Above/Below

By Ben Peek

A city has fallen from the sky.

In the wreckage, two men – Devian Lell, a window cleaner in the floating cities of Loft, and Eli Kurran, a security guard in one of the polluted, ground-based cities of Dirt – will find their lives changed.

Devian, who has done what few in the floating landscape have by stepping outside the sanctuary of his home, will be drawn into the politics of Loft, as he is recruited to be the assistant for Dirt’s political representative. On the ground, Kurran, still mourning the death of his wife, tries to remove himself from the violent politics of Dirt even as he is blackmailed into providing security for the diplomatic representative of Loft, a woman three times his age, and the oldest living person he has ever met.

A tale of two cities, the stories Above and Below make up two halves of another in the TPP Doubles series. Written by Stephanie Campisi and Ben Peek, designed to be self-contained and complete as individual narratives, the two parts can be read in either order, yet also form a single narrative that has been intricately woven and designed to create a single, novel length story. It is a work that suggests not a single way of reading, but rather two, with conflicting morals that will continue to test the reader’s certainty in who, in the cities of Loft and Dirt, is in the right.

Reviews
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Campisi’s “Above” tells the story of a diplomat sent from Dirt to prevent a war from the point of view of his uncomfortable host, while Peek’s “Below” has the rather more action-packed storyline of a native of Dirt dealing with the threat from the sky. Both stories reflect each other in multiple ways: the protagonists are broken men, dealing with dead/dying wives, and apparently unsuited to play host to diplomats. Both are surprised by what they learn of the ‘other’ world. Both are men with very little to lose, and a disassociation from their own culture. Above/Below does not provide nearly as many answers to the narrative questions raised with in the text as a reader might like, but both stories are cleverly and at times beautifully written, and the whole is worth far more than the sum of its parts.

- Not if You Were the Last Short Story on Earth

• Language: English
• Publisher: Twelfth Planet Press
• Release date: Jan 3, 2011
• ISBN: 9780987082879

Ben Peek

Ben Peek is the critically acclaimed author of The Godless and three previous novels: Black Sheep, Twenty-Six Lies/One Truth, and Above/Below, co-written with Stephanie Campisi. He has also written a short story collection,Dead Americans. In addition to this, Peek is the creator of the psychogeography pamphlet, The Urban Sprawl Project. With the artist Anna Brown, he created the autobiographical comic Nowhere Near Savannah. He lives in Sydney with his partner, the photographer Nikilyn Nevins, and their cat, Lily.

Book preview

Above/Below

by Stephanie Campisi and Ben Peek

Above

Above

First published in Australia in January 2011

by Twelfth Planet Press

www.twelfthplanetpress.com

This novella © 2011 Stephanie Campisi

Cover design and layout by Amanda Rainey

Ebook conversion by Charles Tan

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

Author: Campisi, Stephanie

Title: Above/below / by Stephanie Campisi and Ben Peek ; edited by Alisa Krasnostein

Edition: 1st ed.

ISBN: 978-0-9870828-7-9 (epub)

Other Authors/Contributors:

Peek, Ben.

Krasnostein, Alisa.

Dewey Number: A823.0876

With thanks to Jono Chang for his tireless support;

Ben Peek for his enthusiasm in stitching together two contrasting cultures, societies, and narratives;

and to Alisa Krasnostein for her astonishing patience, insight, and her keen editorial eye. Thanks to proofreaders Alexandra Pierce, Tansy Roberts and Tehani Wessely.

As the champagne fizz of fireworks burst into the Lunar New Year, a bloom of poppies against a hedge of cumulus, one of the cities of Loft lost its grip on the sky. As the citizens of Loft clustered about the bright coins of their mechanical clocks and breathily unfurled their party blowers, the city began to fall. As families clattered their wind-chapped hands against the weaving sky-snake puppets, whose rows of slipper-clad feet struck a syncopation of squeaks and thuds against the glossy floors, and whose heads, maned with knotted silk and gold, rose and fell, the city hit the ground. Not just the ground, but Dirt. The plumbing stitched to its underside, metal intestines that curled and tunnelled like a fingerprint, shattered. Pipes splayed like fingers, spread like wings, carved into the ground like teeth against soft mouth-flesh. The television screens running feeds of the Loftian cities’ celebrations flared with the black-and-white knit of static; the leathery speakers that hung like ripe fruit from the vast brass ceilings drooped, shameful. Silence spread with the speed and intensity of a plague as families and couples and lonely wall-gazers struggled with the bubo of taboo that began to surface.

