The sign says WELCOME / WANDERER — and then a question mark, as though even the gate is unsure. I have walked three days to arrive at what the atlas called xity. The atlas was lying, but kindly. The stones here remember more than they admit. I step through.
The noodle-cart vendor recites a thousand prime numbers every evening, to no one. She does not look up when I pass. Two, three, five, seven, eleven. The steam curls into the shapes of small dead languages. I put a copper coin in the bowl and she acknowledges me by starting again at two.
A lantern behind the shutters sways, though the wind in this district is imaginary. Inside, someone is reading aloud from a book that has not been written yet.
The door is off by two pixels. I knock on the air beside it. Something on the other side answers in the wrong tense.
Three floors, four windows, one ghost. The ghost pays rent. Nobody collects it.
A cat has fallen asleep on the sill. The sill has fallen asleep on the cat. Neither of them will wake first.
Inside, folded, is a single receipt for a meal I do not remember eating. The date is tomorrow. I pocket it.
The toll keeper tells me the bridge exists only while no one is crossing it. I ask how, then, anyone has ever crossed. He says nobody ever has, and nobody ever does not. He holds out his hand for the coin. I cross. He keeps holding.
ONE GOLD PER PASSAGE. / REFUNDS ISSUED UPSTREAM / IN THE PREVIOUS AUTUMN.
From “The Catalogue of Cities That Have Forgotten Themselves”: “xity is the clearest example of the third kind of forgetting — not lost, not hidden, but mislaid in the geography of the reader. It can be found only by consenting, in advance, to have already been there.”
The fountain's water tastes of the month of October, somewhere far away. A coin lies at the bottom, stamped with a face that does not match any king the scholars have catalogued.
WHITE TO MOVE. / IT HAS BEEN / WHITE'S MOVE / FOR 318 DAYS. The pieces have grown patient. One pawn, in particular, has learned to sing.
A note in a child's handwriting says: IF YOU FIND ME, TELL THEM I STOPPED TO LISTEN. There is no name, no date, no return address, only the small violet ink-stain of a hand lingering too long on the paper.
A figure stands at the last tile of the world, facing the rendered edge. Beyond it, pixels give up on being pixels and become the noise from which they were made. The figure does not turn when I approach. After a while, I realise it is waiting for me to leave.
TO REST HERE IS TO AGREE / THAT YOU HAVE COME THIS FAR / AND THAT THIS IS, FOR NOW, / ENOUGH.