Speaker 1: This program is intended for mature audiences only.
Speaker 2: You are now listening to Observable Radio.
Speaker 1: Hi there, it's Cameron Suey. This month, we're bringing you
another older story, a longer tale that's both a love
letter to San Francisco and a reason for leaving. Season
two is still coming later this year. For more information,
we're giving monthly updates for free on our Patreon, and
we'd love to see you there. And now, after our
brief word from the observerle Radio Company Store, here's tonight's story.
I lived so long with it, I didn't realize there
could be another way, you know, But it was just
so cold all the time. I don't remember a time
I didn't feel like I was freezing. And it wasn't
my hands, or my feet or even my head. It
was like I couldn't keep my body warm no matter
what I did. And then my doctor told me about.
Speaker 3: Shirts with a shirt like a tower operator shirt at
the Observable Radio Company Store, you'll never suffer from a
regular torso insulation. Again, ask your doctor if shirts are
right for you. Shirts stop being cold. You are now
by from Observable.
Speaker 2: Radio Mapping the Crooked Places When I emerged from a
decade beneath the waves of my private sea. My parents
were dead and gone. With the clarity I had not
experienced since my youth, I drifted, like an airborne seed
through the city. I fell in love not with my
fellow man, but with the place's men, gather with a
small fortune, the life, insurance and inheritance that churned but
modest guilt inside me. I put down gossamer roots into
a dozen places across San Francisco, staying only long enough
to satisfy my curious new desire for belonging, before again
taking to the breeze. In every place I settled, I
drew a map, dreamed a new metaphor. When I lived
in the shadows of the medical college, haunting bars filled
with sleep deprived and wild eyed doctors to be my
map of the city was like the organs and cells
in a body, a vascular system of roads, a nervous
system of wires, and the pale and textureless connective tissue between.
When I left the drafty coal valley flat for a
studio loft in the mission, I mapped the city as
a battleground, isolated camps of combatants brought together by common ideals,
surrounded by the rotting to militarized zones of cultural vacancy.
From a top floor apartment on Market Street, I saw
the city as a vast and productive farm, where I
surveyed each field, growing signature and airloom crops to be counted, stored,
and sold. Like any farm, there were fallow pieces between
the fields, cracked in rotting fences, and rusting abandoned machinery
in every place I settled. These nameless in between places,
The featureless, empty zones between the landmarks and neighborhoods filled
me with shivering unease, like mines without souls. The interstitial
burrows seemed on the verge of rotting away beneath my feet.
It was many months before I could admit why they
were the places that I had once sought out, gray
places filled with gray faces, where I once found quite
oblivion without judgment, the empty hollows of civilization that I
let suck so much of my life away. With the
veil now lifted, I did everything I could to avoid
them and their whispering temptations. Inside the vibrant neighborhoods where
I now made my homes, I would travel only by
foot or bike or fear that I would wall myself
away from the beauty. But when crossing the borderland I
needed the barriers of taxi cabs and train cars. The
empty places reeked of my disease and threatened to make
me ill. I passed through them only when need dictated
and my resolve was strongest. When my map of the
city and her identities grew dense, I had still not
found a place I felt I belonged, a place I
would want to truly live in. I imagined, like the
newborn that I was, that all the city's secrets were
known to me, and my love for her turned sour.
I flirted with the idea of starting again, picking another
of the world's greatest cities, and emerging, naked and fresh
into it yet another new life. In a fugue of
self pity, I forgot why I feared the hinterlands between
the hearts, and wandered into their blankness again and again.
I found outposts inside these places, where people gathered together
for heat, for light, for company, defiant against the bleakness
that surrounded them, although I could no more relate to
them than I could the denizens of the more desirable neighborhoods.
I found comfort in those places, not the comfort I craved,
but the comfort I remembered. It was there that I
could crouch on the precipice and peer back down into
my old obliette. An old, familiar voice whispered back from
the darkness, and I began to think echoes of old thoughts.
