City of Cards
I
We had decided that I should arrive by sea.
Amsterdam has always been a port, so
entering it this way had a certain logic,
given my brief. It was anything but practical,
though: from Turin2 I had to fly to Hamburg,
then to take a train to Bremen, where I
boarded a boat that bobbed along the
coast, cut down through Rotterdam, then
chugged and rattled on to A20. Nor did this
method of approach throw any light on the
question of the city’s territorial limits. I’d
expected a frontier or administrative line,
some kind of procedure – checking
passports, handing out forms, or at the very
least playing an announcement over the
boat’s Tannoy – but there was none of this.
We chugged and rattled, warehouses and
factories slid by for hours on end until the
water widened and the boat slowed down,
the city’s spires and cranes loomed into
view and I realised that whatever limit A20
had must have crept up and glided past us
long ago, as immaterial and transient as a
wake.
The harbour was dazzling. It was early
summer. Dinghies and catamarans were
cutting geometric figures through the water,
lines and triangles of white. Low-lying Golf
Super-Duty tankers let off bellows that were
taken up by dredgers and cargo carriers,
transposed into new octaves and repeated.
A tug was spurting vertical jets of water,
fanned-out columns joined by spraymembranes
that broke the sunlight into primary colours,
a peacock’s tail. Off to the
side, by Java Island, a tea-clipper was
moored: a huge four-master strung with
webs of rigging. Behind it, on land, giant
pylons straddled the horizon. I remember
squinting as I looked at them – squinting
and smiling with exhilaration. They were like
gods, ringing the city in; or maybe
guardians; or maybe simply an affirmation
of what A20, for me, embodied, and the
reason I’d been so keen to take the brief on
in the first place: a promise of connection.
The tea-clipper turned out to belong to
the City of Anachronists. It was one of their
more overstated rallying-points, a kind of
monumental touchstone for that city’s
smaller, less obvious manifestations: the
old, horse-drawn Heineken carriages you
would sometimes see trundling along their
delivery circuits beside the canals, the clogs
whose wooden clipclop you would hear
from time to time down some unremade
cobbled street, the old Dutch language
shopkeepers and cleaners sometimes
spoke. I’d seen that city’s name among the
documents I’d studied back in Italy, but
hadn’t understood how a City of
Anachronists might actually work – or, for
that matter, how any of the civic system
known as A20 might play itself out, function,
regulate itself. Amsterdam 2.0 had become
a buzzword among urban planning circles
the world over even prior to its emergence.
It had become a buzzword among
sociologists, a buzzword among
economists, political theorists, artists and
all manner of vague utopians. Its
constitution was championed as a paragon
of new-way thinking, a document as central
to the age of post-industrial networks as the
American Constitution had been to the ages
of Enlightenment and Revolution. Within
three years of A20′s establishment within
and around the metropolitan area of
Amsterdam proper, other cities and regions
started to consider taking the model on -
my own, the Turin Basin Area, included. And
yet nobody, it seemed, actually understood
it. How could four hundred ‘cities’ coinhabit
the same territory? What might
being ‘in’ one entail? What were the
economic advantages? The disadvantages?
Beyond all that, what would it actually be
like to live there?
Now that Turin was seriously considering
becoming, in part at least, an A20 franchise,
it was this last question that most needed
an answer. PR documents were one thing;
so were journalists’ accounts or urban
theorists’ analyses. What Turin’s planners
needed was for one of their own to give
them a perspective on it all. Not an
administrative perspective but a
psychological one, an emotional one. I was
unattached, in my thirties, and had worked
for the Turin Planning Department for six
years. It was agreed that I would spend a
year in A20 – partly on-site researching, but
more importantly just living: immersing
myself in the place, experiencing it. It was
agreed that I would not file a report or make
any contact until the year was over. In order
to fulfil my brief I would, to a large extent,
forget my brief – forget I even had one in the
first place.
I was provided with a contact to liase
with on arrival. One Arjen Tuithof. He
worked in the Administration Building near
the Centraal Station. I went there as soon
as I had disembarked. It turned out to be
quite small, no more than two floors high, a
drab seventies office block. It had linoleum
floors and cheap Formica tables behind
which scruffily-dressed men and women sat
shunting papers around coffee mugs and
ashtrays. They looked bored. I wandered
over to the only table I could see that had a
chair on the non-operator’s side and asked
the man behind it where I could find this
Arjen Tuithof.
‘Who?’ he asked me.
‘Arjen Tuithof,’ I said. ‘He’s expecting
me.’
The man popped a biscuit into his mouth
and pulled a sheet of paper from beneath
some other papers. While he ran one finger
down this sheet his other hand lifted and
shunted other biscuits. They were some
kind of salty biscuit and he had laid five or
six of them in rows across his desk; while
he scanned the paper his hand reordered
the rows. The biscuits were identical, but
his hand rearranged them as though
following some logic, moving one aside to
make place for another, swapping the
displaced one with a third. He continued
doing this while he copied a code from the
sheet into a computer and waited for the
staff list to come up. He didn’t look at me or
ask me to sit down.
‘No Arjen Tuithof here,’ he said
eventually.
‘He worked here,’ I said.
‘People move on,’ he replied, still looking
at his screen.
‘I’m from the Turin Delegation,’ I told him.
‘I mean, I am the Turin Delegation.’ His hand
stopped shunting biscuits and
he looked up at me.
‘What does that mean?’ he asked.
‘Arjen Tuithof was my contact,’ I said.
‘Into Amsterdam 2.0.’
‘Contact?’ he replied. ‘What do you
need?’
‘I need to connect,’ I told him.
‘Connect?’ he asked.
‘To Amsterdam 2.0.’
‘Go to the Central Subscription Office,’
he said. ‘Subscribe to one of the cities and
you’re in.’ He fished out another piece of
paper and handed it to me. His eyes
returned to the screen, and his free hand
resumed reordering the biscuits.
