Saltwrack

Humanity’s inescapable tragedy is falling asleep to an eight hour train engine POV. Squinting through room’s dark at a screen, stem of your Cahors malbec so far sideslunk in your sadly not drunk your ok cradles the cup, realizing below all you’ve built is the basic ask unfulfilled to be Mediterraneanly baskably still save cradling side to side by bends up some mountain pass, you don’t even care which, just five hours up and five hours down day after day after day, gently reassured by the motion that you’re moving, that the colors on the screen will take you with them, screensavers where “everything you touch is polymer, glossy and smothering.” In the interim, “Some of your time is taken up by organizing supplies, some by being warned”, never at home in whichever city you try, and you do try, “Crisp bread, soft colorless melon. Some sort of warm savory beverage. Your new city seemed temperate, expansive, for a time”, don’t specify, you’ll know when, compelled past “All known and catalogued … in search of deeper secrets.”

Saltwrack’s journey pleasures in snowflake filigrees of “the wrack’s austere beauty, its complete sovereign self” which shine phantasmagorically beyond the “layers of coalsilk and oilfoam fluff” that shiver against. Our daunted north mesmires marine castform divergences, mercurial unfathoms forming “Silicaceous networks and lattices” and “Cnidarian clumps of tendrils.” These psycheflourishes are pinned to the page to ground you in scientific exteriority, this exists for a reason the worldbreaking asserts assiduate to punctuate the campmaking and freezefording. Thankfully for the vibesplorers among us these pages turn quickly, days counting down ration by ration forcing us to forgo the tepidries of rationalizing backstories from blurmarks. Whizzing by the window, Saltwrack’s swiftness of imagism excels: “A sphere of depth, crested with sky.” Sure, the prose overrelies on sky, but only to toneset timekeep the dreamy towards and terrified recoil, piercing through variorum desolations the purpose as pace: “As the ash-white land darkens in the dusk, the sky stays a clear pale blue for an hour or so. You work beneath it.” Such work occupies the play of space to stage fantasy dangers; where “meltwater has carved a channel down into it and refrozen in slick glassy knives below”, impalement lies in a wrongclick.

But yes, sure, fine, we ought to be going somewhere with all this, rationalize a backstory from the blurmarks. Seek out the worldwound: “Something flips. Wrong. At first only a placeless terror. Your lamp is bright and yet there is no light, no emanation. And then as in a dream, where awareness flows to you, you know that experiments in physics were conducted here, that the city at large was renowned for technological advancement. That this point is where it all went terribly wrong. But you know it from the other side, from a patchwork recollection of long-dead minds. This is not what they saw. This is only a trace of it, only a tethered and slumbering remnant. It is all around you. Already you are losing yourself.” Digital twins scar processors in a whois for who is sequenced in helixed dissociations disowning anthropocene apexeclipse anthraxing the technotraumic allwrack to nadir codas of shivery postregrets, if only so that we don’t have to have them, disimminent dissolver of the posed fraxis might we Mani man from I to mythmake the guilt, “split off the real from itself … A grown nightmare, an organic gnarl, physics’ nameless teratoma. It ate from the atmosphere and spewed out its own waste over it, all the toxins that would damage its ecology. An excess, in particular, of salt. There is a thing beyond the vanishing point, and it is living still—while your earth silently decays.” Haunted? You’ll always be, so you should be.

Any complexity to recast twain tautologies of fate to a doom of one’s sown? Gestures of being hunted hound you home, so suddenly, you’re home, credits roll, characters epilogue that life goes on. Turns out scrying the curse from core contagion can be good for your career, you’ll moue into your downed Cahors, time to go to sleep.