A City of Wending Ways

There is a Doramir that disguises itself, each quarter mimicking the streets of a different city: the furriers’ quarter is strung with suspension bridges like the Doramir of the swamp; the restaurant district is crossed by canals and bordered with white walls, like the Doramir where you worked briefly as a gondolier. To lose yourself in this city, then, is to revisit cities you once knew. The more time you spend walking the streets of this Doramir, crossing the bridges which lead from one quarter to the next, the more you understand of the cities you passed through on your way to this place.

First you visit the port to immerse yourself in the talk of sailors and merchants. Their dialect and discourse are immediately recognizable to you, and from them you glean an efficient indication of the city plan: closest to the port are the tradesmen’s quarters and the restaurant district, beyond that, the hotels and bars, and farther on is a neighborhood for the journeymen and apprentices who come to the port to loiter about, and soak in stories from the sea. The sailors’ tales must be perfumed enough to mask the odor of herring, and draw veils across the indications of discomfort you see everywhere around you: men with raw hands loading and unloading casks and crates, livestock being driven down gangways, leaving excrement caked to the planks which the junior sailors scrub and sand. “But the young ones still hang around,” joke the veterans. “The women of this city must be uglier than the goats on board!”

The sailors advise you to hire an apprentice guide for a few pennies, but you prefer to go it on your own. There’s enough time to kill before sunset, and heading east, you figure you’ll bump into the hotel district in due time. But the streets of this Doramir meander and split, double back, dip and climb without any discernable design. This is a city of wending ways.

For a time you wander among the brick walls of the bankers’ district, surrounded by blue-suited men with furrowed brows and twitching fingers. In these straight and narrow streets, the press of the crowd drives you first to the west, then north at the changing of a stoplight. You cross over a bridge and find yourself surrounded by the marble and stained glass of the government district. Here every crossroads is marked by signs indicating what must and what cannot be done: covering your head, playing a trumpet, hitching your mule to the signposts.

Crossing another bridge, you come to a neighborhood built of sandstone, with niches in the walls for flowerpots full of gardenias and irises—the exact replica of a city on the desert’s edge where you once stopped to rest, and fell in love with a woman who was later hanged for treason. In the coffee planters’ district you find the smell of a mountain hotel where you will always be welcome, and beyond that, the cobblestone streets and eight-way intersections common in a city where you were once confronted with a certain set of choices that had no clear answer.

After a time you wander into the streets of the toymakers’ quarter. The toys displayed in the shop windows—marionettes, cup and ball games, china dolls and electric train sets—are the same as the ones you played with when you were a child. Of course, the children of the city are drawn to this district. Their screaming is painfully loud, their joy almost oppressive. You find you can’t at all recollect the intensity of their desire. A boy with dark hair runs up on you and clasps two of your fingers. Seeing you, he is frightened, snatches away his hand and runs off. He had dark hair and a face much like yours, though apparently he didn’t notice the resemblance.

You begin to wonder, if you’d lived your entire life in this Doramir, would you have outgrown this neighborhood, moved into the apprentices’ district, and on up into the various quarters to settle in one of the tradesmen’s neighborhoods? Or would you have haunted the port, soaking up travelers’ stories until the call of the road overpowered your inertia? This Doramir, after all, contains a piece of every other city. What it lacks is the empty space between them, where a caravan advances along a road that runs across a featureless plain. Here a life must be plotted out deliberately. A quarter chosen for living, perhaps a different one for work, and a few for diversion. Leaving your set plans and wandering off the streets you know to simply explore the city, you’re likely to end up lost for hours, and then not even the taxi drivers will be able to guide you home.

The Nuptial Procession

Entering Doramir, a nuptial procession catches you up. The entire city has turned out to celebrate the marriage: confetti too thick to see through, and enough rice that the city sewers will be blocked up for weeks after the next rain. Somewhere at the head of the march there must be a band—beneath the cheering, brass and drums. You don’t get the feeling, however, that this is a wedding for a king and queen, or even for a mayor and one of his mistresses. There is too much laughter and ease.

Out of curiosity, you follow the parade to a fairground. Now you can see the groom, waiting with the best man. Presently the bride appears on her father's arm, her train carried and fought over by urchins who also scatter rose petals with their grimy hands. The whole city packs into the field, wearing whatever finery they could find. You help yourself to a glass of champagne—clearly this is not the sort of wedding you have to be invited to.

The preacher begins to preach. “Of the three great institutions—the home, the state, and the church—the home is the most sacred.” This is a pleasant surprise, coming from a priest. You begin to listen more carefully. “Tranquility at home reaches out into all aspects of a man’s life, so tranquility at home is the most important thing to achieve. It is also the most difficult. Tranquility will never come easy, and it will never be complete, unless you remember always that your mate is more than a lover and more, even, than a friend. To keep this in perspective, the groom should ask himself: if my wife were a man, would she be a man who had my respect and my trust? And the bride must ask herself: if my husband were a woman, would he be a woman to whom I would confide my every doubt, a friend to whom I would give my love freely?”

You find the preacher’s words touching you more deeply than you’re accustomed to. The whole ceremony, in fact, has taken on new layers of significance, deepening through shades of meaning, enough that you cannot separate and categorize all of your responses as you usually would. Instead you find that you can only brush over the surface of your impressions, using your intuition to feel out the contours of a world much richer and far more subtle than the one you’ve known before. You see in the flowers more than just decoration: they are symbolic of life and color, but also of decay. The scattering of petals to the wind strikes you as an unbearable beauty, but for the element of renewal as the children dip their hands again and again into the baskets, each time drawing out handfuls of broken blossoms. In the certainty of the preacher’s voice, you also hear the blithe futility of matching words to life, all of the depth and variety missed, the infinite mystery overlooked. In the joy of the people around you, you also sense, dimly, something of the infinite melancholy of true love.

So shocked are you to feel tears streaming down your face, without any apparent cause, that you initially miss a much more pertinent fact: that these tears are falling upon the breasts which now stretch the fabric of your tunic. Perhaps this doesn’t much shock you because the same transformation has taken place all through the party, the women becoming men and the men becoming women, and because they who expected it, and have experienced this change dozens of times before, carry on their merrymaking with such aplomb and joy. Perhaps you take it in stride because you’re now inclined to look inwards, rather than outwards, for information, and looking inwards you find that your new body suits you.

Whatever the case, your inexplicable sadness has given way to a flush of new impressions, the most prominent of which is that as a woman, you will not be able to continue life as a trader. Not only would you find it impossible to command the respect of your men—knowing what hyenas they are—but even to travel openly on the roads would be to invite disaster. In the territories where the laws of the city do not reach, you would be vulnerable to every highwayman with a strong arm.

Now the preacher, still speaking about the home, begins to make sense to you on several new levels. Where you once thought of it as an abstract idea, akin to rest, or possibly surrender, the idea of home now strikes you as a concrete necessity, the only sustainable course of life. Suddenly you are stricken by anxiety. How are you to domesticate one of these coarse, stubborn creatures? Is there one among them more suitable than the rest, one who could more easily be convinced to see reason, and settle down?

Again your emotions melt, and you find yourself patiently scanning the faces of the crowd. You see men laughing too loud, men with unfocused eyes, men staring at your chest (which you’ve already compared to the women’s around you, and found ample enough) men flushed with wine, chewing with their mouths open. It occurs to you that this could, in fact, be a hopeless task. Again you feel sadness, but this time laced with anger, yet still underpinned by patience, and beneath that hope, and the yearning that you could so easily convert to the organizing of a home, the growing of a child. The filling of the emptiness which has so baffled you, first as a man, now as a woman.

Something of your own inclinations must have remained, however, because you don’t wait for the wedding to end and the spell to be broken, to go home with everyone else, carrying what lessons you’ve learned. Instead you opt to leave the fairground: the world flattens, loses shades of meaning as your emotions fall away like scales, leaving only the core of being—ambition and will—like an exposed nerve, shorn of the superfluities which made life so confusing, and so brilliant. Later, on the road, among the gruntings of beasts and men, you will realize that you’ve carried away a pair of vague impressions (carrying, as you do, only those things which could be of some utility in the future). First, that there is more to life, vastly more, than what you yourself are capable of seeing, and that your own life could be better lived, if you could find someone to show you how.

The Road Home

On another of the uncountable roads leading northwest, leading home, you meet a man with an open heart, a heart much like yours used to be. He is much older than you, and much younger. He has also been away from his home, and longer than you have been, though he has remained much closer to his native land than you have to yours.

“You are going home,” he says. “This is very good.” You don’t speak his language, but he speaks yours with drawn-out vowels, a soothing accent that makes every statement into both a question and its answer.

“I went home seven, maybe eight, nine year ago. Before that, maybe twenty year. A long time, I was away. I have a grandmother there, she was sick with cancer. Cancer in her bones. I didn’t know she was sick until I went home. I saw her. She was very bony. I am bony, but she was more. The cancer made her digestive system turn off. It is too bad, because she loved to eat. She was a cook, like me. But she was a better cook. When you were little, you always know that when she cooks, something good is coming. When I was six, seven, maybe eight year old, I was her helper. She yelled at me, ‘get this, get that.’ That's how I learned the ingredients.”

