Day 7,722

There was a fire somewhere out on the west side this week that broke free of the hoses and spread and spread through what must have been miles of empty warehouses. The sky was red and furious with smoke for days, the sun a malevolent dim orb glaring through the unbreathable air. It was the first time I’ve had all the windows shut in years, and I’ll tell you I suffered, sweltered, and sweated. The lights of firetrucks flickered up the sides of the urban canyons evening and morning for three days, and for a while I feared it might reach to my tower. Would I have to leave? Could I? I haven’t spoken to another person for so long, I have forgotten the trick of being human. Better, perhaps, to burn?

A needless worry, as it turned out; the fires were beaten down, and the sky cleared, and life went on. The cranes are up already, busy with activity in the blue haze of the summer, and in a few months, a year at most, there won’t be any sign of the buildings that burned. It has happened before, it will happen again; people, no less than ants, will rebuild and rebuild as long as they remain. In that sense we are still connected, I suppose.

When I opened the windows again today, it felt like breathing out, like this building and I stood that much straighter. The city below is green and blue, and from the lake below I can just make out the singing of the imported gondoliers.

Day 6,143

The ocean has risen to swallow the city below me, a warm rush of amniotic fluid covering the first three stories of every building. I am high and dry in my lofty rooms, but there is a pungent salt tang to the air now, the sharp smell of rot and decay. And yet somehow life goes on, as above so below; my daily rituals are uninterrupted, and, so far as I can tell, the rhythms of the city barely paused. Cars have been replaced by boats, and pedestrians spider their way between blocks using spindly, makeshift bridges now, but still they move.

It was not a quick flooding, this one, in human terms, I suppose — the work of years and months rather than minutes. First came the warnings, then came the levees and the seawalls, themselves the work of years, then, when the waters rose and overtopped even those, resignation. A thick cable of cars dragged its way up to the hills, at first, as people evacuated, and for a while only the Dofleini and I remained. I lived off my hoarded food; I don’t know what they ate, but now and again a blossom of blood would unfurl in the water, so I assume they weren’t starving.

As time wore on and the water stayed high, people came trickling back, sealing off what they could and living with the rest. Life, like the sea, rolled on.

Day 5,408

After fourteen years, I do not miss people, but there are times my skin hums with the reverberation of a long-forgotten handshake, some impossibly distant clasp of flesh. I have begun dreaming of crowds, of bodies pressed together on the sidewalk and subway platforms, of some smell of humanity I cannot quite recall. Some tang of sweat, blood, hair, piss; I remember the city seeming so dirty, so unconquerably filthy, when I left. The particulars elude me, but dreaming I remember.

A plague, it seems, has come to the city below. Separated as I am from the world, the specifics are as distant as the trains I dream of, but the roads are empty, the bars fallen silent. The few people that brave the streets roam listlessly, circling each other warily, beads of oil shoved across the surface of a dishpan by a fallen drop of soap. It has never been so quiet, and I have never felt so alone; it is only the wailing of the ambulances that says the city is still alive, still working.

An earthquake shook my rooms this morning, a fairly minor tremor that nevertheless knocked the books off my shelves and rattled the dishes in my cupboard. I have begun to hoard my food, no longer so certain of the deliveries I have relied on summer, fall, winter, and spring for over a decade. Even now, even in this eternal retreat, I am as bound to the world as ever, as tied to the city, as reliant on the invisible work of humanity. My loneliness is self-imposed, illusory; a comforting dream of control.

Day 3,210

The water they pulled themselves out of was murky and cold, I am told. Even after thousands of generations spent in that murk, they can do no more than detect flickers of movement, our shadows passing above and their food passing below. Their changing, elusive environment has left them subtle and canny but forever near-sighted.

It can be hard to tell them apart from other people in the city. A turn of the voice, a sudden flash of light in their eyes as they stand in a pool of lamplight beneath my window… Their genius is for camouflage; they do not see far, but they see much. They blend. They tell the same jokes the others do, join with them in insulting themselves, pretend themselves slow and stupid and shallow. Each of them has many hands, many faces, many voices.

What do they want? Some say they want the country to be more like theirs. Some say they are weakening it against some unknown future destruction. It’s a tricky question, and not one anyone asks them. The very question bleeds mistrust. Myself, I believe that the sea could no longer hold them. What could they possibly want from anyone? What do the people want from the city? There is no answer to that, only a shifting light playing on the waves.

Day 1,906

Summer is the season of betrayal. The long, sweltering days; the torpid nights; above all, the inescapable heat of the season; all combine to sap the will and deaden the conscience. Then, too, when all the city wriggles in the crushing velvet fist of August the dead zone of winter seems impossible, unbelievable. In such an atmosphere anything can happen.

Couples pass before my window in the evening, squabbling. Their voices, when they have crossed the long height to me, are tiny and incomprehensible. Alien, perhaps, save that I have seen the same argument a hundred times, a thousand, and move my lips to their fighting.

They are never clean, these summer endings: they trail a dozen grasping, hairy roots behind them, shrieking like mandrakes. Life is too fully lived in the summer for precision; in the winter the same dissolution would end quietly, in privacy and silence. The heat pulls their poison to the surface like a poultice.