Keep
Portland Weird
Well, of course this was a myth. Portland wasn’t weird, any more than any
other city in America. It just had a reputation for
weird, deserved or not, and that reputation brought self-conscious eccentrics
crawling from all corners of the world to try to get in on whatever amorphous weirdness existed
here.
And yet, was it not, perhaps, the inexorable influx of those very same
eccentrics into our fair city, the mass migration that caused us to dig up the
city’s land and build more and higher and more expensive apartment blocks,
which led to the discovery that brought all of the horrors that followed?
A worker at a building site found the artifact. The site was one of the
hundreds of similar projects going up all over the city – a big hole in the
ground, the potential of architecture, another apartment block to replace a
crumbling but charming old house.
Postmodern brutalism, that monotone jangle of glass, concrete, and
steel, the skin of the 21st century stretching itself inexorably over
the city. The building would have three floors of apartments that, even
in this city’s endlessly skyrocketing housing market, would cost more to rent
than a reasonable mortgage. The bottom floor would have space for retail,
and would go unleased and empty for months before it was occupied either by
some inexcusably twee little coffee shop or a vintage-inspired barber who
justified his exorbitant prices by giving away tiny shots of liquor to his
customers.
I
suppose I am a little bit jaded about the city. In my capacity as a
possessor of several advanced degrees in the arcane and the occult, Portland
had always piqued my interest – a town that existed as a tangle of temporal
conflation, anachronistic meta-fashions and the fetishization of the mundane
past. Portland never embraced the present moment, preferring instead to
find joy in dissecting, juggling, and recombining tropes, trinkets, and
trivialities from all over the world and backwards through time. I found
a kind of derisive joy in sifting through the cultural gibberish that the town
produced, and grew to love Portland all the more for it.
But
I digress.
The
construction worker who found the artifact tossed it aside and continued his
work. It was his coworker, who was an
old boyfriend of mine (don’t ask), who picked it up and looked it over. Knowing somehow that I’d find it interesting,
he’d put it in his pocket and brought it to me straight after his shift
ended. I, being at work, was fiddling
with a fussy milk steamer and cursing the world while several waiting patrons
glared at me.
“Hey,”
he said, and I looked up to find his pug nose and irritating mustache staring
over the coffee machine at me.
“Busy,
Mike, what’s up?”
“Oh
Sean, you’re never too busy for me, darlin’,” he said in a fake Texas drawl he
liked to pull out when he was trying to be clever.
“Yeah
well…shit…” The milk steamer was
jammed in a way that only a milk steamer could be. I fiddled with it.
“Listen,
I found this thing at a job site.
Thought you might want to take a gander at it,” he said. I looked up and found him holding a gray,
pentagonal stone, the size of a salad plate, smooth at the edges, with a symbol
on it that immediately filled me with dread. I forgot about the steamer and grabbed it from
him.
“Hey,
I’m still waiting for my—” said someone far away who didn’t matter at the moment. I stared at the talisman in my hand. It couldn’t be what I thought it was. It had to be a clever forgery.
The
symbols on it were in an ancient and dark language, a tongue unknown to modern
man, and if uttered aloud might just summon –
“Sean,
stop staring at whatever that is and fix the damned steamer!” It was my manager, a fetus named Cody just
out of high school who was saving up to tour Europe with his band or some other
irrelevant nonsense. I didn’t even
glance up at him.
“Shit,”
he said, and ran to attend to the steamer.
I assume. I wasn’t paying
attention.
“Where?” I whispered the question at Mike, because the
rest of my voice had run in terror from the thing in my hand.
“65th
and Belmont.”
“I
need to see that site.”
“I
don’t know—”
I
walked around the counter, reached out and grabbed Mike by the lapel and
brought him close to my face. His eyes
widened.
“I
need…to see…that site.” I was still
whispering, but like a tornado whispers when it’s far away. It was a whisper full of menace, urgency, the
threat of destruction.
“Ok…I’ll
figure it out,” said Mike. “Let go of
me.”
I
let go of him. He straightened his lapel.
“Get
me in,” I said in that same whisper.
“I’ll
try,” he responded. “What is it?”
“Just
get me in to the site,” I said again.
