Πυθέας-ημερολόγιο πορείας: Nine Inch Bride (Conundrum) [Kindle Edition]

Δευτέρα 17 Δεκεμβρίου 2012

Nine Inch Bride (Conundrum) [Kindle Edition]

By anonym

Publisher Author Networks

ISBN 9780985389741

Published in Literature & Fiction/General, Literature & Fiction/Genre Fiction

eBook Kindle Edition

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"Visionary, metaphysical and lots of fun."

". . . fills a void as the literary answer to Atlas Shrugged."

"Not at all so whimsical as the series title may suggest, its predictive details draw a short straight line of relevance back to the world as it stands today, and in doing so offer a sharp indictment of the evils of our time and their effect on the shape of our future."

"The present and future, real and unreal fuel a serious and lighthearted bonfire of corporate political culture in America."

"My feeling on the last page was: Wow, everyone should HAVE to read this!"

Sample Chapter

What goes up must come down

The heel of one foot was free of its confines and rested on the rim of my shoe, my weight on the odd leg, like a lame donkey. But for the data case at my side and four hundred dollar shoes, I might have been mugged. My suit jacket was opened, tie looped from the collar, shirt soiled with sweat, unbuttoned. My face was compressed into a mask of bewildered anger. My head pounded. The hair on my scalp bristled.

I stood at the head of the Memorial facing the setting sun, low in its winter angle, gilding the facades of the buildings. The air was mild for the season. A light breeze blew in from a shimmering amber bay.

I had avoided the place for years. Now I was unable to move from the hallowed ground. The bare expression jangled my nerves. Why should the ground of the dead be hallowed and not the ground of the living? What was memorialized here? An implosion of arrogance, obscene in its scale? A desperate feat of arms? Failure and humiliation? Grandeur?

My life had collapsed with the market this afternoon. Wet eyes made a blur of the horizon and fury set my spine stiff. I stood, fists clenched, a battleground of hot serrated thoughts that resolved to one: I was ruined. The edifice of my life was a wreck. My implosion would have no memorial.

I stood cashless and in debt, as if naked, blindsided by a crash for the second time in my 28 years. This time the market fell I was completely leveraged out in a ballet of trades, my vanity come full circle with smoldering vengeance.

Freedom Tower’s cold shadow, crawling inexorably along the plaza stones in the failing sun, seemed like my flung-down soul. My eyes were locked in a blind stare, and within the mind’s eye arose a vision of reason and order, an incarnation of justice and faith, hard work, reasoned risk, and a well-deserved payoff. Mine. That payoff lay crushed like the tangle of steel and pulverized lives here memorialized.

Memorialized. Bile rose in my throat at the word. The machine that is time would not stop to remember me. The world would toil on insensate. Fallen and disgraced in the coliseum of finance, I had no sanctuary. The towers of avarice all around would not nod for my reprieve. All thumbs were down.

I waited for rage, pent up and compounded, to come hurtling back at the glass and steel spire, which seemed poised to implode under its overweening mass, poised to hammer down all sense and sensibility in its footprint. I waited for the spire to collapse in a rage of smoking jetsam like the Twin Towers, my bloodied corpse among the splintered bone and pulp like so much landfill trash.

It was not yet dark, the sun a sliver of blaze across the river, when the plaza began to fill around me. Well packaged flesh and bone straggled through the obedient doors of the surrounding buildings as the elevator banks regurgitated their cargo. Faces passed around me, sullen, drained, bitter, silent. The gaps between them closed until a steady throng of workers marched past me in the gathering dark.

My stomach clenched at the sight of them in the anxious twilight, a swarm of appetites, of teeth and clutches and blows that did not bite or claw or beat upon me. I was unseen and felt invisible. I was not cold, but I shivered convulsively, certain I bore witness as one who was not there.