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Amelia Earhart has no stories left to tell. Every continent has been visited; every ocean thoroughly examined from as close as she can dare to fly. To Earhart, every city has become the same. The second city you visit in your life is an impossible marvel, because in it you see all the ways it resembles your first city and all the ways it doesn’t, and wonder at how anyone could ever create something so close to the city of your heart, yet so vastly unthinkably different. By the ninth or tenth city, the differences become negligible and the similarities too similar to bear. Thirty cities in and you are thoroughly sick of the world. Amelia Earhart has visited too many cities.
When she relates this to Frida Kahlo in the linseed-scented solitude of her third-story apartment, the paint-speckled artist says, “You’re asking me for a prescription for your ennui?”
Earhart says, “Well, yes, I suppose I am.” She is seated at a balcony window stained with gentle rain and glass in many colors. There is a tall glass of something sour-sweet that is crystalizing condensation in her hands. Summer in Mexico City brings more rain than one might expect. The window itself is nudged open, just a hint, to bring in distant specklings of afternoon rain. “You’re no doctor, and nor am I, but between you and me, no doctor could ever cure a malady like this. It takes an artist’s touch.”
Kahlo ponders this, as she pours a drink of her own and sets out sugar-cookies on a plate. Her fingers crook unwillingly as she does, rendering the arrangement uneven and inelegant—crumbs spilling sideways, sugar-cookies cracking down the middle and not-quite-the-middle. It does not matter. It does not have to be beautiful.
“I diagnose you with a chronic lack of imagination,” she says eventually, passing the tray to Earhart. “The cure: you must visit one more city.”
Taking the tray, Earhart says, “But there are no cities left to visit.”
Kahlo says, “Then you will sit with me until you finally can conceive of a city beyond the aching reaches of your tired mind. And once you have, we will visit it together, and you may be well again.”
Earhart looks at Kahlo in something resembling disbelief. Kahlo looks back at her with something resembling frailty—but in resemblance only. “I cannot conceive of a city I have never visited,” says Earhart, “seeing as I have visited every city that matters, and any cities I have not touched foot upon are likely to only be equally dull as the rest.”
“The lack of imagination,” replies Kahlo, “may be fatal, I’m afraid. It is of no concern. We have all the time in the world. If you cannot conceive of a new city, then I will conceive of one for you. If you cannot learn from me before all cities are gone, then there is no hope for you, but I refuse to live in a world without hope. So let us learn together.”
Earhart settles back in her chair, comfortable in the warm evening; the cool rain beyond the window. She cannot conceive of a new city yet. She cannot even conceive of the conception of a city. She is willing to learn. She wants to be well again. She says, “Tell me.”
And Frida Kahlo does.
*
*
CITIES & THE SELF (i)
There are cities where it seems that everyone knows your name, and then there is Cinnabar, the city that is nothing but names. Upon entering, you might mistake it at first for a city like any other—there are the buildings, there are the market-squares, there are the residences and the apartments and the people—and you would be correct in assuming so, for the skin of Cinnabar is like the skin of every unremarkable city in the world, if such a thing could be said to exist. It is only when you have spent some amount of time within its walls that you notice the way its residents refer to it. Every building has a name—and with each name, a soul. Every street a person; every river running through the streets an individual unlike any other. The residents know each building, street, and river by beloved name. When a citizen of Cinnabar worries after the health or remarks on the birth of an Alejandro or Isabella or Gabriel, it is equally as likely that they are referring to a human friend or neighbor as they are to the building they live in—which, I’m sure Cinnabar’s people would argue, are as much friends and neighbors as the citizens themselves. To an outsider unused to the syntax of things, the line between structure and citizens will become blurry with ambiguity—so unsure are they of who is who and what is what, until they couldn’t tell apartment Alejandro or city-street Isabella or river-run Gabriel from any two-legged counterpart no matter how many questions they asked on the matter.
