Sometimes the tug of our daily lives prevents us from visiting the other town as often as we might like. Then a restlessness comes over us, an unease, a kind of physiological unhappiness. We stop whatever we’re doing — mowing the lawn, lifting the groceries from the trunk of the car — and listen. For it’s as if the other town, which is far quieter than ours, is producing a hum, a melody, that we strain to hear. Then we know the time is coming when, in sudden obedience to an inner command, we’ll look around quickly, check our watches, and leave for a visit.
So powerful, in fact, is the pull of the other town that some citizens arrange their lives so as to spend as much time there as possible. These fanatics enter every attic and cellar, examine every tree and bush, taking scrupulous note of discrepancies and successful simulations. Once they return home they always turn their talk to the other town, or else sit restlessly alone, as if waiting for something, so that it might be said of them that their real existence is over there, beyond the north woods, while our town, rising up before their eyes, must seem to them a vision or dream.
It even happens now and then that someone will try to take up residence in the other town — an act forbidden by law. Teenagers, in particular, attempt to hide there after closing time at midnight, though only last year a husband and wife, both in their forties, were discovered by a guard at three in the morning in the bedroom of a house on Sagamore Road. Repeated violations are punished by penalties of enforced absence, which are considered so harsh that they are usually commuted to community service. One group of teenage girls, who call themselves The River, hid in the other woods repeatedly and were finally forbidden to enter the other town for a year. They seemed chastened, performed odd jobs around town, and met quietly at one another’s houses, where they sat on front porches on hot summer evenings listening to the radio, tapping cigarette ash into the air, and pressing against their collarbones cool bottles of soda glittering with droplets of condensation. One night seven of them were arrested in the dark living room of the Lorenzo house in the other town. As it turned out, they had patiently dug a tunnel, night after night, from the north woods into the forbidden world, where they held secret meetings for weeks before being discovered by a guard.
We who are not fanatics, we common citizens who take life as it comes — we’re content to know that the other town is always there, awaiting our visit. Indeed we prefer things this way and feel no desire to cross over permanently. For what would be the point of that? Our lives are here, in our town. It’s here that we work, marry, raise our children, and die. The other town is by nature the town that’s other — if we moved there, it would at that moment cease to be what it is. For we understand in our bones, without worrying it into thought, that the attraction of the other town lies precisely in its being over there. And we understand something else, though less clearly. The other town, when we enter it, suddenly casts over our town a thereness, an otherness, which we find pleasing, if a little confusing. It’s almost as if we can’t feel our town, cannot know about it, until we’re there, in the other town, imagining our town on the other side of the woods. So perhaps it’s true, after all, that when we visit the other town we aren’t escaping from our town, as some say, but entering it at last.
But these are difficult questions, which we’re content to leave to those who are gifted in thinking about such things. For our part, it’s enough to know that each town is there, offering itself to us in its own way. For our town, too, invites our attention, though sometimes we’re aware of it only when we enter the other town. In this sense it might be said that our town requires the other, much as the other town depends on ours. Or perhaps the two towns together form a separate town, a third town, and it’s in this third town that we truly live.
But again I feel like someone who has managed to wander off into the shade of high trees, up there in the woods. Far better to stick to the path, in my opinion. For there, on one of the trails between the two towns, you can decide to come out in either direction: into a sudden backyard, where every blade of grass and drooping dandelion shows itself like a flame, where a bright blue watering can stands before the half-painted lattices at the base of an old back porch, through which protrude pricker branches and a cluster of sun-struck leaves — or, in the other direction, into the picnic area on our side of the woods, with its brown stream, its swings on long chains, and its unpainted wooden tables, on one of which a pinecone as long as a cigar lies beside a brilliant red paper cup. Though both directions have something to be said for them, there’s also a third way, which is the one I like best. That’s when you can stop for a moment, midway along the path, and turn your head in both directions: toward the other town, which shimmers through the thick branches of oak and pine, and toward our town, almost obscured by the woods but still showing through. Exactly where I am, when I stand there and look both ways, who can say? It’s just for a little while, before I move on.
THE TOWER
DURING THE COURSE of many generations the Tower grew higher and higher until one day it pierced the floor of heaven. Amidst the wild rejoicing, the overturned flagons and the clashing cymbals, a few thoughtful voices made themselves heard, for the event had long been anticipated and was known to be attended by certain difficulties.
No one could deny, for example, that the remarkable height of the Tower, which was undoubtedly its most striking and brilliant achievement, was itself a cause for concern, since those who lived on the plain below couldn’t possibly climb to the top within the short space of a lifetime. Inhabitants of the city or the surrounding countryside could at best begin the upward journey, without the slightest hope of nearing the end. Otherwise they could do nothing but remain where they were and wait impatiently for news to reach them from above. Even those who had taken up residence in the Tower could in no way be assured of success — many were now too old for climbing, others lived too far from the top, while still others, though vigorous and within reach, had lost their early fervor and chose not to continue the arduous ascent. It was soon clear that only a small number of devout pilgrims were likely to arrive at the ultimate destination, in addition of course to the company of workers who had completed the final stages of the Tower and were in fact the first to enter the domain of heaven. But the workers were slaves, trained by masons to lay brick upon fire-baked brick on a coating of bitumen, and otherwise uneducated, superstitious, and unreliable. It came as no surprise that their reports were unsatisfactory, especially since their words were passed down from person to person, sometimes shouted at a distance or repeated by a half-drunk servant, and thus hardly more trustworthy than an outright lie. Those living on the plain heard of a brightness, a radiance, a luminous whiteness, but it wasn’t clear what the first visitors actually saw, if indeed they saw anything, although one report, greeted with a mixture of eagerness and distrust, spoke of streets paved with emeralds and gold.
Because the Tower had been the one great fact in everyone’s life during the immense period of its construction, the problem of ascent had been discussed almost from the beginning. When, after several generations, the Tower had reached a certain height, mathematical calculations proved that no one could climb even that far in the course of an entire lifetime. A number of families therefore came to a decision. They chose a son and his bride and instructed them to climb as far as possible into the inconceivably high yet still far from complete Tower, there to settle in one of the new chambers that had begun to be fashioned for townspeople with a taste for height. In their new quarters they were to bear children, who in turn would one day continue to ascend. In this way a family could climb the Tower in carefully regulated stages, generation after generation.