Michael Symmons Roberts

If this is a fracture across time and place, where past and future hold each other’s gaze, then should the world not call a moment’s halt, not hang like a fly-cloud at head-height when a downpour ends? Should it not let fireworks burst, then hold their sculpted light? Then we will see the glory of this wild, this liberated city, where everyone is held in green, red, gold of roman-candle arcs and rocket seed-heads. We walk among the rescued in their newly crowded bars. A couple caught mid-kiss across their table, waiter balanced on one foot with eyes of steel and arms of plates. A self-appointed prophet in a shirt and tie gapes, fish-like, caught halfway through a lie. I could lean and wet my fingertip in stilled champagne, tilted on a singer’s lip. You could grab a smoke ring from the ether between punters and the pole dancer, pocket it as proof, then we could take the air beside the float-glass river, where a busker rests her bow on a string, and you ask what are all these flesh-ghosts thinking? Far from a cheap trick, this city-wide hiatus, the cost per minute is prohibitive. We barely linger in this midnight space before words rush back, before kiss meets kiss.

Geneticist as driver, down the gene codes in, let's say, a topless coupe and you keep expecting bends, real tyre-testers on tight mountain passes, but instead it's dead straight, highway as runway, helix unravelled as vista, as vanishing point. Keep your foot down. This is a finite desert. You move too fast to read it, the order of the rocks, the cacti, roadside weeds, a blur to you. Every hour or so, you pass a shack which passes for a motel here: tidy faded rooms with TVs on for company, the owner pacing out his empty parking lot. And after each motel you hit a sandstorm thick as fog, but agony. Somewhere out there are remnants of our evolution, genes for how to fly south, sense a storm, hunt at night, how to harden your flesh into hide or scales. These are the miles of dead code. Every desert has them. You are on a mission to discover why the human heart still slows when divers break the surface, why mermaids still swim in our dreams.