In the Houses of Disordered Stars
Cathedrals to nothing; cathedrals to refusal.
Like bombs buried under fields of wheat, the Ransei Revolution's suicide booths lurked, pristine, in the mountains. Between the folds of earth and wood they glittered, as strange and secret as abandoned shrines.
A few of them were marked upon my trail map; far more were visible from the lookouts, or from the cliffside passes, shining out from the deep craw of the forest. Their roofs were bronze domes, or spires, or vast slants of stone. Some I only spotted by chance, when facets of them glinted in that hour's sun. Others cannibalized older structures, built into disused fire towers and lavatories, engulfing them in the Revolution's particular architecture.
They say that in our small territory, more than one hundred thousand suicide booths had been constructed. Many remained undiscovered; hungry, overgrown jewels.
It can be difficult to understand that mania. The Ransei Revolution was best characterized by two principles: the rejection of life, and the rejection of ugliness. These sentiments exploded in reaction to a world that was increasingly chaotic, commodified, and hostile to the lost or young. Historians refer, when discussing the era, to various Indices; to inflation, to attempted measurements of the rate of technological acceleration, to youth unemployment and salaries, to illegal aggregates of time spent using social and asocial and fauxsocial (the term emerged to describe single-player games that aped the multiplayer experience using bots) applications, to estimated rates of Vitamin D deficiency, to steroid prescriptions, to the Meta-Pantone report on trends in color preference. Numbers cannot capture alienation. I do not think the world has changed very much.
I have lived in the echo of that dissolution. My home has been the tone that lingers after the bell is rung. So, while those twenty years of decimation and culling and bankrupting are horrifying to outsiders, they are my air and nature, and I cannot see them as anything but melancholic inevitabilities. We wallow in the shadows of their monuments. It is beautiful here, and desolate, and the desolation feeds the beauty.
The phrase “seed-corn macaroni art” is often used in reference to the Revolution. This is somewhat unfair. Yes, it immolated a generation at the pyre of their own hopelessness. It permanently impoverished my country through its feverish commitment to grand and pointless public works—but the works were good, and their art is not counterfeit. Cathedrals to nothing; every inch of them drawn into stark order, the logic of despair reengineering starlight. Cathedrals to refusal: the refusal to live in squalid ugliness, and, almost by extension, the refusal to live.
Name: Keyhole Chamber Constructed: ‘32 Method: Gas Operational until: ‘40 Activations: 27
The booth that sat at the beginning of the trail was externally plain: a concrete cylinder, a roof that gleamed, a greenish vault door with bronze inlaid vines. On my map it was marked with the Ransei lily-knife, and a short list of facts was included in the appendix.
Eight years of operation, and only twenty-seven uses. I wonder how much it cost to build. In the cities, the booths were visited every day, (the record number of activations for a single booth, over its lifetime, is nearly six thousand) until it all came to pieces, and workers stopped cleaning up the bodies. Those last months, when the Revolution unraveled, were called the Grateful Winter, because everybody was grateful that it was winter.
I pushed the door open and stepped into an octagonal space. From floor to ceiling, the walls were layered carvings. Leaves, mostly, though here and there the faces of foxes or rabbits or, strangely, fish, peeked out. The wood was dark, and varnished to be darker; all the light in the room shone through a keyhole-shaped window, pointed towards the forest—its greenness made painfully vivid. I imagined dying there, in the emerald beam.
I'm told that many of the rural booths, like this one, were unstaffed. Sometimes they were built over salt pits, and the bodies were dropped into desiccating basements. And sometimes there was no disposal, just a chemical spray, and the next visitor was tasked with dragging out your scented corpse.
The woods must be haunted. There was no logic to the density of booth construction—there are as many in the wilderness as in the cities, as far as we know. Maybe even more. When I find them beside the trail, I step into them, whether or not they're marked on the map. Most have smashed consoles and some graffiti. Some are, eerily, intact. All hideously beautiful, and robust. They'll stand for another fifty years.
An unofficial Ransei slogan: we are building for uninherited eternity. The parents of my generation are unique in that each individual must justify his or her existence. People survived because they were cowards, because they saw themselves as the necessary stewards of the Revolution, because there was much to exploit, or, most rarely, because they affirmed life.
My parents, I suspect, were simply too pragmatic to die while there was work to be done, and listless in equal measure towards life and death—although my mother, when her doldrums strike, speaks of the Revolution as one speaks of a missed opportunity.
