Damien Broderick - Strange Attractors by Original (pdf) (no david read aloud txt) 📕

opened and people came from them. From their

silence came laughter and greetings. They came from behind and

scuffed his circles. The trucks were surrounded by the inhabitants

of the town, who shook hands with the drivers, and others who

came from the backs of the trucks. The wind blew on Hargreaves

and on the inhabitants of the town and on the machines. They soon

came to loud life again and moved around the end of the town, the

people following. The dust settled. John Hargreaves felt he should

leave the town. His foolish gesture of defiance would not make a

good story. His circles became small and ridiculous. He stood in

the ruin of them until the sun stretched his shadows across the miles

of his walking. Now7 there was no dust. Only the wind.

The bar below him yelled in drunken male tones. The circus had

changed the town. Children had emerged from the houses and run

in the street with their dogs. The patterns they made refused to

mesh with those of the sun and the desert and his own stepstepstep

as he traced the wind-lines in the sand. T hat first explosion of life

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Timothy D ell

had settled now, and become instead a forced gaiety. The townsfolk

still clung to a myth of the city. He wondered at that. The heat had

made the make-up run on the faces of the clowns, and the elastic

bound noses had slipped with sweat and made their faces lop-sided

and ugly. John Hargreaves couldn’t see how the townspeople could

keep their myth after seeing such evidence. He struggled with it,

hoping to find something that would explain their behaviour.

The bar below him yelled. The drivers had congregated down

there; some of the men from the town also. They’d invited him for a

drink, but his own feeling of foolishness and a residue of his hate for

the trucks held him back. He no longer had the words to talk to

them. The words had been burnt out in the desert where meanings

came from millennial movements.

The bar yelled. It came loud and ugly. It made him restless.

Eventually he decided to go into the dark of the street.

It was cooler here, but the noise still arrived. The lights from the

hotel destroyed the power of the stars. John Hargreaves decided to

go and see the circus. There was nothing else to do.

They had set up in a place marked ‘Oval’. He could distinguish

nothing that should make this place any different from the surrounding desert. Four poles stood at one place near the tents of the circus. The stars were pointed out by the poles, but the brighter

arc-lights dimmed them. The circus lights had a focus, the tents.

The poles were white, the central pair taller, as though they had

been there longer and grown more. He noticed that they leaned

towards each other. He followed the line of them to their meeting

place, hoping to find a star there. With a small movement of his

head he found he could place a star in the imaginary apex of the

poles. Hargreaves felt that this sight was one he might wish to recall

in the future. He made sure he could remember the scene by

tracing the lines over and over.

The tents huddled in the centre o f ‘Oval’, in the protection of the

lights. They appeared two-dimensional. He circled around them,

looking for the entrance. His shadow multiplied and stretched in

the halo of lights. It was an effect totally unlike that of the sun.

Nothing. He toured once more. The area seemed closed. John

Hargreaves felt he had a right to go anywhere in the desert. He became frustrated that this place was closed to him.

A clown emerged. It went past him, seemingly oblivious. John

A step in any direction

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Hargreaves followed the figure as far as the poles. Beyond them

were the trucks from the morning. The clown went into one of

them. Its footprints could just be detected in the sand; they made

small shadows that were regular, not like the small dunes of the

desert. He followed them to the entrance,