From a Neuschwabenland Cafe

“Everything we do is built on the backs of suffering people and dying animals. We wallow in blood.” - Anthony Bourdain

"I drank coffee and read old books and waited for the year to end." - Richard Brautigan

There’s a unique anxiety that comes with checking up on the markets. Pulling out my phone, leaned back into the wooden chair of the cafe, a ritual of anticipating anxiety that defines the day. It’s almost not worth calling it fear, the nervousness itself being as ritualistic as the checking. Positions are cross-checked with the graphs, the numbers move somewhere. The actual movement is deferred, cast away to the distance, funny money up and down, the excess of excess of excess, an extra bit of scraps here and there to ease or break the conscious.

Outside the front window of the cafe, wind whips brutally down the boulevard, scouring the snowdunes in wavy lines filling in indented footprints, trudged to be wiped off in the the little portals lining the road. No life could sustain itself here. It was well below zero last night and still is, hovering just below the blue bottom of the fake-mercury electronic thermometer. There’s a joke somewhere, floating about the clubs and salons, always said by a man somewhere else, my husband, my brother, my father - “I call it sweater weather, he calls it slum clearance”. 

It was some absurd accident that brought us into being, first sight at two years, gazing out the window onto a blizzard we were sheltered well away from by the walls and furnaces, glamour of televised religion playing mutely. We saw darkness inside which it was made clear the difference between us and them. Silently, we learned what us meant, not so much by any marks of our own, but by the absence of the marks they carried, our skin smooth and unblemished by starvation sores and the grime of labor. Even today, we can’t ride the bus, lest we be called out for our uncalloused hands, veins pumping with the fruits unavailable in the common distribution, just a little too much subtly chubby glow, clothing just a little too nice.

Water is black. We drink brine, ink down our throats off freshly shined glasses, ancient books cracked open with three fingers, reclined into a nest of blankets propped up on the floating airs of the furnace. Sometimes I take the time, on various jaunts around the city, to indulge myself as we all do without speaking of it to others, drinking the same we sell. Fast food takes like sodium, sugar, more than that, it tastes like what we only know before its production, getting high on our own supply in dark roving secrets.

It’s often said, by the very same people obsessed with the verticality of power, that power is subtle, its machinations systemic. It’s easy to see their argument, in both cases, the mute words of the blue uniform, deferring with the sneering prejudice of a middle class swineherd to the higher law of a book he’s never understood, the stumbling fat of a mid-level bureaucrat placed between them and their life. They fluctuate back up to verticality when they interact with us, their coffeehouses much like this one, coke like ours, coterie fashion self-consciously adorned in far more ritual than it was ever intended to by those who can afford it.

And when the time comes, they’ll join into the revolving-door orgy of chaos - the blackshirts, brownshirts, and silvershirts taking turns with the reds and blacks and black-and-reds, a dip into the latte foam between invective and preparation, a height of excursion as ritualistically prescribed as the revelry they take at those rare apex-points where they make history happen, the point of a baton or knife or gun where their minds give way to the epoch they’re straining desperately to birth from the gash they’ve cut into their spread legs, a black era emerging to spread over like a fog of death across whatever continent may be cursed with their empowerment.

Yet down here in Neuschwabenland, nothing much changes. We flee when the man is elected, we make our homes anew to wile away in a the cardboard cutouts of a suburb or country home or penthouse, no less paper-thin than the one we were birthed into, horizontal movements across the floating clouds our world is built upon. Most of this continent is a desert, no new snow falling for months, long enough to make a tundra-floor as if it were cast in concrete. We take walks in summer along the surface of the ice sheet. The wind whips through us, a fundamental emptiness, the hole we never had a soul beaten into, feeling pain without pain, ice without snow. Maybe someday we’ll be at risk, when they come for our husbands and fathers and we wind up at the end of a bayonet, pierced to let air rush in and implode our lives to the end. But for now, they perform well enough. The coffee still flows, the markets still move. Maybe in the future, we’ll be unlucky enough to have the fog of history catch up with us and face the fate of Antoinette, condemned for the witchcraft of waste, killed not even the jealous rivals they see in our husbands, but for the worse sin of being the empty people who have done no crime and for that all the more infuriating. But not today. And not all of us. To the end of time, we will persist, the wasteful daughters of a world beyond redemption.