Chapter 33:

The Ocean as a Metaphor

Vorelando Magic


“What do you see when you look up at the dome Vorelando?”

Harold asked Vorelando the foreboding question out of the blue. It wasn’t unexpected, however, as it was the type of atmosphere heavy question Harold liked to ask on a Tuesday afternoon.

“I see the sky.”

“What else?”

“The clouds, sometimes?”

Up until that moment, the two had been lying down in the grass, gazing up at the sky. But now Harold was incensed, so much so that he had to stand up and stare down at Vorelando from above.

“No! I mean what do you see beyond the dome?!”

“I see the larger dome around this dome!”

“That’s not the answer I want!” Harold screamed violently before falling back to the ground. “Remember that book Ms. Cumvatz used to read to us back in the day?”

The Magic Beach?”

Vorelando recalled the book fondly, it had been read to them in sections every Friday in their first school year. It was typical hero’s journey type beat about a group of attractive teenage girls going on a day trip to something called a beach.

The beach was a fascinating concept to them, they had never seen sand. They had lakes within the confines of the dome but they could not comprehend the scale of an ocean. And most of all, the swimsuits, oh good gorgeous God the swimsuits.

Each girl’s bikini was described in expert detail, as were their proclivities on the sand. They had divided up the 7 girls into three distinct camps based on this information, bitches, whores and sluts. This had been an important part of the forming of social cliques early on. Depending on which girl you liked most from the story, you fell into one of the three camps.

Mary, Tina and Monica were true bitches. Rita and Jessica were massive whores. Erica and Sandra were the wildest of sluts.

Vorelando loved the image of Sandra in the sun, Harold daydreamed about having Erica by his side. The two of them were sluts for sluts, and therefor inseparable.

“Yeah, that’s the one.” Harold replied, cutting short Vorelando’s spiralling mind. “Do you remember that record player my father used to have?”

“You want me to remember two things now?”

“Do you remember it or not?”

“That old hunk of junk? Yeah I remember it.”

The ‘record player’ Harold was talking about was little more than a needle and scrap wood. At least it had been last time Vorelando had seen it.

Harold jumped to his feet and then pulled Vorelando to his.

“Come back to my house, I want to show you something.”

The two began walking back to Harold’s. Despite not being that far away in terms of pure distance, it was still a two hour walk. They had to take a curved route instead of the most direct path because their path was blocked by one of the inner domes.

The series of domes created ringed districts around the center, which housed the kings palace. Even if you could somehow sneak past the security checkpoints designed to stop class mixing, you wouldn’t be able to get to your destination, as there was only one entrance to each dome.

Vorelando and Harold kept their hoods up and their heads low as they made the journey back. They were migrants in their own city, having come from Dome Eva all those years ago during the Great Kiwi Storm. The residents of Dome Lio had welcomed them at first, but soured to their presence quickly when it became evident they were not going back to where they belonged.

Even a decade later, Kiwijins roamed the confines of Dome Eva.

“I’m home!” Harold bellowed as he entered his wooden poverty home.

No one welcomed him back because his parents were dead.

Harold’s shack was just as Vorelando remembered it, decidedly terrible, except with one difference. The broken record player that usually sad in the corner beside the couch, was no longer broken and had taken residence on a stool in the center of the room.

“Goddamn, you fixed it.” Vorelando exclaimed.

“I sure did.”

“How’d you do it?”

“I can get handy when I want to.”

A misunderstanding occurred between the two. Harold simply meant that Vorelando underestimated his abilities as a handy man. Vorelando, who had always suspected that Harold was a closet bisexual, assumed that he had traded his presumably considerable handjob skills to someone more suited to the job of record player reconstruction. The misunderstanding persisted as Harold thought he had been understood and Vorelando did not wish to push the issue.

“You didn’t just bring me here to show me a record player you allegedly fixed yourself, did you?”

“Of course not.”

From underneath the table, Harold procured a record held in a blank sleeve. He placed it with expert care on the turn table before dropping the needle on it.

The first few notes of the funky fresh baseline shook the walls of Harold’s shack. He had managed to procure a copy of DNCE’s Cake by the Ocean, unlikely as that may seem in the post-apocalyptic domescape of :B:uenos Aires.

The two stood there in silence, soaking in the vibes. When the song ended, Vorelando could only say one thing.

“Kind of a banger, ngl.”

“Now what do you see?”

There was that atmosphere rich question again, ‘what do you see?’ Repeated so many times that it had begun to seem poignant.

“Is this your thing about wanting to see the ocean again? I thought you gave up on that.”

“I had, I had… but then I heard this song. The ocean is a foreign concept, but cake is not. I had rationalized my dreams away Vorelando, I could tell my self that an ocean was nothing but a body of water, simply larger and further away than any other one I’ve ever known. But clearly the presence of the ocean has a material effect on the experience of eating cake, it can’t just be a big lake. A lake doesn’t change that experience Vorelando, nor does a pond, trust me, I’ve tested it.”

“So you want to eat cake by the ocean?”

“Exactly, I want to eat cake by the ocean with you-“

“Oh.”

“-and Miyuki.”

“Interesting.”

Vorelando had never seen so much fire and/or lust in Harold’s eyes before.

“One day we’ll strike back at the Kiwijin, we will find our way to the ocean and we shall eat cake by it.” Harold proclaimed.

“This is not humanity’s last stand, but it’s first.”