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Authors: Jeffrey Thomas
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addicted to a drug called purple vortex. When his uncle tried to evict the men, the nephew and his friend began beating them.
As she sat there on her bed, with the police lights sweeping across her room and her body, and Mr. Moon holding her hand so gently as he sang Blue Blues to her, Cynth did not realize that just then in Tower 3 the police had discovered the elderly couple battered but alive on their living room sofa. They also found the two home invaders, suspended from the living room ceiling in the grip of eight metal hands, some of their parts no longer connected to the rest of their bodies.
2
In the autumn of her twenty-eighth year, Cynth traveled to Punktown from the city of Miniosis a half dozen times for a number of job interviews, and to check on the progress of the condominium she had purchased. Her condominium was one unit of a three story structure that was to have a brick exterior and the look of a converted factory building, to complement its neighborhood of warehouses and places of industry that themselves had mostly been refurbished as apartment buildings or office suites. Over the past couple of decades, most of Punktown’s places of manufacture had shut down, leaving many people – better suited to manual labor than office drone work – jobless, and thus increasing dramatically Punktown’s already alarming crime rate. To Cynth, the building under construction looked as much like it was slowly being stripped down and razed.
Because she had broken off with her fiancé, and because she couldn’t even bear being in the same city with him anymore, as if he were so integrated with that place that its very name concealed his own in code, she was in a dark mood that autumn and took to thinking of the condos-in-the-making as the Mansions of Despair. For a prolonged period the building’s construction had stalled, or at least in her impatience this was her impression. Whatever the case, for several of her visits she’d noted that the outside had been left surfaced in a tarry, charred-looking black material, which she imagined was insulation, except for a middle section that was weirdly yellow instead. When the gaping empty windows were viewed from an angle, the vertical metal supports for the interior walls looked like bars across them. There was to be a high security wall of brick-faced concrete around the condos, but in its incomplete state, with a bristling forest of iron rods jutting up like punji stakes, the wall’s foundation better called to mind a castle moat.
The building was finally finished, however, and by winter not only had Cynth moved in but settled into a new job as well. Still, every morning it was her ritual to steel herself before venturing outside to embark for work. She would stand at her living room window, coffee in hand, to confront the city beyond. Her parents had kept her well insulated from Punktown as a child, but she was no longer that child and her parents themselves remained in Miniosis, where they had moved their family when Cynth was ten. These days, she was only too aware of what went on in the streets that wound like streams through gorges of towering stone. The Mansions of Despair were curious in being so humble in scale, in a city where it often appeared the buildings had rained down from the sky and heaped atop each other wherever they happened to land, in seemingly precarious stacks of palaces atop castles atop fortresses, with metal bridges connecting them or maybe just preventing them from toppling against each other, vines of cable and drooping loops of corrugated pipe slung from one chasm wall to the next, all of it casting the labyrinth of streets below in a perpetual gloom.
Mansions of Despair , Cynth thought this morning as she gazed out upon Punktown once again, again sipped the coffee that had become a prop, an elixir of imagined strength. It’s all the Mansions of Despair
As she sat there on her bed, with the police lights sweeping across her room and her body, and Mr. Moon holding her hand so gently as he sang Blue Blues to her, Cynth did not realize that just then in Tower 3 the police had discovered the elderly couple battered but alive on their living room sofa. They also found the two home invaders, suspended from the living room ceiling in the grip of eight metal hands, some of their parts no longer connected to the rest of their bodies.
2
In the autumn of her twenty-eighth year, Cynth traveled to Punktown from the city of Miniosis a half dozen times for a number of job interviews, and to check on the progress of the condominium she had purchased. Her condominium was one unit of a three story structure that was to have a brick exterior and the look of a converted factory building, to complement its neighborhood of warehouses and places of industry that themselves had mostly been refurbished as apartment buildings or office suites. Over the past couple of decades, most of Punktown’s places of manufacture had shut down, leaving many people – better suited to manual labor than office drone work – jobless, and thus increasing dramatically Punktown’s already alarming crime rate. To Cynth, the building under construction looked as much like it was slowly being stripped down and razed.
Because she had broken off with her fiancé, and because she couldn’t even bear being in the same city with him anymore, as if he were so integrated with that place that its very name concealed his own in code, she was in a dark mood that autumn and took to thinking of the condos-in-the-making as the Mansions of Despair. For a prolonged period the building’s construction had stalled, or at least in her impatience this was her impression. Whatever the case, for several of her visits she’d noted that the outside had been left surfaced in a tarry, charred-looking black material, which she imagined was insulation, except for a middle section that was weirdly yellow instead. When the gaping empty windows were viewed from an angle, the vertical metal supports for the interior walls looked like bars across them. There was to be a high security wall of brick-faced concrete around the condos, but in its incomplete state, with a bristling forest of iron rods jutting up like punji stakes, the wall’s foundation better called to mind a castle moat.
The building was finally finished, however, and by winter not only had Cynth moved in but settled into a new job as well. Still, every morning it was her ritual to steel herself before venturing outside to embark for work. She would stand at her living room window, coffee in hand, to confront the city beyond. Her parents had kept her well insulated from Punktown as a child, but she was no longer that child and her parents themselves remained in Miniosis, where they had moved their family when Cynth was ten. These days, she was only too aware of what went on in the streets that wound like streams through gorges of towering stone. The Mansions of Despair were curious in being so humble in scale, in a city where it often appeared the buildings had rained down from the sky and heaped atop each other wherever they happened to land, in seemingly precarious stacks of palaces atop castles atop fortresses, with metal bridges connecting them or maybe just preventing them from toppling against each other, vines of cable and drooping loops of corrugated pipe slung from one chasm wall to the next, all of it casting the labyrinth of streets below in a perpetual gloom.
Mansions of Despair , Cynth thought this morning as she gazed out upon Punktown once again, again sipped the coffee that had become a prop, an elixir of imagined strength. It’s all the Mansions of Despair
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