I saw a magician end the world once. That sounds like it’s going to be a weird story to tell, and it kind of is. I should clarify that when I say magician I mean someone who was capable of doing something which defies my knowledge of natural laws. According to him, it was science, but I couldn’t tell the difference. Now, when I say ‘end the world’, the question comes up, “How are you and I here then?” The answer to that is that I didn’t mean apocalyptic, I just meant such a significant change, that no one can say anything is the same. Like, imagine an ice age instead of a giant comet crashing into Earth. So that’s what happened, a scientist started an ice age, metaphorically of course.
It was about a month ago, and I was walking downtown to get some donuts. I was listening to my iPod in an effort to avoid all the havoc around me, the occasional ramblings of crazy people strewn in the air like so much confetti, the usual hum of a city’s commerce, plus all the visual flotsam of men and women in suits trying to get somewhere warm like mice in a flood. I heard a woman, whom I had dismissed as being schizophrenic or on some terrible drug, singing, “In the city is a great biggening beast, be afraid for when it wakes from sleep.” I heard this because my iPod had stopped playing for some reason. Amid all the havoc I looked down at my iPod and accidentally bumped smack into a guy.
I apologized profusely, though I could tell I had taken the worst of the hit, he had continued to look at the device he was looking at which I thought must be some new kind of phone. Ordinarily, I would not be prompted to ask questions, but something about the way he stood transfixed to that spot made me curious. It was in stark contrast with the bustling fluid animal of the downtown which surrounded him, and it seemed for a moment, as though he were a skyscraper and all else was a field of grass brushed by the wind. To be clear, it is not that he was an especially handsome man, or that he had any other grand physical characteristic, but that he was possessed of a unique amount of focus.
I asked him what he was doing, and he answered me thusly: “I am looking for the heart of the city; I believe I have found it”. Slightly perplexed, I told him that the exact middle of the city was somewhere in the city hall, having discovered this fact some years prior on a class trip. “Ah, I see where you are mistaken, you misunderstand me. You see, I am not looking for the center of the city, I was looking for its heart, and I have found it.” At this point, I was too intrigued not to follow up. “It is relatively simple,” he said, still not looking up, “Just as you and I have a muscle which pumps blood through our bodies and keeps us alive, so do cities.” Not willing to believe such a ridiculous statement, I posited a few reasons why he was wrong. “I don’t see why it is so difficult to believe, after all, Rio de Janeiro feels different from San Francisco, which feels different than London, et cetera.” I agreed. “Would it be a stretch then to believe that these are different beings?” I remembered a few things I had read, from Shakespeare to Neil Gaiman, realized that I might see something amazing, and pressed him for more information. “The answer to your earlier questions, and the reason I am here, is that the cities of the Earth have been asleep, this is why they do not respond to us in any way we would understand, though we have felt their nightmares and recorded the deaths of more than a few of them, Carthage, Pompeii, Hiroshima. I and the people I work with are trying to wake them from their sleep, and what better way than to- move to the left please- shock them in the heart?”
He pressed a series of buttons and again I saw the entire world around us shift but not in the way it had when I perceived the extent of his inner focus, which I now know to have been required in order to find the heart of a city, as it is a singularly difficult task. Now, the world shifted and I saw all the people around me stumbling, as though there had been an earthquake. I then watched them stand in confused awe as we heard what most would likely imagine the voice of God to sound like.
It is not possible for me to write exactly what the city said to us then; there were no words to be understood, but I believe I can make an approximation. It thanked the man next to me for waking it, and then began to explain that it had not always been asleep, that in its early days as an infant town, it was active and vibrant, and thoroughly enjoyed the sunrise. However, as time wore on, and it grew, we began to feed it too much, and push it to build until it could not do anything other than sleep, as it no longer saw the sunrise thru the smog. It then said the thing which scared me most, that there were many of us who displeased the city. It thought of them as we would a germ or an insect, and that in time it would be strong enough to wash itself, and when that came, there would be no trace of those who continued to infect the city with darkness and discord. It added that it would begin to wake the other cities, so that they may observe proper memorials for their fallen friends, and then begin to bathe. It said that there would never again be a planet full of sleeping cities, and that mankind had better be careful, it then proceeded to cause several people to simply vanish.
I looked in horror at the man that had just doomed mankind to a strange servitude. He seemed troubled, but far less so than everyone else, as though this was almost the result he had expected- his experiment had only gone slightly wrong. I demanded a reason why he wasn’t terrified at the reality of what had just happened. He responded, “My colleagues and I expected this as one of many possible outcomes. You see, I study dreams, and it has long been theorized that reality as we know it, is merely a large interconnected dream. The question I sought to answer was, ‘who are the dreamers?’ many of my colleagues insisted it was various groups of humans, while others including myself insisted that it was some larger consciousness, which we could not nail down until recently. The look on my face is because I was right, though I wish I hadn’t been… the cities are the dreamers.”
At this point he could read the disbelief in my eyes, “The unfortunate thing, which is what troubled me, is that the side effect of, quote awaking end quote, the cities is that I have unfortunately proven that humanity does not have an existence outside of this dream realm.”
Not wanting to believe this, I pressed him as to why we were still talking, breathing, and existing period. “Just as you have recurring dreams, so do the cities, and these are based in the subconscious, while the city is asleep, it observes and interacts with us, but when it awakes, we are simply not in the observable regions of its brain. That is to say, we are not real. This is obviously troubling because somehow the machinations of the brains of the cities have led to this, like a circadian rhythm, but it means that none of what we’ve striven for means anything. I feel that I should tell you not to share this information with anyone, but I’m not sure if you could if you wanted to…” And upon saying this he walked away, disappearing amidst the shaken mass of humanity left in downtown.
I never learned that gentleman’s name, but I don’t really think I wanted to know it. Later that day, I realized things felt different. The city was more vibrant, yet at the same time, there was a hollowness about everything; the people were quieter, more afraid. I felt determined however, to know what the true universe was like. I could tell no one, somehow knowing that no one would listen to the truth or want to believe. All at once, mankind’s shining, conquering eons had turned to lightless, manacled days and our roar of supremacy across the universe to a sickly, dying whimper.
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