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From The Plagiarist's Notebook: Forgotten Cities of Calvino -- Erosphyxia |
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The Library of Erosphyxia, once rivaling those esteemed vestibules of
collected esoterica found oceans and centuries away in Urbino and
Alexandria, slouches mite-ridden and abused, leaping with the black
widows and dust bunnies all great halls acquire from centuries of
un-use. But one cannot be lead into assuming communal catastrophe or
decadence, the predictable dumbing-downs of a society yawning a hole
into its days by gladiatorial games or the blue and sepia lights of
the television box. An afternoon stroll down the cobblestone
promenades, laying ground to seasonal fountains and tight spires,
would lead you to no fewer than a military company of brash and
waist-high boys grabbing jacks and speaking of vibrating strings
thrumming order into space-time and its twenty-six dimensions. The
lesser of them may give lectures on astronomy, lilting his voice on
the subjects of black holes and antiquity's astrolabe. Put simply, the
Library of Erosphyxia has fallen out of use because its tomes contain
no tales that cannot be deciphered in the marble metopes and
bas-reliefs, not to mention the stone faces of men wrinkled into tight
and fleshy triglyphs. Those chalky images, chiseled in stone by
aficionado masters of the golden mean, contain a recurring image: a
young man, coins over his eyes, waterlogged and wilted into the arms
of a beautiful girl. Even those eunuch scribes and wastrel poets once
charged with copying Erosphyxia's history from incunabula onto fresh
vellum made light spirals and loops at the side, littered the
marginalia with dreams of dying and young love.
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Set on high cliffs and divided by water and time, the city of
Erosphyxia has long separated men from women due to the wishes of gods
and naiads that govern the deep wells irrigating the pomegranates and
blackberry brambles found on both sides of the dividing river. Even
the livestock and wild game, giraffes and leopards and the occasional
milk cow, stare out across the waters attesting their heartthrobs in
lows and low moans while unreachable suitors frolic joyful and
bare-breasted in the yard. But follow the bathroom maps and blind
guidance of the oldest liars, and you will find a sewer grate and then
a ladder and then a pool of tepid water surrounded by candles. It has
been said that if your lungs will hold and the gods have whispered
your name, no less than a twenty-minute swim and you may lie down with
those coy lovers batting eyes and wide smiles and flashing thighs from
across that wet chasm. And while tomcats and piebald beeves and
broken-down men stare moonlit across that great expanse, you may try
your hand, snaking your way through the black and the cold as your
lungs fill with algaed prayers. And if the naiads have smiled and you
shiver back onto dry land, a woman you have eyed for the longest of
times will greet you there, teasing your hair and biting your blue
lips for those precious seconds right before the water intoxication
takes hold -- before you capsize from the heart out.