The Central Subscription Office was
across town. I took a cab, which wasn’t
easy. Whole segments of the city were
being ripped up and relaid. Streets regularly
gave way to giant holes from which diggers
were scooping mounds of light brown earth,
cranes tearing up intricate root-systems of
pipes and cables. On one of the many
detours we were forced to make, we nearly
ran over a pedestrian. The funny thing was,
he seemed to almost invite it: he had clearly
seen us coming, but he positioned himself
firmly on the tarmac sideways on to us and
let us come at him, arching his body
backwards at the final moment as we
reached him so that his knees bent away
from the car but his shoulders leant back in
towards it. At another point, we were held
up by a group of people crouching in the
road. I thought at first they were surveyors,
but they weren’t taking readings in the way
surveyors do. They seemed to be poring
over the glitches in the tarmac’s surface –
cracks, stains, the amoeba-like shapes of
introd chewing gum – scouring them in an
almost votive manner. I wanted to ask my
taxi driver what was going on, but he had
the most enormous boil on his face – a
fresh, raw, red one of a type I’d never seen
outside of high school medical textbooks -
and the sight was so unpleasant that I
avoided any conversation with him so as
not to have to look at it.
The Central Subscriptions Office was
smarter and more modern that the
Administration Building. It had carpets and
plants and a much fresher smell to it. The
staff were dressed smart-casual, and were
busy but friendly. The one who dealt with
me smiled and introduced himself as Dirk
This or That as he invited me to sit down. I
started explaining that I needed to join
Amsterdam 2.0 but he interrupted me.
‘You have to understand,’ he said, ‘that
we cannot simply process you into A20 like
it was a single organisation.’
‘No?’ I asked.
He sighed. ‘It is complicated. We have
many compatibility problems. There are
problems of compatibility between the cities
of A20, and between A20 and the non-A20
Amsterdam. And anyway, there is no
member’s card, no passport. If you want to,
you can subscribe to a city. You can do that
in this building or by phone.’
‘Which city should I subscribe to?’ I
asked.
‘There are four hundred cities,’ he
replied. ‘The choice is yours. Choice, and
choice: we have all choice, but no
compatibility. Me, I would advise you
subscribe to Convergence City.
This is what is needed most right now.’
I followed his advice. Convergence City
was city number 78. I ran through the welldesigned
online subscription procedure,
entered my credit and address details and
got a pre-generated screen informing me
that a representative of Convergence City
would come to find me at my hotel that
same evening. He arrived at the appointed
hour and we ate together in the hotel
restaurant. His name was Colin; he was
about my age and slightly overweight.
Convergence City, he explained over a
steak and fries, was in his opinion the most
important of all the cities in Amsterdam 2.0,
as it allowed the other cities to cohabit.
‘It all has to merge, you see?’ he said
enthusiastically. ‘Currency, law, custom, you
name it. No convergence, no ball game. A20
is Convergence City.’
‘Where are you from?’ I asked him.
‘California,’ he said. ‘Napa Valley. But
that doesn’t matter: I could be from
anywhere. That has to converge too. What
skills have you got?’
I told him I had worked in population
monitoring and traffic-flow analysis.
‘That’s awesome,’ he said. ‘We need that
kind of shit real bad. I’ll pick you up
tomorrow and we’ll get you working in the
simulation department. I know the head.’
Colin was good to his word. Over the
next weeks I found myself running a
programme that simulated different types of
processes and networks in need of
convergence. A20′s currency situation was
a mess, with several cities issuing their own
money and the City of Four Hundred
Currencies speculating on it all; my software
would run permutating three-year economic
cycle-scenarios to see how long we could
go before devaluation and hyperinflation set
in. Refuse collection hadn’t been
successfully rationalised either; my software
would run ‘filth scenarios’ in order to
ascertain how soon the situation would lead
to an infestation of rats or outbreak of
disease if unresolved. During the month or
so I spent in Convergence City’s office I
was, effectively, conducting research of the
type that back in Turin was known as
‘Disaster Forecasting’.
Colin found me a flat in the same
building as his, in the Jordaan. We would
eat takeaways together and he would talk
enthusiastically about convergence.
‘Think,’ he’d tell me with noodles in his
mouth, ‘how Amsterdam came about in the
first place. They didn’t have jack shit: no
goods, no military power, not even any land.
So they look around and say: “Hey,
everyone else is at war with each other, and
they can’t trade in their own places, so we’ll
grab some land back from the sea and
make a trading zone where everyone else
can come and mix with one another. And
we’ll tax the hell out of it.” That, my friend,
is convergence thinking.’
Colin was working on acronyms and
abbreviations. Every city needed an
acronym for sorting and referral purposes,
just like airports do, but often two or more
cities laid claim to the same acronymic
sequence. Colin was arbitrating in a long
and bitter dispute between the City of
Animists and the City of Altruists over this
very issue. ‘You’d think the Altruists would
back down,’ he’d complain over dinner, ‘but
oh Jesus no!’ He was also a member of
Convergence City’s Constitutional Revision
Council, which had been set up to iron out
inconsistencies that arose within the terms
of A20′s constitution when two cities’
interests overlapped. This happened a lot:
Fascist City and The (Ultra) Democratic City
were a case in point. Amendments and
Provisos were being drafted within
Convergence City’s offices, and Colin talked
about these with real zeal. Nonetheless I
began to sense that there was something
else beneath his passion for convergence,
some other, more intimate agenda all these
drafts and deliberations served to cover up.
It was a kind of longing, though for what I
couldn’t tell. He seemed very attached to
me, and insisted that we eat together every
night. Sometimes, while he talked, I’d stop
listening and watch the way his hands
clenched at the table, or the pattern of
food-stains on his T-shirt. In these moments
he looked like a child, messy and
vulnerable.
Working in Convergence City, I got to
know the make-up and credos (could I call
them that? Or would beliefs be better?
