Читать книгу The Interrogation - Michael Bazzett - Страница 11

The City

Once we were ten miles outside the city, it

vanished completely. We suspected this

happened from the top down, with television

antennae fading into ether and asphalt

shingles glimmering, like fish scales,

then flecking into nothingness.

For a mere

moment buildings were reduced to rib cage,

people illuminated within the lattice of beams,

bent over ironing boards and countertops,

chopping cucumbers into slender green coins

until they and their knives and even the blade-

scarred board had vanished into empty air.

But there were also those who asserted

buildings softened into something like

sodden cardboard and settled slowly into

themselves. One contingent even claimed

nothing happened at all: the city simply

shifted like a sleeping animal, dreaming

of our return.

We decided to confirm

our top-down theory by hiding a camera

in the woven branches of a linden tree

then climbing into our van and driving

until the city sank into the dusky horizon.

There, someone said, pointing, it’s done it again.

And it was true, the impassive brick and steel

were gone. We cranked a U-turn and rumbled

home over the asphalt we’d just traveled

in hopes of catching our city in the breathless

unclothed moment before she had once again

reassembled herself, down to bits of rusted

hardware on the roadside and the actors

hired to loiter outside of bars.

But this time,

as we coasted slowly into our neighborhood,

past the impostors and hastily reconstructed

but nonetheless convincing details, we smiled

quietly at one another.

The van creaked to a stop under the tree

and we leaned the ladder into its thick crown

when suddenly something lifted

scraping into flight, croaking

like a rusted door—

as if the tree had cracked

open and coughed its dark

and broken

heart into the sky—