Slum

By Shawn Michel de Montaigne

Shortly after my mother died of a terrible illness, I began having ... visions. They weren't wispy, flighty dreams or random, short-lived nightmares. No, these phantasms were much fuller, much more tactile and present, as though I was actually visiting a place, one I eventually started calling Slum.

 

I don't forget these visits like I do with dreams or nightmares or even night terrors, which I've experienced. I am immersed in a grand urban hellscape of both terrible, corrupting beauty and encroaching, overwhelming evil. I can smell in these visions. I can't smell in my dreams. I can touch things; I can sense the continuous burden of time, which I can't in dreams. The world of Slum makes a kind of sick, profane sense. My dreams and nightmares, by contrast, are disjointed, often random, many times utterly nonsensical. Not Slum.

 

These visits are not for the weak of heart or stomach. I offer them to you, the reader, but honestly, I have written them down more to say back to it: "I see you. I hear you. I feel you. I touch you. And yes, I taste you, too." For maybe in this act I can come to a fuller understanding of Slum, and Slum of me. That is my hope.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Shawn Michel de Montaigne
• Release date: Mar 29, 2022
• ISBN: 9798201846343

Shawn Michel de Montaigne

I'm a writer, illustrator, and fractalist. A wonderer, wanderer, and an unapologetic introvert. I'm a romantic; I'm inspired by the epic, the authentic, the numinous, and the luminous. Most of all, I'm blessed.

Book preview

Introduction

~~*~~

I FIRST visited Slum in 1985, not long after my mother’s death. I have been back many times, though years have occasionally separated one visit from the next. What follows is what I've seen and experienced while there.

The city is remarkably well-defined, a dreamscape both unreal and real, horrifying and mundane, profane and yet grand. In essence it's not all that different from any big American city. Time drags on, fatigued from corruption and apathy and hopelessness; it offers no one an escape, not even through death, which is neither welcome nor unwelcome, remarkable or forgettable. Citizens of Slum aren't necessarily or noteworthily evil; what I've seen people do to their fellow human beings there isn't any more ghastly than what real people do to their neighbors every day of the week.

I don't count my visits there as strictly nightmares; I have trouble enough counting them as dreams. Dreams don't have the enduring consistency or completeness of these visions. Nor do they have the detail or the very palpable sense of 'otherness' that fills my senses like the city's dull, sickening smog fills my lungs when I visit. My dreams are typically sight and hearing-oriented only: I see what's happening, but don't feel it, taste it, or smell it. But in Slum ... the cold shadows, the sharp chips in the brick, the rank odor of garbage-strewn gutter water emptying into a drain ... my mind seems wholly insufficient to conjure such things, and with exact congruence one dream to the next, even though the dreams be spaced years apart.

Much like Dante's Inferno, Slum has a terrible beauty to it. The degradation and gloom-draped malevolence hold me transfixed whenever I'm there. Of that malevolence: I always feel endangered but rarely is it an immediate threat. It's a steady malice, and omnipresent, and infinitely patient. Like the foul air, it doesn't care about me personally, nor does it know me. I'm simply there, immersed within it, as insignificant as everyone else.

This small work has no plot, no heroes, no perfectly defined antagonists, no real direction. It is instead a tour and an eyewitness account and a commemoration of past visits. I offer it to you, the reader, as perhaps cynically or skeptically a close inspection of my dreaming subconscious, or as a means to help you connect to your own Slum, should one exist for you as well. It wouldn't be entirely wise to hope such a place doesn't exist within your dreamscapes or in some dimension that you occasionally visit, because in the end, probably the best way to know good is to know, though certainly not to embrace, evil.

Shawn Michel de Montaigne

The Lip of Slum

~~*~~

MY FIRST visit to Slum—actually, my first several visits, as I recall—was to the same place: the edge of a bluff or butte just outside the metropolis proper. The lip of the bluff is sandy, almost like the kind you'd find at a beach. I'm standing very close to it, probably too close, and every time I visit I worry it's going to give way and I'm going to spill down the side, which is perhaps a hundred feet high.

The vegetation at my feet is dead or very nearly so: what lives struggles to do so. The sand has a toxic, sulfuric, rotten-egg odor to it. Or perhaps what I smell is the city.

The air borders on hot. There is the occasional breeze, and it comes from behind me, it pushes into my back as though it wants me to jump and fall to my death.

I look at the city.

It's big. Judging from past experiences living in or near them—San Diego, Denver, Los Angeles, Bakersfield—it's easily as large as these, perhaps larger. I can't tell. It's daytime, but Slum, which begins just past the bottom of the lip and extends right for an unknown distance, is always shrouded in gloom. At least most of it is. The part of the city closest to me is held within the vice of a harsh, hazy, gray luminance. The sun glares off the tops of buildings out there, which are silver-gray themselves, the tallest of which might exceed ten stories, but not much more than that.

The buildings are ordered only in the sense that they break at streets, but beyond that they appear almost randomly placed. Too, there are structures that aren't buildings between many of them, what appear to be great tangles of pipes of all sizes and thicknesses, like the kind you'd find at an oil refinery. The pipes are rusty in patches, dripping black in others; elsewhere their cold steel adds to the silvery haze above.

I see no traffic, nothing that's moving anyway. At the bottom of the lip and slightly off to the left is a heap of rusting, abandoned cars, some with doors opened, others without windshields or roofs. I see something crawling about them, but I can't tell if it's human or an animal or a bird.