Beliefs or desires?) of most of A20′s other
cities. Most had a kind of mission statement
on their homepage. Orchestral City’s talked
of reconfiguring urban transit along
corridors of sound, of buildings starting and
ending not with walls and doors but at the
limit of their audibility. Fire stations,
metalworks and music conservatories
should be strategically located so as to
maximise symphonic range; the ubiquitous
drills and piledrivers should be both
conducted and recorded, together with the
thousand other instruments daily life made
sound for our delight. The City of Alphabets
seemed to consist of people who liked big
letters, and wanted streets, sectors and
buildings to be designated by these rather
than by names. The City of Bullfights urged
its subscribers to consider every urban
interaction as a moment in a tauromachic
contest, a set of manoeuvres in which skill
and technique pirouetted around danger. I
wondered if the man I’d almost run down on
my first day there had been a COB
subscriber, drawing a passado from our car
before turning to receive applause from
some invisible audience of dark-haired
ladies with carnations in their hair. Cargo
Cult City’s homepage, which was in both
English and some kind of pidgin, talked of a
messiah called Jack Frumm, perhaps but by
no means certainly named after an
American G.I. who’d worked on military
bases in the South Pacific during World War
Two. Frumm was worshipped by tribes
throughout Melanesia, who had cleared
landing strips in the jungle and built
imitation radio masts out of bamboo, then
sat around waiting for planes full of tinned
food and electric fridges to descend from
the sky. Cargo Cult City’s subscribers were
paying for docking bays to be built by the
Frieshuis in the harbour: diagrams for their
construction formed a large part of their
webpage. Constructing these was Phase
One of CCC’s long-term plan. Phase Two
was communicated by a single word: Wait.
I worked in Convergence City for over a
month. Why did I leave? I just got antsy, I
suppose. Restless. Well, to cut to the
chase: I got horny. Sitting in an office full
of men throughout a hot and muggy summer,
eating fast food every night and listening to
Colin’s convergence talk, I started
fantasising about other kinds of merging,
physical kinds. Surfing through the cities’
pages on my monitor at work, I’d read
about the City of Sex. In early August I
decided to join it. Back at home one
evening, I phoned the Central Subscription
Switchboard and ran through the transferral
procedure. This took quite a while. They
had an automated menu: If you know the
number of the city you wish to subscribe to,
press One on your keypad now. I didn’t
know the number. To hear a list of all the
cities, the voice continued, press Two now.
City of Sex was number 320. To subscribe
to this city, I was told after an eternity, press
Three now. I pressed Three. Sorry, said the
voice, you must first unsubscribe from your
current city. To do this, press One now. The
switchboard had a background hum that
resonated in the earpiece as I waited. It was
like the hum of countless operators at work,
switching, plugging in, connecting – and,
beyond them, the electric pulsing of the
circuits they plugged into; then, beyond
even that, invisible loops and circuits
forging connections beyond the physical,
sub-strata of connections that made
tangible connections possible. The hum
was like the murmur of all these circuits
blended together into a long, slow, languid
sound with no beginning and no end.
On subscribing to the City of Sex, I was
given a password to type into their
homepage. This brought up a pre-generated
screen which informed me that a
representative of COS would meet me in
the Vondelpark the following afternoon. I got
there early. At the park’s entrance more
diggers were tearing up the streets,
removing pipes, cables and earth. I
wondered what they did with all the ballast
they were getting rid of. It had to go
somewhere. Inside, cyclists and skaters
glided on a counter-clockwise loop along
the park’s main path. I’d been told to meet
the representative, a woman (I’d pressed
Four for female as opposed to Five for
male), near the Cafxe9 Vertigo. On the path
outside the cafxe9 was an Italian ice cream
stand. I knew it was Italian because it had a
little Italian flag flapping above it. The man
serving up the scoops inside it spoke with
an Italian accent: I could hear this as he
chatted with his customers. I thought of
going up to him and asking him what part of
Italy he came from, but the COS
representative turned up before I could do
this. She arrived on rollerskates. She was
fairly pretty, about my age, with longish,
light-brown hair. Her name was Frieda. She
took me straight back to her place and we
had sex. It was pretty good. We ran through
the gamut of positions; she made noises,
came and so on. But her eyes seemed
glazed, her gaze off somewhere else, as
though fixated on some other encounter
taking place in an invisible location to which
I hadn’t been given the password.
I had sex with Frieda quite a lot that
summer. I had sex with other COS
subscribers too. It got so that I could pick
them out in a bar or supermarket pretty
easily, cast them a certain look which they’d
send back and – hey presto! – we were off
to mine or theirs and banging within minutes.
Frieda was my favourite, though -
although perhaps favourite isn’t the right
word. What drew me to her was not what
she gave me but rather what she withheld,
that other place her eyes always seemed to
be looking at. I wanted to connect, through
her, to that. The more time I spent with her
the more this desire grew. Our sex became
more agitated, more violent: I would claw at
her and clasp her face right up to mine – but
still her eyes would glaze and go straight
through me. When she changed cities I
changed with her, graduating from the City
of Sex to the City of Perverts. We would
attend orgies together, frantic sessions in
which twelve or more people raged, tossed
and contorted, tearing at each other’s
bodies like the diggers tearing at the earth
before collapsing, at the end of every
session, in a heap around which contracted
cleaners moved efficiently and
dispassionately, spraying disinfectant and
picking detritus from the spaces between
torsos, legs and faces.
II
I found out why Frieda had been only half
present through our sex sessions: she’d
been two-timing. Two-timing the City of
Sex, that is. It turned out that loads of
people did this: subscribe to two cities at
the same time, using different names or
credit and address references. Some people
were even subscribed to five or six. I don’t
think Convergence City’s people knew
about this. I would have brought the matter
up with Colin, but I didn’t talk with him any
more. I would still pass him in the lobby, but
he’d never greet me. I didn’t sense any
coldness or resentment on his part – simply
indifference.
