Art Along the Aether, Chapter Nine – Xperience Fiction – by Liam Sweeny.

First glance of the second floor was the whirlwinds of sand pouring down from the rafters of the floor above, sent off of horizontal by two giant steel fans that had seen the better days of a busy kitchen downtown. Flourescent ballasts hung just a scant bit too high to preside over a ghost game on nine-ball, if there were even a table to be found, but instead of the place of a table was a rectangular array of chairs filled with an eclectic array of personas, waiting the patient wait of any local Department of Motor Vehicles. A woman in a back choker, tight neon pink belly shirt, Daisy Dukes sprouting tattered fishnet stockings wore a sign that read ‘Dirty Hooker.’ A pasty white man in a brown leather bomber with a close-cropped mustache and a famous part held a martini glass I his hand and a brass cigarette holder in his teeth. He likewise had a sign; “Party Hitler.” A black man in sunglasses and a puffy jacket with baggy pants had a sign that read “Gangbanger.” An obviously disturbed ban was dressed in what could best be described as “thrift-shop couture” wore a sign saying “Kook,” and behind him, a man in a shabby suit held a coffee can and a cardboard sign that said “bum.”

There were thirty people waiting, some of them ingenious cultural mash ups, some simple stereotypes. And one by one, they were called up to a table that seated an androgynous being with half of their head shaved in a suit with at least thirty enamel pins affixed to it. Behind them was a machine; a magnificent machine, sleek and by aerodynamic, so much even the light swirled around it. Its casing, polished chrome, its buttons blue and red and yellow, it switches and dials steampunk and retro, and its presence the same larger than life status of a device that might show up up on a coytote’s door with an ‘Acme’ stamp on it.

The plate on the side said ‘Problematic.’

It was the Problematic, or the Problematic Ultra; it was hard to tell without getting inside the guts of it. They had one at the Shitshow, and its malfunction was one of the many reasons they called it the Shitshow. No one at the show knew what it did except this smarmy, bookish bass player, who said it would make the internet happy, and in the process get the show likes.

Ollie put the Shitshow out of his head and turned that head forward to the action at the front table, where a man in a dress, in a pastiche of an old army comedy private trying to get a section eight, a beloved character that went the full series, set his sign down and entered the Problematic’s analysis chamber, a semi-opage circular space where whirled the holographic images of two highly decorated professors, around and around, and pulses of white light, not to mention all of the other lights, pierced the man’s dress and vaporized it, along with all his clothes. Then a ding.

“Problem!” the machine reported in a voice with perfect human inflection – too perfect. “Harmful pastiche. Character portrays marginalized populations in a negative light based on modern sensitivities.”

The chamber opened to the man, now naked, and two burly men in hospital orderly gear escorted the man to an area Ollie couldn’t quite make out, a recess in the wall, possibly leading to another room.

One by one people went before, and into, the Problematic, and one by one, they returned a problem, and were discarded. “Dirty Hooker” offended Sex Workers Union Local 131, “Party Hitler,” surprisingly, offended German-Americans as well as offending the Jewish, which was expected. However, the Problematic was such a sensitive instrument that it picked up an offense to martini aficionados and to martini-glass aficionados. “Kook,” oddly enough, only reported a problem of denigrating the necessity of thrift stores in underprivileged communities. The “Kook” slur seemed to fly right by, making Ollie think they were dealing with the Problematic and not the Problematic Ultra, which would’ve caught the slur.

The rest were deemed offensive, stereotypical, appropriated, privileged, all except Gangbanger, who, turned out, was an actual gangbanger, but his sign was run through the Problematic and deemed reductive.

Ollie, Sarah, and Juli inched their way behind the seats and found the recess where the processed, now naked people where in a pile, limbs splayed out like they were CPR dummies, with sand raining down on them.

“Buddy, here,” Ollie grabbed the arm of the man that not too long ago wore a dress, lifting him up. His hands went to cover his crotch.

“Thanks, man,” he said. “They said come in! Be wild! Be you! I had no clue they were bringing in a problematic. I was just here to party.”

“Why would they have a party and screen it like that?” Ollie said. “They’re not going to get anyone fun.”

“I think they’re looking for cartoon characters,” Juli said. “Like Lapere Rabbit. Lapere is cool, and who could have a problem with Lapere?”

“The Problematic Ultra?”

Juli scoffed. “There’s no such thing.”

“It’ll kick up a problem with the sand itself, that version.” The man said. “Those things exist to find problem. If you don’t give them problems, their out of a job. It’s got AI in it. Believe me, it can make shit up.”

“They just want to have a good party and not hurt anyone, what’s so wrong with that?”

Ollie pointed to the pile of former party guests. “They just got their clothes ripped off. Hey, anybody hurting right now?” muffled grunts and moans.

“They should’ve picked safer characters.”

“I don’t know, Juli,” Sarah said. “I don’t think there was all that much wrong with Dirty Hooker.”

“Damn right!” Dirty Hooker shouted from mid-pile.

“So you guys aren’t staying in the pile, right?” Ollie said. “What’s next?”

The man standing pointed over to a cubicle, barely visible, and a woman and a chair – a barbershop.

“They say if we get the side of our head shaved, and dye it blue, or green, or purple, we can go back and try again.”

“Wait, try again? Why would you even want to?”

The man chuckled. “C’mon, man,” he said. “It’s a Gallery Party. Who wouldn’t want to say they went to one of those?”