*
KNOWN CITIES (i)
On your first day in Minium, you are told the exact circumstances of your departure. You will be startled, as I was, at the dismissive and often brusque delivery of this information, but as you file forwards through the long lines of immigrants, you realize that this is no declamation of your unsuitedness to the streets and no threat on your limited time. It is simply the Thing To Be Done for newcomers; a common courtesy afforded, the same way a new neighbour might tell you of an unspoken curfew or the only train route that doesn’t run late or the way the streets fill up with hazardously ankle-deep water on stormy afternoons. It is the same as any other fact. They arrive in your head, as if spoken by the same unassuming internal voice: That is an ironing-board. Your belt-buckle is metal. The sky is cloudy today. Three years from now on a cloudy winter evening after your third relationship in that many years fizzles out into nothing, you will realize there is nothing in your house worth keeping. You will pack your clothing into the selfsame leather carrying-bag you arrived with, and leave the tea-things on the shelves, along with the photographs and colorful trinkets, the paper-scraps and strange-shaped screws you always thought you’d find a use for but never did. None of it matters anymore. You will leave the keys on the kitchen table. You will close the door. You will leave Minium.
And it is true for everyone that the fact becomes reality before you ever process it happen. Before you know it, your feet are stepping over the city’s border, and the thought comes to you, as if a distant dream—you know, it is possible that this is exactly the way I was told I’d go, isn’t it? You always knew you’d leave Minium eventually, even if you did not fully believe it when you were told. You kept that knowledge in a gently disbelieving box packed at the very back of your mind—refusing to make eye contact with it, denying your own ability to engage with a departure—and it was only when it turned to reality that you could deny it no longer. Everyone leaves Minium, be it by train or foot or boat or death itself. To enter the city is to make a contract with the certainty of an ending. Everyone in Minium ignores the circumstances of their inevitable departure. It is as equally a contract of ignorance.
*
CITIES & SOUND (i)
The first thing that will strike you about Filemot, city of silence, is the wonderful cacophonous noise that erupts all around you at every turn. You will walk down the street, and every home is a party personified—windows thrown wide open to the point of cracking their hinges, glorious song spilling from the interior to the point of songful hysteria. Filemot is truly overjoyed to be alive, and makes it overknown to anyone who dares to listen in from the outside. But that is the trick—you may only listen from the outside of houses and homes and apartments, for the moment any outsider steps within the walls of a family home all sound dies, as if choked from the inside out. In houses and homes and apartments, all are free to speak as they please, but it is the law in Filemot that on the streets, every citizen keeps their mouth shut. In the markets and in the banks, in schools and in stations, the only sound that might be heard is the swift scratching of a pencil against paper, the uncapping of a ballpoint pen, the soft swish of full paper being replaced by empty fresh sheets. The citizens never complain about this indignancy, this inconvenience. They save their voices for the company of friends and family—within safe walls, as it has always been.
*
*
Amelia Earhart is not sure how much to believe of the cities Frida Kahlo describes to her, but she cannot deny that she is compelled by them. “Tell me more,” she says, leaning forward. “Speak longer. Why do you only describe the outlines of these cities? Any one of these could fill hours of conversation alone, and yet you fill my head with hundreds of places so fast I can hardly keep track. Speak longer. Please, speak longer.”
“If I spent hours on any singular city,” Kahlo answers, “you would quickly grow sick of it, for you do not see it through my eyes, only my words, and often words aren’t enough. Instead, I choose to paint the cities for you the same way I would paint a white cat, if deprived of any white paint to perform the task with. I paint the outline, in all shades of any color I feel like, and let your eye fill in the rest. The same for my cities: the outline is enough for you to fill in the blanks. Why do any more work than I strictly have to?”
Earhart says, “I am sorry if I am tiring you.”
Kahlo says, “It is no trouble. Everything tires me, these days. It’s only a matter of finding the most enjoyable method of exhausting myself.”
Earhart says, “I am sorry for you.”
“Don’t be,” Kahlo says. “I despise that. Look at it another way: I am often exhausted of myself, and trapped within my body, and unable to see the world beyond the aching of my joints and the dull walls around you. You are much the same with your mind.”
Earhart says, “Yes, I am beginning to see this. You are quite the escape artist.”
“From a lifetime of practice,” Kahlo agrees. “And yet my lifetime is the one thing I have never yet managed to escape.”
*
*
CITIES & SPACE (i)
In Viridian, I dropped a coin. I watched it roll off the canvas awning of the shopfront below me, and tumble into a spider-string maze of telephone wires, construction beams, soft-footed cats and paper airplanes drifting from window to window. For a moment, it flashed at me, as if winking, and then disappeared beyond the low-flying kites and sideways dumb-waiters, beyond the reaches of sight.
