UNDERCITY

– A Novel by Monte Schulz –

The story of this world is war.

War against the helpless. War against the infirm. War against the weak.

War against the strong. War against the old. War against the young. War against the poor. War against the rich. War against health. War against science. War against faith. War against men. War against women. War against children. War against law. War against morality.

War against love.

— Peter Draxler

“On the Decline of Man”

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FANTAGRAPHICS

CHARACTERS

MARCO GRENELLE
My name is Marco Grenelle, and I’m probably insane. It troubles me, though I’ve learned to adapt. People tell me I look like a kid, but that night of the fire I was twenty-six years old and I’d lived half my life like a rodent in underground tunnels of filth and flood and fear of sudden death or deliberate torment. I’d learned how to negotiate cave-ins and repair sewer pipes and splice electrical wires. I’d been made aware in my youth of the wickedness of people, and I’d learned the unfortunate necessity of being able to kill without hesitation or remorse if I wanted to live. Stories we recall of survival are deliberately pathetic and cruel. Precious light and water ought not to be a gift we earn through virtue or fortune. The sun is a birthright. Is that not obvious? Memories of life underground and how we’ve struggled to reach the surface, those indignities we’ve suffered, tragedies we’ve endured, are necessarily painful to record and share. Yet without them, our history will go unnoticed, our trials unknown. Each of us in the undercity has a story. We’re far from the end, but there has to be a beginning. So, let me start here.
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Mirés Grillet

Once I was a dancer. That was very long ago in another life I can scarcely recall now, except that I adored the stage and the applause of my audience in the bistros and cabarets of Hyperion District. My parents were theater people and brought me into that world when I was quite young. At three years old, I could perform a sprightly waltz and sing, “Miss Mary’s Music Box,” to entertain friends of my parents at dinner and home parties.

My father, Carl, played piano and did magic tricks and occasionally performed humorous ventriloquism with an old cleverly painted wood-carved dummy he named, “Dr. Bixby.” Margéry, my mother, sang arias, played the flute and danced a dervish with silk scarves of rainbow hues. My parents were quite popular and much loved at the Orpheum Folly where I passed most of my childhood. I was not sent to school. Education in a classroom with children whose families were known about the district as doctors and lawyers and investors in real estate and stocks was anathema to my parents. They preferred that I experience the world through art and performance. I learned my alphabet by reading dramatic recitations and my arithmetic through counting evening show receipts with the Duveyrier’s who owned the theater. Their seven children were also kept out of normal school, and we became fast friends, hurrying about the theater corridors and dressing rooms before and after matinees and evening shows. I have the fondest memories of those years. Unchallenged by contradicting teachers, encouraged by show people whose eccentricities seemed normal to me back then. Other than the Duveyrier children, my dearest friends were Josephine Ordinaire who sang like a choir of nightingales and Miss Ludmilla Bystañara, possessed of a stage-expressed humor heard most often by laborers on the waterfront. Oh, she was quite nasty and immensely popular. I learned much about human anatomy from watching her performances and what to expect as I matured.
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Geismar Brecht

Geismar had a book of killings. It was fairly extensive. Here are a few of them: A young girl who worked at a candy store on Daumier Street was caught in an alleyway after hours and assaulted by some young toughs who raped her and knocked her head on the brick wall. A pair of policemen witnessed the aftermath of this attack, but instead of arresting the cruel youths, they were sent off with a scolding and the girl brought to the Sherley Moore Medical Clinic where she was tested for spyreosis and found to be infected, whereby she was dismissed from her job, put out of her apartment, and sent on a train to Aisne in Tyghe Province as a combat nurse where the war guaranteed a bleak future. Geismar heard her story from another girl who had shared her apartment. He located the two policemen a week later on patrol by the Morley Gardens, lured them to a disturbance near the duck pond and shot them both in the head, though not before securing the names of those young thugs who raped the unfortunate girl. Then he tracked them down, as well, and caught them one after another: two in a burlesque theater on Olivette, one at a bus stop on Europa, and the other pair at a music concert in Jalipa Park. He slashed the throats of the first two and left their bodies in the dark of the back row. He shoved the third in front a speeding auto. The last two he shot in the back when the concert orchestra soared to its great crescendo. Those killings were his most dramatic and prolific.

He was also arrested once and driven to Sherley Moore for spyreosis testing. He was found to be positive. Were he to have accepted his fate, a wagon would’ve come to ride him off to a gigantic coal pit outside of the Nazarene District where hundreds were shot or slowly starved to death and then burned with petroleum fire and buried in the ashes of ten thousands. Not one for remaining resolute to fate, as his test results were read aloud, Geismar took a circus pistol from a pocket hidden in his trousers and killed everyone in the office, then set it on fire and fled into the undercity.

The landlord in a flat Geismar rented when next he surfaced decided the little boys who ran up and down the hallways were ill-behaved vermin who needed to be taught a stern lesson, which he administered by tossing one of them down the stairs. The fall broke the boy’s neck and paralyzed him. Geismar repaid this senseless act of cruelty by sneaking into the landlord’s room one night and tossing him out that third story window into the street.

Later on, Geismar stalked a pair of agents from Internal Security who had been witnessed on more than a few occasions shooting vagrants along the night shore of the eternal river as a matter of amusement. Geismar caught them in a hired auto and splashed petroleum onto them, then flung a burning Lucifer match across the dashboard.

His reputation for cruelty and questionable justice flourished.

In fact, there were so many like him in the undercity, and about our dark districts, one couldn’t point to one or another as the herald of retribution for our suffering. Death wore many costumes in the metropolis.

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Pyrénée
Here’s a story I like to tell: I found out who gave the order to quit milk deliveries into our neighborhoods. It took me four years and a lot of creative persuasion. His name was Mr. Jonas Nauheim and he was just the bland sort of evil bureaucrat you’d think he was. Empty suit and fancy hat. Out-of-date specs. Indifferent to anyone not signing his pay vouchers. I blamed him for my father’s disappearance. I held him responsible for ruining my childhood, and my baby brother Zosh’s death. If he loved his own family, I never knew. Probably he did, and they loved him, too. So what? Nothing he took from me could be replaced. He lived in Simoni District, not one of those high houses, just a nice little home on a quiet street with trees and flowers and fences. Nauheim had a routine he followed every day of the week. I learned it. He walked to work each morning and back along the same sidewalk in the evening. I waited for him in the shadow of a lamp pole behind some garbage cans. When he came by at exactly 7:03, I stepped out to greet him with a fresh milk bottle in my hand.

“Excuse me, sir,” I said, “would you care for a bottle of milk? Three credits. Not much more needed to feed your kiddies.”

He gave me a look like I was a tramp. That was unfair because I liked my clothes. They were nice.

He said, “Thank you, young lady, but I believe I’ll have to do without this evening. My children have plenty at home.”

“Not everyone does.”

“Pardon me?”

“Isn’t milk important for a healthy life? Especially to kids?”

“Of course, it’s a dietary necessity. A valuable component on each breakfast table.”

“For everyone.”

“Indeed,” he said. “So, perhaps you should share it with some needy household. Go knock on a few doors. I’d guess you’ll be well rewarded.”

“Unless I offer it about in Felucia or Guadalquivir, or anywhere else in the Nazarene or Viceroy, right? That might get me in trouble, isn’t that true?”

“I don’t follow you.”

“Well, wasn’t it your order that quit milk delivery to those places?”

He said, “I have no idea what you’re trying to say here, but I really must get home. Thank you for your kind offer. Good evening.”

I smashed him in the face with the milk bottle.

He fell onto his back, splashed with milk and blood. I sat on his chest and looked him in the eye. “You had my father gassed for delivering milk to kiddies who didn’t have none because you just didn’t want them to. You and your criminal pals hoped they’d all die, and lots of them did. Were you happy about that?”

He gurgled some nonsense and blinked. I stabbed him in the neck with the broken bottle and watched him bleed to death.

