Project 23

PROJECT 23
BY
Michael Ernest Lantagne









Copyright © 2006 by Michael Ernest Lantagne

1) 3:30 A.M.
2) Break
3) Grey Walls
4) Green Things
5) Burning Beds
6) Welcome Chaos
7) Forgotten Memories
8) Someone
9) Partners
10) Dawning

3:30 A.M.

         The screens began changing at three thirty in the morning. Every home, street-corner, store, building, home, automobile, desk was equipped with one. The screens where set up for protection, to profile and warn the population about potential criminals. The most dangerous, the most vicious, the ones who destroyed buildings, masses, children but it didn't take very long for the targets to become more and more pedestrian in their potential threat to society.
         The personal information was never supposed to be used, broadcast...legal reasons, ways around them where initiated. Easily, seemingly suddenly people being told that their property and their families are in jeopardy from a nameless, faceless force. A human force that only the loosening of their own rights could stop, people let go so easily and where shocked when they became the target because of a large debt, a questionable purchase, an anonymous tip.
         Those who had the will and the ability to try and stop the totalitarian tactics of the screen culture where the first to be singled out and systematically set right in prisons and institutions. Driving an intelligent, angry subset of artists, punks, criminals, addicts, anyone who would or could stand up to the hysterical psychosis of insular, mutual paranoia underground, deep underground. A grey market thriving just beneath the radar of control. Everything from the works of Camus and Kafka to hard drugs, sex, and technical equipment was suddenly more available than it had ever been and the market was growing and changing. Any dissent restricted one to life on the fringes of society at best, so as long as you where going down you might as go down fighting in a big way. It was never programed to flash more than ten profiles a day but in darkness, all over the country at three thirty in the morning EST, something went wrong and the screens now began to flash the pictures and profiles of every living person at three second intervals.
         The screens database had crossed with the net proper and everyones secret lives where now one display for everyone else. Truth dissolved, names and standing where now forever and permanently fused with every word, picture, alias, number, print, work, crime, purchase, travel, and fantasy.          Three seconds was more than enough time. You where suddenly the enemy to everyone who recognized your voice, your eyes, your name, alias, face, ticks. It only became a real problem when your own profile made its appearance and no one knew that it was a glitch, a problem and so everyone assumed that what the screen said was true and that you where a danger of the highest order.
         There was no pattern to the profiles, the screens where brutally random. Every face soon became a leering grin exposing white teeth, sharp in their lust to destroy. By the time your own profile was flashed you where so sharp with paranoia that you where as dangerous as the screens said.
         Structure broke, the screens became targets along with the flesh that the profiles mimicked. The screens where made of stronger things, long ago designed and built to withstand human weapons and unlike the human mind their internal power units didn't fail. Within weeks the inner cities erupted in violence. Long standing grudges where now given validity and purpose, your enemy had been the real thing all along. Once you had been singled out by the random virus of the screen every sound was deathly poignant. The screech of tires on a dark street, a cat in the bushes, a half heard scream, loud voices. You where now the other. The ones that you yourself had rallied against and ran out of town, ruined, attacked in the streets. You where suddenly not you anymore and the questions where so loud that they even resounded within your own mind. You doubted everything and everyone. The only thing that softened the blow was the fact that you had become numb with fear long ago
         The streets became blurs of knife-blades, hammers, bricks, fists, and bullets. Teeth, hot white in the sun, strewn in patches next to dying weeds. Cops, National guard, Military all present in larger and larger numbers to quell the mob riots. Then they started to recede as the fighting engulfed more affluent neighborhoods soon when the fighting overtook the very groups that where sent to disarm and disperse the infrastructure fell.
         Things spiraled steadily into the unknown, animals now roamed the cities abandoned and hungry like their owners hunting for food and pleasure in the moments before the screens would overtake you as well. Suburbs fortified asylum life, family verses family desperately trying to make sense of the cities plights, screens steadily flashing faces. Fires, frankinstine hunting burns, time speed up in the shattered nerves of people and exploded in firebombs of defense. Charred ruins of homes and gardens picked through by those who where strong enough to put their own survival above their paranoia.
         Large families, criminal organizations, fringe cults, and the insane survived the horrors in the streets. Naturally they had adapted to the screens electronic shackles long ago. They had had time to learn how, not only, to live in shadows but became more insular, streamlined, self sufficient as a result they where actually stronger many years after the screens had become fixtures than they ever had been before. For they relied on each other, on the truth of judging loyalty and liability on reality and not on the cold manic blue of flashing words and faces. They only closed ranks even tighter in the fever pitch of the screens meltdown. The criminals released their associates from prisons and the "insane" did the same in the hospital wards and the now unmanned asylums. The families and cults lasted but melted into the less populated country side. Soon enough the norm population incinerated itself in its blind crusade in the name of safety. Their atrocities and brutality matched and soon surpassed their imagined screen crimes and vivid nightmare world of fear.

