P: Vol. 2. Engineering Feats of the Future

or
Further Obscuring the Line Between Florid and Fauna

What kind of place was this? What legion of emboldened lunatics had designed a city so fast in its stead and dedication to the absurd and surreal that mimicry had become its anthem? That the town itself had become not a desirable place of residence, not a locus of repute or a center of commerce, but an overpopulated and crime-riddled shamlet? A place of living nightmares and monstruous eyesores? A horrifying merger of abstraction and architecture?



Helicopters flew upside down. Food glowed in the dark so that when one opened one's mouth after a meal a train and its cyclopic headlamp appeared to be emerging from a mountain tunnel of tarmac and teeth.



Apartment buildings plummeted with antigravity aplomb, reaching toward the sky with sinuous, self-congratulatory appendages, their towers frolicking around one another like an embroiled mass of nucleic acid chains and Christmas tinsel. Like DNA skipping double dutch with dandelions. Phallic towers of stocks and bonds leaned incongruously at sixty-five degree angles, their domed tiers and severe needle-like antennas aimed as missiles toward the 10 o'clock sun.



Enormous doughnuts made of red brick and scrap metal housed shopping malls and colleges and processing plants. Subways were built with the unnecessary corkscrewing of rickety wooden roller coasters. Bus stop benches were fashioned to resemble spawning salmon.



And the opulent houses miles above the sun drenched hills - suspended like horse thieves to the impassable cliffs with Herculean steel threads - were built in the shape of tomatoes and pumpkins and peppers.



The poor lived in Petri dishes and clear glass boxes for all to see. On display at the theater of Pulchritude were the fruits of advantage or, showing at the nickelodeons, the foibles of misery.