They were not meant to be left so long alone, the Ladies, nor the war to drag on so long. Greeted as liberators, was the hope, a sprightly little springtime war, but somehow the months turn into years and the years into decades and the front lines do not move more than six inches in a year and the horizon turns black with the swarms of uncountable flies. You cannot move through the trenches without wading hip deep in blood, or so they speculate; it has been so long since any word has come back to them, the distant thunder of the guns is the only reassurance they have that the war continues.

But life goes on: the sun rises and sets, just as it ever did, and if the city is empty of everyone but themselves, well, what of it? Do the Ladies not contain a nation within themselves? They work the factories, they till the fields, they write the songs and the novels and the plays; they are artists and artisans, servants and politicians, baseball players and cigar smokers. They form gangs in the bottomlands, pull knives on each other in the alleys, spin straw into gold and blood into oil. The empire cannot fall while they live, or so they hope.

When, through chance or misfortune, this or that soldier finds his way into their city, they raise their ears at the unaccustomed sound of a boot, drop to the ground and slink out of the darkness, coyotes from the storm drains. They value their privacy, their own society, do the Ladies, and immigrants are welcome but settlers are not.

In the factories and the fields, the Gentlemen are strangers to each other. In newspaper offices and business meetings they rub elbows, trade barbs, make weekend plans, empty rituals against prying ears. The parks around the canyons and water towers are dark and anonymous after the last bus has rumbled away, and while starlight and a sliver of moon might catch on an eye, a belt buckle, a flash of teeth, what can be made of that?

But in the bars they discover each other. Fellow workers see each other for the first time in the Red Door or Cherokee House, and cross the room to grip arms, shoulders, touch knees, laugh together freely. The lighting is poor but sufficient; if the floor is sticky and the beer watered down, so be it. The owners are unmoved by talk. They police themselves, keep an eye on the door and the end of the alley, but otherwise breathe together, respire, conspire.

Out of this tumult is formed the order of the clowns. Out there, in the city under occupation, it has a grander name, pretensions toward history; but here in the yeasty womb that birthed it, the Gentlemen hold the truth close, and whisper jolly poison into every unguarded royal ear.

The war, so they say, ended a half century and more ago, but the Ladies keep to the old habits, of want and privation, of solitude in the afternoons, of cold coffee on the balcony. These habits kept them alive, kept them canny, and have not lost their utility with the coming of a notional peace. The front has shifted, not dissolved, and if there are fewer mortars crashing between the buildings, fewer young men carried silently back through the quiet streets, even so: the siege continues.

They have lost the streets, the bars, and the factories, driven inside and underground. They drift among the new society, unseen aqueducts half-buried beneath newly green hills, trenches choked with poppies. In the labs and offices, they stand in circles, laughing humorlessly at a joke told by someone schooled in forgetting, avoiding eye contact, swallowing rage. They know each other in these moments by a tightness around the eyes, a blanch of white knuckles on a sudden fist, a twist of the mouth revealing the pinch of an ulcer.

Evenings they go to ground in windowless bars or drive through the country on surplus motorbikes, mouths wide and laughing to catch the air, eyes bright with whiskey, cheap cigarettes, country music, blues. They carry the war within them, pass it down in silence to their adopted children, who will use it in the war yet to come.

No one signs first, no one signs last, their names ring the letter of protest like a herd of cattle turning their back to the wolves. There is no least element in the set, no weakest member, no place for induction to gain a toothhold and start whittling down to methodical emptiness.

It will not work — power is not so fastidious as logic. When no member is first, all are first; when each trailers another, all lag behind. They are picked off regardless, arbitrarily, universally, all scheduled for reprisal, if not later, then now. The firings never end and the office empties out, the lights are shut down row by row to conserve energy, until no one remains, neither worker nor manager, just the shape of a company left pressed into the world like the echo of a body in a well-worn mattress.

But if there is no logic to their winnowing, there is no certainty of their removal, either. Like mushrooms after a rain, they rise again, fruiting bodies reaching toward the air from a sprawling underground network that neither the hunter nor the pig can reach. Burn the forest down and they will rise from the ashes, first to burn, first to return, an unbroken circle where spirits dance.

A movement without a leader cannot be slowed by assassination.

Like cats, the Gentlemen have a multiplicity of names that they trade between themselves as necessity or inclination demands. Public names, private names, true names; names for the stage, the page, and the war; preferred names and passing names, work names and screen names. They have an endless supply of official-seeming documentation to support these names, cards, badges, passports, library cards, utility bills, job applications, you name it.

These names are real, in the way that a suit of clothes is real, or haircut or beard is real, but they are fluid, labile, suitable to a moment or a mood. They learn each other’s name like collecting quarters, spend them as easily. They hydra out with each introduction, forking again and again, a tangle of identities that scorns the idea of a solid, stable center. Like fish, like coral, like a man o war breaking the surface before descending to feed, they exist only in aggregate, each one a nation in himself.