Break

         Atlas sat staring out the window during craft time. He had taken his medication, he was tired but lucid, his right had dipping a stylus into a bottle of dark ink, calligraphy in five languages in front of him. There where no screens in the institution, for this he was glad. For the world that he saw in the distance he cared little now. He was beginning to enjoy life here within the soft curved ceilings of white and eighteenth century woodwork, leather bound books, the greens of the gardens but the gnashing betrayal still ever-present even beneath heavy sedation of lipstick seconal and pine thorozine.
         Atlas was young, just shy of thirty. Eyes, bright, haunted, blue set off by his shortly cropped black hair. He was handsome and pale, neither so obvious that one could put a finger on why he held such an air of charismatic youth, health, and a far off sadness that the staff attributed to the medication. Atlas saw the same but knew that the look had been there all along.
         Atlas was a writer, he still is. He thought as he stared out the window how he would die for his art. It had always been important, the one and only thing where and in which he felt real, alive, electric. Yet it was this weight, all the weight of history that held him captive within the constructs of his own mind. He had institutionalized himself with the written word and the worlds he created long before he was behind the walls of the asylum. He found regular jobs and there promise of a weekly paycheck, insurance, normalcy and death to be the realm of the unintelligent, the boring. Art was the only the only noble, real thing that should, could make a human being more than a simple set of rotting organs. This they could never understand and they never would and for this he felt some hot mix of pity and contempt.
         Atlas's intelligence tests showed his IQ to be that of a genus and yet he took even this with a grain because shrinks and scientists had invented it. Pedestrian things angered him. Angered him to the extent that his own genus would spiral into a paranoid hatred of the net. He saw beautiful things, the environment, cathedrals, music, individual freedom falling away into a past that he longed to have lived in. A time when ideas and the rebel spirit had meant something. In short, America was fascist and without even the pomp or pageantry of the fascism of old, this country couldn't even do thought control with a moniker of intelligence. He laughed softly to himself going back to his calligraphy, working the translation into German.
         Atlas knew something was coming, something big it was in the air. Long ago he had decided after he was put in the asylum that he would let the whole thing spiral out of control on its own. He had tried, in his youth, to break the system from the inside and it hadn't worked. He waited patiently, an inky spider, within his written world, in music, in painting for the infrastructure to destroy itself. To finally break beneath the weight of its own ignorance and the day the screens started flashing the pictures of all those soulless slaves to money he laughed, the damn had broke, the infrastructure was choking itself finally.
....I am letdown, doubting, tired, sore. Long ago I knew the answer to a question, I have forgotten what that question was and why the answer had been so important to begin with. I am not a part of it anymore, a part of the tradition of art that I long to be. I'm something else, a voyeur of creation and reality. Waiting, stuck always in a now that is devoid of future, choked by the past that I hate and long for. Knowing only too well that I can never go back again, that I should have never been there to begin with. The eternal now is too much. Dreams are much easier, they flow, they make perfect science because they have to make no science to be real. Everyone and everything I knew is gone to me. I left them or they left me and I know full well that it was my own doing and yet I can't mistake the undeniable scene of betrayal and longing that overwhelm me at times. I clutch violently at the past, always only taking joy in the creations of others, such joy and belief in art and in its power. Even in my own creations of yesterday but its tempered now, tempered by an impotence of the day to day dragging of time and space. I know something, I believe in everything good and in the power of the human spirt to overcome anything. Believing in the human spirit, in what it is capable of accomplishing is a heavy weight when you see the eyes in here. Even what I saw in the eyes out there. The struggle, the fear, the hate...like rats on a sinking ship, a crucifix in a deathand and it only becomes that much more crushing when you look in the mirror and see that look in your own eyes knowing full well that there was a time when it wasn't there. When life was full and exciting, a time when all this truly was real a meant something and wasn't just a rest stop somewhere between yesterday and tomorrow. Never repeat yourself, never surrender, never give up or give in. Do something, anything as long as you believe its real, true. Something you would die for. Something that is, always was, and always be totally and uniquely you. No one may ever understand and yet this is what makes it universally human. Work and never delude yourself into thinking that you have reached your destination or its over and dead. Live for something that means more than you because it is you and more than you. Reckless even in caution, growing stronger even in seeming surrender because the only think that they can't take from you is inside of you and that is, was, and will always win...history has shown us that to die penniless in the gutter can lead to immortality and inspire dreams in the minds of untold millions. We all need something. I have that, I always will even in the restless, sore anxiety of this place in this time and that, at least, is something.