Perhaps I had ignored these places and much of the city,
so much of what truly made it, under false pretenses.
I had allowed the weakness of my own character to
cloak these misunderstood places and a my asthma of fear,
a fear that stemmed only from my own failings. With
renewed desire, I threw myself back into exploration, to again
be a cartographer, to map the crooked places that had
once held me in a different kind of thraw. I
could return to the shadow lands and see them for
what they really were, and I could pass through them,
unharmed and clear of mind, and continue my search. This
is what I told myself. I even believed it some
of the time. It was on this last leg of
my quest that I came upon the Tower. It stood
alone in a district that should have curled cold tendrils
of unease around my spine. The streets were empty and
clean in a way that suggested not constant attention but disuse,
and its only neighbors were warehouses and the pale shadows
of failing restaurants and cafes. I had seen it skeleton
from a dozen of my nests, or it had been
growing all the while, like the twisting branches of a
great stone and glass tree for the last half of
a decade. It should have filled me with loathing, artless
and empty, a featureless glass monolith designed to house the
young and wealthy, and those who were drawn to the
in between places for all the wrong reasons. But when
I encountered it, then, during that final phase of my exploration,
something inside it tugged at me, hooked me like a fish,
and never let go. Something high above the city streets
called out to me, singing to me alone. It was
an old song sung with a new voice. The sensation
was so familiar that I was scarcely aware of the
it felt by coming home. Nothing about the tower was beautiful,
I see that now, But I had written a check
a deposit for one of the sterile condos above me
before I realized that I had walked inside in that
familiar fog of desire. I knew one thing. I needed
to be on the upper stories, for the song came
from high above me. I convinced the corpulate building manager
of my need, and he cracked his wide grin bearing
twin rows of perfectly straight teeth, and assigned me a
unit on the top floor. I rode the elevator in
breathless anticipation and went straight to my first room. My
belongings and possessions were brought to me later, For once
I entered the tower, I only exited it once more
for good, nearly five months after. When I left, I
was free of the fog, free of my crooked need
to find the soul of the soulless places, free of
my love of cities and the places of men. I
was scoured clean, left raw and naked, every sensation amplified
and painful. I left with only my terror and my life,
although how much of that I retained is in question.
The first apartment spacious and empty. Rooms still smelled of
construction dust and antiseptic cleaners. One glass wall in each
room offered a sprawling view of the bay and the
crumbling docks, the last few vestiges of proper industry inside
the city's borders. I already understood that it was not
the view that my sudden, hot desire for elevation demanded,
was something else. Within moments, I also understood this. The
top floor was too high. Whatever I was drawn to
was now beneath me. I left the room and began
to descend the stairwell, the metal steps still covered in
powdered drywall. I felt the invisible draw in my lungs,
and the beating of my heart, and the crooked trail
of scars in my arms. It took a few floors
before the locus of my attraction was level with me,
and I entered a hallway that looked identical to the
one above. My fingers drifted up to the eastern wall
without thought, as so many of my actions had once
been and would become again. I paced the hallway and
I felt a pole down the length of my arm,
like a dowsing rod. I dragged my fingertips across the
rough texture. The hissing friction of fingers on plaster and
my soft footsteps on the carpet were the only sounds.
The air was redolent of paint and carpet glue. But
beneath it all, dancing in the air like a cracking whip,
was a thin thread of something sickly sweet, A night
blooming flower, a corpse on the border of rot. Was intoxicating.
I reached a door halfway down the hall, and my
legs froze, as if rooted to the spot on the
other side of the heavy wooden door. Just past my
raw fingertips lay the source of the call. I felt
an intense, delicious and anticipation, a nearly fulfilled desire, the
calm that comes just before the pinprick. No logic could explain,
nor language could describe what my mind yearned for. Or
although the sensations were familiar, the source of the song
behind the door was fundamentally alien and a thousand times stronger.