Afterwards, I searched for days in the narrow streets, the twisting gutters. I never found that coin again. I left Viridian, two Spanish dollars poorer than when I’d arrived.
*
DELICATE CITIES (i)
Every citizen of Mazarine treads their shimmering streets and causeways in socks and slippers. They do so with utmost care and a lingering, inescapable fear. You would think them all sleepwalkers from a distance, viewed from a far-off mountain through a polished telescope. And, yes, you would be able to see them from that distance, for the city is built entirely from steel frames and stained glass. You might think that glass does not make for stable or strong streets, and you would be correct, but if you are very dainty about the placement of your careful feet it may serve its purpose for a great many years without cracking—and even when cracked, can last a good few months longer before necessity and collapse dictates that the shards of the old must be finally hauled away, to be paved over with the fresh-fired new. But glass is expensive, and every citizen fears that the new glass will not remotely begin to capture the singular brilliance of the old, so they seek to avoid the cracking and rupture of the old at any—and every!—cost.
A city of glass is by nature a dizzyingly imprivate place to live. It is not the lack of privacy that concerns Mazarine’s citizens. It is rare that they look at each other eye-to-eye. It is rare that they care about anything beyond the precious, fragile glass beneath their feet.
It is said that the gleaming city of Mazarine reaches its zenith of splendor at sunrise and sunset, where the rays of the sun cut through every clear-and-colored surface, setting the world ablaze in kaleidoscopes of refracted light. The sands of the desert around the city’s edge come alive with twirling fractals, gleaming snatches of impossible color, rainbows within rainbows. Mazarine’s people pay this display no heed and no mind. They are too busy worrying about the next time they slip up. The next time they stumble. The next time the glass beneath their feet lets out a sickening, unfixable crack.
*
CITIES & SHAPE (i)
When I arrived in Ianth, it was snowing in all shades of purple and violet. It is always snowing in Ianth, the buried city, and always has been, as long as anyone can remember. In times long past, it was the work of the people of Ianth to clear this delicate purple skyfall from the streets. Routine developed, as it so often does, around this task—a well-oiled machine’s gears clicking into place, one by one. Here, the children spilling glittering pink salt from hand-sewn pouches, scattering the sharp grains to streets and sidewalks as they traverse from home to school and back. There, the strong young men rolling up their sleeves and pitching shovel to snow to clear it into great lavender heaps that they push back against walls and into alleyways so as to clear a path for all those who pass through. Above, the elderly raise brooms through windows of high-up buildings and beat the snow from rooftops and awnings, revealing the brightly-colored tiles and lovingly-painted trims on every household rooftop. Everywhere, bright-eyed women with freezing fingers and toes tying back their hair and setting their great iron stoves alight, so as to melt it down to syrup and sauce. The purple snow of Ianth, once melted, contains a delicate, almost-sweet fragrance that is more than soothing to the soul, in moderation. Every day, they would carry out this routine, and by mid-day, the streets would be clear and the city would be shining, good as new. And every night, the purple snow would continue to come down, and come morning all of it would be covered in a fresh coat of cold and silence once more.
When I arrived in Ianth, the people had given up on the snow. No more do the children scatter salt; no more do the men raise shovels in defiance of the weather. The women's stoves remain cold and silent. The city remains beneath the snow, but only as impressions beneath a blanket; a reflection through frosted glass. Here, you may make out the rounded mountain where beneath lies the towering spire of a church steeple. There, the apparent lump of the children's schoolhouse. You may suppose that over there to be a bridge; the dips and furrows of streets and sidewalks only implied by the periwinkle patterns of snowfall.
Beneath the purple snow, the city carries on—dark and silent, but never quite as cold and never quite as solemn as you’d expect. Ianth is the buried city, for when its inhabitants gave up on their constant clockwork clearing-of-snow, they found that in their hands remained all the time in the world.
*
*
When Frida Kahlo cannot speak aloud any longer, and the sour-sweet does nothing to soothe her throat to the point where speech is once more available to her, she does not stop describing cities. Amelia Earhart is selfishly grateful for this, because she is not ready to stop listening just yet. Instead, Kahlo throws open the doors to her workshop, takes up a brush, and begins to speak through colors instead.