Grey Walls

         Mars hated the way they screamed like foaming animals. Every night, every single night they yelled at the guards, at each other, at the night sky that none of them could see. Mars had gotten used to it but he still hated it, they where vile, even worse they where week. He could smell it like blood, like fear. Things that he knew first hand, the things for which he had lived. He remembered why he was in here, he just didn't care anymore and besides after ten years your place and reputation where based on your actions in here, only here, only true real things. A shank in your hand, a nose breaking under the strength of your fist...the ability to keep a promise, to be loyal to those who where loyal to you, getting something for someone if the price was right. Every night he breathed a heavy satisfied breath knowing full well that every day survived in here was a blessed cure that your survival instinct was fighting for but that your soul, long dead, longed to be rid of. Life had become a heavy, hard burden and still the blood rushed into your mind and muscles at the slightest inkling of trouble. Mars closed his eyes and saw the black of his eyelids.
         The maximum security unit was crowed, it had become more crowed with each passing month of Mars's sentence. The new inmates where called fish. Mars was glad that he was no longer a fish. The incoming fish had gotten softer with the advent of the screens. Those who had been on the inside a while couldn't have been happier with this development. It meant quite a few things became easier to procure. Sex, recruits for gangs, and drug mules all came easier as the size and viciousness of those put in maximum rolled steadily on towards ridiculous.
         The hierarchy was becoming more and more defined by those who where doing time pre-screen and those put in post-screen. Mars was a few important things that kept him alive. He was big, six-two two-forty, he was well entrenched as a leader of a white gang, he was also intelligent and keenly aware of others weaknesses...chemical, psychological, or physical and he would exploit them to his full advantage if crossed. Yet he did not abuse his power, he was affable, funny, and easy to get along with...he did quite well from the looks of things.
...What a tragic little tale mine is. Full of disadvantage turned by sweet time and myself into one of anger...things function the way that they have to, not the way they should. The system taught me this lesson well, long ago and continues to teach it everyday in here...turning up the heat when necessary, as do I. Who are you to me? Who are any of you? A product, a system, a slave to the only construct that you know...I am no better, I live by the tyranny of rules to, more than you? no, just more closely held and deeper instilled. You break the rules to many times you just end up in here with me, I break one rule here...I die. Simple, deceptively simple...devil in the details. You don't have to believe a word I say to survive in this world but unfortunately I must believe every word that breaks from my lips in here because if I began to doubt, others would doubt me and then I would be just as defenseless as all the rest and that would be the ultimate tragedy.
         
