BSC Brings It With July's First Entry

I'll be the first to post up an entry this month since I didn't have one last month -- hopefully, I won't be the last. The assignment this month, for those who may have stumbled onto this blog by accident or random chance, is for Smackdown entrants to "describe a building as seen by a man whose son has died in a war. Do not mention the son, war, the death, or the man doing the seeing." I have made my attempt at this -- I hope you like it.

Uncertainty
by Brian Crane

To the casual observer the building's distinctive whiteness (derived from the exterior's composition of bone-colored slabs of rock) was all that made it stand out from the other buildings. Closer inspection, however, revealed other truths, subtly and intentionally hidden.

For a building of its size (10 floors), there were remarkably few windows, and these were smallish and vaguely sinister at that. This apparent aversion to natural light seemed especially unusual when the surrounding architecture embraced sunlight, often incorporating as many windows as possible into the structural design. But secrets wither in the sunlight, and the white building'’s inhabitants dealt in secrets. Certainly, they collected and collated and concluded, gathering intelligence meant for the sort of people who'd never had their picture taken. Based on these secrets, important decisions were made that affected billions of people, and though the reasons behind those decisions were not readily clear, their terrible results were as clear as the landing lights on the big C-10 planes that touched down in the dead of night so the cameras couldn'’t film them unloading their flag-draped cargo.

Its strategic placement in the invisible center of the city was a crime committed against them, right under their noses, and yet here they walked past it, beneath a warm and gracious sun, wearing their casually ruthless expressions as though nothing were wrong. But something was wrong. If they knew better, their faces would curl into snarls as they gathered around the white building'’s banal entrance. The tinfoil cars parked here and there would all be upended, slowly rotating on their tops and then set ablaze. A righteous fire would climb high into the air where even those pasty-faced villains on its topmost floor could see the truth of what was coming and shudder. The people would clamor and chant and spit their rage until they got angry enough, brave enough, to march inside and haul out its agents and analysts, bureaucratic insiders with assumed names and no particular allegiance who used their ill-gotten authority to do injury to the very people who (unknowingly) suffered their existence, all of them blinking at the sun and pleading for the mercy they'd blithely withheld.

But this would not happen. – The white building'’s architects and future occupants had collaborated and devised a plan for even this seemingly remote contingency. They would nullify suspicion and erase the possibility of certainty. Their secret weapon: the building itself. Its smooth, apparently ordinary lines were capable of turning even the most vigilant truth-seeker into a credulous rube. The very fact its designers had so artfully blended a quality of anonymity into the building'’s very bones (the curious whiteness just unique enough to make it blend in with the other cautiously distinctive buildings), was either additional evidence of the building's nefarious purpose, or a clever feint designed to attract suspicion to the wrong place while their true bases of operation went unnoticed. The genius of it was that, like a high-wattage radio tower, the uncertainty the building engendered about its own culpability was broadcast to the other buildings around it, until they all stood together as a group of blameless innocents, each of them above reproach from respectable people; too normal to inspire such outrageous notions. The crimes of their occupants would go on. The criminals would continue their work.

But those with reason to watch would remain vigilant anyway.