The Man With a City in His Head by Maxwell Jameson	Table of Contents part 1 part 2 part 3 part 4 part 5 part 6 part 7 part 8 part 9
part 1

He was a small man. He was unimpressive. He was stooped, frail, and walked with a hobble. His body was thin and slight beneath his baggy, shapeless clothing. He was insufferably old.

I can’t remember the first time he shuffled into my establishment, but I quickly grew used to the near-frightening sight of him making his way from the door to the counter, his legs seeming barely able to carry the weight of his body, his deep forehead creases furrowed and gleaming with sweat through his thinning white hair.

I tried to be kind. In Our City, we all did. But we had work to do. Other Citizens cascaded around him. I could feel them Share their muted frustration and their pity, and I felt justified in my own. They were striding confidently towards their destination, towards the duties that waited for them. None of us wanted to see or hear him. He was too much like the Takers. And their era was over.

Once he made it to the counter, his grimace of effort would disappear. He would smile to me as old men often do to young women. I sensed that at one time he’d been quite charming, one used to attracting the attention of women like me. Little did I know. He would greet me with a warm “Good day.”

“Good day,” I would say in return. Despite the flurry of Sharing, there was something in the smile that would cover his face, an open door I could not help but walk through.

“Lovely day,” he would say.

“Yes, it is,” I would say. A strange statement. In Our City, it didn’t matter whether it was a nice day or not. Nobody ever Shared that sort of thing. You approached each day like the one before. But I kept one foot in that door until he left the counter.

He would take his refreshment and sit down. He would attempt to address the other Citizens. He would proceed to make them uncomfortable.

“Now, I’ve seen that book before,” he would say in a warm, inviting voice.

The Citizen would look up, her displeasure coming in clearly. She did not see the open door.

“Oh yeah?”

“Yes, there... ah, that book... it comes from out of... this people... place... I once knew... where I once knew...”

The words came out as if they were making their way down a bumpy road. I could see the look of fear that came across people’s faces as his voice sloshed around his mouth, and I could feel it when they Shared their sense of disgust. It made me ashamed that I felt like I could understand what he was trying to say — could see the words he couldn’t quite find — and it made me think with shame of my past, that perhaps I’d yet to wipe all the dirt off myself.

But thankfully my establishment was so chock full of Citizens in need of service that I had little time to consider it further. Mine was one of the most popular in the Outer Districts. He would go on with his reading or his writing. He was easy to forget until the next day.

But on one day he guaranteed I’d never forget him again.

“Good day,” he said as usual after his his journey across the room.

“Good day,” I returned, preparing his usual refreshment.

“Is it really?”

I stopped.

“Excuse me?” I asked.

“Is it really a good day?” he asked. His voice sounded like an unraveling cloth. “You say it to me every day. I just want to be certain.”

I froze. My body tingled. This did not happen in Our City.

“I... I don’t know what you mean,” I said.

He laughed.

“What?” I asked.

“What ‘what’?” he said acrobatically. His voice was direct and clear, as if he’d borrowed someone else’s for the day.

“Why are you laughing?” I asked. For just a moment, he’d pried me out of Our City.

But his face changed. I knew he knew how I felt; even without Sharing, he somehow knew.

“I did not mean to frighten you,” he said. “I just wondered how happy you really were in your city.”

“Don’t you mean Our City?”

“No,” he replied, pointing with one chubby, liver-spotted finger to his temple, “I found one of my own.”

And it began:

I turned it over in my head. People had their own apartments, their own houses and businesses, such as my own. But they were always subordinate to Our City, just a small piece of the whole. That was how you became a Citizen of Our City. Otherwise, you were a Taker.

We all knew the Takers well. Some — like myself — more than others. They wandered around unformed. They slept in abandoned buildings. They were dirty, angry, grimy people who were universally reviled. There was no place for them, so they wandered endlessly, never truly belonging anywhere, feeding off the Citizens’ discarded scraps and struggling to keep all their hate and anger inside.

So his statement puzzled me. I began following his movements. I tried to look at every part of him except the head he’d pointed to. Because that head did not belong in Our City. But then where could it belong?

We all knew there were boundaries to Our City, but beyond them was nothing but ruins and wasteland. You either accepted Our City or you huddled in the cold, wet places and slowly rotted with the Takers. Or you became one of the subjects of our asylums, tolerated but ignored. I kept tabs on the old man, prepared to notify a Watcher when the time came.

But when Frederick the Writer began speaking to him, I knew this was different.

Frederick held a vaunted position in Our City. He was our conscience. The spokesman for our hopes. He provided words to go along with the elusive vibrations of Sharing. He wrote stories, novels and plays about other times — before Our City — when the forces of chaos and dissolution ruled, when the Annihilation came and the world as it was before was swept away, and certain brave people set in motion the events that would lead to Our City.

