Town

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Town in which everyone knows most everything about everyone else: our addresses, our extended families, our facilities with games of skill, our histories with romantic partners, our last five pants sizes. Gossip traverses the town like electric pulses: there are no secrets among us, except perhaps in our thoughts. Technically, we’re supposed to hand those over to the authorities before we turn in for bed each night, but enforcement is mercifully lax.​

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Town is too small to have a seat in the national governing body, but there is a mayor. The mayor dons a mayoral sash over blue jeans and polo Dry-Fit golf shirts. The mayor is now in his fourth term, all of which have been non-consecutive. In between, other mayors have included a woman who makes sculptures out of macaroni, a non-precocious 10-year-old child, and a robot who insisted upon being called “Da May-Ohr”, with that specific tonality.

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Town in which, each morning, in the center of the Main Square, we write down synopses of our dreams on scraps of surplus paper from the Old Mill. We deposit our dream-notes in a barrel that is ceremoniously spun by hand-crank. Once a week, a dream is drawn randomly from the barrel and allowed to come true. Rendered dreams have included a zoo made of animals carved from ice; a day where all work ceases and all townspeople spend all of their time jumping on trampolines; a new letter added to the local language’s alphabet, resulting in over 23,000 brand new words. The other dreams, those not chosen, are set on fire and used to help light a grill on which a selection of traditional meats are prepared. (Dreams that center around the consumption of said meats are discarded.)

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Town achieves consciousness on January 23, 20—. This is known in town as Consciousness Day or C-Day, and the town celebrates with a speech, in the collective voice, which involves all 7,937 of the residents singing in unison. Our best singers are so phenomenal that they cancel out the worst of us, who are so unspeakably bad that the intonations we make, individually and unaccompanied, ought to be a capital crime.

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*

Town uproots itself from the ground, sprouts legs and goes on a rampage across the plains (or the steppe, the pampas, the badlands, the bush, etc.). Town frightens adjacent towns with its lumbering strides and unnerving proximity. Together, townsfolk move close enough to gaze into the eyes of their newly-encountered neighbors. Their citizens are much like us: each of us has our own other-town doppelgänger. There is the town drunk, the wine connoisseur (in the other town it’s a chocolate connoisseur), the swimmer (mountain climber in the other town). The mayor even has a shadow mayor who was in office during the interstices in between our mayor’s terms. The robot mayor in their town is an anarchist, and possibly even an anti-Christ. There is some discussion of merging the towns into one super-metropolis, but during the most complicated phase of negotiations, our town uproots itself again, and retreats to its original location, minus approximately 500 feet.

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Town attracts a minor league sports franchise. On opening night, there are fireworks. Most of the people in town have never seen fireworks before. They are described as “sky pictures” or “night bullets” or sometimes “dog terrors.” The fireworks prove unpopular and never recur. The sports franchise languishes at the bottom of the league table for the first several years, has one promising season, then retreats to their habit of perennial mediocrity. Attending the team’s games becomes seen as something of a joke, an activity of ironic detachment. It is mused by the mayor (now in his fifth non-consecutive term following a period where the Moon was elected mayor despite not even running) that the team was sent to us divinely, as a way to check our ambitions, to keep us humble. None of the players particularly appreciates being seen as an object lesson in futility, but the resentment they feel doesn’t dramatically improve their on-field performance over time, either.

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Town in which lovers pair off according to lot. This is less about arranged marriage and more about a radical dating and mating experiment we’ve all bought into as a way of combatting the turnoffs of small-town overfamiliarity. Each single adult is assigned a random number. People are matched using complex actuarial formulas determined by a group of professional actuaries who volunteer for this task on their lunch breaks, or are subtly pressured by town society to do so. The current system is admittedly not perfect, but has a 3.7% better success rate than previous approaches, which have included apps, intentional matchmakers, and the vicissitudes of humans in the wild. The thing that all of us have in common with our partners is that we’re from the town, we understand what it is to be a townsperson. We understand that life is random and driven by fate, and also that partners grow more attractive over time due to proximity, until one day they don’t anymore, but by that time it hardly matters, because comfort is the most important thing—and in a way, for most of us, what we actually love is the town itself.

