The One City

There is, of course, only one city really, because all other cities are simply redefinitions of each other. This is the only one that squats, smelly and faded, timeless and ephemeral, revealing its invisible guts to anyone with a sense of smell, smeared in a light so rich that the crumbling stones that compose it seem to drip rather than flake into what the city rose from.
And this is the only one that bathes in its constancy: in this city, even though the wind should change direction, it always brings stolen hints of the same places. It always smells of the exotic, it always belongs to somewhere “out there”; it will always carry strains of the dry heat of the east and the dampened cold of the north; it will sift these essences up and down its narrowed alleyways and absorb them into itself; nothing will remain to contain a hint of anything so transitory as the seasons; it acknowledges no debt to the seasons; it possesses no recognition of their passing other than the change of the temperature and the change of the duration of the daylight: it is a city, after all.
But today, the city feels out of kilter, almost tilting towards the descending sun.
And today, scoured across these lines of history, through every numbered passageway, bouncing into and out of every cul-de-sac, a mixed wind is burning, turning through the city’s right angles with ease, impregnated with external spores, tiny measures of imperfection that seed the air, because out there, across the open space, a modern smell, a plastic swirl of gases, is breaking the wind apart. And the weight of impurity seems intent upon making the city want to dissolve back down into what it was hammered into at its birth.
And today, out there, unspoken-of things are gathering.
And something tenuous seems poised, edged on some futile brinkmanship, as if the city were about to cast itself adrift at long last, as if the city were about to turn on itself like a drunk incoherently punching himself at midnight for long-misunderstood slights and long-forgotten wrongs.
And if this vision should take hold, and if the city should well up, and split on itself, push its insides up until the city is upside down and inside out, split from the centre onwards, flashing the gleaming viscera of its chandeliered innards, revealing its algaed watermarks like courtesans showing bite-mark tattoos, yes, if it should split on itself, it would still be telltale identical, because stains run deep here; deep as rammed-down wooden foundations, and stains spread wide as well, wide as the city’s scheming lines of retribution, lines of vindictiveness across the melting centuries.
But, for the time being, in the time that remains, the wind takes flight again and wavers then flows sap-like across the city to the square. And it drifts in and drifts down, smothering down the dust in the corners of the square with a pull like the reducing tide.
And the square hugs tight, hiding the creamed-out viscera of its own mouldy innards, masking things from view, clinging to its grimy trees, maintaining its dilapidated mystery, its shadows crumbling into dust, its dust melting into shadow. The square is like a microcosm of the city in reverse. There are no chandeliers here.
And in the square, the bloodlife of this part of the city huddles against the outside world, stays still and converses or else goes about its mundane affairs, until the square is criss-crossed with the diagonal track-marks of its lost visitors and lost inhabitants, scrabbling for shade beneath these half dozen shabby trees, tacking from bar to shop to restaurant to market stall, ticking like time bombs, going about their unexploded business, their left-behind tracks across the square still visible as if the energy of these lost visitors and lost inhabitants has somehow absorbed the light and left nothing but black meanderings incised across the damp flagstones like scar tissue.
And listen: a shutter flaps just twice even though the wind has not abated.
And look: a cat scrabbles in the dust in the corner of this square that is trying to turn itself back into a field.
And listen, the droning hum of conversation drops to silence for a period so small it feels like the merest atom of time before the clamour resumes.
And look: round and round a cat chasing a tail in a corner for ever as the world goes on forever until it seems to want to start to sink, pushed down and compressed by the blanket of heat that the sun has left behind, but cannot, and continues to chase its tail forever.
And listen: glasses are clinked. And farewells are almost whispered. Time for another slow retreat. Another night. Another small settling down towards oblivion.
And as the people float away, as the square settles down, clinging like a drowning sailor to what it holds precious: its darkness and its dust and its tattered trees, the city, in turn, begins to settle.
And in the settling down of the city, all that remains is the grate of stone against stone as the city groans and creaks as if held in bony sockets that are grinding into tiny bits, flaking out into the air then back. Tiny powdered specks of stone, like a fungal sprouting. Tiny powdered specks of stone, like tiny powdered specks of time, evaporating and re-circulating, destroying and regenerating the city as its haggard stones keep dripping, dripping, dripping, beneath the drenching pollution of history, dripping seemingly forever.
But out there, something fluid is massing, massing higher than the city itself.