And he was one of the few prominent figures in Our City’s culture who chose not to live in the Floating Center. He came from these Outer Districts and here he stayed. And of all the establishments, he chose mine to frequent. He looked nothing like the old man. His deep brown skin and and sculpted physique set him apart immediately. His ancestry was different than the majority of Our City’s citizens. His people had been enslaved in the distant past, but after the Annihilation all previous social boundaries had been erased.

Frederick moved effortlessly from the door to the counter, often engaged in another task while doing so. He never made a faulty step. He always knew exactly what he wanted and exactly how much it would cost. His face was cut with the deep, graceful lines of a comfortable but hard-earned middle age. His life had not been easy, but still not so hard that he’d lost the spark of connection. He always wore a freshly-pressed suit that was perfectly proportional to his frame, the sleeves or pants legs never too short. I heard he wore it every day, even when he stayed home and wrote.

This was Frederick the Writer. And here he was, consorting with the awkward and confusing old man who barely seemed in control of his body.

But that day the old man was different. Something inside him had clicked into place. I saw him approach Frederick directly. His face showed focus and fortitude. He gestured with confidence. Frederick listened.

I was still worried. I did not want to lose Frederick. I thought for certain his brilliant mind would see the old man as nothing more than a Taker in disguise. That he would notice that my establishment and I seemed to attract Takers. That perhaps my past needed examination.

But I also worried for the old man. I felt protective of him. He seemed defenseless. He had no loved ones or relatives. If he were forced to leave, where would he go? To an asylum? I hated to think that was the only destination for his brand of vulnerable kindness.

But the next day surprised me even more:

Frederick returned and sat with the old man again. But he was not alone. He brought another man, who, like him, wore a freshly-pressed suit. But otherwise there was no resemblance.

This man was old — almost as old as the old man — as had a port, round body and a shock of wild, gray hair. He sat back in his seat that first day and just watched. His face had the same deep-set lines as Frederick’s, suggested the same gradually-built wisdom, but overlaid with an almost feral intensity, the sense that he was constantly confronting and analyzing the outer world through ruthlessly-maintained parameters. And so when the utterly incredulous look crossed his face, I knew my feelings about the old man were warranted. His deep blue eyes watched Frederick and the old man as if witnessing an atrocity.

They sat the whole day talking. The old man pointed to his head. The old man spoke at length. Frederick took notes. The other man stared.

It was one of my patrons who told me who the new visitor was. The patron was a young banker named Adam. He was a short, squat man, barrel-chested and thick-bodied. But he carried himself with the gravitas of a Citizen.

I saw him staring from the counter.

“I have never seen a man of that caliber in your establishment before,” he said.

“Who is he?” I asked.

Adam turned to me in disbelief. “You don’t know? How could you live in Our City and not know? That is Stephen the Historian.”

I was speechless.

Stephen the Historian! One of Our City’s most famous names. One of the founding fathers of Our City as we knew it. Writer of the twenty-volume Complete History of Our City. There was not a single resident who hadn’t read at least some of it. Before him, Our City had been just one of many that rose after the Annihilation. But it was he who recorded its growth, allowing it to spread and slowly incorporate the surrounding areas until it became the largest and most powerful on the planet.

And now he was in my establishment. I heard he rarely to never left the Floating Center. He’d seemed at ease when he’d entered. He’d winked at me in much the same way as the old man. But now the old man had reduced him to utter disbelief, near-horror.

I remembered the much younger pictures I’d seen of him on the bio-page. He’d always looked like a man in total control of his surroundings. As Stephen the Historian should be. So this trembling, angry, but powerless figure before me now only brought back that fear of the old man and the inside of his head.

But Adam did not sense this dynamic. He Shared only the feelings of a devoted Citizen excited at encountering one of Our City’s heroes. He sat in a small alcove nearby where they spoke and watched, transfixed.

And they all stayed there for the rest of the day. Frederick, Stephen, and the old man left in late afternoon. Adam stayed.

As the sun began to go down, Adam came up to the counter to compensate me. His Sharing had changed. These vibrations were dark and foreboding. I had to ask.

“Are you okay?”

“What?” He looked at me as if he didn’t recognize me. This was unusual for Adam the Banker. He was very young but very successful, and an ardent Citizen. As a banker, he considered himself the keeper of Our City’s blood, circulating beneath the streets, the buildings, the tunnels, parks and warehouses, pumping life to every extremity.

His life was composed of rows and columns of numbers. He’d told me that he believed only in what you could hold with your hands, what you could touch and measure. He disdained fantasies, legends or myths. He cared nothing for the world before the Annihilation because none of it could be proven. The Takers, he said, filled themselves with fantasies and therefore were consumed with a rage they dared not confront. I knew that rage well from the night I was buried and assumed he was correct.

But here Adam was, preoccupied. Pulled inside his mind. He seemed to realize it as well. “No,” Adam said. “I don’t think I’m all right at all.”

He thrust his hands deep inside his pockets. I could see his fingers undulating beneath the soft, pliable fabric.

“What is wrong?”

To be continued...

Copyright © 2011 by Maxwell Jameson