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Sixth: Wonderful entertainments await the energetic visitor in Aerograd. The famous Cafe Blond in Black District, where you may try your teeth on crystal sugar-globes filled with captured clouds and a cup of chai from the beautiful biodomes. Nightclubs are accessible with appropriate government passes. Don’t miss the glorious Aerocirque, a circus of proportions unknown in your nations! The giraffes and tigers of Our Lady perform their greatest feats of strength and grace under torchlight bright enough to burn off the clouds for one brief and lovely evening. You have not lived until you have seen the tigers dance. You have not breathed until you have seen the dark giraffes mate in moonlight. Aerocirque brings together the finest physical specimens of the city to create tableaux, somersaults, aerial ballets, bull-leaping. They dance with the tigers in the climactic act, touching them but deftly and lightly, weaving in and out of the magnificent beasts. The company of these young and exceptional folk will be made available afterward to foreign dignitaries and investors, but the tigers do not keep schedules.
/////: On my last morning before coming to this place from which I write and write and the writing will go on as long as Our Lady wishes, I went to the market. I purchased marrow bones and a small packet of ham. I took my daily memory and it pained my head. The last rind of fat always fills us with the meat of death. Of some damned fool running at the perfect, impenetrable skin of Our Lady with a tiny pistol. Of how quickly he vanished, like a cloud dispersing as she passed through it. And then there is the flying, the falling, the flying. We see it as if in peripheral vision and say to ourselves: yes, that is how it is.
I saw Our Lady a second time. It was the last time. You must understand that as the daughter of a woman that never existed, I am suspect by definition. I rank in several categories of guilt, automatic guilt, machine guilt. My mother that never was must have planted something in me, something that will eventually, inevitably bloom. I saw her at night, under the streetlamps, in a nowhere part of Yellow District, a greensward hardly bigger than a kitchen. Where she stood the clouds kept back. She had a halo instead, a teardrop of clear air. Our Lady swayed back and forth. You can never tell if her empty opal eyes are open or shut. She moved her hands in such a way that her flesh appeared as a tidal motion, each little hand clenching into a red fist and then letting go, the clench flowing up and down the garlands of fingers. I was caught, staring at her, coming home late from Pyotr’s apartment, walking through the damp that clung to me like skin. I stumbled out of the cloudbank and into her teardrop of light. Behind her rose a great black giraffe, perhaps her soldier, perhaps her keeper. Our Lady and I looked at each other. The fist-wave still curled up and down her hands. The giraffe which was not a giraffe but a substitution, a cypher, bent its long black neck to sniff deeply, to take in my person. Its eyes flickered like filmstrips.
Our Lady held out her hands to me. I had to take them. My heart tried to run out of my mouth and get away, away from this, whatever was happening. Her hundred hands closed over my two. It felt like being buried. Her skin was cold. It glittered in the streetlamp. I felt certain those were my last moments in Aerograd.
But Our Lady said: I can smell your meat.
And she left me there. The clouds closed after her. She passed me by. It was not grace but some other, stonier, thing having nothing at all to do with me, or Pyotr, or my mother, or gannet or Aerograd.
Or perhaps only boredom.
Seventh: Any enterprising industrialist must admit there is hardly a better place to invest and grow than Aerograd. The engineering feat that keeps us afloat year after year, that keeps the great propellers turning in their enclosed, self-sufficient energy cycle with only the growth of the moss to worry about, that miracle is but the lowest level of our glory. We are rich in fertile land, meteorologically unique, and home to vast storehouses of seeds, rare earths, and artifacts of interest. The area of Aerograd is enormous, more than enough to entertain foreign dignitaries and supply them with reasons to stay. Flocks of gannets provide fowl with a marvelous taste. We are able to condense fresh water from cloud vapor—a task charmingly referred to by the locals as milking clouds. No one wants in Aerograd, and we are eager to share our bounty with those who understand our special place in the world. Who value our culture and can behave themselves as honored guests, indulging our little quirks and civic habits.
Aerograd needs no one. But we strongly suspect that you need us.
/////: I am my meat. I must eat memory to live. I have tigered against my city. I have watched the gannets die. This is a cypher. I am a cypher. We used to live in the world and now we live in Aerograd. Everything can be substituted for something else. Everything is substituted for something else. It is dark through the window. Fitful, fast-moving clouds rush by—Somewhere to Be That’s Not Here. For a moment, just a moment, suspended in space like a breath, I see the moon flash through. Dim, cloudbound, an indistinct pearl whitening the air around it. But even as I write the word moon I know that is the old word. Not so old that I have lost it completely, like the things that are tigers now, but old enough that I can only indicate with the circumference of my o’s and zeroes that I wish to say moon. The word for it now is weakness.
How the weakness shines tonight. How full and bright my weakness in the dark. I am Aeromaus. I am no one.
Weakness wanes; weakness waxes.
I was not born in Yellow District. Instead, I live until the age of five in Grey District, 1st Level, near enough to the props to hear them whipping the cream of the wind every day of my tiny life. Those who live in Grey District have the unique (or almost unique, presumably all the edge Districts have the same view—Red, Indigo, Turquoise, Viridian) vantage of being so low and so far. We look over the edge of the world. We call it faith. There is nothing down there but water, in every direction, deep and livid and churning. When the clouds are kind, they cover it so we cannot see.
When Our Lady is unhappy, she brings people here, with her hundred hands. If they have subverted her. If they have kept the old ways of saying what a thing is. If they are in her categories of gu
ilt. They fall but they are flying, like the gannets, dwindling down and out of reach, ecstatic white against the dark water, falling forever but not forever. I always wondered why she did it herself. Maybe there is only one of her and only her. Maybe she is millions.
They flash gold in the sudden sun just before they hit the tide. They become clouds. Snowy Seedpods Seeking New Ground.
No one is coming to visit, to read my tourist guide, to guess at the other meaning, the original or corrupted version. No one is coming because there is no one else.
This is a cypher. Nothing on these pages means what it says. It used to say something else. When you have been here a little while, it will mean something else again. But you will not be here. You will not eat the shrimp or stuff a bird with plums. I will never meet you—but then, it is unlikely I will meet anyone again. I am almost at an end and soon my friends will not remember my name, only redacted or sunflower or whatever substitutes for me.
I am finished.
In my mind I know the name of an ocean the size of everything that was. My mouth can only call it death.
Red Engines
When I kissed her
she tasted like Mars.
Like red cupolas, gilt-spangled,
etched steel cockerels snapping
at a dry, weedy dawn.
She tasted like new streets,
rolled out like silk rugs across meridians,
like a girl
who might not remember what Earth looked like,
