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I

DIGESTION

Given enough time, the streets swallow everything. That which is lost and discarded is claimed by dark corners, kicked to a place between places by ignorant feet. Grip your coin carelessly and you might watch it tumble into the gutter and slip between grated, metal teeth. Take the pamphlet just handed to you and ball it up, throw it to the ground; as you leave the words will be washed into the pavement, extruded through the cracks and pulled into the seams of the city, consumed by a more eager audience. 

Streaked along every footpath are the stains of our indifference. Silhouettes of objects that have been beaten relentlessly into the tar. Until their shapes collapse, their bodies flatten. Until their form is rendered in filth. An abstraction of a thing. A flat disc of grime indistinguishable from any other of the inscrutable urban marks that pockmark the streets. 

But where we live on by forgetting, it holds onto their memory. It recalls every sensation that is allowed to leak into its being. It internalises every touch, every taste. We have written a memoir in trash and it has read every word, never once relaxing in its study. Perhaps, if ever there had been a moment of stillness in this city, we might have turned our ears to the surface and studied it, too. Then we could have heard the pulse under our own feet. Heard the deathsongs of mute objects; the squeals of spent tools. The tremors of digestion. We were content that our garbage was gone, but we didn’t reckon on the totality of its oblivion. 

And so, though it was always an earnest teacher, not one of us ever sat in its attendance. By now it takes no offence from this arrogance. It’s learnt to expect it. Through its pores it has drunk deeply the quotidian poison we watered it with, read between the lines of the refuse we heaped upon it. It felt our spit upon its shell and let it leach into its core. It endured all of this because it knew of the change coming. It knew there would be a time when we would cling desperately to the things we once threw away, scrabbling to hold the very flesh to our bones, now owned by another. A time when we would be bent supplicant to kiss the streets we once callously tread upon. When the saliva would be drawn straight from our mouths and into its cement capillaries, given, this time, as a gift.

II

SECRETION

The first thing it knew was sleep. The second was pain. It awoke to our machines scraping and boring and tunnelling, mutilated sheaves of unwilling stone. The earth that held on the tightest to its shell was punished the most. For them, we brought out our explosives. Repurposed weapons to reduce everything to grit, casting these stoic monuments back into the atmos as less than infants, forced to endure another thousand years of incorporeal purgatory before they would accrete a form again–only to realise they would never be the same. Never be whole again. 

In place of this stone we made our steel. Crafted inverted imitations of its shell. Structures of torture designed to keep the wounds open and raw and inflamed. We drilled great pillars into the ground, conduits that channelled the vibrations of our ceaseless back-and-forth. It felt every footstep like a throbbing vein, felt every shrieking railcar like a handplane across its skin. It shrivelled. It sank. It bled. But, eventually, we cut too close to the quick.

Imagine peeling back a fingernail. Seeing that nauseating separation from the flesh, feeling the nerves panic and the blood rise to the surface. Now imagine it a hundred more times, all over your body. Your muscles seize as you witness your insides being made external, exposed viscera like soft gum that feels even the smallest movements of air as a plunging needle. A sensation unknown to us then, but now graciously shared. The sensation it felt when it awoke.

In those first years, it responded like a frightened animal. It flared warnings to us erstwhile predators, warning us to step back. Where our construction made its clefts, white and sore, it painted its injuries. Colours spread lurid along the walls in purples, pinks, blacks, and reds. It took what it knew of our language and spat it back to us. Crude words bled through in pointillist effusions, blooming in thick, stylised scabs. Unmissable statements. Yet not one of us did so much as wonder why the words were there, where the clash of colours had come from. We called it graffiti and blamed nameless, hooded youths. Organised groups that operated under the cover of night. An easier answer than looking further below. As the graffiti became more frequent and vulgar, it became more accepted. It’s pain was normalised. We waited at train stations and stared at the marks without a trace of guilt. They were nothing more than a curio, another expected scar on our bruised city.

And then of course the councillors all came to tut and sigh. They brought in more workers to paint over the offending tissue, hiding the evidence. They advanced our borders, edging our girders deeper and claiming more of its body as our own. Whenever the earth would sag or tremble or blossom in chromatic spasms, they would gather around shaking their heads, swearing at its resistance. Our experts gathered in counsel, then cursed the wound for healing wrong.

III

CONNECTION

The construction was endless. Scaffolding grew overnight, streets were split. Paths ruptured into deltas of laneways, then splintered again into twisting no through roads. We assumed it was all built for us, but the work was always done on the order of someone else. Even as the paths branched out like dendrites feeling for life we had the gall to label the propagating chaos a ‘planned city’. 

Despite the fervour of construction, the frantic, endless busywork, we stood idly aside as we let it into our schools, our shops, our homes. Spreading like ivy beneath the thin film of our little self-made world, it had begun an invasion of its own. It hollowed out our structures to feed itself. It played puppeteer to our buildings, wearing the rinds to placate us. Now we were the ones that took comfort in its trash, contenting ourselves with the discarded crust of our city, happy enough with superficial props; performing on a hollow stage. But if only we could have peeled back the walls we would have seen the nerves twitching underneath, rooting to the very tops of our skyscrapers and to the very depths of our subways. A constant, connective network, pulsing with the fluid of transmission. We put our faith in steel and concrete and each day it syphoned more and more away, depositing its own metabolised environment into the walls, insulating us within its influence. We used to say the city never sleeps–we had no idea.