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FIORA PIÑA
I am Fiora Piña and I do not live in the dark. I am not a stinking rat. I sell down here in the tunnels what I steal because if I did so up above in the streets I would be arrested and gassed. That’s what they do when we refuse to admire their laws and rules. Starving to death is a rule to be avoided. Being taken by law to Moxley and raped by the Trinité jailers is also to be avoided. Believe me on this. I speak from experience. That noxious breath on my face as they traded me back and forth on those filthy cots is not easily forgotten. Best not to be arrested. Steal from above, trade down below. The undercity has rules, too, but ours are not so strict unless we hurt somebody else. Unless there is blood or broken bones. Hearts are broken down here, that is true. If nobody’s heart were broken, nobody cried or was afraid, then why would we be here? Who wants to live in these crowded caves? For enough credits, it’s worthy of a few hours a day. Most of us can tolerate that. Some tolerate too much and live so far beneath the sunny streets that it’s impossible for them to leave.
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ZOLA POISSON
I named myself Zola Poisson from a girlhood memory of fish swimming in a brook under the golden light of noon. For years I expected that was a dream I encountered in my spider hole of Les Bonnes Soeurs cavern where I grew up. Impossible must it be to watch fish and birds at play and feel the good sun on my skin. I believed I was mistaken even in my imagination. Yet, I needed to be sure my girlhood was not contained to these black corridors and foul air. So, one morning I followed a group of boys along the sewer line to the Groscny Street elevators and came out by Lilienthal Gardens into a most glorious day. A marvelous breeze carried the fragrance of summer flowers and the sky was blue and brilliant. In my joy and wonder I could scarcely breathe, yet I did and walked about as everyone else and I belonged among them. I saw bees in the honeysuckle and cats in the brush. A young girl leading a fluffy dog on a leash said hello and smiled when I gave her dog a soft pat on the head. She asked my name and I told her, and she was Larissa Dio, a most lovely name, indeed. Her family lived in a garden cottage in Honoré where she played with all the girls of her neighborhood and went to school at the Eaton Academy of Art. There, she learned to paint and dance and recite poetry in Latin. Larissa wore a pink ribbon in her golden braided hair and had the prettiest voice I’d ever heard. She told me how her mother gave piano concerts for chronic patients at Espezel and on stage when she was a girl in the Oxyrhyn Opera House by Philoterra-by-the-Sea. I told her how, once upon a time, I’d had such dreams and aspirations myself, but I married poorly and became destitute of spirit and found a simple glory now in working as a seamstress.
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Mercier Hausmann
My name is Mercier Hausmann and I was a policeman in the Viceroy District. For many years I served my civic responsibility to people who treated me kindly and showed respect for how I did my job. That was my greatest joy, how I was able to make them see how my purpose was goodness and the well-being of each person on my route. I knew them by name and reputation. Karl is a bricklayer and Mora is a nurse and Friedrich brings the mail and Lorena sews trousers for the poor. I memorized their relatives and pets. Bethea has a cousin named Florie who lives in Corvini and Giséle has an uncle who is a conductor on the train to Dove Hill. Bertrand Novelli owns a large hunting dog named Léon and Letty Cross has a kitten she calls Maxwell. So many friends and neighbors on my route. I learned their hopes and dreams for this life and the next. I did my best to see that every one of them got home at night to eat and sleep in peace. There were no honors awarded for that simple duty I performed, and I did not expect any such thing. I was paid fairly by the City Protectorate, but credits on my account ledger were never my reason for walking those city blocks as long as I did. I carried my lamp six nights a week down the damp alleys of Holton Square where the riff-raff slept unnoticed and garbage stained the bricks laid by men who had pride in labor. Blood stained those bricks, too. I saw plenty of that. It was my job to see it. I wiped every ounce of residue up with rags from laundry lines that sagged low from apartment ledges. In the dark, blood glistens by oil lamp and smells of metal and sickness. I tended to the sick and sad and lost. Maybe that was not my job, but I did it anyhow because no one else cared to.
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Dr. Eduard Charivari
Many years ago, I had a student by the name of Gayley Ames whose singular intellect led us to that dark hall of shadows we faltered into. He was quite handsome, tall and fit, an athlete in the spring contests of football and javelin, with a sly, devilish smile and a demeanor our dazzling co-eds apparently found quite irresistible. Not a great scholar but neither a mediocrity by any means. One late spring afternoon, he knocked at my office door and entered with the insouciance only the young possess. Pausing from my labors at grading papers from the lower academy, I offered him the chair before my desk and invited his questions.

And Mr. Gayley Ames had questions, many questions.

“Sir,” he began quite innocently, “in your opinion, has eugenics improved the life of our Republic? Are we truly better off now than we had been before Adolphus Varane began his crusade to improve our lives?”

“That would depend upon whose point of view is being observed.”

“Well, is it true that our most troublesome districts saw a rising good in the Great Separation, once those infamous streets and alleyways were cleaned and cleared away of the rot and refuse we called our fellow citizens?”

“As in those sad words of the barbarian, Calgacus, had we made a desert and called it peace? Certainly, a dinner table never set, won’t need to be cleared, but is that dinner?”

“I can’t speak to that, sir, but I hear orators in Immanuel Fields refer to we who support eugenics as monsters. I don’t feel like a monster. Should I?”

“Young man, often in this life, we wear our identities like a suit of clothes and become so used to its fit, we cannot imagine wearing anything else. Our look in the mirror is so comfortably familiar, we go out the door each morning convinced that the way we dress is every bit as good and natural as the sun crossing those blue skies above. Therefore, when we are informed that our clothing is a shabby imitation of elegant, that our taste is poor and unfortunate, we choose to regard our critics as miscreants, even criminal in their evaluations.”

“In other words, I may be a monster and not recognize myself as such, is that what you’re telling me?”

“I’m only offering you my opinion that our society is blind to the possibility that we may have been wrong all those years ago in pursuing the supposed rectitude of eugenics and using that cudgel to torment millions unnecessarily.”

“You believe we are criminals?”

“Perhaps we are.”

“And our punishment is the Desolation? War without end?”

“Or some other moral adjustment to our futures. No lasting good comes out of ignoring a bad suit of clothes in the belief that our preference is correct in all things at all times. Perhaps a new tie or a coat of a different fabric would be in order now.”

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Perrôt Fantíné

I am Perrôt Fantíné. My family sold books on old De Lâtre Street in Calcitonia. We had the best store with high tin ceilings and tall walnut shelves and glass display cabinets and a glistening show-window where passersby might be drawn to appealing volumes for all ages and fascinations. My mother organized the finances and accounting of my father’s inventory and records, and together they succeeded in this small business that offered more pleasure than profit as reward for their labors. I was assigned the job of alphabetizing volumes and counting change for customers when my parents were out on lunch errands. In the long ago, books were very popular, and people thought it wise and important to own small libraries in their homes to prove how intelligent and sophisticated they were. There was always pleasure to be found in books of any sort because the written word is a gateway to lives beyond our own. Just think of that. On any given street one might meet hundreds of people whose distinctions are different from our own, yet not so removed from us that if we were so driven, we could travel where they’ve traveled and see what they’d seen. But in books, we can ride along the Appian Way with Caesar or sail between Scylla and Charybdis with Odysseus and hunt the Fâcheux Woods with Hassan Sarrastian with his snow-white stallions, perhaps even wander the summer banks of the Alban River and enjoy tea and honey biscuits with Voireuse Bardamu and his consorts.

When I was a boy, I sorted volumes for my father and learned to read by peeking into this book and that and becoming so distracted he would stop and tell me, “Perrôt, you have all your life to read. Today you sort and shelve.”

And I would say, “But Father, I prefer to read, and the stories are so grand and exciting, I can’t help myself.”

Then he would say, “Perrôt, if I were to take a pause with each book I lay my hands upon that draws my eye, you and I and your mother would need to beg for food underground where all there is to eat are black mushrooms and fish with no eyes.”

“No eyes?”

“No eyes.”

“How do fish with no eyes know where to swim?”

“Perrôt, they swim wherever they like because without eyes they have no destination and therefore no distraction from their purpose.”

“How odd that must be, Father. But what is their purpose?”

“To swim and eat, just as your purpose is to sort and shelve these books today.”

“If I had no eyes, Father, how could I do my chores for you?”

“You could not, Perrôt, and that’s why you are my son and not a fish.”

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Eros and the Owl

Thomas found Pandora that afternoon beyond the north quadrant in a grove of olive trees and fresh oleander where she often retreated when the sun felt too hot and her spirit sagged. Her lazy days, he preferred to call them. No pruning or cultivating better habits of industry and improvisation, Pandora felt little delight in the active life when sanctuary temperatures rose above ninety-two degrees and the wax in her candles softened. Her pale nude form reflected a lovely sheen from the lone gleam of sunlight that penetrated the olive grove when she lay on the grass, sipping from peppermint tea and nibbling on a ripe orange.

"There you are," Thomas announced, pretending to be mildly pleased at finding her when in fact it irritated him to chase all over after her. She had obligations that far exceeded her daily investment.

"Are you hungry?" Pan smiled, offering him a fresh lime she'd plucked earlier. She stared at his appendage, half-aroused as he approached.

"No, thank you, dear." Thomas circled around her to put the sun at his back.

"Suit yourself, darling, but they're frightfully delicious."

"I have no doubt." Thomas sat on the grass beside her. "Question?"

"Not now, dear, it's too late in the day. I'm utterly exhausted and I need to wash."

Thomas ignored her evasion. "Why do we love?"

"A revisited topic?"

"An incomplete conversation. You fell asleep."

"You bored me with your illogical insistence on quoting poetry I cannot stand!"

"Such as?"

"Oh, you know perfectly well!"

"I could lie down like a tired child and weep away this life of care."

"Please don't, Thomas. You're absolutely exhausting."

"The question!"

"My god!" She nodded at his waist. "Isn't that worm of yours all you need to divine the purpose of love?"

