity of the starting point. Time for some trippy Chums of Chance shizznit!

So they're on ground-leave, and they've set up camp in Central Park, because why not. A lad comes one night and gives them one of their usual mysterious messages; they pay him with an Exposition coin; he judges this worthless, noting that he'd need "d' toime machine" to use it, and the Chums are immediately like, whoa, the time machine? The lad, named "Plug" Loafsley, runs off but returns the next day with instructions for getting to his personal headquarters, the "Lollipop Lounge," which is also a child brothel. Whee! Chick goes to meet him there, and Darby tags along. The place has as sleazy an atmosphere as you would expect. Plug is unwilling to go into the time machine thing any more, but a substantial bribe changes his tune. He leads them out through the fog-choked city, near the harbor--to an electrical generating station, Chick guesses, correctly.

So yeah, fog, fog, fog, et cetera. Very foggy. Like descending into the abyss itself. Dante is quoted. At the place, Plug introduces them to Dr. Zoot, "an elfin workingman's fatigues, carpet-slippers, smoked goggles, and a peculiar helmet punctuated over its surface by not entirely familiar electrical fittings" (402). Zoot shows them the machine, which is spraying sparks, and in general, kind of beat-up and ramshackle. They are skeptical, but Zoot offers them a sample ride, which they take. The machine apparently works, because they see vivid apocalyptic visions all around them, which I will cite, because they're kind of cool.

They seemed to be in the midst of some great storm in whose low illumination, presently, they could make out, in unremitting sweep across the field of vision, inclined at the same angle as the rain, if rain it was--some material descent, gray and wind-stressed--undoubted human identities, masses of souls, mounted, pillioned, on foot, ranging along together by the millions over the landscape accompanied by a comparably unmeasurable herd of horses. The multitude extended farther than they could see--a spectral cavalry, faces disquietingly wanting in detail, eyes little more than blurred sockets, the draping of garments constantly changing in an invisible flow which perhaps was only wind. Bright arrays of metallic points hung and drifted in three dimensions and perhaps more, like stars blown through by the shockwaves of the Creation. Were those voices out there crying in pain? sometimes it almost sounded like singing. Sometimes a word or two, in a language almost recognizable, came through. Thus, galloping in unceasing flow ever ahead, denied any further control over their fate, the disconsolate company was borne terribly over the edge of the visible world... (404)

Chick and Darby are understandably freaked out by this, but then they are plucked back to present time. In his defense, Zoot notes that he got the time machine pre-owned, from a fellow named Alonzo Meatman, at Candlebrow U. He warns them that Meatman is a shady and possibly dangerous person, but it looks like they're going to look for him anyway.

UPDATE: I just realized, from browsing the above-linked blog, that the Dante inscription in this chapter ("I Am the Way into the Doleful City") is the same as the one that the inhabitants of the nameless city put up on an arch to commemorate the destruction, way back in 2-3. So either the nameless city was in fact New York, or we're seeing a parallel of some sort. Given the whole Iceland spar/duality thing going on throughout the book, I would actually be inclined to put my money on the latter...ALTHOUGH, you may note that at the end of that chapter, Hunter Penhallow took a subway seemingly into the future. So...yeah. As is oft the case, things are highly enigmatic.



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