John arrives at the empty city in the evening,
everything is dark, he parks his car so its headlights shine onto the buildings, the engine rattles and dies, we hear a door slam, he ventures forward, his shadow precedes him, etc., etc., we point this out to alleviate any doubts as to his intentions, we intend to be transparent in our clarity, the city is empty but it is populated by wraiths, or what we shall call wraiths, one leans against a wall, she is of medium height, slender, rounded buttocks, the usual erotic accouterments, longish legs encased in hose, sleekness, yes, silkiness, a delicious smoothness created by the nylon sheathing, encorsetted waist, shoes with heels of an improbable height, her shadow with the sweep of headlights stretching and compacting along the wall where she leans, John's arrival noted and then dismissed, clearly he will be of little interest to her, we cannot say just what she is doing here, lingering provocatively against the wall, or what significance she will have in the story which follows, we see another face, however, wraith-like behind glass, though perhaps not a wraith at all, John does not notice this face, he is a young man beset with the distractions of youth and rather innocent, although he will remain neither young nor innocent, like all of us he will become decrepit, he will creak and groan, joints will become stiff, skin brittle, internal organs erratic, we ourselves speak from this pinnacle of achievement: we are ancient, primeval, as eroded as prehistory, archeological, fossilized, a reliquary of abandoned tombs and ossified bones: flesh, what flesh we have, lies haggard: blood, thickened, pushes through ropes of veins: in the context of this story our ages will be a constant counterpoint, there is a kind of harmony to this, a metronomic ticking. But enough: we speak of John: a young man of the usual carnality, a certain height, slimness, not ugly, not stupid, not many things, embryonic, a restless man with a certain fixity of purpose, we shall get to this fixity later, he stands in the headlights of his now quiet car, the empty city before him, caverns of streets, concrete, marble, lintels, windows, doorways, dark recesses, alleys, a city bereft of life, this is a dream of course, a nightscape of impulses firing electrically in his brain, we don’t wish to be deceptive here, he is dreaming, he will awaken and forget all of it—he will forget, we shall not—and resume his quotidian life beyond our purview and indeed beyond our interest....

 

An excerpt from the new opening of "Evidence of a Lost City,"
a new novel/video by D.N. Stuefloten.

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