From his words, images slowly start to seep. First in a metallic blue, formless, but then they take on other colors and begin to resolve themselves into definite shapes. From the fog emerges an image of your grandmother’s face—how did he know about the mole above her eyebrow? Even you could not remember that. In your country, children leave home early and stay away for long periods of time. They call this independence. As a result, you know very little of your own mother, and about her mother you remember next to nothing. But from the open-hearted cook's voice drift visions of a house on a canal, a rocking chair, a particular sunset.

“She did not know my face when I arrived. She was in the bed, because she was weak. She was very weak. She looked at me once, and did like this.”

“Rolled over.” You don’t want to speak more than is necessary, but he is leaving space for your voice, out of courtesy.

“Rolled over, yes. She did not know my face. But I wanted to do something for her. I sit down next to her on the bed, and I start to talk to my nephews. They are so little, I could not even know them. My brothers’ and sisters’ children. Five of my brothers and sisters survived. We have a large family. So I am talking to them, and my grandmother hears my voice. She knows my voice. She doesn’t roll over again, but she says, very, very quiet, ‘Where have you been?’”

The question is stretched, by his voice and by the nature of it, opened into a hole deep enough to hold a thousand years of absence, a question that can easily devour a lifetime, or two. This question is bounded on one side by what you once considered to be your own needs, and on the other by the daily exclusion of your life from lives which were built in part around your own. You do not usually like sad stories. This will be the saddest part. Her death, because this story will certainly end with her death, will be a relief, the punctuation which finally closes the question.

“She whisper, 'Where have you been?' This is a big question. How can I answer her? She would not know where Doramir is. But then I hear her sleeping. So I get a towel, and I get it wet with cold water, and I wipe on her back. I wipe very softly, very softly because her skin is very soft. I can feel it. I can feel her skin with my hand. I wipe on her back and on her neck. Then very quiet, nobody else can hear, I hear her say, ‘Wipe me harder.’ Nobody can hear but me, and she knows it is me, because I can always hear her when nobody else can. She says ‘Wipe me harder.’”

He starts to laugh, all the pleasure and sadness, the cold wetness and the softness of papery skin are growing in his eyes. You know the relief is coming, but already he has closed the question, or she has closed it for him, or they have closed it together. A return is possible. Quietly this seeps into your sadness, and all the volume which was weighing on your heart becomes something different, like a fullness you had not expected to be there. An understanding that grew somewhere between his words and your ears, or between his life and yours, or between his life and hers.

“She die at seven o’clock. Seven o’clock on that night, she die in her bed. I was so happy. I am so happy.” Again the pleasure and the sadness of her soft skin shimmer in his eyes. “She die very peaceful in her home. The mother of my mother…”

Before you part, he tells you again that to go home is the best thing. It is best to die at home. Of course, at this moment he is as far from his home as you are from yours. You met in the middle of a road, and he told his story to a stranger. Perhaps it is this distance which makes the images so sweet, so sad, and such a relief.

At the Fruit Parade

At the fruit parade, the fruits (and vegetables) have to be carried into town on oxen-drawn carts. Summer squash twenty feet long, tangerines that, once peeled and cut, squirt gouts of juice that will sticky the streets until the rain comes. At the center of town is a decanter of red wine seven stories tall, with seven balconies ringed round and seventeen spigots at each level, with another seventy drilled just above the ground. People pass by to suckle, climb over one another, playful as drunk kittens. In a plaza slightly to the west, a buffet table fifty feet long and covered with produce: corn kernels like basketballs, wedges of watermelon as long as a man’s arm and twice as thick, tomato slices the size of plates.

The crowd looks impenetrable from a distance: the dancers whirl and kick in close quarters, a hundred seats at a hundred tables are taken, with thousands more wandering between the buffet and the wine. Carts of monster fruits cram the streets. But once you’re in the mayhem you find it easy enough to move around, as long as you don’t care where you’re going. And you don’t care, because everything here is worth seeing. You sip from samovars of mulled cider, climb the decanter to look over the parade and to take your turn at the wine spout, dance a turn with a woman who appears from the crowd as if for that purpose alone. A man in a coral shirt carries a cockatoo on each shoulder. Bird feces stain his shirt, but that does not seem to bother the woman beside him. “Cinnamon!” says one of the birds. “Cinnamon!” There is a woman with hair falling to her ankles, all tied through with ribbons and bells. A man is walking a monkey, and the monkey leads a rat on a leash.

The word parade is a misnomer, because the party in this city ebbs during the night, but continues on year round, even through the rainy season, when bright umbrellas are thrown from rooftop to balcony, and the tattoo of the beating rain winds itself into the music. In this city, your every desire can be fulfilled at any time, as long as you only desire pleasure. While you eat, a cup of wine is placed to your lips. A woman kisses you without bothering to first wipe the kiwi juice from your face. “Cinnamon!” says the cockatoo, and begins to whistle a waltz. On the racks, unread, newspaper headlines tell of engineering successes, and another year of peace.

The people of this city never seem to tire of their unending sport. The food and drink they consume is burned by dancing. The musicians forever find their inspiration on the stage, without ever needing to return home to compose fresh songs in silence. A fresh wind sweeps down from the mountains each morning, bringing the scent of dew and carrying off the clouds of stale wine. The few chores which keep the party going—clearing out trash, carting in new food, pressing grapes and refilling the seven-story decanter—are performed voluntarily. The man with the coral shirt occasionally cleans the bird shit from his sleeves.

This is a city that wants nothing to do with progress, and a people who could give a damn about personal growth. It is a city satisfied with its never-ending glut, where the things that are acquired—food and drink—are soon enough digested and gone. But to you, such a city makes no sense. In the world where you were raised, competition was the essential thing. Man was meant to strive against man, to perfect his skills in fighting with his neighbor for wealth, territory and, above all, for prestige. This is a dysfunctional city: there is no industry, no commerce. People wear ragged clothes, have scraggly haircuts, their homes are barren, devoid of basic material comforts. There are no theatres, no taverns, no libraries, no doctors. A plague could sweep through this town unimpeded. Some people here have bad teeth. Moreover, the people lack any critical ability. They eat the same foods, all drink the same wine day after day after day, never asking for something new, never seeking out finer flavors, more modern fashions, greater comforts.

It is the lack of commerce, especially, that makes it impossible for you to remain here. Of course you don’t mind passing through every few months, though it’s not exactly on your route, and there is no profit to be made.

Perfume, Part Two

That night you have a dream: in it, your father is cutting off your fingers, one by one. You don’t know the reason, but you have the certain sense that this is a necessary process, or at least an unavoidable one.

First he takes the pinky of your right hand, using a hatchet. The only sound is the snap of the delicate bone, and for some reason there is very little blood, and only a moderate amount of pain. Next he takes your ring finger. As the hatchet bites, you know for certain that you will never again have the strength to unload certain boxes, boxes of heavy wool, books, metal ornaments. By the time he smashes through your middle finger, you begin to panic. How will you handle your horses when they spook? How will you tie knots? You will never shake hands over a deal, never write up another bill of sale, or draw the nails from a cask of wine. Then your father takes the first finger. You will never again use your dominant hand. The physical pain is not so bad, but the pain of loss, disfigurement, of knowing what you once were and never will be again—that is unbearable. You start to cry. Your severed fingers in a row on the railing: your past is that close, and that impossible to regain. “Now,” says your father, “I need your feet.” You wail like a terrified child.

When you awake, your eyes go immediately to your fingers. Reprieve, and sweet mercy. You practically quake with relief, even as you throw back your dusty blanket and stand, boil water for coffee and try to forget your helpless terror. This is not an easy thing to do. You take a needless inventory of your caravan like a rite, a panacea, but your mind wanders back to your dream. It occurs to you that the theme of loss, with your father holding the hatchet, likely grew out of your experience at the perfumery. Subliminally, you probably do want a perfume of your own. Something of yourself to hold onto as you age, even if only a token to prove what you once were.

Over a cup of coffee by the dying fire, ideas begin to emerge as you set yourself to the task of cleaning out your subconscious. Lack of fixity is at the root of your problem—this is quite obvious. It is also the reason that your perfume could not hold a scent. Not because you lacked thoughts, emotions, memories, and a profession, but because you lacked a base, a home, a context to which your odors could anchor themselves. When you were a young man, it was a great thing to leave behind cities, women, selves like shedding skins as you grew, your explorings engaged with a constant process of becoming. Your self-imposed solitude struck you neither as romantic nor brave, but as a necessity if you were ever going to reach the destination you instinctively craved. Now you realize that there was no destination. That your wanderings were not a journey towards a future, but a running away from the past. Why this decades-long flight? Because of the trapped look in your father’s eyes: trapped by a debt incurred on his behalf by his wife and children, by you yourself. So you resolved never to fall into debt, monetary or emotional, and you left your father to regain what he could of his freedom.

The sun is rising. For lack of another purpose, you dump out the dregs of your coffee and lead your caravan to market, claim a central location in the shade of a palm. For a while, work blots out your thinking and you are able to exist as you always have, with the clear, mindless drive of an animal that knows everything it will ever need to know. Sweat gathers beneath your arms, in the hollow of your back. You do have an odor. Moldy cheese and vinegar. You have your fingers, and a fortune you can carry with you wherever and whenever you please.

