People are the first indication that you’ve moved from Djuna’s city to Tom’s. People: better to call them figures. They behave in only one way, not the same way but one way each. They’re doing what they do whenever you look. Unobserved they likely hide, lay folded or at length in canisters under the street like tanks of obsolete poison.
The ones wrapped in on themselves may burst with new selenotropic buds that spring up where brows rub wrists. Dirt-caked blooms with stiff seaweed fans, picked by other flowers and other fish into a comb of rigid tendrils. Fed by cool milks of the moon. Fed on white drink with ribbons curling through it, blue and moonflecked like Pierrot’s face.
The ones laid out full-length must grow by diminution, like corpses getting bigger. Their chests will rise to lower points and filter out less yeast; their eyes will sink nearer to the tank’s tarnished surface and take root in metal clefts. With their other flesh laid aside, stretched full elsewhere and eyeless, such eyes would stand like glistened marshland plants. An eye unglassed, unglazed, still shocked by sight, atop a stalk of greasy nerves. And every slump toward the floor makes these bodies longer. When they die, we think, they die as man-shaped patches of damp. Not a fingernail thick, but thirty feet between their toes and the eyes that stand still upright.
Cave paintings made with human soap.
Or no less likely: when we don’t watch, the figures in Tom’s and Djuna’s cities are still there. Statues charged with lichen till they attain a hybrid life; statues full of waterbugs, whose palsied trembling is just the health of waterbugs inside the statue’s cracks. They make their own internal food. They live of inner wine fermented and digested and expelled to re-ferment.
The figures signal cities’ breach by their behavior.
In the city of Djuna, people are caricature of Djuna’s extremes. They sift through her poses and her tremors to eliminate the mean and median. Because Djuna, like anyone else, mostly sits or walks without event. She sits with legs less crossed, more splayed than many women; she walks with longer steps and pocket-rooted hands — but still, sitting and walking. She eats with her head. Her surfaces know the sun and moon. More the moon, but nobody escapes the sun. Her clothes are wider-wove, their edges sharper, but they’re clothes. They cover skin because it’s hidden for her lovers or it’s too weak and white for weather. Because it blooms with red carnations that would riot in the light.
But the people in her city excise the middle part of her actions — that is, the things she mostly does. They’re tableaux vivants of her extremity. The hardest head-down slump (while with Tom at table), the loosest width of drunk-walk, the posture of a cracked flamingo in a graveyard’s empty quarter. What she does least but still does. These gestures become, in people’s hands, like Japanese theater. They’re born with Djuna as one picture; the people turn them into filmstrips. They take the ghostly image and copy, copy, copy until a zoetrope of Djuna spins inside them. Though they make a series of her single points, they add no new behavior. Rather, every copied frame is re-lit and reconfigured.
Overexposed, to food with fuzzy children’s light.
In negative, so Djuna shines a whiteness in white-night streets.
Reversed to make her left hand dominant. Her hat’s little feather (the small stiff quill of English hunters, not a Broadway plume) shifts allegiances, is made to point along a compass overturned.
And then they’ve got twelve photos on a lanyard, like herbs hanging from the neck of a witch-doctor in blackface. And a posing wind blows through them. A wind that sorts their cabinets, where little Djunas twirl in every drawer. Impaled on turning posts without a music box beneath.
In Tom’s city, everyone has only one directive. Djuna’s figures are a petrified menagerie, like Pompeii’s public zoo inside a crust of bouldered ash. They make an aviary’s imprint pressed upon a soft gray screen. But Tom’s people stand in one place each, exactly one, in circumspect attendance. It isn’t clear if they’re waiting, seeing the thing they’ve arrived to see, or mocking expectation by standing guard over nothing.
They face but one direction, toward the Tom-and-Djuna border. When you walk deep into Tom’s terrain you do it against the grain of faces: their stares are all polite, if stares can be polite. Their eyes aren’t wide with fear or red arousal. They don’t quite have the very same point of focus. It’s like they all want to see the same thing but are shamed, by inches, in their wanting.
Like a woman is screaming from a window-ledge and they’ve turned toward the sound, not to look at her. Like a woman’s about to jump from a balcony, but they were already scanning that particular building.