The sweet ache took root in the very structure of
my flesh and throbbed with my heart. I raised both hands,
fingers splayed wide in a lover's caress, and held my
body to the cool wood at the door. I had
to enter the room I needed to be inside. This
could only be the home that I had been searching for.
I looked up to the numbers twenty three nineteen, picked
out in delicate and filigreed gold numerals, and committed it
to memory, repeating them breathlessly. I knew, with a sharp pang,
that I would need to leave the doorway before I
could return to be fulfilled. I would offer any price,
I'd pay any cost, but I would cross the threshold.
I would go inside, and I would be made happy
and whole. I might have stayed fixed to that spot,
almost but not yet, touching my prize forever. But after
a long moment, through the warped glass bead of a
peep hole, light flared, shaking me from my trance. It
took me a fractured moment to understand. While I pressed
my body to the door, sighing with private intimacy, the
occupant of twenty three nineteen, the interloper, had been on
the other side, staring out. What kindled in me then
was not the polite embarrassment that good breeding and decency demanded,
but something more akin to sexual jealousy. But there was
more a violence. I felt boiling in my forearms and
cledged fists. Something beastial, cruel reason returned, and I relaxed,
secure in the knowledge that I had the means and
now the clarity to take what I needed in the
proper way, with no need for bloodshed. I grinned into
the looking glass. My eyes slidded with cold assurance. I
was not a man accustomed to being disappointed. The manager,
that perfect creature of the dead zones, merely furrowed his
brows when I returned, holding out my check book. The
room was indeed taken. It was the first chosen by
the very first occupant. He made clumsy jokes at first,
not seeing the clarity of my need desire made me
needle sharp. I offered to buy out the occupant. I
offered to buy the whole building. In the end, the
best I could do was place my name first on
a waiting list. In the meantime, I moved my deposit
to a new room twenty two nineteen, where I could
wait just below and bide my time until the occupant
could be persuaded. I never unpacked, even though I had
the contents of my previous beachside flat shipped to me
great expense. I lived out of boxes, on minimal furniture,
and subsisted entirely on delivered food twenty two nineteen was
close enough to the wet and living beacon above me
to act as a temporary salve, and for a while
I thought it might be enough. Simply being there filled
me with a kind of contentedness that I had only
dreamt of my previous life. The wandering cartography of the
invisible borders was over, for I had found what I
had been searching for. I would lie on the floor,
eyes drifting between the floor to ceiling windows and then
to the neutral texture of the roof above, trying to
see through the city beyond held no meaning for me
any longer. If I wished, I could still see the
neighborhoods and districts I had loved, I could see the
gray stripes of nothingness that bound them to each other,
the no man's lands that I had tried to avoid.
But I no longer saw. I had misunderstood the city,
and now I saw its true meaning. Every part of it,
unknown and known, existed across centuries for one purpose, to
birth the tower, to create the room above me, to
safely house the thing. Whatever it was that sang out
and promise to me. I could smell it in my
waiting chamber. The strong chloral scent permeated the walls and
stuck in my skin, cloying and thick. I heard harmonic
vibrations echoing through the walls and down the wires and
into my veins. My whole life had led to this
place and this time, and I hovered on the precipice,
terrified to go any closer for fear of losing it all.
But soon proximity was not enough. I found myself standing
on a wooden chair, sometimes for hours on end, trying
only to be closer to it. I would stretch my
arms high and press my palms to the ceiling, feeling
the siren's song running through the carpels and radius and
ulna and humorous and spreading into my lungs, and a
heart like a warm and famili your wave. But even
that could not save me. So I coiled my desire
and kneed into a sharpened point and brought it into
baar against the occupant, the silent intruder above me. I
began with noise. I unpacked my stereo and pointed the
speakers upward, blasting random and sharp intervals with a tonal nonsense.
The tower was still sparsely populated, in truth nearly empty.
I knew that I had the floor to myself, and
but a single neighbor above yet another sign I disregarded utterly,
one in an endless parade that should have driven me
far from this place, had I still retained my sanity.
