Dangerous Laughter

THE DOME

THE FIRST DOMES, the precursors, appeared here and there in affluent neighborhoods, on out-of-the-way roads, where they attracted a certain attention before growing familiar and nearly invisible. The few outsiders who actually witnessed them tended to dismiss them as follies of the rich, comparable to underground heating pipes for winter gardens or basement bowling alleys with automatic pinsetters. Even the early newspaper reports did not quite know what tone to take, shifting uneasily from technical description to ironic commentary, with moments of guarded praise. And that was hardly surprising, since the domes, while having features that were judged to be admirable, displayed themselves in a way that could readily strike an unsympathetic observer as pretentious or irritating.

Each of the early models, made of transparent Viviglas, was designed to fit directly over a house and its property. Now, emerging from the front or back door in summer, the owner of a dome could step comfortably into a world of air-conditioned lawns and gardens, thanks to a highly efficient system of filters and evaporator coils built into the Viviglas. There were other advantages. Recessed fluorescent lighting with dimmer switches permitted the property to be illuminated at night, so that you could read a book or newspaper in the cool outdoors on the hottest, muggiest evenings. Owners were encouraged to practice their golf swings, play badminton after dark, and enjoy a bit of night gardening, in the always perfect weather under the dome. In fact it was a boast of the manufacturer, much quoted at the time, that “Inside our dome, rain never falls.” As if that wasn’t enough, the manufacturer promised future models that would heat the enclosures in winter, though a number of difficulties still needed to be ironed out. It was above all as technological achievements that the early domes impressed most observers, who nevertheless remained skeptical. Questions were raised about the extent to which such excesses were likely to be shared by the average American household, since the domes at that time cost nearly as much as the estates they encapsulated. Nor could a number of journalists resist reflecting on the metaphorical implications of those glistening, crystalline structures, which enclosed the rich in little princedoms that insulated them even further from the everyday world.

There were, moreover, serious flaws in the early domes, which became apparent soon enough. Grackles, jays, and sparrows settled in great numbers on the dome-tops, where they blocked the sky and left broad smears of yellowish-white excrement. To make matters worse, many birds, deceived by the transparent Viviglas, flew directly into the thick walls and fell dead or injured to the ground below. Now the manufacturer had to send out daily cleaning crews, who washed the outsides of the domes, gathered up the dead and injured birds, and installed small boxes that made a grinding noise intended to discourage wasps, bees, birds, and Japanese beetles from settling anywhere on the shiny surfaces. Other problems began to reveal themselves. Rainwater as it evaporated left dusty streaks, which had to be removed; airborne particles gradually formed a layer of grime. Trouble developed even on the insides of the domes, where mist from sprinkler systems collected on the inner surfaces, increasing the humidity and obscuring the view. The manufacturer devoted itself assiduously to every complaint, while pointing out in its own defense that many of the little annoyances were due strictly to summer and might be expected to vanish with the season. The owners waited; and as the weather turned cold, frost formed colossal and oppressive patterns on the transparent surfaces, which were further darkened by the falling of the first snow.

One might have been forgiven, at this point, for predicting the death of the domes. In many instances the owners did in fact have them removed, a costly business requiring a small army of workmen and fleets of flatbed trucks. Others remained steadfast through the winter, during which a number of benefits became evident. No snow fell on the walks and driveways, bushes and hedges were protected from harmful layers of ice; the air inside the domes, though still unheated, grew pleasantly warm on cold but sunny afternoons. Such discoveries were offset by a burst of new drawbacks. Accumulations of thick-crusted snow froze to the tops of the domes, while spears of ice clung to the sides, and sweeps of high-drifted snow pressed up against the Viviglas doors. By the end of the first winter, it was clear to most customers that the domes were more trouble than they were worth.

The change came in early spring. Three separate events took place within one crucial ten-day period: the manufacturer discovered a cheaper and stronger substance, Splendimax, that reduced the cost of the domes by half; a pollution alert lasting an entire week drew new attention to the domes as pure environments; and a rash of kidnappings in small towns in Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Vermont led to a sudden interest in the domes as protective shells. Now the domes began to appear in less exclusive neighborhoods, where crowds gathered to watch enormous strips of Splendimax being lowered into place by towering cranes. Newspapers and weekly magazines paid close attention to the new middle-class phenomenon, which some journalists attributed to the influence of the mall, with its habit of combining disparate elements under a single roof. Others saw in the trend still another instance of a disturbing tendency in the American suburb: the longing for withdrawal, for self-enclosure, for expensive isolation.

As the domes began to spread slowly, rival manufacturers produced less costly varieties, composed of improved materials and marketed under an array of names (Vitrilon, XceliPlex, Amphiperm, Colossotherm), often with new and attractive features. One dome was equipped with a heating system for winter, another had retractable panels for controlling frost and mist, and one well-advertised version, promoted by educators, came with an artificial night sky that displayed constellations, planets, and other heavenly bodies, scientifically adjusted to latitude and longitude, which moved slowly across the inner surface and were far more vivid and convincing than those in the actual sky.

Yet this activity too might have run its course, leaving behind a scattering of domed properties in towns that had gone on to new diversions, had it not been for an event that took many observers by surprise. Just when it seemed that the market for domed houses had reached its limit, a developer decided to enclose several blocks of newly constructed homes on fourteen acres of land, beneath a single dome. The vast span of Splendimax rose not only over individual properties but over a small park with swings, a communal swimming pool, a stretch of oak and beech woods, and nine freshly paved streets. Two weeks later, in a nearby town, a gated community voted to endome itself; and as the fashion for doming continued to spread, citizens at town meetings and city halls began to debate the question of enclosing commercial districts and public lands, while keeping them accessible to area residents.

It was during this phase of enlarged domings that the first town voted to enclose itself, in a massive dome that was reputed to be one of the great engineering feats of the new millennium. The immensity of the structure, the sheer drama and bravado of it all, caused a sharp increase of interest, for the new magnitude represented a decision that could no longer be dismissed as a passing trend. Critics attacked the hostile apartness of the town, which in its hemisphere of VeridiGlo was said to resemble a walled medieval city, as if the advance in technology served only to conceal a secret atavism. Admirers, as might be expected, hailed the brilliance of the engineering, the grandeur of technological accomplishment, which placed the new dome in the noble line of the skyscraper, the suspension bridge, the hydroelectric dam, and the ancient pyramid. Others praised the domed town for its clean air — a system of escape vents permitted the expulsion of factory pollutants and gasoline fumes — while several took a more aesthetic approach, finding in the space enclosed by the dome a spirit of gaiety, of pleasurable artifice, reminiscent of the old European plaza with its fountain and shade trees or the American mall with its food court and Santa’s workshop, for under the roof of the dome the inhabitants of the town were said to feel a bond of community, a sense of uninterrupted gathering in a special place set aside for their common pleasure.

