[original] cityscape
The world is white and lonely.
The first step Dominic takes here ripples in the emptiness. He feels like he has desecrated this place, like he has spoiled a white canvas with a monstrous smear of black paint. He has wasted its potential. When Dominic blinks, skyscrapers puncture city fog and the ground is unforgiving black tarmac beneath his naked feet. Snow feathers down towards the only occupant in this metropolis.
The world is white and lonely.
-so move.
The words aren’t his and they bubble through the silence, barely masking laughter. His body lurches ungracefully into movement and propels him forwards, his feet slap against the road one after the other. He should be thinking ‘What am I doing here?’ but instead thinks ‘Why is someone else here?’, as though he has always known this urban kingdom is his.
His legs lead him down an unmoving escalator, one that makes him cling to the sticky plastic handrail in fear of a sudden, mechanical, jerk into motion. As long as he keeps moving he’ll be fine. The jagged metal teeth bite into his feet. As long as he keeps moving he’ll be fine. He doesn’t let go of the handrail until he reaches the bottom and his hands leave incriminating fingerprints.
He passes like a spectre into a deserted cinema, drifting past the ticket booth, then the concessionary stand, then the first of the cinema houses. And for the first time, there’s music and there’s noise, and maybe there’s another person here in this white, lonely world. His pace quickens when it should slow in suspicion.
The sounds come from House Number Fifteen. He steps inside, the floor warm and carpeted beneath the soles of his feet, and light spills onto his snow-numbed cheeks. A movie plays regardless of its non-existent audience. Dominic stares.
A voice bubbles through the silence, barely masking laughter. “It’s lonely, isn’t it?”
He scans the seats, finding a brunette woman sitting in the middle of the cinema house. He wonders how he could have missed her. She smiles at him and tilts her head in a way that speaks of years of friendship, effortless years of familiarity. Dominic approaches her, but lingers in the aisle a safe distance away from her.
“Lonely?” Dominic repeats her before he can help himself. The word rolls awkwardly off his tongue, like a curse word in a language he lacks the accent for.
She shrugs. “You know. Being in an empty cinema.”
He has always reacted defensively when he doesn’t want to understand. “I’m not lonely.”
She smiles at him, tossing a piece of popcorn into her mouth. “Of course not, not anymore. You do have to be alone to be lonely, after all.”
Then she returns her attention to the movie screen, as though she hasn’t shattered the first barrier between them.
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When the white walls of his hospital prison bleed into the delineated edges of his empty city, it doesn’t surprise him that his mind has dragged him away, that it’s forced him here now. Somewhere else, somewhere in reality, the sickness is eating away at Dominic as the morphine dissipates into his incompetent bloodstream and his nerves shatter like glass bottles. In reality, he only has less than a month left in his hospital prison. He is curled into a ball and every muscle in his body hurts. But Agony can’t follow him here to his mindscape, there is only-
- the words had sliced open raw insecurities, because maybe he didn’t know himself so well and she knew him better it’s lonely, isn’t it? -
-loneliness.
He takes the first step, as he has once before. It is still snowing here, here in his empty city, and he wonders absentmindedly if it ever stops.
-only if you want it to.
The woman’s bubbling voice returns and fills the streets, racing up the sides of skyscrapers and coiling around him protectively. Dominic relaxes because he is not alone and she is still here, she is still here as he has secretly hoped she would be. His feet move, leading him again through deserted city blocks, down the unmoving escalator and into House Number Fifteen.
Dominic recognises the movie this time. “James Bond?”
He is standing in the aisle again, a safe distance away. And she is there.
“‘James Bond: The Quantum of Solace’,” she clarifies. “A lot of people seem to hate it in comparison to the other movies, but I think the Bond Girl has more emotional depth than any of her predecessors.”
His lips twitch upwards in amusement. “People don’t like Bond movies because their Bond Girls have emotional depth. People watch them for sex and violence.”
“Is that why you watch them?” she asks, tossing a piece of popcorn into her mouth.
“I haven’t watched any of them. I’ve just seen posters.”
“Yeah, you seem like the horror movie type.”
He thinks he should be offended but isn’t. Compared to all the carefully roundabout explanations and stiff silences he’s become accustomed to, her blunt honesty is refreshing.
They stand in silence. Onscreen, the Bond Girl is curled into a ball and every muscle in her body hurts. Flames eat away at the world around her and her end seems inevitable. Dominic knows she will die alone.