But instead I squatted in that abominable and heartless husk
of a home, in a place that should have set
my teeth on edge, a wild eyed and unrepentant fool,
a quizzling to all that I had claimed to love
about the places of men. When the occupant made no complaints,
I raised the frequency a volume, until finally I could
no longer stand my own tortures. I turned to pounding
on the roof with the brooms, slamming the ceiling until
chips of paint and plaster fell down into my eyes.
More than once I thought of simply tuddling upwards and
emerging from the hole, to choke the life out of
the occupant and claim my prize. I got a response.
At last. He would tap his heels lightly an echo,
and reply to my thundering, a retort I found mocking
and intolerable. I tried horrid smells boiling, foul and moldering
scraps of food and pouring them. On the threshold of
twenty three nineteen, in the small hours of the morning,
I made complaints against him, claiming he was responsible for
the noises and the smells, but the manager believed none
of it threatened to expel me. I began to slide
notes beneath his door, angry, volatile screeds, threats, grotesque descriptions
of the violence I would visit upon him if he
did not vacate the place. They became pleading, muling cries,
offers of wealth, lies in thin tails, designed to stoke
his sympathy for my needs. I had made a life
once of manipulating people to achieve my desires, and now
I used every tool at my disposal. In the end,
he would thrust the notes back out as soon as
I slid them in. He was always in, always home.
When I understood this, he, like myself and so few
others knew, felt the pull of the place and of
whatever was inside. In my most magnanimous and clear headed days,
I knew that he and I were kindred, and he
had merely had the luck of being first. I grew
thin physically and mentally, and I became brittle and dry.
I was on the verge of giving up not my
desire for the special place above me, but of the
very act of living, in a final childish tantrum. Although
I was closer than I dare dream, the distance felt magnified,
and I knew if I left, it would haunt me.
A bullet lodged in my flesh, working its way toward
my heart for the rest of my days. At last,
after a week of petulant fasting, it came to me
that there were only a few paths left to lead
me to what I needed. I pulled my ragged body,
barefoot and reeking, from the sodden chair where I had
sat for more than a day. From the kitchen, I
retrieved the snub nosed pistol that I had hoped never
to need, and left my Ersat's apartment. I shuffled, un
tingling legs towards the stairway and began to climb. I
smelled the sweet death smell on the air conditioned breeze
when I entered his hallway, and I pushed my shaking
body toward the door. At the precipice, I hesitated and
considered moving straight to violence. I could blast the lock
from the door, enter with or without permission, and still
have enough bullets to clear the occupant from the equation.
But I believe we both deserved one final peaceful chance,
and so I knocked and knocked again and again. After
a while, I heard him moving behind the door, a
slithering sound, like a snake squatting in the place that
should have belonged solely to me. But he would not answer.
So I knocked as hard as my condition would allow.
I pounded until my knuckles bled. I shrieked, and although
the sound from my dry cracked throat lacked the proper authority,
continued to scream as I hammered the door. At last,
I heard the sound of whispers, and the thought of
the occupants speaking to it made me nauseous with jealousy.
Then I heard him slide towards the door and turn
the handle. I wrapped my fingers around the cool assurance
of the gun, a totem of my authority, hud I needed.
The door opened a fraction of an inch, and the
occupant's gleaming eyes met mine. He opened it further to
the full extent the brass chain on the door would allow.
I might have kicked against the door, forcing my way inside,
but I held fast some notion that I could still
get what I wanted without the undue risk islands would bring.
He was born to be a citizen of the Borderlands.
Like I had become plain and well groomed. He dressed
in expensive clothes or uncomfortably, like a second skin. Some
may have called him handsome, but it was a flavorless
sort of pleasantry, symmetrical, synthetic. The imprints of our shared
passion clung to him, marked him as a brother and nemesis.
He smiled at my wasting body and the stained clothes
that clung to my bony frame. But after every glance
I saw his black eyes snap backwards towards the locusts
of our need. I understand, he said, at last, his
eyes still fixed behind him, I really do. Despite my resolve,
I began to cry. Small, exhausted sobs shook my body.