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Town in which everything is, or can be, a gamble. We gamble on what color shirt certain old men may wear in a given morning. We gamble on the size, shape, and quantity of clouds that may appear overhead. We place bets on who will be the first townsperson to wake up each morning, and who will be the last to go to sleep at night. We bet on who will have the darkest thoughts, and because we rarely express our darkest thoughts, these are revealed only via the honor system. The money we exchange on these bets is meaningless, Monopoly money essentially, since we operate on barter rather than financial incentives. (There are limited exceptions.) We guess at the futures we will never see: when will the Earth be destroyed by an asteroid, etc. These gambles will never pay off and it wouldn’t matter if they did. All we really want in our town (and perhaps this is also true in yours) is the action.

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Town in which it rains numbers. Each year on the ninth day of the ninth month, the town holds its annual Numerology Festival, in which numbers carved from wood are tossed from the roofs of the town’s tallest buildings, and teams have to gather numbers that add up to a certain total, which changes each year. The participants are largely children who use the game to learn sums, and win prizes that most often involve a locally-popular brand of candy. One year, the organizers purposefully and perversely chose a solution that was simply unachievable through the addition of the [1] [2] carved numbers. The game went on for 177 days, which was the same impossible sum that was the goal of the game. One enterprising child won by chiseling an extra “3” out of a tree branch, and we accepted this creatively-hacked version of victory, because we were all exhausted by the game, though it had kept the children busy and out of deeper sorts of trouble. We worried that the game had actually had a reverse effect and taught the children to hate numbers—but it seemed this was more true for the town’s grownups, and kids were seen for days after with eights and twos and fives and 9.4s stuffed in their shirts, wrapped around their heads like necklaces, and brought into maths classes to be added, subtracted, multiplied, divided, and otherwise made whole.

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Town in which the town’s two richest men compete to build the largest, most ornate house ever seen, at least by any of us. Each man waits to see what the other will do—which additional wing, which colorful span, which swooping, curvy, Gehry-esque architectural flourish. Who will build a floor that is almost entirely a swimming pool, who will build a playroom exclusively for exotic cats? Townspeople attribute these gentlemen’s competition to loneliness and idleness. None of us  seem to remember how the pair originally made their money, and neither, apparently, do they. We wonder if it matters; we wonder if we would want to be them, given our druthers. There is a  room constructed in each of their homes dedicated to our wondering. These rooms are both called the Wonder Room, and they were completed at the exact same time, or at least close enough that both men can claim to have finished first. Both men also died on the exact same day, and their residences were demolished and imploded simultaneously; if there is a moral to be discerned in this tale of greed, ambition, boredom and madness, no one in town can quite reconstruct it.

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Town that was once a lake. After the last Ice Age, to be precise. This story was told to the town’s schoolchildren, who instinctively dreamed of swimming, paddleboats, games of Marco Polo (though they might have called it something else, the name of the town’s founder, who had a less satisfyingly consonant name than the Italian explorer). As it was, most townspeople had never seen a lake, except for drawings in books. One enterprising townsperson built a pool based on one of those drawings. But since there was a protocol about not wasting what water was trucked into town, the “pool” contained beanbags dyed dark blue to resemble our collective imaginings of bodies of water. We built a diving board and townspeople leapt in with bellyflops and triple pikes and cannonballs. Eventually, water rationing laws were relaxed a bit, and real swimming pools were built. But beanbag pools still remain popular to this day, perhaps because many people prefer the perfect dream of a body of water to the real thing.

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Town in which death is a cause for celebration. We celebrate the life of the deceased with a series of games and contests in their honor: sometimes, this may be a tug of war (symbolizing the tug of forces the deceased may have had to reckon with during their earthly tenure) and sometimes it may be darts, or a ring toss, because that’s the sort of thing the deceased enjoyed doing while drunk. Trivia quizzes about the deceased’s life are written in particular detail (questions may include “Who was their ninth grade science teacher?” or “Where is the most notable mole on their body?” or “What is their ATM pin based on?” with the deceased’s remaining possessions being awarded as prizes). Townspeople do grieve, however, in specially-designated grief stations in public spaces, and at certain intervals along the roads, where buckets are kept to capture our collective tears.

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Town creates a plan to improve itself. According to this plan, on one night (called “Update Day”) all 7,937 townspeople will nod off to sleep and by the morning, they will have all been replaced by nearly identical versions of their bodies with better battery life and more memory. There will be, according to the Update Day legends, entirely new features that present-day townspeople can’t even dream of. No one in town knows for certain when Update Day will arrive, but each night when they doze, they are prepared to wake up to become different people. In fact, each day they are already slightly different versions of themselves, as are we all.