         Green Things
         Atlas was outside watching the birds circle in the skies above the asylum. He was also curiously observing the distracted guards. They paid him little attention under normal circumstances due to his solitary nature. Yet Atlas studied them constantly in their apathy, an apathy that had become almost hostile in its nature since the screens had begun flashing. They talked in circled groups, clustered in unsure bodily positions that the uncomfortable take when their normal worlds are thrust full of the uncertainties of life that they fought with all their souls to hold at bay. Shifting eyes, unsure words, lips pursed with a thought frozen half finished. Atlas smiled and watched the two birds squabble on the brach of a spring green tree.
         Days rolled slowly past, Atlas in solitary study of his surroundings. With the passing days the number of guards, nurses, doctors, and staff dwindled. Those covering for the absent needed in turn to be covered and so things continued. Meds, meals, things ran as they always did but the weight of the outer worlds pains where beginning to crack through the bars and bricks of Arkum. Atlas felt pangs of longing to see exactly what was happening outside the walls. He wanted, needed to be a part of the chaos...he felt aquetly alive within the spreading fear of the staff. They where finally wearing their deep seeded fear of chaos, of the unknown on their surface and no amount of money, status, or denial would be able to hold the seeping fear and bay forever. They where finally falling prey to their own closed minded sanity and as a result Atlas's days where becoming less and less monotonous, in short the sun shone brighter as the fear spread.
.....I have spent years here waiting for something, waiting for something just like this. In my dreams, even in here beneath the haze of medication and monotony are pitched with the other...of the world that is after something like this. A time that I have known was coming for some time. A time in which everyone will have to rethink all those certainties of their lives, a time when each of us would have to be as a child and learn the rules of life anew. Learn how to live with conviction and zest, with real love and real need, with passion and fear fusing to become that which is ultimately life affirming, namely that life is interesting, deadly real, infinitely fragile, and seductively fleeting. Suddenly when pressed upon by forces that one does not understand, when chaos and lack of certainty, fear and seeming hopelessness, death and decay...real, real things are up close and will not back away even before closed eyes and choking have-measures one must change or be overwhelmed by them....I changed a very long time ago and for that I am eternally grateful to the nature of things....
         
Burning Beds
         Things where coming undone within the walls of Arkum. Atlas knew that soon it would be time for him to make his move, the biggest move of all, the move to the outside world that was now open to chaos again. He wanted to create beauty in what he felt where the final days in human history. He finally felt that he would become a part of the history of art and beauty, the dream that had kept him believing and alive for so long even in the crushing monotony of his days.
         Atlas always felt that special chill in his spine in the presence of great art, music, and literature. He felt it in old books, in museums, in the stories of the great creators of this worlds history who against all odds had made there place in a world that had tried desperately to marginalize them. He felt a kinship with them, he could not explain it but he knew above all else that he was one of them and that his own time would come and now that time was beginning.
         Atlas began taking in the details of which doors where being locked less often, noticing when carelessness resulted from the fatigue of the overworked staff, when they slept, where they left there keys. He did all this with great care and without bringing notice to himself. So, he read, wrote and studied as usual but only half hardly with the wisps of freedoms flow dragging hope closer with each passing day.
....I can't think about all of the rest right now. I can't make this into a crusade to save everyone in here. I must be selfish now to make escape and survival possible for any of us. I must think small, small and exact. There are times for grad schemes, this is not that time. You drove us underground, drove us out of your culture...branded with the letter of the undesirable and made it impossible to re-assimilate and you expect what? thanks? sedate acceptance? remorse? Never!...the kind of never that you use to justify the sick, self-indulgent culture that you have created. Admit that you where wrong and I will admit my wrongs but the one thing to which I will always cling, the thing the I will never surrender is my belief that it isn't a sin to be glad that I'm alive. At least I'm searching for purity even in my missteps...certain things mean everything and the greatest sin of this world is that those things...beauty...freedom...art...experimentation...magic...expression...questioning...dreaming...These are the very things that the big, almighty god dollar has no place for and therefore those of us who spend our lives in pursuit of something better than what we where given are damned to live in a nebulous, grey place of secrecy and fear. This will change now, it has begun, your pictures are flashing across the screens right this very moment. I can wait you out. I can watch you all fall at each others hands waiting to be saved. No one is coming to help! You can count on that and only that. You had your time...jokes and martinis...SUV's and hotubs, it's all crashing down and you are so numb to the magic and survival inherent in the searching soul that you are defenseless.  Finally reduced to the insects you are, fighting over the bloated corpses of capitalism and greed...How does it taste?

