Something rotten is afoot in Colonial Imperialsburg, and there’s no investigatory body waiting to assemble to determine the source. The town hall has stood matter-of-factly on the town square for the townspeople to assemble the town council and vote on the town laws for more than three centuries, and your rot might be their flourishing, and who asked you, anyway.
But I didn’t ask, I was told. I snuck past the guards and toured the Colonial Museum, it treated the Founding Fathers like Olympian gods, mentioning their “unpaid assistants” in the same breath as their “legendary work ethic.” I saw Washingson’s desk set; it looked like the pens had never been used. It was small, I wanted to sit in the chair to see if it would support my weight, but the Colonial guard wouldn’t have had much time for that. I touched Jefferton’s coat, it was rough, and his wig, it was rough, too. The Fathers’ skin had to have been irritated constantly, I thought, and when I saw Hamilbur’s wide selection of epidermal tinctures, I knew it to be a fact. It reeked of tallow and every wall was painted up with broken promises, and so the cloud over my head in Imperialsburg had to have formed there.
So I walked the cobbled streets and took in the juxtaposition of ancient-looking structures with definitely-modern businesses inserted within them. There was the bootblack shop housing a branch of a major insurance company, provoking my wondering if there was a time when indemnity was available from the men who kept the footwear of the monied distinct from that of the working people. In the next block, a vinyl shop carved out of stables, whose sign neatly proclaims “Horsecarriage Records,” suggesting perhaps that they had kept the sign after one no longer needed a full archive of who owned the means of conveyance in town, and waited for a business which could go by a similar moniker. The attempt at rendering the police station more quaint with its antiquated title of “Constables” was on the one hand in poor taste, but on the other was a useful reminder of the origin of the institution. To have an original (or incredibly convincing facsimile—that could be a cottage industry in itself here, perhaps built out of an actual cottage) sign over the jail labeled “Barracoon” suggested a tongue in a cheek which I wanted very much to find and cut out before burning the entire place to its centuries-old foundations. I gritted my teeth and strode on towards the diminutive library, cloud darkening, storm forming.
The library turned out to be a niche interest, and one in which I was certainly not a participant, as it contained books only from the High Colonial era—apparently the heyday and preeminent obsession of this place—or written in the last five years. At the summer solstice, continued the plaque bolted to the side of the place, the oldest from this window would be rotated out and donated. Though it was of some moderate interest that books in this place had to be run through the library for half a decade before being freely available, I did not want to expend the mental energy figuring out why anyone would devise, and then presumably abide by, such a system. I further knew that nearly every single book which meant anything to me could not be contained in such a place, and the few that could would not be there. The library was situated, naturally, on a terrace of red cobblestones, out of which were cut small planting squares, the request of an early vice-president’s wife who had stayed in the quarters above the place, back when one did such things. Of course the volume of her notes on the arboreal diversity of central Pennsylvania could easily be checked out from the library today, should one desire a sleeping aid of the literary variety. In any case, Imperialsburg had appreciated the design sufficiently to reproduce it on every block of the downtown area, and as I trudged on, I noticed in each one of the dirt squares a small, as in young, dead finch in early stages of expiration, judging by the lack of visible decay. The first bird was off-putting, as I nearly stepped on it, the second prompted me to look skyward, as if the source of the dead birds was to be found there, but by the fourth, I did not want to look down anymore as I walked. Something in the air was all wrong, and I wished I had a mask to avoid breathing in whatever had downed these adolescent avians.
It was not long for not looking down that I did not want to look ahead, either. The constables (as I imagined they’d prefer to be called) rode on horseback here. The horses appeared deeply embarrassed, save for one that must have come from a long line of the equestrian unit, as he was either proud of his post or just generally haughty about carrying around the law of the Colonies on his strong back. The law of the Colonies looked the same as the law everywhere else, with the possible exception that it was always looking down at the tops of the citizens of Imperialsburg, who as a result almost uniformly wore dark hats. As I went to make my next turn towards the café, I heard weeping—deeply humane sobs, gentle, as if someone had asked that the sobber not cry, and he had tried to respect this request. He sat on the curb, wrists restrained behind his back, while three police watched over him from various heights: sitting on proud horse, standing next to embarrassed, sheepish horse, and crouching over him, location of horse unknown. His crying looked anguished, and though I was a bit embarrassed by the small assemblies of people watching the scene, I was glad that there were more witnesses. The rottenness flowed through me in a dizzying flurry of thoughts: how quickly I could race when the first blow rained down on him, what it would feel like to kicked by a horse or struck from above by a truncheon, what a night or two in the barracoon might be like, how difficult it must be to cry with your hands bound behind you, as your impulse is to cover your face or at least lean forward, why this town in this state in the country in this world needed to restrain bind excise hide people it deemed abject unacceptable other, and then I was interrupted because the man tipped over to the side. A few of the better people of Imperialsburg, the ones who hated the town name and all its fetishistic markers of its brutalist past, and not least that proud police horse, moved forward to assist, but they were brushed away and the ambulance rolled up, and the man was, in the ultimate metaphor for state violence, sat up, then stood up, then laid down, then re-bound, then rolled away. I felt a stone in my stomach and love and hatred commingling in my upper guts.
