Names also ebb away. Erosion has polished the letters; some it has crumbled and scattered. Those that remain no longer have any substance. It is a pity that the name vanishes. Yet could it be as beautiful as it is if it did not disintegrate from one moment to the next? When there are no letters there is no city. For only they were something certain in the chaos of dates, events and imaginings. Only they encompassed that which could not be encompassed: joyous First of May parades, and the forgotten helicopters of the municipal transit system, which from having flown for so long without fuel have also shrunk and apparently now hover low over the ground in the botanical gardens in the guise of dragonflies.
A rickety enclosure made from a handful of letters, amongst which there jut out the spikes of Ws and As, now has to contain air-conditioned American banks, cruel and ruthless arms dealers, illegal manufacturers of heroin who shoot at the police from behind chewing-gum kiosks, shivering Gypsies squatting on the sidewalks, and Asian women selling French perfumes on the street directly from suitcases. It may be that at some point supercilious Cossacks in armored personnel carriers will surround the city’s central intersection, or that the savage hordes of Genghis Khan will pitch their tents and build campfires along the main thoroughfare, blocking the way for the trams and buses full of people on their way to work. It may be that Tartar warriors will start slaying passersby with blows of their spiked clubs. But they too will be unable to prevent the collapse of the whole.
There is no one who might know what to do with the damaged construction. It has become clear that the polishing of floors, the cleaning of sidewalks, the spraying of water on the asphalt on hot days or even the painting of walls with oil paint — none of this was sufficient; but the inhabitants of the city did not know how to do more. Disheartened they neglect their duties, which are of an ancillary nature and of little significance. The essence of the city was and remains incomprehensible; if the city planners had some vision of it they kept it to themselves, perhaps in the hope that this knowledge would never be needed. The inhabitants of the city know how to repair only that which can be touched. They are unable to touch that which cannot be seen and yet is most impaired, and that which has an indirect influence on the condition of the whole, since it controls the flow of nouns, adjectives, verbs, affirmative and negative sentences. The true indicators of urban solutions are the utterly unknown rules of joining sentences and creating stories, the principles of linking ideas with other ideas and of assigning weight to questions and answers.
In the current state of affairs streams of groundwaters, strata of clay, and sandbanks are a constant threat to the city. If purity is to be maintained in the enclosed region of happiness that the city was meant to be — this bastion of order holding back the stormy ocean of chaos — then sentences and stories must be removed to the outside day and night, as is done by the municipal sewers, so that in the city there should not remain a speck of dust, not a puddle, not an ounce of trash on the squared paper of the sidewalk. Even words need to be removed. But then that which remained in the city would be dispersed in a single instant in the waters of the countercity, like a flotilla of ships that have lost their anchors.
The inhabitants feel they have been cheated. Irked and embittered, they ask why the creators of the plans did not ensure that the foundations were properly separated from the bedrock: in other words why they were not placed in the air, far from any sources of rot and decay. But the creators of the plans say nothing. Is it possible that they too have been swallowed up by oblivion? Is it possible that they never really existed? Then whose will and whose views are imprinted in the framework of the city? No one knows. Those who ask must seek an answer on their own. One possible answer declares that attempts were indeed made to put the foundations in the air, but that the inertia of liquid concrete proved an obstacle: its boundless indifference and the fact that for its part it did nothing to support order. The stubborn passivity of building materials is responsible for the fact that the city could not realize the hopes placed in it.
The greater the regularity and harmony beneath the sealed dome of the sky covering the buildings and streets, the greater the confusion on its far side. There in the blue depths, whirling in disorder, is all that was ever successfully removed from the city: faulty castings, chipped sandstone slabs, fragments of red brick, umbrellas snatched away by the wind, wood shavings and sawdust, empty cigarette packets and mountains of butts, streams of engine oil, moldering herringbone caps, rags, potato peelings, roiling clouds, excrement, and even the twisted spans of bridges. And though the dome of the sky protects the city from a meteor storm or an inundation of trash, it still finds its way into the groundwaters and by this route returns.
Just as unattainable as absolute airtightness, it seems, is complete purification. In essence it is necessary to remove thoughts before they even arise. For in this city there are no thoughts other than confused ones, nor any events but accidental ones. It is never clear which thought was the source of things that happen, or how it managed to move the mechanical components of the world to set the event in motion. There is no way to determine whether thoughts are the consequence of accomplished facts or their cause, the product of a familiar machinery or that which lends direction to the movement of its cogs.
Unfortunately nothing is known about how the cogs themselves are made or of what, well hidden as they are from sight. Initial confidence in their high quality was so great on the building sites that they were installed without being inspected. It was quite another story with the lime that was mixed on the spot: Anyone could see that it was lumpy. Those who employed it relied on the perfection of the principal construction, believing that it could withstand anything. They counted on its boilers, engines and gears being without exception of the finest quality; they were simply indestructible. With use it became apparent that the unseen components of the world had also been made carelessly and of low-grade materials, worse even than the defective bricks with which the inhabitants of the city had raised their shaky edifices.
The special mechanisms separating good from bad became completely overgrown with the de-aeration and purification machinery that worked exclusively to serve their needs. It was said that these mechanisms themselves created more chaos than they were able to pump out beyond the dome of the sky. When the authors of the idea of cutting off the city from the countercity reduced all problems to the matter of the power supply for the mechanisms, they could not have foreseen how costly it would prove to continually remove all disorder from the world. For is the world not composed of disorder?
With the passage of years the artificially stretched thoroughfares of the city began to droop. Gaps and concrescences began to appear, and even stress fractures in all kinds of installations, including the most important ones, those involved in the removal of the countercity. Filth accumulated in the city. Soot stuck to the plaster, a wooly substance gathered in the seams of the inhabitants’ clothing and the window ledges and cornices were covered with bird droppings. Cats tore mice to pieces in shadowy corners. Stairwells acquired the cat-and-mouse smell of that which is dark, random and cruel. All objects turned gray, just like the Ws and As in the name of the city. At some unknown moment the glints in windowpanes vanished. Crystal chandeliers lost their luster. Though in fact the majority of them had been taken down when they became hazardous. Gilding peeled from the frames of mirrors, the plush upholstery of armchairs grew worn and even the red of the tramcars faded. The sides of canals were coated with a greasy slime. Walls subsided; pavements collapsed.