Part Three of ERRATICA: From the Desk of Fiore Amore, Esq.
The Olympia structure, also known as the Legislature fault, is an 80km long gravitational and aeromagnetic anomaly separating the sedimentary deposits of the Tacoma Basin from the basalt of the Black Hills uplift. It is not known to be seismic—indeed, there is very little seismicity south of the Tacoma Basin as far as Chehalis—and not even conclusively established to be a fault.
The Olympia structure is not a fault. It is an anomaly, a dark omen. This city is the site of competing cosmic forces. That much was made evident in my recent return from exile. Olympia was not Olympia upon my arrival. It had become something else, something much older. This was Wet City, USA—the horror of the South Sound.
Time has forgotten Wet City. Wet City is the site of stagnation and erratic screams. I cannot remember the last time it was Tuesday. What I do know is the cawing of the gulls. Wherever you go, you hear them. I cannot discern whether they follow me or if I have never moved, any step away from the pier and its stench a comforting delusion.
Beyond that there is the fog. Have you seen the fog? It has seen you and sees you still. Wet City seeps into your pores. Wet City has never let you go. Wet City is your damp blanket in the alley behind a place you once knew but now escapes you. Wet City is a memory, no longer burning but drenched in a melancholy so mundane you cannot notice its ineffable persistence.
“Mountain’s out,” or so you tell yourself at night.
Where is the beach?
Wet City pulls you down. Wet City is the darkness. You cannot see outside of Wet City. Along Cooper Point the forest is not a wall but an ocean without waves, which in concert with the night sky swallows you whole.
Did you hear what happened at the Safeway on Harrison? I didn’t.
Wet City is infested by ghosts.
The fog embraces you like a lover.
“It’s really coming down out there.” This is every utterance from a stranger. Each voice is fragile, light as if the bone of a bird.
Malfeasance seeps out from the Capitol Lake.
The last time I ordered a cup of coffee I tasted the brackish earth and its myriad worms.
My friends in the Mycology Club still have not returned. The mycelium spoke to them and they listened. They always listen.
Every time I pass the Handy Pantry my heart sinks.
There is no lurking in the shadows for the shadows are everywhere we all travel the shadows every street lamp is a feeble and indecipherable cry for help. I’ve gone deaf to the longing.
Did your ex ever have a face?
Wet City never had a face and does not want one. And yet, you see the face of Wet City in your dreams. You think you’ve seen her in a piano room in COM. You’ve never been in COM.
I found myself shirtless in the mud taking bites from wild Amanitas in search of a lawn chair upon which I would become the next Oracle at Delphi, adorned in moss, immovable, reading the splatter patterns of my regurgitations as if they were the palms of my peers in a different time.
The campus police have high-powered rifles and they’re pointed at you. In Wet City you are the enemy. Nobody knows what you’re the enemy of.
Again I hear the gulls and their agony. It is the only thing which cuts through the Wet. The Wet is everything. The Wet consumes and infests. The Wet is a pool collecting inside you at this very moment. The Wet knows no bounds. I saw glimpses of the Wet standing in the bay and I watched from the bridge in awe in reverence at this force beyond my recognition, all-encompassing Wet, Wet which transforms men into minnows, Wet who puts Moloch to shame in its hunger, Wet whose power is apathy, Wet a patron saint of slumber, Wet who pissed in my cheerios, Wet whose blues give way to grays, Wetness at the end of days, Wetness whose slow ooze signals sadness.
I miss the veggie burger at the Reef.
Whether I am an investigative journalist or undergoing paranoid delusions as part of a prolonged mental breakdown brought about by utter disillusionment and being too tired to seek help is a matter open to interpretation.
Do you remember when you felt happy?
My pen is running out of ink.