Frieda had been two-timing the City of
Sex by subscribing to the City of Agents. I
think this city was closely affiliated with the
City of Code, or Hermeneutica, but this was
hard to ascertain due to the level of secrecy
its protocols demanded. I found Frieda’s
subscription form when I was going through
her stuff one afternoon when she’d popped
out to get provisions. I confronted her with
it as soon as she got back, and her eyes
instantly unglazed, halfway at least,
affording me if not a full view of that other
place, that invisible location onto which
they’d always seemed to focus, then at
least a reflection – perhaps not even a
reflection, but at least an overspill of light.
‘Why don’t you subscribe too?’ she said.
I kissed her passionately, then did this
straight away, from her phone. Again I
listened to that plugged-in hum, that
murmur of endless connection. Again I went
through the keypad menu. I was given a
password to type into the City of Agents’
homepage. This brought up a pre-generated
screen which informed me that a
representative of COAG would meet me the
following morning in a building in the East,
just off Safartistraat. I arrived at the
appointed hour. The building turned out to
be an abandoned workshop. It had raised
windows whose distance from the floor was
made even greater by the fact that the main
floor was sunken. The windows were caked
with old industrial grime. I called out Hello!
several times, but got no answer. I waited,
but no one came. After a while, my eyes
became accustomed to the darkness and I
managed to discern, in the middle of the
sunken floor, a small work table. It seemed
to have been placed there for a purpose:
there were no other tables, no other objects
at all – just this table, set exactly in the
middle of the space. I descended some old
iron steps and walked across the floor until I
came to it. On its surface lay an envelope.
My password was written on it. I picked it
up and left.
This turned out to contain a tape
cassette. I didn’t have a cassette player and
had to make a trip to a retail outlet run by
the City of Anachronists to find one. Back at
my flat, I played the tape. It started with a
sequence of white noise – crackle and
hissing, abrasive bursts of static – but after
a while there emerged from these a human
voice which read out lines of text. They said
things like:
Listen: the world is a sign of restless
visibility greater than six miles. CDT 00Z.
And:
Ovid 253. Ice forming on spinner. Current
data not available.
And:
Flying over parts of Dover from the UK or
Ireland towards Cambodia, Apache Attack
Helicopter shot down the biggest mission of
our lives, standing on the earth’s far rim.
Marginal outlook: good.
The lines would appear and then fade
out into static. They didn’t make much
sense, needless to say. There seemed to be
a constant theme of flight. I assumed they
were some kind of code, but wasn’t sure
what I should do with them. I got to know
them pretty well, though. They were quite
addictive; I’d listen to them each night as I
fell asleep. Then, after perhaps two weeks,
when I was buying milk in my local
Alberthein, I found a note with one of the
phrases written on it. They must have
known that I had only gone for milk, and
when I would arrive: the note was slipped
under the foremost carton on the shelf. I
picked it up and read a line I instantly
recognised:
Ovid 253. Ice forming on spinner. Current
data not available.
I pocketed it, paid for the milk and left
the store. Back home, I perused the note
more closely. There was a yellow patch, a
kind of grease-stain, underneath the text.
When I held it up to the light I could discern
another line of text watermark-set within the
stain. It read:
Nieuwmarkt dot-dash benches 17:25.
Occasional light snow. I think we really
should make something go.
Nieuwmarkt was a square on the edge of
the red light district. There were benches in
one of its corners interset with short round
stools. I assumed these were what they
meant. The benches and stools did kind of
form dots and dashes, or at least would
have done if viewed from the air. I turned up
there at exactly twenty-five past five that
evening and sat down on one of the
dashes. Within seconds I felt the presence
of another body sitting on the same bench,
facing the other way.
‘Don’t turn around,’ a man’s voice said.
‘Just give me the message.’
‘Occasional light snow,’ I said. ‘I think we
really should make something go.’ The
man was silent for a few seconds.
Then he replied: ‘Listen: Between cities,
countries or continents we are going to
crash. H26. Repeat the line to me.’
‘Between cities, countries or continents
we are going to crash. H26,’ I said.
‘Take this message to the Natural History
Museum. Dodo exhibit, 13:25 tomorrow.
And one more instruction for you: look to
surfaces. Infiltrate other cities if necessary.’
I went to the Natural History Museum the
next day. The attendant who punched my
ticket had a boil on his face similar to my
first taxi driver’s boil: a huge, raw one,
horribly unpleasant. In front of the stuffed
Dodo case at twenty-five past one I
delivered my cities-countries-continentscrashing
message to a person – whether
male or female I couldn’t tell because their
voice was deep but soft – whose reflection I
only half-caught in the glass as they stood
behind me. They gave me a further
message, with instructions on where to
deliver it.
I spent the next few weeks ferrying
messages. I also infiltrated other cities: the
City of Aesthetics, the better to be able to
listen to the strangely poetic lines of code I
was being given; the City of Stigmata, to be
able to spend time scouring surfaces. This
second was a revelation. I started noticing
messages left in the street, disguised as
workmen’s markings. I started noticing
patterns in oil-slicks and the minute quirks
of parking restriction lines that to the casual
eye seemed perfectly straight, the regular or
irregular distribution of confetti outside
churches. I would crouch down in a strip of
street for hours on end, oblivious to the cars
that wound around me. I compiled
maps and lists of markings. Why? I did it to
impress my superiors within the City of
Agents. I wanted to be let into its inner
circle, connected to whatever great
conspiracy lay at its core. I felt the need for
this with a burning passion: that some
pantheon of elders would approve me,
grasp me to their breast. This being taken
up and grasped, clasped, taken in, became
the only thing that mattered to me.
It was the Nieuwmarkt agent who could
best help me achieve this, I felt: I’d
exchanged messages with him several
times, always on the same dot-dash bench.
Although I’d never seen his face, his voice
carried the most authority; other agents
seemed to listen to the messages that came
from him with more intentness, and to style
their own according to the formers’ content.