The morning comes on in full, and women stream into the market to do their shopping. Hundreds of women. By now, if not years before, you’ve become aware of your desire for a mate. But how to choose among the hundreds, the thousands, knowing that this choice, once made, will preclude thousands of alternatives? That this Doramir, if you choose to settle here, will be the last city you’ll ever see. How do other people find it so easy to sacrifice an entire world of possibilities?

It is not until mid-afternoon that inspiration strikes. You will gather together all the perfumes of this Doramir, every scent the city has to offer, and when that is done, you will possess the essence of every possible life. Then you can make an informed decision and consciously choose a future, rather than leaving your fate to fate alone.

So you change tactics, begin to barter with all your skill, offering rebates, samples, discounts in exchange for nothing but a bottle of outdated perfume from each customer. People are generally happy to part with them, for a reasonable price, and you are not so concerned with acquiring the most current scent for each person. The next customer who happens along will possess the qualities hinted at in their neighbor’s aroma.

For a while you concentrate on the elderly, seeking the most complex, the ripest odors. Then you begin to move backwards in time, focusing now on the scents of men about your own age. The next day you come to market with a bag of hard candy, and you begin to gather the scents of children, simple, as easy to follow as a blueprint.

You spend a week in this Doramir. By now you’re not even going to market, instead just wandering the strets, buying scents for cash. Another week, and you’ve amassed hundreds of vials, developed a palate as sensitive as any perfumer in the city. You’ve learned to identify and distinguish between all the human traits you once disregarded. You fill your nose and mind with professions: apothecary, cobbler, haberdasher and tailor, distiller, perfumer, engineer, banker, barber. You learn the fragrances of dozens of types of women: brilliant, expectant, sexy, matronly, educated, homey, simple, driven, submissive, complex, saintly and slutty. You spend ten days just mixing the children’s perfumes, trying to build a new life from scratch, and you find that certain characteristics in combination mirror the effects of certain professions. Your own blend of patience, acquisitiveness, and curiosity resembles the specific odors of both merchants and artists. So are you to become a painter, and marry a restaurateur, a shopkeeper married to a poetess? The evidence is inconclusive.

The men in your caravan become impatient by the middle of the second week. By the end of the third, they are in full insurrection. They’ve sampled every whore, been banned from every tavern in town. They are young, impatient, ready to travel and utterly baffled by your sudden preoccupation with perfume. Still you keep mixing, sniffing, speculating, searching for a scent to stop the relentless engine driving your mind. After a month, you’ve acquired upwards of a thousand vials of perfume, and there is not a scent in this Doramir that is unknown to you: smells of cardamom, cream, orange peels, forsythia, coffee, mescal, all these infinite possibilities you have learned to translate, a world of lives are revealed to you, and you delight in being able to possess them all in stoppered bottles in boxes in a single cart. You’ve become intimate with the odors of sadness, expectation, disappointment, relief, joy, fear, pleasure, patience, arrogance, humor, exhaustion. You can easily differentiate between love and lust, knowledge and self-deception, care and concern, between surrender and actual contentment.

Now, of the thousands of vials, only yours is missing.

One night you awake from a dream of fog and hopeless wandering, and you go to the cart you’ve emptied to hold your perfumes. You choose a scent at random: leather, soap, salt-water. The forlorn scent of a cobbler who has lost his only son and now cries for the smell of him in bed after his bath. You choose another. It looks the same as the rest, but inside you will find a distinct story. So many goddamn stories.

You hurl this one against the side of the wagon, smashing open the rot and freshness of a girl who lives beside a dump, dreaming of mountaintops. You smash another: clover, curd, and wool. A shepherd and his wife, tending their flock, making cheese and sweaters. You seize a box and smash the whole thing to the ground, hurl another into the stones, and a third, a fourth. Glasses shatter, lives are exposed, and a city grows, fills up the night air. A city you cannot see, cannot touch, a city you’ll never be able to bottle. You take one unbroken vial from the ground and crush it in your fist, your palm, your fingers gashed with shards of perfumed glass.

The pain sobers you up. There’s blood everywhere and your men are awake, feigning sleep but staring. In the morning, they will desert you.

You go to the river to let the water coax the slivers from your skin. Your hands reek of ozone and blueberries: a farmer’s son. His life winds away in the stream as the current pulls the glass from your flesh. You bandage your hand and lie back down in the dark, defeated, but regrouping. Tomorrow you will leave. You will begin the journey home.

Perfume, Part One

The smell of this Doramir is overpowering. Not necessarily a stench, though the reek of a herring cannery, a waste treatment plant, the caustic assault of a tannery each in turn pinch your nostrils and quicken your step. You also find the smells you’ve come to associate with cities: cigarettes, exhaust, body odor. There are the smells you usually seek out: bakeries, steakhouses, perfumeries. But everywhere else, even in the emptiest streets, even at dawn when you’re the only one on the prowl, staking out your spot in the market, there is this pervasive, almost cloying odor. It’s too complex to be either pleasant or unpleasant. It simply drenches your olfactory sense, enters your mind through the nose, takes up habitation, and refuses to leave. The smell makes it hard to think, hard to breathe. What is it? It is perfume: it is the steakhouses, bakeries, tanneries and canneries, but it is also attar of roses, wet dog, sandalwood, brass, ambergris and rhubarb, an electric storm, mud flats at low tide, lust and oysters, horsemeat, chardonnay—it is everything. Every possible smell in a mélange too complex to be unraveled into its component parts, as varied and disparate as the city itself.

When the market opens, you ask your neighbor, “What is that smell?”

“It’s us,” he says, apparently well used to travelers and tourists. “The perfumers here know a way to distill the scent of a person’s innermost self. This scent is how we get to know each other, and how we recognize one another in a crowd. By scent. Here,” he commands. “Smell.” He offers you the crook of his elbow, and you inhale the particular scent that clings there. Mint and caraway seeds, milk, sweat, butter and some sweet, thick smell, a smell like caramel, but not quite.

“What is it?”

He laughs. “That’s me.” Heaped on his tables, bundles of mint and bags of caraway. Drying in the sun, the sweat of his morning’s work. “My wife just had our first child,” he grins. “A daughter!” The smell of caramel and milk is recalled to your nose, and in this smell you can see him standing beside his wife, who is seated in a rocking chair, feeding and finally, briefly quieting their child as the low dawnlight begins to filter through the curtains. Milk and the baby-smell of caramel and butter all through the room. The more you smell, the more strains of life you detect in your neighbor’s scent. There is the pine of his wife’s chair, cut grass from their small yard and the gardenias she places in a vase on the windowsill every morning. There is the waxy scent of her lipstick and, too subtle for your foreigner’s nose to parse, his wife’s perfume mingled throughout his own.

“How do you make it?” you ask. “The perfume, I mean. Is there a process? Is it secret?” You are thinking that the incomparable subtlety of these perfumes, and the individuality of them, would yield aromas to capture the imagination of the world, and make you a very rich man. Who would not want a bottle of their own essence? Who could fail to admit that such a personal, magical thing would be worth any amount of money? And what of all the other things you might be able to capture? The scent of a home, a favorite pet, a sunset, a child’s passing years kept safe in a bottle on a shelf to be taken down at any time…

The merchant draws you a map to his friend’s perfumery, a certain place in one of the richer quarters of town. So at sunset you pack up what remains of your wares, again offer your neighbor your somewhat insincere congratulations, and you make your way to the address he provided. As you walk, you become more sensitive to the smells that surround you. Passing a woman who smells of the sea, all the fullness of salty, breezy, fishy, clean air, your traveler’s heart is arrested by the urge to follow her. But keeping on, you inhale the parade of scents: patchouli and cinnamon, cotton candy, dirt, cedar, sex, canola oil, rusted iron, wax and fireworks. The smell of the city slowly unfolds itself to you, and you realize that it is not the city, not this city or any city, that possesses an essential scent. The people and their lives, they create the odor.

“Can you make a perfume of me?” you ask the new father’s friend. Sniffing yourself, all you come up with is vinegar and headcheese, dust and axel grease.

“Of course,” the perfumer replies, filled with the pride of his art. “Of course, like any process of self-discovery, it takes time, and can be a bit painful.” You consent without considering. Even the children here have their own perfume, so how painful can it be? “How much do you want?” he asks.

“Not much,” you reply. What you really want is to see the process, to determine whether or not this is a magic you can replicate on your own, and profit by in other Doramirs, or if you’ll need the assistance of a master.

“Good choice,” says the perfumer, readying his materials, glass beakers and Petri dishes, metal scraping implements and a needle that gives you pause. “Your scent may stay the same for your entire life,” he explains, “But the perfume of your innermost self is constantly evolving, ripening, generally becoming richer and more complex. The perfume I will extract today will not be satisfying to you next year, and won't even be wholly accurate next month.”

You agree, though you’re relatively sure that you haven’t done much in the way of changing since puberty. “First we scrape off a layer of skin,” he tells you, and with a straight razor he takes a layer from most of your body, concentrating especially on your most fragrant, or most noxious, parts: the genitals, armpits, and feet, and he takes especial care with the crooks of your elbows and knees, the soft place between your collarbones. “That is where the most delicate scents reside.” He then withdraws a tenth of a liter of blood and lets it soak with the skin, funneling it off from the Petri dishes into the beaker, which he stoppers.

