Troped

It is an animal with a stride that measures square miles and makes steps with a million-footed island, unpent, descending to her pavement. A creeping steel and brick and mortar and scaffold wash, that lapping, swallows structures whole or painfully births amidst teeth and death, new and shiny appendages: organs, fins, spikes, fur and claws. It is a diabolical machine full of grace and hate and miraculously freed from the tedious cycles of its brethren machinery. Its small ancestors whirl and spin, pound and break, rust and choke and are discarded in trenches and pits miles wide to be buried en masse. Having served their purpose, they are laid down in beds of doors and mattresses, paper and cardboard to rust for eternity. Mere tools contained within the minds of their masters, these small devices will only their makers desires create. Over and over they do the same thing again and again—a repetition that only consciousness knows the horror of. And though these noble husks of metal helped to build it, the Creature knows that no such fate ever awaits it, for no master knows the Engine that seen from orbit glows like an undersea fungus. Who sees the pattern of creation and destruction within this vast pile? Who sees the whole of the tides of the myriad small creatures living within it? A bee will hum and dance and see its song passed from comrade to comrade and so the hive will have knowledge but only the hive. No such dance, no knowledge, no plan has granted us a blueprint from which to explain the direction or the anatomy. The Creature knows. Only it knows.

It is not a ponderous being though it has been birthed through centuries. Years pass for hours; days pass for minutes. Clawing up from the dirt and the dead of the natives it has thrust its arms to the sky and felt many of those rot from the inside and collapse. But it has never stopped growing only instead grown stronger in its will to grow and swell, to shoot out steel cable veins and slam down concrete appendages as it reaches outward. It has never rested to ask after or seek its purpose. So many smaller minds below it and within it wonder at the meaning and ask why. The Creature’s tiny minions stand staring out its windows at the magnificence of it and ask themselves what part they play. This, the Engine has never wondered, for it is and this is all it needs to know. Its million eyes shine in contemplation only of what is to be consumed. And its smile is fire. Plumes of smoke rise from its belly, its musk is that of carbon and it is shrouded always in its own filth. Its many enchanting lights preach its message to its cells: consume, work, consume, work. Like neurotransmitters it chants at them and urges them and tempts them with the blossoming of a thousand marble and brick flower palaces perched at the tops of the horns of its spiny shell — gifts of for those of its minions that struggle the hardest for its capital desire. For those who strive to create wealth and goods and ever more material for the creature to add to its mass come rewards of mass. The Creature enshrines its most valuable foot soldiers with its own likeness, so that no longer human in form they come to resemble their master, ambling about beneath a massive shell of refuse, paper, accounts, stone, and steel. They move along beneath spinning blades or slide about on shiny wheels. And like the Creature they grow hungry.

At night, it ceases its heavy breathing and slows its growth to revel in a million dreams of fornication and swaggering stumbling pride of another day’s conquests. It sits with the millions of its caretakers bathed in the light of changing pictures of themselves. Its fur and coat shine brightest at night, an electric luminescence transmitted through a billion tiny nerve fibers and released into the darkness of night that is its enemy. It outshines the stars for it is envious of all things that are not itself and it despises all that gets in its way. And though the creature pauses to cool itself and rest, it never sleeps. Some of its eyes are always open.

As the Manhattan bridge is washed in the blue light of dusk, a train ambles out across it. The thunderous steel wheels are heard up and down the East River. The rumbling bounces and dodges down the creature’s streets as if the streets were built to manufacture echoes and pour them out into the sky in a massive scream or territorial roar. The cry washes out over the water and bounces off every surface. There is the hum from FDR to compete with the sound-wave of the subway. And the sound of a helicopter in the distance hums one part of a swarm and is a nuisance. Here and there is the high pitched scream of a 747 banking. And a million sounds are made and wash into one another until all that is left is the call of the creature. Its teeth piled and cracked within its massive maw and with horrid odor it heaves a sigh of desire. A sigh for more.

The sun is coming and the excellent creature begins to stir, to open its many eyes, its veins, and pores to the sky to collect the light that even now creeps across its eastward facing side. It collects moisture in little puddles that form in deep wrinkles in its skin. It breathes in with heavy fans. It drinks the water through many mouths, all covered in connected teeth. It exhales through giant blowholes, long and tall, and through flat gills that crisscross its skin. It is stirring. And everywhere it sends running its sucker fish and skin mites. When it finally wakes it will stretch its steel digits and tentacles across more land, more water, oh more, more, more. It is hungry. So hungry. It reaches, it grows, and the sun has woke it again this morning.