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A Simulation

Though the explosions shouldn’t surprise him they do. They sound off rhythmically every few minutes and he shudders startled by each and every echoing blast. Placed where he is on the terrace looking out over the river he can see the Basilica’s towers and the smoke sift upward through the trees-line. The blasts’ depth can be heard from the other end of the city—buildings rattle and shake; glass shivers in the windowpanes. At every screamed signal that precedes the cannons’ fire the same lump rises swollen and stuck in his throat; he sees crumbling walls and buildings, feels the way the earth tilts under-fire, and his hands tap his ears as he falls forward folding into the receptive ball he was taught to produce under such circumstances.

His hand trembles as it brings the cigarette to his lips. The ice rattles against the sides of his glass of whisky. Natalia should be home by now, he thinks, moving from his chair into the corner of the balcony. Preoccupied, he knows that something has occurred. He sits balled behind the chair while the next explosion sounds out. This time he hears the walls of the Basilica fall in, he’s sure of it. He’s certain he hears a child yelling and mutilated somewhere on the other side of the river, but he tries to reason with himself: the sounds are not real, there are no children crying—and if there are, they are merely playing soccer in the park down the street.

It’s the third day of the simulation.  Two hundred and two years ago Napoleon drove through the Pyrenees and occupied Spain, and even now at 6:45 pm the cannons are still firing off.  For three days the parades marched down the Passage of Independence and throughout the city: horns, drums, trumpets, horses, and citizens disguised as traditional French and Spanish militia. Yet it’s Sunday, and the parades have stopped. The uniforms have been cleaned and folded and put away in cupboards for next year’s festivities.  But the explosions will continue until midnight, when the fireworks blast off from his side of the river, and the Santiago Bridge is crowded with families watching the artificial fire shimmering and dispersed in the sky reflected in the black mirror of the river.

He pours himself another whisky from the bottle at his side, and notices that a fly has plunged into his glass. He watches it struggle in the brown poison, able to distract himself with the sight of its futile attempts to escape. She’ll be home soon enough, he thinks, she’s only run into an acquaintance in the street and stopped to have a coffee in a neighborhood bar. Nothing to worry about, he repeats to himself, as the insect ceases to move. The liquid has finally seeped into its pores, and now it floats lifelessly saturated with the ice cubes—“nothing at all.”

Better for him, he thinks, extracting it with his finger and flicking it out over the edge of the terrace. He thinks that all of it is a bit silly and returns to the chair, looking out toward the river. The trees look nearly bent in half in the wind, and he sees the smoke rise form the tree-line, but he doesn’t hear the explosion. Now that he thinks about it, he doesn’t seem to hear anything at all, not even the wind whipping across his face.

For a moment everything comes to him with the sensation of complete lucidity: it’s merely a fake, a simulation. None of it is real, not even himself on the balcony, or the smoke rising through the trees, or the leaves torn from the branches. Not he or his wife, or the cannons or children’s voices; not the French or Spanish, or the fly.  Not a God-damn one of them was real since the day he’d come back to this city. It was all an illusion, and it would never cease to be exactly that: a world full of shadows without bodies to cause them.

Convinced by this truth he stands on his chair breathing in deeply the smoke-filled air. He spreads his arms wide as wings, and steps onto the ledge of the terrace. Perhaps they are wings, and he’s always been a bird trapped in the labyrinth of a human nightmare—none the less, now, he is free—closing his eyes and taking to the air, what had always called him away from where he found himself.

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© Patterson Willis 2010

Patterson Willis is in the M.A. Program at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, however currently finds himself teaching ESL in Zaragoza, Spain—compiling his thesis on napkins in the Sol y Sombra bar.  He writes in any medium possible yet has a tendency toward the theatre—especially that which is absurd and unsettling.  His stories have appeared LITnIMAGE, Knee-Jerk, and Paradigm magazines, and one of his plays will appear this summer in Prick of the Spindle magazine’s June issue.