While the skin soaks, he goes into his garden and draws up a mandrake root. “The mandrake was born with a body, you see, but without a soul.” He shows you the root, which does appear, in fact, to be roughly baby-shaped. “Because it longs so desperately to be human it has adapted, learned to extract a soul from flesh and blood. From these simple materials, it can take thoughts, emotions, memories, livelihood, relationships—in short, the essence of a life—and each quality it withdraws, it withdraws as purest distillate, oils and attars each with their own specific scents.” While he talks, you see the mandrake absorbing the blood and skin, its limb-like tubers flexing and waving like a baby’s limbs.

“Here is where the magic comes into it,” the perfumer explains, and you lean forward, eyes open for any trickery, or perhaps to glean some fact so simple that the perfumers have overlooked it for all these years. “We extract the mandrake’s oils,” he says, and the root, its flesh now pinkish and creamy, like the skin you keep hidden from the sun, he places into a press. As he turns the screws, you hear a thin, keening scream, the mandrake’s shriek as its hard-won humanity is taken away. The screaming does not stop until all of its juices have been collected in another beaker. “We put the juice into a pressurized alembic,” he explains, pouring the mixture into a copper flacon with a head for condensing liquids, of a simple design you’re sure you’ll be able to replicate. “And we boil it over a low, low heat for three hours.”

For those three hours, you walk around the empty nighttime streets. You smell cloves, alcohol, leather, ice, goats and honey. How many lives are being lived all around you—so many that the street, even while empty, remains active in its fragrance. Here there was a market, here a fight, here there was a carnival, the heady scent of communal celebration.

And how will your own perfume come out? The things you sell change so often they can’t possibly be said to define you. And though you can still recall the perfume of cut timber and river mud that blew daily into your childhood home, the scent is about the only memory which remains undimmed by the decades. Those things which define you are mostly abstracts: travel, commerce, the pleasure you take in meals and the occasional love affair. The smell you’ll produce will probably be the smell of a caravan: the sweat of beasts and men, dust, rain-rotten leather, the oily and bitter metallic smell of oft-handled coins. Most likely you’ll dispose of your perfume as soon as you get it.

“I can’t imagine what went wrong,” the perfumer tells you. “The mandrake was healthy, we had plenty of raw materials. But, well, smell for yourself.” He holds the bottle up to your nose, and you brace yourself for some putrid stench. But you smell nothing. Less than water. Less than the air of an icehouse. Nothing at all.

“Perhaps the problem was in some secret trick?”

“There is no secret trick. It is the air of this city, or perhaps the soil in which the mandrake grows. I just can’t figure out what could have happened. In the morning I will ask around at the other perfumeries.”

“It’s okay,” you tell the perfumer, thank him, and pay him anyways for his time. In the street, an old, familiar emptiness comes over you. You know what the problem is: you don’t have an inner essence. There is nothing in the world that defines you. No home, no family, no friends. You’ve known this for too long for it to depress or fluster you, whatever effect it may have had on the perfumer.

You withdraw the little bottle of nothing, hold it up to a street light. Like yourself, it takes on the colors of its surroundings: flickering candlelight, blackness, the hints of stone and glass broken up, amplified, and recapitulated in the bottle of scentlessness, a world comprehensible in its pieces, but foreign and fractured when taken as a whole. And though it may look different by daylight, on the trail or bathing in the river, reflecting the pure cerulean mountaintop sky, it will forever remain without a scent. But there’s nothing wrong with that. Is there?

Your Skin against Your Skin

“In this Doramir, we shake once before the deal, and again after,” says the man seated across from you. “And you are not allowed to leave the table without shaking again, whether we reach a deal or not.”

“Alright,” you say. As far as customs go, this one isn’t particularly odd. And as it turns out, this is one of those customs which has a reasonable basis: as soon as you touch the man’s hand, you become him. Your body is still your own—you do not inherit his arthritic fingers—but his memories, his thoughts and feelings, the pain in his knuckles, they all become yours. ‘By god,’ you think, ‘I’d better make this deal, or Martha’s going to have nothing to eat come winter.’ That is the overriding thought in your head, but there is not enough of you, the real you, left to use that knowledge to drive a harder bargain.

In fact, if there is anything left of you, it sits outside of this lifetime of memories. Because your memories shape your thinking, it is impossible to separate your self from your past—even if you wanted to remember the other you, where would you look? Without your own, other memories, you cannot even want to be your old self again. One life fills you—you are Carlos Correa, of a backwater Doramir in the central plains. You remember your father’s face, and the unquenchable thirst for love which led you to leave his farm. Memories of your Martha as a young woman, the insignificant times which have slipped your mind and hers—those are the only memories you’ve lost that you want to seek again. So you’re in no hurry to shake hands with the foreigner a second time. You’ll conclude this deal as you’ve concluded a hundred others, and in your proper body you’ll go home to her and together look through your long history at the glowing moments which shaped it.

While you bargain you hide your desperation, and you use your father’s humor, the humor which has won you so many prizes, your Martha included. “Deal,” says the foreigner, apparently far more eager than you to conclude this transaction. You’ve gotten a better price from him than you expected. “Deal.” You shake…and Carlos Correa seeps out of you. The place he’s left, you fill with your memories of a hundred Doramirs. Of him, next to nothing remains. Only a woman’s name, but you cannot recall which name, and even if you could, it would mean nothing to you. From your time as the farmer’s son, you’ve learned nothing.

Your next trade is an accident. As you are asking directions back to the southeast gate, a young woman dashing from the alley runs headlong into you, knocking you into the dust. Onlookers rush to intervene, but they stop short of physically restraining you, and that is all that could stop you from going to Josh, your beloved Joshua. No one is going to stop you. Not his parents, not your brother, and certainly not the people yelling at you to slow down, come back. Slow? What do the old know of the young heart’s pace?

You arrive at the designated cypress grove on the mountainside below the robbers’ caves, in such a hurry to feel his lips pressed against yours that you do not notice the panicked look on his face. But something is quite wrong. Pulling away from the kiss, you are Josh, as you’ve been nine times before—the giddy rush of your love’s mind moving into your skin is as it should be, but the look on his face now registers: ‘why did this old man just kiss me?’ It starts to dawn on you that Josephine must have bumped into someone on the way. So your mind is in Josh’s body, as you wanted, but whose body is Josh’s mind wearing? Certainly not yours—it’s the body of a guy who’s about seven hundred years old, stinks, and is badly in need of a shave. From Josh’s mouth, Josephine screams.

A few concerned townspeople arrive shortly, bearing in tow a curvaceous young woman wearing a less-than-amused look. She grabs your arm…and everyone is able to have a good laugh at themselves, except for Josh, who is wiping your kiss off his lips.

This time, something of the encounter does stay with you: a memory of a feeling, Josephine’s urgent love, so dense it will take her years to unravel all the threaded emotions. But as yourself, you have a reference point from which to look back. The love which ten minutes ago consumed you is now distant as if behind a pane a dozen years thick, and you can sit beneath the cypress, inhale its flavor, feel something like nostalgia for a life you’ve never lived.

Returning to the town, you are now very curious about these people. They must be wise, for having lived more than just one life. It is confinement to a single self, you think, that makes us so prone to misunderstanding. How wisely must these people love, when husbands can become their wives, when in a fistfight, lives are traded with every blow.

What you don’t know is that no matter how many people you become, you will never see yourself as clearly as you see others. For that, you’d need a Martha of your own. But ignorant of this fact, you set out into the town in search of the oldest, most peaceful-looking man you can find.

Find him you do, on the other side of town, though he is likewise sitting beneath a cypress and dreaming. You sit down beside him, ostensibly to strike up a conversation, but your true aim is to switch places with him for a little while. Scarcely have you sat, however, before his spotted hand sneaks out and seizes yours…You’ve got a young man’s body again! You make your escape, dashing down the tree-lined paths, heading for the whorehouse. It won’t be long before the police catch up to you, and this time they’ll probably lock you up for good, in your prison and in your own, impotent body.

But how good it feels to be young again! The other men your age claim to be satisfied with their long memories—what pompous gasbags! The real stuff of life lies between the legs. All of a man’s life is a mindless thrusting, domination, and the brief and likewise mindless peace that follows, and intellectual pleasures be damned! Perhaps they suffice for women, and the truly old, but old is a state of mind forced on you by the body. In this Doramir where the body has no power, why should old age? The gasbags like to talk about the Natural Order of Things as if that, too, does not lie between the legs.

But even as you’re once again up to your ears in flesh, so entwined you know longer know which who you are, satisfaction eludes you. Emptiness—that is the natural order of things, is what you’re thinking when the police arrive and you…become yourself again. “Goddamn you, old man, you’d better not have given me a disease!”

So much for finding peace in old age. Though that fellow probably wasn’t much representative of what you’ll be when you’re old, you can see clearly enough that those things you’ve desired your entire life, you will continue to desire in your old age, whether or not you retain the faculties to obtain them. You, then, will always long for travel, to escape confinement to one city, one self. That is, unless you teach yourself some new desire.

