I awakened to the artificial voice from the grille overhead saying, “Next stop Ashtabula. Connections to the Great Withern Line and the Ember River.” The light outside was orange and the sun was the color of raw beef as the train pulled into the station.

The station, under bluish artificial light and overly air-conditioned, felt like a dream of a walk-in refrigerator, the travelers the butchered carcasses that hadn’t stopped moving. It was supposed to be comforting, I imagined, a contrast to the heat and ruddy light outside. There were very few windows, and of course no skylights — ashfall would have kept them permanently blocked and jammed any mechanism to clear them. I imagined great scraping blades, like windshield wipers, creaking more loudly with each swing until they finally fell still.

I crossed the station, past restaurants and banks, casinos and brothels, and the great escalators to the pneumatic local trains. Everything was shiny and fresh. The perpetual boomtown could afford to replace any part of its public face that began to look shabby or dated. It could afford a lot.

That was the gift of the Ember River, a perpetual magma flow that split the Withern Lands. Fuel for a million steam turbines, it fed the longest, narrowest nation on the map the way the Nile fed Egypt. And the lure of free power had populated an unlivable land. The daughter of greed and ingenuity, Ashtabula spread underground a kilometer deep, ten wide and thirty long, a carbuncle on the Ember’s sharpest bend.

I bought my ticket to the farry and waited for the next skimmer. The Ember wouldn’t tolerate a bridge, so one crossed on a carpet of steam.

The water table of the Withern Lands had given out long ago, but the free power made importing water worthwhile. Bets had been placed — with bankers, not bookmakers — on when Ashtabula would fail. Maybe the longer ones would pay off.

The ferry gate lit up and chimed, and the huge valve of the airlock opened. A hot wind rushed out with the disembarking passengers. Pink and sweating, they lumbered towards the ices stand near the gate. I would do the same at the outbank station, even though all the drinks here tasted metallic to me. It was a standard complaint of out-of-towners, along with the hotel housekeeping, the restaurant prices, and the air conditioning in the brothels always being set for maximum chill.

On board the skimmer, as soon as the wheels left the ramp and it started gliding on steam, the air heated up. They’d pumped it full of cold station air at the gate, but it didn’t last.

No windows in the passenger compartment. There wouldn’t be much to see but clouds of ash and steam, and the flying hot mud they gave birth to.

I needed caffeine. I should have grabbed a coffee ice at the inbank station. I’d get one at the outbank gate. I had hectares of factory to tour, and I’d need my best administrative hauteur to push past the official tour and actually gather useful data.

Two weeks until I could get out of this ridiculous place. “That’s the smell of money,” the locals liked to say when an out-of-towner complained. I knew money; it smelled like polished hardwood and ice-distilled wine, and thin slices of freshly killed raw meat. Ashtabula smelled like hot metal and burning insulation and freon, and the stink of boomtown greed.

         No one knows anything about Pity Me because anthropologists refuse to study it.  I mean, who wants to spend three years studying a bunch of whiners?  At grad schools across the country, Pity Me ranks even lower in popularity than its neighboring regions of Nobody Likes Me or Everybody Hates Me.  Budding anthropologists even find it more congenial to go native in the wilds of I Guess I’ll Go Eat Worms.  Time and again, the scene plays out at our nation’s universities. 

         “Susan, I’m shipping out tomorrow, perhaps never to return.  This may be our last night together.  Won’t you give me something to remember you by?” 

         “Oh Tommy, I wish I could, but it’s just not possible.  Where are you being shipped off to?” 

         “Pity Me.” 

         “Oh, all right, we can do it, but no photographs.” 

         The few facts that we have about Pity Me come to us from the reports of explorers who never amounted to much after visiting Pity Me.  “Why bother exploring,” they would say, “if we’re all just going to die eventually?  In fact, I’ll probably be the first to go, with my luck.  I think I’m coming down with something right now, and look at this rash, it’s—” and the people they were talking to would excuse themselves, saying they have a pressing engagement that they entirely forgot about until right that second.  So very little was learned about Pity Me through them either. 

         Sometimes people escape from Pity Me, hiding their origins.  When other people ask where they are from, the people from Pity Me usually reply, “Cleveland, Ohio,” not realizing that for most people, this is functionally equivalent to saying, “Pity Me.”  With their diminished comprehension of social mores, the people from Pity Me can therefore never understand it when the people they are talking to suddenly, yes, excuse themselves by saying they have a pressing engagement that they entirely forgot about until right that second. 

           It was a man from Pity Me who devised the first practical room-temperature fusion reactor that could deliver cheap, virtually unlimited energy with no pollution or byproducts.  But then he threw the blueprints into the trash, because nothing every works out for him anyway. 

         People from Pity Me rarely write anything, but when they do it’s usually about Pity Me, because they really want people to understand what it’s like in Pity Me, and why everything is worse there,, and how the universe is conspiring to ruin their lives.  In fact, that the best way to tell if someone’s from Pity Me, is if he writes about Pity Me and uses the phrase “Pity Me” a lot.  They like to use the phrase “Pity Me” because they hope, futilely, that people will pity me.