Tom tries not to meet their eyes, which is easy, nor to meet their faces, which is much harder. One meeting is a narrow boat against their faces’ tide: Tom glances at a street sign and slips amid the fall of pearly faces. But when he’s walking in their direction, that’s another kind of meeting. He becomes his own spectator. He watches himself walking, tall but stooped, toward an invisible disaster: he thinks, That man won’t help or call for help. But I can’t believe he only happened to be headed for the vortex.
“What are they looking at?” is no real question. Tom fears sometimes that they’re assembled as a parody of vision. That they stand, ingrown to their places, and look at nothing’s many facets so as to tell him: Here’s the virtue of observing keenly. That you get wet when it rains; that sunheat after rain fogs the windows with your steam.
It’s impossible not to bump against them or at least thread spider-delicate steps between their posts. When Tom walks, Excuse me—pardon me—yes just there—if you don’t mind puff from his mouth. They’re not reflex so much as articles of pressure, like he’s been hit and must expel a punch’s grunt. When he finally sits down, he mouths the phrases again to himself. With no more air behind them, the words are a dry cicada click. A desert’s lisp when sand-plate dips to sand-plate.
He can’t believe he’s said them out loud, and can’t remember the moment of speaking. But still he knows he has; and still knows when his mouth must have opened. In the shape of pardon me.
In the shape of dusty wings.
Tom’s watchers wear out quickly. It’s hard to say how quickly: they look very much the same. Mostly men, approaching middle age, thirty but a thirty weighted toward oldness’ onset like lead balls sewn inside the watchers’ gawky limbs. All dry-mouthed, sucking nothing. Their tongues in reptilian mode but not forked or geckopointed. Stubbed tongues for battered snakes, a fresh-held sense of smell abridged in flesh. Like snakes atop a big red rock, itself atop a red rock pedestal, snakes that can’t smell the makeshift vultures turning.
Vulture-creak and vulture-shed. A vulture comes unstitched in middle-fight; a cardboard rain of thwaps where its scrapyard pieces fall. Wings made of garbage bags stretched over cracked umbrellas. A canvas hump between shoulderblades distilled from damaged spoons. A solder-line of lightbulb wire to fasten on the beak; a thicker knot of razor wire, fared out with vulture-pliers to make its feet. Only its stomach original, its sense of smell revived and filled with targets, eyes and holes for sound unnecessary.
Mostly men among the watchers. But there are kids and women, too. Although the kids don’t look young; they look paused in youth and left to harden there. Because Tom’s people don’t really age, but simply fall apart, it might be that the act of watching overrules the act of growth. They certainly get older—certainly. But not more weathered, stooped, or sparsely furred. They crumble and go gray like bread that no one meant to eat. Bread left between candles for a ceremonial purpose, in tribute to a lesser saint whose link to bread is a dull mystery.
The watchers’ pores get larger and more profound; their eyes protrude, or the tensile tarp of eyeskin goes slack; their fingers seem longer, worse-proportioned to the hand. This includes the children. Otherwise, they don’t get taller or thicker. They don’t germinate new stubble and don’t show more wrinkled kneecaps. Everybody just recedes. Like skin from a dead skull, but entirely un-gothic.
Like the skin of a corpse who lies in state, glassed in for public viewing, and rides a corpse-tram in shallow lines. Palace to palace, last palace to state museum, city to the provinces, last stop—from National to Cultural to the closet of Natural History. There between the useless mockup looms and indigenes in wax.
Where there are women among the watchers, they watch with fear-wide eyes. Djuna’s city or her city’s direction isn’t what scares them. They plainly aren’t afraid to watch. It’s more that they saw something else a long time ago. Something that sewed fear to vision and made them dowse away from a shared seam. So that neither is quite itself: seeing is tinted by the gauze of fright recalled; and fear is just a foreign lymph, the body’s reminder that something is to be seen. Both are on the quick plane of reaction and partake of that plane’s thinness.
