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27: Wonder and Vertigo
It was called the City of En, because N is infinity, the mystical end point of all prime number progressions. Pardon me, not a point but a direction. Not a Hiersein or Dasein, but a trope. Neither hier nor da—neither here nor there. All roads start from the hypothetical zero, which is far less real than you'd think, and tend toward a hypothetical Infinity. I say 'not end' but 'tend.' The middle between those two tendencies is a vast blur of dark and other matter arranged along stronglines conforming to number progressions. They all occur in nature, from the Fibonaccis to the Primes. Their joints are hierophantic, parabolic, metabolic, and who knows what else. Think of the megaverse as an Eiffel Tower or a Zeppelin made of toothpicks glued in radiant patterns. The go-dots are the primes, the relicts, the left-overs, the stuffing in the mattress, the disconnected and illogical endpieces and odd lots. The struts and joints of the universe, and therefore the bridges and roadways of the Temporale, are the integer patterns. Like a train leaving a station, they start out slow: 2, 2, 2, 2...and then they speed up a bit...3, 3, 3...they begin quickly to blur and overlay like 4, 4, 4 which is 2and2, 2and2, 2and2...then 5, 5, 5...3and3, 3and3, 3and3...and so on. This will make more sense to you if you are a time traveler who has stood, say, in Victoria Station in the 1880s, or in the gare de l'est in the 1920s, anyplace where steam locomotives were in their glorious, chuffing prime—even counting the sad trains that pulled J. M. Barrie's lost boys out of Charing Cross toward the Belgian Front and eternal darkness.
We had only a few minutes to get a feel of what the City of En was all about. Actually, we would get another perspective and a very different one, the next day. But here, in the night, we looked down upon the predictable metropolitan sprawl, the quadrille of colored lights receding in all directions, the honk of horns and the smells of lunch and diesel rising up to our senses ("I dine on coal and air," Rimbaud wrote around 1871, describing the industrial city as he inhaled its air and its views and exhaled his poetry).
After the first glimpse, looking up I saw a mirror image looking down on the endless quadrille of droplets of colored light. Through that apparition filling the sky I saw the moon, a moon, moons, glowing amid the constellations. I saw air cars streaking overhead in arrow-like lines, leaving contrails of neon in all its hues.
But more yet, looking down I saw there were no streets, just criss-cross canyons filled with vehicles pouring like molten gold, like fast-rolling droplets of mercury. This city had no bottom and no top.
"It goes on forever in all directions," I cried out.
Edgardo looked philosophical in his own rapture. "Yes, it seems that way. At least, I've lived here all my life, and I have never reached bottom in any direction. You can travel any distance you want, and you will find all of history slowly happening like the slow march of circus elephants passing through town."
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