If he noticed my shame, he pretended not to, whether
in grace or embarrassment, I do not know. Soon, he said,
the word hung in the air and coat me like
a healing salve, pregnant with promise. I'm afraid I'm done
with it, or it with me. You'll understand. He shook
his head, a singular, violent snap, and his face creased.
It was a face unaccustomed to sharp emotions, looking oddly
fetal and new. As something strong and sharp gripped him,
he shuffled ever so slightly backward, his eyes fluttering behind
toward the thing. I could not see, the knowledge that
my desire, my prize, waited for me just beyond. His
obscuring body clawed at me. My fingers twitched around the
weight of a pistol. It waited so long for this
place to be built, he said, patient. It was here
before us, for the city or anyone, and it will
be here long after us. Again, he shuddered, and I
saw the suit was soaked with sweat, far filthier than
I had originally thought. Not creased, but wrinkled. I had
somehow mistaken his tousled appearance for cleanliness, his chaos for order.
But the glamor had faded beneath the night perfume of
our mutual addiction. There was something else, something acrid and wrong, panic, hysteria, terror,
His calm and still demeanor gone, his temporary posture. Once
wielded masterfully, he could no longer hold for more than
a minute. This was not my brother, no equal, I thought,
as I steeled myself for what I had to come.
I knew, if I knew anything at all, the sight
of a man on a precipice, and I knew how
to push. You're right, I told him, and locked my
eyes to his, stretching the last of my strength into
a sharpening point. It's going to kill you. It doesn't
want you, it's bored of you. He opened his mouth,
let it hang open like a fish. His eyes swam
behind a veil of welling tears. I know his voice
was dry in papery, trash caught in the wind. But
I can't leave, not yet. What makes you think you'll
satisfy it? It called to me, I said, stepping closer
towards the gap until I could smell his decay. It
called to me, and it has sung to me every
night since I came. Like it no longer sings to you.
I took this shot blind, but I saw in his
wincing face that I had struck true. You might be right,
whispered with a joyless smile, that I'm here at all,
should cast out all doubt. I pressed further, putting one
hand on the door to push back until the chain
vibrated and hummed. Why are you making this so hard
on yourself. It's time to go, it wants me. At
that moment, As if to harmonize with my argument, the
sweet song behind him surge, hot and fragrant. We turned together,
my gazes searching for the wondrous thing that he alone
could see. It's good to be talking with you, he said,
after a long silence. You're right, You're right. He grinned wide,
and I saw the rot in his teeth. I needed
this to clear my head. I think the words trailed off,
and he turned, rocking on his heels. I threw my
weight against the door with a feerial scream, but his
strength outmatched mine, and the door slam shut with a
click that sounded like the end of the world. But
then I heard the shuffle of his feet away from
the door, heard him trying to hold his body aloft
before crumpling to the floor. I heard him cry out
a lost wail on the knife in the very heart
of our desire, and I knew that the gun would
not be kneaded I had won at last. I returned
to my room below, with a lightness in my step
that I had not felt since the days below the waves.
I went to gather my things and return. The time
to submit myself to the thing had come. The muffled
sounds of his voice, pleading and ragged, drifted down from above,
and I grinned, approaching ecstasy. I heard the sound of
something being dragged, and there was a great surge of motion,
announced in vibrations through the walls. A trouble, explosion, splintering
symphony of glass outside my window, a sparkling cloud of
frozen light, and an over stuffed leather chair hung illuminated
in the night air, an absurd tableau of shattered glass
and furniture defying gravity. Then it was gone. I heard,
in the following silence, the heavy tread of his feet,
then the meaningless babble of his final words. Away from
the window, towards the door. Stop, a pacing circle, stop,
a sudden run, a blazing trail towards the window, towards
the open night. I pressed myself against the cool glass.