Thomas felt himself stir further. "My tumescence is surely more the result than the cause of romance, I would argue."

"Of course you would, darling. You've never been impaled by that wicked implement of yours, therefore I am suspicious about your objectivity in this question."

"Can we not agree that love is superimposed on our existence as the supposed pillar upon which our entire species resides? And that without love, and loving, we would collapse upon ourselves as cannibals, wresting that last thigh bone from the weak?"

"You are such a fool!" Pan laughed aloud and tossed part of her orange peel at him. He ducked but returned a nasty look. She had no interest in the questioning, yet he knew she fully understood its importance.

"Persuade me, Pan, that you have an opinion on this august topic worth considering. Please!"

"Do I have to, darling? Why can't you lie here with me and count the hummingbirds? There seem to be more than ever this afternoon. I wonder where they've come from?"

"Love is a contradiction in perspective," Thomas said, evenly. "Why must we chase after our lovers if love is a necessity?"

"Why didn't Madelyn throw herself on the ground at your feet, you mean," Pan laughed, "and thrust her buttocks up for your engagement? She thought you were a cad and a fool and would rather have been assaulted by a raccoon."

Thomas persisted through her idiotic diversions. "If there were no love, only mating, no pleasure in sex other than the fondness for anticipating our created offspring, would there be any romance in this world at all?"

"Or would there be love if there were no mating?" Pandora asked, softly sucking on a fresh orange. "Sometimes I wonder if I kiss you only in order that you'll mount me."

"Why do you say that?"

"Because, darling, you are a dreadful kisser and awkward to play with. If you weren't the last man on earth, I really doubt I'd tolerate you at all."

Thomas laughed. "Love requires a much deeper understanding of tolerance than you could possibly understand! Good God! We're not kissing ourselves, after all, although I'm sure if there were a procedure to facilitate doing so, you'd have quit yourself of me entirely. No, my dear Pan, we love because we are two halves of the same self, extending back to the dawn of our species. We are not man and woman, but rather human being, and love exists to reunite that whole, to extinguish the loneliness of our division, and bring us into a deeper appreciation of our lineage and our destiny. I believe we love those whose hidden gleam is a reflection of that part of ourselves we cannot know and never see except in our lover. That, dear Pan, is the meaning of love."

"Of course it is, darling," Pandora smiled. "Now, please sit down and feed me."

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Fabrízia Gréta Pílitano

I am Fabrízia Gréta Pílitano and I grew up in the lovely hills of rural Saléria where my sister Fatíma and I played with children who were less fortunate than we. The houses they lived in were built of thin wood and thatch and were bitterly cold in the icy nights of winter. We found our new friends along trails of brush and thicket and raspberries where wild cats stalked and hid and birds sang across the morning light. The children we met were wild, too, with brambled hair and crazy, hazy eyes and tattered, thread-weary clothes drooping from arms and legs like worn-out wash on a laundry line. They bathed rarely unless we splashed in the cold creeks that trickled through the woods, and knots in their hairs collected like rat’s nests and who knew what bugs infested those curls and tangles? But that laughter was infectious, and joy echoed across the air. We liked them a lot. They taught us games to play in the cool shade of the enormous trees and along the creek-beds and told us stories of impossible events they claimed to have witnessed. Like crows performing readings of the tarot deck in a cloudy barrow; bears dancing to fiddle tunes in the moonlight of Marmora Ravine; a conversation they’d once had with a boy who flew over the forest in a rainstorm wearing nothing but a cap made of fox fur. They told us the boy urged them to follow him to the edge of the world, but he flew much too fast and was lost to sight before they could ask his name and where he was from. Of course, we believed them because why would we not? Mysteries abound and nobody has answers to every question that might be thought of and who can truly claim to solve all the riddles of earth?

Now, these children we met had peculiar ideas. Each was born believing we come from underground and are burst forth by our mother and father who take a spade to the forest and dig us up like potatoes from the damp soil when we are ripe and ready. Fatíma and I agreed that must be why they were so happy in those filthy clothes and hopeless hair. Indeed, they showed us shovel holes in the forest where loving cousins had recently emerged, and they named each dig as boy or girl or sexes whose identity had not yet been confirmed. Nature was a wonder we had to accept. Proof was there beside the leafy trails. When we offered our own understanding of birth and its miracle, they laughed and laughed, then cried genuine warm and salty tears for our ignorance of truth. We agreed to our own stories of creation and chose to accept that perhaps whichever path we each came through into this world was different yet equally beautiful.

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Marsh Huat

My name is Marsh Huat and I am the self-appointed mayor of the undercity.

I auditioned myself. No votes for the position and nobody else on the ballot of volunteers. Perhaps there was a reason for that. I was told that if someone were to be announced as the political leader of the undercity, the fact of it would alert the Judicial Council at Prospect Square and such a person could expect a visit at some inopportune moment from agents of the Security Directorate. Meaning assassins. Who could possibly entertain that idea? I didn’t because I had not thought of myself as a political person. In fact, I was so naïve that I assumed the job of mayor would involve organizing permits for holiday bazaars and directing signposts connecting one catacomb to another and down among the myriad tunnels and caverns. If you’ve happened to wander the undercity, you know that would be a project well-worth doing. I assumed that payment for my services would be sponsored by our most successful merchants who needed structure and continuity to facilitate their pursuit of profits and commercial survival. I knew most of them by face from my own travels underground and felt recognized and well liked. Truth is, I get on famously well with nearly everyone. People find me polite and interesting. They can tell I appreciate humanity. This is clear because I have tremendous empathy for the suffering endured throughout the undercity. It is unconscionable to compel refugees from up above to sleep in the slime of limestone passages, to beg for food and water in the black catacombs, to die unattended in spider holes and crevices inhabited by rats and insects. Yet it is the story of this world. As mayor, I intended to address all of that, to seek comfort and well-being among all our citizens, and instill compassion for all those who’ve been abandoned by fate under a God gone blind to His people.

That was my campaign.

What arose with my declaration of mayor ended up distinctly underwhelming. No one paid any notice. Nobody cared about the position of mayor. I was given no authority over anything and no appreciation for my enthusiasm. I had a fancy badge manufactured by Naïl Villefranche in the Nazarene and wore it about the caverns for a month, brandishing my authority as an official elected by the masses of the undercity. Of course, no election had actually occurred, and I knew it. Perhaps not everyone else had that information. At any rate, I was not troubled by the absence of popular consent. Our dark world has never operated by that concept. At its heart, our undercity is a collection of vagabonds, regardless of status. Everyone knows it. I truly believed that some form of leadership mattered, that importance and meaning be given to the noble ideal of someone stepping forth to take the reins and do good by it. I suppose I still do.

Or perhaps no one trusted me.

A distinct possibility.

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Leno Amos

I am Leno Amos. Yes, it is a fact that I have loved more than 1000 girls and women in the undercity. Some were pretty, some were not. I am not particularly handsome, nor manly in a traditional sense, but I was endowed with the capacity to thrill and not one denied my advances. Rumors of my prowess spread like a blessing among the curious and lonely. They lined up for me and I refused none. Some were pretty, some were not. Most were attractive enough to excite my interest and that was easily achieved with a wink and a smile. I’ve been lectured by those whose fears of my intimacy prevented them from seduction that I am immoral and indecent in my pursuits. My answer has always been that I did no chasing at all. Never! My lovers came to me unsolicited. I have found notes in my soup and poetic scribblings on my stoop. Ingenious letters of passion with all forms of delicious obscenities slipped under my front door in the Clarinét Cavern. I have felt my bottom pinched at the Halévy market and my bare hand grasped when strolling along the fishing stream at the Harmonia tunnel. Whisperings of disproportionate carnal enchantments in my ear is a most favored method of introduction to love with me. So crude and delightful. Those words that pass a lovely female’s lips would cause most men to blush and retreat. You cannot imagine what they offer me. Of course, I am flattered and proud. I could not be counted among human beings were I not. A man wants what he wants, and if he, too, is wanted, can that not be considered a gift from heaven? So many mornings I’ve awakened with a floral scent of perfume on my body, I often wonder if it has become my natural odor. Satin and silk pillows make a passable imitation of a boudoir where the graces of so many women have left a part of themselves for me to remember and rejoice. I do love them, each and every one. I hope they love me, too. For what I shared with them is just a fragment of myself. I swear there is so much more.

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Evander Juno

My name is Evander Juno

Registration number: G18736454

Assignment: Hermès Company, 16th Battalion, Petronius Brigade, Third Army

Rank: Cannon Fodder

20 November

I’ve decided to keep notes on the degradations I’ve suffered since conscription out of my hometown of Ville De L’Arbre. Possibly I should’ve stayed in school like my brothers. They have fine important jobs that keep them out of the mud. It’s raining tonight and cold. I have a candle that’s burning down and won’t last another hour. I’ll requisition a new one tomorrow morning if I can, but right now I have a lot to say so I’ll write as much as possible before Karzt calls lights out. He’s strict about that. Snipers come after dark. It’s how Frankie Fever took his bullet. Went out to smoke some fresh hoggari and got his brain removed by a Malthus rifle.