You return to the market only because you know your way from there. You don’t intend to make another trade, except a sign in a secluded corner of the bazaar catches your eye. ‘Trades,’ it says, and under that, ‘Free.’ At least worth investigating.

“When I was five,” says the woman behind the counter, “My father hit me between the eyes with an iron poker. Since then I haven’t been able to feel anything. Not heat or cold, not love or hate. I keep my kiosk in the darkest, dirtiest corner of the square because it is cheap, though cheap and expensive don’t much matter to me, but neither do the dirt and dark. They are no better than light and cleanliness. I am not sorry for my life—I know a freedom that most men never will. I am free from self-doubt, from fear, pain, loss—but I am bereft of joy. So what I offer is a trade, my life for yours, for only one day.”

“And you promise to come back?”

“If I don’t, you won’t care.”

“Do you promise to come back?”

“Yes, I promise.”

She sits you down in her place. She says that she’s left customers standing before, and found them still standing twenty-four hours later. “They say it’s murder on the knees, but I wouldn’t know.” Seated, you take the woman’s hand, and…

This one walks away. Across the square, that one arrives at another kiosk. People all around walk away, arrive, speak, joke, are alone. They have the same basic needs, slightly different motivations. The sun shines directly in your eyes, and the people are vague silhouettes. Later the sun will move, and faces will emerge, clothes will grow colors. You know that people have favorite colors. People care what clothes they wear. You just can’t tell why. To represent something of themselves, perhaps. Do they think there is so great a difference between themselves and other people? Only the distance between skin and skin.

The sun sets, the sun rises, a woman arrives with a smile on her face. “Please,” she says, “It is time to trade back. I am so happy, and so tired.” She takes your hand. You sit like that for a long moment, your skin against your skin.

Bubbles

First the air begins to stink of tar. Then it gets heavy. Picks up an odor with a gritty texture. Keep heading in this direction, and you’ll see the trees fail. All green rotted into the ground. Then, on the horizon, the bubbles of Doramir, grown like plastic blisters to hide the last habitable parts of the city from the polluted air, the filth still spewed daily from smokestacks punctuating the domes. Ten corporations own these bubbles, and the people who live inside them. Ten corporations, ten populations, and no real city, except those cancerous streets that ache in the poison sun, crumbled and useless as a memory.

The people here work long days and earn a lot of money, but it is money they cannot spend, because this Doramir produces nothing of use. Only luxury goods: stretch limousines, yachts, private jets, chandeliers, giant plastic domes. But though their money is useless, the people have to keep working. Otherwise they’ll be ejected from the bubble, cut off from clean air and water, from doctors, from the shelter that only money and corporations can provide.

You are carrying a load of peas, beans, lentils, lettuce and radishes. “This all’ll sell like crazy in the Doramir by the salt flats,” the farmer told you. “But take care. The people there are hungry.” You don’t take his advice as well as you should. Noticing the lettuce beginning to wither in the foul air, you order your men to drive the caravan directly into the nearest of the bubbles.

The streets are lined with empty and broken windows, or, where there is still food to be had, people are lined up around the block. Their gaunt and hunted faces look poorly set above tuxedos and evening gowns, smoking jackets and silk sundresses. Their shoes gleam in the plastic-dulled sun, but their eyes do not. The children are curiously subdued, and you see no dogs or cats in the street. In the doorways men stand, chewing their fingernails, while the women gather in threes, shawls draped from their elbows. You don’t sense panic in the plaza, but still—maybe bringing a massive amount of food in close proximity to starving people was not your best idea.

“Beans, peas, lentils!” you put on a hawker’s voice, trying to defuse the tension growing around you. “Very cheap! One day only!” But while a customer up front begins waving his money in your face, someone in the back tries to steal a bag of beans. One of your men cudgels him over the head. Someone else grabs your man, two more of your mercenaries defend their partner, someone yells “They’ve got food!” and the tarps are ripped back from the carts. After that, all you can do is drag your men into an alley, watch the mob carry off your livelihood.

In a few minutes, there is nothing left. You don’t have enough money in your pocket to pay your men, let alone to invest in another harvest. All you can do is go to the police.

“What do you want?” You tell them your story. “We’re not in the business of looking after foreigners,” they say. “Why don’t you go back to your own country?” The two desk sergeants return to watching TV—an advertisement for cosmetic surgery. But eventually you’re able to make them understand that you’ve got nowhere else to go, and so won’t be going anywhere. “Look, just fill out this report, will you?” one of them directs you. So you give your information and wait on one of a bank of vinyl seats.

After an hour the captain, red-faced and puffing, storms into the room with your report in hand. “Can you idiots not see that we have a distinguished guest?” he rails. “Go get him a cup of coffee!” Then, “I’m very sorry to have kept you waiting. I realize that a businessman of your repute has more important affairs to attend.” You let the flattery stand. Better for him not to know that, at this moment, you’re as bankrupt as anyone else in the city. “Let me assure you that the Maloney Boating Supply Corporation Police Department is completely at your disposal. Assuming, of course, that you would be willing to underwrite some of the expenses we will incur while recovering your goods. Ten percent should cover our costs on this end. We have an understanding, yes?”

You agree because you have to, and an hour later you are standing on the rooftop of the police station, overlooking the main square. Sunlight filters through the bubble, stained with pollution inside and out, giving the air of the plaza a feeling of density. You are vaguely surprised that people are able to wade through it.

“I think you will be impressed by the efficiency of our force,” the chief tells you. Below, you see small men moving in twos, kicking in doors and leaving with objects—chairs, mirrors, loaves of bread—which they pass off to guards stationed in the central plaza. “The people are willing to give up so much because they are afraid of what would happen if the corporation weren't here to protect them.”

You want to tell him “no!” to withdraw your claim and rebuild your fortune on your own. But there will be no convincing this huge man in his white uniform with the epaulettes that catch the dull light. You can see that much in the straightness of his back, the bulge of his stomach.

The spoils laid out in the conference room include exactly one half-pound of lentils and four heads of lettuce, all rotten to the core. “They must have eaten all of it straight off,” reports a lieutenant. “But the rest of this stuff should cover you.” On the table are clothes and glasses, a guitar and a bicycle, a child’s doll and a stack of books. It goes on forever. Value-wise, there is far more here than you came in with. The chief directs his men around the trough of commodities, taking for himself a brass alarm clock and a woman’s hat. They finish rooting through the pillage, and you are about to utter some kind of refusal, to cede your right to any of it, exempt yourself from theft. But when the chief orders all of it loaded back on your carts, you lose the nerve to turn him down.

You can’t sell this mish-mash of stuff in bulk. It would take you a year to unload, and you tell the captain so. “Why don’t you take it over to Wilkinson City—I’ve heard things are much worse over there." Preying on people’s desperation does not seem as clever to you as the captain makes it sound, but if you want to convert this pile of crap into cash, there is no other way to go about it.

So you set up the caravan outside the bubble to which the captain referred you, and you take inventory, numbering and recording everything in the carts. For each item you make up two numbered cards, and in lemon juice make identical, specific marks for each. One of the cards you tape to the item, the others you bring with you into the central square.

If the people here are worse off, it only shows in their clothing—they could not be any hungrier than the yacht-builders. But their tweed jackets are out at the elbows, their high heels broken down into pumps. They walk around the streets, buying and selling meaningless things—rubber bands, gravel, a brick—playing the moneymaking game to keep their minds off their misery.

“Rag and bone!” you call through the square. A crowd begins to gather, which in turn draws more crowd. “Rag and bone! Everything I’ve got needs a home! Trombones, gramophones, colognes and tombstones! Rag and bone!” People jostle, wave their money in the air. Is it to impress their neighbors that they offer such ridiculous sums? Is it because, without necessities to buy, money has completely lost its meaning? Or is it because the people need to add up the value of their work, hold something in their hands which they can point to and say, ‘it is for this that I have traded the hours of my life’?

One by one you call out the stolen items on your list, and a bidding war begins. You trade one piece of paper for many more, people handing over their wages for items they’ve never seen. A few con-artists get a look at the cards, and run home to reproduce them, but held over a candle flame they reveal no lemon juice-mark, and the cops deal them a crack on the skull, send them back to their idle cons.

You make a small fortune. Enough to live in a civilized country for a year, or in Doramir for the rest of your life. Leaving town with this unimaginable sum of money in your pocket, it occurs to you that, perhaps for the first time, you can choose the kind of life you want to lead. But even after having seen the ugly side of commerce, it is still only one trade you know. And traveling is the only kind of life you truly care to live. So, free of the blasted lands of the corporate Doramir, you stop among the farms of the southern steppes, start putting down deposits on the next year’s harvest. You'll feed the people, and make money doing it. That can't be wrong...

Herringbone

The Lake Isle of Doramir works on an honor economy: instead of paper or metal money, the people of this Doramir are granted or denied access to privileges—the best fishing areas, well-situated homes, the greatest influence in community decisions—based on their reputation for honor. This reputation is established by way of a herringbone necklace. Each person is allotted a number of herringbones, which they paint in specific, individual colors. They carry these bones with them to give to friends and neighbors who, for example, help with a particularly unpleasant task, donate time to public works, or provide a particularly wise or innovative idea to the island. The herringbones they recieve they string onto necklaces, and those with the greatest number and variety of colors are treated to the finest clothes, the most food and drink, and the greatest amount of respect, which they prize above all else.

