In The City, infinite aesthetic distance is always possible. This is necessary. Imagine having to share a limo with Robert Pattinson. In that limo, two people I know are receiving a text from me exposing the name of the song I hid behind last week. They put the song on and share a look of knowing amusement mixed with sympathy, both of which are just imagination. They’re in a car but they don’t need to be and could easily have taken the subway. They’re in it for the glitz, but they can’t afford it.
Nobody can afford anything in The City. I myself can’t afford my apartment, but I don’t need to, because it’s covered by parental love, which nobody can afford, even its recipients. Nobody can afford the life that a body can afford. Worry about the national debt has always been about another debt, but the people who worry are never the ones who should be worried.
Strange birds arrive by storm in The City, and attempt to mingle with the locals. There may be many such birds, but locals, out-of-towners, people on the other side of the world, everyone, can only be aware of the birds whose lovely plumage makes headlines. Every beloved bird tells the story that every bird can be beloved. If you wait at a window long enough in The City, you’ll see a bird you’ve never seen before smack right into its own reflection.
One of the people I know is looking out the car window, but it’s too tinted to see much of anything. She’s taking a phone call. It’s the woman she called yesterday for the first time in years, calling back, but it’s not her. “I think you have the wrong number,” this woman says, sounding nothing like the woman, but also just maybe exactly like the woman, beneath a thick sediment of new personality and stale memory, as though the woman moved to The City and has since out of necessity become almost unrecognizable. “Hello?” says the woman or not the woman. Not believing this is her, the woman I know hangs up.
If one isn’t meeting anyone in particular in The City, one dresses for no one in particular, which is possibly impossible. Despite the density of people, it’s impossible to imagine The City, and therefore to live in The City, without thinking of someone not present, but everyone does it anyway. The City is a miracle but it’s not holy, it’s not good, it’s not even okay. It’s possible to wander aimlessly in The City, because no matter where one goes, one is still in The City. In The City one suffers from a fear of abandonment to the same degree that one is relieved from the necessity of ever meeting anyone again. The degree is considerably less than total. If one doesn’t meet someone again, one may end up thinking of that one.
The City is arranged in blocks, which passers-by in turn arrange into sequences in their memories. A visit to The City is setting up a game of Jenga or a building of many floors, each one pressing down on every previous. The bottom of the building is under great stress, and then a commercial airline smacks right into the top.
Before her flight takes off, she gets a bagel. Nobody has ever seen The City. In The Country, or as people from The City like to call it, The Mountain, many see many parts of it all the time, but nobody talks about those parts. The Country exerts great pressure on the senses, so that everybody appears still, calm, and laconic. People in The City often think people in The Country are very scary, very stupid, or experiencing joy.
In corrolary, there are certain parts of The Country that make it onto postcards, onto little points of public photos on a map, like constellations, that if not present in a given part of The Country make that part uninhabitable to an habitual inhabitant of The City. A landslide may well bring it down dramatically, but you can only see your reflection in the snow-covered hills or something like them, not for instance in a landfill.