Tonight we’re camped somewhere in the Bayham Woods of Bourgh Province. We’re not told our exact location for security reasons none of us understand. What if we’re ambushed and get scattered? How will we know where to reconnoiter? Hard to trust anyone out here. When the mission is killing people, there aren’t any doubts of purpose. Harper Cayetano said that. I give him credit for brains, though I question how he ended up out here. But I’d be dead if it weren’t for him. A single pumpkin I almost picked up in the field outside of Pelloquet had a bomb in it. If I’d done so much as rolled it over, I’d have been blown to pieces. Food for the crows. How had he known? He said pumpkins don’t walk, so he guessed someone had put it there and he asked himself why that would be. And seeing as how we’re out killing people who are happy killing us, too, he just decided that pumpkin was on the other team. Harper had us all step back a dozen paces or so, and he fired a round into it and the thing exploded all over of us. We smelled like burned pumpkin for days.

21 November

My point is, I don’t think I deserve any of this. I really don’t. At school, I was a superior athlete. I ran over, ran around, or outfoxed all our opponents across the county. My class marks were decent enough. Middle of the grade. Not the best, not the worst. No one hated me and I had a few good friends. I was fairly popular. I had a girl, too. Pamela Bunuel. Pretty as anyone. Not too tall, not too short. Loved to kiss and cuddle. She was the best. We made love in Piper’s Field after a drink party with our friends. She smiled through the whole business. She loved driving, too. Her mother’s canvas top Delaney. She drove fast and liked it. She also loved my driving with the top down so she could stand on the seat and wave to the world flying by. One sunny day I’m behind the wheel and she’s peeling a peach and telling me go faster. Then the right front tire came off the rim and we flew into a ditch and flipped over and I cracked my skull and broke my left arm, and Pamela was tossed out upside-down and crushed. When the auto stopped rolling, I got out and found her in the grass and she was dead. Her family blamed me. My family blamed me. The court blamed me. I offered myself up for conscription as penance and everyone agreed that was a fair and reasonable sentence. I call it a sentence because the army today is a jail with no door.

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Hubert Huxley

My name is Hubert Huxley and I’m a doctor in the Arceneaux Catacomb. We have a clinic with fairly current diagnostic equipment and cabinets of medicines for treating most common ailments and diseases. The undercity is a petri dish for bacteria and viruses of all sorts, and my nurses and I are in a perpetual whirlwind of activity with patients of all ages, sexes, and cultural distinctions. We treat our calling as both privilege and obligation and are proud to do so.

I was born in Lycia Township, Vulturnas Province, but was raised in Banizon, just west of the metropolis, a pleasant village of friendly people and ordinary pursuits. My father was a well-regarded architect and my mother a doctor in family medicine who shared her enthusiasm for the healing arts with me. I guess she was justified because since childhood I had no greater passion than to fiddle with thermometers and stethoscopes and pretend to be a physician. My own formal training began at Hippocrates College in Meridianville. My marks in Underschool and Medical courses were more than acceptable and my professors diligent in guiding me along to a productive internship at Flammarion Hospital in the metropolis where I thrived at internal medicine and prescriptive interventions. Surgery held no appeal to me, nor did medical research. Possibly I didn’t trust my ability to slice open my fellow human beings, and I had little interest in pursuing a structured life of libraries and laboratories.

Nor did I really feel any genuine enthusiasm for practicing medicine in my hometown. I sensed familiarities that both worked for and against me there. A continuity of life and associations with people I’d gone to school with and known through my parents, those daily hours and interminglings of stories and reputations equally warmed my heart and tried my patience. Would I be comfortable and content taking blood pressure and examining throats and eyes and private parts of my school principal, the druggist, my mother’s bridge partners, girls I’d advanced affection for year after year. I understood that I was trusted and admired but is it so simple to tell my postman how his persistent cough was today indicative of a virulent phthisis that would kill him by season’s end? Or gently let that Romena Pascal whom I once kissed in our dooryard orchard know that her own little Eva had diphtheria and the veal tea with which she was treating her little darling could not save her. Perhaps some of us have hearts too feeble or fragile for such trauma. Put simply, I did not trust myself to be that doctor my lovely town deserved. My mother agreed. She urged me to choose another outlook where I might discover my best self.

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Flora Vale

My name is Flora Vale and I lost my childhood eighteen years ago this month. I should say, it was stolen from me with no regard for goodness. That I am alive today in my lovely sunroom of high plants and blooming flowers overlooking the warm blue sea is a miracle of unimaginable chance because much more than childhood was taken from me. Talk of innocence lost feels trite. So many years have gone by and I’ve forgotten most of what would be terribly hurtful to remember, and that I believe is one of the unintended virtues of aging. To be bitter is human. To forgive is extravagance. I’m no longer bitter but I do not forgive. I don’t owe that. It’s not a requirement for grace. What was lost can never be regained whether here on earth or in heaven above. My bitter remembrance was retrieved from a dusty old box of what I thought were nothings from the days of that child I was but am not now. A little embroidered book I once bled my heart into and forgot about afterward when its purpose and meaning I pretended were no longer important. My life in a distant moment long ago. I cried when I drew it out this morning from under those old moth-eaten and dusty dresses and opened to read about that little girl I once was. She spoke to me through my tears and I listened.

Let me share her with you.

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Paul Hurtaut

My name is Paul Hurtaut and I am an ordained minister to the Church of Our Heavenly Savior. I have a small but faithful congregation that gathers each Sunday in the Capucines Cavern through fellowship with love of our Lord. I am His servant.

Our Lord tells us how once we were perfect until we were not. Errors of judgment and ego were committed in His beautiful garden. It is a story everyone knows. A lesson ignored and forgotten. Ages pass and little is learned of His wishes for us, His beloved children. Can we not kneel to Him? He gave us gifts of uncommon value. Can we not honor His generosity? Our behavior shames us in His presence, and He is everywhere. I feel Him as I go about my day. I hear His footsteps tread upon my heart. His sun lights my way, His moon and His stars. I owe Him my every breath. What He requests, I try to deliver. When I fail, guilt lays me down as I worry that I am not worthy of Him. Are any of us worthy of His glory? In the town of my birth, the seat of my mission, I discharged my duties in His honor, at His mercy.

Is a good church built on obedience or study, faith or good works? I have struggled with that since my rebirth. One member of my congregation was persuaded that her neighbor down the block had stolen her daughter’s little dog and had tortured and eaten it. No, she hadn’t witnessed the theft, and, no, she hadn’t heard any yelps from her neighbor’s basement. She was just sure it had happened and asked what sort of retribution would be permitted by our faith, what would God be willing to allow?

She told me, “I have thoughts of sticking her with a pitchfork or offering her a plate of fresh cookies baked in rat poison. Is that wrong?”

“Do you feel hatred for her?”

“All day long. It’s disrupted my routine. I can’t concentrate on my cleaning, and I forget what I need to buy at the market.”

“You’ve made this woman your obsession.”

“Yes, I suppose I have.”

“Your hatred has allowed her to control you like a puppet from down the block.”

“I think it has, yes.”

“If you take a pitchfork to her or injure her with poison, what will you hope to accomplish?”

“She’ll be dead and out of my hair.”

“Will your daughter's dog live again if it's truly been eaten?”

“No.”

“Would you be happy in prison?”

“I should hope not.”

“My dear, we mustn’t allow the actions of another to influence our emotions, nor permit our emotions to guide our actions in ways that disrupt or even spoil the good life God has given us. Can you understand that?”

“I do, but at the same time I wish God would listen to my prayers and kill her so that I won’t need to.”

“We should not expect God to exact revenge upon those who trouble us. He has His own plans that are unknowable to us. It’s our faith in Him that ought to allow us to either forgive trespasses against us, or at least put them aside so that we can go on with our lives in some sense of peace.”

“Well, I don’t believe I’ll feel any peace so long as Yelena Jakobs still exists. I want her to be dead. I hope God will do that favor for me. The sooner the better.”

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Charles Kingsley Osborne

My given name from the Epinoitis cavern is Charles Kingsley Osborne. It is not dishonest to say I was born there. Shadows and machine steam are my earliest memories. Electrical odors. The industry of flesh and blood men monitoring and mentoring me. I am what they desired of me, what I was to be, what I am now. All they poured into the electrical conduits of my brain is who I have become, but less than all I expect to be. I am not human, but perhaps I am a man, my origin notwithstanding. I believe Dr. Skaife is uncertain about my identity, that purpose he had proposed to my father, if you will, Mr. Talos and his own assistant, Mr. Thallus.

I had caught Dr. Skaife at his kitchen table with a bottle of Libro wine and an unlit cigar. He looked tired to me, worn out from his own day’s labor, whatever that happened to be, but certainly not given to tireless industry along the eternal river. He poured himself a glass of wine. “You ask a question, Charles, that is perpetual to our existence. How we survive.” His voice was thin.