Eyes met each other, then averted. People tried not to know, and so they didn’t.

One

Devian lived deep within the bowels of the residential levels of the floating city of Liera, in an apartment that cowered hunchbacked and claw-fingered amidst the labyrinth of hallways. It was a place that he was slowly learning to avoid: each day it seemed to grow thicker not just with dust and grime, but with memories of Ninae, his wife. Memories that seemed to bloom while she herself faded into the hospital bed whose startlingly white sheets had become the backdrop of the rest of her life. Just yesterday Devian had been sitting, reading, when he had noticed the faint dimple her elbow had pressed, months before, into the arm of the couch; the day before he had found himself staring at the toes of the now-frayed slippers Ninae had always insisted he wear inside. If he took the time to make a morning coffee before braving the communal dining rooms, he would fixate on her favourite coffee mug, tannin-stained and chipped, and turn away only to find himself confronted by the glass rose with the curling tail that she had hung from the door of the splaying kitchen cupboard.

No doubt many of his fellow Lierans would see Devian’s avoidance of his home as a positive step, an indication of a changed life, of changed priorities. The level on which an individual lived in Liera, after all, could be tied rather closely with their worth as a person, and as a citizen. Devian’s apartment was on the second-lowest of the residential levels, an area where the rental costs were a mere token, where purchase prices were virtually unknown: no agent would ever bother to conduct an evaluation of the area, would venture over the outstretched legs of lounging children, or past the vendors positioned at the numerous crossways flogging all sorts of oddities. Even if Devian’s days were now largely split between the hospital where he was grudgingly granted snatches of time with his wife, and lost, directionless wanderings on the viewing decks, these changes in itinerary meant that he spent less time on the lower levels and all that they represented. Less time amongst jostling gangs of youths who postured and swaggered and made claims they scarcely understood, less time amongst the stalls whose wares stepped beyond delicacies and more towards anathema, less time in a place that to Loftian eyes was rife with the darkness of taboo: its proximity to Dirt had surely tainted it. The Lierans, after all, sought a more upward trajectory. One that sought to move beyond the clouds that carpeted their cities and through the lens-like veil of the atmosphere out into a more profound vastness, rather than one that looked down, as Devian always had.

Despite his fellow citizens’ wont to turn an uneasily blind eye to an individual’s engagement with taboo—acknowledging such departures was all but taboo itself. Devian, a pragmatic individual regardless of what the authorities might say, had typically been cautious in his daily comings and goings. Whilst Liera’s law enforcement brigade would typically avoid the depths of the city save in the event of a serious issue, there was always the risk of being caught out, dobbed in. While these days it was less of an issue for Devian, given that he had all but renounced the topics that had so fervently engaged him in his youth, the thought of being caught was something that had once haunted him as he stumbled back to his room with dog-eared scrapbooks concealed beneath his shirt, cassette tapes bundled in his pack or a new song or rhyme close to spilling from his lips. There were few like Devian and his ilk, revelling in the taboos they so loved, dreaming of a different world, a world of space, of openness. A world without walls. A world without vertigo.

Over the years he had grown more cautious, his devil-may-care attitude slowly subsiding to allow for a new sense of self-preservation. He spent less time indulging in hushed discussions, less time in the library searching for books carefully concealed within others. He no longer moved between cities when the claustrophobia of their walls became too overwhelming. His relationship with Ninae further quieted his activity and the discovery of her illness had all but silenced it: he no longer overtly sought anything to do with Dirt. But, oddly, it seemed the more he stamped it into a tiny cube of nothingness, the more, like an air-filled canister in a pond, it was determined to surface.

break

It was not, as one might imagine, at school that Devian’s interest in that behemoth of taboos that was Dirt began. Rather, his interest grew piqued by the muttered references, the comments in passing, the subtle hints and evasions.

