Story for performance #46
webcast from Paris at 09:25PM, 05 Aug 05

on the auction block
Source: Mark Landler, ‘Uneasy passage for Turkish economy’, New York Times in International Herald Tribune online, 05/08/05
Tags: dystopia
Writer/s: Frazer Ward

Scraping woke him, but not the inevitable sand blowing against the window above him. He rolled over on the floor and sat up, looking through the legs of an old man, a pair of glasses askew, otherwise naked, his hand wrapped in the corner of the sheet of plastic he was evidently using to drag around a small pile of books. Bargelt, who had seen an old trolley on its side, in a pile of books and sand between the stacks, thought the old man at best inefficient. One thing about the end of civilization was that you couldn’t do anything you wanted; use running water or electricity, say. At the same time, you could do anything you wanted. You definitely didn’t have to talk to someone if you didn’t want. Not making any sudden movements, he picked up his pack and walked out past the abject old man.

For a while, in the wandering about, he had kept an eye out for someone to kill, thinking it might orient him to the times, but the appeal of making himself over like that had worn off. Anyway, civilization as we know it looked like it was beginning to reconstitute itself. Roving, roiling packs of teenagers would fall upon unwary travelers and beat them to death, rape the women, paint themselves in blood. And there were the farmer’s markets, ironically named, no one knew whether or when the ground would grow anything, and the sandstorms were getting worse. People bartered whatever they’d found or made, cans of food, a sock to make a pair, tools, always cigarettes, every now and then precious booze, and everyone gave away the gossip and hearsay that passed for information. Bargelt had once found a carton of cigarettes, somehow gone unnoticed in the rubble of a supermarket, now eked them out when he had to, made each one look like his last. Cleaned-up kids from one of the packs had been insistent, trying to trade strips of pemmican on the edges of the last market he’d passed, but no one was buying, suspecting what animal they’d be eating. Not yet, anyway, but people were already skinny. Was it just as well or not, Bargelt wondered dryly, that weapons worse than blades didn’t work any more.

He was heading south. The latest rumor in the markets came in two parts. It said there was food growing in the south, then it said that the far side of the Panama canal was barricaded clear across. For fifty miles, some said, eighty or a hundred, said others. Not one to get carried away, Bargelt recognized this as a fantasy. But after all, there was nowhere else to go, it would take forever, and he’d probably end up on some different path, along the way. No time like the present, it amused him to think. No time but the present. He started walking every day a couple of hours before dawn, until he had to get inside in the afternoons to avoid the sandstorms. He liked to sleep in libraries. Aside from the crazy old man, he’d hardly ever seen anyone, and the kids had no use for books. Bargelt could read, and would in the afternoon light, novels, and histories that read like novels. Sometimes he thought he’d come upon some municipal library and find it bustling, people trying to work out how to make an engine, a boat, anything at all, but it hadn’t happened.

Compasses unreliable, inland become mythically, Bargelt was sure, treacherous, he picked his way south through the remains of the vast east coast Urb. Occasionally other pilgrims appeared, usually alone, usually men, rarely a woman all but disguised as a man, once a bedraggled family of four, pushing their poor belongings and the youngest, wild-haired child in a shopping trolley. Bargelt gave them a wide berth, as he did the occasional precinct guarded by men clutching knives, clubs, or once in what had been Maryland broken bottles. What they cared to guard, for a long time he had no idea. He scrounged, got by, chewed on sticks on days when he couldn’t find anything else.

In the north, by some consensus, the farmer’s markets were neutral zones: anyone but the vicious kids could come and go, fights were taken to a boundary line. It was south of the ruins of somewhere called Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, where Bargelt first had to give up a cigarette to enter the market. Hot and hungry, approaching along the beach, he saw that he could skirt the crude wooden post-and-lintel gate, manned by three guards and a collector with a basket for the loot, but they were marking people’s hands, so had some kind of organization inside. Bargelt knew something was up when he tried to trade an aluminum foil plate he’d found and cleaned up, an attractive deal for half a can of sardines. The man looked at him like he was an idiot. Bargelt wearily gave up another cigarette. Time to go, threading his way through the market. Nearing its center someone grabbed his wrist from the side, dropped it as he pulled away and looked around. The surly teenage boy had been checking for the mark on his hand, he realized: they’d somehow turned the kids into cops. Carefully, he raised his hand for the boy to see, who nodded. Bargelt turned to leave and saw how they must have tamed them. On a patch of sand at the center of the market, ringed by the pack, an older man with a machete at his waist held a rope that tied two naked women at the wrists. Before him stood a dozen men and one woman; several of the men with knives at their waists, one with broken bottles hanging from a string; the woman with a Stanley knife in a carpenter’s belt. Tersely, quietly, because it was evidently complicated, calculating the equivalences among cigarettes, tools, and food, they bid on the women.

Adapted for performance by Barbara Campbell from a story by Frazer Ward.