It’s been said that civilization is founded upon its causalities; that progress marches on – over a bridge of corpses. Civilized humanity was bred for obedience, but every breeding project has its rejects. Ismailia is the place where they all end up.
It works like this: when a boy is to become a man and a member of his society, he has to pass a test. Maybe he’s got to register for the draft, or go out and kill something dangerous, or walk through a TSA scanner, or hold still while they cut off his foreskin. Whatever the test, it has nothing to do with proving courage, cleanliness or ability to provide. It’s all about whether or not he’ll do what he’s told, no matter how stupid, as long as it’s wrapped up in myths of honor and tradition. If he fails, he’s out of the tribe and he goes to Ismailia. Girls, being more necessary to breeding, don’t usually get either the test or the option, but some still get there by hook or by crook.
Ismailia is the ultimate frontier desert town. On the outskirts, shanties and saloons are knocked together out of architectural salvage, spent missile shells, pieces of downed aircraft. In the center, there’s organization, public works, even massive art projects, all made from recycled junk, as if a vast Burning Man is held there year-round – literally, because everything gets destroyed and needs replacing frequently.
“A Boy And His Dog” was filmed here on location, and Warner Bros. has announced they will do a urban noir remake of Peter Pan using the population as extras.
Four people came walking into Ismailia one evening, from different directions.
The first one clearly did not belong there. Though young and male, he was stern of visage, taut of muscle and disciplined in his stride, and if anyone had checked, they would have seen he was indeed circumcised. He dressed halfway between “soldier” and “monk.” He came in from the North.
The second one just as clearly did belong to Ismailia, or possibly it belonged to him. Wild of hair and eye, jangling with spikes and chains and piercings, wearing enough black leather to upholster downtown Seattle, and so covered with tattoos that they merged, like layers of graffiti, he came in from the South.
The third was a girl, leggy and coltish. She was not pretty, being at an awkward phase of teenage development, but had an engaging disproportion of snub nose and long jaw, and bushy reddish-brown hair. She dressed in gypsy layers of colorful lacy torn skirts. She came from the West.
The final person slouched and ambled his way reluctantly into the city from the East. He was tall and lean and on the far side of a cynical forty. He had a hat, a coat, and a cigarette.

Bad Kissingen originated as a small German seaside resort town on the North Sea, where a tiny geothermal vent pressed up through the narrow crust, producing hot springs with a far higher than typical sulfur content. Hence the name–in the marginal dialect of Lower Middle Flendish, “kissen” means “to break wind.” (It is a little appreciated fact that Henry Kissinger’s family originated from this portion of Germany, but this explains why in his globe trotting travels he never visited northern Germany, because he feared locals would laugh uncontrollably when he would be introduced.)

Today, however, Bad Kissingen is located in the midlands of England, about a hundred kilometers southeast of Manchester. After the first World War, the defeated, broken Germany was desperate to pay off its war debt. The Duke of Flenda sent his son to France and then to England, trying to raise capital. It was in Great Britain that the Duke’s son found a suitable mark, in the form of Lord Smithe-smith. Smithe-smith had made a fortune in undergarment procurement for troops in the trenches during the Great War and had pounds to burn. He also fancied himself somewhat of a lady’s man. So when the son of the Duke of Flenda approached him, Smithe-smith thought the name “Bad Kissingen” rather racy and suggestive, not realizing it mean “bath of farts.”

A huge convoy of barges were towed across the channel, around Denmark, and into the North Sea and the northernmost shores of Germany, where tons of sulfurous mud and thousands of acre-feet of water that smelled like dead feet were loaded and trundled back across the channel and across the famous English canals to the small village of Sack-under-Stick on the south side of the Stick River.

When Lord Smithe-smith arrived at the newly reconstituted Bad Kissingen, with his wife, his ex-wife, his mistress, and his ex-mistress all optimistically in tow, he found the townspeople of Sack-under-Stick fled and the air unbreathable with the stench. The shock caused Smithe-smith to have an immediate stroke, although for years rumors abounded that he had in fact been beaten unconscious by his enraged wives and mistresses.

From his hospital bed, Smithe-smith wrote angrily to the son of the Duke of Flenda, then to the Duke, and finally to the German ambassador, demanding his money back. There was no answer. He then pleaded with Whitehall to intervene, but was told that there was nothing to do under the treaty of Versailles. Three months later Smithe-smith died a broken man and, according to his will, was buried on the Isle of Skye, as far as it was possible to be from Bad Kissingen and still be in the British Isles.

With the money, the Duke of Flenda, one Heinrich Goebbels (the name means in Lower Middle Flendish, “something God coughed up”) built an armament factory, and his son, Joseph, embarked upon a famed and meteoric career in government. A few decades later, tens of millions more were dead, and it is not inconceivable that a randy English lord, a fast-talking German lad, and tons of stinking mud, plaid some small part in setting the stage.