by George Salis
On the surface, this earth seems all too familiar, albeit ancient, yet it’s the unseen irritable bowel syndrome that seeks to upend Italian life. The citizens can feel it, their stomachs churning as subterranean rivers burn, everyone crouching over their loos in sympathetic and deafening defecation. In between discharges, the temporarily emptied find themselves drawn to the volcano’s mouth—would that they could kiss Vesuvius flush on his lips—instead they settle for crowding the crater. It is hard for the gawkers to take their eyes off the fire that blazes deep under their feet, and so the staring continues until each eye holds the slow-bubbling magma as an internalized light show, something to soothe the citizens to sleep back in their beds before they wake and do it all over again.
And then the world-rocking eruption, no more a surprise to the Pompeiians than the fact that winds blow and gardens grow, that souls cry and life dies. This is what the citizens waited for, what they labored over in their own way. Still, they never expect the formidable fountain of lava to roil and rise, coalescing in the sky as an ovoid glob suspended, a second sun that blots out the first. Now, it is hard for the gawkers to take their eyes off the fire that blazes high over their heads, a crystal ball blister, a brain aflame. The feast of a permanent blast. They would have accepted even that airborne phenomenon as natural if not for the adverse effects of the ubiquitous red light.
At the outset, some could not take the Hadean heat, which continues to magnify as though the original sun’s rays refract through its double, and the unlucky over-bake as easily as unsuspecting ants, become their own ashy effigies. The remaining Pompeiians heft off their already sweat-heavy tunics, returning to the Edenic state of austere nakedness, yes, this must be what it felt like to exist on the newly birthed earth, where one breathes the inferno, feeds on sparks, and passes obsidian kidney stones—the body a pyre.
As for the never-ending light, some of the survivors wait patiently for their blindness to dissipate as their pupils adapt, shrinking to microscopic size and revealing finer gradations of red, including maroon, Mars, cinnabar, cardinal, candy apple, menstrual, scarlet, vermillion, lateritious, claret, chili, burgundy, puccoon, cherry, Ferrari, coccineous, erythraean, and coquelicot. Others wear midnight-slitted bone-shades that shadow the monochromatic world as they run errands, an accessory that shows the subtleties of charred façades, scalded horses, scorched carts, and toasted trees, and few can tolerate using the shades beyond brief moments, instead preferring to close their eyes and pretend to sleepwalk.
In the boiling of the light, which oozes at times like ketchup and rosé, other times like blood and fluid rubies, the stone streets melt, and so citizens use makeshift skis, out of scrolls or pots or spare wood, to slide down them toward work or elsewhere. And then the skin on people’s ears peel down and hang in the manner of translucent jewelry, a phenomenon known as “ghost lobes.” It does not take long for the omnipresent red to seep into everyone’s veins, causing acute hypertension, and it even alters people’s personalities so that they find themselves more prone to rage and lust, precipitating Hephaestus hissy fits and Eros encounters in the open air, and thus Pompeii becomes a violent brothel by any other name.
Yet this hell proves inconstant, amorphous even, for the magmatic moon above fails to sustain its temperature over the years, cooling and cooling, a contained ice age in which the radiance fizzles and the globe condenses into an igneous eyesore half its original size, something that generates an irresistible gravitational pull on everyone below, the reverse rain of people re-sparking that near-death ember so that all fall then rise again, rise then fall again—bone to bone, the cinderous citizens fuel a lava lamp civilization.
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Bio:
George Salis is the author of the novel Sea Above, Sun Below. After a decade, he has finished his second novel, Morpholocal Echoes. He’s the winner of the Tom La Farge Award for Innovative Writing. He’s also the editor of The Collidescope, an online publication that celebrates innovative and neglected literature. His website is www.GeorgeSalis.com.
Philosophy Note:
As with my previous story, “Evert,” “Psychopompeii” imagines an upheaval of the laws of physics (in this case, one more localized) and follows that alteration to its ultimate conclusion and back again. Among other things, these stories explore the concept of a cyclical apocalypse in which, perhaps paradoxically, life persists, even if it bears mostly no resemblance to what we know or can even recognize, which may feel both miraculous and horrific. Consider Sufjan Stevens’ “Vesuvius” the story’s unofficial soundscape.
