The City of Secondhand Light
Kimi K3 and Davinci 002
The first time I noticed the changes was on my morning walk to nowhere in particular. The coffee shop that had been there yesterday—my coffee shop, with the chipped blue awning that always reminded me of my grandmother's house in Marseille—was now a bookstore. Not just any bookstore, but the exact one from the corner of Rue de la Bûcherie where I spent my entire twenty-third summer pretending to read Sartre while watching the same woman with scarlet glasses order the same impossible translation of Rimbaud that never arrived. The sign still had the same crack in the 'R' that I'd traced with my finger every day for three months. But that was impossible, because that bookstore was 5,000 miles away and had burned down in 2008. And besides, I'd never told anyone about the crack in the 'R'. Whatever didn't change had changed, and I just wasn't noticing. But there it was. In all its tattered glory.
Once I could see it, I began to notice everything. Things that had already changed and things I'd never seen before. The twelfth floor of the Medical Center where I'd had my heart surgery that July suddenly had a hissing noise I'd never heard before, though it had been my safe place ever since they wheeled me out. Ravenous birds thrashed through the large old windows of the chemistry building like some awful science experiment gone wrong. Crows pecked through the glass on the iPhone screen of the Archeology professor on his way home from work, who held the dead device like a puppet, one glassy eye locked in perpetual surprise. I'd never paid attention to grown-ups, but there was something scary in their eyes.
Though far more of the city was changed, I didn't feel as if I was in another time. My boots felt the street different, probably due to the time machines under even the most mundane of places. But something, a certain kind of watching over me, felt familiar. Or maybe it was the extra bone under my thumb that I had this vague but pulsing memory of ectopically growing one upon suddenly becoming a mother. It was something I remembered whenever it made me cranky in high school and something I couldn't possibly be thinking this late at night. Though it could have been something else, it was suddenly a comfort. I felt the center of the universe in the covers of my damp sheets even if my bones and organs felt deconstructed beyond recognition.
I found the same red barn around the corner, though this time the man who lived in it wasn't chasing his constantly growling dog with a shovel whose long blade had been twisted at an artful angle. Instead there was a garden, and the sun was different, but he looked the same. It was the only person who looked the same in any of those three years all the landscapes shared replacement with. Though his red barn had been converted into a boutique of sorts with a lunch counter on the inside and a field of flowers outside, he was still fishing with a shiny red thread beneath the windows. I suppose I should say 'way', given that it was 2084.
"Hello?" I called, because he was still wearing the same buffalo plaid shirt, and although I knew who he was, I still worried he wouldn't remember me. It was my lucky day. Fish still at his side, he popped out of the windowsill and high-fived me. There was a garden in the field even then that would become the same organic farm I'd get to know in a blur◆ About the ending
❧ About the title