To the surprise of almost everyone, the new dome did not immediately spawn another. It was as if people felt that the doming process was moving ahead a little too rapidly and required a pause, during which the consequences of the new technology might be studied more carefully. It was recognized, to begin with, that the sheer cost of a dome this size far exceeded the annual budget of all but the wealthiest towns. At the same time, a broad range of practical problems had yet to be solved, such as the efficient flow of traffic into and out of the dome, the pattern and duration of nocturnal illumination, and the seasonal migration of birds living within the structure. People began to wonder whether they would be safer under a dome, or whether a permanent enclosure might prove harmful, in the long run. But even as the issue hung in the balance, decisions were being made in remote rooms, behind closed doors, that would soon change everything.

We live in the aftermath of those decisions. To say that the Dome is the single largest achievement in the history of architecture is inadequate and misleading. It is a leap beyond, into some new domain without a name. The story of its building is well known: the drama of starting on both coasts, the erection of the great pillars, the early collapse of the northwestern foundation, the construction of the offshore airports, the closing of the final gap. Many of us can scarcely remember a time when we did not live beneath a soaring roof of transparent Celestilux.

And yet the achievement is not without its detractors, even today. Critics argue that the Dome represents the complete triumph of the consumer society, of which it is the extravagant and unapologetic symbol. For the Dome, they say, has transformed the entire country into a gigantic mall, whose sole purpose is to encourage feverish consumption. The sensation of being under a common roof, of spending many hours under artificial lights, is said to stimulate in the average citizen a relentless desire to buy. And it remains true that the completion of the Dome has been accompanied by a sharp increase in consumer spending, as if everything beneath the Celestilux roof — houses, lakes, clouds — were being displayed to advantage and offered ceaselessly for sale. Some have even claimed that our Dome is the final flowering of the nineteenth-century department store, of which the American mall was only a transitional, horizontal form. According to this view, the great empty spaces of the Dome will gradually be put to commercial use; there are predictions of transparent floors in the sky, level upon level, connected by hollow Celestilux tubes containing motorized passenger platforms.

But those who dislike the Dome do not simply accuse it of serving the interests of late capitalism. They attack the name itself, arguing that the enclosure follows the irregular shape of the continental United States and is therefore no true dome. Defenders, while not denying that the lower base is irregular, are quick to remind their opponents that at the height of four hundred feet the soaring walls of Celestilux slope inward and gradually provide the base for a classic dome that rises over most of the nation. Indeed, the forging of a true dome above a vast, irregular perimeter is one of the engineering triumphs of the entire project. But defenders are not confined to such quibbles. They point proudly to a host of benefits: the national regulation of climate, the protection of our coasts against hurricanes, the creation of twenty-four-hour illumination and the consequent elimination of time zones, the Celestilux shield against ultraviolet radiation.

Without choosing sides in the debate, we may note a number of subtler changes. Because everything lies beneath a single dome, because everything is, in a very real sense, indoors, our feelings about Nature are no longer the same. The Dome, in a single stroke, has abolished Nature. The hills, the streams, the woods, the fields, all have become elements in a new decor, an artfully designed landscape — designed by the mere fact of existing under the Dome. This experience of landscape as style has been called the New Interiority. In former days, a distinction was made between inside and outside: people emerged from their homes or apartments and arrived “outside.” Today, one leaves one’s dwelling place and steps into another, larger room. The change is dramatic. The world, perceived as an interior, shimmers with artifice. A tree growing in a park is indistinguishable from a lifelike tree in the corner of a restaurant. A lake in the country is a more artful version of a tiled pool in a mall.

This perceptual change has led in turn to another, which has been called the New Miniaturism. Things in the world now appear smaller, more toylike. An object that once towered above us — a tall pine, a steep hill, a snowcapped mountain — is itself dwarfed by the Dome, which by the ever-present fact of its vastness miniaturizes what it encloses. The Mississippi is nothing but a trickle of water in a child’s terrarium. The Rockies are only a row of stones in a third-grade diorama. Events themselves, under such conditions, have receded in importance, have become aestheticized. Experience is beginning to feel like a collection of ingeniously constructed arcade games. Is it because, living beneath the Dome, people are reminded of playful worlds in enclosed and festive spaces, such as movie theaters, bowling alleys, laser-tag arenas, video arcades, the old fun houses and circuses? Indeed, one might argue that under the regime of the Dome, the country has become not a mall but an immense hall of entertainment, in which every citizen is a player. Certain unpleasant facts of life — rundown neighborhoods, traffic accidents, robberies, drive-by shootings — are in this view taken less seriously, since they are felt to be part of the artificial displays under the Dome. Death itself is losing its terror, has come to seem little more than a brilliantly contrived effect.

There are rumors of grander plans. At a conference in Oslo, architects and engineers have proposed a transparent globe, supported by massive DuraCryst pillars, which would surround the entire earth. That such a vision shall be fulfilled in our lifetime is unlikely; that it should have been dreamed at all is perhaps inevitable. For under the visible fact of the Dome, it is difficult not to imagine still vaster encompassings. Already, at certain moments, in certain moods, the famous Dome has come to seem a little diminished, a little disappointing. No doubt we shall never rest content until the great All is enclosed in a globe of transparent Astrilume. Then solar systems, galaxies, supernovas, infinite space itself, will become elements of a final masterwork — a never-ending festival, a celestial amusement park, in which every exploding star and spinning electron is part of the empyrean choreography. Meanwhile we walk beneath the Celestilux sky, dreaming of new heavens, of impossible architectures. For a change is in the air. You can feel it coming.

