City of Roses is a serialized epic firmly set in Portland, Oregon: a wicked concoction of urban pastoral and incantatory fantastic, where a grocers’ warehouse might become a palace, and an antique bank is hidden beneath a department store.
Sorcerers have always held the anomalous position, at the edge of the fields or woods. They haunt the fringes. They are at the borderline of the village, or between villages. The important thing is their affinity with alliance, with the pact, which gives them a status opposed to that of filiation. The relation with the anomalous is one of alliance. The sorcerer has a relation of alliance with the demon as the power of the anomalous.
Recently, I went to see a Rothko exhibit with my friend Adam. We were in Paris, and the city was gray and cold. On my way to the Fondation Louis Vuitton, I walked through a wooded area. I looked up, and there were pine trees. For a few moments, I couldn’t walk because I was so flattened by the sight of these enormous trees. They were bare of needles. The scaly bark was an ashen purple. The branches were dark as they spread out over the milky veil of the sky. I used to run through pine forests with my cousins. The pine tree is an indelible image of my childhood. But something about seeing them there, when I least expected it, thousands of a miles away from the pine trees of my youth, the trees which had been cut down to pay for booze and which would never be replaced, all this time and distance away from those lost trees, to have encountered them in Paris, my life so radically transformed, startled me.
Happy Labor Day! Today is for me the fourth of a four-day weekend, so I feel I’m doing the holiday justice—though I have been engaged more than usual in the work of self-promotion over the course of it, which is in itself laborious. Ah, well. Let’s get to it:
Her name was Opal. She didn’t become a friend. She was more like a rival. She had flour to the elbow like long white gloves and she clicked that stud while she waited for me to get to the end of a sentence I was in no hurry to get to the end of, because the ordering was the point and the pizza was a formality. “The Pig Kahuna.” Back bacon, thin pineapple, red onion, chopped cilantro, hot honey. I told her how I wanted it built and she built it, layer by layer, with the flat, unhurried patience of a woman dealing cards she knows you can’t afford. The hot honey came last, always last, and she held the bottle at a height that made a thin line of it and I watched the line and she watched me watch it. There are women who will make your food exactly how you asked, and there are women who will make you watch. I ate the slice standing up. I did not taste it once that entire year.
The clutter all about, the color if it all, those garlands of plastic marigolds tinting the air, corded hanks of prayer flags in deep primaries, parched pastels of dried flowers hung in sprays down the cool white-painted wall, the shelf of joss sticks in upright packets brightly popping, fire and sunrise and sand, the glass case beside filled with ceramic thimbles, each of them topped by tiny figures, green coats, brown hats, red dresses, yellow baskets filled with flowers, black top hats and upflung fishing poles, wee blue towers topped by redly conical roofs, and also the jewel cases of compact disks, identical copies neatly stacked for sale, titles and images difficult to make out through light-gleamed plastic wrap, Songs that Made this Country Great, says one, and The Return of Pansy Smith and Violet Jones, Leaf & Liege, Selections from the Big Book of Oregon Ghost Stories (the Audiobook), the rack of sweatshirts and hoodies and windbreakers and rainshells a jumble of clashing yellows and reds and bright blues and cloudy greens with a handwritten sign at the end, ALL REDUCED, and oh so many candles, never touched by flame, he’s turning about, Sweetloaf, taking it all in, his expression a dismissive assemblage of cocked brow, snarled lip, “This?” he says, “this, this fucking shit, this? is it?”
“There’s a, workroom, loading dock, storage space thingie out back,” says Jo, sat behind the counter, pointing over a shoulder with a cheap ballpoint pen, her hair colorless, her polo shirt periwinkle, “but otherwise,” she says, and shrugs.
“You are a fucking Duchess!” he shouts, spinning about again, his matted pompadour, his goggles pushed up on his forehead. “You’re gonna sit here and play fucking shopkeeper?” He shoves at the counter between them, hard enough to rattle the postcards in their spinner rack. “I’m pretty sure,” she says, “the shopkeeper is whoever owns the shop. Keeps it, you know? I’m just a, a clerk, which, wow. Dickensian.”
“So you’re just gonna fucking what, sit there?”
“It’s serial fiction done right.”
“Who else could cause an LLM to hallucinate Emma Goldman, John Berryman, and an Irish sea god?”