In the City of Aesthetics I’d learnt to pick up
modulations by studying verse structures. I
could tell the difference between iambic and
anapaestic lines, and discern free-verse
variations on these even when they’d been
unconsciously produced; as a result I’d
started to pick up the frequency of
modulation of COAG’s messages, and to
understand that the Nieuwmarkt agent was
a node, a central hook-point. Sequences
would kick off and resolve themselves with
him.
I decided after a month to ask him to
admit me further in. I did this at the end of
one of our meetings. He had listened to my
message, sat in silence for a few seconds,
then given me a new one of his own. He
started to rise from the bench, but I reached
out behind me and pulled him back
down by his shirt.
‘What are you doing?’ his voice asked.
‘I want further in,’ I said.
‘Into what?’ he asked.
‘The City. The circuit. I’ve done well, you
must admit. I should be let into the loop.’
‘What loop?’ he asked.
‘The cell,’ I said. ‘The cells. You must
know how it works. You’ve got it all
mapped. Circles, then circles within circles.
I’m on the outside. I don’t even know what
we’re plotting.’
‘Why should there be a plot?’ he said. He
stood up again.
‘No!’ I told him. ‘Wait!’
But he had plucked his shirt loose from
my grasp. I turned around and jumped up
from the bench. It was a Saturday; there
was a market in the square. Lots of people
were milling around. How could I tell which
one he was? I never received any more
messages, any more instructions. When I
tried to access COAG through their
webpage I kept running into page-nolonger-
active messages. I tried to reconnect
by phone using another name, but this
didn’t work either: the automated menu cut
me out each time just as I pressed Three to
subscribe. Then, after a few weeks, I lost
interest in COAG altogether. I still wondered,
though, for months to come, whether the
people I saw muttering as they walked were
COAG subscribers – or the people picking
cigarette butts from the streets, or pressing
their faces against bus shelters, or moving
along the pavement in short, jerky patterns
that looped and mutated, or sitting in
doorways with their track-scarred arms
flopped forwards, palms turned upwards
to the sky, their eyes glazed like Frieda’s as
they stared into some middle-distance
intrigue only they could see.
By autumn I had started to feel
homesick. I thought of Turin each time I
passed the Italian ice cream stand in the
Vondelpark. One day I went up to the owner
and greeted him in Italian.
‘What?’ he replied in English. I was
certain that his accent was Italian.
‘I’m Italian,’ I told him. ‘What part of Italy
are you from?’
He shrugged. I repeated the question in
English.
‘You want an ice cream?’ he asked.
There were people waiting behind me.
‘No,’ I told him.
I returned there often, just to watch the
looping cyclists and skaters, the Italian
scooping out ice cream. The spot probably
held a sentimental value for me: it was
where I’d first met Frieda. I never saw her
anymore and, since they never met each
other face to face, necessarily hadn’t seen
her since subscribing to the City of Agents.
One day an altercation broke out by the
stand. A dog had crapped beside it, which
made the Italian angry. He was demanding
loudly to know who its owner was. No one
came forward to claim this title. Then a man
of Far-Eastern origin who’d been waiting for
ice cream announced that he was from the
City of Dog Eaters and that, since the dog
was unclaimed, under Section Such,
Paragraph Such-Such of A20′s constitution
he was rightfully entitled to take it home
and cook it. This assertion drew gasps from
other bystanders. Another man stepped
between the Korean and the dog and,
proclaiming himself a subscriber to the City
of Dogs and Cats, cited Section Other-
Such, Paragraph Other-Such-Such which
guaranteed the rights of animals within
A20′s borders. A woman from the City of
Bureaucrats waded in at this point, finding
fault with both men’s understanding of the
constitution’s application in this instance.
Within two minutes the dog had become a
rallying point for half the park. Scuffles
started breaking out as the City of Justice’s
subscribers jostled with denizens of Laissez
Faire City who in turn jostled with Mongrel
City’s people who in turn tried to hold off
those from the cities of Parks, of Predators,
of Property or Public Space – the confused
dog barking all the while at Animists who
wanted to make friends with it, Deviants
who wanted to fuck it.
Not far from the ice cream stand there
was an area where old people would sit
playing guitars and smoking dope. I
couldn’t work out if they were part of the
City of Orchestras or of Anachronists. I tried
to listen to their song’s lyrics. It was some
kind of protest song decrying a situation
that not longer pertained, at least not in
A20. City of Memory. How did the ice cream
man remember Italy? Had he even been
there? Or was it just the colours of a flag, a
set of tastes? City of Sensualists. Maybe
the Anachronists were Sensualists too,
tongues flickering after melting scoops of
texture – places, objects, times, who knows.
Maybe all of them, A to Z, 1 to 400 – Agents,
Bullfighters, Cargo Cults to Yoga, Yeast and
Zanzibar – were Perverts.
The Vondelpark ran on a loop and life ran
on a loop. Every few weeks I’d change cities;
by the winter I was doing it every few
days. The automated menu looped as I
pressed Three to subscribe to the City of
Birds, of Antiquity, Entrepreneurs, Ghosts,
Giants, Glass and Ghettos, City of Ideas, of
Interaction, of Models and of Myths and
Legends. Sometimes I phoned up the
Central Subscription Switchboard not to
subscribe or unsubscribe but just to listen
to the background hum, the endless
blended pulse of loops and circuits;
sometimes I’d even fall asleep with the
receiver cradled to my ear.
I still hadn’t entirely given up hope of
making a connection – to the heart of A20,
its raison d’xeatre, its source. Every city has a
founding stone: some actual, some
abstract. A wellspring. Perhaps, like the
Cargo Cult people, I simply had to wait for
this to descend and manifest itself to me at
a time of its own choosing. Then, I
reasoned, everything would make sense; I
would be uplifted and redeemed into an
understanding beyond words, a state of
grace. At the same time, I felt a fervent urge
to make contact with Turin. The isolation
was becoming unbearable. Around
Christmas time, I cracked and made the
call. As I dialled, I listened to the switches
clicking their way through the networks and
in my mind saw Turin opening up: its
colonnades, its paving stones, its squares,
all unfolding from the Central Telecomms
Depot through which my call was being
directed. But this vision was soon
interrupted by a pre-recorded voice that
said:
I’m sorry, we are unable to connect your
call. For more information, press One on
your keypad now.
