THE PLACES
one neighborhood to each story
THE LAST STOP
Where the funicular ends and the hill continues without it. Distances are given to here and no further. Above it: steps, then gravel, then a path with a rope rail on the seaward side.
THE GATE, AND WHAT IS BEHIND IT
A rusted gate propped open longer than anyone has been alive to prop it, and a small monastery of whitewash and smoke-black. Not administered. No fee, no receipt. The box is separate and is not for the house: it is so you can feel you have given something to a place that needs nothing.
THE PONTOON
Where the crossings leave from and where every distance in the city is measured from. The column stands here, carrying the water marks, two restatements and a third scheduled.
THE FISH MARKET
Keeps its own weather under the awnings and is not covered by the rain schedule. The one place in the city with no weather scheme, and the one the metering has never reached.
THE TANK
A cistern drained the year the boats came off the boat-hill. Forty columns wired through their bones; the room plays itself. Behind the third column, the old water stairs, which used to go down to the water and now go down to the dark.
THE LICENSING HALL
Renewals on Thursdays. The queue folds twice around the room when the term ends. Window seven once returned a payment before it was asked to, and printed a line to say so, and nobody in the queue had seen that happen.
THE WING
A remand wing that closed when the city stopped remanding people and started invoicing them. Three feet of stone with a skin of brick, which is the whole reason. A locksmith took three weeks to reverse every lock on both landings, and the reversal is the wing’s one law.
THE HALL OF CABINETS
Forty cabinets to a row, each humming its one note, on the fourteenth. One bay is empty and swept to factory-clean, and the hall’s fans lean away from it a degree, all year.
THE POST-OFFICE PALACE
Third floor, between parcels and the quiet-boxes: export. The shortest queue in the building. A license does not travel; a recording travels on payment of a duty calculated on the retained portion.
THE BATHS
Under the dome, where phones die in the wooden lockers. The last unphotographed light on the hill, and the one room the city cannot reach — which it reaches anyway, in a mother’s mouth, teaching her daughter which words are dear.
THE WELL
Fitted with a card reader. Some people bring coins. Emptied on the last Thursday of the quarter; the coins are counted, recorded and returned to the general account; paper taken from the water is dried in case it is money and then discarded. The wishes are not recorded. They were never asked for.