Fantastic Metropolis

II

In the second hour after death, the man finds himself with his musician friends playing a concert in a public park. A crowd has gathered, some standing, others kneeling or sitting on benches. The trumpet is hot and golden in the man’s hands. With each breath he blows into his trumpet, he feels the surge of an unidentifiable emotion and a detail from his past appears in his mind. The man feels as if he were filling up with Life, each breath enhancing him rather than maintaining him. He remembers his name—the round, generous vowels of it—but resists the urge to shout it out. A name is a good foundation on which to build. The members of the audience are cheerful smudges compared to the clear, sharp lines of his friends as they move in time-honored synchronicity with their instruments. Their names, too, pop into his head—each a tiny explosion of pleasure. Soon, he swims in a sea of names: mother, father, brother, daughter, postman, baker, bartender, butcher, shopkeeper… He smiles the radiant smile of a man who has recalled his life and found it good. This is the pinnacle of the second hour, although not all are so lucky. To some, the knowledge of identity seems to be escaping through their pores, each exhaled thought just another casualty of the emptying. The man, however, is not so truthful with himself. He smells the honeysuckle, tastes the pipe smoke from a passerby, hears the tiny bells of an anklet tinkling through a pause in the music and does not wonder why these sensations are dull, muffled. His friends faces are so near and sharp. Why should he worry about the rest? The blur of the world shouldn’t be his concern. The instruments that seem so cruel, all honed edges, the metal reflecting at odd angles to create horrible disfigurements of his face? Why, it is just a trick of the shadows. The quickness of his breath? Why, it is just the aftermath of musical epiphany. The fluttering of his eyelids. The sudden pallor. The smudge of green that he wipes with irritation from his cheek… When the concert ends and the crowds disperse under threat of night, the man is quick to nod and laugh and join in one last ragged musical salute. An invitation down narrow streets to a café for a drink elicits a desperate gratitude—he slaps the backs of his friends, nods furiously, already beginning to lose the names again: pennies fallen through a hole in a shirt pocket. On the way to the café, he notices how strangely the city now speaks to him, in the voices of innuendo and suggestion, all surfaces unknown, all buildings crooked or deformed or worse. The sidewalk vendors are ciphers. The passersby count for less than shadows; he cannot look at them directly, his gaze a repulsing magnet. He clutches his trumpet, knuckles white. He would like to play it, bring the jovial wide vowels of his name once more into focus, but he cannot. The names of his friends fast receding, his laughter becomes by turns forced, nervous, sad, and then brittle. When they reach the café, the man looks around the beer-strewn table at his friends and wonders how he fell in with such amiable strangers. They call him by a name he barely remembers. The sky fills with a darkness that consists of the weight of all the thoughts that have left him. The man wraps his jacket tight. The street lamps are cold yellow eyes peering in through the window. The conversations at the table tighten around the man in layers, each sentence less and less to do with him. Now he cannot look at them. Now they run away to the edge of his vision like a trickle of blood from a wound. The man’s last image of his dead wife leaves him, his daughter’s memory lost in the same moment. Even the dead do not want to die. Stricken, face animated by fear, he stands and announces that he must leave, he must depart, he must go home, although thoughts of the grainy apartment floor leave a dread like ice in his bowels… This, then, is the last defiant act of the second hour: to state a determination to take action, even though you will never take that action. The world has become a mere construct—a hollow reed created that you might breathe. You may hear echoes of a strange and sibilant music, coursing like an undercurrent through inanimate objects. This music may bring tears to your eyes. It may not. Regardless, you are now entering the third hour of death.