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Town in which raccoons run rampant across the abandoned tennis courts. The tennis courts have existed since time immemorial, but no one in town actually seems to know how to play tennis or what a tennis racquet looks like, or even that there is such a game as tennis played with racquets and balls. We do play a game, a guessing game, where we divine which square on the court the raccoon will scurry to next. We’ve numbered the squares and rectangles of the court, and though we don’t understand the language of serves and forehands and loves and deuces (I’ve acquired this knowledge, covertly, by leaving town, but am only sharing it here in this missive no one in town will presumably ever see) we understand shapes and geometry, and the patterns raccoons make when they dart to and fro. The word “tennis” does exist in town, but it only exists as a synonym for the raccoons, whom we sometimes call “tennisers” or “tennisans.” We imagine that in addition to the predictive games we play with the raccoons, the raccoons are also involved in their own internal games with one another: the raccoons size each other up from across the net, attempting to assert their dominance, or mirror each other’s curiosity, or as a highly structured form of romantic courtship. Townspeople cannot remember a time before “tennisers” and “tennis courts” and would not choose to live in a town without these features. Even after we are all gone from this Earth, we imagine, the tennisers will still be there, jumping from rectangle to square to square to rectangle, moving with boundless, pointless energy, playing their endless, scoreless game against time.

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Town in which everyone, secretly, is a writer. Not that any of us actually bothers to scribble anything down, or at least not much. But we write, constantly, inside our own heads. And everyone is telling the same story: the story of a town where everyone lives the same story, more or less. Nobody invests in notebooks, pens, pencils, or ink. Nobody writes on a computer, or on the notes app on their phones (the phones are a recent phenomenon for us). No one in town actually dares to dream of their name on the cover of a book; the town has never produced a notable author, going back decades, even centuries. Of course, because of our aversion to actually putting things on paper, our recordkeeping is spotty to non-existent, so who knows. It’s possible we’ve produced a great writer at some point in our storied past, but if so, their work has vanished from history. But what if one of us—writers in spirit if not in pen—decided to break the cycle? What if one of us dared to share all of the town’s darkest secrets out loud and in the open? What if one of us became the kind of writer who would crack the code, spill the beans, dish the tea—or even be able to do those things while using less cliche language? What if our timid little town could be unhidden by the magic of strategically-orchestrated words? Maybe it shouldn’t happen, maybe all the paper should be burned, used to start fires to warm the chilly winters, or cook our dinners.

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*

Town is wiped out by meteor. No: this is a cheap trick, too easy, and the Town Council vetoes it. Town is attacked by a horde of sentient knives. Stop it: too bloody, too weird. Town blasts itself into the deepest recesses of outer space. We don’t have the budget for this; we can barely manage to have the garbage picked up on time. Town commits mass suicide. It’s been done before, and also, none of us are quite sad enough, and somebody, inevitably, would live to be traumatized by the devastation. Everyone on the Council throws up their hands in surrender. The current Mayor (who, confusingly, is a campaign poster for the previous Mayor, the poster having defeated said Mayor in his bid for an eighth non-consecutive term) suggests that maybe the town shouldn’t be destroyed after all. Maybe the town is indestructible, like the mighty cockroach. Maybe the notion that all good things must come to an end is overrated. Maybe, the town is a consolation, a useful shield from the brutality of the outside world, a better idea than any alternative. Maybe, the mayor ventures, the town is Life Itself. The Council members greet this sentiment with polite applause, then set the mayor on fire, and promptly schedule new elections; the previous mayor and a tennis-court raccoon top the list of candidates.

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Town in which time stops. We are all frozen in place, like statues. Our needs do not cease: we still get hungry, we still need to urinate, we still have urges of other sorts. Our minds continue spinning like some eternal wheel. But there is no forward motion, so we exist in a form of limbo. Maybe the town is a weigh station between worlds. Maybe it is a kind of Hell. Maybe the town has no special meaning at all. Maybe the world, we dare to think, has no meaning either. But this can’t be true, can it? The raccoon mayor stands in the service box of the tennis court. Numbers begin to rain from the sky. Letters follow, and make a little plinky sound as they hit the ground. Words start to form, then sentences, and paragraphs: Town becomes the story it tells itself about itself.

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Town which is shrunken down, folded up, and made to fit in a briefcase. Town which is buried deep in the woods. Town which is dug up, generations later, by an enterprising Dachshund with a nose for this sort of thing. The dog is unanimously elected mayor, and the celebrations last for weeks.

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