Chicago Forecasts

Max leans headfirst into glass. Presses, as though he’d like to slip twenty-seven floors down into rush-hour Chicago. He’s no fear because he knows this glass, bolstered, heat-strengthened, his. Mystical about this view, he often pulls a recliner close to the window to witness, at length, westbound rush, southbound stagger, traffic teem and flow, distant heads of sundown smog. Snug in sprawl-generated warmth, he sometimes sleeps here by the window. Critically, being no Chicagoan, he’s still mystified by implausible peaks, what towers, reaches, outdoes, overcomes in concrete and steel, gloats in glass. Sad glisters on the river still bestow meaning. Standing at the window he watches high-rise Morse Code blink from windows in an opposite block, translates these into weather warnings, blizzards, record lows, cold snaps, surges.

Light rain, 3°C windchill, gold rises, Euro gains, Dollar drops, Dong grants life, grains spoil, hogs bark, cattle crows, soybean oil sops, dairy and Yen steady. Count your Yuan, Pesos and peanuts before light rain righteously thunders.

Omani Rial. Mojave Dong. Kalahari Ding! 

Ding. Ding. Ding. 

Max pulls his recliner closer to the window with his pen pressed to a fresh sheet of paper.

We’re sitting on swamp energies. Mud and sludge Mojave.

Yes, he says.

Stratiform traffic won’t morph into vision. A seagull flits which he mistakes for a message too surreal.

Max believes he’s possessed of electrostatic intuition, hairs prickle at risk, ears flush when world events threaten markets, fingertips blue at oncoming blizzards, sties erupt, his joints ache? Bail. His myoclonic jerks predicted 2008. When other traders squawked, abandoning themselves to thoughts of human sacrifice during the meltdown, Max drifted, this slow-motion image, winged and ecstatic in the pit amidst planets imploding and yellow-jacket cannibals gnashing.

These messages transmit from someplace between swamp energies always at work and the top floor of the block opposite hazed by traffic.

This apartment is no homelier than Chicago at large. His home’s the view. 400-million megawatts at 260 feet.

Max spots a bat, a hennaed spec in Mojave streetlight.

He waits in his dark apartment ready with pen and pad until after midnight.

You’re more than a complex contraction of water, earth, light, nitrogen, carbon, chlorides, sulphates and air with big ideas.

South Wacker Drive Zloty. Chicago Dings.

Dings, he replies.

They pass found environments from O’Hara in the taxi, quiet fallout, skews and smudges, practise dabs and swipes at prairie landscapes. Soon it’s rich in traffic and Chicago driftwood wobbles into the picture. Interstate insomniacs drive by in the opposite direction.

Gábor inches the window open to the womb-Muzak of highways, soothing Max to sleep while his Mum sits forward to watch the Sears Tower sunrise. Northbound trucks and a cavalcade of black Mercedes gun up I-94 and Gábor asks them why’s Godzilla never done Chicago? and it sounds like an old refrain. Neither answer, waiting. Swayback blocks, dead roads. A serif-contrail streaks the sky and Gábor says they deserve a major monster like Rodan or Varan, make it Chicago’s own.

When she goes to bed he sits at the window.

His Mum looks much older than he remembers, although it’s only been six months. Before she arrived, he saw how embarrassingly bare, almost unwrapped his apartment appeared. Down at the store he bought cups and cutlery. Put items at random into his trolley in a homeware aisle. Lamp, cactus, an artist’s mannequin, porcelain cat to hold stationary he’d also need to buy. He pushed junk food off the shelves into his trolley. This was a sign you lived somewhere, he thought, empty packets left on the bedside table, under his bed, crumbs and half eaten pretzels. This says I’ve become comfortable, find my situation liveable. She won’t worry if there are crumbs. Endeared by his own stage play, he dropped off the shopping and went to a bookshop downtown. Even better, coffee ring on a copy of a biography of Philip Johnson on top of the virgin counter. He bought copies of books he’d read a long time ago with classics purchased 3-4-2 on tables at the entrance. On his way out he remembered to buy a couple of different newspapers too, which he’d roll up and leave carelessly under the coffee table looking skimmed through. Magazines for the coffee table too. She’ll like imagining him stroll, stop off at the bookshop and browse. Will feel good seeing his acclimating American choices: East of Eden. My Antonia. Herzog.

It was blueish out already, just before all the apartments switch their lights on. Balancing a new brass lamp on a small side table, he switched it on and off a few times. 

He wanted these new objects to bed in and fill up his apartment, forge miniscule personal histories overnight. Chair canted sideways to the window, he saw vehicles swerve a car stalled at green traffic lights.

Swamp Dollars skyrocket. Pound Sterling bombs.

Healer’s hands say sell five million euros.

Buy fifty thousand dollars is pious.

Sell seven hundred thousand juvenile angst.

Grief: buy half a million dollars.

Max visits the open outcry to hear the music of strange transactions between unknown places, Niger Delta to South Wacker Drive, London to Singapore, New York to Golgonooza, and to watch stock tickers scroll faster than he can read them. He walks along the rim searching for his friend Gad’s signature ticks in a superstructure of jangling bodies in yellow jackets. If Gad’s already achieved midday rapture, bouts of fatigue will soon follow and he’ll be seen leaning against pillars or prostrate on the littered floor up-gazing.

Gad believes imposters often slip into yellow jackets and wend through the crowd to get high on fumes coming off real traders. He said they like getting roughed up in huddles, too many out there to count, miming to phantom buyers and brokers, playacting with vast quantities, giddy basking in fetishes of world resources, make-believing they can move mountains of Rial with a look. Play charades with crude oil and gold and Dollars, Swiss Francs and soybeans.