IN THE REIGN OF HARAD IV

IN THE REIGN of Harad IV there lived at court a maker of miniatures, who was celebrated for the uncanny perfection of his work. Not only were the objects of his strenuous art pleasing to look at, but the pleasure and astonishment increased as the observer, bending closer, saw that a passionate care had been lavished on the smallest and least visible details. It was said that no matter how closely you examined one of the Master’s little pieces, you always discovered some further wonder.

Among the many tasks of the maker of miniatures was supplying court ladies with carved ivory plants and triple-headed sea monsters for their cabinets of delight, drawing the fur and feathers of fabulous creatures in The Book of Three Hundred Secrets, and, above all, replacing the furnishings of the old toy palace, which the King had inherited from his father and which was filled with moldering draperies and cracked wood. The famous toy palace, with its more than six hundred rooms, its dungeons and secret passageways, its gardens and courtyards and orchards, rose to the height of a man’s chest and occupied its own chamber, across from the King’s library. In return for his duties the maker of miniatures was given a private apartment in the palace not far from the court carpenter, as well as an ermine robe that entitled him to take part in official ceremonies. He was assisted by two youthful apprentices. They roughed out the larger miniatures, such as cupboards and canopy beds, fired the little earthenware bowls in a special kiln, applied the first coat of lacquer to objects made of wood, and saved precious time for the Master by fetching from the palace workshops pieces of ivory, copper, lapis, boxwood, and beechwood. But the apprentices were not permitted to attempt the more difficult labors of the miniaturist’s art, such as carving the dragon heads at the feet of table legs, or forging the minuscule copper keys that turned the locks of drawers and chests.

One day, after the completion of an arduous and exhilarating task — he had made for one of the miniature orchards a basket of brilliantly lifelike red-and-green apples, each no larger than the pit of a cherry, and as a finishing touch he had placed on the stem of one apple a perfectly reproduced copper fly — the maker of miniatures felt in himself a stirring of restlessness. It wasn’t the first time he had experienced such stirrings at the end of a long task, but lately the odd, internal itching had become more insistent. As he tried to penetrate the feeling, to reveal it more clearly to himself, he thought of the basket of apples. The basket had been unusually satisfying to make because it had presented him with a hierarchy of sizes: the basket itself, composed of separate slats of boxwood bound with copper wire, then the apples, and at last the fly. The tiny fly, with its precisely rendered wings, had caused him the most difficulty and the most joy, and it occurred to him that there was no particular reason to stop at the fly. Suddenly he was seized by an inner trembling. Why had he never thought of this before? How was it possible? Didn’t logic itself demand that the downward series be pursued? At this thought he felt a deep, guilty excitement, as if he had come to a forbidden door at the end of a private corridor and heard, as he slowly turned the key, a sound of distant music.

He set out to make an apple basket the size of one of his apples. The new wooden apples, each with a stem and two leaves, were so small that he was able to carve them only with the aid of an enlarging glass, which he set into a supporting frame. But even as he struggled pleasurably over each apple, he realized he was dreaming of the fly, the impossible fly that, as it turned out, was visible only as a speck on the minuscule stem, though it was perfect in every detail when viewed through the glass.

The King, who had praised the original fly, looked at the new basket of apples with astonished delight. When the Master invited him to observe the apples through the glass, the King drew in his breath, appeared to be about to speak, and suddenly clapped his hands sharply, whereupon the Chamberlain strode in. The King instructed him to view the miniature fly through the lens. The Chamberlain, a cold and imperious man, gave a harsh gasp. By the next morning the story of the invisible fly was known throughout the palace.

With new zest, as if he were returning to an earlier and more exuberant period of his life, the middle-aged but still vigorous Master devoted himself to a series of miniatures that in every way surpassed his finest efforts of the past. From the pit of a cherry he carved a ring of thirty-six elephants, each holding in its trunk the tail of the elephant before it. Every elephant possessed a pair of nearly invisible tusks carved out of ivory. One day the Master presented to the King a saucer on which stood an inverted ebony thimble. When the King picked up the thimble, he discovered beneath it a meticulous reproduction of the northwest wing of his toy palace, with twenty-six rooms fully furnished, including a writing table with ostrich-claw legs and a gold birdcage containing a nightingale.

Scarcely had the maker of miniatures completed the thimble palace when he felt a new burst of restlessness. Once embarked on his downward voyage, would he ever be able to stop? Besides, wasn’t it plain that the tiny palace, though but partially visible to the unaided eye, revealed itself too readily, without that resistance which was an essential part of aesthetic delight? And he proposed to himself a plunge beneath the surface of the visible, the creation of a detailed world wholly inaccessible to the naked eye.

He began with simple things — a copper bowl, a beechwood box — for the material he worked with was, before magnification, itself invisible and required of him a new degree of delicate manipulation. He quickly recognized the need for more powerful lenses, more subtle tools. From the court carpenter he ordered a pair of complex gripping devices that held his hands still and steadied his fingers. This was no work for an old man, he thought — no, or for a young man either — but only for someone in the full vigor of his middle years.

His first masterpiece in the realm of the invisible was a stag with branching antlers. Through a powerful glass he watched the invisible sharpen into the visible: the head twisted to one side, the mouth slightly open, the lips drawn back to reveal the teeth. He carved it and painted it down to the last detail, tooth and hoof and pale inner ear; and it was said by some that, if you looked very closely through the enlarging glass, you could distinguish the amber irises from the bright black pupils.

No sooner had he finished the stag than he embarked on a far more challenging task: an invisible garden, modeled at first on one of the thirty-nine palace gardens but quickly developing its own more elaborate design. During the early stages a sudden draft destroyed a week’s worth of work. With the aid of the court carpenter, for whom he drew up a plan, the maker of miniatures constructed a teakwood box with a sloping top, in which was set a square magnifying lens. Two panels in the sides of the box slid smoothly up and down, so that a pair of hands might be inserted, and the square lens, attached to a system of rods and screws, could be raised and lowered. The intricate and delicate garden, protected from disturbing currents of air, grew slowly until it contained dozens of twelve-sided flower beds, fourteen varieties of fruit tree with individual leaves, a system of crossing paths paved with tesserae of ebony and ivory, onyx fountains carved with legendary creatures, snails under stones.

