Most of the city’s underground—that’s how hot it’s gotten up there—great descending 
galleries, complex, reinforced earthen walls, the temperature a steady fifty-five degrees—
apartments tiered four levels down, the underground river bisecting the city, lit blue or 
yellow or green to denote neighborhoods, help drunken passengers on the ferry find their 
way home. Up there any trees left have been taken by fungus, and no mere rainstorms 
come anymore—just torrent, unsettled soil, foundations of shorter buildings shifting—
and the taller ones leaning forward, as if peering down, as if expecting to glean some 
meaning from seeing old couples walking quietly, obdurate in nostalgia, on their above-
ground evening passagiato, the men’s hands clasped behind their backs, the women a few 
paces behind, as if the path they trace—a script cryptic, enigmatic—would one day, by 
dint of repetition, translate itself into sense—a ratcheting backward into the old dimly-
remembered dream of verticality, cool stone, temperate breeze.
	You impute more to buildings than is there, you say, but I say that it can’t be said 
that buildings have no intelligence.
	Memories of the old life above ground are fading, so at night they auction stories 
here, and the rich send their representatives to bid for them. Therefore the cellars of the 
rich are lined with stories, some of them my own. I don’t mean stories I’ve invented or 
read; I mean stories of things that happened to me up there, things I’ve told out loud—the 
fistfight with the man slapping the prostitute on the boulevard, the drowned dog eddying 
in yellow light, the first time I ran for my life.
	I never had the sense that these were “mine,” exactly. All stories, once told, 
belong to all of us. But in the buying of them, the storing of them, I do feel that part of 
me is lost, and in fact all of us, when we try to tell our auctioned tales again, stumble on 
the words, cannot keep the thread.
	Friends of mine often leave their homes late at night, cross neighborhoods, blue to 
yellow to green, find the fine houses where their stories live, then pace in front of those 
houses, bright light flaring from windows like hyperbole. It’s as if merely being near their 
stories can coax them back, but I tell them it doesn’t work that way. The common ones 
remain locked in the cellars, the sexy ones in the vaults, and the ones heavy with irony go 
to the poorly-lit libraries. 
	It is my belief that our auctioned stories speak to each other at night and are 
changed, exaggerated in a kind of desperation at their captivity.
	There’s a story I want to tell called “The Bastard and the Bishop,” and it is partly 
about me—but if I tell it, diaphragm its sad breath into the air, and if one night, many 
years from now, at a fancy dinner party you hear a story called “Ten Bastards and an 
Archbishop at Eighty-five Degrees,” say my theory is right, won’t you? And remember 
me, think of me: I was the first of the former bishop’s bastards.