Somewhere in Germany during a festival, the streets crowded with people milling about. I notice several black Germans pass by in traditional lederhosen, fully German culturally now — yet I can’t help but wonder what their ancestors put up with, knowing how other European countries treated their African subjects. Soon I’m with a mixed group, sitting to watch an indoor performance in the last two rows. A special request is made of me: get a blonde girl (whom I don’t know personally) a special yellow t-shirt to wear as a top. She slouches cooly in the back row with arms crossed, breasts out, but I can halfway imagine her wearing the yellow top already.
I saunter into an alcove where a meek group of bland-seeming workers is watching a training video, though it ends just as I sit down. Mechanical automatic lockers then open in front of them, though not for me, and we mill into a narrow back area. From these lockers they’ve received tokens (which I of course don’t have) so these back rooms with token-operated machines — arcade games or sewing classes etc — aren’t a practical way to earn the yellow top for the blonde girl.
Which seems like it doesn’t matter, since at the end of this back area is a love den, where she and I engage in another one of our rendezvouses (despite being introduced to her secondhand just earlier, now we’ve been casual lovers for awhile). She’s a sexual athlete and a freak in bed — she actually has stackable bins she carries with compartments for nitrous, whipped cream, amyls, toys, even a case of Greek fireworks (what are those? I don’t know). We’re lounging in bed afterwards, and one of our rules is that we don’t tell personal stories so there’s no chance we could get too attached or bored with each other (her rule, mostly). But I’m reading this newspaper article and it’s a bit shocking actually, so I read it aloud to her — some recent racist government exposé that’s almost too outrageous to believe.
At a desk window back down the hall, on the opposite side from the token rooms is a detective’s office. An ethnic family (older, wearing glasses, perhaps Indian) is trying to file a report. Observing the scene, my blonde girl comments about a stodgy white man visible at the back of the room: “doesn’t he just have that ‘I’ll jam your cell phone’ look to him?” Though I think her comment facetious at first, I watch as the family’s phone signal drops… after which they’re unable to report the crime they’ve been victim of.
A big salt gritter truck parked on a small residential court during the wee hours of the night. I climb into the big cabin and get everything ready for my first drive (fairly sure I’m the yellow-shirt blonde girl now). It appears that in the night someone has stolen much of the trucks tank through the front tank port. However, I confirm the integrity of the single spike guard in front of the port that’s supposed to serve as barricade against a stranger’s siphon hose.
Then there I am, a relatively small blonde girl, driving my new massive beast of a vehicle away at night for the first time. The driver’s view appears as a bright grainy grayscale fisheye lens, a bit disorienting at first but proving very useful. I round the corner out of the short dead-end street, swinging much wider than intended, yet the vehicle’s turning radius is very powerful despite being slow and ungainly.
I drive up a freeway ramp, struggling against the sandy ripples, when I remember I have the option to use the gritter tank to stabilize the slope. There’s a pink effect as I do so, one girl saving the day for all the drivers to follow.
I’m one of two younger girls fighting under table, the other an imposter trying to reach the other side of the room on some nefarious mission. I call “dad, dad!” while holding the imposter down. But the dad is on his computer looking at the email reply of one of his recent online ‘your post has been hidden’ appeals, glancing briefly and perfunctory at our desperate tussle.
In some random rest stop store, I’m looking through the aisles and come across two pieces of a gun hanging from display hooks. It’s wrapped in some kind of sports team graphic, and though they sell other guns from within locked cases, this one is priced so outlandishly that somehow the shopkeepers think it’s ok not to lock it up since it’s in two parts? Ugh.
In a pocket universe, a shabby run-down concrete park is closed during the pandemic. Oddly kids can’t seem to understand this. But adults immediately can spot a certain cracked rear wall, with an exposed adjacent building leaking in foreign universe, among other dangerous problems.
The scene zooms out to the broader area map, revealing the 2-symmetric lobes of this flat bubble universe, and the further 4-petaled algorithmic fractal pattern rotated out from the same central origin. I wish I knew more about this particular place, it seems quite unusual.