Something lodges in his throat. His voice is weaker than he thought it would be. “I’m going to die.”
The movie rolls on. The Bond Girl shakes onscreen, but she does not cry.
“I’m going to die,” he repeats.
He wants to laugh at the irony; the words only seem true away from reality. He wants to laugh until his cheeks hurt and his stomach burns, until his eyes water and his body shakes because it feels like forever since anyone has last laughed. He feels like he has taken their laughter from them and he doesn’t know how to give it back.
Dominic begins, “Who are you?”
Something flickers in her eyes. Her voice gusts from her lips, as though she has been desperate to tell him all along. “Rhamiel. I’m Rhamiel.”
The crimson blur and crash of the movie screen wrenches their attention from each other. They watch as James Bond tears into the burning room and finds the Bond Girl whose end seems inevitable, who shakes but doesn’t cry.
And he saves her.
Dominic wants to say something. He isn’t good with words. He wishes that for once in his life he were his brother so he can say exactly what he needs to say and nothing more, or even his mother who says too much but is always understood. He needs to say something because Rhamiel understands and Rhamiel is hurting too.
Dominic says nothing. He sits down in the first of the cinema seats and they stay there until the movie credits roll off the screen and the houselights are revived, and then they sit in silence.
They are only three seats away.
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Reality has finally breached Dominic’s mental sanctuary.
He can feel Agony beneath his flimsy flesh, thrumming beneath his skin like a terrorist in civilian’s clothes. It’s slight and only troubles him when he breathes too deeply, but he knows the monster will grow, and it will fester, and it will rot him from the inside out. It has found him again. He is not safe anymore. His kingdom has become a prison and it closes in on him from all sides. The pavements are strewn with rubbish and the air is chlorine gas. Streets are missing where they should be and the walk to the cinema is too short.
It disturbs him.
Rhamiel pats the seat beside her, eyes glued to another movie Dominic doesn’t recognise. He approaches her, but is careful not to sit where she has indicated. He sits two seats away from her. Neither of them are watching the movie, but rather waiting for the other to say something. The silence stretches between them, and then snaps.
“What’s happening outside?” he asks her.
Her smile dulls. “You’ve noticed the change already?”
“The city…it feels different. It feels darker. Colder.”
“This city is your body. As you grow weaker, the more the city will begin to change,” Rhamiel explains.
He remembers the dark, clouded windows and the flaking skin of greying buildings. His city is suffering. His city is dying. “So the city dies as I do?”
“It’ll fade away. Parts of it will start to deteriorate and disappear, more and more each time, until…”
“And this cinema? When will it disappear?” he asks.
(when will you disappear?)
She looks at him. “It will be the very last thing to go.”
Dominic nods heavily. His head sinks forwards before hauling itself back up again. The action is just a movement, an attempt to camouflage the tidal wave of insecurity and fear that is drowning him, but then Rhamiel pulls him to the surface and teaches him to breathe again.
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“When the cinema disappears,” Dominic begins, “what will happen to you?”
The silver screen flicker haunts Rhamiel features, shuddering, shuddering. “I don’t know.”
“Will we both go to heaven, or wherever it is you go when you die?”
“You don’t have to worry about that. You’ll be fine.”
“You’re not answering my question. What will happen to you?”
He sees the calm expression drop from her face like eggshells into water, and she returns to the movie onscreen. They’re watching a comedy this time and the juxtaposition is too much for Dominic.
She laughs too hard at a joke that could have been wittier, digging her hand into the bag full of popcorn. The cloud-like pieces crumble in her fingers as she crushes them. “I don’t know.”
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Dominic used to be able to differentiate between his city and his hospital room, but they have begun to jar against one another in stark blacks and whites. There are cold machines and tentacle tubes, there are holes in the endless sky and rubble in the streets. Then there are bed sheet white walls and empty visitors’ chairs, there are carcasses of buildings and cracks in the windows. The hospital room has never changed, but his city is almost gone.
He is almost gone.
Agony has become one long unending scream that he no longer has the strength to voice. It rips through his muscles and grates against his lungs, but somehow he finds the will to keep moving. His feet lead him to House Number 15 and he imagines Rhamiel’s bubbling voice through the walls. He strains forwards, tearing through the theatre doors and searching wildly for Rhamiel.
He doesn’t find her.
