dlp 1.1.3 - William Basinski

For what it’s worth, the San’Ūxian takeout place was still open. Maybe it had a generator running elsewhere, or maybe they were just lucky, but their lights were still on, garishly bright and cold, but a welcoming light amongst the darkness of the night.

They walked towards the store using their phone as a flashlight, approaching a terraced building with thin, almost plastic windows—to one side, someone is leaning against a window, smoking a cigarette. They open the door in the middle; wood-framed with a glass window, exceptionally loud (creaking, but it did ring a bell after opening,) definitely not maintained in a while.

There was a man in the corner trying to find phone signal (everyone was; the networks were set to prioritise first responders in the wake of the earthquake.) as they’re entering, sitting down at the counter, gently drumming their claws against the desk, as someone comes in from the kitchen; some kind of ferret, some part in his 30s or 40s, clearly from San’Ūxia (curiously; the sign on the left wall ended with “Proudly family-owned.” He probably inherited it from his parents.)

They point out what they wanted, and he writes it down, handing it to a chef behind, who responds in a language foreign to the customer, and gets to work, making rhythm from cupboards and cutting boards. They pull out their phone, briefly browsing through social media (it felt more like doom-scrolling. Every other post was a lost connection) before realising it’s probably smarter to conserve battery life; it’s only on 32%, and they’re hoping there’s a spare charger here; even after replacing the battery, the first generation Skyline was notorious for its exceptionally poor battery life.

“Excuse me, do you have a spare phone charger? Type-B?” They gesture to the phone’s charging port through a tattered case; the magnet holding the front flap shut fell out a while ago, the faux-leather is torn and shredded and the card holder is one bad day from disintegrating.

He rummages around the counter for a bit, pulling out a charger and cable in surprisingly good condition; plugging it in to a wall-socket underneath, and handing the cable to the customer.

“Thank you.”

A few moments later, a bell rings from the kitchen; he turns around and hands the food to them in a cocoon of paper; inside, a wrap, which they give a brief look-over—it seemed to be alright, so he takes out a payment card from his wallet, tries to put it into the reader, but the cashier gently swats their hand away.

“No, no. No pay, no.”

He picks up the card reader, gently thwacking it with his right paw.

“Broken. Broken to shit. No Internet.”

—“Are you sure?”

“Very sure. Whole place gone to shit. It’s free.”

The server didn’t speak much Taikujian; enough to run a restaurant, but it sounded particularly broken; San’Ūxian appeared to be his mother tongue, not like that really mattered much in the wake of a blackout.

The television hums in the background, quietly, as a news reporter of the Taikujō Broadcasting Service drones off numbers and statistics of the earthquake while on the site of a collapsed building seemingly just down the road; it’s from the 1940s, maybe 1950s? It’s hard to tell from a plasma screen in the corner of their vision, one with faint channel logos and news tickers burned in over years of operation.

In between bites, they try to start conversation—

“So, where are you from?”

“San’Ūxia. Migrated here in 1999.” (The 1999 San’Ūxian Housing Crisis. A lot of people were displaced out of the country as a result.)

“Do you miss it?”

“Sometimes. I visit once a year to see family.”

San’Ūxia, from what they could remember, was south-east to Taikujō; it was a small country that broke up into archipelagos into the sea by the south, separated by a mountain range to the north; a large portion of its exports came from tourism.

The bell rings as someone else enters. They’re feline, and quite beaten up; her elbows have noticeable scrapes and they’re walking on a slight limp—they find the seat closest to the entrance and slump down, the cashier handing them a menu, placing it on the table, as the chef speaks from the kitchen.

“It’s all free. If we lose power, we lose all our food.”

She speaks with a noticeable Esterian accent (south-west, nearly neighbouring, but not quite), mentioning her order to the chef, as he walks back through the door to the kitchen. Her phone rings; the ringer is a bit broken, it sounds shrilly, stopping once she flips the top half open, answering the call.

“Yeah? Yeah, I know. The mobile network is under pressure.”

“Don’t worry, I’m still alive. Love you.”