Fantastic Metropolis

The leaves are always bright in Purgatory. At mid-day, the sun is always shining, the breeze blowing, the water running. The traffic is light in Purgatory. I live on a main street and by nine at night you could walk out in the middle of the road and sit down to a snack without fear. We have a deli on the corner across the street and they make a decent cheese steak, but the owners have no warts or glass eyes, no nutty stories from Coney Island as they had back before all this.

Everybody knows that if you walk through the woods in the park, you will come to the edge, where the earth breaks off and there is nothing but vast floating blackness with distant stars. The woman who walks dogs, Helen, walked right off the rim a while back and swam into the void. We all gathered to watch her go. Not much was said. She just took a step and started doing the breast stroke.

My other neighbor, Bill, sometimes takes his pistol to the edge and fires it out into space. His theory is that the bullet will eventually have to hit something. When I asked him why that was important, he just shrugged and asked me if I wanted a beer. Yesterday he shaved his head. His roommate, Mac, keeps sending a lot of money to these sweepstakes games that show up in the mail. So far he hasn’t won anything, and he gets really angry if you mention it.

I’ve got to go over to the park this evening because my six year old has baseball practice. I take the baby along and while the practice is going on we play “Baby Squirrel and The Man.” I forget sometimes that his actions are always trying to tell me something, but I never forget to carry him on my shoulders when we walk. It’s beautiful there under the giant trees with the sun setting. Ducks circle in the pond. The little bridge gets more splintered, more decrepit each year, but it never gives way. When it’s over, we each get a water ice and sit on the bench under the willow and talk about comic books or TV.

There’s a lot of TV. in purgatory, and I think it’s how they watch us. They look in while you think you are looking out. There is a man with a tiny note book, no bigger than four postage stamps, and he is watching you and transferring your actions, your comments into mathematics and jotting it down with a straight pin dipped in ink. They show a lot of good looking women, a lot of stuff where everybody is shooting a gun into the void. Once in a while, late at night, you get a sex show and that heats the blood a little, but basically it’s all as empty as the head of Colonel Rasuka.

I don’t know exactly what his head is made of, but it’s some strange substance between a plastic and a vegetable. It sits in a field by the river that is the other boundary of town—big as a house, rooted at the neck, pointed mustache, thin lidded eyes, nostrils that swell and flatten like a pair of bellows. In recent weeks the Colonel has been losing his hair and looking a little tired, but he’s always ready with the gossip.

I was down there walking the dog the other night, so I stopped over to chew the fat. “Colonel,” I said. “What army was it that awarded you your rank?” My question woke him, but he never answered it. Instead he told me about a visitor who was coming across time and space to Purgatory. “He’ll be very quiet,” said the Colonel. “Exceedingly quiet. You’ll hardly know he is here.”

“What’s his thing?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” he admitted,” I can’t quite make that out.”

“I am here already,” a low voice said from down by the river. My dog growled.

“What are you doing?” asked Rasuka.

“Sitting by the river and waiting,” said the quiet one.

“Who are you?” I called.

Yesterday, I caught him picking up pennies off the sidewalk outside the convenience store in the center of town. He is middle aged, thin, kind of stooped over, with sparse white hair and his hands in his pockets most of the time. I still don’t know what to make of him. My wife’s comment when I mentioned him to her was, “Who gives a damn?”

So I’ll make some turkey meatballs, which we’ll eat when we get home from the park. The kids will run back and forth from the living room to the kitchen, from the kitchen to the living room. We’ll read a few stories, sing a few songs, put them to bed. My wife will fall asleep on the couch, watching television. I’ll take the dog for a walk through the woods in the park and sit on the edge with my legs dangling into outer space. On the way back, I’ll light up a spittle stick and smoke it slowly, staring at the big trees blowing in the dark.

In my room, I’ll day dream this other place I have been thinking about where Colonel Rasuka has a body. He goes to an ancient city inhabited by a coven of flying female heads called the Polychize. He comes to it in the dead of night. It sits on the shore of an inland sea and its buildings are like sand castles washed once by the ocean and then shellacked for eternity. Its streets are no more than alleyways paved with broken rock, its windows and doorways, the empty portals of an insect mound. Something is going to happen tonight in that city, something spectacular—or I can only hope.