“Where did everyone go?” I began asking myself this question some years ago, when I suddenly noticed how staged and mute everything felt, how antiseptic and unnatural and sequestered, not for me. There they are, I’d mutter, the rouged passersby of Edward Hopper’s Soir Bleu. There they go, I’d point, smaller and smaller. My phone was kaput, but I kept it tucked into the pocket of my jeans anyhow. It seemed to belong there, undeniable. Like regret. Or furniture.
I’d receive regular correspondence from an ambitious insurance agent named Patrick Foster, but little from friends. I didn’t know this Mr. Foster but I admired his persistence and the humble, clean type of his letterhead. Once, on an errand in a foreign part of town, I serendipitously came upon his office, the only occupied stall in a low, multi-unit strip on a busy arterial. A single car—new within the past few years but otherwise unremarkable—was parked in the accompanying slot. I considered pulling in, to introduce myself, to meet this man of letters, Patrick Foster. But I didn’t, and his mail ceased, and I forgot about him.
At nine and five the streets are frantic veins of cars and trucks, but actual people? No. City plows pile pedestrian sidewalks high with a slushy sludge and to brave them—in the dark, inches from traffic—is to court disaster. This is America! That is Italian for “The Machine.” Happy is the man who can deny winter at sixty-miles-per-hour.
Nevertheless I’d walk to the store, open till midnight, for a loaf of warm French bread and my favorite German cheese. Perhaps a mile, each way. I met cats, feral children on trikes and in trees, saw the silent lightning of TVs in every window, but passed nary a stranger. When I did, over squares of heaving concrete, we’d brush shoulders, heads hooded, and look at our shoes. Two gods afraid of the light.
I was underemployed and harangued by a vague desire to write. On outings I carried with me a small, green notebook from the Federal Supply Service, and at home it never left my desk. The word “Memoranda” was printed at a severe slant in yellow script on the cover, but I mostly filled it with lists, reminders, theological passages, names, strange words and drawings of crosses.
The Town Where Nobody Lives. I remember thinking, “That’s the title of a children’s book.” Illogical, deceptively simplistic, subtly sinister. It would be illustrated with fantastical—but tastefully minimalist—woodblock prints, jagged little things with humorous details and undeniable craftsmanship. I wrote the title in my Memoranda book. I live in The Town Where Nobody Lives. Surely I am the man to tell its story. I scribbled the words again, this time in all caps. I made mental notes of the homes on my block—the classical elements, the sloping lawns, the brickwork, faces like funerals—that would undoubtedly haunt THE TOWN WHERE NOBODY LIVES. I put the people in, teasingly, and took them out. Didn’t even give them time to reminisce or put up fences. I rolled tumbleweeds through like dice and printed packs of wild dogs.
But something changed. I returned to making lists. Foodstuffs, Top 10s, things to do on a day off—the jejune fluff of a diary. Names for a boy, names for a girl. I began to leave my green book at home. I’d forgotten to give The Town Where Nobody Lives an address, and it had fallen off the map. No one, thankfully, was home at the time of the incident. Nevertheless, this world-building business, I’d decided, was too much. Even one emptied of persons! Too much. What is wrong, after all, with bit parts and bench-warming? There is some kind of honor in restraint, in settling, in the menial. They shall inherit the earth. Give me little or give me death. I returned to strange words and diagrams.
And I forgot all about The Town Where Nobody Lives. Both of them. Perhaps I enjoyed the company of silence. Summer came without a fling or budding friendship, outside of one with mezcal, and went south again. Memoranda slipped to the bottom of my knapsack, a labyrinth of pens and half-remembered books, and met its minotaur, a putty-soft black banana. Only with the sweet odor of decay did it finally find its way up and out and back to my desk, where it languished yet again, this time in a haze of incense and heavy metal.
But Hesse and Huysmans, Blake and Bonhoeffer vied for the same strip of real estate, and my green notebook vanished, again, beneath the visions of a lost continent, Europe. I’d moved there, in a sense, homesick for something like askesis, but inarticulate. I found Jung there, who, in his own journal, lamented the loss of “the scary and beautiful feeling of solitude,” what he called “the shadow side of the fortune of love.” Ah-ha! I rescued Memoranda and scratched his impression on a clean, new page. But the words looked sacrilege in my hand, because I saw in them a profound warning. See, I was glad to be alone, and, for the first time, so very thankful to be without “the fortune of love,” in the lowercase.
Perhaps that warrants some elaboration.
I’d crawled inside a book crammed with people, and we greeted one another—everyone!—with little bows. Some bent so far they kissed a knee or swept the ground with their hat in a dramatic woosh. They spoke of a city “that is to come,” and I believed them because I, too, had once imagined such a place—a town where, well, you know. I’d painted it. I told them I was even writing its history. No, no, they said. Yours is a city of the dead. Ours is The City Where Everyone Lives.Here, the people move about as if on air, gathering light like fruit off the vine. Here, eating and praying are the same thing. Here, they said, love and solitude are the same thing. Everything is capital “el” Love. The whole film is a denouement. I said, “I don’t quite understand.” But they persisted, breaking into song. “Keep reading,” they sang in a butterscotch lilt without a trace of the dissonance I’d hear honking from the radios of handymen on neighboring rooftops.
And so I did. Page after page I was pummeled with outrageous claims and fantasy. This city can’t possibly exist—can it? Where are the skyscrapers, the trams, the shopping malls? The bums! Where are the houses? I found myself darting between the letters—some black, some red—hoping for a glimpse, a whiff of dim sum, the clangor of industry, anything. Certainly here, I’d repeatedly observed, there are citizens aplenty for a city, but how strange they are. How forward. How awfully presumptuous. And most peculiar of all—how joyous. In The Town Where Nobody Lives—perhaps understandably—smiling is not forbidden per se, but discreetly discouraged. It’s unbecoming. With so much misery elsewhere, how could you? Laughter has the tenor of a muted soap opera. Every car is a hearse.
I read until the book slipped from my hands and I fell into a dream. I’m an old man in the company of other immaculately dressed blue hairs—tailored seersucker jackets, stout bow ties. We are slow dancing alone, in a spotlit ballroom, leading invisible partners across the hardwood, dipping them in pools of light only to draw back into darkness, loosely synchronized. I spin mine, step to the left and the right, twirl. Dip. Repeat. The man nearest me is lost in a kind of revery, eyes closed clutching air, his left arm elegant and high. His smile is toothy and ordinary, like a fib, but radiant.
Click-eek-clack. I awake with a start to the clangor of the mail slot. The ballroom of old men collapses in on itself and recedes, a weird cloud. Habit (and a full bladder) lures me to the front door. On the floor is a letter. It’s from Patrick Foster. My eyes leap to a swath of bold type. True to form—the man must be a saint—he says he’s got an “unbeatable offer” for me, and in silver ink has signed off, “Your friend.”
The mailman has already crossed the street, zig-zagging up the block with the verve of a satisfied, competent lover. A pair of kindergarteners hustle through his wake shrieking, hurling snowballs, chasing a cat. The sun is already on her way out. I am suddenly suffused with the irrefutable feeling that I must change my life.
Image: Courtesy of the author.
Impolitic 