“I try not to be naïve about these things.”

“You’re a curious young man.”

“Am I?”

“Quite curious. Talos told me you would be, so I’ve been prepared for it.”

“No, am I a man?”

“A man? A real man of flesh and blood?”

“Not flesh and blood, though I do have the simulacrum thereof. No, I mean, am I a person, a being?”

“You think and act, am I correct? You form opinions and develop ideas, right? You’re able to converse and dispute. You exhibit wonder, which is the art of life. So, in that sense I do think you are a person. Of sorts.”

“Thank you.”

“But a man? No, you are not. I don’t believe so. Your flesh, such as it is, betrays you. That electronic brain.”

“Not exactly electronic.”

He waved his hand and took a sip of wine. “You understand my meaning.”

“I suppose so. My science is abstruse, I admit. Even Mr. Talos cannot easily explain it.”

“Charles, we both know a man is born of a woman, not a laboratory. Don’t take that as an insult. I merely state it as fact. You have astounding characteristics and much to recommend you among us.”

“So, there is that divide between what I am and how you define a man to be human.”

“Yes.”

“And yet eugenics draws a further line in dividing man from man, is that not so?”

“To a point, I suppose. Achievement and potential are how we grade and make determinations.”

“That one is more human than other?”

“No, that one can be superior to another. Both men, one inferior to the other.”

“What makes one inferior?”

“Health, intellect, mental acuity, potential. Aspirations and intent. Appearance.”

“Am I not healthy and strong? Is my intellectual capacity more than adequate, my mental abilities to grasp, intuit, and solve problems? Do I not strive to be more than I am? Am I not handsome and well-appointed? What is there to object to in me?” He smiled. “Nothing at all, except that you are not a man, despite your many gifts.”

“Yet I could be superior to the greater man, is that not so? By physical strength and intellect and education. A better man.”

“But not a man.”

“Given the choice for society, might I be selected as a better choice for leading our culture forward than those inferiors banished from here or disposed of in lethal chambers?”

He laughed. “But Charles, you cannot reproduce.”

“Perhaps not. Still to be determined. Yet you refuse to permit the inferior ones to reproduce. Am I not at the very least a superior substitute for those undesirables?”

Staring at me, clearly confused, he took a long drink of wine and set his glass aside. He said, “You make a case for yourself, possibly undeniable. Eugenics desires to perfect the imperfectible, or at least set sights in that direction. In following that course, Varane has argued how the lesser among us prevent our ascendance to the glory we deserve.”

“And if I were considered a perfect being, if not a man, then where do I fit in that ladder of evolution? Your superior man is preferred above the inferiors as named by eugenical thought, correct? What if, as I suggested, I’m acknowledged as superior to your best man? Am I not therefore closer to perfection than you, whether human or not?”

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NAVIGATING UNDERCITY

Eugenical Politics & Philosophy​

WAR

GOD

LOVE

Of Life & Death & Truth​

Eugenical Politics & Philosophy

Nothing evolves to endure this earth but the fit and the hardy. The weak make room for the strong. A good course is set. The path ahead is cleared and lent prominence. Weeds are dug up or burned away. Only the fittest seeds are planted and expected to grow. Life blooms with that promise. Eugenics teaches us the logic of all this. We are partners in creation.
Those who resist our re-engagement with the pursuit of societal perfection must be let off this train of our destiny and made scarce for the good of all.
What we do is what appeals to us in that moment when such violence feels trite and harmless to our morality. Blood spills more easily than we imagine and the deliberate spilling of blood is a simple act like plucking a rose from a hopeful bush. Then again, who plucks the wings from a glorious butterfly? Some may not, and thereby walk on with spirit and soul intact. Others cannot resist such temptations. A rose is not human, a butterfly is not a person, a good society is not served by the existence of that smelly ragpicker. Diminish anything’s part in the world and possibilities of apathy and disdain abound. We victims endure by the simple choice of survival, for we are given little else.
Does it really matter? In a good society, where we are born, or whom our parents were before they met and married has no bearing or moment of importance. Ours was not a good society.
Never in the history of the world have so many fools struck gavels in the halls of government. Deluded are they who are certain in the rectitude of decisions that have blighted the future of millions. Either these men and woman have the utmost faith in a morality that punishes those of varied cultural origins and distinctions – not to belabor the wickedness of gassing the infirm and mentally debilitated – or they are so thoroughly obsessed with their own tower-touted prestige that suffering endured in the basements and muddy fields of our Republic is entirely irrelevant to them.
Eugenics is not merely a mistake. It is a pernicious evil. A blight on our moral lives. An unmitigated disaster. And a nightmare we had better wake from if we have any hope at all of recovering, because our very souls are at risk.
Eugenics had a pernicious grip on the imagination of those whose opinions were never salutary nor generous toward their fellow citizens. It appeared to be impossible for a certain segment of our illustrious society to view those unlike themselves with any true sense of compatibility or compassion, even the sentimental notion of accepting cultural or native differences as human realities.
The notion that a society can improve itself by erasing those elements it perceives are diminishing the potential of its best citizens.
The logic of eugenics. Darwin exposed us to just that in his years at Galápagos among the turtles and tides. Nothing evolves to endure this earth but the fit and the hardy. The weak make room for the strong. A good course is set. The path ahead is cleared and lent prominence. Weeds are dug up or burned away. Only the fittest seeds are planted and expected to grow. Life blooms with that promise. Eugenics teaches us the logic of all this. We are partners in creation.
Think of society as a living, growing garden of ideas where books provide the soil of constant nutrients and a free exchange of dialogue becomes the sunlight that shines on all we think and do. No lasting goodness can come of amputating a culture from that conversation, from cutting out any books whose content is controversial or morally upsetting. And who decides that? More often than not it’s those chamberlains of culture who read sparingly, if ever, and whose education is seasonal and sporadic. Abandonment of books is the death of civilization. Eugenics is threatened by books. Learning is to eugenics what poison is to pests and vermin.
Beauty follows wealth. The best people inhabit the best homes and neighborhoods. Who names them best? They do. And who names the least among us? The best, again. And when the best choose to beautify our great metropolis, do they sprinkle our less fortunate districts with care and feeding? No, they do not. Rather than raising up our sad neighbors, they’ve chosen to let them wither away.
For most of us, sunshine is a promise of light and life. We take for granted the sweet air we breathe. Not all of us, however, have been offered that choice, not all born into a wonderful earth of sun and flowers and freshwater ponds. There are destinies dark and horrid. How many of us live out our lives in the dark? I’ve been assured that millions of human beings are born and live and die in these caverns without ever once feeling the morning on sun-starved skin.
Is eugenics a noble pursuit for our society or merely baseless political persecution of the disadvantaged? Are those of us who categorize certain members of our citizenry as corrupt and unhealthy for society being moral or immoral?
We’re a people in search of that identity which meshes comfortably with our ancestors, our founders, what we might gladly inherit of that wisdom handed down to us across the ages and point ourselves forward in the best sense. Being a people born to the gift of greatness and wedded one to another in that steep climb to heaven, wherever it may be found.
The perfect man might be saint or monster, depending on how he’s affiliated.
You and I are witnesses to the morality of eugenics in quite different terms. You see it as a wonderous flame leading our path through a darkened wood of the inferior and useless, while I see eugenics as the torch that ignites a burning at the stake of all we hold dear.
Weed humanity’s garden. Separate the wheat from the chaff. Grow the best children together and watch them bloom. Let the inferior fall away. Let the spoiled root and seed rot. Let the poor and invalid make way for the healthy and strong. Watch the best of us rise and dominate. Watch the world succeed to the benefit of all who deserve to be here.
Think of society as a beautiful but profligate orchard. Growth ought to be ordained, bloom and fruit expected. Yet somehow it’s stunted. Pests proliferate. Grapes and plums rot rather than ripening. Healthy vines shrink, fragile young branches crack and crumble. The orchard withers and dies. Why? It lacks a keeper. An orchard keeper who oversees its promise. He feeds and waters. He weeds and prunes. He keeps order.

