Cities and Transportation IV: Lafeye

 

Every night, the Great Commissioner Tony Pettiti and Marco Polo would sit at Big Ten headquarters smoking as the Venetian described the cities of his empire to him.  One night, Pettiti said to Marco Polo, "every night you tell me about the cities in my realm and yet we sit here smoking. You do not ever seem to leave this Rosemont Fogo de Chao." "Commissioner," Marco Polo said while flipping over his meat card, "consider that a city that is not a fixed place in space or in time, but a collection of memories. These memories build and perhaps are more important than bricks, and mortar, and roads. Cities are a collaboration between the living and the dead in simultaneous realms, for without the dead the city is an empty husk, a collection of asphalt and steel imbued without any meaning. Do you have to travel to a city or can you merely rearrange collections of memories until you can see every city?" The Commissioner chuckled, not completely believing what Marco Polo said but also realizing that the alternative to listening to him was to watch a Rutgers football game.

Cities and Transportation IV: Lafaye

There is no way to get to Lafaye from a road or by boat. The only way to enter the City of Rails is on a train. The entire city exists on rails.  Every road, pathway, and alley, and even the floors of large buildings have been torn up and replaced with tracks and elaborate switching systems. Different trains are constantly moving through the city: zippy cars carrying passengers, ponderous freight cars, trucks that have been mounted on rails to move them from the outskirts of the city, hand carts pumped by Pumpoliers in colorful costumes who belt out songs as they pant that are immediately drowned out by the ferocious roar of a passing train.

Some people in Lafeye wear elaborate rail boots with wheels on the bottom. They propel themselves up and down the tracks with large poles that the push from side to side like kayak oars. The traffic as the tracks narrow through tunnels and around rivers matches the pace of the slowest train. There is no way to pass, so Lafayens are patient and unhurried. But not perfectly so.  Every so often, there is a dispute or a scuffle where two people shove each other with their train-oars and try to roll the opponent off the rails entirely where they will be trapped and flailing until a train car with a joist can lift them back onto the rails to continue their journey.

To move around Lafaye requires travel in a predetermined circuit. Everyone is always going the same way. No matter where you thought you wanted to go when you started out in your journey, the city of Lafaye will deliver you to where you are supposed to be. This does not seem to trouble the residents of the city, who exist with a good-humored fatalism.

The defining aesthetic of Lafaye is grotesque. The only art in the city consists of large, hideous statues of people with jutting chins and eyes dilated with madness wielding heavy bludgeoning instruments. These grotesques stand at every corner designed to surprise and terrify unsuspecting visitors. Some are spring-loaded to leap out unexpectedly at passing trains. The Lafayens know where all of them are at all times and they simply smile and smooth their blonde mustaches.

Take a Lafayen out of the city and this person will fall into the throes of confusion. Put them in a sunny plaza and tell them they can walk in whatever direction they want and they will stand still, unable to comprehend the idea. Tell them they can take a car or a boat and they will worry.  They will even regard a street car with some suspicion. Show them stairs and they will panic and fall down.

The Lafayens seem happy with their lot, boarding trains, taking them where they will go, and being deposited with the flow of the crowd or forced to continue riding around the city until the train stops. There is no concern with what to do next. They are content, even if every night they all end up in the same soot-covered train depot where the trains stop and rest for the next morning. The people of Lafaye do too.