I hung up and tried again. The same
message greeted me. I pressed One, and
got another pre-recorded message:
If you know the number of the city you
wish to subscribe to, press One on your
keypad now.
I slammed the phone down, threw a coat
on and ran out to a public phone box to call
Italy from there. The same thing happened. I
tried a second phone box, then a third. The
same each time. I came back home and
redialled again and again. I must have done
it fifty times, right through the night. The
same result each time. I’m sorry, we are
unable to connect… If you know the
number of the city you wish to subscribe
to… I’m sorry, we are… If you know…
unable to connect… press One… Eventually
I fell asleep with the receiver in my hand
again, still pouring out its endless testament
to circles within circles, to webs.
III
I decided to leave A20 the next day. I
packed my bags and took a taxi to the
Centraal Station. The forecourt outside had
been so ripped up by now that there wasn’t
any pavement left – just a giant crater out of
which diggers were still scooping sand and
earth. Beside the crater lengths of wire and
cable waited to be laid down. They were
clean and new, but didn’t seem compatible
with one another: they were all different
colours, different lengths, different sizes;
none of them seemed long enough to go
anywhere, do anything, connect to anywhere
else. I didn’t care anymore -
didn’t care where all the hollowed-out earth
went, all the voided ballast, didn’t care
about the loops and circuits, their
convergence. I entered the station and went
over to the International Departures board.
It was blank. I sauntered over to a ticket
window and asked for a train to Turin.
‘Turin?’ the man asked. He pulled a stack
of timetable cards from his desk. While one
hand ran its way down one of them, the list
of destinations, his other hand slid the other
cards around, fanning them out into a
spread across his desktop, picking one out
of its position before reinserting it into the
fan, then doing the same thing with a
second card, a third. I thought of peacocks
for some reason, then of salt.
‘That’s not a destination,’ he told me
after a while.
‘Well, give me a ticket to the border,’ I
said.
‘What border?’ he asked.
I felt a kind of flush go to my head.
‘Yes,’ I said, slowly. ‘Fine. Of course.’
I left the ticket window and headed
straight for the platforms. Escalators led
from the concourse tunnel up to these. At
the bottom of each were automated signs
with letters on them – strings of letters,
none of which spelt out whole words. City
of Alphabets, City of Code or of Acrostics.
The letters were flipping over, reordering
themselves into new sequences. I stood in
the tunnel watching the signs until I saw, on
one of them, an aeroplane symbol come up.
I stepped onto the escalator leading to its
platform. At the top of it two policemen
stood checking people’s papers. I slipped
my Italian passport from my jacket pocket
and handed it to one of them.
‘No longer valid,’ he said.
‘What do you mean?’ I asked.
‘Not recognised for exit purposes. You
need an exit visa.’
‘Exit visa?’ I repeated. ‘That’s ridiculous. I
don’t even know where I’m -’
But his colleague was already escorting
me back to the down escalator. ‘Exit visa,’
he said as he released me back into the
tunnel. ‘Central Office.’
As I left the station I saw Frieda. We
walked right past each other but she didn’t
recognise me. She looked old, and had a
fresh red boil beside her mouth.
The Central Subscriptions Office was
much harder to get into than it had been
when I first arrived. You had to queue
outside, then queue again inside, then,
when your number was read out by an
automated voice, proceed towards a
window.
‘Exit visa,’ I said to the man behind the
window after half a day of waiting.
‘Exit visa?’ he repeated.
‘I need to leave Amsterdam 2.0,’ I told
him.
‘Amsterdam 2.0 has no border,’ he said
wearily. ‘How can you leave a place that has
no border?’
‘The police wouldn’t let me leave without
an exit visa,’ I said, raising my voice. ‘They
told me to come here.’
‘The Central Subscriptions Office is not
responsible for the decisions of other civic
bodies,’ he replied. ‘And if you shout then
you will have to leave.’ He pointed to a
large sign beside the window which outlined
CSO employees’ right under
Section Such-and-Such of A20′s
constitution to work in an aggression-free
environment.
I still had the key to my flat. Back home, I
picked the phone up, waded through that
odious hum again, and took out a
subscription to the one city I thought could
help me in this situation: the City of
Escapologists. I was given a password to
type into its homepage. This brought up a
pre-generated screen which informed me
that a representative of COESC would meet
me the following afternoon in a building on
Prinseneiland. I arrived at the appointed
hour. The building turned out to be a former
gym. Much of the gym’s equipment was still
there: running belts, bars, weights and
ropes – plus other contraptions I’d not seen
at gyms in Italy, such as glass cases full of
water, boxes with chains around them,
hanging suits with straps protruding from
their sleeves. The representative was
trussed up inside one of these last devices -
upside down, like a bat. He writhed and
wriggled as we talked.
‘You want to leave A20?’ he said. ‘How
can you – ugh! – leave a place that has no
border?’
‘That’s what they told me at the Central
Subscriptions Office,’ I replied.
‘The Central Sub – ugh! – Central
Subscriptions Office isn’t where the big -
yes! One hand free! – the big decisions get
made anymore.’
‘Where is, then?’ I asked.
‘There’s another place. I’ve heard it
called “The Chamber” and I’ve heard it -
second hand! – heard it called “HQ”.’
‘That’s where they issue papers?’ I
asked.
‘There are endless papers there,
apparently,’ he said. ‘I had it described to
me once. There are so many pi – ugh! -
piled up that they form long walls and
corridors. And sometimes they – foot’s
coming loose – they cascade over in big
paper landslides.’
‘Where is this place?’ I asked.
‘Where? Who knows? The person who
described it to me was from the City of -
ugh! Come on! – from the City of Believers.
Between you and me, those people are a
little gu – Jesus! – a little gullible.’
