VIRTUAL CITIES

after Italo Calvino

Susannah Duncan

virtual, adj. 4. a. That is such in essence, potentiality, or effect, although not in form or actuality. In later use also: supposed, imagined.

Oxford English Dictionary

Zema is a city built in a labyrinth. Even the residents who have lived there for generations do not fully know their way around. They memorize only the everyday routes to their house, their workplace, the market, and leave the rest up to chance. One cannot set out with the intention of arriving at a particular street or residence. One must wander out with no destination in mind, follow the call of curiosity down darkly curving lanes, give over to the strange tendency of the city to present to you what you did not know you were looking for.

The walls are thirty feet tall and made of a sandy rust-colored stone. Houses are built into them, windows carved directly out of the rock. In some places huge silver barriers interrupt the walls. Some are doors, ornate and impenetrable, sealed by a complex system of locks. Others are gates, filigreed with intricate patterns depicting fairy stories, sealed to all but cats and children who are slight enough to squeeze through the bars. Neighbors meet at the gates to exchange gossip and fresh fruit. They wrap their hands around the silver bars, leaving slick handprints.

It may be the city most in need of a map, yet no maps exist of Zema. For every year on the solstice, the labyrinth shifts. Children are called early to bed, and adults make sure to seal their doors and strap down their belongings, for at midnight, the walls begin to shift and rumble. They slide past each other with slow thunder. All night long, the rearrangement takes place: walls trade places, neighbors are carried to opposite districts, streets seal off and disappear, doors blocking passageways that had been lost for generations shiver and click open. No one directs this transformation. It is thought to be orchestrated by an ancient mechanism deep in the earth, built by the founders of the city who neglected to preserve any of their records. Or perhaps the walls themselves are alive.

The morning after, the residents of Zema wake to an entirely new environment. The sun slants at a new angle through the window; the noise of the street outside has an altered cadence. That first day after the rearranging, no one works. All the people of Zema roam the streets, learning new paths, meeting neighbors, willingly losing themselves in the brand-new streets, hoping to wander into a side street or a walled garden that, overnight, has breathed itself into existence.

Ic Gahnmi is perched on the shores of not one but two seas: the water, and the floating ocean of the clouds.

The stormclouds beside Ic Gahnmi are perpetual. They stretch out over the gray ocean and halt at the shore as if meeting a glass wall, looming higher than any skyscraper. Strange lights and sea creatures roil in their depths. Between the clouds and the sea a narrow space opens up, which the people of Ic Gahnmi peer into as if into a dollhouse. The flat gray sea is deceptively calm. Below the surface, its slumber is disturbed by the rotation of sea monsters turning over in their hibernation.

Both the sky and the sea are asleep. They have been placed under a spell by a witch who intended to save the blocky grid of the city from the twin forces of a vicious storm. That is why the clouds never dissipate, and the waves curl at the shore, never breaking. But the residents of Ic Gahnmi live in constant fear of one or the other awakening. Who knows what beasts the sea dreamed up in its eons-long slumber? And who can help them when the tidal wave of the clouds, miles high, decides to fall?

And so the people of Ic Gahnmi stay indoors in their watertight houses, hurrying out only for groceries with a nervous glance up, waiting for that vast looming threat to come crashing down.

The city of Wacker has two layers. There is the surface city, which is like any other, sunny, flat, full of the bright flashes of people rushing by; and then there is the subterranean city, a mirror image of the surface reflected belowground. Each of the city’s roadways were built doubled. The streets are hollow, so as to make room for greater flow of traffic, and to hide the stench of the automobiles. But now that cars are no longer useable, the subterranean city has taken on a life of its own. There are buildings there, houses, concrete parks beneath the upper crust of the city where one can sit looking out onto the canal. The roadways connect to the abandoned subway station where turquoise paint climbs halfway up the pillars like an ancient waterline.

The people of Upper Wacker prefer to forget the lower city’s existence. When they are forced to think of it, they imagine that the land beneath their well-shod feet is a subpar copy of the streets they walk above. But really, it is the upper city that traces the lower. Its shiny storefronts and winding roadways are a flat imitation of the complex network of roads and passages below, which extend deep into the ground, beyond the smooth lines of any human-made road, past aquifers and dripping caverns, reaching ever closer to the beating rabbit heart of the earth.

The people of Nimanil live in the shadow of an enormous dream-bridge. Its blue struts and girders occupy the sky, stretching over their heads and across the river before disappearing on the horizon. No one has crossed it in generations, but it is said to be the bridge to another world. In fact, it is the path to the world of dreams. Each night, thousands of souls rise from bedroom windows and float over the sparkling lights of the city. They file over the bridge in a line of pale mist, never ceasing till they land on the other side whose character no one knows.

No one in Nimanil remembers their dreams. Each morning they wake with the vague sense that they have traveled very far, but it is washed from their thoughts with the morning tapwater. And they step outside and go about their days in the shadow of that bridge, never once looking up at its pale rafters, which hold, too far away to see, the footprints of their dream-selves.