Although the King expressed wonder and amazement at the garden seen through the glass, and praised the Master’s conquest of a new world, he asked many questions about the lens and the teakwood box, as if he suspected them of working a spell. At last the King permitted himself to wonder whether his maker of miniatures might not soon return to the visible miracle of his exquisite palace furniture. In the King’s voice the Master heard a tone of unmistakable reproach. As he explained the apparatus and adjusted the lens, it seemed to him that by venturing beyond the visible world he had embarked on a voyage more perilous than he had known.

But already he had thrown himself into the crowning masterpiece of this period: the King’s famous toy palace, entirely invisible to the naked eye. The more than six hundred rooms would be completely furnished and scrupulously rendered in every detail, including dovetail joints in the cabinets, working locks on the drawers, and fifteen dozen complete sets of knives, forks, and spoons in chased silver, each with the royal insignia — a crown and crossed swords — worked onto the handle.

During the construction of his palace-beneath-the-glass, the maker of miniatures paid several visits to the original toy palace, and was startled each time by the vast building that towered almost to the height of his shoulders. The chairs in the council chamber were the size of his fists. Ever since his own work had taken its slight and necessary turn, its odd unaccountable swerve away from classic smallness toward another, more dubious realm, his two apprentices had assumed the task of supplying furniture for the King’s toy palace. And the Master saw that it was good: they were well suited to large and striking effects, he had perhaps been unduly harsh in limiting them to elementary tasks, in the days when such things concerned him.

One day, while looking at a desk in the King’s toy palace, the maker of miniatures fell into a reverie. Fastened to the drawer of the desk was a pair of brass lion’s-head handles, which had once seemed to him the height of elegance and had cost him three days of work. The smallest object in the toy palace was a silver needle no thicker than a hair. It occurred to him, not without pride, that the entire palace he was now constructing beneath his glass, with its more than six hundred rooms and its gardens and orchards, could be enclosed by the eye of that needle.

But even as he sank deeply into his little world he felt at the back of his mind a slight itching, as if he knew that his palace, even that, could not satisfy him for long. For such a feat, however arduous, was really no more than the further conquest of a familiar realm, the twilight realm of the world revealed by his glass, and he yearned for a world so small that he could not yet imagine it. As he worked on his palace the craving grew in him, and he seemed to sense dimly, just out of reach beyond his inner sight, a farther kingdom.

He began to see it more clearly, with growing excitement, though he confessed to himself that it was less a seeing than a desire gradually hardening into a certainty. Although he now worked with material so minute that it was invisible to the unaided eye, it remained true that the invisible was made visible by his lens. If to others he seemed a magician who brought the seen out of the unseen, in fact he worked wholly in the visible world. It was an ambiguous and elusive world, which vanished into the invisible as soon as the glass was removed, and yet it was a far cry from the purely invisible realm he sensed just beyond. And he longed to construct objects so small that they would escape the power of the mediating glass, remain submerged in the dark kingdom of the invisible.

He began as always with a simple object: an oblong ivory box with a sliding top. Although the box was so marvelously small that it remained invisible even through the glass, he continued to make use of his teakwood viewer with the sloping top and movable lens, for the familiar apparatus served to concentrate his attention and steady his fingers. The ivory box, which never once emerged from its hidden world to reveal itself to the eye of the Master, was completed in seven days. With his inner eye he contemplated it coolly and felt a calm elation. Despite the absence of visible evidence, he was certain of its formal perfection, of the elegant precision of its parts — never had he taken so much care.

Immediately he threw himself into a more ambitious task: a beechwood peacock with outspread tail. The enchanting peacock, radiant with unseen colors, took him nearly three weeks, and when he was done he felt ready for the task he had secretly been preparing for: an imaginary kingdom.

And so he set to work on his invisible kingdom, with its walled cities and winding rivers, its forests of beech and fir, its copper mines and temple towers, its spoons and insects. By the end of a year he had completed a single city. The city contained cobbled streets and market squares, baskets of grapes on the fruit sellers’ stands, merchants’ houses with pillared balconies overlooking courtyards, individual bottles in the glassblowers’ shops. He felt tired and exhilarated, and as he imagined all that remained undone, stretching out before him like an immense adventure, he found himself wishing that he could reveal his work to someone, as he had once been able to do. The solitude of his task was never oppressive, but from time to time, in the pauses of his day, he felt a touch of loneliness. The King no longer summoned him, and his apprentices had moved into an adjoining chamber and taken on apprentices of their own.

One afternoon, when he was deep-sunk in his invisible kingdom, there was a rap at the door of his chamber. Half raising his head from the teakwood box, the maker of miniatures called for the visitor to enter. The door opened to admit two of the four new apprentices. They began by apologizing for disturbing the Master at work, but explained that they had long admired his unsurpassed art and could not resist the desire to pay their respects and to beg for news of his latest work, of which they had heard confused and contradictory reports. Their own work was still crude and trifling, they had scarcely the skill with which to fashion the leg of a table, and they hoped that a visit to the Master would instruct and inspire them. The Master knew at once that the apprentices, who were both quite young, were very sure of themselves and were belittling themselves only out of courtly politeness, but the loneliness of his last months was soothed by their words of homage. Giving way to temptation, he moved aside to permit them to view his kingdom through the glass. True, they would be able to see nothing, for he had dropped fully beneath the floor of the visible, but perhaps they could somehow sense, as he could in the darkest depths of his mind, the splendor and precision of his invisible art.

The first apprentice bent over the glass in the sloping top of the teakwood box. After a few moments he stepped aside and allowed the second apprentice to bend over the glass. When both had done looking, the younger of the two said that the Master’s work was indeed incomparable. Never in his short life had he seen anything so remarkable in both conception and execution. At once the second apprentice gave voice to his admiration, saying that even in his dreams he had not dared to imagine such loveliness. And indeed it was the highest of all honors simply to be in the presence of so great an accomplishment. Then the two apprentices thanked the Master for dignifying them with his attention and respectfully took their leave. The maker of miniatures, knowing that they had seen nothing, that their words were hollow, and that they would never visit him again, returned with some impatience to his work; and as he sank below the crust of the visible world, into his dazzling kingdom, he understood that he had traveled a long way from the early days, that he still had far to go, and that, from now on, his life would be difficult and without forgiveness.

