The Tourists

The sky, which had been baby blue all day, was snowing white confetti. We stopped walking and looked up from our maps. We were reminded of parades when we were young. We leaned our heads back to see where it was coming from and blinked as the confetti fell in our eyes. It wasn’t coming from the sky as we’d first thought but from the magnificent skyscraper across the street, fluttering out from hundreds of shattered office windows.

It was funny how the paper came first, before anything else, before the sparks or the strands of hair, the clouds of skin cells set free from their anchors, the fibers from shirts and slacks and socks, the rain of teeth glistening with saliva, and then whole shoes set free into the sky, hitting the pavement with rubbery thuds, and then fingernails, pale and polished and gnawed, and then hats and eyes and elbows and patches of tattoos and wedding bands. 

If this was a celebration, as we believed in those first moments of confetti, then where was the music? In the confusion, traffic halted. The street and sidewalk became a plain of white. Bicycles tipped over and the confetti cushioned the riders’ falls. We thought of winter storms and shivered even though it was summer, tourist season. We shook the confetti out of our hair. 

It was mostly white but we also saw bits of pink and blue and yellow, and the hallowed gray of newspaper. Some pieces of confetti were hole-punched and some were stapled. There were words on many pieces, or almost words, like “Mem” or “thon” or “ling.” Simple sounds like babies make, half-words, non-words, guttural cries. On some shreds of paper we even saw whole words if the words were small enough, like “Sir,” or important enough, like “shareholders.”

We dropped our backpacks and cameras and folded our maps, all of this still in the time before anything but confetti had rained from the sky. We rolled up our sleeves and set to work collecting the confetti letters and words to combine into longer words and then phrases.

Once we had that, we lined the words and the phrases up on the pavement, discarded those that didn’t seem to fit, and rearranged words here and there.

Son of Iapetus, surpassing all in cunning, you are glad that you have outwitted me and stolen fire—a great plague to you yourself and to men that shall be.

Hesiod, someone murmured. We gasped. No, no, we said, that’s not right. We took the words apart as quickly as we could: the phrases, the clauses; we tore the confetti into separate letters. We sorted the letters and laid them out in alphabetical piles along the ground. We saw what we had done, and we liked it. Yes.

And then the sparks began to fall after the confetti, burning the pieces of paper that were still lingering in the sky for want of room to land on the ground. We covered our hair with our hands, fearing we’d go up in flames. 

Firecrackers? we wondered. Birthday candles? The air smelled of childhood memories dug loose: a crackling fireplace at the ski lodge, a campfire at a Girl Scouts retreat, Dad grilling hamburgers in the backyard. With the confetti out of the air we could see the sky again, pink from the embers. When we realized the sparks were soft and cool from the long descent, nothing more than ashes, we laughed and held our hands out to catch them like lightning bugs.

But there were more than ashes in our hands. There was a sheen of dust, cells of other people’s skin. Our fingers felt like they were caught in a web and we discovered strands of hair woven around our knuckles. Some of the hairs were longer or shorter than our own, or lighter, or darker. We looked up again and saw hair and skin descending in slow currents from the windows of the skyscraper. We sighed and opened our palms to the sky, gathering enough stray hairs to make many wigs.

Then we began to sort the hairs into their colors and we lined them up on a patch of pavement where the confetti had been cleared away. Blonde and brunette and auburn and white and silver and black. And we subdivided each color into straight, wavy, curly, kinky, ringlets. We pursed our lips to keep from swallowing the lost hair and skin, and we took precautions not to let our own hair fall into the piles. We nodded in approval when we were finished, because this seemed like a good way to manage such a thing, and we waited to see what would fall next.

The wind arrived, roaring around the corner of the skyscraper, strong enough to bring unwilling sparrows and pigeons with it. The windows belched dust, and then a great many things began to fall. Oh, we didn’t know what to think. We ran this way and that, organizing the fallen objects into piles: socks here, collars there, the pile of brassieres towering twenty feet above them all. We were dwarfed by the piles around us.

The descent became faster and we panted to keep up. We flexed our muscles and stretched our calves and took sips from water bottles in our backpacks. Bracelets fell, earrings, fillings, canes, hearing aids, half-digested pills, and a shower of diamonds coated in dirt as if only just dug from the earth. A black patent leather three-inch-high heel fell and pierced one of our skulls like a spear, and as he crumpled into the pile of neckties with a dying moan, we understood how truly serious this was. We dragged him out of the way.

Faster, we said. A pair of lips fell, freshly glossed, open in what might have been a scream or a big bite. The teeth rained down after it. Incisors here, and bicuspids here … Molars were crunched under our heels in the frenzy.

A lone fetus fell without a sound, the placenta trailing after. We started a pile for that. Then a silver belt buckle. The myopic blue iris of an eye. A pair of glasses—perhaps they had once helped that iris see—fell to the pavement without breaking, while a once-full scotch glass shattered into a thousand wet pieces. An office chair landed upright and swiveled in tragic circles. 

We had piles for knee joints, big toes, tongues, thumbs, and a pile for hearts that pulsed and spread blood in waves over the tips of our shoes. We had piles for inboxes, outboxes, ballpoint pens, fountain pens, office phones and mobile phones. A woman’s vibrator fell, smooth and pink, and began to thrum when it hit the ground. A long curved knife came next, caked with blood or dark chocolate. We licked it; it was blood.

When the rain of things began to slow, we leaned our heads back and waited. We were wise and weary and almost glad of what we had done. And then we heard it. At first we thought it was music, a drum or a horn, but as it went on we were able to tell it was the sound of breathing. It was hot and low. It was our own breathing, only us.