Invisible Cities

Kublai Khan insists that it seems like Marco Polo hasn’t left the garden and hasn’t had time to visit the places he describes. Marco says that everything he sees and does takes place in a calm mental space and he exists on a river and in Kublai’s garden at the same time. Kublai says he’s not sure he’s in the garden either; he might be conquering more territory. Marco suggests that the garden only exists in their dreams and they haven’t stopped fighting or trading, but when they close they eyes, they can think. Kublai suggests that they’re actually two beggars digging through garbage they think is treasure and drunk on bad wine. Marco suggests that maybe what’s left of the world is a wasteland of garbage and Kublai’s garden. Their eyelids separate the two places, but they can’t know what’s inside and what’s outside.

Cities and Eyes. 5. When a traveler crosses the river and the mountain pass, they’ll come to Moriana. It has alabaster gates, coral columns, and villas of glass. Girls dance beneath chandeliers. Return travelers will know that cities like this have an opposite side: walking in a semicircle will bring a person to an expanse of rusting metal, spiky planks, sooty pipes, and ropes only good for hanging oneself. To move from one to the other makes the city seem like it continues in perspective. Instead, the city has no thickness and, like a sheet of paper, exists as opposites—a person can only look at one side at a time, and can’t separate the two.

Cities and Names. 4. Clarice is a glorious city with an awful history. It has decayed and recovered several times, but it always keeps its original version as the ideal model. Decadence gives way to plagues and slowly, survivors emerge like rats to loot but, like birds, want to nest. People take things to use them differently, such as using curtains as sheets or funerary urns as plant pots. This creates a “survivors’ Clarice,” and even though there are hovels, Clarice’s splendor is still there—just different. That in turn morphs into a new city, and people move in who didn’t know the old Clarice. As this happens, Clarice is destroyed—despite its wealth, it feels alien.

People put shards of the original Clarice under glass so they can use them to remember the old city. The city continues to grow and change as the name stays the same. Each new Clarice shows off items from the old Clarices and now, nobody knows when the tops stood on the columns, since those tops functioned as tables for a while and now are in a museum. People believe that there was an original Clarice, but there’s no proof. The only thing they know for sure is that they shift and shuffle the same number of objects. It’s possible that Clarice has always been nothing more than a collection of broken objects.

Cities and the Dead. 3. To make the transition to death less abrupt, the inhabitants of Eusapia constructed an identical city underground. They take their corpses there to continue their activities. Plenty of people want a new life in death, so there are lots of duchesses and bankers. There’s a hooded group of brothers who take the bodies to the Eusapia of the dead. The brothers exist among the dead, and rumor has it that some are dead and continue to go up and down. Every time they go down, they find that the dead have made new innovations. The living do what they can to keep up with the dead and so the living Eusapia is a copy of the dead Eusapia. Some say that the dead built the living Eusapia in their image. They say that in Eusapia, it’s impossible to tell who’s alive and who’s dead.

Cities and the Sky. 2. In Beersheba, people believe that there’s another Beersheba in the sky that’s virtuous. If Beersheba would look to the version in the sky, the cities would become one, with silver locks and diamond gates. Beersheba’s residents collect precious metals and stones because of this. They also believe that there’s another Beersheba underground that contains everything vile and unworthy. They constantly try to diminish anything that resembles this lower city. Some imagine a city with trash everywhere; others imagine that there’s a thick sludge that flows down from the sewers, creating a city out of human waste.

Marco Polo says that there’s an element of truth to all of this—there is a celestial and an infernal city. However, the residents are wrong about the infernal city, as authoritative architects designed it and it functions perfectly. Beersheba doesn’t know that its only good times are when it lets go. The city also contains a planet that glitters with riches that are enclosed in broken umbrellas, candy wrappers, and eggshells. This is the Beersheba in the sky and it’s only happy when the residents of Beersheba defecate—only then are the residents not greedy and calculating.

Continuous Cities. 1. Leonia changes itself every day. People wake on fresh sheets, wear new clothing, and pull food out of brand new refrigerators. Everything from yesterday, from light bulbs and newspapers to pianos and dinnerware, sits outside in bags for the garbage truck. Marco Polo says that one must measure Leonia by what it throws out rather than its opulence. It’s questionable whether the city enjoys new things or whether it enjoys discarding things. People welcome street cleaners like angels, but nobody wonders where the refuse goes. As Leonia expands, the garbage piles outside the city rise higher and the trash breaks down more slowly. Leonia’s trash would take over the world if other cities weren’t fighting for space for their garbage. There could be a landslide at any time. It could destroy Leonia, allowing other cities to expand and take its place.

Marco Polo suggests that the garden overlooks the lake of their minds, while Kublai Khan adds that they both hold this conversation within if they’re actually out trading and fighting. Marco suggests that the opposite could also be true: the soldiers and sailors might exist only because he and Kublai are thinking of them. They discuss what other people might exist because they think of them. Kublai admits he never thinks of porters or washerwomen, so Marco says they don’t exist. Kublai isn’t sure this exercise works, since they need porters and washerwomen to luxuriate in the garden, so Marco declares that everyone else exists and that he and Kublai don’t. Kublai insists that they’ve proved that if they were here, they wouldn’t exist. Marco notes that they’re here anyway.