Arriving in this Doramir, then, you arrive as a pauper. Fortunately, as a trader, you are able to exchange your goods for theirs, which you ferry over the calm waters of the lake on a massive barge. But after a series of fair transactions, you’ve still not gained any herringbones to earn you passage back to the mainland when, loading your acquisition of bass and carp, you frontload too heavily and swamp the whole affair. You're stranded.

The trader who’d exchanged his fish for some of your wool sees your predicament and invites you to dinner with his family. Angry at your own stupidity, you tell him you’ll camp on the beach and spend the night bailing out the barge. He laughs at your frustration and takes you to the community icehouse where, with his own herringbones, he buys you a block of ice large enough to cover the fish that otherwise would have spoiled on the shore.

Without any bones of your own, this is a debt you can’t repay, so you offer your thanks instead. “It's nothing,” he says. “The bones come and go.” The man who minds the icehouse gives him back two of the brightest-colored bones, and adds two more of his own. “See?” says your guide. “I’ll help you shave your ice, and then we'll eat with my family.”

His attitude does a lot to cool your ire, and by the time the work of preserving the fish is done, you’re in a better mood. You take two of the largest bass (but not the single largest, your prize, which you expect to sell to a certain posh, inland restaurant you know), clean them, and present them to the man’s wife as a gift. In exchange, she gives you a green and gold herringbone, a glass of wine, and a plush cushion to lie on.

People here are social, you find, and your presence only draws an added number of friends and neighbors, curious to meet one of the money-spenders from the mainland. They come with small gifts, bottles of wine and beer, pipes of tobacco and hashish, cured herring and pickled shark fin. One man brings a guitar, your host provides bongos and himself plays a bit of the flute.

Their dialect is hard to follow, but their mood is easy enough to read—they take pleasure in good company. Not understanding their conversation makes it easier to learn from their interaction, and everywhere you see evidence of their preoccupation with generosity, kindness, and interdependence. Bottles pass freely from hand to hand, they urge the tastiest morsels upon one another, fight to tell the funniest jokes, and the hostess keeps more cushions on hand than her family could use in a year.

When one man, drunker than the rest, upsets a glass of wine onto a white cushion, he is overcome by shame to the point where he can’t even beg her pardon. The hostess laughs. “We’ve all gotten drunk and wrecked a cushion or two,” she says, waving away his stammered apologies. A few people throw her herringbones, but no one takes any away from the drunk man, who excuses himself shortly after. You see how their economy, which you at first took for a naive system, is actually based on quite a reliable principle: everyone knows what is the right thing to do. There's no confusion, and there is nothing arbitrary about it.

It occurs to you that valuing honor makes far more sense than assigning value to pieces of paper and metal.

You also notice that their ideas of honor take precedence over other means of classifying and dividing people. There are people of all different skin colors at this party, ugly people chatting with beautiful people, two men who are clearly in love entertain the group with what seem to be the funniest stories. They all wear their herringbone necklaces, honor hanging bright and colorful around their necks. They all belong.

It is late and people are quite drunk when you see one of the women pocket a stone carving as she passes through the kitchen. She sees you see her, and freezes. Your own sense of honor is not so highly developed—is it better for you to let her off, or to expose her crime? Fortunately you are saved the decision, because the man next to you is not so drunk that he can’t tune into the tension which has mounted between you and the kitchen. He yells at her, forces her to turn out her pockets. In addition to the carving, she has stolen a spoon and a small mirror. She gives the hosts a number of her herringbones, but apparently not enough—the mood of the room remains tense until she hands over half again what she’d already given. Then she herself begins to yell, and point at you. “That foreigner saw me and didn’t tell anyone! He’s a money-spender, an honorless dog!” At this the entire room becomes outraged, and for insulting a guest the woman is stripped of her remaining bones and sent out into the night with her shame.

“She will not have enough of a necklace to come back here for weeks,” your host tells you. He says that you should have exposed the woman’s crime, as if explaining morality to a four year-old. “A herringbone necklace is one thing,” he further explains. “Honor itself means doing what’s right when there’s no one to see you.” Ashamed of your failure, you hand him your sole herringbone. He refuses to take it, and instead hands you one of his own, painted garnet and silver. You’ve learned something of honor.

In the morning, everyone you met the night before comes to help you bail out the barge. With two-dozen hands, the work goes quickly. For their pains, you give each one of them a fish, and each of them gives a herringbone to you as a new friend well-met. But your prize bass you keep wrapped in a tarp, out of sight. The merchant who sold it to you knows you have it stashed, but he doesn’t say anything. You’re under no obligation to give it away.

By the time you’ve finished saying goodbye to your new friends, they’ve threaded your bones onto a necklace of respectable thickness and variety. “The next time we meet,” your host tells you, “You can bring the wine.” You thank him for his hospitality, and give him some of the bones you’ve collected, which he now accepts.

When you’re out of sight of the shore, you take out your prize fish. The black tarp must have soaked up the morning sun, because the ice runs out into a puddle of warm water. Your prize fish stinks. It’s rotted from the inside out. You stand there with the decaying carcass in one hand, your necklace of herringbones in the other. The fish you throw overboard, along with a single bone from your necklace. The rest of the herringbones you stow in your rucksack, for when you return.

A Boy Named Bird

“I awoke sweating, covered in paint. My childhood real forever.” James Serafino, A Boy Named Bird

If you’d known this was the Doramir of Childhood Games you’d never have come. Your peaches are rotting in the sun, and anyways there is little time in your life for games. Besides, most of your memories from childhood are painful ones, though whether or not you led an unhappy childhood is something you can no longer recall. Those days are gone, and good riddance, or so you’d thought.

But how long and straight this road! Perfect for shadow-racing, and today you might just get the jump on that black-suited tagabout. Now you’re off! The cobblestones blur and the whole world bounces. You’d forgotten what a joy it is to go so fast!

As you run, you see the city built of games. Checkerboards the size of city blocks, chutes and ladders built ten stories tall, and the screams of delight echoing through the alleys, whispering down the lanes. But the best games don’t rely on boards and boundaries, pieces and rules—the best games are the ones you invent yourself. And the children of this Doramir know that.

“Tag!” shrieks a pigtailed girl, leaping from the orange grove. You race after her, running and running, but she stays always just a step ahead. She is bigger and faster than you. Now the trees are grown so-tall, reaching like leafy armed giants into the sky, and your strides have gotten smaller, your feet buried in the thickness of sweet-smelling grass.

It is not until you fall and skin your knee that she draws up beside you. “Don’t cry,” she says, and unwinds a thick yellow ribbon from her hair. ‘No way it will fit my leg,’ you think. But it does, and with length to spare. The blood soaks through immediately, but her kind care takes most of the pain away, and you are ready to run again.

“Come with me,” she says, and you follow, slowly now, and that’s okay, through the woods where leaves drop yellow as ribbons twirling in the air. The rotting peaches are long gone from your mind. In their place, golden leaves spinning in the bluest sky, her white dress on tan skin on green grass, and red blood soaking beautifully, painlessly into yellow silk. The smell of oranges still ripening on the tree. The day is as open as a smile, an adventure forever beginning. Someday, when you are grown, you will travel the whole world looking for precisely this feeling. But right now you carry it with you, wherever you will go.

“I’m going to show you the best game in Doramir,” she tells you. “But first you have to tell me your name.”

This seems like something you should know. You look around and suddenly see that you cannot see, a labyrinth of thick trunks, and you strain into the deepening shadows, as if, among the things concealed from sight, your name might be hidden. Where is your mother? Your mother would know. But where is she? And where are you, if you’re not with her? Lost! You’re lost! You’ve run too far from home, and now you’re nowhere, and you’ve lost your name. The hotness fills your head, burns in squeezed-off streams from your eyes. The world blurs and throbs, the trees closing in.

“It’s okay,” says the girl. Maybe she’s right. Maybe it is okay. Her voice sounds like home. “Don’t cry. We’ll give you a new name.”

“But I don’t want a new name. I want my own name!”

“A new name is better than no name at all, isn’t it?” Her eyes are friends.

“I guess.”

“Okay then. Your new name is…your new name is Bird.”

“Bird?” You stop crying to consider. The name has a certain appeal. It’s a small name, but one that can fly. “Okay,” you agree, and the tears are gone as if they’d never existed at all. You don’t have your mother, but you do have a friend, and this is okay for now. “What game are we going to play?”

“The best game in Doramir,” she says. “But first we have to climb the lookout.”

“Climb the lookout? What do we have to do that for?”

“To lookout for pirates. Duh.”

This seems like a wise plan of action to you. Already you are learning something of caution, and your hands, unnoticed, have grown a bit. You climb ahead. From the top of the tree you can’t see much at all, only the thick-leaved boughs forever waving hello to each other. “There!” she says, pointing into the leaves. “Pirates!” And sure enough, there’s a black flag flying over the trees. “Look this way,” she says. “You can see all of Doramir from here. Games and groves and rivers and homes. You can see the whole world!”

She’s right about that, too. When you close your eyes, the whole world is exactly what you see. Mountains and oceans, deserts, swamps, and city upon city upon city. Unnoticed, your hands start to shrink again. “You know,” you tell your new friend, “I think I’d like to stay in this tree forever. We could make a bed in this crook here, and whenever we needed something we could lower down a bucket, and someone would bring it for us.”