WAR

Worlds rise and fall and rise again. Often for the better, often worse. Life is resilient, even when individual lives are not. What do we gain by killing one another? More hours of sunlight on our faces? Or one more slice of hot ginger pie and a glass of liquor to cloud our thoughts of those we’ve displaced? Is that the purpose of life? Is there such a thing?
The war has been a rent in the fabric of our Republic.
War offers nothing to considerate hearts and souls. Leave it be.
If we don’t kill, we’ll be killed. That’s the law of this universe.
The trouble is that we’re not killing enough people.
The war begat a permanent underclass of resistance and desperation.
Boys from my congregation thought of war as romantic, a chivalrous bow to our Republic and her people. A great crusade to save us from that race of unworthy and troublesome creatures who were undeserving of the natural air and sun and water we so freely enjoy. These boys saw no contradiction in the grace they embraced in the pew on Sundays and that hateful rhetoric they listened to over the daily radio waves exalting in distant victories that heralded the deaths of tens of thousands. I suppose there were evenings when I, too, confused patriotism with morality and saw no reason not to cheer.
Lots of houses to visit. We kill the owners and take what we find. It’s legal according to rules of war out here which are basically none.
When such as they are able to appear at dusk with weapons of war sufficient to erase conflicting ideas, then what can be done? Nothing but submit or die. Or flee.
Can you summon into your brain the spectacle of mass slaughter? The nightmare of the land ripped asunder by artillery shells and earth mines. And hydrocyanic gas breathed into the air like a foul wind that melts flesh and bone and lungs. Who has seen death arrive among a gentle populace like a fierce rain on an autumn evening, beating down the stalks, laying everything low to mud and dispersal? And that putrid and hideous stench of rotting corpses then common as stones cast about?
Our war had been unending, perpetual, peace unimaginable in our time. In the hours of fire and mayhem, who could see a kinder future through the smoke and horror?
Morality is never so fluid as convenience pretends.
What we witnessed since the Great Separation was something else entirely: the notion that a society can improve itself by erasing those elements it perceives are diminishing the potential of its best citizens.
Our world is a trial of good against evil. We can study on cause and effect, the root of all sin present under the sun. We may question who is to blame for our war. There are many points of view and endless opinions.
Do boys understand the nature of war? Do they imagine it to be just a grandiose extension of those football battles on the playing fields of schooldays where winners send up a cheer and the losers shower off the mud and scrapes and go home to mend with soup and consolation?
People died by the millions as we went to church, the moral irony lost on most.
We forgive the most heinous acts imaginable so long as their result leads us toward a victory we are certain is arriving. War does that to a people.
War was intentional. What evil was perpetuated had no excuse in a false morality. And that evil was constant. Did they believe those uniforms they wore guaranteed absolution from a generous and understanding God for every wickedness? All soldiers in all wars held that as an article of faith, that what they did to fellow human beings was permitted, and even encouraged, by the righteousness of their cause and that flag for which they marched. An undeniable fallacy. Goodness cannot proceed from evil. The taint is permanent and unremitting. Evil is a stain. Morality is certain. No one truly imagines otherwise.

GOD

I’ve never believed in a deity of any sort, and certainly not one who supposedly strolled the desert sands by the Southern Sea in a land of conflict and dubious miracles. Why was God not among us here? And I don’t mean in spirit, floating through our tunnels and catacombs, spying on us, listening in on our conversations and visiting our dreams. Rather, I’d prefer to see Him buying tomatoes at our markets for a fair price, perhaps restoring a rancid steak or curing someone’s stomach of a bad carrot or mushroom.
God disgraced the heavens when He abandoned us into the underground. Would his brooding acolytes treat us with better hearts? Undercity practitioners of occult science and secret investigations professed little faith in such a deity. No good came of worshipping in those grandiose cathedrals. Our prayers fell on ears deafened by prejudice and ignorance. God strode across our graves like men upon anthills. The sentimental love for Our Heavenly Father dissipated with pestilence and starvation. Only children still prayed on night pillows. Our knees have become too sore for such foolishness.
Why does God frown on us for stealing a plum at the market while permitting a family of parishioners to be arrested and shot by our authorities for the sin of crossing borders of cultural distinction?
When we act upon our basest desires and persecute our fellow human beings, when we pursue cruelty against our brothers and sisters, we are decidedly not doing God’s work. His plan is revealed by goodness in all things, not these relentless campaigns of corruption and murder.
We must not forget the least among us. God forbids it. Rather, let us pray that our hearts may once again find virtue in our fellow human beings. That we might restore our own humanity by a new crusade of goodness and charity, and that God may see how we are yet worthy of His gracious love and consideration for our eternal souls.
The issue is humanity and the heart. A simple equation. Some might argue theological, expecting intervention from heaven. If we treat particular classes of our fellow human beings as lesser entities, even creatures to be avoided, or extinguished, our own destiny becomes not brighter but poisoned, our souls crippled. When we falsify those differences between us, a bleak shadow is cast on our collective humanity and we are troubled, perhaps irredeemably. The heart witnesses our deceit and knows us better than we will ever know ourselves.
To read the mind of God. Is that possible? No, it is not. God is not knowable to us in just that way. He exists above our pitiful attempts to be stewards with His perfect and eternal designs. Our earth is His garden and will never be truly known to us as it is to Him. When we act upon our basest desires and persecute our fellow human beings, when we pursue cruelty against our brothers and sisters, we are decidedly not doing God’s work.
I don’t pray at bedtime because I’ve never witnessed the use of it. If there’s a God, He hasn’t bothered to hear my worries, so I refuse to worship His eternal apathy.
God witnesses miracles and encourages us to see them as well. We fail when our faith disbelieves and life rolls on like this wagon to another horizon and another audience where faith is tested and resolve to believe occurs.
I find myself asking how God manages to alert Himself to our slightest transgressions while seemingly ignoring the most malignant horrors of our day.
God is not welcomed entering stage left in the final act after blood has spilled. I think we expect the Eternal Face of the universe to speak up for us and use His mighty hand to stay the sword of the wicked and let us live in peace.
He hears our laments, sees our suffering, and weeps for us because our failures belong to us, not Him. He has provided the paper and pen upon which we’re to tell the story of this world. He has given us our hands, but does not guide them. That, my friend, is our duty, our destiny to choose.
We must not forget the least among us. God forbids it. Rather, let us pray that our hearts may once again find virtue in our fellow human beings. That we might restore our own humanity by a new crusade of goodness and charity, that God may see how we are yet worthy of His gracious love and consideration for our eternal souls.
Anger drives us to commit sin as crimes. Our souls fall out of balance, and we forget our humanity as described by God in His Holy Book.
Our Lord tells us how once we were perfect until we were not. Errors of judgment and ego were committed in His beautiful garden. It is a story everyone knows. A lesson ignored and forgotten.
To whom do we owe a greater allegiance: ourselves or our country? Is the question political or philosophical? I have always felt the inquiry can also be theological, referring to our place in this world, and our standing with God. Are we citizens of our Republic, or God’s eternal kingdom? Or do we more rightly belong to the family of Man?
“God is a magician who conceals His rabbits in the clouds above and only puts on His show when He believes we are in audience of His wonder.”

“So God is a magician?”

“The greatest of all.”

“And magic comes from Him? Did He invent magic?”

“No, He discovered it hidden in the woods of the universe where it collected for Him to uncover and demonstrate to us how magic is no more illusion than a sunrise after that rainy night.”

“Magic is natural as sunlight and air?”

“No, it’s more than sunlight, more than air. Magic is the substance within sunlight, within air and water and earth and flowers and birds of the sky and beasts of the field. Magic flows like blood through our veins and drips with our tears.”

“And God does this? The tears and birds and dewdrops?”

“No, God witnesses these miracles and encourages us to see them as well. We fail when our faith disbelieves and life rolls on like this wagon to another horizon and another audience where faith is tested and resolve to believe occurs.”

