Short Story: All That Is Solid Melts Into Air

“May I come in?”

“Sure, Patrick,” stretched on the bed, Amy raised her eyes off the thick tome she was reading. People banging away at tinny kettledrums outside were of little assistance in understanding the finer points made by Marshall Berman in All That is Solid Melts into Air, but they certainly made her miss New York City more. She liked Palanda, the capital of Ophir, hot, alien, crazy, sprawling, already hit by Moses-style modernity lambasted by Berman—indeed, if New York had the Kennedy Airport, Palanda had a development of high-rise apartment blocks built on American aid money in the 1960s and named after the assassinated U.S. President, mostly populated by civil servants and officers. But Amy had fallen in love with New York. She

Was Patrick likewise missing Paris? He had been living in Ophir for approximately two years, and she didn’t know whether he had been home. Patrick was doing what he wanted when he wanted, at least that was how it looked.

“I’m going out with my camera,” Patrick came into the room. “Would you like to have a couple of photos taken before I head out?”

“Um, okay, thanks, Patrick. Just get the book cover,” Amy couldn’t possibly pass up on a chance to shock her mother to whom the photos would be mailed. She hoped Olympia Barksdale would recognize the book’s title coming from the Communist Manifesto; even though she hadn’t sullied her hands with a single volume of Marx, Mother liked books of quotations.

Snap snap whirr.

“It’s really hot outside, Patrick. Don’t get sunburned. Listen, do you want to go back? To Paris?”

“I fly home now and then, but I like it here. Don’t you?”

“I do, but it’s so different.”

“Perhaps it is good that Ophir feels so different. Amy, you’ll adjust. Maud and Fabio are fine people, and there are so many things to discover here. You’ll travel north, you’ll travel south—”

“Sure, Patrick. It’s just—well, I guess everyone misses home in the first weeks. It’ll pass.”

“It helps when you have someone to

Maud had lied to her about her whereabouts last night. Tiziana obviously was in good health and had spent the night away.

Why did Maud mislead her?

• • • • • • • • • • • •

“I hate this road,” Don said. They were stuck in a traffic jam behind a bullock-cart whose driver, a smudge-faced cigarette-smoking teenage girl, was scrutinizing them with curiosity. Don glanced at the burned-out hulk of a three-story hotel that loomed to the right. Amy knew that on the New Year’s Eve one of the many revolutionary groups in existence set off a bomb in the hotel, killing four staff members and three gimlet-sipping English ex-pats in the bar. The country was supposed in Washington to be a bulwark against the Communist influence, but the edifice was not without its cracks. Amy noted this to Don.

“I’ve seen enough in Iran,” Don answered. “The history isn’t going to repeat itself here. The country kept its independence, it’ll hold against the Reds.”

“Ophir preserved its independence by being a buffer state between the British and the Dutch Empires,” Amy glanced at the scallop-emblazoned tanker truck slowly making its way through the traffic. “Worked out pretty well—for some, at least.”

The bullocks in front of them started