It is an imperfect conversation. All conversations are imperfect. In the language of paint, she gestures towards the idea of yet another city—a swathing stroke of startling scarlet trickling down from the top of the canvas describes a place where the rain of the city is blood and the blood of the people is rain. Feather-light dry strokes like delicate chicken’s claws suggests a city erased at the edges by fools unable to conceive of a city-structure beyond their immediate control. Earhart holds the palette and passes new tubs and tubes of pigment over as Kahlo bends over the canvas, delicately mixing one tone with the rest, for hours on the hunt for the one shade that will perfectly communicate her meaning.
It is an imperfect conversation. Earhart listens anyway. She cannot speak back in the same language, but sometimes aloud she asks the questions anyone would know to ask: And where does it stand? And why does it stand? And how does it continue to stand, despite everything? Kahlo answers, as best she can, with long, languid trails of paint and swift brushstrokes and washes of filmy color. Together, they become accustomed to the ebbs and flows of this new language of theirs. The ways it fails where their previous language succeeded. The things it communicates that no other language could.
A new city emerges, as they speak in words and without. A swift smear of electric green. A flash of violent blue. A twitch of the mouth, denoting dissatisfaction. A swipe of linseed oil, a smudge of turpentine. Kahlo erases, erases, continues to erase, burning through oil and canvas until all that is left is negative space, a city in the spaces where a city is not, the lack of a city to denote where a city should be.
Amelia Earhart would like to know where this city-without-a-city stands. And why. And how. Frida Kahlo answers without words, as she takes this non-city to the place where all non-cities go, into the dark corners of her workshop, piled on top of hundreds of erased-and-eroded canvases that met the same fate, long ago. She returns to a fresh canvas and a fresh jar of linseed oil. She begins to construct a new city. The conversation flows on.
*
*
CITIES & SHAPE (ii)
On the road to Gridelin, I found myself weathered and weary. Everyone is weary on the road to Gridelin. Gridelin is a city situated at the top of a mountain so high that the clouds obscure it, and the road is anything but direct. A traveller wishing to enter that distant city must follow the path in turns and turns and turns again, and in the journey they will wind around the circumference of the mountain clockwise ad nauseam, wondering quietly to themselves if the circuits they take are really growing smaller in size, or if they are simply going around in circles with no hope of ever reaching a destination. I was not alone on that road, and nor will you be too if you ever attempt to traverse its dizzying slopes, my sweet friend. There is always someone else on the road to Gridelin. An old man with a lovingly carved stick that he gently presses into your hands, telling you to take care even as he falls behind into shadow. A pair of young women with half-shuttered eyes and their hands intertwined, murmuring to each other in velvet tones, but pausing long enough to incline their heads in your direction. A bedraggled hound who trails your footsteps for several hours, never close enough to extend your hand to but excellent company all the same. There is a certain kinship that comes with walking this winding road. There is no bench to rest at, and the ground is too treacherously stone-marked to stop and sit for any length of time, so every traveller must walk without pause and hesitation. When you walk the road to Gridelin, you will never see anyone returning in the opposite direction. It is simply not done.
It is possible that the city of Gridelin at the top of its winding mountain path has a form and shape all of its own, and contains untold mysteries and treasures within its walls—if it does have anything resembling walls. But the Gridelin at the mountain’s peak is of little interest to those that seek it. To them, the real Gridelin lies in the pebble-strewn path they walk—every turn of the mountain’s perimeter a previously-unseen city street, every new strata of sky a rising building. To travel to Gridelin is to become a citizen in the journey. To see that nameless mountain is to view it from afar.
*
DELICATE CITIES (ii)
Cerule melts on your tongue like a snowflake. You visit it gently, see that there is only so much of it to go around, and take your tiny share, just as gently. Some cities are too large and sprawling to describe within a handful of words. Cerule is only this handful of words. It is an experience you can fold in half and click into a locket. Everyone’s Cerule is different—unique—personal—and yet I could sit with anyone who’s ever attended those streets, hear their handful of words, and they would know just as well as I that we have both visited the same city. I open my fingers. The words are cradled there. Cerule is there, as it has always been. Exordium. Venerance. Aurora. Sassafras. Silhouette. Sky.
