Getting Across

9.

In Hawk Nest nature has followed art. The name, I have heard, once had purely neutral connotations: some real-estate developer’s high-flown metaphor, nothing more. Yet it determined the district’s character, for gradually Hawk Nest became the home of predators that it is today, where all men are strangers, where every man is his brother’s enemy.

Other districts have their slums. Hawk Nest is a slum. I am told they live here by looting, cheating, extorting, and manipulating. An odd economic base for an entire community, but maybe it works for them. The atmosphere is menacing. The only police machines seem to be those that patrol the border. I sense emanations of violence just beyond the corner of my eye: rapes and garrottings in shadowy byways, flashing knives and muffled groans, covert cannibal feasts. Perhaps my imagination works too hard. Certainly I have gone unthreatened so far; those I meet on the streets pay no heed to me, indeed will not even return my glance. Still, I keep my heat-pistol close by my hand as I walk through these shabby, deteriorating outskirts. Sinister faces peer at me through cracked, dirt-veiled windows. If I am attacked, will I have to fire in order to defend myself? God spare me from having to answer that.