“That’s a stupid idea,” she says, still on the lookout. The tree begins to shrink. The leaves block your line of sight in every direction. Now the mountains and oceans, the cities beyond number seem close enough to touch, hidden as they are behind every leaf. You feel this fierce compulsion to run again through that grove, to touch every tree, and if the pirates find you, then so be it. You will fight them off.

So overwhelming is this urge that you leap down from your perch. “Where are you going?” your friend yells. “The game isn’t over yet!” But you don’t care. All you want is to run and run and run. You don’t know why. The why and the knowing, they’re the same thing. What you think you know is that if you run fast enough, and never stop running, no one will ever be able to call you names.

You reach the long, straight road that led you into the city. The same road now will lead you out. “You’re it!” your friend tags you and runs off, looking back to see if you’ll chase. But your taste in chases has changed. You have grown again, but you are still Bird—a small thing, but a thing born to fly. You can rest in a tree, but your home is the forever sky, the eternal emptiness of blue.

“I’m sorry I called you stupid!” she yells from the grove. But you’ve already become an adult, and adults just can’t hear very well. Nor can they see that sometimes the names people call you are the names that give your life shape and meaning. It’s too late for you, though. Your childhood has become real forever.

Canyon

Two days south of the great inland lake, in the highest of the highlands, there is a Doramir built into the face of a canyon. The rich live at the bottom, nearest the river, where the oxygen is thick enough to taste and the trees drop red, ripe cherries. The poorer classes live higher and higher up the walls which enclose the city, with the middle class inhabiting well-appointed caves on the rock face, and the poorest, the factory workers, living on the windswept plateau in barrios of tin and cardboard. There the trees drop nothing but sadness. It falls from the branches along with the leaves, and is carried through the streets on the mistral that brings the winter.

The factories of this Doramir are chiefly engaged with the manufacture of knowledge. They first obtain raw knowledge, procured by trade agreements forged between the wealthy of this city and all the people of all the Doramirs, from the inhabitants of the pine forests, the fishermen of the coastal lowlands, the desert dwellers who draw their life painstakingly from the scorched earth. This knowledge is then transported to the factories, where it is processed, packed into consumable forms: books, pills, carbonated beverages, bottles full of invisible gas, and what have you.

The poorest classes live nearest the factories, are everyday set to work at cramming knowledge into these various products, and are paid based on their standing in the community. Those who work hardest, complain least, conform most completely to the mores of their class, in short, those held in highest esteem by their superiors, receive the highest wages, which they are free to spend on such frivolities as are available to them: finer clothes, padded furniture, alcoholic drinks. The classes who live in the caves, with brightly painted walls and no leaks in their ceilings, away from the sadness-bearing trees, are entrusted with the distribution of these knowledge goods. A portion is allotted to the originating city or tribe, a portion carved off for general sale in the richer Doramirs, and another, the greatest portion, is reserved for the owners of the factories, who take the pills, read the books, drink the elixirs themselves, and also give them to their children in the same way most parents foist tasteless vegetables on their kids, and for the same reason. These citizens who live beside the river venture rarely to the factories. While the working classes go every day, it is enough that the owners put up their money, and contribute the occasional innovation.

You, traveling overland, reach the tin homes first. You arrive at the central market, but instead of farmers and merchants gathered to ply their trade individually, you find a vast cement building where the fluorescent lighting sucks the colors from the fruits and vegetables. The meats are all wrapped in plastic and stored in freezers, the spices all dried and screwed into jars. All the other goods—umbrellas, clothing, children’s toys—are made of synthetic fiber and plastic rods. The prices are machine printed, stuck to the products, obviously non-negotiable.

You speak to some of the people here, inquiring about a market for fresh produce, hand-made goods. “Why would we want that?” the people ask back. “We have the convenience of our supermarket, which allows us to get everything we need in the shortest amount of time with the least expenditure of energy. That way we can spend more of our time at home after work.” From speaking to the people, you begin to gain an idea of the life they lead. You learn that the various corporations administrate all the affairs of the town. They build the houses, supply the markets, pay the doctors and the teachers. The people’s lives revolve around their jobs for this reason—without a job, they could hardly live. Even were a person to save enough money to quit their job and work solely for their own benefit, or to go into business for themselves, they would not have access to even the most basic resources. “Why don’t you form a government independent of the corporations?” you ask some of the people, but they only shrug their shoulders and tell you that this is how things are, and so it must be for the best.

Moving down the paths which traverse the cliffs, you find small markets for fruit and produce, but no one able, or even willing, to trade in bulk. Because their schools, jobs, and supermarkets are all organized like factories, the people think only in terms of production and consumption. They have lost their affinity for private commerce. You ask them if they’d not live a more independent, perhaps a more prosperous life by working in trades of their own choosing. “Perhaps,” they reply, “But this way, we always have security. Besides, this is how everyone here lives, so it must be for the best.”

And at the riverside, you find people with their needs well satisfied. Their children swim in the clean water while the parents converse, and ripe cherries all but drop into their mouths. “Don’t you feel guilty living in such ease while so many live beneath the trees which drop sadness from their limbs?” The people here look to their children, or look to the sky beyond the walls of the canyon. “We didn’t dig this canyon from the stone, and we didn’t plant the sadness-bearing trees. We only came to live by the river, and by our resources we distribute knowledge to the many Doramirs. If we live an easier life than most, it is all for the best.”

Having found nothing of value in this city, you leave. For all the people’s conviction to the contrary, there are better Doramirs than this.

Multitude

This Doramir is a shocker: everyone looks like you. Everyone is you. You at all ages. There are both men and women: you never would have guessed that you had such a populous feminine side. There are many sides to yourself, actually, that you’ve never explored. Exploring the world has always seemed enough. In other lands, those customs which have suited you became or already were a part of you. Those which didn’t indicated also something of yourself, helped you to draw and redraw the vague borders of a self-perception within which you have always been comfortable.

Here, everyone seems foreign at first glance. Then, on closer inspection, people become instantly recognizable. You only failed to identify gestures, reactions, attitudes because they were aspects of you divorced from the whole. Detached from your blundering reserve, it is hard to identify the furious impatience of the man in the window berating his wife. Perhaps you choose not to identify with him. In a little girl dangling upside down from the lowest branch of a magnolia tree, you are at pains to detect the carefree moods which sometimes steal upon you in sight of waterfalls, or as you overlook the arc of the world from the very tops of mountains.

You are repulsed by this city. The only reason you push on is that you know every traveler here likewise sees their own face. This Doramir is more than just a city existing to mock or enshrine you. Perhaps it is less: only a mirror, a simple trick of light. In either case, the people who make their homes here existed before you came, and will continue on with their individual lives after you have gone. Perhaps, to each other, they all wear faces of their own. Does this imply that every traveler who comes here comes with the exact same numbers and types of selves? Does every wanderer sometimes bloom like a girl among magnolias?

Selves you see on the way to market: a gondolier with a fine voice; a woman with eyes that see everything; a rich man with eyes that see nothing; a boy counting the clouds; a mother nursing her infant. A village idiot stumbling drunk through the streets, engaged in some hilarity with himself: what choices and turns of fate allowed you to escape this possibility? What must you avoid in the future, to keep from awaking this self who slumbers inside you?

The men in the market come as something of a respite: they reflect the one self to which you are accustomed. Their calculated reticence, their casual familiarity, even their well-concealed greed do not trouble you. Nevertheless, you conclude your business quickly, and immediately head back towards your caravan. Let your men come without you to make the exchanges and load the wagons. You’d rather make the long walk around the city, outside the walls.

But, trying to find a shortcut, you lose your way. The road which seemed to head north in reality bends gradually southward. Reaching a fork, you take the route branching northeast, which winds subtly until you’re headed due east. At fork upon fork you choose the northern road, and time and again find yourself headed in the wrong direction until at last you’ve lost track of the twists which brought you to the place where you now stand.

Then, when you can sense your proximity to a main street by the smell of car exhaust, you are accosted by a man with a knife. His similarity to you is such that, for a moment, you cannot tell if you are you or if you are him. The difference is that desperation has undone him: perhaps he was himself robbed at knifepoint, and now must steal to survive, to gather the means to leave this city and reclaim his own face. Whatever the case, he is upon you before you can reason with him, before you can show him that you carry nothing of value. But his desperation makes him impatient and heedless, and his starvation has made him weak. You soon have the upper hand. By the time your red vision has cleared, you have already eased the knife into his throat. It is now too late to take a different road. Beneath your hands, a man with your face is gurgling on his own blood, feet waving like an infant’s, striking futilely against the spit-splattered asphalt. Then he is dead, sacrificed so that a better, or a stronger, or only a luckier version of yourself might live. Suppose he had killed you, found your caravan and taken command, regained the life he’d lost? What would then be the difference between you and him?