*
CITIES & SPACE (ii)
Lovat is the city that is built from the top down. To start in the sky and construct down to the earth is a ridiculousness and an inconvenience both, and yet that is the way it was done. All its architects were far beyond fed up of using up their best ideas at ground level, growing weary over the course of its construction, and reaching a state of supreme apathy by the time they reached the top. Every time they emerged to the end of a city’s construction, they would have no will to place anything at the very top save for an indifferent weather vane; a thoughtless clerestory, a callous cupola. The only way to save yourself from apathy is to invert yourself, so the architects did. They started with the most marvelous of gables. They created spires and chimneys and dormers equal to none other in the world; they poured a riotous flood of glorious inspiration into every rooftop and frieze and high-up gutter, and by the time they made it all the way down to street level, they were tired of the city and tired of themselves and couldn’t summon up the care to structure anything but the barest minimum. A half-hearted foundation. A careless cobblestone. A thoroughly unsympathetic front door, through which nobody enjoys entering through. From the ground, where all mortals must dwell, the citizens of Lovat see their magnificent city as nothing more than plain and uninspired. It has never occurred to any that it was never made for them to view.
*
*
Kahlo teaches Earhart to paint. “It’s just like flying a plane,” she says.
Earhart says, “It is nothing in the remote vicinity of flying a plane.”
Kahlo says, “It is an unfortunate truth that I have never flown a plane myself. I bow to the expert.”
Earhart says, “Or maybe everything is like flying a plane and I’m only being persnickety about it. Flying a plane can’t be that terribly difficult. I manage it every day.”
“And you’ll manage to paint, too. Here, start with something light. A yellow, or a brown. You’ll build up the color around it. Layers upon layers.”
Kahlo teaches Earhart to paint. Earhart is a messy learner. She muddles yellows into grimy browns and greens, smears paint past the edges of the canvases, cannot stay within guidelines for the life of her even when the guidelines are self-created. “See,” she says. “Every city I paint turns out just the same.” A tangle of muddied colors that can’t seem to decide if they’re being confined to the canvas, or staging a daring escape from it. Five paintings in a row. It should be impossible to paint the same thing twice by accident, let alone five times in sequence. “I have always been a prodigy,” Earhart proclaims.
Kahlo cleans the brushes and clears the space and picks out a single tube of crimson red. “Start with this,” she says. “And use nothing else.”
Earhart protests: “But then the canvas will be nothing but red.”
“There are many red cities, my friend, but you seem to be painting none of them. Maybe we have been going about this all wrong. Maybe you will thrive best under restriction.”
Kahlo teaches Earhart to paint. Under her watchful eye, the disparate strokes of crimson begin to bloom into something glowing. Something distant. Something more.
*
*
CITIES & SOUND (ii)
Gamboge arrives with a crash like the end of an eternity. It is the city that comes when you least expect it, a city that exists only in the shards of its own destruction. Gamboge is here! It was not before, but now it has crushed its way into the world, and there is no escaping it. Welcome to Gamboge, city of agony. Its citizens lie in the rubble, dazed and bruised and in many cases close to death, as they have fallen apart along with the rest of it. This city is the high, aching wail of a child rising above the ash and smoke—the confusion and horror of a living being who is experiencing the first great, true pain of their short life. It is the soft shifting of settling detritus, gentle rearrangements of gravity; the percussive snap of something breaking irretrievably. Soft murmurs of attempted aid. A woman is crying. A man is crying too, much the same. In the agony of a world ripped apart, we are all more similar than different. Again, I say to you: this is Gamboge! It could never exist outside the rising symphony of its pain. You could not hope to reconstruct any semblance of rising tower blocks or squat hamlets by measuring the rubble they have left behind. The city is a wreckage. It is agonies in motion. Before now, it was not Gamboge—it was some other city, I do not know which, I do not care to describe. Gamboge has arrived. It will only depart when we have rebuilt our lives, one at a time or all together.