The female watchers look like they’re seeing the re-enactment of a cyclical disaster that nonetheless can only ever repeat. They watch the sun devoured by black velvet cancer and carnivorous plants; it happens every day. They watch their city spin toward its own frontiers, where a ring of cosmic dust marks the matter lost in cities’ revolution; it happens once per second. They watch the backs of watchers’ heads and see the hair look longer when, they know, the skin has actually shrunk.
Tom has gotten used to them. Of course he had to, but he’s also really done it. Other cities have their peopled solitudes, too. They hover like a ringing in the skyline’s ear. Attendant to the death of city-cells that die too slowly to disappear. Cells whose death is one line with the city’s life, a double-tracing in red and black. If you look quickly you’ll see only one line; if you have to study the graph every day, you’ll notice where a red fringe populates the black beam’s tropic zones.
Subways, certain places. Tourism, or fat gray birds, or (now we’ve seen it) war. Their distribution is so dense that they’re unfit to notice. Te people who become a city’s meat, eaten or rotted or salted, are people who can’t let a crowd cohere. Who insist upon the faces of an underground train even when the train’s portholes are fitted with rubber masks. Who memorize each soldier’s expression because they want to know something of war and end up stuck in every wooden rictus.
Convenience, lust, a looseness in the bowels—these can move a human face. You can study them and you’ll be made to recite. But the fodder for cities, on its way to the fodder-heaps, wants to learn a secret when it stares at fields of staring. This could be why the people of Tom’s city stand at one-way visitation. If you articulate a crowd, you miss its vast new weight. You miss the organs it can grow. And the limbs that will hold you up and crack you for your slow white substance.
And all because you were afraid of knowing a crowd’s food, in its uniqueness; because you couldn’t condescend to feed where crowds are digging.
So Tom does not insist; so he survives.
He moves through crowds like a submarine through a mottled hang of tentacles. They may tangle beneath a whole halo of squids; they may attach to one squid-god, asleep or dead. The point is that he doesn’t crack the crowd’s enclosure. If he notices a face, he notes as well the guidewires by which the crowd deforms it. If he notices a walk, he’s careful to imagine it in different water pressure. How it would look on land, outside the density of crowds’ seas compacting it. How the lunar atmosphere would move it, where crowds are not yet rumored. And how it could stalk through ruins, crowd-stained once, but no more to be marked by circulation.
Tom sits on the pavement by a statue of a one-armed general. He’s surrounded by watchers and invaded by their gravity; he is alone.
Tom stands ten feet from a tree enclosed in a silver cask, the metal lined with bark’s aberrations. He weaves through a watching copse to touch the tree but then withdraws his hand. Alone.
Except not always.
A mass of water will force, given time, through any seam. For now there are trouble-days and better ones.
Ezra’s city is the most complex. Or least, or both. It’s not precisely anywhere: it wakes in different countries. It walks with two minds, one like a clarity of knives, the other always dizzy from the changes in altitude. Ezra’s city can breathe any continent’s air but they don’t all equally agree. And sometimes he feels best-loaded, best-coiled and -hidden, in a climate that makes him sweat or shiver.
His city has no permanent people. Its warders can’t be named by their behavior or seen to have a habitat, like the citizens of Djuna and of Tom. Like any city, it’s a catalogue of scenes and their combination: geometry, physics, chemistry change with every blank of sleep. As they do anywhere. As everywhere. But a city also heats and forms the nervous system that connects a scene to its buried urban spine. Its veins may be clotted, its column decadent or cold, but one part leads to another part and has some knowledge of it. Not to the same part and almost never a reliable knowledge. But still somewhere, thinking something.
Not so in the city of Ezra. There he wakes perpetually in the outlands. Wherever Ezra rises is the lip of an envelope, whatever membrane holds the city in. And it, this membrane, can’t be walked past or crawled under.
Djuna can escape into a wilderness pocked with glassy monuments. Tom, with proper paperwork, can leave for whole summers if he wants to. But Ezra doesn’t leave, and leaving is a concept void of form. His city comes together every day with himfor continuity. Where he goes, it is. A place without Tom can watch in crowds without motion; a place without Djuna can stand in Djuna poses under dots of colored light. But Ezra is the tissue of his place.