I stood dumb for a moment, like the fencepost I was, and then glanced to the sapling a few feet away, verifying the presence of the dead bird, this one seemingly the smallest yet. I wanted to languish in the cold syrup of bad feelings, but was interrupted by an incredibly deferential and apologetic person asking if I had any money or food. They were nearly prepossessed with “not being a bother” and “knowing you have other places to be.” Their voice was a high alto of care and concern, things it did not need to be, as they were the one in need and I the stranger in a strange land. I handed them the couple of bills I had, and walked the last couple of blocks alongside them, apologies, thanks, and small talk washing over me as they answered their own questions and seemed to be happy to have an ostensible listener. I kept my questions about libraries, museums, horseback cops, and birds to myself. We crossed into the block containing the café, and my companion suddenly swiveled to the right, seeming to notice someone familiar, though operating precisely the same script and inflection as upon our meeting. I hoped for the best and feared for the mundane bad which swirled around and between both of us.
The dichotomy of the café was almost welcome at this point: saccharine if pleasant enough staff, menacing furrowed-browed patrons, and a hidden, nearly empty back room to hide from both. The modern whitewashed brick and blonde wood shelves décor gave way to a sad, empty platform, complete with the skeleton of a disused guitar stand, just high enough to be called a stage, though no more than one folkie clown could have sat upon it. Because there was an unfortunate deficit of clowns in the vicinity, I was forced to imagine Lead Belly sitting on one of the short stools, occasionally nudging with his foot the small suitcase containing his payment beneath him to verify its presence, sitting stark upright and hammering every one of those twelve strings as he intoned “Talkin’ Bad Vibes in Colonial Imperialsburg Blues.” It wouldn’t make him blue, though, it’d just be another night in the colonies, worthy of neither chagrin nor opprobrium, just a three-minute blues and splash of whatever gutrot was kept on the shelf under the cash register. But he disappeared before my eyes and ears just as sure as he materialized before them, and I could not for the life of me remember the melody afterwards, just the faint, ironic refrain of “Lancaster, Lancaster, what a nice place to be—Lancaster, Lancaster, let’s go there right now.”
There’s a limit to the amount of quiet contemplation one requires, or can withstand, depending, in such a place, knowing that holes are being bored through the walls by the distrustful citizens of the Imperialsburg Café, built out of a dead letter office, the misbegotten postcards and Dear John letters of one burgeoning colonial power separating itself from another. I did not need to be told twice to leave, and so shuffled on, frustrated slightly by the high caliber of the coffee I had consumed within. The staff waved goodbye, the patrons returned their watchful eyes to their steaming tea and whispered scuttlebutt conversations. All that was left was the place itself, the object of my ambling, where the music would be played and the trip could end with a melodious whimper. The dead birds marked my return path, they knew nothing of bad vibes, having been granted leave of the outmoded idyll.
There were teams tonight, as sometimes happens due to circumstances often beyond anyone’s control. Far be it from me to consider at any length the state of American country music, suffice it to say that the Nashville sound and the fetishization of modernizing Appalachian folk music are both very much alive, well, and giving not the slightest concern to your or my opinions thereabout. Contemporary country music is not here to hold your hand gently and explain to you how pop can in fact simply refer to what is popular, how tribalism is dead, and that modern production has long since folded in on itself and the genre distinctions to which you apparently cling. If it tells you to grow up, it means it with all due respect, and giving people what people want is what it has always been about, regardless. If it mumbles something under its breath about culture, it is in both of your interests to just ignore it and get on with your evening. The salient point here is that artists are of only a limited responsibility for their audiences, and though it is in most cases clear who is on whose teams—women in American flag tank top and tucked-in white dress shirt and mid-waisted jeans; man in Nick Cave 1996 tour t-shirt and thin chain wallet—there is one naggingly unclear case. An olive green—or is it army drab?—A-shirt with a red bandanna around the neck could cut either way. I can feel the tension in the room as his every move is watched. Is he standing politely in the back for the Good Sons of Yesteryear’s set? Or is that the quiet contemplation of a true fan who cannot bear to be so near to his favorites? Was that a yawn? He seems to be drinking a fair amount, but is it a fair amount for him? He’s definitely in a buoyant mood, but no one knows him, so that may just be his thing. Either way, the rot of the place has not gotten to him, he is no proud Imperialsburger, but neither is he an embarrassed one. Let’s see what four kicks of the drum and a swift ravishing of the floor tom reveals.
It reveals the same thing it generally reveals: he is one of ours, and we one of his. A toast with Shannon, queer fury and gentle hospitality from lands further afield, drives out the last of the rot, though, in fairness, the rot drives me out as well, and I slough off my suit of bad vibes and leave it in a heap, the better to sink between the cobbles and fertilize the land of the not-dead-but-still-dying colonial adventure.
