Model City

In the city of the model makers, the population turns out once a year to judge an art competition, as in the intersections and plazas, the model makers present their miniatures of this Doramir. In their models, each artist strives to represent the city more faithfully than their competitors: in the materials—sandstone, cedar, stained glass—in the clothing and interactions of the wind-up dolls who populate the microcosm, in the names on the storefronts, which rarely remain the same from year to year.

To create their models, the makers spend a lifetime observing their city, watching it grow and wane, reproducing fluctuations through periods of decadence and decay. The most difficult task, however, is to render chaos.

Passing through the streets of this city, as any city, one is struck by the constant flow of random events: a broom clatters to the ground, startling a cat who runs into the street, causing a car to veer into a telephone pole, which sets a bank of row houses on fire, and the fire is extinguished by rain from a storm which began over an ocean three hundred leagues distant. The model makers’ children are raised from birth to hunt out the hidden causes which lurk behind apparent accidents, and to intuit relationships behind what appear to be unrelated events. To see that the broom was blown over by the first gusts from the storm which later extinguished the fire. Presumably, it is the pressure and near-impossibility of this lifestyle which leads so many model makers’ children to suicide. It is certainly the reason that so few models each year are judged a success.

Only a few artisans each generation are able to reproduce the secret behind verisimilitude: when the people gather to inspect the models of their city on the night of the solstice, it is not enough that they recognize the pothole which formed on their street the winter before, nor that they can identify the precise faded green of the turban worn by the madman who prowls the financial district, hollering tidings of doom during rush hour. It is not even sufficient for a maker to study each and every inhabitant to the point where they can cut the gears and cogs of individual mechanisms so precisely that a woman out for her daily wand of bread will raise her nose and walk by an enemy, but will stop to chat when randomly passing an acquaintance.

More than any of that, what the people most crave is a glimpse of the order which underlies chaos. They want to look down, in miniature, upon the storms which cause and extinguish fires, on the ringing phone that draws a man into the kitchen just before its vibrations trigger the collapse of his living room ceiling. Those cities which come closest to representing random chance are invariably judged to be the most accurate, even if the events which transpire in miniature don’t correspond to the history of the city. Better: it is around these models that the people gather to foretell their futures, to seek portents and draw auguries.

This Is Not a Story

Let me tell you the story of a Doramir I’ve seen, and if you believe me, so much the better.

I arrived in this city on a Wednesday to see the people all dressed up for their day of worship, which they practice in the streets. I went to a restaurant to have a meal, and found that every bite I took only made me feel less and less full. By the time I had put away a pork chop, two ears of corn, and a baked potato, I was famished. So I went to find a police officer to tell him that I’d been robbed, and I found two uniformed cops fleeing the scene of a bank heist, their pockets and holsters stuffed with stolen bills. I went to rest beneath a linden tree: its blossoms stunk of decaying fruit, and when I opened my eyes to go, I was infinitely more tired than when I’d first laid down.

Continuing on, I saw a woman forcing the lock to her lover’s apartment, a group of children in a sandbox discussing an equitable tax scheme, two grown men in well-cut suits squabbling in the dust over a marble until one, victorious, ran off with his spoils and the other laid down in the dirt to weep.

This Doramir has a very simple secret: to obtain the things you want, you have to seek out the opposite. So now when I am in this city and I want fulfillment, I don’t go to the restaurant district. Instead I concentrate on emptiness until it fills me. When I want justice, I look for a thief, and when I need to rest, I busy myself with work. For wisdom I look to the children, and when I long to convince myself of the innocence of pure selfishness, I look to the squabbling of men in well-cut suits. If I want religion, I don’t wait for the Sabbath, and I don’t seek it in the church.

This Doramir is not so different from other cities I’ve known. In fact, every time I try to leave it, I find myself arriving here again. Even in unfamiliar quarters of far-off cities, I still find myself trapped by the falsehood implicit in the things I know to be true.