Crude floodlights play over the Old Bridge or huddle under a loggia. Here and there, spots of sculpture bob above four meters of water. Piazza becomes lago, and eight centuries of art's aid and comfort are lost. Distraught signori from the National Salvation Board tell how they have given up on the mosaics and frescoes and are concentrating on porting as many priceless paintings and papers as possible out of reach of the rising ooze. All those not busy saving themselves are conscripted: inmates, the army, whole schools…
On that sound cue, cut to another, simultaneous mudslide. North now, October of the same year. From the center of history to its exploited edge. Pitiful little Welsh mining town, population too small for formal census. The view of disaster from inside the doomed schoolroom. How they looked out, looked and saw a mountain rise up and roll down its own slurry of slag, settle in and simply annihilate this building like a felt hat left on a chair. Inside, the town's entire next generation, one hundred and sixteen studious would-be graduates, most of them slated for the mines, hard at work doing sums and grammar and history — the Blitz, the famous Evacuation — look up for a minute before they are mass-buried, swallowed in one spasm by the sliding earth. Look up and see a tribe of faces their age, peering in the schoolroom window, coaxing them desperately outside, elsewhere, beyond safety.
Now is already too late. Mudslide slips elementally into sandstorm, a desiccating desert war. Boy soldiers in that same epochal year once more march into the town of God's Foundation, while other boy soldiers flee the sacred city through secular back streets. Everywhere, scripture is fulfilled faster than it can be written. At the same time (now what, Kraft wonders, can that absurd little phrase possibly still mean?) as this holy showdown, student armies face off on three other continents. The call for victory of belief over doubt wipes away with one sweep the last cobweb cling. Half a dozen simultaneous dream liberations are declared by those young enough to have nothing to lose but the childhood already denied them.
A six-year-old black girl fire-hosed from the streets of Birmingham is replaced by a crowd of her contemporaries, singing into the city center. Teen rioters vent their birthright terrors even here, just down the block from Kraft's alma mater. He watches them stand off the State again for a while, until the inevitable body bags decide matters. The newsreels veer to the shadowed half of the ball. There, in mass placard marches, Maoist high school dropouts cow a quarter of the planet. French, Spanish, Chilean, Indonesian, and Rhodesian school-agers blunder through the revolutionary calendar, staunching their way toward year one. A fly-fanged, glazed-eyed, successionist, baby Ibo exoskeleton flexes its stick-limbs, twists to reach a mother's teat no larger or moister than a shriveled mole.
No possible connective thread explains, let alone excuses, this shock-wave assault of images. The obvious answer — Chronology, Your Early Years in Review — appalls Kraft with its arbitrariness. Okay, so the pics in this sampler of disintegration all took place in the space of — what? A small-spanned handful of months? A shared time frame still reveals nothing by way of explanation, nor says what possessed the show's rambling editor to string these random spots together. Empty syllogism, domainless variables: this then this then this…
His nostrils flare at the remembered stink of a certain institutional-green, paint-plastic coating, a pocked, porous, cinder-block lunar landscape. He feels the impression of it, close up, smashed against his face during some drill — fire, tornado, raid, political collapse. He and a few hundred others, crouched down for hours, giggling and dry-heaving by turns, compacted into the stingy angle between wall and floor. The smell sticks in his throat as if newly coated, memory's phlegm brought up by this cough of cavalcade. If these film bursts share anything at all, it's the thread running through all the other free-associating open channels. The one distributed middle, the only available theme: tenderfoot decamping, refugees on the run, issuing from cities set ablaze by those no closer to legal age than they.
Angel Cities: well, he is getting warmer now, much. That must be it, the link he's supposed to recover. But what can this panicked pleasuredom, this theme park of loosely confederated, strip-mailed membership stores — self-asphyxiating, self-immolating, drugged, gelded, joyriding, willfully slipping back into the worst of Third World crippling sinkholes — what can his current address possibly have in common with the first one, the city Kraft once spoke to in its native language, before his facility with languages withered away to pocket translating dictionaries?
It comes to him with the force of first discovery. He lived once in another place by the same name, yet spelled in a far more ample alphabet. A city called the City of Angels in a country called the Land of the Free. A people called the Free People, although the outside world knew all three only in clumsy transliterations.
And this picture parade, the infinitely extensible police lineup of intermediary staging grounds for those Crystal Nights all school drills promise: Florence, Aberfan, Madrid, Detroit, Prague, Paris, Hong Kong, Hanoi, Newark, Belfast, Harare, Jerusalem. Each a namesake, yet sharing something steeper, deeper down, beneath names. All are celestial suburbs gone wrong. Single steps, separate arithmetic means between the shining seraph of his own childhood and this place, its follow-up succubus.
His confirmation comes in one quick cut, almost faster than he can frame his guess. There it is, on three dozen diffracting screens at once, each appliance assorting its yoked electron sprays into patterns that whisper of geometries past the axiom, corollaries beyond the freshest new crop of Euclids' ability to prove. He sees her on the screen, her beyond all reasonable doubt, running naked through cratered streets, clothes singed off, taking her skin with them.
She runs in blind panic from something dropped out of the sky. She limps, favoring the ankle he himself has only recently excised, a girl unable to outrun the leading edge of her own animal terror, running both from and right into the next descent of aerial rupture. Running dead on, in another minute perhaps dead, into the impartial lens (but a man behind it, some picture scavenger, standing there filming). She runs into a world-famous image, one arrested forever a dozen years before his little girl is even born.
And she's not alone. The whole canon of ward cases accompanies her, in shot after shot. The No-Face fills the screen, his features miraculously whole for a moment before they are smashed in again by a Chicago policeman's cudgel. Then the Rapparition, laying down a Frelimo battle celebration in Bantu-Portuguese. Joleene Weeks holding what at first seems to be her Chatty Cathy doll but horribly isn't, mother and child both panting, breathing through their ribs in — well, could be anywhere. Remember these places, does he? The day's Biafra, the day's Dhaka?
Even if he has blunted the exact coordinates for a couple of sedated decades, he cannot fail to recognize the next face, as fresh in his mind as if he'd seen it for the first time just days ago. It's the newcomer, the old kid, a year or two further along, yet a half-century younger. Still bald, or rather, shaved. Led out of the subterranean prison where he'd been buried alive. Turned about for the camera like a vertical rack of lamb, his body molded all over with blue flash burns, a Roquefort grown in caves on copper wire skewers.
And this one does not come from out of the bowels of some provisional capital a day's forced march from the Chaco. This one's from closer to home. As close to home as can be, as flush, as smack up against it as video and imagination permit.