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Home - Issue 2 - from A Letter from Atlantis Click here for Issue 1
Coming Soon! Issue 3

 

Imagine a city. Begin with its old quarter, a grid stretching perhaps six blocks inland from the eleven blocks that hug a riverbank congested with moored ships and bleating ferries. Line each narrow street and cobblestone alley with an unbroken façade of charming shops and cottages. The tropical sun that bakes the brick-and-stucco walls is unrelenting this time of year, so give each upstairs apartment a balcony, festooned with wrought-iron railings, to cast shade over the sidewalks below. Now fill those pavements with knots of tourists gawking at the quaint architecture and with locals jostling past them on the way back to work after leisurely lunches in the fine restaurants for which the city is known. Let the humid afternoon warmth damp the din of commerce and mute the clack of mule hooves and iron-shod wheels, the screech of automobiles, the jingle of coins dropped into a street musician's hat, the tolling of the cathedral's bell, the interrogative horns on the river. Thicken the air with sweet olive, coffee, rotting fish, gardenias, and burnt sugar. Allow the heavy buildings to waver in the heat. And provide every home there with someone writing at a desk or stirring a kettle of soup in the kitchen or dozing on an old couch. Let their children, playing in patios fringed with palmetto fronds bobbing in a warm breeze, squat beside the shallow pools of ornate fountains to tease golden fish feeding on mosquito larvae. Now spread the rest of the city across a low plain wedged between a long crook of the river and the vast bay to the north. Erect office towers, an opera house, universities, theaters, hospitals, schools, a stadium, factories, churches, an aquarium, warehouses, museums, stores, statues of heroes, a train station, and two hundred thousand homes. Divide the whole place into Irish neighborhoods and Italian, German and Vietnamese, Latin American and French. But reserve half the town for Africans. Invent an accent for them all to speak. Set a fleet of small shrimp boats afloat on the bay, dragging their nets behind them. Loose a tide of cars down the highways that crisscross the city and arc over the river in broad bridges. Speckle the sky with planes banking toward the airport. Have aH one, two, three thousand phones begin to ring. Suffuse the chatter of half a million people with coughs and curses, whispers and wheezes. Let a hundred dogs bark, fifty doorbells squawk their greetings, two hundred thousand television sets hawk the news, and a single lion in the zoo yawn. Provoke laughter until it ripples across the whole city. Now--while they're still laughing--unpeople the place. Scatter in boarded-up houses, especially in the poorest neighborhoods, twenty-five, fifty, maybe eighty thousand men, women, and their children. But evacuate everyone else. Unleash a few dogs and cats to stray in search of food. Let the traffic lights continue to blink. John Biguenet

 
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