Name: Bird Church Constructed: ‘29 Method: Gas Operational until: ‘42 Activations: 14
People have argued that ambient beauty is numbing, and that the human aesthetic instrument is only sensitive to moving peaks and troughs; that an artwork or landscape becomes invisible if viewed in perpetuity. That may be true, but I believe that invisible, unperceived beauty works upon the buried brain. It encodes the right shapes and relations.
And through that encoding, rather than being a numbing agent, the beauty makes its victim hypersensitive. The expectation of harmonious accord pervades all seeing—and its absence stings. I have visited other places, and in many of them that lack is omnipresent, the intolerable noise of it driving me home.
Home, death, beauty. The streets lined with monuments, the sky draped in arches, and all of humanity framed by the tall mountains, like wave upon wave of green oil.
And the booths: old, bright mausoleums, too small and spirit-stained to be repurposed, making the whole country a cemetery. One stood a few feet off the trail, its roof a cluster of spires, moss growing where they met. I had to circle it to find its plain metal door; the front was all panes of stained glass.
It bore no signs of vandalism, and, though I knew that it had been gutted of its electronics and chemicals, I shivered at the unbroken console. The light inside was remarkable. Filtered first through the trees, and then through the rippled, colored glass—each rhombus as thick as my fist!—innumerable segments played across the floor, intersecting in floral, stellar bursts. The dust glowed. My own arms, spotted with luminescence, seemed like the appendages of a beatific jaguar.
High up, between the arched windows, were cubbyholes stuffed with fluff and twigs, separated from the interior by thinner rounds of clear glass. I might have missed them, had the peeping face of a wren not caught my eye—dozens of nooks for birds to nest in. During the right seasons, the booth must have sheltered hundreds of nestlings.
I hiked. I admired the crooked trees, the birds, and the banks of silky fog the mountains periodically exhaled. I visited the booths that I passed on the trail, and noticed many more nestled in the valleys. I met no one. As the sun turned amber I stopped to check my map, and refill my bottle at a nearby spring. I had made good time, but the last hour of the hike would proceed under darkness. I tested a pair of flashlights, and clipped them to my belt.
Either the spring had run dry, or I lost myself on the way to it. I wandered to and fro, and managed to find a thin, if somewhat boggy, stream. The water flowing at the surface was clear enough, so I crouched to fill my bottle and dropped some iodine into it. I was five minutes from the trail, and about to return, when I noticed the door.
It was built into a stony hill behind the stream, and half-hidden by a tangled mass of vines. Weathering and moss had turned it green, but it was still discernably formed into a bearded, glaring human face, its pupils shaped like stars.
I hopped over the water to investigate. The door had no handle, but the madman's leafy, sculpted hair was easy to grip. It swung open; a wrought iron staircase descended into a cave.
It was damp and very cool. The whole chamber echoed with musical trickling. A coppery net, held up by occasional pitons, enclosed the raw stone walls, where little electric lights—thousands of them, surely—gleamed like constellations.
One of the ways in which history loomed over my childhood was through the circulation of stories, rumors, and urban legends about the discovery of operational suicide booths. Grotesquely exaggerated playground horror stories, often, ridiculously, featuring vengeful ghosts—naturally, we all secretly dreamed of finding one. I felt certain that, many years too late, that juvenile wish was being granted. At the foot of the stairs, a console glowed; but that was not what drew my eyes.
Behind my nursery school there grew a camphor tree so immense that we made a game of encircling it. Four or five children, pressed up against its trunk, could barely link hands. In summer we decorated it with paper chains; in winter with lamps. Many of my early memories passed under its shadow.
I aged, and it seemed to shrink, as did the whole world. I moved away, and all but forgot it.
Visiting my parents one holiday, I chanced to pass behind the old school, and saw it lying there, quite newly cut. The effect was like a scream—not from me, but emanating from the tree: a buzzing shockwave of pain, disbelief, paralysis. Fat veins of rot ran through its trunk, like holes jabbed by massive, coal-stained fingers. I learned later that the foresters had been concerned that it would fall, and crush the school. They had sent it in the opposite direction, where it shot out over the crest of a hill, the earth dropping away from its enormity. It no longer seemed small.
And that is how it felt to find the body. It looked much larger than it was, lying in that well, lit by false stars. There was no smell; the corpse was withered, but the decay seemed chemically mediated. It was wearing a hiking jacket that had been popular a few years before, and which I had, until recently, owned—I was suddenly much less regretful of its loss.