*
KNOWN CITIES (ii)
You asked me earlier about Nacarat, my friend, a city I mentioned in passing and could not bring myself to elaborate on at the time. I will attempt to elaborate now, but what a task lies before me; for what is there left to say about Nacarat, the seaside city that has been catalogued within an inch of impossibility? Beneath its well-known streets lies the library that goes on forever, and within each book is recorded every detail that anyone could ever want to ask after, and quite a few they would never think to ask. The shape and slant and geometry of the painted tiles its citizens must traverse on the way to market; the whispered names of every child’s imaginary friend, the exact number of leaves contained on each shivering branch of every lovely silvering tree. The library knows the position of every paint-stroke, every imperfect chip and splotch and peel, all along the boardwalk and far beyond. It knows how much ink is contained in the lonely poet’s inkwell, and will be the first to take note when that last drop of ink finally runs dry. Everything you could ever hope to know about the city is contained in writing, if you only know where to look. In Nacarat, the archivists never sleep, for there is always something new to record in their endless library and if they stop for a single second an infinity of information will be lost forever. What is there to say about Nacarat that has not already been said? What is the point of books when nobody cares to read?
*
CITIES & THE SELF (ii)
Viewed from the right angle, you would easily draw the conclusion that Kermes is a whole city unto itself. Viewed from the wrong angle, you might start to notice something strange, but such a city it is that you might easily dismiss it as a trick of the light. After all, it is cathedrals and circles and perfect perimeters all the way down—great sprawling parks ringed in trees heavy with fruit and blossom. Museums and theaters and libraries in-the-round. From a different angle: you might look down on Kermes from above and mistake it for an abstract dartboard, so concentric is its design—every district and street winding its way around to a perfect center. You will make many mistakes when attempting to interpret the meaning of Kermes—you will make every mistake until you decide to tread the streets yourself, and cross straight like an arrow over the parks and bridges, the pavilions and ringed rows of houses, straight to the city’s center, where you will press your hand up to the great mirror that bisects Kermes through its very centre and realize that this city is only half of itself. All else that you might assume to be real is only a suggestion of the true Kermes—or maybe it is the suggestion that is real and you are only the reflection. It’s entirely possible that you are making every mistake again; after all, the streets and parks and people are mirrored with every accuracy, and the mirror is polished to a keen shining transparency that you yourself could not tell the difference from afar, and when you met yourself walking in your own direction, it was so that for a long lingering second you thought yourself to be meeting a very familiar stranger. Maybe the distinction does not matter. You sit back-to-back with yourself at the place where reflection meets reflection, and look into the concentric sprawl of Kermes, real or false as it may be. You do not feel the coldness of glass at your back. You only feel lingering warmth. Every woman her own mirror.
*
*
Frida Kahlo has a globe of the world that sits precariously at the top of a sequence of piled-high canvases. When Amelia Earhart asks why she stacks half-finished canvases and crates of forgotten art supplies to use as shelves rather than installing the real thing, Kahlo says, “Every time I search for something necessary, I must confront everything I deemed unnecessary by comparison. It’s a very humbling experience.”
The globe is a marvelous thing, given to Kahlo by an uncle or a mother’s friend or a brother-in-law’s-sister’s lover. It is old enough for dragons and sea-things to haunt the emptiest of oceans, all blank eyes and snarling teeth. All the coastlines marked out in clear bright ink, jagged and perfect and correct, although reality may choose to disagree if you went there in person. The paint flakes at the top and bottom where the globe meets its axis, where the certainty of the world begins to falter. All the countries of the world, in all their delicate brushstrokes of every color there is.
They take it down and sit cross-legged across from each other, placing the globe equidistant. They take turns spinning it this way and that. Gradually, Earhart lifts her fingers to the painted wooden surface and begins to trace the path of a journey she has never flown. “I begin in Smalt, a city where they started building the capital airport, took so many years to do it, forgot how to stop building airports, and therefore it is nothing but airport these days,” she says, and twirls across the Atlantic, fingers searching for a landing spot. “From there to Albicant, where the wind gets into your house no matter how tightly you seal the windows and bolt the doors, and every person on the streets seems windswept and startled.”
Kahlo follows the path with her own fingers, trailing softly in Earhart’s wake. She breathes in each new city with something like relief. “I see I have cured you,” she said, “or to be precise, you have cured yourself. There is no more need for this. You may go wherever you wish.”
“I could—but I would like it very much indeed if you’d tell me about one more city,” says Earhart.
“Only if you tell me one in return,” Kahlo replies, and in that manner they sit and talk for a while longer—late into the night and later still, so when the sun breaks over the sky and leaves them quietly slumbering against the window-glass and tall-backed chairs they’d abandoned themselves in, they never even noticed when consciousness left them both.
*