Note to readers: “2200 Blues” is a novel in progress, and each chapter is an early draft in its unfolding journey. Your thoughts and reactions are invaluable, guiding its evolution and refinement. 2200 Blues © 2024 by G.R. Nanda. All rights reserved.
The corrosive weight of sitting slithered around his hips and up his spine, seeping through his body like he had been seated for an eternity—another mark of the hovercraft.
“Thousands of years of the second,” the old man said, pointing two fingers in the air, “most powerful technology, religious dogma.”
A cataclysmic shattering reared through the earth behind the table. The sky was nearly comprised entirely of dust and rubble, an ocean frothing at the very height of Nickel’s vision.
“Undone, denied by the sins of fathers’ fathers’ fathers’ fathers’…………….”
The body of flying dirt rippled over, joining the skyline entirely. The curtain of dirt grew warmer, its color lighter as a brightness began to grow at its center.
“The rape of the soul gone too long, we replaced the technologies of the mind with technologies of the eyes.”
As the growing light behind the curtain of dirt spread throughout its thickness, silhouettes of rectangles and squares formed across the dirt, wrapping around its curvature.
“Nickel, let’s go!” called Theren. His voice came from the far right, a dull noise. A pale halo of light grew around the old man. It was a beam of light coming from a hatchway that Theren was slowly opening from the far right corner of the cavern ahead.
The growing light dulled the image of the old man and his seated accomplices, grazing Nickel. He cowered, cringing at the pale light touching him.
“Come on!” Theren shouted. He was just barely visible against the thickening wall of light he stood against in front of the hatch that he opened. “What are you waiting for?” he called helplessly.
“Will you leave me?” rasped the old man. Looking away from the pale light at the hatchway, the image of the old man resumed its resolution, becoming clearer to Nickel once again. Who did he want to disappoint?
“I don’t know,” said Nickel. To whom did he want his resolve to matter more to? His young Thraíha guide or this phantom of a Thraíha ancestor?
“You’ve been invited to my private mass,” the old man said in a lower voice. He took a sip of his blood-dripping glass. “The authorities of history have let you in here— let me in here. Will you not honor my Eucharist?”
The wall of dirt fizzed like bursting chemicals, compounded by the force of the bomb rearing the earth apart.
“The quick deaths fueled the empire of dreams,” the old man said. “That’s why the slow death of the soul is preferred.”
The glowing rectangles curving around the wall of dirt grew brighter. As they brightened like ascending suns, they appeared like the screens that Nickel had been used to viewing in his hovercraft, but inverted; instead of curving inward around him, they curved outwards, against the wall of dirt that had neared the dining table so much that spittle of flying dirt shot out at the old man and his accomplices’ heads. A clump of dirt dropped into his wine glass of dark red blood.
“The forces of nature and desire denied so long were stripped from their bondage, and their abundance turned into a new bondage!”
The light of the bomb’s explosion made the ephemeral hovercraft screens glow even brighter.
“They made a whore of Mary Magdalene!” the old man screamed. A large flowing streak of wispy light emerged from the halo-like screens, flowing like a serpent, as wispy as smoke.
“The burster children of men sucking the lurid milk of her bosom— the milk of Hedonim!”
The light grew brighter, tinging more of the flying dirt, now cascading over the shoulders of the men, coating the table in a shower of dirt and rubble.
The accomplices unfroze, shouting at one another, their pre-existing argument resuming. As more dirt splashed against their faces, they whirled around to face the oncoming waves, gasping and crying out in horror.
By then it was too late. The atomic blast sheared through the table, making its seated inhabitants and food disappear in a blinding flash of light that soon overpassed the hovering screen-like images.
The trailing wisp of smoke burned hot in the oasis of exploding light, morphing yet again into the familiar image of Nickel’s dreams: the singing sorceress. The seductive enigma of her form materialized out of the smoke. She was long as a boa constrictor, as large as a beast, and as shapely as the women of Nickel’s dreams.
A shearing pain erupted inside Nickel’s chest as she locked the burning pits of her eyes with his. She swam towards him, her naked body writhing in the air.
Her jaws opened, growing as wide as a dragon’s, sinking over him as everything grew to an unbearably hot and blinding light. The screams that had become deafening were all Nickel could sense when the light finally faded.
The remaining of his senses returned bit by bit. The screaming had subsided, save for one, though to whom it belonged remained to be seen.
Nickel sat on a chair like he had before, but the table before him was broken in half, its cleaved halves— the shards of their edges meeting below at the middle of the rock floor. There was a fallen metal cross, stained by black marks with only remnants of embossed patterns remaining on its surface. There was no pitch black as the contours of its rock surfaces were clearly visible.
Sitting across from Nickel, in front of the shattered remains of the dining table, was a skeleton, wrapped in withered rags around its arms, torso, and pelvis.
On its lap, sitting on bone and withered cloth, was a large tome. Its pages were yellow, crumpled but torn at the edges, streaked in dirt. Its leather binding and jacket were equally withered. Embossed face up on the cover were the words:
HOLY BIBLE
A burning sensation rippled through Nickel’s throat, making it unbreathable. It was then that Nickel realized that the last screaming voice he heard was not another’s— but his.
G.R. Nanda 