Welcome Chaos

         Atlas walked out of the front gates of Arkum into blinding sunlight. Smoke began to fill the air about five miles out. Hungry dogs roamed the streets, their eyes both pleading and hostile, Atlas gave them a wide birth. He noticed the obvious chaos but the obvious was for them, they could have it still. He needed things to get to where he was planing to go, to do the things that he planned to do. Head down, eyes up he grabbed the first and the heaviest broken pipes he came across, everything new must begin where it must.
...I need Hermes wings, his glib toung, his double meanings and thrill to confuse and convey. They will come, the others...like me. I just need to survive long enough. Create something different in the wake of all this. Let them do as they will but we all need to eat and defend as we begin to rebuild a small place in the rubble. Soon enough all the hordes of the norms will be gone, they where never built for this...culture, they themselves convinced themselves long ago that this would, could never come...now that it has, they know not how to live in chaos even for short periods. To them death is preferable to that which they can not comprehend. I must start simple, hide my means of living, my means of creating. They killed who I was long ago and this is the ultimate advantage, I can be anyone, anything at any given time. The exertion of will in chaos to create. A library will do nicely. The images and accumulated knowledge of a dying society. All that I need lay within me for from within in can influence those who will come. Moment to moment this creates itself through me, all that I know, all that I will learn, all the dream whispers of the years of solitude...the sun is warm, the smoke is thick, the time is now.
...There is a problem...God, all those years in study and silence with youth wasting away, I am tired now. Tired on the verge of sickness. No, that is not the entire truth it is more like I once was a character, I was playing a great role in a great tragedy...I still remember all the lines, every movement that was required to make me great...the play closed in the twilight drugged sentence to which I was committed. I am an actor without a role now and this frightens me like broken glass under bear feet. Vi-cereal fear, vomitious fear, a lost searching fear that I never had an inkling could exist. I never thought it could exist because I was up until now always young and youth makes things easier to believe, makes the impossible seem mearly unfulfilled...now the simple ache of my legs when there should be none brings everything into question. I should find a building soon. There are only a few hours of daylight left and now is not the time for the tragic romanticisising of my position. I am a man, a lone man in a hostile environment and soon darkness will fall on a world that is paranoid, violent, and alien. Now is the time for simple thoughts...this I must work on and work quickly, my very nature of living in the abstract, living in quotes and in art. All this will only become art long after I am gone, most likely not even then but if I am going to cary through and make all those lost years mean something it starts with a roof, warmth, food, and this pipe of iron and the unflinching will to use it knowing that I am right.

Forgotten Memories

         ...The funny thing is that I don't remember how. Funny,funny like suicide. I had ideas, so many ideas and plans. Every dream was brilliant even in sleep and now? It becomes a matter of faith...faith in the fact that I am one who does possess "it", the intangible, that all my manic drive, dreams, skill, focus, will has not been stripped from me...some dead rabbit hanging in a Manhattan window still covered in fur distended for the knife and board. I just have to keep moving and hope that it awakens, once and future self. That mindless essesssnse that could sit hour after darkening hour and create scenes that should never have been and yet needed to be so badly that I was chosen to bring them reality. However false, fleeting, all consuming a desire it must be...it will become again. Forgotten memories of some life lived or unlived can only hide, can only be in chronic non-exisistence for so long before you are forced to the blank page. A conduit for an art that is and always was utterly you, waiting for you to become it, the scene inside yourself that is life,art.
...After time, much time the abstract becomes simple, the simple abstract. So much uncertainty in all of this, in my mind...atrified by time and suggestion. Why haven't I stopped at a liquor store yet? A pharmacy? Found a women?...I have a feeling that these will all find me soon enough, time has passed but I am still me. That most elusive of all ideas, me, the one thing I will always have...hated,unwanted...treasured,revered...memories, scars, nightmares, joyous memories of simple smells that bring to mind stories and times more complex than I will ever have the time to commit to paper. Everything wrapped up in so many things, people, places, tastes, ideas, visions. The most terrifying things, always so simple. Just one line, just one true sentence would make all the bars, years, pills, lies, betrayals worth something. This world needs something new, not recycled me. It needs a new way. I need to transcend myself, my knowledge and memories. I must become something in spite of myself and yet all the weight of accumulated experience must be crouching behind some far off mountain tapping its fingers and nodding its head...knowing that it will never be needed but that it can never die because everything, this new world and all of us who will populate it require its existence and I ever vigilant with the knowledge that I want it all to break through, that I am the tapping fingers...more simply, starting over is heavy on the soul. The sun is setting purple, red streaks...the moon rising in hidden silver pools and it's time to rest and eat. To much thought, still in solitude. Soon the first of them will begin to show themselves and finally less me will fill my world.