‘But it must exist!’ I said. ‘Who issues all
the PR documents for A20?’
‘City of Propagandists,’ he replied. ‘All
they do is issue pro – I’ve nearly got it! -
issue propaganda. It doesn’t necessarily
mean anything.’
‘But who franchises A20?’ I said. ‘When I
was back in Italy we had a contact, there
were people who, who…’
‘People who what? And anyway, when
were you – ugh! – when were you ‘back in
Italy’? Sounds to me like you could have
been subscribing to the City of False
Memory.’
‘There is no City of False Memory,’ I told
him. ‘I know the whole list by heart.’
‘Who’s to say they’re all listed? Oh yes!
Here it comes!’ His second foot came loose
and he slid from his suit onto a crash matt
on the floor. He stood up, grabbed a
stopwatch from a little table and
announced:
‘Eight minutes seventeen seconds. That’s
my best yet. Phieuw!’ He took a swig of
water, threw the rest of
the bottle over his face and neck, then,
shaking off the excess, rubbed his hands.
‘Here, help me get back into the suit,’ he
said.
I helped him strap himself back in, then
left. My visit hadn’t been a waste of time,
though. Who’s to say the cities are all
listed? he had asked. The hours of hanging
upside down, the excess blood irrigating his
head, the reverse angle on the world -
something had given him a vital insight.
Who was to say they were all listed? Was
there a rim, a vantage point from which the
whole non-territory could be viewed? How
could we even conceive of such a location?
A location? Where? Within the networks?
Some sub-strata of the hum? Within the
office of cascading papers that probably
didn’t exist? And even – even – if there were
a vantage point, then how could it
command a view of every cranny, overhear
every last whisper? What was to stop me
and my neighbour What’s-his-name, the
fatty from the City of Convergence, starting
our own city? Or even if they had bugs
everywhere, still how could they prevent me
from forming my very own city and
subscribing to it secretly, myself, by running
through the automated sequence silently
inside my head – pressing my own
imaginary Three, being greeted by my own
imaginary pre-generated screen informing
me that a representative of the City of One -
me – would meet me here, now, and
whisper in my ear some silent password
only I would understand?
Over the next few weeks, I unearthed
hidden cities. I found them in gaps, holes
and dead zones: in the static between
stations on the radio, the seemingly chance
arrangement of words produced by ripped,
overlaid posters. I picked them up in the
banter between flower sellers and their
customers, the nods exchanged between
lock-operators and the pilots of the boats
that floated through them. There was the
City of Erasure, the City of Crypts, of Mutes,
of Melancholia, of Sighs, Whispers and
Whines, of Sleep. And there were others,
countless others, that didn’t have names. I
sniffed them out. I tracked them like a batdetector
tracking bats at night. Why? To
find, somewhere among or beyond these, a
way out. I knew there must be one – and
that I had to track it actively. One day I went
back to the Anachronists’ shop, bought an
old Dictaphone and carried it around the
city with me, recording locations then
cutting them into other locations, so the
sounds – snatches of conversation, fire
engines and drills, those instruments -
would fold together to produce new sounds
- and, trailing behind these, new images
that would unfold inside my head. I
recorded the sequences across onto the
cassette player I’d bought earlier, cut in the
mixed-up sounds once more and retransferred
the resulting sequences back to
the large one yet again. From that day
onwards I made myself stay up – a day and
night, then one more day, then one more
night and yet another day without a
second’s sleep – to lower my defences, put
me in the state of receptivity in which I’d
really hear what I was listening to, be
irrigated, see the reverse angle and,
released, slip free. By the second day I
was getting images
of boats, sailing boats. They were smaller
than the tea-clipper I’d seen on my arrival,
but old nonetheless. These images would
come to me repeatedly as I listened to the
tapes. They weren’t logically implied by the
tapes’ content, but that didn’t matter: I was
getting images of boats, strong images, and
that meant something to me. By the third
day I was also seeing the harbour – but not
as I’d seen it when I first arrived: I was
seeing it from the other side, the land side,
facing out towards the North. In terms of
sound, I was picking up a strong set of
quasi-repetitions around several words and
phrases. One of these was Aries: I would
see it each day in the piled up newspapers
I’d go through, on the horoscope pages,
and my eye would travel straight towards it
past the Geminis and Cancers: Aries,
always Aries. Another was Be near us. The
City of Ghosts had launched a large
recruitment drive and put up posters
everywhere whose strapline read: Be near
us. On the fourth day I forayed out for food.
I went to Alberthein and bought bananas.
The checkout clerk didn’t know the price,
and had to ask his supervisor how much
bananas cost: as he did this, he
mispronounced them as banaras.
Aries, Be near us, Banaras. By the fifth
day I knew that I was hot. I sensed that my
escape route lurked behind this wordgrouping:
Aries, Be near us, Banaras. Then,
on the sixth day, I heard a rustle and a drift
beside my door, then footsteps dying away
along the corridor outside. I stumbled over
to inspect, and found, lying on the floor, a
post card. Somebody had delivered it by
hand. I opened the door, but whoever it was
had disappeared. I picked the post card up;
it had a picture of a boat on it, a sailing
boat, just like the ones I’d seen inside my
mind, and from the background I could tell
that it was moored in Amsterdam North. On
its side, just above the waterline, was
painted a name: Benares. I turned it over:
the other side was blank – white, clean,
unmarked, erased. And yet I understood it
perfectly.
I was convinced: a boat – Benares – in
Amsterdam North: that was my salvation,
my escape. I dressed as casually as
possible and, taking no luggage, left my flat
for the final time. I walked to the Centraal
Station, walked past the giant hollow crater,
past the empty departures board, along the
concourse tunnel, out the other side. There
was the harbour again, full of yellow buoys
and flags and tugs and dredgers. There
were floating cranes ripping wooden poles
out of the water, plucking them like teeth.
