The Great Commissioner has an atlas that shows all of the cities in his conference’s empire. He shows it to Marco Polo who sees them unfold from coast to coast, popping up features. The explorer remembers the freeways of Angelina unfolding before him in a shimmering, endless ribbon whose haze formed a curtain between the real and the possible. He remembers the great and terrible grotesques of Lafeya, their hammers poised above his head. And he remembers Piscataway, where he once had a nice sandwich.
"When you return to Italy, will you tell the people about the cities that you see?" the Commissioner asks.
“Each person is only able to receive the stories they can understand. When I talk about a city where memories are at war with the living, the gondolier or stevedore hearing it can only understand from the context of their own memories, their own ghosts. That city will be entirely different than the same city I tell you about, Commissioner. The cities all exist simultaneously to buttress and destroy each other.”
“What’s the cable TV market like for football where you’re from?” the commissioner asks.
It is an unwise traveler to Anna who arrives without legal representation. The city of Anna is a city of formal complaints, lawsuits, and hearings. To walk down the street is to invite a summons or be deposed as a witness to a dispute happening several feet away.
The citizens of Anna are busy appearing in courts, writing letters, and demanding evidence. They move furtively through alleys and sewers to avoid further complaints and denunciations and subpoenas. Or they sneak about themselves, trying to track down the targets of their lawsuits. The largest growing industry in Anna are people who will disguise themselves to deliver notices. They pop out of garbage receptacles and paint themselves like tree bark; they hoist themselves onto ceilings and dangle themselves from light fixtures. The most diabolical of them disguise themselves as someone their target is serving papers to only to whirl around serve their target before anyone has time to activate a smoke bomb and melt into the streets.
The city is filled with discarded paper from letters and transcripts. They blow into alleys and onto people’s faces. There is so much official paper flying from windows and open doors and briefcases accidentally jarred and flying open while a dimayed Annan sinks to his knees that the sheets stick together and congeal into hardened bricks. These paper bricks form into large structures that are the only things built in Anna. It is legally impossible to do any sort of construction, and people cram into wobbling paper buildings to hide from each other or to spring through the walls unexpectedly.
The people of Anna send their disputes to courts, committees, and government bodies. But these organizations are beset by infighting and formal complaints as well. All day, matters are referred to responsible bodies whose members are off filing motions each other or disguising themselves as statuary in order to serve papers to rival members. They all form networks of complex alliances and constantly betray each other. They ambush each other with trick complaints that actually turn out, when read aloud, to be a complaint against the person reading it. No dispute has ever been successfully settled.
The citizens of Anna have heard about this section of my writings and dispute it. I have already had fifteen pointed legal documents delivered by a boat navigating around the most treacherous capes to get here and demand my appearance in Literature Court before getting another note that Literature Court had been dissolved and placed under the aegis of Literary Court and then another telling me to disregard the previous letter, Literature Court had in fact never gone anywhere and is in fact suing the members of Literary Court for Court Infringement before getting another letter telling me that Literature Court is actually dissolving and I was hearing from the true Committee on the Activities of Literature Court and not a series of belligerent imposters, who had sent the previous letters and are themselves the target of multiple lawsuits. I also received a letter that was just a drawing of a hand making an obscene gesture.
Under the advice of counsel, I should like to tell the Great Commissioner that Anna is an ordinary city with no unusual features.
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