Night-time screams out in yellow in my ears. "There is somethin' out here! You want to breathe this cold air!" A lot of nights I used to spend just walking around, with really nothing to do. All was right with the world, in a way that I fear I can never get back. I would trek around the byways of cities in which I lived, overground route-finding, zigging from zag to zag, looking for things going on. As a kid I always wondered what happened to the world after dark, where everything went, what went on in the places I recognized during the daytime. As an adult I have grown to learn that nothing happens anywhere, not even during the daytime. But especially not at night.

You learn the most about a city at night. During the day you can learn about what a city once was or wants to be, but all the cultural exhibits, streetside plaques, and brand-new buildings tell you nothing about what it means to be in the city from day to day. All I have ever known about any city I have known because of the streets at night. During the day you go to an art museum, you walk around and see everything plainly: here is the dock, there is the bridge, over there is something else entirely. What is it? Oh: only another bridge. Geography is garish and renders itself unnecessary when the sun is out. There is no need to worry. If you get lost, you can look a little harder, you can find a way to get to where you are going, even if you have to ask someone on the street. Look over there. There's the bridge we just crossed. It's pretty much the same as this bridge over here. Let's cross this one now, we can still see the bridge we just crossed anyway.

But at night, cities have a different feel. Liquid blackness fills the spaces that used to render themselves so clearly, so vividly. Now the bridge is a tunnel, a horizontal abyss dripping with oily darkness. These bridges all look the same: this isn't right. Was I just at this bridge? There's no one around to ask, and the streetside plaques are all tarnished and smeared with food and food grease. I just want to get home now. The art museum is lit up like a French whore, but it's not even open. There is no good art now, except the art of getting my ass home. You walk around and look into windows here and there, trying to discern what it is that people are doing with themselves. Trying to join them, if only for a moment. The whoosh of buses on wet pavement form the structure of the soundscape and yells, sharp metallic clicks and tire squeals, fill the framework with wordless terror. The night is constructing a cage for you, made of your own fear and loathing. You are here, you are separate from those people who live among the willing, the indoors are for them. You have somewhere to be, but where could it be?

What you learn about cities at night that you cannot learn during the day is what the city does with its leisure time. The city doesn't like work much. No one does. The city works because it has to pay rent, commutes and recoils in frustration at the amount of pollution in the air. The city has to do what the city has to do. All cities do this, and no one city's work is really substantially different from another's work. Some work in factories and some in offices, some have to smile when they sell you back your soul, and some only really need to be there to make sure you aren't going to steal anything, but every city shows up and suits up because it has to. But what cities do during their leisure time is different: it is everything.

Does the city have a penchant for strip clubs, prostitution, gambling, drinking, drugs? Does the city simply fall asleep in front of the latest Must See TV shows, only to wake up hours later to reruns of previous Must See TV shows, with a terrible taste of dead skin and bacteria in the mouth, to drag its sorry ass into bed with its clothing on? Does the city ever sleep?

Some cities are quiet, in the outskirts and suburbs almost all are. Some cities are so lively they practically punch you in the gut when you walk into the night air, dressed to kill. There is a time and place for all of this.

A Home In The Shadow

Invocation:

I am evaporated, listing slightly, listening to the sleeve. Side one: twofold and none more. Side B: all whinging and bubble-wrap. Someone was looking at the night, piercing with eyes cormorant-like, penetrating and discursive.

You want me to tell a story, something like the old stories, when things we knew were simple and you could simply tell a story. A nothing. A something to be totally detached from the damning light of day. Now everything means something. The magic of light and lying has gone. Even lies are functional - there is no more play, no more silliness for us, only the meaningful and the dead. The dead are lucky, but they are not here to hold it over our heads at least.

Exposition:

Sometime down there in Mexico, a certain man looked at a cactus and told himself, "I will build a home in the shade of this cactus." It was a large and impressive cactus. It had arms that spread themselves in the sun, further out than any cactus of any variety within a good square kilometer. In the distance, mountains and the clouds they wore as hair and beards pondered these things. They thought it would be better for the man to live among them, but that is another story.

The man began with a plan. He was sure it could be done. The shadows of this cactus changed daily, as they did for every other cactus. They were elegant, long things in the mornings and at night, yawning over several meters at their longest, but by midday they would disappear almost entirely. He sat chewing on the end of a pencil, thinking about where he would make his start. On his knee sat a piece of paper, unmarked except for his monogram and a little doodle of a cactus that looked nothing like his cactus.

