Other Places

The City

We came from towns where the water runs thick with nitrogen in the spring. Or towns where front lawns are covered in white stones and defensive plants. Towns where we know the kid they’re collecting for at the gas station. Towns whose most crowded buildings are the nursing homes. Towns where a girl disappears and you will find no one who saw it coming.

We came from suburbs with churches the size of malls. Suburbs where they fix Brazilian cocktails and cleaning-fluid drugs. We came from suburbs where the houses are squat bunkers and the trees cool and tall. And from suburbs where the doors and walls are hollow.

We came from cities that have worked their rivers brown. Cities with the scars of streetcars. Cities that buy their movie reviews from the newspapers of other cities. Cities that like dogs and scrapped-tire decking and wild-caught salmon.

We came from places where people only get close enough to touch across cashier counters. Where you might believe you are the first to see something, own something, bury something.

We thought we didn’t have accents or style. We thought we had been uncreased. We thought that polls were never talking about us.

And we came to this one place, the tallest, densest place. A city that will never need a marketing campaign. But often we came with our eyes normal-sized and open in our heads.

In fact, we didn’t always want to come, and we worried, some of us, about what might happen to our brains: how could we think when we knew that in every direction, for miles, millions of people were also thinking. The air looked, in our minds, like a nest of wires.

We visited the city beach once, before, but we could not go in the water, though it was ninety degrees, though we love the ocean. A few feet was the farthest we could have gotten from the next pair of legs. Everyone in the same water, the same sand. How would we think our thoughts were new?

We almost never have thoughts like these anymore, never feel like we’re in a prison of lungs and legs and greasy palms. We’re happy with an open park bench.

One evening in the part of the city where night is lit like day, we looked up a side street and saw a serpentine path, dark against the concrete. It began near our feet where it was evaporating. It was as if a garden slug the size of a wheelbarrow had disappeared down the street, leaving a slick behind. We followed its slow disappearance.

We were a small crowd because there was something to see, though none of us was sure what: a magic trick, an accident, an artwork, an advertisement? Something that would make us feel stupid in the end? We could hardly believe it, but it seemed simply this—water evaporating. And taking with it rainbow bubbles of gasoline, the tiny follicle where a rat hair had fallen from its hide, a drop of orange soda, drop of ink, drop of Windex, scents of pizza, ash, urine, and ginkgo berry, scuffs of shoe leather, rubber and plastic, spit and bubble gum, ice cream and sweat, dog nails, snake skin, spray tan, the feces of at least five species.

We breathed it in, of course. We let it land softly on our shoulders. We couldn’t have stopped it. And the city, its daily use, became part of our next seven years of cells.

We followed the path until it was gone, just like that. And we thought for a moment, before going home, how many roads we took to get here.

We found out later it was an art piece and photos had been taken of the path and its observers. We should have known there were cameras. There are always cameras, and daily we have to assume that people are too bored by human folly and vanity to care what they’ve caught us at.

These photos went on display downtown, but we didn’t want to see...