A Soul-Walker's Mistake/The Seam

The Seam was almost impossible to see at first -- just a small red hairline between two buildings at the corner of Nothing and Nowhere. I would never intentionally evoke such a tired old cliché, by the way: those were the actual names of the streets. I say "were" because they don't really exist anymore -- Nothing and Nowhere, now literal, then just curious names. Empty stretches of asphalt, the kind of place where you were most likely to finally fulfill that inexplicable Old World dream of actually seeing a real, dead tumbleweed blow right past you.

On Sundays, the local populace of lonely seniors would cobble together the weekly street market -- a dusty, desolate encampment at the old intersection, built almost entirely of habit and labored routine: the homemade stands, shelters, and lean-tos were only an incidental facáde. Sometimes, Ricardo would play his banjo on the sidewalk to the occasional coin from his longtime neighbors. It was a closed cycle of exchange; coin in the hat, then into the pockets along with the rest of the day's earnings, then onto the counter of the store owned by one of the old busker's market patrons, then finally back into the hat come next Sunday. A familiar pattern.

Ricardo was the first one to fall into the Seam.

If you weren't born there, you had to have a pretty good reason to live in St. Nada, let alone Nothing Avenue or Nowhere Street. Mine -- my reason, I mean -- was work. Actually, it was much more than that, but for the sake of a decent yarn unfolding the way it ought to, for now I'll say it was work. At the orchards fifteen minutes out of town, work was easy to find, steady, and paid... well, it paid. Usually. I can't remember the name of the fruit -- funny little gray things, leathery and about the size of a baseball. The inside of the rind makes your skin itch like hell, and processed, the bright orange pulp finds its way into just about everything you can find at the store. That's what Ricardo told me, anyway -- swore he could taste it in everything he bought.

* * *

It had been twenty-six years since he'd seen a new face, the day I first walked down Nothing Avenue.

"Give or take a few months," he'd said as he shoved off the curb with all the grace and stability of a baby elephant finding its feet. An Anachronistic wonder burned in his eyes as he introduced himself as Ricardo Soyuz -- the flabbergasted disbelief of a medieval peasant come face-to-face with a modern businessman.

"Nil," I replied with no hesitation, shaking his trembling hand. That was the first time I'd remembered the name I had given myself.

* * *

Ricardo had told me he came to St. Nada all those years ago to learn the banjo. He didn't elaborate. He still couldn't play; not very well, anyway. The occasional coin from his neighbors at the street market was a thing of habit: appreciation for the comfort of a familiar fixture such as Ricardo and his banjo. The residents of Nowhere St. and Nothing Ave. were lonely, but they were fond of routine. I have to admit, I was getting fond of it too: the orchard, the market, Ricardo's stories of working at the tumbleweed factory up North -- the skeletal balls of dried-out bush always came from that direction, even though the wind always blew from the South -- even helping the old woman next door catch her two-headed chickens when they escaped. Of course, the Seam changed everything. Even its glow reminded me of the Old World... Crimson neon, flies and city moths. I say Ricardo was the first to fall in, but the residents of #226 Nowhere St. -- the big bay-and-gable house at the corner, and host to the Seam itself along with the abandoned flat next to it -- were the first to suffer its effects. None of us noticed until they stopped leaving the house -- a dull, content couple in their mid-forties, the youngest people on the street bar myself -- and once that happened, they wouldn't speak to anybody. They would stare out of their luxurious front window, gaping at the sky above them, apparently expecting it to be some color other than the perfectly normal radiant green that it was every day in St. Nada.

* * *

"Weight is very important," Ricardo had been saying, "Weight and overall balance. Without those, it ain't nothin' worthy of bein' called a real tumbleweed." He paused to pick at the dull gray skin of a small orange. "Too light an' it looks unnatural, see, and too heavy an'--" his eyes shone as he realized what he was about to say -- "An' she won't tumble!" His laugh turned over and shuddered into action, seeming as always to belong to a different conversation, perhaps instigated by some poor subordinate's pathetic oversight or the latest bit of scandalous gossip instead of the warm-hearted, friendly humor that now shone with inviting camaraderie from his half-moon eyes.

Nothing about Ricardo seemed to fit right -- all disparate parts from strange machines -- and I loved that. He was like none of the old stereotypes I'd known in the Old World. His banjo playing, halting and slow but somehow confident, as if he'd worked all his life to sound exactly like that, was the voice of St. Nada to me. More ancient even than my so-called Old World -- the shapeless, reaching City-soul where I'd lived before St. Nada -- it radiated warm familiarity and endless comfort.