THE OTHER TOWN

THE OTHER TOWN, the one that exactly resembles our town, lies just beyond the north woods. To get there, we have only to walk through a stretch of shade, over a spongy layer of pine needles and brown-black leaves, and come out in any of the backyards that border the woods — the DeAngelo yard, say, with its flowered beach towels hanging over the back-porch rail and its coil of green hose next to the dented garbage cans, or the Altschuler yard with its tall sugar maple, its yellow Wiffle ball bat lying half in sun and half in shade, and its aluminum chaise longue with strips of orange and white vinyl on which a blue eyeglass case is resting, or the Langley yard with its grass-stained soccer ball, its red-handled jump rope, its tin pie-dish for home plate, and its bags of peat moss and fertilizer leaning up against the side of the detached garage. Those of us who prefer not to go on foot can drive up North Pine or Holbrook, both of which end at Linwood, the street that runs along the front of the houses whose backyards border the woods. From there we can go in any direction, all over the town. If we’re in the mood, we can stop wherever we like, walk up to any house, open the front door. We can step inside and explore every room. Later, if we wish, we can drive through the other town’s north woods, up the other North Pine or Holbrook. Then we’ll come out at the edge of a town that is different from ours, a town with its own style — as if, all along, our trip through the other town had been nothing but a trip through our town, which of course in some sense it always is.

Although we’re drawn to the other town because of its startling resemblance to ours — the morning papers lying at the same angles on the same porches, the doors and drawers opened to the identical distances, the same dishes in the dish racks and the same clothes in the laundry baskets — it’s also true that we’re struck by certain differences. We can hardly fail to notice the separate groups of people, often our own neighbors, crossing lawns, entering and leaving houses, stopping now and then to look about, like tourists visiting a famous spot. Then there are the town guards, in their dark green shirts with yellow armbands, who are visible everywhere — in every house and store, in the two parks, in the high school, in the picnic grounds by the stream before the woods. Here and there we also catch glimpses of the replicators, the ones who see to it that all changes in our town are repeated in the other town, and who do their best to keep out of our way. In addition, there’s a sense we all have, an elusive but still quite definite sense, which might be called an intuition of absence: the absence of people living in homes, working in stores, conducting the daily life of a town. For of course no one lives in the other town, which exists solely to be visited by us.

Apart from these large differences, which none of us can help noticing, there are many small discrepancies, usually detectable in one’s own duplicated house, as when the crowded kitchen drawer contains the very can opener missing from the drawer in one’s own kitchen, or when the tomato plant, tied to a stick with string at the side of the house, bears a tomato of different size, on a different stem. Those of us who are older, and have visited the other town many times, take a special pleasure in detecting such mismatchings, though a few purists among us argue that any difference is a flaw and should never be tolerated.

The origin of the other town remains obscure. Its first appearance in the historical record occurs in 1685, some forty years after the founding of our town, when the building of a new house “and of the same house in the North Towne” is reported, though the mention is so brief and riddling that it has been subject to conflicting interpretations. One town historian has argued that “the same house” refers not to an identical house but to a house in similar style. Another points out that “the North Towne” is itself an expression of uncertain meaning, since it was sometimes used to indicate the northern part of our own town. Not till the middle of the eighteenth century does it become clear that a second town exists to our north, imitating our town and maintained by our residents; in addition to public records, private diaries report visits to the other town, which one citizen calls a “wonder work.” Still, many details of reproduction and maintenance remain unclear, and it isn’t until the nineteenth century that a full record begins to emerge, including the founding of an early version of town guards and the establishment, in 1882, of the craft of replicators. Such evidence as we have suggests only that the other town arose not long after ours and was in some sense a copy. Even this broad proposition has its dissenters, for some argue that the other town was at first distinct from ours and only gradually took on the quality of imitation.

However that may be, the record for well over one hundred years indicates an increasing concern for meticulous replication. Indeed, there’s good reason to think that in earlier years the level of imitation was far less precise than it has since become. Before the establishment of replicators, the business of duplication was carried out by separate groups of craftsmen hired at need by the town council. Since the workers had other business, delay was frequent and the entire system subject to a high degree of disorganization. The importance of the replicators lay above all in their being full-time employees engaged in a single undertaking. But whereas the original replicators were expected to attend mostly to houses and their furnishings, our present-day replicators are responsible for all elements of decor, from the paving of streets and the renovation of public buildings to the daily adjustment of levels of salt in the saltshakers and the arrangement of forks in the silverware drawers. Groups of “watchers,” working in our town, report on their laptops all daily changes, which the replicators in turn bring about in the other town. During prime visiting hours, from 8 a.m. to 10 p.m., the replicators bring adjustments up to date every two hours, so that, for example, a package delivered to a front porch in our town will also appear on the front porch of the identical house in the other town; because of the difference in time, it’s possible for someone who receives a package in our town to drive to the other town and await the same package, which always arrives, though later; such discrepancies seem inevitable, although the replicators have reduced the time lag significantly during the last decade and foresee an era of temporal simultaneity.

Recently the art of replication has reached new levels of mastery. Replicators can reproduce the precise grain of a weathered shingle, the pattern of mud spray on the side of a car, the faint discoloration on the rim of an old coffee cup, the design of cracks on a glued-together porcelain rooster on the kitchen windowsill. A more difficult challenge lies in the realm of Nature. The arrangement of twigs and branches on a specific sycamore, the exact position of blossoms on a flowering rhododendron, the structure of petals in a particular white rose, all present challenges of design, patterns of apparent randomness within a complex order, which have taxed the skills of master craftsmen. Only two generations ago, replicators did little more than select real plants, restricting their attention to size, shape, and number: a medium-sized wild cherry for the side yard, three azaleas and a well-trimmed snowball bush under the front windows. But complaints about discrepancies led to a decade of radical artifice. Suddenly every Norway maple with its precise system of leaves and branches, every spirea bush and marigold, was replicated in the master workshops and planted in the yards of the other town. This in turn led to a new outburst of complaints, since the artificial plants and trees, though convincing at first, gradually gave off an air of falsity. We’re now in the midst of a more satisfactory experiment, in which the real and the replicated are carefully intermingled: among the branches of the actual shagbark hickory, a few artificial branches; among the real leaves, the cunning leaves of a master replicator.

