The truth is, it does not matter if Aerograd existed before the occupation. If we were ever other than we are we have forgotten it. Forgetting has been attached inside us like a second spleen. Memory is dispensed through official channels. Go to the market; stand in line; receive your ration of the history of the city. I do not speak in metaphor. Our dialect no longer allows such dissembling. You cannot say a thing is another thing. It is like another thing, perhaps, though even that smacks of a certain effete enervation of thought. But it cannot be another thing. That is an unworthy lie.
This is not a lie: Memory has the taste and texture of cooked meat. Eat it and live. Remember, but only what it is licit to remember.
In Aerograd, the words for meat and memory are the same.
Second: Aerograd was originally designed as an Academy Town, an experiment in isolation. Hundreds of pure, precise minds brought together and removed from the nation as a whole. From distraction, if not from oversight. We descend from the best and brightest of the Old World. On Phalarica Hill, rising greenly through the constant clouds, you will find the University, a wonder of revival design. Each year the University graduates clear-eyed, clear-minded students of the highest caliber. In the mist of Blue District, the Capital reflects the University in both architecture and intent: to govern with clear eyes and clear intellect.
This is the Ossuary. It is where they turn laws into bones.
The mist in the Capital is uniform, curling like fleece. It is opaque, pearlescent, unchanging. It does not part, not at morning nor at night. Even inside the gilded buildings it is so thick and silver and soft you could not see an elephant if she sat down beside you. Water drips from the carved metal columns. This is how virtuous government is performed—good ideas are accepted with joy, without personal prejudice, no matter who’s mouth they emerge from, for it could be anyone’s mouth. Your mouth, mine. Even Our Lady’s.
////⁄: I remember the first time I saw Our Lady. I am allowed to remember that, why not? She processed through Yellow District, walking as I have been told she always does, to show that she is like us, she is one of us, no better or worse. Her tigers went before her, long and bright in the unceasing cloudfog. Where they breathed and snapped their garnet-colored jaws, pools of clear air appeared. They ate the clouds, so that we could see her. I was afraid. My mother pushed me forward, in case Our Lady should glimpse me and bestow some minor favor. So I watched without obstruction. She processed, very tall, very straight, bald, dew pearling on her cheeks. In her silver government dress, with the blue sash indicating her endless duty to Aerograd. Her skin was a fiery opal violence, terrible glittering colors, hard and slick with vapor condensing and rolling down the gem of her skull. Our Lady appeared as though she was crying. I tried not to look at her hands. I knew what they would look like. My primer had an algebraic game based on them. I could not be prepared. At the sopping ends of her buttered lace sleeves, fifty graceful, strong, ringless hands hung like garlands of awful flowers. The hundred hands of Our Lady. Hands in every part of the city, able to seize anything and anyone, hands around every heart, not squeezing yet, but soon. It seemed an unbearable weight for her to carry with those thin arms. When she clasped her fingers together, they became a huge single fist. Our Lady wore no shoes. Her feet clacked hard on the wet pavement, stone striking stone. Behind her black giraffes followed, dancing, winding and unwinding their necks.
No one else in the city looks like her. I have seen old pictures of tigers and none are that color. She is a dream we all have at the same time. I do not think any meat tells where she came from. She has always been here, like the occupation. But she cannot have been, for nothing in Aerograd is built for fifty hands. She is the occupation. But that is not true. We are all the occupation. We occupy each other and save work for the tigers. We are afraid of her and her animals. We do not even know her real name. We speak of her and God using the same words.
Our Lady did see me. She turned the glitter-black and hot ochre cups of her empty eyes toward me. I felt nothing. On the inside I too was a cloud. Our Lady looked up at my mother and said something. Her voice sounded like a propeller winding up.
What Our Lady said was: “You do not exist.”
And she didn’t.
My mother simply wasn’t there anymore. Her workplace had not heard of her. My father was not married and never had been. Her things no longer cluttered the house. Even her smell winked out. I felt her evaporate from my hands. But these days I have to chew memory to think of her at all.
Third: A necessary digression on the weather systems here. There are places in Aerograd where the sun can be reliably seen. Some the size of a golden pin; some blanketing half a district. These are holy ground, tended by a congregation of biodomes, herbaria and hydrofarming. You are unlikely to receive a permit to cast shadow there. Everywhere else, we dwell in cloud. Mist, fog, cirrus, gloam, cumulus. We have a complex nepheline vocabulary. The clouds never clear, but with practice you can find your way surely enough, except in the Capital. Move through the world as through a labyrinth; pick your path between clouds like monstrous, ephemeral whales. When you pass by, the crackle of snow like electricity will raise the hairs on your skin. You will feel awake, as we do. On the verge of something forever.
Because you are foreign and do not know any better, you will not be able to see the subtlety of the cloud cover as locals do. Ugh, you will exclaim, it’s thick as hair out here. What a dreary, grey mess. It is sad for you. Each person has their personal vocabulary of condensation. The Aerograder dialect is malleable and opportunistic. Many times the Ossuary has released an official chart of terms and grammar to be used when discussing the weather. In this small thing and only this, no Aerograder obeys. Clouds are constant, they are personal, they are ours. Should you have an interest in linguistics, you might amass a considerable collection of private cloud-dialects in one trip to the city.
You will be always damp in Aerograd. You will be always half-blind.
////⁄: Today the clouds ooze forward, flowing like suspended oil. Their tops limn with cold bronze; their undersides bruise violet-yellow with unspilt snow. Look—I will share with you my tongue. How intimate, how bare, how pornographic. In cypher is safety. These are Ice Eels Speaking Forbidden Words. I like them but they make me sad. Their feathery fronds reach out to me, chill my hands, even down here.
I had a lover once. We never married; married couples are kept under observation. There is a danger inherent to them. When traveling to other Districts or off-air reconnaissance zones, one half of the two must remain at home. The Ossuary believes this reduces the likelihood of membership in subversive clubs, public assembly, defection, undue attachment and suicides. But those are all suicidal acts, in the end.
My lover’s name was Pyotr Duda. He had a son by another woman. I never found out what happened to her. Pyotr made roast gannet stuffed with plums for me when Melancholy Horseheads rolled in—that was his phrase. I can share it because he is dead now. Horseheads pricked him with energy, made him hopeful. He took the bird out of the oven and said:
“Bya, you’ve lost three buttons on that shirt. Also the radio says Yellow District will have a high concentration of tigers tonight.”