Someone

         It was dusk on empty streets. Dusk streets...almost empty in the setting sun. Atlas spotted a girl, a woman, he couldn't tell yet as he tried to make out the form of the body in the black dress beneath the short blond hair. He moved slowly but deliberately, in plain sight and making plain noise. She was gathering up any fruit that was still ripe form half barrels tilted and sitting as they must have for years beneath the overhang of a convenience store.
         A woman, definitely a woman...full figured and striking filling out that black dress that seemed to be wearing, scared by successive days. She heard his approach and only continued with her fruit. The confidence of the insane or the well prepared, to Atlas her movements suggested the latter. When he was within thirty yards she stood up straight and put her hand on her hip, the bag of fruit lay at her feet. The pose accentuated her curves, the natural singularity of her short blond hair and the facial features that one associates with them. Atlas was a bit dumbstruck as if he where approaching a movie star from the forties, so as not to appear completely feebleminded or rude he managed a small wave and a nod...at that moment he nearly lost his balance, light-headed, elated at the sight of her green eyes. She smiled and mimicked his wave, her head tilting slightly,mockingly to the right.
...Those green green eyes taking me in so wholly and simply. Assessing, judging, wondering with quick ticks...no cold stare, she has been on the streets for some time, before the screens. She knows the power of her looks, rightly knowing my obvious attraction. Quick hard look into my eyes to confirm her analysis of who I might be, of what danger, of what I want, and seemingly more importantly what, if anything, I have to offer. It is in this quickness, offset by stoic beauty, and made real by the quirks of her manic movements that told me what I needed. I needed a partner and in her I was sure that I had found one.
....He is in love with me. He is no danger, conventionally anyway. Stoic eyes but wet, that wet blue that exudes intelligence but intelligence with need. The eyes move like camera lenses, focusing and backing off for clarity and tact. Educated, emotionally lost, a dreamer, but the rare kind who can and will implement dreams even against all odds and all reason. What does he want from me? Sex? well yes he is still young and seemingly intact but not just that, well that but later. The confusion, silence, embarrassment at his approach, intelligence, physical strength, lack of supplies?...Thats it, it has to be. He doesn't necessarily want me, he needs me. He needs a partner, he was institutionalized. Alone, locked in his thoughts and now the world is free again. A world in which his own mind can be all that it was never allowed to be but its been to long and he sees the streets in me, he sees enough of himself in me but he also sees survival in a world that has become lost on him over time. His eyes are beautiful, I has been too long, alone, wondering, twitching and looking over my shoulder. He will work. He will work just fine and I want to see the tick of his mouth and the blue of his eyes when he realizes that I'll go along with him.
         She put her hand on his shoulder, flipped her blond hair, and looked into his eyes. "I'm Jasmine and things get boring out her, alone that is. I know a place where we can stay tonight. You O.K. with that?"
         "Couldn't be more O.k., my names Atlas and thank you. I saw you reading it in my eyes."
Jasmine smiled and took the bag of apples in one hand, Atlas's in the other and she lead them slowly down the road shooting Atlas a soft smile.