Asleep, he sees himself trailing fearful connectors from his body. Powerlines half-animal and half-mechanic. And sleep is the activity that populates his new day with animal machines, with charcoal birds.
Geographies of Ezra are pulled together by force. Not violence or coercion but an impersonal power. Like meteors shaved in two for passing certain deltas in the sky. No one has done it and to no one has anything been done—but the thing has happened. His city is always formed in past tense, without an actor or a field of action.
If he dreams of its composition, he dreams in breathable spheres that well up out of a middle darkness. Te darkness is more purple than black and doesn’t spur foreboding; the sphere contains a fluid that isn’t oxygen. But in his dreams Ezra can breathe it while he watches the city pull together.
Ezra wakes in light on a hillside, the light and hills both distillates of gold. Leafy vein patterns have been worked into them with a little pick and hammer. He can touch the light and trace each metal tributary to the nodule that releases it. Every vein moves to a bulge; the bulges are unornamented and irregularly shaped. Just planar lumps of pressed gold stuff. Their texture and their form arise from every other hammering. Te light has got to gather nodes somewhere so all the light between can run with spidery lathes. The nodes are charged with rills in infancy, unworked spangles, the lozenges and arteries that hide in coils of gold potential. With two bumps for handholds, you could rip down the whole scene.
There are people on the hill. They’re tending metal animals. Which means they’re mostly looking around or at their own hands. The animals are like impressions of sheep or goats registered by stained glass. They’re made of burnished polygons: one for head, one for trunk, a set of them for legs. But none of the shapes are detailed. Or they aren’t detailed in animal codes—some do have a line of little sigils, a circle that inscribes a sketchy rose, repeating crosses.
The animals stake themselves with triangular feet. They take awkward piercing steps that set them wobbling, pinned to the metal hill. They collide with hollow clangs and fall over; a shepherd sets them up, helps their pointed toes pierce through ground-metal softness. They’ve got a call like an underground wind through sewer pipes, wind with a heavy mineral load. Or the instrument that hangs between shofar and trumpet: the first horn that hadn’t been a horn already. The first sound-horn never used for goring.
Ezra wonders if they’re kept to give brass milk, if someone eats their brass meat, if their brass cuts are butchered with an electric saw. Or if it’s necessary on some other level that these animals should live.
One of them clanks over to him and looks—he thinks—up at his face. If they look at anything, or live inside the fearful arch of looking. He starts to pat its head; then he stops; then he starts again. His hand makes skimming noises. Shick shick, like someone crawling fat along an airplane’s wing and leaving fingernail half-moons. Te animal creaks into different poses, framed by rows of pylons in the gold air. Ten it tips over and clunks against the ground.
Ezra helps it up and it judders away, leaving dents and punctures in the hillside. A bubbly fluid roils just beneath the holes: these hills are packed with sunheat. Red-white steam spits from each divot and stains the pressed-gilt sky. Its reddest patches are like windows to an unmetaled planet, where powder falls in brittle fakes from archway after archway.
Where the archways lead to a hot red sea; where low tide pulls back sea-curtains on a city of broken statues. Thousands of statues locked in the squares of a low-walled maze. Not one of them intact.
Certain names will not conform to the shape of any vessel.
Covered in an astral sweat, he hangs astride the globe.
Ezra wakes in a plague city. He wakes in the corner of a dusty square. Low concrete bunkers with windows painted shut; low clay bunkers with doors painted on. He feels the outline of a door rasp his knuckle skin. He feels a knuckle-trace left raw on every plaguedoor. They slip by inching hours down the door’s charcoaled lines: over the bevel and into the fats. Down through the fats, where dwarf aromatic trees sprout musty in deserted sun, and onto the slope of another bevel.
He sees himself in the middle distance. Te second Ezra stands in desolation. Complete but for one ganglion of wood, maybe a Joshua tree. It’s on fire. He knows that second Ezra hasn’t lit the tree; he knows the tree’s combustibility. Trough its zebra-skin of bark he watches the burning gradient rise. Its thermometer of solar wind: the passage from heat to fre is marked with fattened black ticks. The tree’s outer layers are radiant with inner lines. It stands on the rigidity of diagonals, where the waves inside one bark oppose another bark’s tide.
