City of Lethe

The city of Lethe is a city with a thousand torches, and I would wish that you could visit, since it seems to have just as many wonders—but I can’t say that you haven't already.

The city of Lethe is a city with a thousand torches. It is surrounded by a wall whose appearance is like the architecture of the Nabateans—that is, it appears to be from many cultures at once, piled on top of each other: from Babylon to Egypt, from Sumer to Greece, and on.

A ferryman grants entrance through the walls. He rides a waterlogged boat made of woven reeds that nonetheless floats, and he wears an eyepatch beneath his hood. He pushes his boat along with a single long stick. If you give him two golden coins emblazoned with the face and name of an emperor, he will let you ride his boat to the city—though he is not picky which emperor, or empress, is on the coins.

The torches are fueled by an oil that appears clear or greenish, like fine olive oil. The city dwellers collect the oil from deep wells, and it’s said that the wells are connected by a natural maze of caverns beneath the foundations. The oil collects and condenses, dripping down the stalactites and sides of the walls into natural streams. They say the oil is made of memories.

After I gave the ferryman my two coins, I passed through the drawbridge made of tusks of long-extinct mammoths and elephants. I saw inside first a floating head made of the skin of tycoons, those who spent their lives only achieving for the sake of money. Children in makeup would shoot spitballs at them, laughing as the head spat out sugar lumps like a piñata, which the children ate.

I saw animals that were extinct, or perhaps never existed. Octopi that walked on wooden stilts, laboriously swinging them with their tentacles, beaks chattering in a clattering language that reminded me of the Xhosa on Earth. There was a donkey that had the body of a lion, and a ram that had the legs of a giraffe, both carried on leashes by a man in a bowler hat whose face I couldn’t memorize, no matter how long I looked at it. "How do you do?" he asked. "I'm not sure," I answered. He nodded and tipped his hat, as if this was a fair answer from a stranger, and walked on his way.

I stood on a famous bridge in Venice, but it was carved in front of a waterfall flooding a highway beneath me, filled to the brim with carriages pulled by horse-sized insects: Hercules beetles, giant Scarabs, an ant who wrote poetry, and a caterpillar who kept asking what a butterfly was.

I tried the street food at the ferryman’s behest, but it appeared to be a page from the Book of the Dead, rolled into a scroll and slathered with sauce on a stick. I removed it from its skewer and unrolled the page to read it, wiping off the brownish sauce that smelled like roasted cacao and tomatoes. I tried to read the words, but as I did, the words erased themselves so I couldn’t read them again. I can’t remember whether the book it was from was Egyptian or Tibetan.

I would wish that you could visit the city of Lethe, since it seems to have as many wonders as it does torches, but then, I can’t say that you haven’t visited it already. What I can say, is: for each spectacle you see here, you'll look again, and there will be another to replace it. It’d be torture to try keeping a pet in this city, or to hoard some kind of treasure, since it’d keep changing each time you looked at it. Once a balloon, now a cat; once a lamp, now a bodega selling fried cupcakes to men with zebra faces complaining about how the morning dew sticks to their suits.

But if you can let go, and find yourself not grasping for possession of anything you see here, every spectacle is its own kind of joy, continually changing, always regenerating. Not always chaotic, just unpredictable.

You may even realize it is not the city that is always changing, but you, who simply cannot remember what you’ve seen from glance to glance.

The only thing consistent is the wells, handled by men and women hooded like that ferryman, who refill the lamps with that crisp-colored oil, making those strange lights spring eternal.