The breath stopped in my lungs, and I saw him
go one leg out a runner, jumping hurdles, wild hair
whipping in the breeze, arms wide to the night sky,
free and like the glass in the chair. Before he
was gone, no sound announced his impact. He simply vanished.
The blooming corpse flower smell surged hotter and brighter than ever.
And if I could have scaled the air itself to
ascend to the roof above me, I would have clawed
through ground, my fingers to the bone. But it was
too much, and I broke each joint, separating each muscle
going slack. I dropped to the floor, unconscious. Before I
hit the ground, I woke how much later, I do
not know, to the sound of far away sirens trilling
in the air. My body tapped into its final reserves,
flooding my limbs with carefully hearted fire, and I surged
to my feet. I didn't have much time. The police,
the manager, They would be to his room any moment.
I took the stairs two at a time and flew
down the hallway. He had unlocked the door before his fall.
In a final gesture of resignation, I put my hand
on the door knob and side in glorious expectation. As
I pushed the door open. The room was a twin
of mine. The occupant, my predecessor, had lived like I had,
out of boxes, with minimal furniture. Waist and rumpled piles
of clothes were strewn across the room. The great hole
in the glass window sucked at the air. The sounds
of traffic in the world below came to me for
the first time in months. The curtains fluttered, whipping like
flags of surrender. The call was stronger than ever before,
and I closed the door behind me, my eyes vacant
and searching. It was here, the siren, the flower, the lure.
At first I could see nothing, But as I walked
on uncertain, atrophied feet, I began to at last perceive it.
As I stepped sideways, it resolved from nothingness, like a
sheet of paper. Seen first from the edge, It was
a seam in the world, a tear, a hot, colorless
wrend across space, impossibly thin yet gaping wide. It flared
achingly bright in recognition of my awareness. The cloying smell
flooded my nostrils and twined around my ribs. The call
was a fire in my pierced forearms, in my veins,
and my ecstasy was complete. It seemed to curl and whip,
but it never moved. Alien colors and smells flooded from
the maw. Somewhere deep in the core of my body.
I felt it reach inside and touch me. The wordless
beckon of the past months resolved like a picture snapping
into focus, and it spoke to me. I walked towards it,
my hands outstretched, weeping with joy. The heat of the
thing seemed to reignite every nerve ending in my body.
It made me whole, healed me, comforted me, washed over
me like the old wave, and I knew I would
never want for anything, never fear I would be loved
for all time. It asked precious little in return. I
might have stepped into its oceanic arms, forever, might have
been lost to its promises. If something had not awoken
in me, then perhaps my true self emerged, sober, at last,
lost to the bile chasm's draw so long ago. Perhaps
it was only the unthinking, panicked animal we all hold
chained in our psyche, the runner, the fighter. Perhaps it
was the echo of the occupant, his last act of defying,
Still rustling in the breeze with the shredded curtains. I
do not know whatever emerged it took control of that moment.
I saw its lies. I saw it imprisoned by the sky,
calling out filthy, wreaking promises to those below, those attuned
to the foul wavelength, the desire for oblivion. I saw
delicate filaments of influence, coils of burning plasma, reaching down
to the city below, infecting, cancerous. I saw them wrapping
around the lights and hearts of men, choking, crushing, hateful.
It was the Borderlands. It was the name to my
nameless fear of the dark places in the city and
inside me. It was, and it will always be. It
would use me, bend me, break me. It already had.
When I was done no more use to it, I
would be cast aside, and it would call again. I
tugged for control of my body, a flesh and bone
trader that still approached this fragment of profane divinity. I
pulled harder, and when my vessel cracked free of its grip,
I slid back into my skin and allowed the animal
instincts to guide my escape. I stopped only long enough
to kick twice at the dials of the expensive gas
stove with one bare foot, the rotten egg odor of
gas began to twirl with the corpse flower smell. An
hour later, I would marvel at the blood pooling in
my shoe with every footstep as I fled the tower
and race to the edge of the city. But not now.