Although most of us simply enjoy visiting the other town without thinking very much about it, there are those who can’t help wondering why it is there at all. Some say the other town serves as a welcome distraction from the cares of our own town — for them it’s a kind of superior amusement park, where we can forget our worries and take delight in a world of sensations. If a window is broken in our town, we rush to have it fixed, we can’t rest until the damage is repaired. But in the other town we note with pleasure the skill with which the pattern of broken glass has been imitated, we point admiringly at the shards of glass lying on the living room rug.

Such arguments, others claim, are suitable only for children. The real value of the town, in their opinion, lies in the way it permits us to see our own town more clearly or completely. Preoccupied as we are with domestic and financial cares, we pass through our lives noticing so little of what’s really around us that we might be said to inhabit an invisible town; in the other town, the visible town, our attention is seized, we feel compelled to look at things closely, to linger over details that would otherwise fail to exist at all. In this way the other town leads us to a fuller or truer grasp of things. Far from being a childish diversion intended to distract us from more serious concerns, it’s a necessary stage away from the simplicities of childhood and into the richness of adult understanding.

For my part, I think there is some truth to both these theories, but I believe the other town serves another purpose as well. Although it strives to resemble our town precisely, in fact it offers us freedoms unthinkable at home. There, we can penetrate other houses at will, cross forbidden boundaries, climb unfamiliar stairways, enter secret rooms. All that is closed to us, in our town, is open there, all that’s hidden is seen. This shattering of constriction, this sensation of expansion, of exhilarating release, is in my view the real purpose of the other town, which for all its stillness invites us into a world of dangerous and criminal pleasures.

Our urge to explain the other town, to justify its existence, is not without practical import. The other town is maintained by our workers and paid for by our taxes. Voices are regularly raised in opposition to the whole foolish enterprise, despite the sense shared by most of us that life without the other town would be unsatisfactory, in some way difficult to explain. Repeatedly we hear that the other town is simply unnecessary. We already have a town, the argument goes — a second one, exactly resembling it, is entirely superfluous, not to say absurd, all the more so because no one lives there and no use is made of it, apart from visits that draw people away from more profitable pursuits. This objection shades quickly into a purely material one: the other town represents a shocking waste of land and money. The material argument generally includes proposals to make the existing houses available for sale, to build new homes and low-rise apartments, to develop a senior-citizen center — in short, to make use of the other town in ways that would benefit everyone.

Such ideas are vigorously supported by a small but aggressive group who attack the other town on moral grounds, arguing that the so-called pleasures it offers are disgusting and corrupt. What after all can be said in favor of the pleasure of spying on the lives of one’s neighbors, of violating private property, of undermining the laws of our town? These moralists object in particular to the invasion of homes, above all their own homes, especially late at night, when visitors are allowed to explore any unlit room with flashlights supplied by guards. The visitors — we ourselves — are accused of having an unhealthy interest in secret and sexual matters, in hidden things of every description, and in truth we’ve become quite good at finding and interpreting signs: the black half-slip and the twisted jeans on the throw rug by the rumpled bed, the burst of red wine on the kitchen wall.

But the moralists don’t stop here. They go on to accuse the other town of encouraging indecent behavior in our children. A recent incident has inflamed their anger. A band of six children, ranging in age from nine to twelve, was caught roaming through a house on Warren Street, in our town, when the owners were away. A valuable table had been damaged by knife cuts, a bedroom wall defaced with an image of male genitalia scrawled in ink. Those who defend the other town against charges of corrupting our children argue that incidents of this kind are quite rare, that parents themselves are to blame for failing to enforce the distinction between our town and the other town, that in any case childhood disobedience won’t vanish if the other town is abolished. In my view, all such defenses are a mistake, since their very existence lends legitimacy to the objections they seek to remove. Far better to listen with melancholy patience, nodding slowly now and then, with a slight narrowing of the eyes, as if smoke is drifting against your face.

In addition to those who attack the other town in every possible way, there are those who support the idea of a second town but object to what they consider a grotesque obsession with replication. It’s precisely the differences, they insist, that make the other town worth visiting. Some go so far as to say that the differences are too subtle and ought to be increased and exaggerated. They propose fantastical dwellings, streets of alabaster and gold, underground dream-parks, unearthly towers. Others claim that the existing discrepancies are already so vivid and abundant that larger departures would seem childish and crude.

In spite of these noisy quarrels and harsh attacks, which have plagued us during our entire history, one thing remains certain: the other town is there. Tirelessly it exercises its powers of attraction even on those who protest against it, and perhaps especially on them. Scarcely a week passes when we don’t make our way, by foot or by car, through the north woods and into the other town, a town so exactly like our own that for a moment a confusion comes over us, before we remember where we are. Then we wander across backyards, noting details that might have escaped our attention, walk along streets that are just like our streets, except for certain differences, check to see whether the new stop sign has gone up, enter a neighbor’s house to explore a rumor of adultery — the necktie over the clock radio, the blue bra draped over the cordovan loafer — or observe the work of a replicator rearranging chairs, opening a door, placing a cup in the sink.

Sometimes the tug of our daily lives prevents us from visiting the other town as often as we might like. Then a restlessness comes over us, an unease, a kind of physiological unhappiness. We stop whatever we’re doing — mowing the lawn, lifting the groceries from the trunk of the car — and listen. For it’s as if the other town, which is far quieter than ours, is producing a hum, a melody, that we strain to hear. Then we know the time is coming when, in sudden obedience to an inner command, we’ll look around quickly, check our watches, and leave for a visit.

So powerful, in fact, is the pull of the other town that some citizens arrange their lives so as to spend as much time there as possible. These fanatics enter every attic and cellar, examine every tree and bush, taking scrupulous note of discrepancies and successful simulations. Once they return home they always turn their talk to the other town, or else sit restlessly alone, as if waiting for something, so that it might be said of them that their real existence is over there, beyond the north woods, while our town, rising up before their eyes, must seem to them a vision or dream.

It even happens now and then that someone will try to take up residence in the other town — an act forbidden by law. Teenagers, in particular, attempt to hide there after closing time at midnight, though only last year a husband and wife, both in their forties, were discovered by a guard at three in the morning in the bedroom of a house on Sagamore Road. Repeated violations are punished by penalties of enforced absence, which are considered so harsh that they are usually commuted to community service. One group of teenage girls, who call themselves The River, hid in the other woods repeatedly and were finally forbidden to enter the other town for a year. They seemed chastened, performed odd jobs around town, and met quietly at one another’s houses, where they sat on front porches on hot summer evenings listening to the radio, tapping cigarette ash into the air, and pressing against their collarbones cool bottles of soda glittering with droplets of condensation. One night seven of them were arrested in the dark living room of the Lorenzo house in the other town. As it turned out, they had patiently dug a tunnel, night after night, from the north woods into the forbidden world, where they held secret meetings for weeks before being discovered by a guard.