His vision blurs and a wave of hurt robs his strength from him. His knees smash against the edge of a luminous step but the pain no longer registers as he curls his hands into fists. Dominic has to remind himself to keep breathing inoutinoutinout and he presses his forehead against the rough carpeting, his teeth grinding into enamel dust as he hears his heartbeat in his ears, slamming, slamming slamming-
A hand curves around his shoulder. “Dominic.”
Arms fold around him. Fingers comb through his hair. Another heart beats.
He thinks he cries.
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SCREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEECH-
The machines howl around Dominic, screaming out for his salvation but for all the icy hands on his skin, the machines have no choice but to continue. He can’t - won’t - stay here and every muscle in his body fights against Agony, the only force chaining him to reality. He thrashes and screams, the hospital cot moaning beneath him like a demon mid-exorcism, but cold fingers continue to force him down. He wants to go home to his broken city, he wants to see House Number 15, he wants to see Rhamiel.
He needs to go home.
He needs to go home.
The burn of the fluorescent lights through his thin eyelids blinds him. He opens his eyes and there is no hospital ward, there are no more machines, but the apocalypse has come to his city. He stands, the only legend in an urban desert as the world deconstructs around him. The buildings and the streets are unravelling like tapestries into strings and the process is swallowing the entire city, chasing after him with a resolve-shattering roar.
- will we both go to heaven? her starburst fear tore her invincibility to shreds -
He runs.
His nervous system rakes its talons through his body and his bare feet slap, slap, slap against the ground. He should be thinking ‘What am I doing here?’ but instead knows ‘I have to be here’, as though he has known all along that everything will end in his urban kingdom, this place that he loves and is so proud of.
His legs lead him down an unmoving escalator and he doesn’t cling to the sticky plastic handrail because his safety no longer comes first. He’s scared he’s not going to make it to Rhamiel in time. He hears the gritty churn of road tarmac being torn from the ground as buildings surrounding the cinema rip apart and explode into nothingness. He’s scared he’s not going to make it to Rhamiel in time.
He reaches the bottom and he flies past the ticket booth, then the concessionary stand, then the first of the cinema houses. And the cinema house is dead and it’s silent and he is running faster, faster and his breaths come in short gasps.
He sees House Number Fifteen. The escalator screeches as its steps are wrenched upwards and destruction is too close, the end is too near, so he throws himself inside. The carpeted floor soaks up the blood leaking from his torn feet and the houselights flicker on and off, on and off. There is no interlude music blasting from the speakers and no buttery smell of popcorn, there is no movie projected onto the wall but there is a brunette staring up at an empty screen-
He tries to call Rhamiel’s name. His throat is thick. He can hear the destruction of the concession stand, the smash and rip of metal and carpeting. And he and Rhamiel remind him violently of piano keys, contrasts in every single way that work, and he wishes he could tell her all of this and more. The words won’t come. The words won’t come.
“Rhamiel,” he calls out.
She turns.
It hurts him to see her expression, to see the fear etched so clearly into the slash of her mouth, the knit of her brows. But then her features tremble and cast away the mould they had been encased in. His chest burns as her eyes glaze over, as she stifles her breathing.
He can’t breach the distance. “It’s lonely, isn’t it?”
“Lonely?” Her voice breaks- it doesn’t bubble.
He hears the roar of the theatre houses outside, apocalypse approaches. “You know. Being in an empty cinema.”
Neither one of them says a word.
Then he spreads his arms wide and she runs to him.
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Notes on Cityscape
So yeah Cityscape was never intended to be a piece about death, it just turned out that way. It was always intended to be a piece about loneliness and overcoming it with someone else and how they can motivate you to change. I also wanted it to show that that sense of motivation and strength that you take from a person also goes the other way.
I wrote this with the idea of the cityscape being Dominic's reaction to his loneliness and the reality of his illness. I still haven't decided whether or not the cityscape and Rhamiel are psychological or not but to be honest I don't think it really matters. Although Rhamiel and Dominic's relationship was initially intended to be romantic I left it ambiguous cause I wanted to show that love and selflessness comes from mutual understanding and trust not necessarily romance. I used a lot of repetition particularly in the rhythm and phrases of the opening of the pieces at the end of the the piece in order to help show in its circularity that Rhamiel needs Dominic as much as he needs her.
Inspirations:
- The Man with Night Sweats by Thom Gunn
- limbo from Christopher Nolan's Inception
- A Million Little Pieces by James Frey