The sky is cloudless. The sun is a small, diffuse bright spot with a ring of encroaching dark around it. Out here, at the edge of Slum, the sounds of the city are blended into one low, lifeless roar like an ocean-sized cesspool under the influence of tides. I can just pick out individual noises—the sharp clank of metal on metal, say, or the rising groan of a city bus, or a child's lonely cry ... but I can never see what or who is making them. It's as if the city is dead, and all that remains is its echo, forever trapped in the haze and gloom.

Searching for the Child

~~*~~

FOR A long while I thought I'd never actually set foot in the city proper. Years passed between visits, and each was to the same place—to the lip I had stood at before.

I'm not what is popularly known as a lucid dreamer. I don't attempt to will myself lucidly between places while dreaming. More to the point, I don't really want to. Past attempts to lucidly dream have always felt like gross intrusions to me, a willful mucking up of a dreamscape or dream environment. There are lessons to be learned in dreams, or in some dreams at least, and even in some nightmares. To lucidly dream my way through them seems to me on its face to introduce a canceling out effect of whatever lesson or thing or event I was meant to be a part of. It dilutes the dream and takes away details, along with removing or minimizing randomness and uncertainty.

That's my experience, anyway. You may disagree with me.

Anyway, back to Slum.

I remember having resigned myself to standing at that lip when a new vision brought me to the end of one of the streets at the outskirts. I'll switch back to the present tense at this point, because it helps to remember details.

I'm looking down at my shoes, and then at the asphalt beneath them. It's black and oily and scorching hot, and appears new, like it was laid very recently. I'm standing on one of the only visible patches of it; most of the rest of the street is covered in a thin layer of sand, the same type and color as that on the lip overlooking the city. Lifeless breezes lift and twist it weakly here and there.

The street stretches on endlessly before me, disappearing into the gloom that hangs over the distant skyscrapers, which rise into it like dark gods. It’s wide and utterly deserted: no cars, no people. Half a mile away is an overpass, also deserted.

Everywhere is the clank and crash of industry. It's almost deafening. But I see no one building, no one running heavy machinery, no crews with hardhats holding drills or biting into the new blacktop with jackhammers. But it's happening all around me, invisibly.

The sulfuric rotten-egg odor is much stronger here. It's coming from those enormous tangles of pipes between the buildings. Bone-white steam rises, hissing like furious snakes, from random patches in the tangles before dissipating into the monochrome haze.

The buildings themselves range from single-story homes to office buildings ten or so stories tall. Windows are dark and doors are closed. It’s then I notice it: there are no sidewalks. The street goes right up to the structures themselves.

I look at the homes. There aren't many of them, maybe three within sight.

They have no yards. They don't even have fences. The tangle of pipes goes right up to their walls, crawls up them on all three sides save their fronts.

I start up the street. I hear a child crying, just discernible over the ever-present clanging and grinding and hammering. It's close, and it sounds miserable, as though it's been abandoned and forgotten. I want to find it and help it.

Everything is covered by what I can only describe as stifling mundanity. Nothing stands out: the chipping paint on the buildings, their masonry, the pocked and cracked cement, the steaming pipes, even the odor and the din. Nothing matters ... to the point that it becomes overpowering, the omnibanality decaying to consummate, undeniable, pervasive and perfect evil. There's no escaping it, ever.

Billboards rise above the pipes. They are torn and covered in gang insignia, but never to the point that one cannot see or understand the original message. Cigarette and booze ads, real estate ads, even church ads with Bible verses. The bottom of a smiling face and a perfect chin, or the end of a smoking stogie, or a gleaming half-full shot glass, or happy cursive beneath the picture of a large home overlooking a blue lake in some unattainable mountain community, children playing outside with their parents, everybody white and dressed cleanly ...

The child's cries get louder. I leave my trek up the street's center towards one of the homes. Surely it's in one of them.

I get to the window of the nearest domicile and look inside, or try to. The bright haze makes it difficult, so too thin white curtains. I press my face to the glass and cup my hands around my eyes.

It's a living room. Empty red plastic cups lie scattered here and there; a torn sofa is against the right wall, an old coffee table covered in dust and hypodermic needles in front of it. There’s a television with its face smashed out in a far corner, its guts strewn over a stained carpet. There are fist-sized holes in the walls, and rats. Cockroaches weave in and out of sight.

A shadow fills the entrance to what I can only guess leads to the kitchen. It's big enough to be that of a parent.

Hello? I call out, knocking on the glass. Is that your child? Can I help?

The shadow retreats.

"Hello? Hello?"

The child's cries get louder, but I'm not sure they're coming from this house. I turn my head left, right, listening as hard as I can.

Its cries wrench at me. They're heartbreaking. I press my face back to the glass and get a rude shock: the window has become very hot! I pull back, my nose and forehead burned. My eyes start streaming.

I try to look in again, but I can't get close enough because of the heat coming off the window. It’s as if it doesn't want me to look inside. There are noises coming from inside now, the sounds of muted violence: someone's brutally clubbing someone else. But no one yells, no one curses. It's clubbing from an agent too furious to speak, too angry, too filled with black hate, being delivered to someone incapable or too afraid to cry out. I can hear only their breath leave their bodies with each strike, weaker and weaker with each hit.

The child ...

Its cries lessen suddenly, then sound out again down the street.

I hold no hope for it. There must be no mother for it, no father, no siblings. It's been abandoned to die here amid the callous concrete and steel and steam. I'm the only one who can help it.

I hurry up the street. Thick silver tangles and hard clank, gray haze and cheerful defaced billboards, impersonal asphalt and scorching sand, distant gloom and monotone hissing, rotten eggs and rusted chain-link fences, gang insignia and dark windows.

There's another home next to an overpass. In its shadow, barely visible, are men. They're in the loose garb of bums and there is no life in them. They lean against the pillars and concrete and watch me. It's