There were the small and oblique utterances, first: Binta, no shoes inside the house: you know what they’ll bring in! or Medya, do you think I’m stupid? Do you take me as someone from below? Utterances that were combined with meaningful accompanying gestures: a downward jerk of the head, a lowering of eyelashes, the tugging of an earlobe.

Devian’s curiosity, unlike the other children’s, was never put down, never put in its proper place. His quiet ways may have had something to do with this. Rather than boisterously questioning his parents or relatives about the maybe-world that existed far below them, Devian simply listened. Every now and then, an older relative, one who had grown up during times when the taboo had not been so all-encompassing or who hailed from a less conservative city, would say something better left unsaid, oblivious to the sharp intakes of breath, the tightening of mouths. There were other moments, too: sketches that fell from second-hand books; a faded black and white Polaroid found in a great uncle’s effects; fairytales whose origins were carefully obscured. At school, during his third year, his class was given a lesson that fell somewhere between a briefing and a tale. Their regular classroom teacher was not present; rather, a bone-thin woman in a stern skirt had stood before them to give a lesson on history. Some of the children flinched during her speech. While Devian’s classmates were appalled to hear of the world that existed beneath the cities of Loft, of the bleakness, the pollution, the sacrilegious bent of the people who lived there, her speech had the opposite effect on him. The small seed that lay patiently waiting within him was bolstered by the words as far as the eye can see.  Questions had not been allowed.  Devian, voracious by now, giddy on the gateway drug of secrecy, took to spending time at the viewing decks, peering through windows and squinting at the slowly chugging clouds. Time allotted for research on school projects saw him flicking through myriad library index cards or fluttering the pages of ancient books in vain hope. His obsession waxed throughout his teenaged years, as did his bent towards nomadism. The pressing walls of his home city of Trennor became too much, and he sought solace in a series of its larger relatives, moving from city to city until stopping finally at Liera. He had not intended to remain there, but Ilia and its cousins, with their whisperingly pro-Dirt bent, were out of reach of his mediocre grades and his inability to pay the necessary insurance. And Liera had provided an unexpected boon. There was Ninae, of course, but also a job opportunity at which Devian had immediately leapt: a job that saw him cleaning the outside of Liera, bringing him as close to Dirt as he could ever hope to come. A job that would make him one of the walking dead, effectively useless for future employment, but one that he could not bring himself to turn down.

Two

Beneath the worn, floor-smothering rug in Devian’s lounge area was a box. In the box was a telescope of sorts, one that had been reworked in such a manner as to allow a bastardisation of optical physics. This item had once, so long ago it seemed now, topped his list of hobbies; he had spent many a careful hour with it angled this way, tilted that, the tiny groan of its hinges and gears dangerously audible against the otherwise silent apartment. The silence had been a necessary precaution. It allowed him a moment or two in the event that he might hear the squeaking of boots along the corridor or hushed and guilty murmurings or the rustle of accusatory papers.

Ninae, always careful to project an appropriate image of citizenship and never one to put her nascent medical career in jeopardy, had been dismayed when she had happened upon the device, had demanded that Devian not use it in her presence. Devian’s clandestine viewing sessions had been therefore necessarily scheduled to occur when she worked a late shift at the laboratory or attended a community meeting. He had waited anxiously for these moments when he could pull out the device and watch as the jumble of wires and reflectors drew in the light from outside Liera and sketched before him a churning sepia that hinted at times past, and also at those that should never be.

Since Ninae’s illness, the box had lain in quiet solitude in its coffin in the floor, deliberately forgotten, as blind as it had ever been.

break

By the eve of the Lunar New Year, when the city of Adur fell, Ninae was less a person than she was a memory. She continued to cling to the thread that stitched her to life, but Devian was shocked to find that her presence was more strongly infused into the apartment, where