Max can’t isolate Gad in the irate geography.

Muscle spasms of crisis and gossip ping around the pit. Isolated penance, fists to foreheads, hats clutched in stock images of despair reusable for all epochs and degrees of disaster. Veterans weathered into banks of screens. Their every baroque gesture begs numbers on the board be reasonable. No use finding out what anybody’s trying to say. No use learning their names or birthdays. No use knowing what they know. Max wants to project their faces on wide white walls in a clear dark room, dangling projector, slowed down to two-painstaking-frames-per-second.

Gad’s stargazing scoreboards.

Say oil, Gad says.

Oil.

Say soybeans.

Soybeans.

Silver and gold.

Silver and gold.

Say live cattle.

Live cattle.

Nothing speaks to me anymore Max. Ethanol Futures and Canola nil. Dry mouth.

Last week there had been a breach. Pigeon got loose on the floor. Pigeon nests, pigeon shits, world takes a tumble. This was the fear. Gad asks, can a synesthetic lose his gift? What arrangements were made with fate to be born with these gifts? Whatever psychic end of the bargain he’s meant to uphold, he’ll see it through to the end.

Max reclaims here metaphor deprived him by Chicago’s skyline. Open to being smelted down into units and signs, turned into compressed moving parts that ache and creak, vent and press, collide and dance, this body of people don’t resist getting reshaped into a forest, machine, cosmos; these will do, so will insect swarms and battery farms. Magic too offers an ugly abundance of maladjusted metaphor with all the conjuring going on, rabid incanting on holy ground, their high chants, Gad summoning dark and distant forces of schismogenesis.

Buy ninety wheat contracts is light flashed in your eyes.

Supplicants sell, sell fifty-thousand dollars.

Ghosts and guano, he begins.

 What happens on South Wacker Drive reduces mass murder to piddling downswing, upsurge, pitiful equivalence. Our transactions, each blip once was a human victim, one humble life blitzed a thousand years ago. We give life. Our gains grant life. Ours is the loss that keeps on giving.

Max follows cases of amnesiacs who turn up many years later, who snap out of one life and step into another.

At breakfast he recounts some examples to his Mum, perched at her spot on the kitchen counter eating cereal, chair elbow level. Coffee’s good, she says, reading one of his magazines.

Dallas. Mother of two, presumed dead. Ten years later reappears at her now empty family home. No recollection why she went, where she’d been. Her kids think she’s dead. She just remembers taking a bus into town. And Sweden, early 2000s: deliveryman has a minor accident, knock to the head, mild concussion they said.

Her cereal has a crunch.

After a few days he goes missing. Five years later turns up at his parent’s house who thought he was a burglar because he has a beard. Says he’s been at sea. Can’t say how or why. One day though he’s at sea and remembers everything.

You’re not going to Sweden though? she asks.

Oslo guy. Work trip to Hyderabad in 1999, phones home seven Christmases later, says he missed his flight. Guy in Ontario goes out to buy cigarettes and milk in 2005 came home in 2012, says he saw his kid in the crowd on a network news segment, clicks.

Me and your Dad stayed in Oslo when he worked for what’s-it-called. ‘91 or ‘92? Stick with Chicago Max. Don’t go to Hyderabad or Ontario. You’ve a nice life here. 

She washes her bowl, pours a glass of water and swallows vitamins. Aren’t we taking the tour bus today? she asks. 

Max watches buses float into ghost prairieland on the horizon, fleeing Rodan! The Flying Monster! who swoops down on Goose Island, where, quietly, it’ll discard its wings and join the westbound commotion moving through a fraught Chicago morning.

Swamp resonances keep him awake.

His eyes glaze, at sleeping windows, he thinks they’re also just pretending to sleep, not immune to these energies seeping, like his Mum, who snores.

Rodan Rial. Sour windchill. Waxing crescent moon, feels like -999°. Deranged brokers manoeuvre the world’s resources.

Swamp Hogs, he replies.

Bisoprolol controls blood pressure, his Mum says.

He’d been staring at the tube on the countertop without really looking, reading the word in his head.

Santa Monica, guy in his forties goes missing for seven years. He was a postman, got a knock on the head one day, weeks go by, some dizzy spells. This I read last year. His wife said he complained about headaches then one day he doesn’t come home. Seven years later turns up at the house, says he’s been living out in Phoenix because he forgot. Says he kept driving because he didn’t know what else to do, ends up in Phoenix. No ID, nothing. Says one night he’s watching TV, sees Wiltshire Blvd. in a movie, clicks.

Bisoprolol controls blood pressure, he begins tonight.

Max’s Mum encouraged him to enrol in TM when he was in London last year. She blamed a bum mantra on his failure to transcend.

Hrum, he says. She won’t tell him hers, takes seriously her oath, believes disclosing jeopardises a mantra’s instilled power. Say it out loud to another soul then that word’s lost to you personally.

Sekhat? he teases, while she eats breakfast. Prlem? 

Om, he chants sitting in his chair at the window. Om-m.

If you’d given it time, she says. If you found your mantra. Trusted silence. Watching the view, he wonders if today they’ll climb the tower she mentioned and lean into Chicago’s skyline.

So, today’s the tall building, with the view? she asks.

Today’s the tall building with a view.

But I’m tired, tell the truth.

I’m tired too, he says. 

With this view of Chicago he submits, asks to be plucked by the claws of a city strange as Rodan! The Flying Monster!

Sekhat, he blinks, later when it’s blue. 

There’s no question communication took place. Things of ultimate value were without question communicated.