There, behind rows of locked up bicycles,
was the quayside and, shuttling between
the North and the main island, the two relay
ferries. I waited a few minutes until the near
one docked, then walked on with a gaggle
of cyclists, motorcyclists and pedestrians. A
horn sounded, the gantry was raised and
the ferry headed off again.
The sky was silvery and flat, like a biscuit
tin’s lid. The ferry wrinkled the water in front
of it, swirling it into whirlpools from which
gaseous bubbles erupted. City of Strata,
City of the Drowned. I didn’t care: I had a
date with the Benares. On the far shore
were large letters: Z, P, Z again. The ferry
shuddered as it docked by one of these.
Its front tongue panted down onto the jetty and
the bromfietsers and bikes rolled off,
dragging the pedestrians in their wake. I
stepped onto the land and looked around.
The air was quieter here: no orchestras, no
drills, just air and quietness. I was standing
on a tree-lined road. On one side were a
row of bungalows; on the other was an inlet
of water. Beyond this I could see sailing
boats’ masts: it was a little harbour inset
from the larger harbour.
I found the Benares here, at the end of a
domino sequence of walkways and
pontoons. It was just as it was depicted in
the post card – that is to say, just as I had
seen it in my mind. As I approached it I
heard voices inside – men’s voices,
murmuring intermittently across stretches of
silence. I stepped onto the deck, then
through a door and down some wooden
stairs into a cabin.
Inside, three men were sitting round a
table, playing cards. They had glasses of
some kind of alcohol in front of them and
they smoked cigarettes. A large knife was
lying between them, in the middle of the
table. They were quite old men, maybe
sixty, sixty-five. Two of them casually
glanced in my direction as I stood at the
bottom of the staircase; then they returned
their attention to their cards. All I could
think to say to them was:
‘Benares.’
The game paused, and all three men
looked at me. One of them asked:
‘Do you have an appointment?’
‘I received a post card,’ I said.
‘Where is it?’ the man asked.
I fumbled in my pocket but I couldn’t find it.
I must have left it in my flat.
‘Where are we going?’ I asked them.
‘Going?’ the man answered. ‘Going?’ He
smiled. One of the other men smiled, then
the third smiled too. The second broke into
a chuckle, which was taken up and ran
around the table in a ripple.
‘What’s funny?’ I asked.
‘Look outside,’ the first man said.
I walked back up the staircase and
stepped out onto the deck. I’d been so
eager to arrive at the boat on my way in
that I hadn’t noticed that it was dry-docked.
All the boats were. A wall of corrugated iron
polders ran around the harbour; lolling over
this, on one side, was a pump whose base
sucked at the last remaining puddle. They
were taking the water away, just like the
land. I went back inside.
‘Who are you?’ I asked them.
The first man picked a card from the pile
and inserted it into his hand. His hand was
fanned out.
‘Benares,’ he said. ‘City of Death. You
can subscribe if you want. Most subscribers
are older than you, though.’ He slipped a
card from his fanned hand and laid it on the
table. ‘Four,’ he said.
I sunk onto the floor. I started crying.
Nobody came to pick me up or comfort me.
They weren’t unkind, though. They
continued playing their game while I sat
crumpled, crying. I don’t know how long I
cried for. I cried myself out – or rather, cried
myself into a state of clarity. City of Death: it
made sense. Death at these men’s hands
was the one active option left me. In
submitting as a willing sacrificial victim to
their knife, I’d take control, connect to a
world beyond the loops and webs of A20, to
an infinity of which Turin, the past, the
future – all pasts, all futures, all cities – were
part. I jumped up, tore my jumper off,
ripped open my shirt and shouted:
‘Do it!’
The game stopped while the three men
looked at me. Eventually one of them
picked up the knife. He reached a salami
from the sideboard behind him, carved a
slice then placed the knife down on the
table again.
‘Do what?’ the first man asked.
‘Death!’ I told him. ‘I want it!’
The three men looked at me again. Then
they looked back at their cards. The second
man’s were laid out in rows across the table
top; they were face down, but he’d
reorganise them, moving one aside to make
place for another, swapping the displaced
one with a third. Occasionally he’d lick his
finger. He picked a card up and, looking at
it, said to me:
‘You’ve come to the wrong city. You’d
better go and read our statement on the
internet thing.’ Then, laying his card down,
he said: ‘Seven.’
I looked back in disbelief. ‘But you’re the
Death people!’ I wailed at them.
It was the first one who replied this time:
‘”Death cannot be commanded,”‘ he
said. ‘”It cannot be rendered meaningful or
slotted into a present or past. It comes
without arriving in the patience of the
unrecountable era.”‘
‘What?’ I asked him. ‘I don’t understand.’
‘Paragraph Two,’ he said. ‘You want
more? “Dying is patience: the passivity in
which an I that is no longer I answers to a
limitlessness which no presence
remembers.” Paragraph Three.’ He was
reciting his city’s mission statement, some
dubious wisdom clobbered together from a
mish-mash of cod-philosophy and old
religion.
‘If you don’t kill, what do you do?’ I
asked.
It was the third man, the one who hadn’t
spoken up to now, who answered this time.
Looking at the card he’d picked up, he said:
‘Wait.’
‘Wait?’ I replied. ‘Wait? What for wait?
Wait for what? For whom?’
The third man sighed, then laid down the
same card he’d just picked up.
‘Jack,’ he said.
‘Jack?’ I repeated. ‘Jack Frumm? The
Cargo Cult G.I. guy? You people worship
him?’
This question went ignored. The first man
picked a card up, slotted it into his fan,
plucked another card out and laid it down.
‘King,’ he said.
The second picked up, re-organised his
rows, then laid down:
‘Four.’
I left the cabin, stood on the Benares’
deck and looked around. My tiredness
broke the daylight into patches, flecks of
dusty light. The corrugated fencing cut out
my view of the harbour – but rising above
this, dwarfing it, I could see the pylons
striding out to the horizon and beyond,
extending the city’s circuits to all corners of
the earth, its hum through all of space.
