The cracks crazing the boiling blue sky run together into rivulets, brooks, mighty raging rivers flowing into a sunlit yellow tree trunk standing brilliant against the cold, tranquil winter sky, riddled with the bullet holes of its shadowed fruits. The numinous rising wingbeats of a doomed pigeon, one foot long ago eaten by lye or some leprosy, carry it across the frozen static of crossed branches with another tree that still retains its worthless, dried leaves, the poisoned excrement of a summer it cannot remember. Below, there is singing: the radiator fan of a car lamenting its overwork, the baritone thunder of a bus diesel. The fragmentary sidewalk, bearing the scars of too many careless attempts to repair the electrical and communication lines beneath bears the weight of dozen fear-filled West African Plains Apes, each containing a universe of wonders no one else will ever glimpse, each a lonely prisoner of her own distrust and hate, their lives piously dedicated to serving hungry ghosts that never lived upon this earth, but who nevertheless poured these sidewalks, planted these trees, and built these engines that moan with the cries of fish and krill dead since before our foremothers began to lay eggs on land, ghosts called states and companies and races and churches and schools.
In the bus, a skeletal man in a suit fidgets, alternately slumping and suddenly sitting erect, mumbling to himself as he wipes his eyes and scratches his chin. A young mother braids the hair of a daughter on her lap. When her daughter was born in a heroic ordeal of agony and blood, she came to the city, seeking solace in its vastness, yearning to become part of something bigger than she is, leaving behind the memories of her lover who died bisected on the train tracks, stinking of Fernet Branca, a memory that hurt her more than the birth of his child. Still sometimes she awakes at night to his kisses, only to find herself more alone than ever, alone and aging toward her inevitable death.
Her great-grandfather died by a bullet from a man from this city, who came to fight for his rstate and his ace, the race of the city, and erase hers from the Earth; to this race existing only in his imagination, he dedicated his demonic human sacrifice, lawlessly murdering in the name of Law. Her line did not die, but now she sings of her love to her daughter with the words of the man who slaughtered her tribe, and in this city her accent and her skin mark her forever as an outsider, a subjected people. Some days she dreams of a world where her people remain free and her love never tasted Fernet, never called her a slut, where he stood beside her still, tall and strong as he was when she first kissed him, not bloody and cold like when she identified him in the morgue. She dreams that her great-grandfather never beat his wife.
The bus is the larger body of its driver, and in his halting and hurried caresses we feel his anger, his impatience, his desperation to compete for position with the taxis and motorcycles he swims through. The girl in her mother's lap feels it and scowls; the skeletal man in the suit fidgets a little faster and rubs his face, a face nobody else caresses. The engine growls the impotent rage of its driver, oblivious to the beatific smile on the plastic face of Jesus beside the steering wheel.
The air cylinder to open the doors cries out like a gunshot in a tunnel, and the bus leaves me behind, its superchargers screaming in fury. I walk through the darkening silence it left behind, its vitriol stinging my nostrils like the legacy of decades of insufficiently strict pollution standards, as if a law were as real as the bloated corpses of idealists who hung themselves or took fifty times the lethal dose of Ecstasy, trapped in their own unyielding prisons of logic and delusion and burgeoning, cancerous timidity.
Later, the planet has turned and shadowed me, wrapping me in a darkness that reaches only to behind the nearest streetlight, an assembly of 98 5-watt white LEDs. These false stars of civilization, infecting the wound of our fear of our fellow humans, cannot hold back the unstoppable blackness of the night, but they do shield us from its wonders with ignorance. Children growing up here like weeds in the cracks of the concrete never know the sight of the Milky Way or the Pleiades, except on the hood of a Subaru. At night the woman's grandfather in her village had used stories rather than streetlights to swaddle her in addictive, comforting, toxic ignorance, telling her the Milky Way was spilled milk in the sky.
I emerge from an artificial mountain where I have been reflecting and weeping, a cube of false stone honeycombed with geometrically formed corridors, with trees and meticulously mowed grass on top, and in a few pits in the middle. It has stood in the middle of this city for four generations, and thousands of people earned their livings spinning and weaving in it; unknown dozens of them have lost fingers or hands or died, mangled by the machinery, within its echoing cavernous depths. Walking around it takes almost ten minutes. Our concrete is lashed together with tendons of steel, but our pozzolanic additives are inferior to the Romans’, so such buildings decay without constant attention, and a generation ago the roof swimming pool had cracked and would not hold water, and the palm tree next to it had fallen over, unable to shatter our conglomerated stones with its roots. Now I make my office within.
On a black roundrect of mostly stone, bearing an ideogram of a fruit on the back to represent the imaginary person who made it and still owns it in a way that I never will, I inscribe my thoughts in letters of fire, letters that will leap invisibly through subtle vibrations behind the air when I arrive