Genevieve Goffman: The Town (excerpt)
The Town is a short story I wrote to guide me in making my pieces The Gate and The Dog.
It tells the story of two children who live in a town separated from an expansive wasteland by a hideous gate. The boy and girl often sneak over the gate to explore the wasteland which is rumored to be populated by mutated creatures. As they grow up the boy stops going, but the girl continues to sneak over the gate. The town is old and its population is stagnant and stale. The boy leaves the town at 18 for military training. When he comes back he is disturbed by death, lifelessness of the town. He is even more disturbed by the ways in which the girl has changed in appearance and behavior. He becomes convinced that she is still traveling to the wasteland and bringing its toxins back into the town. He tries to stop her but she refuses. He follows her through the gate where he watches her meet up with a terrifying dog-like creature. The next day he follows her again with his gun intending to kill the dog. However the dog smells him and the girl confronts him telling him to leave. He attempts to kill the dog, but she gets in the way. In disgust he shoots her. Then the dog kills him in revenge.
A farming town grew prosperous and large. It was the hub of industrial sized fruit farms to the north and south of it. Then, to the west, a laboratory was built by a private company. That company found investors and clients including the government and it expanded quickly into a network of factories, laboratories, testing sites and warehouses. The physical growth was contained and the distance from the town maintained by the legislation put in place by the town and the land rights owned by the farms. There was cross pollination but most of the tech workers lived on site so the town was neither dependent nor culpable for what happened in the growing tech centers to the west.
200 years after the first factory was built there was a massive explosion and a subsequent fire. The fire was hot. It burned for days and days. It melted construction built to be impervious to fire and to melting. But the fire was law abiding. It showed no interest in spreading outside of the legal boundaries of the company property. Even the smoke seemed to just hang in the area. No ash fell on the town. The fruit farms were unthreatened. The fire simply devoured the laboratories and when they were gone it starved and flickered out.
The towns had as little to do with the fire as it did with the company. Hours after the explosion the federal government in the form of opaque military men began setting up camps on the perimeter of the fire. They let no one near. People speculated that perhaps the explosion had been an international attack. But the government did little investigation. They flew helicopters over with sprinklers but without much enthusiasm. Mostly the men in fatigues seemed to just wait the fire out. Then when it went out they built the wall and gate.
Beyond the gate a wide obsidian lake of melted metal, black and pearlescent, stretched for miles. In the afternoon it shone so brightly, reflecting the sun, that you couldn't look at it directly. But in the morning and evenings one could see far in the distance small instances of refuse, the few pinnacles of the ruins left over from the fire. As time went on weeds and shrubs began to spring out and around those pinnacles. Eventually roots would crack the metal in places and the mirrored wasteland became a new type of swamp.
-excerpt from The Town by Genevieve Goffman
The dog was white with red eyes and walked on its hindlegs which were long like jackrabbits. The dog had antlers. It could do things like cry, or bandage a wound and when she stroked its coarse white fur she could hear his thoughts. He could hear her thoughts too even when she was touching him.
One time he walked her to the gate, and as she was reflecting on how ugly it was the dog brushed up against her and thought, “it’s ugly because the architects want the gate to mean death and for that meaning to last for eternity for any person who sees it, no matter what language they speak.”
The dog was very smart. She believed everything he told her. And she always followed his instructions carefully. Wearing the ventilator when she crossed. Showering the moment she got home. He told her crossing the Gate was going to kill her. She had believed him, but she did it anyway.
-excerpt from The Town by Genevieve Goffman