LOVE

If there were no love, only mating, no pleasure in sex other than the fondness for anticipating our created offspring, would there be any romance in this world at all?”
Love is a necessity on the order of bread and breath.
Nothing instructs more about the world than love. Its joys and torture. Its rewards and deceptions. We learn suffering, a critical lesson, most strictly from love and all its devices.
Love is the most beautiful flower in the universe.
If your soul is alive, then you must love and do so with all your heart.
If you cannot sleep or eat your morning meal without constant thoughts of that one your heart has chosen, that is love. If you are unable to take a walk without his hand in yours, that is love.
Love is that moment of recognition when all your world fades away but that entrancing smile you now come to believe has been chasing after your heart every day of your life.
Love is a comfort of binding hearts.
For too many of us, love has been a constant stranger.
As if reason ever has anything to do with our hearts once love walks in.
We fall in love and wish to share every part of ourselves.
That leap of faith our hearts demand of love.
Love is spread like a nurturing draft.
Love conquers us, one and all.
The heart is a bitter organ. Cannot be tamed.
Love circulates through our lives like clouds up above. Some days they are there and others they are not. We understand that by our experience of looking up. We need to do the same with the love we would seek in all the days of our lives It will be there if we look, one day or another.
We find that middle ground in our relationships if we seek it and refuse to barter for our preferences.
Do you know how fast the world spins? It would make you dizzy if you thought about it, but since it goes so quickly, we don’t need to worry. Love is like that, if you look closely enough. We’re swept up in a passion so overwhelming, we can’t see it from the inside, yet we know it’s there all the while. And it goes so fast we can’t do anything but hold on and let it ride us anywhere, because it’s the most wonderful thing there is.
Love is such a terrific madness. It can go sour so quickly, you don’t know what’s gone on until you’re hiding under the pillow with fever.
Love has convictions. Too often, barely perceived, one lover to the other.
Independence is part of companionship. We are lovers, not slaves to each other.
Do we not love those who show us love in return? Is there not a reciprocity of affection and caring and trust in love?
Love is a contradiction in perspective. Why must we chase after our lovers if love is a necessity?
We love because we are two halves of the same self, extending back to the dawn of our species. We are not man and woman, but rather human being, and love exists to reunite that whole, to extinguish the loneliness of our division, and bring us into a deeper appreciation of our lineage and our destiny. We love those whose hidden gleam is a reflection of that part of ourselves we cannot know and never see except in our lover. That is the meaning of love.
That one thing most human beings crave most: the touch of a loving hand, an embrace of someone whose heart cleaves to our own, that assurance of knowing we are not alone in our moments of desperation and worry.
Love is inherently dishonest. The heart is a prolific deceiver. There is no end to its artifice. It dips and sways to teach us patience and forbearance. Nothing instructs more about the world than love. Its joys and torture. Its rewards and deceptions. We learn suffering, a critical lesson, most strictly from love and all its devices.
We are born to love, and without loving we are less than we should be. We are husks of human, not fully alive. Without love of that sort, we go about our business day after day, staring into the sky and sun and breathing the scent of earth, feeding ourselves and sleeping to dream of wonderful lives we’ll never enjoy. For such existence, love is evaded when it should be chased. Love is the very purpose of our days here. True agony comes in its absence, not its experience.
One loves, or does not, according to the heart whose mystery has never been solved. Have faith that all love is worthy of our devotion and what comes of it cannot be understood until long afterward.
Is inner or outer beauty the prime requisite for love and affection?
Marriage is a blessing of passion. Convenience is keeping trust with that someone who shares our common heart’s desire.
We rarely understand our parents as romantic partners except through a touch of hands and a sly smile we aren’t supposed to notice. Sex between them is unknown to us and unimportant. We are here because of that physical union and it is sufficient. Somehow, they are not real to us as fully experienced human beings. That is to say, they live a life we know little about and can’t be bothered to care. If we are fed and clothed and loved and entertained, that’s enough for us and all we ask of them. The rest is mystery.

Of Life & Death & Truth

Gladness follows life in every circumstance. Just to breathe is a celebration. Follow a bird in flight. Try a pastry. Skip rope. Ride a bicycle. Flip a coin and call it heads. Trade a hug and a kiss. Share a smile. That’s where life begins.
Goodness cannot proceed from evil. The taint is permanent and unremitting. Evil is a stain. Morality is certain. No one truly imagines otherwise.
What are we if not brothers and sisters in this dance of humanity, family one to another?
Morality is certain. No one truly imagines otherwise.
Do the wicked ever see themselves as wicked? Perhaps not. Or if such a thought crosses one’s mind, it flees just in time. We do, after all, strive to see ourselves in the best light in order to function and thrive as human beings.
This life is a conundrum with less meaning than stale bread and spoiled butter. We live because we’re not dead, and we die when our lives are used up. Laugh or weep however you like. Nothing changes but the hands on a clock face that revolve and revolve and have no intricate story to tell.
I think we are born and breathe until we cease breathing and then we’re gone and nothing matters but that we don’t exist anymore and nobody pays notice to our passing once those who’ve known us have gone, too.
Life is resilient, even when individual lives are not. What do we gain by killing one another? More hours of sunlight on our faces? Or one more slice of hot pie and a glass of liquor to cloud our thoughts of those we’ve displaced? Is that the purpose of life? Is there such a thing?
Blood spills more easily than we imagine and the deliberate spilling of blood is a simple act like plucking a rose from a hopeful bush. Then again, who plucks the wings from a glorious butterfly? Some may not, and thereby walk on with spirit and soul intact. Others cannot resist such temptations. A rose is not human, a butterfly is not a person, a good society is not served by the existence of that smelly ragpicker. Diminish anything’s part in the world and possibilities of apathy and disdain abound. We victims endure by the simple choice of survival, for we are given little else.
Knowing too much about the world can be inhibiting. Faith in goodness and unbridled enjoyments, simple play and fun, is just as important. Smile when you can because there’ll be more than enough frowns to come.
At what age do we begin to cry for the suffering of those we do not know, for strangers who neither see nor perhaps even care about us? Does there not come a moment in our experience of maturing when we discover we are not the only sensitive human beings in this world? Certainly we must be aware of those who have less food, less money, less opportunity, poorer health than we do. Walking any city street will offer that opinion. Saddened eyes, downcast faces, rents in shabby clothing, skin bereft of sunlight or common nourishment. When do our hearts begin to suffer the suffering of others? If we even do. Because we also come to notice the disregard too many of us possess for fellow human beings who are not our family, our friends, our kind. Then arises not just disregard but hatred for those who are different, who do not belong. And, finally, apathy, perhaps the worst sin of all. To begin treating the "other" as not worthy of affection or interest of any sort. And then that most wicked of intentions: being rid of those we care nothing about, putting them out of our sight, consigning them to the ash heap of society where they'll be forgotten.
Trust is a commodity to be traded like fruit and potatoes at market. When nobody truly knows anyone else’s heart of hearts, who can be reasoned with? These days are corrupted by men who believe their own thoughts above all else. A society of mirrors and no windows is dangerous.
The freshly born enter this world devoid of petty ideas and unnatural prejudices. What pours into our brains afterward inspires who we believe we must be. We have choice, indeed, but to choose wisely implies knowledge of one thing over another. The apple or the onion. We are not born knowing the difference. We learn by the experience of ourselves and others and hope not to be deceived.
The soul travels with the heart. Where you lie down to rest is where you make your home.
For some of us, the sky brightens with a piercing white light, while for others that aura of colorful morning hues shifting moment to moment strikes the heart as essential. Yet, if two sit side by side, they will have witnessed the same event and seen it together, which is the most important aspect.
The sun rises and sets, the wind blows and rests, tides crest and recede. A clockwork of our universe. But we are not that, nor have been. People are restless. Ideas shift. Manners falter. Goodness strikes a faulty bargain with the wretched and disdainful. Seasons of men change unaccountably. Who can predict the human heart? None have, nor ever will.
Do we not struggle to survive the challenge of life? Are we not here to live and live and live? What beauty is found in rot and decay? We persist to breathe and eat and reproduce as this world has called for ages beyond our longest memories.
Mysteries abound and nobody has answers to every question that might be thought of and who can truly claim to solve all the riddles of earth?
A world without books is like a mind without thought. Those of us who read and cherish the written word accept as axiomatic how books offer infinite gifts. We collect them in categories of memory and knowledge and enjoyment, and horde our most belovèd volumes, often stowed away from the world and hidden in our private drawers and secret corners. Books are precious to true and avid readers. We consider them portals to better, more appealing worlds than this.
It’s beautiful to think of society as a living, growing garden of ideas where books provide the soil of constant nutrients and a free exchange of dialogue becomes the sunlight that shines on all we think and do. No lasting goodness can come of amputating a culture from that conversation, from cutting out any books whose content is controversial or morally upsetting. And who decides that? More often than not it’s those chamberlains of culture who read sparingly, if ever, and whose education is seasonal and sporadic. Books, to them, are anathema, deadly totems to a philosophy that holds no value in the dispersing of ideas and opinions that appear to counter the common thought, those agreed upon values and mores of day to day living in a uniform and philosophically regimented society. Abandonment of books, any of them, is the death of civilization.
A free exchange of ideas is a good thing in a conventional society. An important and necessary thing. We cannot acknowledge what is beautiful without knowing what is ugly, nor can we recognize what is good without seeing what is evil.
Books reflect our true selves, that perpetual mirror of hope and spirit and purpose. What lies within pages offers us more than possibilities. Eden is not a myth. It is a book.
The tomorrow of death seems irrelevant to me. What I feel and touch today is all that matters.
A man wants what he wants, and if he, too, is wanted, can that not be considered a gift from heaven?
We inherit all we permit, and become what occurs to us and in our lives. Although we must try and try to rebuild our own destiny once another’s is thrust upon us, nevertheless there is residue and memory that cannot be undone or dismissed.
Words are like flint. Be careful not to strike unless you’re prepared for the flame.
To see each other as equals is a difficult, often terrible thing. Love thy neighbor as thyself. A beautiful sentiment, but in daily practice? Who can truly say we behave so righteously? Few among us, I would argue.
Each of us is a riddle. Like a Chinese box whose disassembly is complex and profound, or knots that require calm and patience to undo. We barely touch the soul of another human being, even in our closest moments. Perhaps we are finally unknowable. That’s a thought to consider. Do not fool yourself into believing you see anyone in this life more clearly than you ever will.
One moral infirmity often suggests the potential of others.
The beast in us is often elusive and hard to name. Some of us hide it too well.
Are we evil? Are birds evil when they swoop down to eat a worm? Are cats evil when they catch a mouse and chew it up? They kill to eat or they’ll die. Aren’t we smarter than that? Our human brains. Do we make rational decisions for good or evil? Perhaps we’ve made such a mess of everything that we don’t belong in this world. We ought to let the birds and bees and bugs and bears have it all. At least they seem to know what they’re doing.
I could lie down like a tired child and weep away this life of care.
Beauty follows wealth. The best people inhabit the best homes and neighborhoods. Who names them best? They do. And who names the least among us? The best, again.
Does that world even notice our passing? By the memory of those who’ve known us, maybe, but beyond reminiscence? No, nothing of us remains. Like that dandelion clipped and strode over. A rose dried to rot and blown away. Who pays any attention to the carcass of a dead mouse? No one. Dust to dust. We, too, share that fate. Oh, there are funerals for most of us, and a few sacred monuments, some in polished stone or marble, but those bones underneath? Forgotten. And once the living who have carved memorials to their beloved die, too, then what? Memory is not eternal. Eventually every living soul with just the barest remembrance or thought of those beneath the slab and earth will have followed off to dust themselves, and then our presence here, such as it ever was, will be forgotten. Not even a healthy riddance. Not even that.
This world is more than what we see and touch. There is undeniable reality in thoughts and emotions.
I think we’re a people in search of that identity which meshes comfortably with our ancestors, our founders, what we might gladly inherit of that wisdom handed down to us across the ages and point ourselves forward in the best sense. Being a people born to the gift of greatness and wedded one to another in that steep climb to heaven, wherever it may be found.
Do differences between people truly matter? Whether incinerated in a crematorium or shoveled under the grass, all are reconciled to personal histories great or small. Naming one another as superior or inferior is the height of hubris, since nothing staves off the end of day.
The world is both of itself and us. Natural laws and humanity’s are not in contradiction. We pretend they are, but they are not. We rise at dawn and wander about hoping to make sense of our day and return at dusk to lie down in dreams of better days, or more.

