A city in the style of Edvard Munch.

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A City

I was scared of downtown.

Not scared in the ordinary sense, like a man afraid somebody might steal his wallet or sell him a watch containing no recognizable relationship with time. This was a more educated fear. Downtown had begun to suspect me.

The buildings leaned over the street as if they had heard something disagreeable about my character. Doors stood open where no sensible door ought to be, and every window seemed to contain another window, and behind that one another, until architecture itself had become a rumor.

The people were worse.

Everybody looked like a Francis Bacon ghost equipped with a jack-o’-lantern. Their faces appeared to have been painted correctly in the morning and then dragged sideways by evening. They floated past carrying those orange heads like municipal permits for entering the afterlife.

It put me in mind of the Irish sort of Halloween—not the American business with candy bars and plastic witches, but the older country where a turnip has a soul, a road remembers who died on it, and James Joyce is somewhere around the corner taking seventeen pages to cross the street.

I crossed anyway.

That was my mistake.

Downtown immediately unfolded.

One street became three. A bridge passed through a building and emerged among the stars. The courthouse acquired a planet. The cathedral had evidently resigned from Christianity and taken up astronomy. Doors detached themselves from houses and wandered about independently, looking for better employment.

A procession of ghosts came downhill.

Each carried a pumpkin.

Nobody spoke.

This worried me because silence in a city is never innocent. Silence is merely noise that has hired a lawyer.

I followed them.

There are moments when common sense tells you to go home, lock the door, make coffee and deny everything. Unfortunately, common sense has never possessed much influence over anybody worth telling a story about.

The ghosts entered a doorway standing alone in the street.

I went through after them.

On the other side was the same city, except that it was midnight and several million years later. Bridges crossed empty space. Planets hung at street level. The buildings stretched upward like memories trying to remember who had lived inside them.

Then I understood what downtown had been doing.

It wasn’t frightening me.

It was remembering me.

Every door I had ever opened was there. Every street I had forgotten. Every room abandoned, every person gone, every wrong turn preserved with the bureaucratic efficiency of eternity.

The pumpkin ghosts continued ahead.

I called after them, “Where are we going?”

One turned.

There was nothing inside the hood except darkness and two small lights.

Then he lifted his jack-o’-lantern as if proposing a toast.

And I understood perfectly.

We were going downtown.

We had always been going downtown.