The Architecture of Somewhere Else

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There was a city where every staircase had a different opinion about where you should go.

Some went upstairs in the ordinary way. Others climbed toward doors that had not been invented yet. One staircase descended three floors and arrived at Tuesday afternoon.

Nobody complained.

People had learned long ago that architecture was more reliable when you didn’t ask too many questions.

I arrived carrying a small suitcase containing two shirts, a toothbrush, and several ideas I had been meaning to get rid of. The customs officer examined the ideas carefully.

“You won’t need these here,” he said.

He kept them.

The city was mostly white buildings floating against a black sky. Churches grew out of other churches like architectural mushrooms. Arches opened into arches. Towers rose until they apparently forgot what they were doing and stopped.

Under everything ran rivers of color—red, blue, yellow, black—flowing around the buildings without water.

I asked a woman standing beside one of them what the colors were.

“Time,” she said.

“Which color is the present?”

She pointed at all of them.

That didn’t help.

I walked for several hours and discovered that whenever I thought I was approaching the center of the city, another center appeared somewhere else. Eventually I understood that there wasn’t one.

This was considered very advanced urban planning.

At sunset—which happened vertically—the bells began ringing.

People emerged from doorways and gathered on the staircases. Nobody seemed to be going anywhere. They simply stood there halfway between one place and another.

I joined them.

A little boy beside me was holding a paper boat.

“Where does the river go?” I asked.

He shrugged.

“Probably where rivers go when nobody is watching.”

Then he placed the boat upon the red stripe flowing beneath us.

It sailed away perfectly.

That night I rented a room above an archway. My window looked onto another window, which looked onto another window, and somewhere impossibly far away I could see myself standing there looking back.

I waved.

The other me waved too.

For a moment I wondered which one of us had arrived first.

Then the bells rang again.

Somewhere below, the paper boat continued traveling through the colored darkness.

I unpacked my toothbrush.

The city had already unpacked everything else.