City of Roses is a serialized epic firmly set in Portland, Oregon, only with more sword fights: a wicked concoction of urban pastoral and incantatory fantastic, where aspirants are knighted in Forest Park, and the Devil keeps a morgue in an abandoned big-box store.
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.
While I’m writing a story, I am subject to a set of tensions indistinguishable from those that overtake me when I write poems. The distinction is most of all technical, because I find the idea of “poetic stories” more horrifying than yellow fever, and I am always very careful that what happens in my stories suggests to the reader a definite structure, a given reality, as unreal as it might seem to the eyes of a newspaper reader and those beings with-their-feet-on-the-ground. (What are feet? What is the ground?) If I find in your stories a fraternity that excites me and makes me want to be your friend, it is precisely the supreme nerve with which you plant your word trees.
Aisles of pillars stretch ahead, reached up to bear the weight of the viaduct above. It’s not all that much darker here beneath it, the slanted morning light strikes crumbled grass-choked pavement all about, and the embedded rail lines cross gleaming straight and true. The blocky hulks of warehouses closing in to either side ahead still steep in cooling shadows, and while out in the open the white siding of a double-wide trailer’s dazzled, the pallets offloaded beside it are still dimly uncertain, bundled panels of cyclone fencing, perhaps, Jersey barricades waiting to be deployed, and all the unhung signs leaned up against them in anticipation, Umpqua Bank, they say, and Crutchfield Evans, Sogge Enterprises, Hoyt Street Properties, Hoyt Yards, Coming Soon, Hoyt Yards.
The pillars, though. This one, here, one of the central file, flat grey face of it figured with a hermit in chalky white, a lantern held high in one hand, and calligraphed above, well out of reach, faded letters that say Diogenes the Greek Cynic Philosopher walking the Streets of Athens with a lantern looking for an honest man. He was born about the year 412 B.C. She reaches up to lightly brush the chalked rays of light stroked out from the lantern-shape, just above her head. Black curls hang loose in artless tangles about her shoulders. Her slender, knee-length gown of ivory satin, edged with lace the color of bone. One last tap at the pillar as she steps away, slowly, even regally, despite the hint of a limp. Her feet are bare, and filthy, stickily damp, glistening amidst the grime.
The deck of the viaduct slopes gently down and closer until some dozen yards ahead it declines much more sharply to end, of a sudden, in a blank flat concrete wall. She looks down, at the random assemblage of litter strewn about between the pillars here, the screwed-up twist of paper, an uncrimped can, Washington’s Viking Beer, it says, the crisp plastic wrap spilling soy sauce packets, a grimy yellow dish-glove, ripped half inside-out. She looks back along the length of the viaduct, the pillars. Shading her eyes against the rising light.
Her limp is more pronounced, crossing the sunstruck pavement. She leaves the most faintly glistening footprints.
“I think it’s the only time I’ve fallen in love with a city through a novel.”
“—if you like fantasy, and fancyness, swords and knights and long-winded sentences and a big vocabulary and really interesting characters with lots of character—”