* * *

Life in St. Nada was everything I'd hoped for when I'd left my old home in the city -- derivative of, but separate from the rules of that Old World, it was easy to adjust to and at last allowed me to see my thoughts clearly. Finally finding it after months of searching the empty expanse of the plains beyond the cities, that sleeping place with no waking soul where nothing was defined and the only rules that existed were the pieces you unknowingly took with you from wherever it was that you came from -- finally finding it there, untouched by the devouring soul of that place I'd left behind, was a dream. Living there was nothing less for someone like me. But although I tried to ignore the Seam when it first appeared, to tell myself that I had no idea what it was or, failing that, that it would simply go away and be defeated by this place, I knew inside what was going to happen. I knew the mistake I'd made when I crossed the plains...

Within a few weeks the Seam began to expand.

The simple haunting redness grew quickly, pushing the space between the houses but neither separating nor consuming them, so that if you looked at the whole scene for too long you'd get a headache and lose your balance. The old woman next door was gone, left the street carrying nothing but the most confused and disoriented expression I had ever seen her wear, and her chickens had gone, too -- exposed to the growing influence of the Seam's Old World logic, they had ostensibly decided that two heads were inferior to one and made short work of their weirdly dissociative suicide. Looking at it, the Seam now covered my entire vision, though it still occupied only a small sliver of space between #226 and the old flat. I felt like screaming when I saw it, migraine pains shooting across my brain and knocking me off my feet. But still, through watering eyes, I could see Ricardo stumble and fall for presumably the same reason across the road, hand shooting out for support but finding only the strange red wound of the Seam. He seemed to fall awkwardly into everything, then -- the wall he'd touched, the dusty ground -- and in an instant there was only a shapeless expansion of red noise where he used to be.

Mind numb and convulsing, I stared straight ahead and moved, somehow, towards the spot where Ricardo had been. A glance up and to my left showed me that the sign reading "Nowhere St" had somehow become "Northerly St" -- and then my shoulder hit the Seam before I could turn back.

-- And suddenly the memory hit me with complete clarity and perfect sense of context:

The idiot groove of the underground clubs and basements all along the Strip, pounding subs shoving poisoned air in the epileptic assault of the floors and pits. Crowds of coked-up zombies that don't know it yet, alive alive alive until they aren't, rock bottom in some too-quiet motel room, gray walls and the sound of rain outside. The Old World, the City that's never dark, job hunts and apartments and bad parties and traffic. Noise. From somewhere inside the Seam -- I couldn't really see yet -- I heard banjo music: Practiced, sad, virtuosic technique.

I screamed until I tasted blood. Somewhere very close, a voice impacted, detonated, and burned in reply:

"THEN KEEP ON DAYDREAMING ASSHOLE YOU'RE NOT GONNA MAKE IT ANYWHERE IN LIFE YOU PATHETIC FUCKING HIPPIE HERE'S FIVE BUCKS GO BUY A CLEAN SHIRT AND SOME GOD-DAMNED BR --"

-- The voice of the Seam, random monstrous segments of thoughtless abuse in five trillion ignorant voices, school bullies and bank robbers and incompetent bosses, canceled itself out with a deafening "POP" and a fading keen. I woke up in the warm, dry emptiness of Northerly Street with blood under my nails and drool down the front of my shirt. A single tumbleweed bounced by in the wrong direction, carried by that wind from the South, drier now, both wind and dead plant moving in the same direction. I felt sick as I heard the banjo music again, this time right behind me. I fought the instinct to turn around with everything I had and walked out into the intersection of Nicolé Avenue and Northerly Street, the banjo steady and flawless and utterly, utterly wrong behind me.

*

I never went back to St. Nada for what I'd done. I realize now how I killed that place's soul: I'd brought the fragments of another with me somehow, invisible remnants clinging to me as I walked the plains, and they'd fought -- the larger soul, naturally, had won through brute force and size alone. It was the soul of the Old World, now present in what had been St. Nada as well, all the places with all the rules that made sense because we knew them, the "ordinary" to everyone save a select, invisible few. And we dragged those rules and that soul with us everywhere we went, unknowingly conquering the thoughts of other places, smashing beautiful and personal ideas on the way things should work -- up, down, light, dark, gravity, the propagation and existence of sound -- with the knowledge and laws of the gargantuan place-soul which our species dragged behind us like a net. The mass assumption that what we are used to witnessing is the absolute reality, that every place is the same place with the same rules and ideas and style, was maybe the biggest mistake we'd made in the development of our theories and sciences and schools of thought.

So now I'm trying to clean myself, to not just name myself Nil but to become it, so that when I find a new place that is likewise clean and untouched I will not destroy it but help it to grow -- the Seam between that place and the hungry soul of the Old World cities far, far away across the plains where the other Walkers roam, truly clean and blind. I won't need a reason to find it, hidden somewhere out there on the endless sleeping soul of the plains, but if anyone asks, I've always wanted to learn the fiddle...