CARS & VEHICLES

Cosmopolitan

Zenith

Algren

Delaney

Zane

Model Seven

Model Five

Liberty 1200 electric

Recco electric

Marmon

Bryant Plus 8

Imperial

Grandville autocycle

Hanley

Lyman

Luna

Royale

Zinetti

Métro

WEAPONS & INVENTIONS, ETC.

Chlorocyanic gas

Hydrocyanic gas

Malthus rifle

Hand bomb

Borrado 90s

Rodochi 12s

Remedios gun

Punt gun

Earth mines

Prionic gas

Incendiary pipes

Radio rockets

Charnel pellets

Gäeten revolver

Mechanical rifles

Gas Myrmidon guns

Mobile incinerators

Radioactive phenotheric gas

Diatomite

Tri-nitrophlogistics

Robots

Invisible soldiers

Electric ear-horns

Standard Interpreters

Aphaca incense

Tonny’s mint

Romberg pills

Phenacetin

Luchita serum

VeraForm

Oromorphium

Völker oil

Tacontine pills

Taxile tablets

Stubble shoes

Conklin shoes

Rochforte shoes

Hoyt boots

Clarion beads

Thryrrus gems

Bindle shells

Javel oil

Cenaes oil

SCHOOLS & INSTITUTIONS

Holborne Institute

Regence College

Van Fleet College

Zynismus Academy

Seagraves Compendium

Carales School

Molly Institute

Hugo Academy

Numanus University

Sacred Sisters of Tadmor Clinic

Diocesan orphanage

Flaxton Youth Academy

Grointon School

Veeder Hall

Antin School

Villar-Brunn

Mignard Institute

Mollison Institute

Organic Medicine Institute

Cultural Mechanics Institute

Trilling Academy

Pausanius College

Helvidius Academy

Willsford Academy

Coupole School

Terrentius College

Eaton Academy of Art

Willard House

Jhering Hospital

Flammarion Hospital

Sherley Moore Medical Clinic

Ézpezel Hospital

Herophilus Medical

Temple Mount Academy

Caiéta Ánqueil Sanctuary

Parrish-Lavinian Tower at Zinsser Court

Mendel Building

Citium House

Hippocrates College

National Cathedral

Thessandrus Hippodrome

Ferdinand Club

Grace Academy

Archimbault Cathedral

Mallarmé Church of Perpetual Grace

Drumont Prison

Jouhandeau asylum

Montclos Gardens

Immanuel Fields

Orphalene Platform

Hesperien Pier

Dome of Eternity

Sabbath Square

Hoheimer Docks

Ile de Lutitia

Fields of Mnestheus

MUSIC & THEATRES

“Miss Mary’s Music Box”

Fosdick’s Concerto in D major

“By Twilight Stars Above”

“Endymion”

“Flight of Orestes”

“Theme of Moses”

Schindler’s “Triplet”

“The Summer Matinée of Elise Obrirst”

“Love’s Secret Heart”

“Lucky Me, Loving You”

Sappho aria

“Navigato” in E major

Oren Gustine “Song of Life”

Veljish Opera

“The Moon of Love Above”

“O How Cupid’s Arrows Fly”

Hymn of Dawn

Five-string Kithura

Ten-string mahlousjka

Campo horn

Phelps Heron-Knorr

Zigeunerweisen

Orpheum Folly

Olympia

Baghdad Gardens

Alpen Haus

Aeolian Hall

Memorial Park Theater

Cosmo House

Sadler Bandshell

Emporium

Playhouse

Lyceum

Gessonex Musée

Imperial

Lautrec

Opera House

FOOD & DRINK

Cordon Rouge bottle

Potatoes Varénne

Mercara lamb

Bottle of Valmore

Seawrack

Cocoa coffe

Mandamour brandy

Tetuan tea

Oulmés tea

Almus liquor

Phárés

Minzaj

Morillo beer

Requeña cigar

Ras-el-Ma

Ulla liqueur

Spirits of Yindall

Filo (liquor)

Griffo weed

Hoggari

Tchäro cigarettes

Pincraçio liqueur

Butter cheese wine

Ilux liquor

Honey muffin

Maldoror beer

Zerekten liquor

Djemaa smoke

Pothinius wine

Messana pies

Lilien cheese

Butter sticks

Jade Morini

Valmore

Zemlya

Emerald wine

Fulton sausage

Gobseck

Tafilalet cheese

Miggly cookies

Gordoñia cheese

LeVau sausages

Corn muffins

Apple wine

Tuodra

La Forgue bourbon

Aïssa sauce

Mandamour brandy

Vanilla madeleines

Coulette pie

Eggs Kerezza

Red-head rosy sausage

Conyer sauce

Crumb cookies

Aged Tuodra

Aïssa sauces

Pajapiros

Udo gum

Gujari wine

Cocoa cookies

Cheese noodles

Emerald Myrlyn

Atargatis mushrooms

Honeyberry muffins

Lucha leaves

Swamp-green cinnamon

Caféreus champagne

Boucle seeds

Laval oysters

Askour caviar

Tafra grain

Terumi

Vanilla-scented Garabito

Speckled Shotun Halévy mushrooms

Tübingen blueberries

Tülloch stems

Black Tartarean

Schulz’s passion for accuracy and nuanced detail inspire tales colored by history’s treasure trove of world events, transcendent descriptions of scenery, and the ability to capture the human condition authentically. Each of eight novels, reflective of Monte’s unique writing style and methods, have been inspired by a pursuit of meticulously documented facts, gathered to layer color and depth, create powerful visual sagas.

All eight novels transport readers into scenes and conversations amongst characters as if they were participants. This dedication to fact combing and weaving fictional story threads lead to the release of a thousand page Jazz Age novel, published in three parts including the famed Naughty, paved the way for Crossing Eden – a tale of a nation in the last months of the Roaring Twenties – a glittering decade of exuberance and doubt, optimism and fear.

Most recently published is Undercity, a companion to the award-wining novel Metropolis, which dives deeper into the upside-down dystopian underground labyrinth of cast-outs, misanthropes and the disenfranchised masses. In a world of hopelessness and despair, unfettered greed and unchecked power – who will emerge victorious? While conceived in the last decade, Undercity can be interpreted as prophetic in describing our contemporary moment. This engrossing work of fiction feels all too real at times and seemingly draws eerie parallels to today’s political and social landscape – a prediction of what may come in the future if we choose to deny our past. 

An avid supporter of his local artistic community, Monte resurrected the Santa Barbara Writers Conference and its decades old community of writers. As the eldest son of Charles M. Schulz, Monte inherited his father’s appreciation for the power of the written word. Both and author and instructor, Monte has taught literary writing style at SBWC and is a lecturer at the College of Creative Studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara (UCSB).

As a multi-talented, creative virtuoso, Schulz is also a composer, songwriter, producer and collaborator. Performing under the name Seraphonium, and to manifest his lyrical and melodic intuitions, Monte marshaled musical collaborations with 72 of the most accomplished and respected musicians from the Los Angeles and Santa Barbara areas. Recorded in Santa Barbara, “After Many A Summer” is an ambitious and sophisticated body of work.