I.
From there I sail across an ocean, and watch the gray metropolis of B. lift above the horizon. Everything moves upwards here; alongside the canals and through the steel bridges I see each building raise as high as it is financially able. Fertilized by cheap labor, cutthroat developers and, above all else, deep wells of capital, the skyscrapers outdo one another level by level.
Heavy headaches plague me, forcing my body to twist and tighten. They mash me into a ball and squeeze my eyes closed; I breathe heavily and strive to not moan. Skyscraper nightmares and alleyway fantasies loom. But they pass quickly. After I've shut my eyes for a brief time against the pain, as I adjust to the dark behind the eyelids, the headaches wane into absence and my head is clear.
This isn't true of everyone. For the commercial developer who arrives blinking off the underground railway, the air of B. breathes intoxicatingly, thick with promises of initial investments, hints at counteroffers, expensive ideas for marketing strategies. The developer smiles through this fog, hoping he has the luck to stumble across a vacant lot. An empty corner exists near the southern limits that he'd love to get his hands on. Everyone here knows the trick of visualizing a property developed to the utmost of its potential — a waiter who works in one of those raging streetside cafés taught it to me. All one must do us take the border of the holding and extend it continuously for hundreds of feet. And in this fertile air, I understand that that's the building I will find there next week, when I pass the corner again.
Deals are made on napkins. Promises are made, are broken. The wind of handshakes circulates the air.
I climb the Burnett Building just to look back down. Even though I might believe that steel-reinforced concrete holds me here, twenty-seven stories higher than the ground, I know that all these buildings are made of is money. B. is a tangle of pipes gushing with liquid capital, pumped from Midtown to the shorefront high rises to the Seventeenth Street projects to the glutton pocketbooks of the businessmen involved. Chaos, competition, above all Capitalism sprouts B. up and shapes it.
But all I can see is NOISE, drying up my eyes, causing those headaches. NOISE buzzes in the rectangles of the composition, shakes along the girders, broadcasts through the crowded plate glass windows. It does not take too many sleepless nights to recognize its character. All around me, the NOISE is this: everything competing with everything else, a struggle, appetite and theft, money swarming beneath skyscraper's skin.
II.
I journey by train to N., an ordered city of sweet verticals, where no one makes a false step and everything stands taller than I first believe. Gesticulating teams of astronomers, mathematicians, sculptors, and electricians rush among N.'s towers, making sightings with brass telescopes, dropping plumb lines, working toward the engineering of a most perfect city. N. fills, at the sun's first touch, with mirrored angles, complimentary facades, every last shade of gray. Whichever way I turn my eyes it seems as if the engineers have had success, and everything is in its right place.
It is impossible to speak of fixed height in the city of N., for all buildings constantly move in that direction at a thousand feet per second, and I tend to experience a pleasant but thoroughly disorienting vertigo upon looking up. Some say that the rising nature of the city owes itself to the fact that steel, glass, and concrete become lighter than air after crossing N.'s borders, and it's a great feat of the mathematicians to even anchor the materials before the steel, glass, and concrete stretch away into the sky. Others claim that the city's rise is due to the master plan, a convoluted tangle of slants and angles penned by an optical illusionist who spent sixteen years ensuring the exaggeration of all vertical perspective by methods of light and shadow.
I step beyond the shadow, into the light, and watch a tower cascade its reflection on the surface of a mirrored wall. I see the reflection spin itself, and it draws a subversive notion in my mind, it forces me to pay attention, makes me slip. Standing under the sun's touch, I comprehend that the engineers have accomplished nothing: the city does not rise, the towers stand in place.
Instead, the city raises you. The perfect harmony of the angles, the elegance in the transparency of windows, the color of the sky -- all is composed to elevate your reflection and mirror it to the top. I see my image cascade up support columns, reflect across the street-chasms, ascend off lightning rods to break free of the skyline. All around me, scores of other citizens rise like motes of dust trapped in the light. We live in the crystal grip of a lifting city.