The brochure Your New Home: Ganzoneer opens:
Planning to relocate here? Great! However, please heed some advice from those who have preceded you here (and there are many). Your first days and nights (but especially days) in Ganzoneer can be disconcerting, reminiscent of the transition a box spring — mattress sleeper undergoes when s/he fulfills the lifelong dream of owning a water bed. It is highly recommended that those planning to move here, in fact, sleep in a water bed and spend a couple of hours a day on some form of trampoline or rent an inflatable “moonwalk” contraption for up to a month beforehand. Though this will not fully prepare you for your first day on the street, it will significantly reduce some of the initial shock. We do not recommend the “acclimation shoes” that some are selling (that go by “ganzies” on the black market), as these are based on altogether different principles and will actually make it harder once you get here, though if you are not relocating here, we’d opine they can be quite fashionable.
Remember that YOU are mostly water yourself, and thus that the polymer-based proprietary hydropolylipidinous compounds that comprise most of the city’s architecture are hardly alien to your own anatomical makeup. In fact, you are more like Ganzoneer by far than you are like Paris, Delagotha, New York, or Raedmeon (unless you are a cement-, metal-, and glass-based sentient creature. In which case, Welcome, Cement-, Metal-, and Glass-Based Sentient Creature!). Become, then, more like what you are — where other cities, even those tropical ones beneath lolling fronds, offer up hard corners, horizontals and verticals at every turn, the resistance of straight edges, Ganzoneer offers you naught but embraces, caresses, bouncy, jubilant, TRULY TROPICAL moments.
Ganzoneer: Become More Like What You Are.
Emila cringes when she thinks of that catchphrase, when it catches her; the whole brochure hounds her line by line, in fact, though she reminds herself that she wrote it under tight deadline, under “snark attack,” as she calls it, from Maypeath, her boss. That this voice — so distant from her own sensibility, so crass and patently patronizing, so transparently manipulative — that this voice nevertheless came from somewhere within her makes her shudder. Initially, she thought she could be the closet intellectual who just happened to pay the bills at the Bureau of Tourism — after all, they’d hired her on the basis of her credentials, right? She was overqualified, sure, and they all knew it, but she made extra sure her copy was unassailably down-to-earth, vernacular, employee-of-the-month-friendly.
And still, she’d hoped to smuggle in her thesis (sweet subversion), which argued for a secret link between phenomenology and sociology, positing that the majority of crime, poverty, homelessness, and mental illness could be traced not to the heightened density of population, nor to anonymity, nor to materialism (these she argued against). No, the root cause was simple hardness, the unforgiving nature of pavement, from which blood, vomit, death, and grief are too easily wiped clean. It was that simple: Cities, like prisons, secreted their essence into your flesh, turning you hard as they were, perhaps not overnight but assuredly over time. She’d tried to spell it out in the brochure: “The steely resistance and determined glares that worked in other cities will not only disappoint here but will undermine your very intentions.” Maypeath red-lined it, reverting instinctually to his mantra: “Focus on the positive.” Thus Ganzoneer wound up a partly chewed gum wad, a sex-starved temptress — that, she thinks, is how in the end her brochure packages her city.
She remembers her own arrival in Ganzoneer: no water bed, no bounce machine, no special shoes, just a lonely twenty-four-year-old with dry light-brown hair, a degree in sociology from Vitmora’s most prestigious university, and an attraction to the library that verged on the agoraphobic. Having gazed longingly over Ganzoneer from her cell-like turret for years, she finally had the opportunity to go there and test out her theory. Her first day was hellish, an experience she could only compare to seasickness, each step like being on a tiny deck in tumultuous open seas. She’d had no idea where to focus her gaze, the whole city swaying pendulously, and her along with it. Others seemed to negotiate the streets so easily, to glide with the swarthy ease of skaters adept enough to chase pucks, one another. When she fell the first of numerous times, instead of skinning a palm or knee, Emila felt herself caught in a series of tiny falls, an errant ball arriving slowly at inertia.
At first, she figured she’d spend a year here, then return to Vitmora, ready to shake them up with new ideas, propose they soften and slacken their own streets. But she has not found Ganzoneer immune to problems; they lurk just under the veneer of bounding joy and cartoonish delight. Liberation harbors a dark side. The Ganzoneerian handshake, limp and rubbery, often precedes betrayal, sometimes by mere minutes. Ganzoneer’s columnists shift their stances daily, and politicians their positions hourly; one is scorned here for having a definite idea that one clings to for more than a week. Blood and the stench of poverty are as easily hosed off from these ductile surfaces as from more solid ones. And, in the end, the crime rate in Ganzoneer is as steep as Vitmora’s or anywhere else’s. Emila doesn’t understand exactly why, but she senses something altered in herself after a mere eight months here. Bathing in the morning, she’ll often find herself running the razor over her legs long after they are smooth, relishing the friction and pain, envying the hard, glinting edge, and even this envy has a certain palpability, that of things too long denied.
Planetarium
By the time I recognized Kevin Scully, “Skulky” to those who were enrolled in SAT prep classes, and “the Skull” to everyone else, he had already locked me in a mortal embrace. I extracted myself; it was him all right. Under the circumstances, there were good reasons to doubt it — I hadn’t seen him in fifteen years. Also, I was dizzy and nauseous after steering the miles of switchbacks up the Going-to-the-Sun Road in Glacier National Park, and so I didn’t trust my own perception of things.
I’d been going a little faster than I’d wanted to, spurred on by the cacophony of cries for the bathroom. The late-afternoon sun in the west seemed most blaring right at spots where the edge plummeted into oblivion. “That’s it,” I’d announced to my family, grinding the gas pedal into the floor. “No more liquids this week for anyone.” Now, the rear floor of the rental car was strewn with discarded plastic containers and crumpled juice boxes, and every so often they spat their remnants. And the four of us, my wife and two kids and I, had been peeing like rats in a dialysis lab.
Scully hadn’t followed me into the bathroom, but he must have seen me go in, since he was waiting for me when I emerged. Now I stood back and looked him over while my ribs decompressed. Once I was sure it was him, his elated response to me made even less sense. We’d been in the same circle of friends back in our New York high school, but what that really meant was that we had possessed roughly the same social rank, and we were therefore able to pick one another apart about evenly without either getting the upper hand. Another way of putting this is that we were separated by less than five points in terms of GPAs. Just standing near Scully made me want to shelter Emmett and Kelly, my two kids, from the cutthroat competitiveness that in many ways had defined me. He might have changed his outfit from a polo to a flannel shirt, and traded in his penny loafers for scuffed boots, but as far as I was concerned, he was still contagious.