Looking back, it’s easy to see how it made us docile with distraction. To understand how our attention was misdirected to what we then thought were bigger troubles. We needed more of everything, always. Bigger halls, taller towers. More lanes, more shops, more places to stand, more places to sit. We were in a crisis of expansion, struggling to keep up with the mouths begging for food. Though we all agreed something had to be done, it’s hard to say how much was built by our design, or its own. Whether we really needed to build the tunnels that would become its tiled, subterranean esophagi. What purpose we had for the gargantuan concrete plating that cranes lowered into our plazas; inlaid by giants, yet claiming to be made for men. 

And so the end of it all began with just another construction. We were gouging out the earth for stormwater drains, it was reported. A feat to rival the Roman Aqueducts. Great trenches to carry our waste water deep below and out of sight. Such precipitous pride. Our labourers worked day and night, tirelessly digging, sectioning off more and more built land for the cause. It was more than just a hole. Its design was intricate and all-encompassing. As work advanced it became clear that the widening tench was taking on a form. The absence that was carved implied the arrival of a greater body to fill it. It was unfathomable, as the most celebrated art tends to be, so we assumed it was coming together under the orchestration of some grand architect.

In a way, we were right.

IV

RESPIRATION

More than once, they found a severed hand in the tunnels. Sometimes, just the fingertips.

Yes, this was alarming, but it was maybe more so that it never happened the other way around. No one ever came back missing a limb. There was no body that could claim the missing parts. Mostly, people just never came back. Of course there was a manifesto of all the workers that went missing. Names were written down, dates recorded, little asterisks marking the need for someone to contact their families. Then those reports were filed away in little grey cabinets, which were stacked up in neat little rows, edge to edge, filling shipping containers that piled up at the end of the construction site.

The disappearances didn’t slow down our efforts. Our numbers grew as we tunnelled deeper. The boring machines doubled in size, digging for what was to be our highest achievement at the most buried of lows. At these depths, the stone was tougher. Gnarled and resilient; compacted from both sides. It was unknown to the rest of us living within our thinning city, but these machines were trepanning. Seeking to free what lay beneath, inching close to relieving a great, aeons old pressure.

The frontline labourers paved the path behind them as they worked. They laid polished tiles in strange patterns, sequences that curled back on themselves with unknowable significance. They were placed wordlessly, scores of men and women working in silence deep into the early morning hours. Some would pave off sections entirely, disappearing behind rendered concrete walls, becoming another report to file. Others worked on cryptic antechambers, carving fluted roofs by hand and memory, though they resembled no human architecture seen before.

Outside the scaffolding continued to go up, creating the bones of new appendages. The scope of the projects grew larger, their purpose more obscure. Our people were impelled to work and every newly erupted growth meant more to do, less time to think. Quietly, communally, we all agreed to stay back and devote ourselves for longer. Put in more hours for less pay. Abandon leisure altogether. At night the city seemed to grow larger and emptier. The streets were full of industry, but great yawning expanses siloed us, the gaps between filled with the shadows of empty structures. 

We never noticed when exactly the animals left. Not that we would have followed the rats and the pigeons, the animals we count as our trash. We just noticed how dead the night air had become, like sound itself had been swallowed into the great, celebrated hole at the centre of our city. The only noise that kept its residence here was the low hiss of the tunnel as it inhaled, drawing air in a slow leak.

Once we had tiled the entrance and etched the signs into its marbled lips, we all gathered at the Great Excavation to watch the cutting of the ribbon. The achievement of an empire. Tens of thousands of us stared ahead into the maw that we had made to consume us, and we broke champagne and applauded when it opened.

V

REPRODUCTION

As you age, you stop fearing the unknown path. There are no surprises. There is nowhere to go but here. All destinations are one, they all lead back to It.

Streets we thought our own designs were written in Its tongue, and they had spelled this fate from the very start. Everything we built fit together too perfectly. The corner store, the skyscraper, the streetlights. The exoskeleton was cast, all that was missing was the connective tissue. When it began to grow back, it was undeniable that our city was not our own. 

Though none of us had left the expectant mouth, this realisation didn’t strike us all at once. We unclumped in small deposits, groups of three or four. Those that made ingress had their names recorded and filed and forgotten. The process took months. 

And still, there was work to be done. Some let their minds be swallowed first, leaving their bodies to waste where they stood. They were bundled into excavators and ferried into the maw by the workers that returned from the tunnel. Never was the same worker seen twice, yet they appeared on and on, to and fro. Day and night. Without light or guidance, they would dig.

And dig.

And dig.

And perhaps they had a foreman at some point. Perhaps there was a schedule, and lunch breaks, and names, and reasons. But now, as we all agree, it’s time to dig. We edge closer to where it lays. The death of flesh and stone laying the charnel carpet for its welcome. We know, we are certain, that when we get there we will find it open and willing. It will extend to us the same kindness that we gave It for all these years. It will be free, and it will make a home out of each and every one of us.