The faraway tree burns from its top toward the ground. Where the fire has already been, its branches are carbonized and upright. Second Ezra blows on them; he thinks they’ll make a soft ash shattering and fall away.
They don’t. The fire has clenched them into dirty diamonds. Their edges are more squared than before. The brighter black patches between their burnt crests are tar-sticky. They carry a blood immune to burning. But a blood that waits for fire, that only shows in the aftershapes of fire. Its flow and its congealing are as one. The black blood starts to move; and in its moving, silent sheets of black glass arise.
Second Ezra never burned the tree.
First Ezra, Ezra-prime, sees his double at the center of a huge desert circle. The land is ringed by odd mountains. They look pliable, folded. At their feet a gray rock wall wavers with the heat. It’s like the little walls in a necropolis. Te mountains seem to be at constant rock-loss, stone shavings always falling from their peaks. Like the wind maintains a rock-drill powered by erosion. A rock-drill with a metal hatch that opens to accept the wind’s load of moving sand.
Then Ezra’s vision zooms toward the borders, comes up vertical against the mountains. They aren’t mountains; they’re much closer and smaller than he thought. They’re piles of worn vultures. Dusty stretched vultures, by the hundred. What looked like slow rockslide is the puffed sky that picks up topmost birds. Some of them can shift, unworried, into fight; they go cutting dips across the land. Across the circle of cupped atmosphere that hangs upward from the land.
Other vultures are asleep when the wind kicks their wings, and they wake to falling seizures. Of these, the better part recovers and flaps out a hot, thick, feather-heavy sound. But a few don’t wake up. They describe a narrow arc: the first part is like a rollercoaster that might not make the incline. The second part is faster and nothing like a rollercoaster. They crack against the ground. Sand, tinted with vulture cobalt, sputters from their open veins.
The rock-wall is also not a rock-wall. It’s a chain of cloth men. Men assembled from rags, rags balled up in ragged pouches, patterned rags around the ragball of a head. How they’re cloth and also men—it doesn’t matter. They move in a way that, for meat and hair men, for men with lymph that hides between their bones, would be painful-looking. But since they’re fabric-built, there is a softness to their creaking. It is very, very slow. They walk the same direction in the second ring of three: the ring of glands and underfat. Where the desert is a vulnerable circle and the “mountains,” vulture-folded, make a coast of leather crags.
Each man is tied to the one in front by his right leg. Tied with cloth. So this may be a part of their biology: an umbilicus that follows cloth afections. Even just the afection of space for bodies that demarcate it.
Then Ezra is back in the city of plague.
As you would expect, it’s been abandoned. There are corpserinds in the street. Things that were clearly people, but unidentifiable as any of a person’s parts. Maybe the candy in a human’s chest that survives all plague refinement. Or maybe the candied glass that receives disease and distributes it as coloring. Infusions of the plague through a frosted-sugar tulip; it would taste sharply sweet. But its sweetness would evaporate above your tongue. And where your molars make a stone circle, in the field proscribed by molars’ round, its favor would go acrid. Too pink and overfloral. Like you’d eaten something meant as garnish; like you’d chewed and licked the foliage of display.
The bunkers and the plague-leavings make Ezra want to move. They make him feel like a rectangular ghost, or a wobbly ghost held up by distended squares. Tough their walls are straight, he can’t stop feeling like the buildings balloon out from their foundations. He sees evidence of their straightness. He tries to be calm.
But if he scans a bunker wall, he feels his head train back. As if away from the top half of a skyscraper, so high that nothing could be straight. So high, their presence at that height is pure distortion and invades the dreams of graveyards. Chalky stones with names worn of will tilt back ten degrees, all of them at once. From above they’d look like sea-fans pushed by sea-pipes’ outflow. What shoves them, though, is the presence of angled buildings at a height that knew no angles. Until very recently.
Except that these buildings, in the plague-town, are hardly seven feet. And still Ezra wants to break from under their collapse; and still they aren’t collapsing.