Now I felt nothing. I do not remember descending the stairs.
I entered my flat and grabbed a single, still packed
duffel bag in my long abandoned shoes. It called to
me from above, furious and reproachful, promising and threatening, all
at once and painfully familiar. I could not shut it out,
but I held tight to the image of the occupant
soaring gracefully through the air, arms, forever fllling at the
task of being wings hanging in the night sky. I
would leave the tower in my own way, I thought,
And this simple promise kept my body my own. I
lit my own gas so before I went, and from
a curling strip of a discarded pizza box, I made
a small torch which I held to the ragged ceiling
one of the tiny frayed holes. The legacy of my
vandal idiocy began to smolder. I do not remember choosing
to do this. I simply did because it was unlike
everything else in the tower, unlike everything else I had
done for half a year, right in some profound way.
When I left it no longer was promising anything but
everlasting suffering and pain and submission. Yet I still wanted
to go to it, still felt that elemental undertow At
the staircase, I very nearly went up, feeling some awful
analog of gravity tugging me skyward. It would have been
so easy to go to it, to surrender myself to
its magnificent tides. When I hung frozen in the air
with my predecessor, saw his final relief and escape, and
made my body to set out on the sidewalk. A
pair of policemen interviewed the manager, jotting notes as the
fat man wrung as perfectly groomed hands. He saw me coming,
saw me wild eyed and unkempt, and his piggish eyes
narrowed into slits. He thought I'd come now to claim
my spot in the waiting list, to take ownership of
the room. He thought me a grotesque, monster, murderer. He
opened his mouth to speak, and from above there came
a great and terrible roar, a cacophony of cracking glass.
A tongue of fire licked the night sky from the
gaping hole of a tower's side. Glass began to rain.
Burning scraps of paper and clothing danced in the night sky,
while all eyes were upturned, voices raised in confusion and distress.
I turned and slipped away into the night. They want
me back in the city to answer questions. I know
that any day they will come, but warrant drag me
from my new home to answer what happened in the tower.
I know, of course, that I failed to kill it,
that I could never have even truly harmed it. At best,
I kept others from it, or a short time, perhaps
I kept a single, mad and passionate fool from falling
into its slick and sweet honey trap. This and my
own temporary safety are enough. I also know that even
if they never find this cabin, never tracked down the
twisting trail of money that allowed me to flee the city,
even if I lived to see a natural death, that
I can never be free. It has marked me forever,
that salivating sweet smell as ever in my nostrils, it
never stops speaking, and I will see it in every
crumbling barn, in every rusting skeleton of every abandoned car.
I saw its writhing tendrils growing and thickening across the
city as I fled. I saw them twine across the
land in every highway border town. I see them in
every dying community I've passed through. It is not quite
here yet, in the dark woods, my isolation, my final home,
but it will come. It is a corrupting and spreading growth.
It isolates, It squeezes, it chokes, it infects. If a
lone cell should escape, then the refugee can only carry
the contagion with him. It is inside me. Someday it
will have me back. I can only hope in the
end that I will fight, that I will not go
so willingly. But I know that when it calls me
home at last, I will go without question. I will
return to a city that has become one immense dead place,
one massive, heartless hinterland. I will answer for my small
and meaningless act of rebellion. But not today, the day,
at the very least main free. Today is enough.
Speaker 1: You have been listening to Observable Radio. Tonight's episode Mapping
the Crooked Places was performed by the ensemble featuring Jason Smith,
written by Cameron Suey, Produced by Cameron Suey, Phil ven
hest Purparina and Wendy Hector. Edited by Cameron Suey. Our
psychology consultant is Doctor Elisa Leel art by Karn Fletcher.
Our theme is The back Rooms performed by Mew. Additional
music from this episode provided by Amber Glow, Aauve Air
Dex twelve hundred, Bill Fergren, Lennon Hutton, Tim Koolick Parr,
and Rocket Noise. Observable Radio is listener supported thanks to
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