SIXTEEN

Fake City

[Outside Time]

No, no, that was the airless quality. That was not a sun. The sun dot city dot dot up in the airless quality; could not help but think of it as she. She?

That was not a sun up there. There was something familiar about it, yes, but it wasn’t the sun. There was light, but no source of light, and the light was even and wan and somehow limpid, if a bit thick. And it was not as bad, and it was not as dark, and it was not as difficult as it once seemed or felt, to walk these airless blocks as if I were still living… yet there was an emptiness to it also, a bodiless-ness. No. No. I couldn’t feel my feet. I could feel the feet were there, but not feel anything through them, detached by the airless quality. And in the back-forth-ness of even, persistent movement I found how a false stability may be maintained. It was to a point effective, but not to other purpose; I was only walking. I had nowhere to go. The city was changeable, a construct within a bubble – it had proven that much already, as the forms it took came into focus, shifted, and then were gone – and on its canvas were put in order a variety of similar forms, all having their relations, composed and repurposed, composed and disassembled, where persons, flocked like grouplings, moved, moved with traffic, moved again to follow the signal, where persons then waited with the signal, and waited… It didn’t seem so important to feel through my feet anymore, all considered. Just that my feet were there. The distance between them and the rest of me allowed a directionless wandering, a wakening, and that was as much as a body could allow for. How to hold a person together? That was a question. Enough to keep a form? Another question. But with as loose a step as this – it was so like feeling myself – or no, if not feeling; or no, if not myself; then – a fish, perhaps, without a fin. A sucker.

But this was not my body. It was hardly that. As best as I could manage. So where was the body? A thing could not be gotten over. And also: where was the mind? The real mind? Oh, that thing in the sky? This was not a mind. That was another thing. And where… damn it, where had Finch gone off to? Yeah, I knew… I knew where he’d gone to, as much as I could know about that. I wanted to tell him how he’d got off too easy, disappearing like that, off to the smoky void – though near twenty years of following me around in ghostly form, all considered, had been anything, I’m sure, but easy. But what I did not now want to admit, how with my “friend” gone, I had maybe started going a bit unraveled. Un-rav-el-ed. Bits and parts and pieces of it, all a-scatter. Yes, the mind. This, this, this was no place for the living, clearly so. It seemed as such one had need of a ghost companion, parasite though he was, to keep from falling apart. Here. This was bad news, bad news, this. Oh and how I would have loved to just stop walking, just stop walking around this way, to no point, to do other, no other point than to keep from un-rav-el-ing. For myself I kept my hands stuffed into my pockets, and my arms held rigid to my sides. Shuffling. Not going to pieces. But I was alone, nowhere to go, and the light here was too abstracted, too thick and too diffused to seem much of anything like regular daylight. Though it did at least allow enough to see.

For me. And all the others. All the others.

Their movement was familiar. A surge at tide’s flush. Moonlight, maybe, seen through water. And all that distance. Slimy sludge stuck to the bottom. A rock. Many rocks. There a flatfish moved, flapped a flipper, moved the sludge. This must be the city at night! Though long ago I thought I’d lost the sea, it looked now that I hadn’t. At home here, in my element – I was once, after all, a sea creature. One among the others, all the others. All were sea creatures, and why not be a fish? Or a seal perhaps? Or an anemone…? And I could tell anyone at all the future, anyone who asks, because the future is always the same. Whatever happens after that is their problem; why should I be bothered, changing into forms? Listen now, I’ll tell you a story, a song about the things to come in all their shifting forms, and then what follows. I’m pretty sure you’ll like it too, since it involves you directly. When you, a fish, one of a whole school, a school of thousands, should turn as all the others do, and in the same direction, turn and show your side to flash in the streaming, refractory light of the moon – or better still, in mediated sunlight – I will ask what it is of mine that you have not taken yet from me. Because you, in all your numbers, have stolen memory, and meaning, and all that connects one moment to the next. And you have left me open-mouthed and staring, and empty, with these pieces and moments all made separate; left me staring into the shimmering strands with the other mindless things that swim.