Other Cities Benjamin Rosenbaum Ponge Ponge, as its inhabitants will tell you, is a thoroughly unattractive city. "Well," they always say at the mention of any horrible news, "we do live in Ponge." A survey taken by the smallest and most cantankerous newspaper in Ponge (a city of many small cantankerous newspapers), the Ponge Poodle, claims that the inhabitants of Ponge (Pongians, according to the League of Concerned Pongians; Pongeans, according to Pongeans for a Better Ponge; Pongarians, according to the Proactive Society for Immediate Pongarian Betterment -- but you get the idea) have 29% more quarrels than the average, and half again more excuses per capita than the inhabitants of any other city in the world. Among the favorite excuses that each Pongarian (or whatever) treasures is his or her excuse for not moving to Strafrax, the safer, cleaner, nicer, more exciting, and more meaningful city across the River Dunge. "I was planning to move there last month," says Ruthie Mex, "but my cat got the flu." "The cigar import taxes there are too high," says Candice Blunt, who smokes no cigars. "My mother's grave is here," says Mortimer Mung. "I would only be disappointed," says Fish Williams. Oddly, deep in their hearts, the citizens of Ponge are happier than those of Strafrax. Ponge's motto is "What Did You Expect?" and the Pongeans (etc.) whisper it to themselves in bed at night as they think back on the day's events. "Well, what did you expect?" they think smugly, pugnaciously. "What did you expect? We live in Ponge." Strafrax's motto is "Anything Can Happen," and you can imagine where that leads. Ahavah You can't ride the rails for long without hearing about Ahavah. Sitting around a fire in an empty lot near the train yard, some old codger will start raving about the city, and the old arguments will start. It don't exist, one guy will say. My brother lived there four years, another will retort. Where is it then? North of Nebraska. Eastern Louisiana. Montana. Mexico. Canada. Peru. The argument gets heated. Maybe there's a fight. Why all this ruckus about Ahavah? Free food there; free love, too. The mayor's an ex-bum himself. The citizens welcome you and take you into their homes. There's sailing and skeet shooting and dancing into the night. Some of your fellow travelers don't take Ahavah too seriously. Some others rant about it -- the same old cranks obsessed with Lee Harvey Oswald's trips to Cuba. Some figure there must be such a friendly town somewhere, even if you discount the stories of whores working for charity and a parliament of hobos. Just our luck nobody knows where! But there are some -- mostly young ones, loners, self-reliant, the kind who could succeed in the world if things were just a little bit different from how they are -- who decide that, as they got nothing better to do, they'll look for Ahavah. You might be one of those. You might spend a while teasing those wild stories out of the older guys. Finding a library that won't throw you out, cross-checking facts. Asking around. Sooner or later you'll find the network of those who look for Ahavah. You'll start arranging to meet and trade tips. Leave messages at the mail drops. You'll see the hard evidence some have gathered over the years. Meet some of the older guys who organize the others. They'll assign you to some circuit: the Yukon, maybe. Get up there, look around as best you can. Get back to us. Being homeless feels more and more like a cover story, a means to an end. Finding Ahavah stops being a solution to the problem of being a hobo. More and more, being a hobo is a way to help find Ahavah. "When we find Ahavah," you say to each other, drinking Gallo in an abandoned house near the Canadian border and waiting for a seeker to show up. Laughter, politics, dreaming. Eventually you're one of the old guys running the show, and as you get older you get less certain of your goal. You dispatch resources, look for new recruits, keep in touch with the networks abroad. You make sure those who need help get it. Sometimes there's a party, maybe even with skeet shooting. More and more, you wonder if this is already Ahavah. Zvlotsk Around the turn of the last century, as its factories pulled workers from the countryside and its population boomed, Zvlotsk was afflicted with many of the urban ills of its time: slums, houses of prostitution, and unsolved murders of a rough and ready sort. If not for the work of the forensic genius Herr Dr. Oswald LŸgenmetzger, Zvlotsk might have continued to endure these plagues in gritty mediocrity. Though he also broke racketeering rings by reasoning out their webs of suppliers and customers, specified the precise alloy to be used in police badges, and liberated poor girls from the slavery of prostitution through the exercise of Kantian