the White City

There are only vestiges of respect left inside of Hans.  What life with its disappointments, regrets, had not yet taken from him had been, like fossilized rock, slowly calcified inside of him, in his tightening limbs, his twitching penis, the shiver that shot from his spine and down  the length of his arms until reaching the quaking hands.  Hans remembered...

As a boy, he had gone to the world's fair.  It is hard to exaggerate the wanton optimism of such a place.   In the face of the dark problems, the heavy concerns implicit in the fair's theme of environmental action now to avert ecological apocalypse later, the gleaming white architecture postured in shiny denial.  And that incongruous embrace of the future saturated the fair grounds.  It moved from pavilion to pavilion, country to country, like a virus of subtle nods and smiles.

The politics aside, the architecture and science left to the desperate future, there was among the apple blossoms and lilacs that lined the thoroughfares groups of singers, dancers, musicians.  They had, at the behest of culture and for the sake of civilization (and to escape the daily squalor of there own claustrophobic lives) descended upon the strange city in a far hemisphere. And here on sunny cool mornings and drizzling evenings, they sang.  They played.  They danced.  And it was the magic of these artists that made the insufferable message beneath it all bearable, at least for a moment, at least for an afternoon.