Partners

         After a quarter mile or so their hands separated as Atlas fell behind to take in his surroundings. He failed miserably, he could only watch her walk...determined, graceful perfect symmetry in her leg muscles and blond hair being simply touched at the edges by the breeze. She turned every once in a while, he would pretended not to be looking, she would pretend not to notice but couldn't help allowing her mouth to smile sideways. The game continued, changed slightly with the blocks and what one would notice changing about the other. They where both subtle masters of body language and it didn't take long for each to realize this about the other. Clouds shifted, hips shuffled, eyes brightened, hands to hips, a finger tracing its own neck, time passing and finally a three story house..."We're here."
         Jasmine led Atlas up the flaking white wooden stairs in the back of the house. Atlas traced his hand over the railing as Jasmine let him know that she had been staying here for just over nine months. This caught his attention and halted his hand, he was struck because the house betrayed no sign of being lived in from the outside. Seemingly, deceptively abandoned to the eye, he knew that one could only remain relatively safe if no one knew that you existed. They where also heading for the third floor meaning that Jasmine knew that even if the house where stumbled upon by other squatters or worse, that they would take one of the first two floors as they where larger and easier to access. He again began to run his hand over the railing even as Jasmine opened the door and waved him on. He smiled, took two stairs at a time, and entered enchanted.
         Jasmine, without a word, waved both arms in a gesture of welcome and pride. Atlas's eyes widened, the room was a decadent scream of stimulation. The walls buzzed with decoration, posters of stars of every conceivable musical genre, boas, flapper hats, tin signs of the 20's, gun racks with guns, panties, cigarette boxes, fur coats, splashes of paint, a guitar, clocks (deco to gothic), paintings (seemingly original), hubcaps, street signs, and seemingly at this swirling center a small picture of Jasmine herself blowing a kiss...seemingly to all the accumulated art and garbage of history.
         A cream colored four post bed sat in one corner and Jasmine moved towards it, her supple feline indifference growing with each step. Scripted and honest in intent and meaning she reached the bed, she sat, crossed her legs as the black silk of her dress climbed thies as if on command. Turning to the wall she grabbed one of the 20's esque flapper hats and carefully placed it on her head. It's purple top fit perfectly, its black lace border almost obscuring one green eye...all framing her beauty of feature with back blond bobs of hair.
         Atlas stayed in place, moving only his right leg forward, bending it slightly for comfort. He watched her with everything he had, watched her as if this had all been scripted for him and him alone. His mind was overloaded even as it was overjoyed. All the pleasure circuits where being bombarded and yet he was at the same time realizing how off balance and squed his perceptions must be having been on mind numbing medication for so many years and only now having his mind begin to clear and refocus. Concentrate, don't concentrate, you know...use your intuition...your innate understanding of human behavior, psyscologhy, movement, influx of voice, timing.
         Jasmine turned her head from side to side pouting her lips as much for herself as for Atlas.
         "You like?"
         "How could I not? Your stunning. Can you dance? You know jitterbug?"
Jasmine was taken aback by the question as it shifted a little of the seductive power away from her alone. She stroked her long neck from hair bob to cleavage before speaking, "I think I can manage a little something"
Serpentine, she rose and glided towards her record player, smiling downward all the while. Music jumped and purred forth, she snapped her fingers and motioned for Atlas to come towards her. His aquward walk gave way to a swinging, driving pulse of living notes. The took each other in their arms and danced, kissing bodies through the blue black night.
         Hours later their intertwined legs, arms, naked slipped out from under the beautiful cream covers of her scavenged four post bed. It seemed that night, beneath roof and moon that humanities hope was reborn and for at least the two of them it was.

Dawning

         Waking next to another, bliss swift and palpable. The sun streaming in the back east window, marking floor and glowing on the walls colored decorations. Golds, burning reds, sweet sweet oranges and soothing blue and their eyes opened with a questionioning, astonished caring/lust. Jasmine kissed his forehead. Atlas responded in turn by taking her hand and gently moving over her wrist. She smiled, leg drifting up and over his, she left her short hair gently hanging shagged and bobbed now becoming backlight with the rising sun. Atlas's head lay slightly below hers forcing his longing eyes upward, he noted the weakness of his position and accepted it. She grabbed his head and pulled it into her just beneath her chin. Again a kiss to the forehead with a dead world sitting in sullen silence. Gentle caresses, quick looks, smiles, crooked smiles, crooked smiles and bright eyes, soft bodies and time gentle as never before. Atlas sat up half way after the better part of an hour, leaned on his elbow and gently rubbed back Jasmines hair. She cooed and stretched, they kissed and without a word they now knew that the day must begin in ernest.