THREE

Fake City

[Outside Time]

As the man whose name wasn’t Proteus was finding his way into the capital city of Mongolia, I stepped out of the grim and into the murk of another gray Fake City morning. The skies were an even slate of brownish-gray nothing, without features of any sort. On the sidewalk, I turned around and looked up: there, part-hidden behind the brick building’s corner, near the roofline, hung the halved silver of the familiar metal orb, waiting just as motionless, in exactly the same place, as always. My friend. As often as I’d seen it there (and how often was that?) I still had to stop and stare for a time.

For a…?

As unimpressive as it was to see, still, I had to.

The air was approaching cold; not enough for sweaters or jackets and such, but neither was it warm. In my torn overshirt, I wrapped my arms around myself and twisted gently back and forth, staring up. Not for warmth, but for something else.

For…? (Insert left-handed “m.” Scrawl next to it left-handed “e.”) For a…? (Scratch out same.)

In Fake City, a place where nothing was real, in a place outside time, matters of time, duration – never mind simultaneity or sequence – were impossibly difficult to pin down. What happened when, what at the same time as when, or for how long… it was impossible. There simply was no before and no after, and the concept of during is most deeply blurred when everything that happens happens everywhere (except here, in Fake City, of course) all at once. It’s effectively the same as if nothing happened at all – it was all just one great massed blur of event, in stasis, muddled together in a lump. And this piece of me, which for narrative convenience I’ll call “me,” understood this relativity of blurring only insofar as it underwent such (which is to say it understood this not at all); forgetting the past, losing the future, and retaining only the this-here-right-now-ness of an undefinable moment. It succumbed, all at once, outside time, to timelessness and not-being. If I’d looked into a mirror, I’d’ve not seen anything. I wouldn’t know myself. It was good that I had no mirror.

But now it was “time” to get to work. So I tore myself from the sight of my distant orb-friend in the sky and walked on.

This fragment of me which I’ll still call “me” was no less partial than that shard of a man called Proteus. The two should properly have fit together into a single, self-aware person, but they did not. What “I” had that he did not was a locus of little perspective points, little referents, like so many stretched threads of awareness all intersecting together in more or less one place. “I” was that ill-defined center; the place where the filaments met. “I” could say “I” and mean it, even if I didn’t know what that was, while he… he could exist in the world. Not very well, granted, but he could do it, even if he couldn’t find himself there. He was in fact bumping and knocking around Ulaanbaatar’s nighttime river of lights at that moment, looking for it, looking for himself, getting hurtled about in cars, or feeling his way through a corridor like a blind man – which he wasn’t – stopped (he was so easily confused) by the smell of something odd but not off-putting.

But here – in Fake City – as the traffic always did, it snuffed and rumbled and occasionally it surged forward (never backward) through the streets, beneath the looming weight of so many tall and colorless buildings. Buildings made of steel, glass, stone, and concrete – at the financial center of the city, these structures rose beyond sight and seemed to always only get higher, or at least heavier, every day. There was no sense or reason to these towers’ unchecked growth, but since Fake City was unreal, sense and reason could be lost, and such expansion, at least according to that logic of skyscrapers themselves, was inevitable. Cars on the ground, so populous here, were all of an era, one seemingly long past. Their makes were indistinct, having heavy, rounded frames, huge engines, bulbous, white-walled tires, and tailpipes that spit gray smoke out the back behind them. They could’ve been a thing of one mind, and certainly acted as one mind; this traffic was a mass mind of slow and senseless movement that never stopped – each car, its driver, and every passenger too, was a vector of motion’s continuance, individual cells in the city’s sludge-bloodstream of gridlock, the thickest, the slowest, and most impossible at its center. Horns bleated, drivers shouted at one another, all to no effect. All inched along in desperate, slow gasps. Still, no one ever quite entirely stopped.

It was towards the middle where I headed, though I was out on foot. I had no car, so couldn’t drive. I was not part of the traffic continuum. Lucky again, it seemed, not to be stuck in all that, as it was better to walk. My place of employment was in that tower that was largest and stood over every other; I was at the very center of all of it. But my place was not above, in the heights; it was at street level, at an indistinct if high-rent bakeshop that served bread and butter, soups and coffee, and plain little sandwiches, sold at astounding prices, to those who worked their days up top.

Off the central avenue, down a narrow alley lined with dumpsters from where the crows scattered at my approach, a service entrance let me into the kitchen – a bustle of vague yet frenetic activity, of moving bodies in white jackets, hair held up in nets, of faces looking up without recognition, glances met and just as quickly broken. I found a jacket for myself from a metal armoire and put a company cap on my head, then clocked in.

•

“Who left this here? Did you?”

“Me? How could I? I just got here.”

“You know you don’t leave these here.”

“Okay, but –”

“You wash them and you put them away. Don’t send them to the dishwashers; they won’t put them away. You do it. You wash them, you put them away. Understand?”

“I know that, but –”

“This one smells like garlic. Where did you get it from?”

“I didn’t. It wasn’t –”

“Did you get it from here?”

“No, listen, I –”

“If you get this one from here, you don’t use it with garlic. These ones aren’t for use with garlic. Do you know why?”

“Because they smell like garlic after?”

“That’s right. So if you’re going to use it with garlic, don’t get it from here, get it from over there. And then what?”

“And then what what?”

“And then what do you do with it?”

“Wash it and put it away?”

“That’s right. That’s what you do.”

“But I didn’t –”

“I know you didn’t, so that’s why I’m telling you. Look, drop whatever it is you are doing, I need you to take an order upstairs.”

“I just got here. I wasn’t doing anything.”

