The Commercial Exchange Building

A Micro Play in 3 Acts

By Eliot Gabriel Graham

Act I

The earth moved like a ship on dark water matter. Thales’s clipper train equal to the task, if only by a few cog clicks, for its buzz bee amber juice dried up allowing but for a momentum slip up the final stretch. The lights fell, as kinetic friction squeezed out the last bit of action potential, coasting us all to a greased Zenonian quit.
“Yo, somone fucking do something, eh!”
“Nah, fool, this is stupid, eh.”
The door was pried open barbarically, the disgruntled party bus spilling out onto Flower Street. Ghostly but intact, the area was, initially, without obvious ruptures or abrasions, though it was difficult to see through the downtown dark. Until we turned on 8th, and, looking up the street, a mass of Mark Tobey figures had formed in the middle of it, all gazing up to the same block spot. Somehow the building’s blade marquee was still lit, backlighting the crowd menacingly with its turquoise neon hum. Both sides of the structure were leaning in towards its center; a massive cleave had appeared, like a Godzilla cat had worked a steak knife down the middle of it. Crumbs of bricks and sugar sparks still clung to its beating heart, swaying and thumping a metronomic vision of a living wound, adding encore life to its core and mangled zipper teeth, shining grotesquely as cascades of chlorinated water from the roof sheeted down.
“Not the pool!”, someone screamed, stirring up a collective, undulating bay that oohed and awed each time a small crackle fire was extinguished and a scroll of steam sneezed out like through a pipe of big rig exhaust or cathedral organ.
“That’s a lot of bricks, foo” someone else mused.

The tableau of fill dirt, pavement, chipseal, and skid marks just had a moment. Does old mother earth consider these geriatric moments? Nature only zone-patrolling for a stint into deep space for inspiration. A bit of the codger's dypsomaniacal short circuit shakeout flare, tremblement de terre? From sneaker soles to cow licked crown tops, though, the spirit of the tremor flows. It stung all the chairs lounging on its epicenter, trilling outwardly causing all to dive for the nearest doorjamb. From this point, surely a reflection on the sensation of gravity, having lost its anchor line, masonry heart and all, disturbing one’s pituitary ballast, must be bubbling up. The meta questions, smash cutting, worm dropping to progenitor gyrations spawning crops of pestering, questioning folks, nagging their neighbors with concerns irrelevant to their everyday materials. “Why is rhetoric in the first degree?”, for example.
“Don’t be a damned fool, just hand over the amphora already!”
They wouldn't let up, “What’s the nature of nature?”
And, “How is the presence of the gods felt? Like the forces of the economy, perhaps, or the effect of sport on culture? Or, I know, like comic book superheroes?"
Only to be put to the sword on a Syracusan shore, sand castling harmonic constants that would prefigure Kepler’s Harmonice Mundi. Be these brethren? Descendants? Has Vera’s earthquake finally stirred deep enough to rouse the Aegean spirit, or does the Tyrrhenian maintain its homie hold? The eye in the sky is on hold, too.

So, anyways: who’s responsible for this dumpster fire? Everyone points up in unison without breaking eye contact with their interloping cunei-phones. Sorted, then; key hole filled up with that sumptuous and juicy raspberry blame. The right balance of tart and sweet to enable the instruction pointer to assert the subsequent 16 bits of von Neumann elephantine delight. People need hardhats. This block needs a foreman, an idea, a blueprint, shovels and bricks and barrels and tracks. And a contract!

FIVE FEAT TO THE EAST. The neon sign flicked spastically.

“That was fast,” a bullhorn squawked from somewhere within the building.
“THESE PEOPLE NEED HARDHATS!” Thales Contractors, LLC, won the bid, apparently. Behind the voice was, in fact, a shiny new hardhat with the company logo decalled winkingly onto the side of it.
“I’ve got the Ostomachion!, he continued.”
“Who’s Ozomottly?,” an anonymous lady-voice from the crowd chirped back.
“Osto-ma-chion!” he screamed over his amplifier with exasperation, revealing himself to be clinging on to a marquee mount pole with one strenuous arm, as if head locking the hornrack of a rowdy buck. His free arm working his apparatus.
“Go home and get a hardhat, and come back…Oh, and any other tools you might have in your sheds.”
This started the crowd into an entropic confusion, like a herd of zebras upon sensing a prowling lion.
“An Asto-Mocha?
“Hardhats?”
“Who is this guy?”
“It’s too cold for this.”
“Is this a simulation?”
And then the fever broke with: “Chale, homes, it’s not my fucking problem, eh.”
The idea detonated like dopamine in everyone’s cerebral touchscreen, unlocking the exit latch for those already leaning that way, momentarily holding the mosh combustibly together with a kindling energy, a phlogiston, spurting out solar flares of ‘simón” and “my pad”, and “jefita”.
Half the crowd began draining away forthwith, throwing up gang signs until they reached vanishing points, twinkling flatland speckles, my-crazy-life dots floating off the page.

“Good, saved me from firing them all anyway, and probably a class action or two, ha-ha”, Thales Man chuckled.
“We can hear you, sir!”
“Oh, dammit, I always forget to…” he struggles to turn off the bullhorn with his teeth.
“But what if we don’t have sheds!?," the same person inquired.
As he manages to flip the off switch with his buckteeth, he switches it back on, “Whatever, your garages, then!” he retorts dismissively.
“But, like, all the garages are across the 6th Street Bridge; we live in like, flats, in flats with our children.”
“My god, your children! They’re home alone!?”
“I know, like, totally,” a different woman responds, “I don't know about anyone else, but I was on my way home to take mine for a walk, when this drama happened.”
“A walk? Ohhhhh, ahhh, you mean your pets.”
“Yeah, a lot of us have puppy and like kitty babies,” another clarified.
“Ahhhhhhh, Okay,” Thales Man concluded as he slunk himself back behind the sign.

GO HOME, the sign now read.

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II

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III

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