He sat and he thought. He looked over the cactus for hours, getting up now and then to get a different angle on it. He poked himself intentionally with the cactus needles, the barbs that protect the cactus, to keep himself awake and alert, because thinking about the cactus was boring and monotonous. "If it will not show itself to me," he thought to himself, "I will simply begin, and let the home build itself." He had read a book about sculpting once that said great sculptors do not chisel a form from stone. They start with a good piece of stone and, using the chisel, allow the shape in the stone to illuminate itself, so that when they are finished, the stone is exactly what it was meant to be instead of some arrogant bastard's idea of what it ought to look like. The man thought about this a while, and laid down to rest when the sun fell behind the mountains.

The mountains, for their part, let the man be even though they thought it would be better for him to live among them.

The next day, the man woke up and went back to his piece of paper. He looked down at it, perplexed, and tried to think of what he had been thinking of the whole of the day before. He could barely remember it. He noted this on the paper, and thought some more about what shape the house would take. The note said, "Try to remember."

The man thought all day, in much the same way as he had done the day before, and he went to sleep again when the sun fell behind the mountains.

The mountains decided it might be better if they helped him a little. They made a rumbling and a rustling with their beards and hair. The man woke up in the middle of the night and saw a lightning storm off in the distance. He heard the deep voices of the mountains rolling over the desert, and he watched as the mountains tried to get his attention to no avail. He rolled over and went back to sleep.

He woke up again the next morning, and looked at his paper. "Try to remember." So he remembered that the previous day he had decided to go to the mountains to get building materials.

As he walked through the desert toward the mountains, the man thought it would have been smarter to travel at night. The sun beat down on him, and there was no water at all, anywhere. He trudged on, promising to drink some water as soon as he had an opportunity. He didn't care if it was a stagnant pond, or a stream of piss from a camel; he would drink it. Night fell, eventually, and the man found that he was at the foothills of the mountains. He slept in a hollow log using moss for a pillow. He slept until midday the next day, dreaming of velvet, which he had never seen or felt, and barley, which he had never tasted. He woke up thirsty.

There was a stream nearby that he hadn't been able to find at night, when it was dark. He went and took a long drink from the stream, and splashed water all over his face, until it dripped from his hair. He laughed a little bit at this, thinking how silly he must look, and tried to determine what building materials he might use.

After some internal debating and a few blind alleys - live animals are not good for structural supports, he had deduced - he began collecting branches of trees, bundling them up with strands of moss and ropy tendrils of some of the smaller trees. When he surmised he had gathered enough bundles, he took another drink from the stream. The water was cool and cold. It occurred to him that he might simply stay here, at the foot of the mountains, where there was plenty of water, and he could laugh at himself. But the desert was his home; he had never lived anywhere else. So when night fell with the sun and their shadows stretched for kilometers over him and everything he knew, the man hefted all of his bundles and began to walk.

Traveling with the bundles of sticks made for considerably slower going than when he had been unladen. He stopped lots of times, and sat on his bundles. He was only halfway back to his cactus when day came again, so he stopped, watched the sun rise over the horizon and shed light on everything he knew. He laid down to rest and, because he was so tired, fell asleep immediately.

The mountains wondered if they hadn't frightened him off.

He woke up in the late afternoon, rubbed his face, and looked at his bundles: there they were, just as he'd left them.

The man began his trek once more, and arrived at his cactus once again in the dead of night. He had a hard time sleeping, so he meditated on his predicament, how to start building his home. There was shadow everywhere, he thought, even with the moon and stars out. It would be difficult to design a home in a place of unlimited space.

Once again, the man began to look over his prospective home, and wondered how he might make a start. He decided that as soon as the sun came up he would simply begin working, and that the house would present itself, like in the books about sculptors.

The morning came and the man set to work. He put his hand into the shadow of the cactus, and scooped some out to test its consistency: a little stretchy, but perfectly useable. He kneaded it, and added some to the ball, working it around to get it properly apportioned. The ball grew larger and more stable. He set about smoothing the edges where the shadow connected to the ground and the cactus. Using the branches he'd collected, he stretched the shadow out to let it dry in the sun. By midday, he had one room almost completely finished, the walls stretched out like canvas. He would be able to sleep inside tonight. He cut a window out of one wall to let a little light in, to let him know when the day had come again.

In the distance, the mountains were happy for the man, but confused.