“I don’t care. The delivery girl didn’t show, so I need you to take these sandwiches upstairs. It’s important. They’re for one of our best customers, and this needs to go right now. If there’s anything wrong with their order, if we’re late, if you screw this up, they’ll drop us straightaway and find somewhere else for their lunches. So don’t screw this up.”

“I… won’t. I will.”

“Won’t, will, what?”

“I won’t screw it up. I’ll take it right now.”

“So get going already.”

•

But I’d never actually seen anybody eat in Fake City.

I mean, I couldn’t. I could neither sleep nor eat, yet seemed none the worse for it. Yes, I was always tired and hungry, even desperately so, yet these things like all the other things were part of the landscape, like buildings and traffic and smog, and I found they did little to affect the constancy of life, or death, as I’d come to know it. How other people managed to get by, I couldn’t be certain. And whatever became of these boxed lunches was someone else’s problem too. At least I was working.

The elevator took me up into the sky. 102nd floor, 103rd… My destination was on floor 129, the BOX Group, some kind of banking or investment firm, I didn’t know what. When the silent elevator at last stopped, the brass doors slid open and let me out into an immaculate lobby of polished, black flooring and live bamboo arrangements in wooden planter boxes. A long desk ahead of me accommodated three receptionists, two of whom were busy on the telephone, so I went to the third and stated my business, holding up the several plastic bags of lunch as explanation. I couldn’t have physically carried any more.

“Yes, good,” the prim young woman at the desk said. “Just set them up in the boardroom over there, will you?” She pointed. I nodded and went to where I was told.

The boardroom, partitioned off the lobby by a glass wall, held a large, ovoid table, also made of glass, surrounded by a number of plush chairs on rollers. The space was impressive, intimidating in its display of wealth. But most striking about it was the view out the window from this height. All of Fake City – or at least the half that could be seen from this side of the tower – lay stretched out far below, looking like nothing so much as a gray and brown patchwork tapestry, and save for a few very tall buildings close in, nothing was near as tall as this. And we weren’t even on the top floor. I took a moment to search for the neighborhood I’d just walked from, where I lived; there it was, to the… what was that? North? Northwest? To the left in any event. The area didn’t look like much from up here, but then it didn’t look like much from street level either. And that would be the building where I lived. And from the back of it, where my room was, from where I could look up and out, through the window, toward…

Yes, there: in the bleak and featureless sky, not nearly so high as I would’ve thought it was, and not nearly so large either, there hung my friend the metal orb. It was still higher than the floor this office was on, but not by so much. From here, it looked even kind of little, more like a balloon than anything. I knew it wasn’t any sort of balloon, but still, I never would’ve imagined…

And looking past that, I could see even beyond the city limits, past which… my god…

“Excuse me, but who are you?”

Startled, I turned away from the window so fast my neck twinged. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I was just setting up your box lunches. Came to deliver them was all. I was told to put them in here.” I’d started taking them out of their bags to set them one at each chair. One per chair, each got a box, marked “BOX,” with one lunch in it. So I figured.

“That’s quite enough. We won’t be needing them now.” The man stepped forward. The dark cloth of his suit flashed its hidden, fine textures with reflected light, but only at certain angles. From his hairless scalp also, washes of slippery highlight blurred, then faded back to skin tones in shadow as he moved. But his eyes were cold and piercing and absolutely colorless beneath the severity of his brow.

I started to pick the boxes back up to pack them again into their bags: BOX, BOX, BOX…

“Never mind about that,” the man said. “You may go now. Please.”

“Yes, sir.” I let the armload drop back down onto the ovoid table and scuttled out.

•

No doubt I’d hear about it downstairs, I thought as I rubbed at the neck muscle I’d pulled. It didn’t hurt, so long as I didn’t try to turn my head.

On the elevator ride back down, I rehearsed my story of how I’d only done what I’d been asked to, never mind that it was the wrong thing. What else was I supposed to do? The boss would be annoyed, no doubt. I’d just have to wait and take it when the trouble all came back.

Whoever that bald man had been, he hadn’t wanted me in there. But why? I’d not interrupted anything. There’d been no sensitive materials out for me to see; no papers, no company secrets, whatever. Just a big glass table in an ostentatious meeting room. So what? All that I’d seen had been the view out the window…

And that’s what he’d not wanted me to see. The view.

It didn’t make any sense, but I felt, with certainty, that had to be it. It was the only thing. The bald man hadn’t wanted me to see the view from this high up.

Of what? Mosquito? Should that be a problem? Who didn’t see that? The thing was visible from just about every point in the city. It wasn’t exactly a secret. Not that anyone ever mentioned it either. Not that anyone ever… much seemed to notice it at all… now that I thought of it…

No, not Mosquito – it was what lay beyond the city limits: the city surrounded by a yellow-gray and level desert, its whole blasted expanse… I hadn’t seen that before, I never knew the city was in the middle of that.

I shook my head and rubbed my hands over my face. The pinched nerve in my neck shot stabs of complaint. I was reading too much into this whole thing. The guy in the suit – he’d just wanted to mess with someone smaller than himself. I was there, I wore a uniform, I was obviously a monkey of no importance. It was fun to see me jump, that was all. Well, fuck the guy. I guessed that by now he would’ve called to complain. I’d see if I still had a job when I got back to the kitchen.

•

But there’d been no complaint. Nothing waited for me downstairs but the rest of the day’s routine work. Roskind, the kitchen manager, who normally wouldn’t have sent kitchen help like myself out on a service call, had nothing to say on the matter when I got back; so as far as she was aware, everything had gone just fine. I was relieved to not get fired – granted, it was a lousy job, but still a job – and so I buried myself in little tasks. One of these, at the end of the day, after we’d sold all the lunches we were going to, was to stamp the word “BOX” onto all the little boxes that we delivered our lunches in.