The City on the Edge of Forever

“He who looks in through an open window never sees as much as he who looks through a window that is shut.”

—Charles Baudelaire

Most who covet utopia do not begin by appointing their bookshelves with banned authors, nor by placing covered portions of supper on the stairs outside their domiciles.

As always, a dashing and restless few commit, certain that some city must exist where live the pacified, well-fed order. Frustrated that only a book of emulsions and dead reckoning serve as the atlas of the scarcely trod places, these numbers raise the kaftans and parkas, mules and alpacas, tents, sails, burners, lamps, engines alongside crates, and cartons of everything they can imagine might be bartered in paradise.

Expeditions launch in asterisks the globe over. After the sobering first miles, the seekers burn snapshots of sweethearts and children, before the gesture becomes dead weight. On the most stubborn corpses, might be found a small note, or a lock of hair pressed between their bosoms and the shell of an overcoat.

Their detail of the vastness of the blank, forbidding and primal spaces will be lost. Centuries after their logbooks disintegrate, their anachronistic remains and alien effects will be debated by the academies as evidence of the presence, or the lack of a divine plan, their fortitude doubted by their descendants.

One beleaguered group, meets not death on futile and endless steppes, but are instead beckoned by the refulgent crown of the sought city. Those able hoist the bodies of fatigued companions over their shoulders, sling others over the backs of the beasts lurching their flayed hindquarters.

The scent of the pocked limestone walls dissolve all tiredness in man and beast. The party’s snug-fitted goggles filter partially the gates’ florescence. A slip of a minister appears between the phalanxes of guards, his yellow robes thrust a hand in greeting. His broad smile leavens the young commander, vouches that they are to be allowed past the gates of—La Puerta del Sol? Shangri-La? El Dorado? Though the minister is fluent in their tongue, the expedition must practice to pronounce with authority the name of their destination.

The profiles of the cities’ tallest ziggurats seem carved into the vista. Atop slim and resolute spires, colossal flags collect and disperse as power and breeze, the winds divested of the menace of the flatlands beyond the city walls. A pyrite shimmer sweeps the battered ivory clock faces. Old men play jai alai on stone courts. Adolescents stand and laugh over tables that ring the plazas. In the streets, every person waits until their eyes meet before exchanging salutation.

The women warm first to the hospitality. Unburdened from the weight of their packs their shrunken collars and lean bodies flush under the firm and manicured hands sent to dissipate their aches and anxiety. The men are, at first, wary of the girls who come to soak the grimy years and who polish their breaks, abrasions and beards. Enveloped in lustrous blue vestments, finally, they all take to mirrors, astonished how easily roughshod wanderers can appreciate into denizens of the promised land.

Over many dinners, the date and mission objectives alight with the names and visages of those who perished, scattered, finally in a motion of the hands by representatives interested in the rules and reasons for rugby. The group concurs: what they have brought for trade—silly when freely observed, the methods used to sustain the populace, heard for themselves a precise string of words transform aggressors into firm friends, and how in the produce markets and bazaars, coin is voiceless, only a nod passing between vendor and patron.

After those dinners, seekers-turned-long-term-guests rise, as is custom, mingle and select dessert from the terraced gardens of quince and succulent blossoms that beam and sway in the bluish night—find, uninhibited the glance the blush the smile the kiss the night meeting the borders of an amber morning—they are convinced that during their time excivitas their former world could not have prepared for such a leap, nor can they trim what they have seen...