The Future Isn't Thirsty

Yet another piece related to my degree project. Hexagrams: #39 Obstruction ---> #33 Retreat

The Future Isn't Thirsty

This season, there is an over-abundunce of cacti in the foyer. Spiny and plastic, anchored beneath wood chips, they invoke a breed of nostalgia that is not compost-able. Rather, they are indestructible creatures from a B movie, able to haunt the most unexpected corners of the mundane; any moment one could lumber off the set and devour our morals. Given this threat, the guests are vulnerable; I have been hired to protect them.

To accurately play this role, they have outfitted me in the garb of Wyatt Erp, and I am drowning in my own sweat. Fifteen feet above the entrance, a giant banner reads "THE FUTURE ISN'T THIRSTY." Rolled vinyl emits a whooshing yelp as the custodial staff lowers a projection screen along the eastward wall. At stage left, key members of the press (those hired for the occasion,) flash posed pictures of W.P.C. (Water Purification Committee,) members addressing the historic importance of the event. Heard in its polyphonic grandeur, the room's chatter suggests a jungle-like diversity of sounds, or perhaps the condensed echo of rush-hour traffic were it rising to ground-level from beneath the Amazon, (the likes of which now festers with mutant-life.)

I pace deliberately around each rectangular garden, a sentinel lost to daydreams. Each garden is adorned with a mechanical fountain spring; their combined gurgle is enough to tease urine through a kidney stone. The event is meant to preserve the utopian tone of the last presidency, when it was assumed that we'd be able to save Africa.

Occasionally, my boredom becomes painful; it is then that I call upon my favorite trick. I perform a time-lapse of the moment, condensing the lobby's occupants with its furnishings, until all loses its trace of animation. Though the water's trickle continues to tickle my ear, each motor ceases to turn. The face of every guest remains awkwardly posed, exuding its own calculating glow. Guest's hands grasp outward at traces of frozen conversation, some clutching the dregs of a glass of champagne. These uptowners would be shriveled bodies were they lost in the desert. There, hands would reduce to bone, and with them, each plea in want of an oasis. For me, the oasis is real; the dream is not dead; the dream is something rooted in my marrow, the spongy profane core of my body's structure. The mystic in me screams: "The antidote for thirst still lingers in the air once every cell has putrefied, but the dream is nameless!" I realize that if I had to, I could wander through myself like this for days without end. With this, my desert-scape disappears, and the guests return to piddling about.

I wonder who built this theater. That honor must be held by the Bureau of Water Purification. I'm sure its solvent; the state subsidizes environmental projects, and these days, they're the only organization with enough money to do so.

I wonder if I really am cute in blue fatigues? Well, this CEO certainly thinks so. He's been ogling me for the past twenty minutes, his wife aghast at his lack of concern for her own fixation on the upcoming Purification Party gubernatorial candidate, a man who's tie sports its own second-rate globs of technicolor distraction. And these pricks think they're gonna save the world. I could really use a drink.