TWENTY-FOUR

Fake City

[Outside Time]

I’d chosen the apartment for the view. That was the thing that did it. I had to watch, I had to sit for as long as I could and watch, watch it out the window as it sat – no, not sat – as it hung there (because that is what one does when one is in the sky), its burnished surface in the distance hazed by the air that was between us; air, or what that was, the air, the smog, the smoke…

So I settled in my folding chair and sipped at the tea (it tasted like dust) and simply watched. Because that’s what people do when they’ve lost something, when they’ve lost the thing they look at. They look and look; they watch it. There is a hunger in them, a longing, a sadness – if you call it sadness (I don’t know I’d call it sadness) – maybe call it something else. They stare out the window and they watch with that thing, what you call it, while what they watch does what it does while it does nothing, or it just hangs there.

You see, that… that is not nothing. That would be wrong to call it nothing, what it does. Because it hangs there, yes, it does that. In the sky, the metal sphere that is not the sun and not the moon but somehow both these things; it does what it does, it is there, it is hanging, it is doing something, and that… that is something and not nothing.

In the gray dark of the gathering night, I sat with my tea at the window and watched through the dust- and bug-specked glass out toward the din of the street, with its sparkling if colorless streetlights, and its headlights, and its taillights, and stoplights and signposts and signals and lights in the windows, and those in the doors of apartments and stores that were still open at the hour (whatever the hour), and all those buildings in the distance, those half-lit or dark, some short, others tall, and a flat place off in the distance somewhere behind. There was a flatness to the sky. There was a flatness to the distant landscape scarce imagined.

Steam rose from the chipped ceramic cup that I raised to my lips, but the tea had a flavor like dust.

There’s more to the thing than that. I mean, the thing – give it a name, call it Mosquito, other things have names too (like sadness), I know that I do, and both its and mine are wrong – there’s more to it, to what it does than it just hangs there, it simply hanging there… there’s a thing about it, a thing about the thing, it’s a… it’s…

If I were given to imagine that Mosquito were inside me, I might describe the sense like a buzzing, like a buzzing inside me, one not heard but felt, like with the bones, in the bones. In there. It had a chilled buzzing-ness to it. There was something very quick about it, quick and cold – you could sense this, if not see it move – though that didn’t mean it wasn’t. It was moving very quick while hanging very still, but its stillness was a ruse. The stillness wasn’t real. But the stillness, to all appearances, was absolute. It never ever moved from that one spot (that was why I’d got this place, so I could see it always, with nothing in the way). It never shimmered, never jumped, never wobbled, much less drifted in the sky like a moon. The feeling of motion and why I called it quick was something else, another thing, this thing you felt like a buzzing in your bones, and I knew it was a mind. Not that it had a mind; it was a mind. It was thinking. Or it was a quality of thought. It was the thinking mind that was quick, and cold, that moved, that moved quick, that made me think that, to compare it, I was stuck in mud. My thoughts were slow and fuzzy – they were like that anyhow – but next to it, they weren’t even thoughts at all. They were more like the moss that was grown to the side of a rock. It was as fast as thought itself. It was like a lightning bolt, over and done before you ever saw it. Except that it kept going like that all the time. And it was cold, and it was…

Here, with my tea, though the tea had the flavor of dust, and it steamed less now, and was less like tea with every passing minute, I knew, though I had lost this thing I called Mosquito, I could still study it, I could study it through my window. That was why I’d got this place. I could stare out my window in hunger and in sadness (and though I would not call it sadness, I would call it hunger) and with this longing for the thing that I’d lost. In losing it, I now at least could see it. It was there – it hung there – and I could see, and I could study it, watch it all the night as it did what it did, as it did nothing – or if not nothing, as it hung there – thinking, thinking quick, thinking quick and cold, while I, all fuzzy now and slow, struggled along to catch up, feeling sadness (no, not sadness, hunger), reaching deep into the hole it had left there when I lost it.