The second floor bar was laser-etched steel with neon pinstripes and a betta’s taste for blood. The bartender swiped sand off the surface with a rag back and forth, swipe to and swipe fro like windshield wipers in a cicada swarm. The sand was in dregs in the drinks in the hands of esteemed and cultured patrons, all of whom sat before little bitty rice paper signs that said ‘Reserved.’ They all were one in a million in a one shaven side of a hair-died genuine self-expression that bore the end result of a bar population of automaton stamped with a custom market identity.

Ollie ordered a beer. But they didn’t have a beer. It wasn’t a liquid they sold, but a title string descriptor of organic farm-to-market harm-reduced and ethically sourced brew, tribute to Bavaria with nods to Mesopotamia and IPA-neurotic mania from the depths of that cozy little niche forum. And so Ollie ordered one of those. Sarah was on the wagon, and so dragonberry-flavored water on a tumbler-bottom beach. Juli seemed to know exactly what she wanted, which was a selfie with the row reserved.

“We gotta find that book,” Ollie said. “This place gives me the creeps. I don’t get the vibe here.”

“It’s culture,” Juli said. “And I think your nose has been up in the air and it’s been noticed. I mean, whose side are you on?”

“I didn’t know there were sides other than the side that didn’t steal the Poet’s book. Someone here did that, and I think you might kiss their ass while we’re trying to kick it and screw up our aim.”

“Look, I’m not trying to kick anyone’s ass,” Sarah said. “Juli, I just want you to have a chance to get what I got. But I don’t see this place as any safer then the warehouse if you’re trying to kick.”

“I didn’t say I was going to kick,” Juli said. “Or not kick. It’s my lived experience. It’s my empowerment to do what I want with my body. If that means dope, then it does.”

Ollie drank his words and set the sand-infused mug down at the far edge of the bar. Music was coming from behind a canvas curtain, the curtain behind a chocolate velvet rope, the rope behind a sign that read “Reserved,” which had at that point convinced Ollie and Sarah both that it was no caution and simply a decorative word.

Ollie and Sarah slid through the curtains to find an even gross of people doing a dance that the uneducated, Ollie being one, would have labeled a tango. They’d walk arm-locked, dressed to a number in custom-tailored three-piece suits, and as they’d stop to a crisp snap they utter words to each other back to forth and forth to back, and it wasn’t until Ollie got deeper in that he heard the gist of the choreography.

“The asinine devil.” They said to her.

“The outrageous, bombastic buffoon.” She replied back.

Then they danced, foot slid in alternating foot, slid forward, forward. Another couple face to face and words to words.

“The vulgur, plebian, deluded nincompoop.”

“The Machiavellian, bellicose, maniacal, petulant clown.”

They continued to dance and continued their exchanges of derogatory descriptors, each couple, each dancer, out to undo the rest with their command of the dark side of the English language. Sand was pouring down from the ceiling to the degree that piles of dunes had accumulated in and around the dancers.

“Cynical, callous, vain…”

One of the dunes was bigger than the other. Ollie stepped in between the dancers and discovered that the large dune was not a dune at all but a man, at a guess, but a person at a guarantee. Ollie lifted him or them up and brushed the sand off them.

“You okay, man?” Ollie said.

“Yeah,” they said. They held their hand out. “Suzy.”

Ollie took it, continuing to brush dust off. “I ain’t mean to call you man.”

“You just got me out of the soup,” Suzy said. “Call me whatever.”

“What the hell had you trapped?”

Suzy shook her hair out, and what at first sand glued into a course crop became a billowy squadron of curls.

“Would you believe it was support?”

“I don’t follow,” Ollie said.

“I work for the place,” Suzy said. “I got called up here to find out what’s causing the sand to leak down. It’s hard to get upstairs, so I figured I’d start in here. And they’ve been dancing all night, so they took a break a while back, I got on the floor, rolled my ankle.”

“Why didn’t they help you?”

“Oh they did,” Suzy said. “They gave me their support. They offered me a safe space. They threw safety pins at me; I have no idea what that even means. They offered to fight anyone who called me names and got in my way.”

“Did you ask them for help off the floor?”

“I did. Nice at first. And after all that support, I told them the dance floor was closed until I could get up and figure out the sand situation. And they just walk back on the floor like I’m nothing, and they start this insults game, like I’m some opponent of theirs.”

Ollie laughed, wiped his forehead with a bandana he had in his back pocket, shook the sand out of his hair.

“Repugnant, exasperating, abject fool…”

“Why are they like that?” He said. “People are weird here, I don’t get them.”

Suzy pulled a mini-flashlight out of the pocket of her skirt. “It’s the sand. It’s post art. It used to be cool here. It was about personalities then, too, but it was about raw, you know, creating. There was a real discussion. You could just create whatever came from your mind, and sometimes people liked it, sometimes they agreed with it, and sometimes not, but the art was the art. Then someone brought in that fucking book, and they took it upstairs, and I don’t know what’s in that book, but now art has to take sides. And that’s why we’re in post-art. It’s all people, it’s all identity, it’s all aesthetic; that’s what the sand is, I think – pure aesthetic.”

Suzy grabbed a stick that was propped up on the far wall, away from the dancers. She tapped the ceiling, and a fresh stream of sand came down.

“Something killed art here,” she said, “and hid the resurrection root.”

More from Liam Sweeny…