Warm Bodies by Isaac Marion

Author:Isaac Marion
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: CCV Digital
Published: 2011-03-06T10:43:09.296000+00:00

The sports arena Julie calls home is unaccountably large, perhaps one of those dual-event ‘super-venues’ built for an era when the greatest quandary facing the world was where to put all the parties. From the outside there is nothing to see but a mammoth oval of featureless walls, a concrete Ark that not even God could make float. But the interior reveals the Stadium’s soul: chaotic yet grasping for order, like the sprawling slums of Brazil if they’d been designed by a modernist architect.

All the bleachers have been torn out to make room for an expansive grid of miniature skyscrapers, rickety houses built unnaturally tall and skinny to conserve the limited real estate. Their walls are a hodgepodge of salvaged materials – one of the taller towers begins as concrete and grows flimsier as it rises, from steel to plastic to a precarious ninth floor of soggy particle board. Most of the buildings look like they should collapse in the first breeze, but the whole city is supported by rigid webs of cable running from tower to tower, cinching the grid tight. The Stadium’s inner walls loom high over everything, bristling with severed pipes, wires, and spikes of rebar that sprout from the concrete like beard stubble. Under-powered street lamps provide dim orange illumination, leaving this snow-globe city smothered in shadows.

The moment I step out of the entry tunnel my sinuses inflame with an overwhelming rush of life-smell. It’s all around me, so sweet and potent it’s almost painful; I feel like I’m drowning in a perfume bottle. But in the midst of this thick haze, I can sense Julie. Her signature scent peeks out of the noise, calling out like a voice underwater. I follow it.

The streets are the width of sidewalks, narrow strips of asphalt poured over the old AstroTurf, which peeks through any unpaved gaps like garish green moss. There are no names on the street signs. Instead of listing off states or presidents or varieties of trees, they display simple white graphics – Apple, Ball, Cat, Dog – a child’s guide to the alphabet. There is mud everywhere, slicking the asphalt and piling up in corners along with the detritus of daily life: pop cans, cigarette butts, used condoms and bullet shells.

I am trying not to gawk at the city like the backwoods tourist I am, but something beyond curiosity is gluing my attention to every kerb and rooftop. As foreign as it all is to me, I feel a ghostly sense of recognition, even nostalgia, and as I make my way down what must be Eye Street, some of my stolen memories begin to stir.

This is where we started. This is where they sent us when the coasts disappeared. When the bombs fell. When our friends died and rose as strangers, unfamiliar and cruel.

It’s not Perry’s voice – it’s everyone’s, a murmuring chorus of all the lives I’ve consumed, gathering in the dark lounge of my subconscious to reminisce.

Flag Avenue, where they planted our nation’s colours, back when there were still nations and their colours mattered.

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