City of Arnock

A town of opposites where people lead double lives, and the arcane shadows the academic and inventive.

The city of Arnock has layers that are not quickly understood or noticed. Superficially, it appears like any other city. It has shopkeepers, barbers, thoroughfares, and government buildings that evoke Victorian flair. It’s a seafarer’s town. It sits on a plateau overlooking the ocean, and its lower districts have ports that jut out from chalk-white cliffs. Taverns hum there with the clink of glasses and the din of poorly tuned accordions; whalers swap stories of sea monsters and Flying Dutchmen, and each time the monsters in the tales grow larger—many-headed—and the Dutchmen fly higher.

Arnock has an inventive, scientific side. The oil extracted from the blubber of sailors’ catches churns mills which, when combined with a kind of magnetized fan, generate electricity. Arnock would have been Tesla’s city, even prior; you could say it was a forerunner, and it was by this electric power, gifted by way of the sea, that it cemented its economic place.

Few understood this new energy, as Arnock’s architecture evoked an earlier era. Fashion and decor hadn’t yet caught up with the offerings of automation; women still wore hand-embroidered clothing and journeymen made fine china, seeking to imitate the work of their masters. Electricity and magnetism may as well have been magic to its common residents. An aristocratic class kept a close eye on elite and eccentric inventors who could repair and manipulate them.

But as happens with inventiveness, and the curiosity of wandering minds, even the obscure is entertained for possibility’s sake. This gave birth to Arnock’s other, more arcane layers.

Every good city, like every good person, has at least one finger planted in some kind of muck. A plant won’t grow without fertilizer, and a tree’s canopy only reaches heaven insofar as its roots scrape hell. For Arnock, this spectrum evoked practices that the seafarers shunned for fear of bad luck, and that the aristocrats conversed over in their absinthe parlors late into the night. Below the administrative districts and the markets, with all their fruit carts and butcher stalls, rats and ravens ran rampant in sections of the city carved out by old coal mines. This Old Arnock, which was reputed as the place for smugglers and renegades, was where a certain kind of cultist gathered.

It’s hard to tell exactly what these cultists believed. I’d barely reported that they existed by the time I got out. But it may have been that, like the district itself, they took whatever Arnock had above them and simply inverted it. If there was a ball, dancers wore dresses front-to-back, and men and women switched places. If there was a masquerade, the masks would be worn in the back of the head, or upside down. Meals at either kind of event were served dessert first, and if antrilom was served—a kind of haggis involving a fish’s swim bladder—the bladder would be first turned inside out. Music would be played backward, and partakers would have to count their footings in reverse.

Something about it all was unsettling, knowing there were whole groups of people living luxurious lives, possessing the power to do everything they did otherwise, but backward. They could take a mirror to themselves and their beautiful city and invert it just as easily as they played the part of the forthright. There wasn’t a desire or effort to resolve this opposite—just an immaculate method of portraying it. I’m not sure which disturbed me more: the portrayal or the lack of its interrogation.

So, with that salty sea smell in my nostril, there accompanied me a kind of unsettled ambiance whenever I kindly bid the market stalls a good day, then passed through the taverns and down into Old Town, where the mice scattered over wet cobblestone and I could hardly tell the cry of ravens from crows. I rendezvoused with an inventor who had a scar on the left side of his forehead, and he’d tell me the story of his dinner at the ball in Old Town the night before; I couldn’t help but notice his scar was now on the right side of his head. A left-handed perfumer with too much makeup would mix a fragrance and hand me back my change with his right hand instead. 

Arnock was a town of opposites where people lived double lives, professing democracy with one side of their mouth, then subverting it with the other; holding in one hand inventions born from clean academic science, then dabbling in things with the other that reeked of dusty books, wet-ink sigils, and dried blood.

I left after a year. The stink of its lower levels didn’t leave me even when I hung my foot off its piers and dipped my toes in its ocean. Gull cries mixed with caws of crows. The whiff of last night’s absinthe mixed with my latest cologne. In the background, always: that smell of whale oil—blubber. As much as they tried to hide it, it went everywhere.

I struggled even as I settled in a village to the north of France. A blackbird was sitting in a tree outside the villa I stayed in, and I cursed at it when I thought I heard its cry ringing in my ear in reverse, like it was replaying a record wound counter-clockwise. 

I tried to write my thoughts down in a journal at the suggestion of my therapist. My hand started to shake when I realized I’d written it backward.