Your city, if you are indeed living in a city and not a village, likely has a China Town. It probably also has a Little Italy. Maybe a Gay Neighborhood. A Japan Town. A Korean Residential Area, with one Korean Supermarket just outside it, and one or two Korean restaurants too far away from it. That Hindu Shop close to the crossroad next to the pizza place and the Pho place. A Mediterranean supermarket where you can eat paella and buy strange soaps. A city is not a living city unless it has diversity, just like how a body usually has more than one kind of organs, and if you only have one type of organ you are probably an automaton. Even robots may have more than one organ.
So picture this. A city, any kind of city, big and populated and diverse and expanding. Any city has liminal spaces, like bus stops and the invisible line between the districts.
Sometimes, you see a temple in the distance. Not the places of worship you see with a small gathering sometimes, not the type with songs and prayers. A mirage. A blue temple, atop a mountain or ziggourat that wasn’t there a moment ago. Silent. Alone. No birds that circled it or landed on it. The temple, bluer than the sky, stays until you are distracted, and when you look again, it might be still there, but might be gone. Sometimes you can watch it fade away like a painting made in mist and smog.
You know this temple. The Veiled Bride. She was made before you were born, long before you were born, for a purpose that was not worship. You almost remember the place. You watch as the temple shines like a second moon in the afternoon sky.
And your bus is here.
You embark. You scan your card. You find a place to sit. You fall almost asleep from the rumbling of the aged engine.
Sabri was waiting behind you. The woman with dark skin and black hair, with eyes so brown they were almost black, with glasses so thin she did not need to wear. A camel jacket and black pants. Black, polished shoes. Silver jewelry. A suitcase, black with gilded buckles. A laptop sits inside, and her documents and few sketches. She reeks of papier d’Arménie. She does not embark.
Instead, she waves towards behind the bus. It’s one of those taxi that won’t stop when you try to wave it over, even when it is empty and its light is on. You can always remember the taxi but never the driver, and you don’t remember the license plate either. She waved her pass at it, and it stopped. You stop watching because your bus goes another way. Your life stays exactly the way you expect it to unfold.
Sabri’s life, too, stays the way she wants it to unfold. She dozes off lied down on the passenger seat, neglecting the belt. When she arrives, she pays her fare with her pass and disembarks, right at the foot of the blue temple.
Not the Veiled Bride, of course. A replica, in Her likeliness.
The breeze is humid and almost like petrichor.
The Blue Temple district has wide sidewalks. Ambulant stands selling various goods take up one third of the space. The streetlights, rather than a vertical pole or an inverted L, are double spirals like cultivated fortune bamboos, with notes and flowers and amulets on each of its knots.
And the temple, along with its ziggourat, with their wide windows and green roofs, attract many tourists with its beauty. Birds of paradise peak from the first floor roof, flowers yellow as dawn, leaves green as night. Birds of feathers and flesh peak from those flowers, curious and joyous.
She is not climbing up there, of course. Not today. There is no elevator for tourists, and outdoor stairs are off-limit for safety issues. Polished rocks, when mossy, can be fatally slippery.
The lowest level of the ziggurat is open to the public, being registration bureau. Snack stands on little carts line the ways to its entrance: fried frogs, fried sparrows, fried fish, soy sauce dove eggs, fried locust...
In the ziggurat, Sabri reports to the reception that she is here for an appointment. Her business permit has been approved. At the same time, her permission to live in the city has been granted. It will not make her a citizen yet, but as an immigrant she can spend more than 24 hours in the City, and in a few months she will become a naturalized citizen.
The person who finalized the process was unsure. “May I ask you something personal? Not as staff of this building, but as a curious person.”
Sabri nods.
You do not need to know how the conversation goes. What the question was, or the answer. You are not even here. You are in another city. You took your bus, and you should be almost home now.
Sabri will not be able to leave the City alive. She is locked here. You can still choose. Any city, any town, any hamlet. And if you don’t care about what those little pieces of paper say, any country or continent.
Cherish that.
Sabri, overjoyed, decides to visit a restaurant. She still has savings. A duck would be nice. Or a fish. There is a Sichuan restaurant in the China Town by White-Blue East-West gate that sells good catfish.
While waiting for the fish, a young man walks into the restaurant with his boyfriend and sat in the table next to hers. She recognizes them. The Crossroad Child and the Weather Management.
“Hey,” the Crossroad Child leans back on his chair to talk to Sabri, “Sabri, right? Nice to meet you, I’m the current Crossroad guy, Flavian. This is my boyfriend, Jupiter. Just to let you know…”
And then it was idle chatting. Showing her the ropes. Savouring the fish.
I don’t know when you will be reading all this.
The restaurant street, branching from the China Town, is next to the flower-bird-fish-critter market street. I heard that even in China, you cannot find such streets anymore. The wonders they sell. The noises it made. The chattering of mankind and clattering of coins mixed with those of hundred creatures bred for songs. In western world it would be called a bazaar street, but that is not as precise as the four-lettered name.
This is where the young man, the Crossroad Child, bought his boyfriend. A terrarium. Meant to be a tree.
The boyfriend’s name was Juniper. When the human shape was in the market, he was bone-thin and gangly, crawled on the ground like the evergreen. He was never meant to be sentient, not that body, no.
But the human body was not the being.
“Right here,” said the vendor, showing the Crossroad Child a caged down feather, “this one, not really a bird, is the mind. You put that in like a seed, and it’ll grow in him. The body will change. He’ll grow up handsome, and he’ll be able to fly. You might want to clip his wings when that happens.”
And so the boy planted the feather like a rose, and waited. The body distorted and healed, grew up and grew handsome. Then the Crossroad Child released him.
Like how he released you.
But there was no place like home, and the City was Juniper’s home. He came back and made his roots.
When he returned, he became Jupiter. He controls the weathers of the City.
When are you coming back?
Are you coming back?
How many cities have you visited since you left?
I’m trying to picture your home. A room. A double sized bed. You probably got an animal, a cat or a gecko. No? A dog? No pet? I’d bet on cat.
Did you leave to avoid your eventual fate inside the Black Temple?
Or did you leave at all?
Are you there?
I saw you take the bus, away from here. You shouldn't be here. No.
I call for help from within the Black Temple. There is an error.
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