This would have seemed quite pedestrian, I supposed, to my mother and father. An unwelcome intrusion of past horrors. I wondered what they would think when I shared the news. Then, driven by some morbid spell, I crept downward.
He was crumpled at the foot of the stairs, such that I had to make a small leap to avoid touching him. Except for the netting, lights, and console, the room was entirely naturally formed stone. The ceiling was low in places, and everywhere, water dripped. Its volume was very irregular, and cramped, and it was perhaps even smaller than a typical suicide booth.
There was a backpack beside the console, which I unzipped. Underneath a surprising number of dented thermoses, filled to the brim with old water, I found a wallet and a phone. These I resolved to bring with me, to turn in to the authorities when I reported my discovery. There were several licenses inside the wallet—the young face upon them did not much resemble the face of the corpse. None were expired.
After replacing its other contents, I zipped and hefted the backpack. It was very heavy. For a moment, I hesitated—then I swung it into the console, again, and again, hoping to smash it as I had seen it smashed elsewhere. Bottles clanked, I panted, and the display flickered, but did not crack. Then I heard the click of a lock and the hiss of gas, and with dread I realized that I had erred.
I sprinted up the stairs, displacing the corpse, and pounded on the metal door. I groped around it, scratching, but neither the seal nor the hinges were exposed. I tried to remember what they used to kill people, and whether it was heavier or lighter than air, but my mind went blank. It was getting darker.
Darker. But, the stars were brightening. Ambient light was being sucked away, while the pinpricks grew in magnesium intensity. Then, they must have each been surrounded by a prism, because their edges feathered, and the white hot points split into many-colored rays. It was very beautiful.
It occurred to me that every booth might contain a secret, a play that only the dying experienced. We had sterilized them all, and lost so much. Beaming from the crooks and bends in the small cave, these constellations shed the distant flatness of the firmament. It was like walking among them, radiance from every direction, even below. I listened to the hiss of the poison, and my own hiccuping keening, and the droplets that still trickled, melodious. And I thought, if water is flowing, the room can't be totally sealed.
I took a deep breath and walked to the place where the ceiling was lowest, holding it. I felt the slimy walls until I found a rivulet whose path I could trace upwards, into a crack. Then I dug at the crack with my fingers, my knife, and prayed that fifty years of erosion had widened it; and when my lungs could burn no longer I pressed my mouth against it and inhaled, mostly brackish water but also a pittance of stale air.
And I stayed there, neck bent like a broken fawn, kissing the cool stone, for what seemed like hours, while the darkness deepened and the false-stars brightened and the room became a grid of intersecting silver—until the rushing of vapors had ended, and I heard the click of the door unlocking, and I fled.
Name: Above Below Constructed: ‘33 Method: Gas Operational until: ‘96 Activations: 4
Author’s Note: On the meaning of Ransei
This story is not set in Japan. However, to name the Revolution, I adapted the Japanese era-naming procedure, as outlined here.
A breakdown:
Modern era names are based off passages in ancient texts. Though I began by searching through the Man'yōshū, or “Book of Ten Thousand Leaves”, I ended up breaking with tradition and instead selecting a passage from the Nihon Shoki, one of Japan’s oldest chronicles.
庚午。日没時。星隕東方大如。逮于戌。天文悉亂。以星隕如雨。
23rd day. At sunset a star fell in the quarter of the East as large as a jar. At the hour of the dog the constellations were wholly disordered, and stars fell like rain.
Why this passage? It seemed appropriate, somehow—both beautiful and doomstruck, true to the values of the Revolution.
We thereby end up with 亂星, and pray that those characters could plausibly correspond to disordered stars. There is hope; a Japanese-English dictionary translates 亂 as war, disorder, riot, disturb and 星 as star, spot, dot, mark. I am resigned to this being, on some level, an anglophone’s hodge-podge simplification. In Hokkien Chinese, the characters apparently mean comet.
Finally, we generate a romanization. Ransei seems most likely, though there’s a lot of ambiguity to the selection that I don’t understand.
Thus: Ransei, the Revolution of Disordered Stars.
Many thanks to my friend David Frew, who patiently guided me through this process, recommended resources, and corrected my errors.
I remember reading your tweets about the booths in Fragnemt, but it's another thing to learn about the lore & experience it alongside a character wow