The Compass of Vienna

First published by The Dillydoun Review (2022).

South

Past the nearest cigarette vending machine, under the turrets of the Bundesministerium, onto the rim of the Innere Stadt and down into its soupy maw, boiled cobblestones, horse meat, insane felt hats and shredded sneakers: beyond this, a cemetery stretching to the shores of the Adriatic.

North

The discarded trash of ghosts, a neo-brutalist train station of metamorphic headstones, the red signs of Gemeindebau, ministries and commissions, a secret highway, green hills painted onto the horizon by an adolescent, a mausoleum for empty paint cans, an elevated line, streets so crooked they involute into cul-de-sacs, excluding each other in a pride of alchemical roundness; a cliff dropping into the secret, underground canal which flows backward to Czechia, a black aura on the horizon.

East

Over the canal one enters a different world. Its soul is of pure, ageless concrete. The eastern island is harsh, its buildings slide back and forth on metal rails, just like the trains throughout the rest of the city. No matter where you go, you are funneled onto Rembrandtstrasse, the narrow, iron gate through which one must pass before being spat out in front of Augarten. You see the tower behind its walls. It is a black hole of nausea. It pulls your stomach toward its event horizon and makes it ache, however strongly the rest of your body turns away from it in disgust. On Sundays, Augarten becomes a frolicsome beer garden. Sometimes, when the rustling of yellow leaves on their branches ceases and there are only a few black-clad loiterers standing around or lying on benches drunk, you can hear Eine Kleine Nachtmusik pouring through the paths like a regiment of fireflies. Beyond all this, to the east, there is only an error message taking up one fourth of the looming Zodiac.

West

A shining wealth of oxygen that intoxicates all of life to its core; over gently sloping hills, packed with friendly cobblestones and sunlight, you come out on a little knoll. Bone-white spires and belfries soar into the sky around you unhindered. It is as if they were made of glass, so strongly do they amplify the light of day. Yet somehow, it alters into a cold, cosmic species of light, the reflected light of space and void that pushes stray meteorites and debris to and fro past other worlds, like wind playing with butterflies. The moon behind the spires . . . no, not somewhere heavenly, but somewhere else . . . I think of Man on the moon, hopping around like an asexual bunny rabbit, before gliding back to earth . . . but still, the white creation above me glowers, and the pale moon in the blue over its shoulder.

Night

At night, the four winds have evaporated. The poles collapse into each other, and the mass of potential coordinates scurry like insects released from a trap.

We live the syntagmatic life of daytime, we cast singular shadows, speaking English, French, German, Spanish, Mandarin, et al., doing lax algebra with our tongues and eyes. We walk in syntax. The morphine drip of grammar pervades us. But nighttime brings the paradigmatic life and its own style of speech, a breathy logic devoid of syntax, relying only on Judgment, on the locked, starry mirror of subjectivity.

One climbs up out of the foxhole to discover that the bodies strewn over the fields have risen, and they are dancing with the music of unexploded bombs—there is a silent shrapnel thrown into a void split by a sinew of piano string.

Night is a dictionary.