metaphysics, LŸgenmetzger's true metier was the murder case. He could often solve murders before they occurred: it then became merely a matter of stationing an officer where he could observe the foul deed and apprehend the evildoer. LŸgenmetzger's savaging of the criminal underworld could not long escape notice. Soon an entire industry of tabloid journals, pulp editions of victims' memoirs, and theatrical reenactments grew up around his accomplishments. Thousands of would-be detectives were sold Starter Kits containing magnifying glasses, fingerprinting equipment, and copies of the Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics. By 1912, the popularization of detective work accounted for a third of the Zvlotskian economy. Dr. LŸgenmetzger's answer to this tawdry circus, the Zvlotsk School of the Forensic Sciences, was an immediate sensation. But after the First World War, his cerebral style became increasingly unfashionable. In contrast, the Modern Academy of Detective Work offered a two-fisted, emotionally involved approach that eschewed antiseptic ratiocination. By the late twenties, the schools had by any measure wildly succeeded. Detection rates were stratospheric, and criminals fled Zvlotsk en masse for less demanding cities. The falling murder rate squeezed the city's detective industry, imperiling the economy. Editorials lambasted the cowardice of the fleeing criminals, and the Gridnovsky publishing empire threw its weight behind a variety of remedies: Murderer Starter Kits, sponsorship deals for elegant archvillains, and women's magazine articles with titles like "Ten Ways To Find Out If He's Cheating On You (And Deserves To Die)." In the thirties, economic privation and anger restored the murder rate to its proper levels, and Zvlotsk boomed. As murderous and detection-happy immigrants crowded into the city, a snob hierarchy developed. The disaffected mugger and the enraged cuckold were despised as lowbrows; the true craftsmen of murder inaugurated ever more elaborate schemes. Both murderers and detectives sported flamboyant costumes and exotic monikers, attempting to distinguish themselves from the common herd. The Second World War dealt a major blow to amateur detectivism, and under the Communist regime it was outlawed as a form of bourgeois sentimentality. Both murder and police work became as drab as the endless rows of concrete block housing which grew up around Zvlotsk's smokestacks. Dissidents lit candles to the spirit of LŸgenmetzger and privately circulated illicit copies of true crime stories in the Gridnovskian mode. After the Revolution of 1989, there were great hopes that Zvlotsk's unique prewar culture of crime and detection would again flourish. But while the youth of Zvlotsk have embraced American-style serial killing along with MTV and McDonald's, they find crime-solving prohibitively boring. The intellectuals of the University of Zvlotsk have declared detection an obsolete attempt to impose a totalizing narrative on the pure sign of murder. At present, Zvlotsk is a city with many murderers, but very few detectives. Jouiselle-aux-Chantes Jouiselle-aux-Chantes is the city of erotic forgetting. The spores of a certain mushroom produce dementia in those who find themselves in Jouiselle-aux-Chantes in the spring. Those who have grown up there are somewhat resistant: they treat the spring as a time to be very careful doing business, a time when everyone is slightly drunk. But visitors to Jouiselle-aux-Chantes in the spring display all the symptoms of senility: they do not recognize their own wives and husbands; they forget their names, professions, and histories. The wise city fathers of Jouiselle-aux-Chantes, rather than treating the spores as a calamity, have marketed their city as an erotic paradise. Couples coming to Jouiselle-aux-Chantes forget their rivalries and resentments, and frolic and cuddle as if meeting again for the first time. Businesswomen's hearts race like schoolgirls'; sailors blush; kisses are clumsy but full of promise. If a debutante propositions the gardener working in her parents' garden, it can produce no scandal; if a priest forgets his vows, it is no sin. In the fall, the mushrooms die, and the cool air clears everyone's head. Most of the tourists go home -- confused, but treasuring snatches of memory of the high life they lived in Jouiselle-aux-Chantes. But there are always those for whom the season of forgetfulness is their undoing, for whom the return of memory is cruel. In the fall, the grave diggers always have plenty to do. His stories have been published in Strange Horizons, Nature, Harper's, McSweeney's and F&SF. He is spiky and inedible. More at http://www.benjaminrosenbaum.com home - about us - editor bios - contributor bios - contact us - submission guidelines