We who are not fanatics, we common citizens who take life as it comes — we’re content to know that the other town is always there, awaiting our visit. Indeed we prefer things this way and feel no desire to cross over permanently. For what would be the point of that? Our lives are here, in our town. It’s here that we work, marry, raise our children, and die. The other town is by nature the town that’s other — if we moved there, it would at that moment cease to be what it is. For we understand in our bones, without worrying it into thought, that the attraction of the other town lies precisely in its being over there. And we understand something else, though less clearly. The other town, when we enter it, suddenly casts over our town a thereness, an otherness, which we find pleasing, if a little confusing. It’s almost as if we can’t feel our town, cannot know about it, until we’re there, in the other town, imagining our town on the other side of the woods. So perhaps it’s true, after all, that when we visit the other town we aren’t escaping from our town, as some say, but entering it at last.

But these are difficult questions, which we’re content to leave to those who are gifted in thinking about such things. For our part, it’s enough to know that each town is there, offering itself to us in its own way. For our town, too, invites our attention, though sometimes we’re aware of it only when we enter the other town. In this sense it might be said that our town requires the other, much as the other town depends on ours. Or perhaps the two towns together form a separate town, a third town, and it’s in this third town that we truly live.

But again I feel like someone who has managed to wander off into the shade of high trees, up there in the woods. Far better to stick to the path, in my opinion. For there, on one of the trails between the two towns, you can decide to come out in either direction: into a sudden backyard, where every blade of grass and drooping dandelion shows itself like a flame, where a bright blue watering can stands before the half-painted lattices at the base of an old back porch, through which protrude pricker branches and a cluster of sun-struck leaves — or, in the other direction, into the picnic area on our side of the woods, with its brown stream, its swings on long chains, and its unpainted wooden tables, on one of which a pinecone as long as a cigar lies beside a brilliant red paper cup. Though both directions have something to be said for them, there’s also a third way, which is the one I like best. That’s when you can stop for a moment, midway along the path, and turn your head in both directions: toward the other town, which shimmers through the thick branches of oak and pine, and toward our town, almost obscured by the woods but still showing through. Exactly where I am, when I stand there and look both ways, who can say? It’s just for a little while, before I move on.

THE TOWER

DURING THE COURSE of many generations the Tower grew higher and higher until one day it pierced the floor of heaven. Amidst the wild rejoicing, the overturned flagons and the clashing cymbals, a few thoughtful voices made themselves heard, for the event had long been anticipated and was known to be attended by certain difficulties.

No one could deny, for example, that the remarkable height of the Tower, which was undoubtedly its most striking and brilliant achievement, was itself a cause for concern, since those who lived on the plain below couldn’t possibly climb to the top within the short space of a lifetime. Inhabitants of the city or the surrounding countryside could at best begin the upward journey, without the slightest hope of nearing the end. Otherwise they could do nothing but remain where they were and wait impatiently for news to reach them from above. Even those who had taken up residence in the Tower could in no way be assured of success — many were now too old for climbing, others lived too far from the top, while still others, though vigorous and within reach, had lost their early fervor and chose not to continue the arduous ascent. It was soon clear that only a small number of devout pilgrims were likely to arrive at the ultimate destination, in addition of course to the company of workers who had completed the final stages of the Tower and were in fact the first to enter the domain of heaven. But the workers were slaves, trained by masons to lay brick upon fire-baked brick on a coating of bitumen, and otherwise uneducated, superstitious, and unreliable. It came as no surprise that their reports were unsatisfactory, especially since their words were passed down from person to person, sometimes shouted at a distance or repeated by a half-drunk servant, and thus hardly more trustworthy than an outright lie. Those living on the plain heard of a brightness, a radiance, a luminous whiteness, but it wasn’t clear what the first visitors actually saw, if indeed they saw anything, although one report, greeted with a mixture of eagerness and distrust, spoke of streets paved with emeralds and gold.

Because the Tower had been the one great fact in everyone’s life during the immense period of its construction, the problem of ascent had been discussed almost from the beginning. When, after several generations, the Tower had reached a certain height, mathematical calculations proved that no one could climb even that far in the course of an entire lifetime. A number of families therefore came to a decision. They chose a son and his bride and instructed them to climb as far as possible into the inconceivably high yet still far from complete Tower, there to settle in one of the new chambers that had begun to be fashioned for townspeople with a taste for height. In their new quarters they were to bear children, who in turn would one day continue to ascend. In this way a family could climb the Tower in carefully regulated stages, generation after generation.

But this method of ascent led to a second problem, which hadn’t been anticipated. As dwellers in the plain climbed the Tower, their relation to the world below became less and less definite; after a certain point, a climber understood that he could no longer return to the plain during his lifetime. Such people, and there were many, found themselves neither on earth nor in heaven, but in some in-between realm, in which it was easy to feel deprived of the pleasures of both places. One solution to this problem was for people to remain in a comparatively low portion of the always rising Tower, too high to descend to the plain, but close enough to those below for tales of the plain to reach them within a reasonable stretch of time; meanwhile, from a much greater distance, reports of heaven could find their way down. The drawback of this solution was that the farther from the top a climber found himself, the less reliable the reports from above were likely to be. For this reason, many in-betweeners climbed as high as they could, in order to be closer to the upper reports, with the corresponding disadvantage of receiving from below reports that grew less trustworthy as the height increased.

Just as the problem of reaching the top of the Tower had led to a number of unforeseen difficulties and confusions, so a host of purely technical problems had arisen during the long labor of construction. The original plan had called for a spiral ramp running around the outside of the Tower, along which lines of workers could transport fire-baked bricks and buckets of bitumen. But at the height of a thousand feet — a height three times greater than any tower had ever attained — it became clear that the original calculations had failed to anticipate the actual strains on so vast a structure. It was therefore necessary to widen the base to nearly four times its original dimensions — a labor that caused the destruction of large sections of the city. And so a second Tower, as it were, grew up around the first, to the height of a thousand feet. At that point a single Tower continued to rise, but now containing an inner ramp that was the continuation of the original outer pathway. The Tower now had two circular paths, an inner and an outer, both of which were used by workers who, as the Tower rose higher, began to work inward from the outer ramp, and outward from the inner ramp, and who began to leave, along the inner ramp, small hollows used as storage and resting spaces.