At this point, the difference is clear: he is a victim, and you have blood on your hands. If someone sees you, you will soon enough find yourself plunged into a fate even worse than his. You drag the body into a corner and bury it in garbage. You clean the blood from your hands with newspapers which tell stories of less immediate bloodshed. Then you carry on in the direction you’d been heading, and shortly find the main thoroughfare. It is crowded with people who wear your face, showing no traces of guilt. You move quickly. Your hands will bear cursory inspection, but there is still blood under your fingernails. When a police officer stops you, you adopt the air of a man out for a stroll, put your hands casually in your pockets. It is unconvincing.

“What’s the trouble?”

“No trouble.”

“You’re in a hurry.”

“I just bought a load of mangoes, I want to get them on ice as soon as possible. I’m a trader.”

“Where’s the blood from?”

You make the mistake of looking at your hands, tell him you slaughtered a lamb for dinner the night before. But as is the case with one who lives their life without mirrors, you failed to take account of the state of your own face. It is splattered with fresh blood.

The officer takes you immediately before a judge, as is the custom in this Doramir, and returns to retrieve the body from the place you’ve indicated. From his appearance, you hope, the judge will recognize your victim’s desperate straits, and this will corroborate your story.

The judge seems to be a careful woman. She looks just like you, but lacks the restlessness which has so long set the course of your life. Will she hold your fluttering hands against you? You are suddenly aware of the mud on your boots and, for that matter, the blood on your face. How must you appear to this self seated in judgment of you? As you sacrificed the man in the alley, will she now sacrifice you to a higher justice? When she looks at you, does she see her own face smeared with blood? It is hard to say. You have never, or at least not since puberty, stood before a mirror and levied passionless judgment upon yourself.

You tell your story, but the judge wants more. Are you married? Where do you call home? What kind of family do you come from? Any siblings? What lives have they chosen? Do you have a history of violence? Previous encounters with the law? Over the course of a few dozen questions, she has extracted a sketch of your life. What, then, will she infer about the state of your soul? You wish, perhaps for the first time, that you knew more of yourself. That you had a few simple sentences on hand to characterize the life you’ve lived, to explain the choices you’ve made, to defend that restlessness which has driven you from city to city, but has never sent you exploring within.

At length the officer returns. He didn’t recognize the dead man, but several people said he fit the description of a trader who arrived several months earlier, was cheated at market, and had since been driven mad by the sight of his own face in the faces of those more fortunate than he. You yourself have never cheated anyone, nor been cheated, but you’ve come close on both accounts. Is that the lone fact which separates you from your would-be murderer? Which one of you, then, actually survived the encounter? Perhaps you are the one lying dead in an alley beneath a pile of coffee grounds and bloody newspapers.

You keep those ideas to yourself while the judge hands down her decision. She says that under these specific circumstances you were not to blame, but that this Doramir, as your case shows, is not conducive to the type of life generally led by itinerant traders. She hopes that if you do visit her city again, you will come with enough understanding of your own face that your fate does not become that of your victim.

You thank her, for her judgment was not so harsh as it could have been, and you head directly out of the city. But you do not stick to your original plan. Instead, you guide the caravan yourself, returning to the city to search the multitudinous faces of your several selves, looking for a clue.

Two Rivers

There is a Doramir at the confluence of two rivers where two pharaohs rule, earthly representatives of two opposing gods. One, a sun god, claims dominion over the day, crops, fire, the gathering of gold, and the destruction of useless things. He lives in a palace of white marble on the east side of the city. The other, a moon goddess, rules over the night, the waters, the spending of money and the creation of new things. She lives in a black marble palace on the city’s western wall.

Servants of the sun dress in white livery and work by day, harvesting, processing and selling crops, and demolishing the rotted quarters of the old city. The servants of the moon dress in black, and by night they dig and re-dig the irrigation canals in the fields, buy up the necessities of daily living, and raise buildings in the quarters where the sun’s followers have finished their work. There are also many people who, afraid of offending either deity, will wear by day the sun’s white, then do the work of the moon goddess every night. These people sleep only during the hours around dawn and twilight, and tend to fulfill their duties in a haze, never living fully in either world and never doing any job particularly well.

The two rulers are jealous of one another, and constantly compete for followers, so when you enter the town (wearing a brown tunic and blue jeans), sentries stop you and bring you before the pharaoh of the sun.

“You are a merchant,” the sun god tells you. “You sell your goods and gather gold by the light of day. This makes you my servant. You will renounce the darkness and all that it represents.” You see no reason to renounce the night, but even less to offend a king with well armed guards. So you put a white robe on over your clothes and hurry to the market to conclude your business and leave this city as quickly as possible.

The fertile river soil and the constant care given the crops mean that this Doramir raises lush produce which will fetch premium prices in any city in the country. The people of the sun, however, deal only in gold, and you are forced to wait until nightfall to sell your own goods to gather the money you’ll need. You traveled a long way today, and you will travel further tomorrow, if you want to bring these fresh fruits and vegetables to the markets on the other side of the mountains. So you go to the river and lay beside the bank to rest, and you fall deeply asleep, balling up the white robe in your rucksack to use as a pillow.

When you wake, it is dark, and the sentries of the night are upon you. You tell them you are a foreigner, which they can see from your clothes and hear in your accent—they bring you to the pharaoh of the moon.

“You allow my subjects to spend their money on the goods they need, so this makes you my subject, also.” If she sees any contradiction, she doesn’t let on. “Do you then renounce the burning light and swear your service to the healing moon?” Being a practical merchant, you agree. Before night falls again, you will be gone, never to return, and lush crops be damned.

So you leave, dressed in black, to sell off your spices and textiles, and you learn that many families in this Doramir have worked out their own system to survive the jealousy of their gods. The women wear black and take charge of the shopping, while their men devote themselves to the harvest. As a man wearing black, you are something of an oddity, but the women deal justly with you, and you do brisk business. By midnight you are asleep by the river again, having judiciously stowed both robes out of sight. At sunrise you will wake, dress in white, buy up a massive load of corn, yams, and strawberries, and leave the town well before dusk.

But as it turns out, just as in nature, there is a time when the two gods are forced to share their dominion. In the hour before sunrise, when the sun’s light has crept into the sky and the moon hangs all but hidden on the horizon, two sentries wake you. One wears black and one wears white, but they have both dealt with you before, and in due course realize that you have sworn yourself to both of their gods.

They bring you to the central plaza. If the pharaohs let you speak, you will defend yourself. You will point out that without both the water and the sun, their crops can’t grow. That without one god tearing down the festering walls, the other could not build, and that without women and men working together, the pharaohs will soon find that they hold power over nothing but a dead and ruined city.

Of course, these gods don’t deal in reason. The arguments you could make have all been outlawed. Instead they set you in the middle of the square between two fountains, one of white marble topped with a male figure in an open posture, the other in black marble featuring a female form turned in on herself. You are given a coin and instructed to toss it into the fountain of your choosing—at which point you will be in violation of one of your oaths. The plaza is ringed with sentries. If you’re lucky, the forsaken god will only strip you of your assets and expel you from the town. Less lucky, and you will be jailed, maybe executed.

First you choose a north-south line between the two fountains, and you try to leave the plaza that way. You are turned back. In their lust for clarity, the gods of this city recognize only two cardinal directions, two whole integer degrees, a fraction reduced to absurdity when divided by the infinity of real number possibilities.

Next you examine the coin in your hand, looking for a loophole. On one side, the sun. On the other, the moon. Flip or spin it as fast as you can: only one side is revealed at a time, the two obverse faces staring forever in opposite directions. There must be another solution. For all the gods’ insistence, and for all the faith of their followers, this is still the real world you inhabit, a world of infinite directions. North and south, southeast, north-northwest, up and down…

Then you have it. It is full daylight now, the time for buying. With one of your own coins, you buy a spade. You pry up five tiles from the center of the square, and in full view of the gods you dig down into the earth, soft and yielding beneath the artificial floor of stone. You dig deep, sweating profusely as the sun strives towards the meridian. As its full light shines on you, you find what you knew would be there.

You smash the shovel through the pipe, the single source of both fountains, itself siphoned off from the place where the two rivers converge. Almost immediately, the two fountains stop flowing and your hole fills with water. For a moment, you are afraid you will drown in this pit of your own construction, deeper than you are tall, but the water buoys you up. As you climb out of the hole, the water begins to spill out, heading to all sides of the plaza, spreading equally and simultaneously in all possible directions, lapping at the base of both fountains. When the water is trapped on the lip of the plaza, it begins to rise upwards.

Eventually the water stops flowing, weighed down under its own pressure, and you drop the coin into the hole you’ve dug. So have you made a choice, or chosen not to choose? Have you fooled yourself again into claiming the entire world as your own? When you leave this place, you will take only one direction. Maybe you will see all of the world's Doramirs, but you will see them one at a time, and each one you’ve left, each one you reach, will change even upon your arrival or departure.

And if you expected the sentries to cast off their robes and don all the colors of the rainbow, you were mistaken. They have each made a choice which defines them. Your choice, or refusal to choose, changes nothing in their eyes. Aligned behind their chosen gods, they wait for instructions, feet planted firmly under water.

But the pharaohs themselves must understand something of the wisdom upon which their dual rule is based: that it is not one or the other, but the tension between them which allows their people to flourish. So in their wisdom, they allow you to leave unharmed (taking a small price to cover the cost of repairs to the plaza). When you leave, you take with you several bags of gold, but you are permitted none of the crops grown from the soil of their ancient civilization.