The City Itself

Abstract

The City Itself Maud Casey (bio) The city is, in many ways, like other cities. Like other cities, it was built alongside a river and has a series of low rambling buildings, at the center of which is the domed chapel of a cruciform church. In the chapel, Chapelle Saint-Louis, the great doctor will one day lie in state. We will be invited to pass through, to look upon his dead face; those of us who can’t walk will be brought on stretchers. From a stretcher, it will be harder to look upon his dead face, but they will tell us that to see his face is not the point, though we will have had enough of the point by then because we have had enough of the point already. Still, who wouldn’t look? We will look the way he looked, seeking out the disease. Did you leave this world gently, our mother’s and father’s wish until it wasn’t because they could not find gentleness in the world and so why would leaving be any different? Anyway, who leaves this world gently? We will look the way we all look when studying a face that has studied us. Who are you who am I where are we going what is this feeling inside of me why why why what does it all mean, etc. His last words? I am feeling a little better. How about now? ________ As in other cities, there are alleys with pollarded plane trees, which, if you know the way, will take you the back route to the market, the bakery, the laundry, the vegetable gardens, the school where we learn grammar, history, geography, and sums, the gymnasium where we learn to bend and not to break, the library where those of us who are able to read borrow books about other cities, the post office where those of us who are able to write consider posting the letters we might someday write; until then, we write in our head or trace them in the dark on each other’s backs. We take a back-alley route to the cemetery where sometimes we go to visit ourselves. In other words, as in other cities, there are places to live and places to die. In the city, we are dimly aware of the other cities, the villages, the farms, where we were born or found, or we found ourselves, places we left behind as this city wrapped itself around us like time. Until it became the only city. The places from the before fade, grow fainter, farther away, until it is too far to travel even in our minds. For example, the city that contains our city? The one outside the wrought-iron gates, which open onto, where else, Boulevard d’Hôpital? We can’t be sure we didn’t make it up altogether. The city is, in other ways, unlike other cities. In the courtyard, sometimes [End Page 37] there are masked balls where famous scientists and artists and doctors dress as robed monks, musketeers, knights in armor. On those nights, the great pavilion is strung with fairy lamps, colored lanterns, flowers, and streamers, and we dance as though we are Jane Avril at the Moulin Rouge and then, look, there is Jane Avril. No, really. There she is, a citizen of the city, too, for a brief while. The luxurious pain of a body in the throes of its symptoms has been likened to a dance and when she, a dancer, was a body in pain, it was something to behold. Unlike other cities, there is a photography annex with platforms that fill an entire studio, platforms along whose length we walk because the way we walk is worth capturing and inscribing on plates of glass. There are headrests for close range, large-scale photographs of our head or parts of our face—our eyes, our mouth, our nose, our ears. Longer exposure requires immobility, and so, iron gallows to suspend those of us who can’t walk or hold ourselves upright, those of us who will eventually be carried on stretchers, those of us who...