As the Tower rose still higher, workers encountered another problem. How could they transport new bricks to the always rising top of the Tower? For already, even at this very early stage of construction, it took many days for the bricks to be moved from the kilns in the brickmakers’ workshops to the upper rim of the Tower, by means of solid-wheeled carts pulled by two men round and round the gently sloping ramps. The problem was solved by assigning special workers, called carriers, to levels separated by thousand-foot intervals. From each level the carriers moved bricks to the next carrier above, who brought them to the next carrier, and so on. The carriers, who of necessity became permanent dwellers in the Tower, enlarged the storage and resting spaces into primitive dwelling places, which later were elaborated into one of the Tower’s most striking features.

For once the carriers had begun to live in the Tower, bringing with them their wives and children, the notion of permanent residence began to take hold. Toward the end of the second generation, when the Tower was already so high that it disappeared into the brilliant blue sky, like a long pole thrust into deep water until the end trembles, shimmers, and vanishes entirely, the King of Shinar, renowned for his piety, ordered workers to prepare a court high in the clouds, where he intended to spend his remaining days in fasting and prayer. When the court was ready, the forty-year-old King left his palace, and in the company of his Queen, his sons, his diviners, his concubines, his courtiers, his menservants, and his musicians began the long climb up the inner ramp of the Tower; by the time he arrived in his new quarters he was an old man, his Queen long dead, his sons solemn with middle age, but he took up residence in the broad halls and richly appointed chambers that stretched away on both sides of the inner ramp.

News of the high court spread quickly. It soon became fashionable for merchant families and even skilled laborers to arrange for living quarters within the Tower, far above the roofs of the temples and the royal palace, higher than the smoke of sacrificial fires, higher, it was said, than the dreams of young women fetching water from wells on rich blue summer afternoons. In this manner the city on the plain was gradually drawn inside the great Tower. The Disappearance, as it was later called, came about in part because of the example of the pious King, but in part, too, because it was terribly oppressive for people to live at the foot of an enormous heaven-seeking Tower, which threw its shadow farther than a man could travel in a month and which, even at a distance, loomed like a raised arm about to strike a blow. Slowly the dwellings of the city were abandoned, the streets deserted, the gardens run to seed; the poor now gathered in ramshackle huts attached to the vast base of the Tower; after a time there was nothing left in the ruined city but wild sheep and lean oxen roaming the weed-grown streets, frogs in the wells, snakes and scorpions in the abandoned temples and dwelling places.

But no sooner had the Tower swallowed the city than a new desire arose, which no one could have foreseen. Even those who had thought long and hard about the Tower, in the days when the city flourished — the temple priests, the royal household, the administrative officials, the chief scribes — even they had failed to imagine one small but eventful change: a gradual loss of mystery and power, in the glorious structure that rose higher than the flight of eagles but that had come to seem, as the years passed, just a little familiar. The Tower had, after all, been in existence for as long as anyone could remember. Although it was growing higher, day by day, it was always the same size to those within it and even to those few who had remained in the surrounding countryside, for the work at the top took place in invisible regions far beyond the range of earthbound sight. At the same time, even among people who believed firmly that the Tower would one day reach heaven, the early expectation of a rapid and almost miraculous success had long been abandoned. It was therefore natural enough to feel that the rise toward heaven was, in a sense, part of the unchanging essence of the Tower, that the act of completion belonged to a different tower, a dream tower, a tower out of childhood stories, and was in any case an event so far in the future that it no longer had direct force in the lives of any but a handful of fanatical believers. There thus arose, in the hearts of the Tower dwellers, a nostalgia for the plain, for the shouts of the marketplace, the sunlight falling past the awnings onto heaps of apricots and figs, the sun and shade of the courtyards, the whitewashed temples, the outlying gardens shaded by date palms. And it came to pass that after a time many of the Tower dwellers began to descend and take up their old lives in the shadow of the Tower, rebuilding their ruined homes, planting their gardens outside the city walls, and gathering daily around the stalls in the market.

When, therefore, the Tower was completed, it contained a considerable population who lived on nearly every level, in chambers varying from primitive caves to rich halls painted with red, black, and lapis-blue hunting scenes, above a thriving city that had already forgotten its earlier abandonment and decay. The news of the successful completion led to a number of immediate changes. The city dwellers, who for their entire lives had scarcely given a thought to the perpetually unfinished Tower in their midst, suddenly stared up at a new, mysterious Tower, an unknown Tower, a Tower that had sprung out of the old one in a single, exhilarating leap. Tower-fever swept the populace. Helplessly caught up in the new upward-flowing excitement, people began the impossible climb, without any hope of reaching the top. Meanwhile those already living in the Tower were shaken by the news — some rushed to begin the final ascent, others, far below, drove themselves to climb higher, while still others, though remaining in their chambers for reasons of health or spiritual feebleness, kept raising their eyes nervously, as if their ceilings would burst, as they awaited word from returning travelers.

And the travelers returned. It was all a little puzzling to those who didn’t travel, and even to the travelers themselves. No one, to be sure, had spoken of remaining permanently in heaven, in the days of the rising Tower. But the vision of a new life in the upper world had always shone out as a promise, especially to families who had climbed higher in successive generations and were waiting for the news that heaven had at last been reached. Now the way was suddenly open, yet there proved to be little inclination for settlement. People rushed in, stayed for a few days, or a few years, and then returned, with the exception of a handful who disappeared and were said to have lost their way in those white, unmapped spaces. Of the many reasons for return, two made a deep impression on those who were waiting anxiously for news from above. First, when all was said and done, when experiences of every kind were taken into account and carefully considered, the upper realm was somehow not what anyone had been led to imagine. The many reports of a brightness, of a blinding radiance, while attractive in their way, tended to suggest an absence of objects, a lack of the visible and tangible, which however wondrous was also somewhat tiring. Even those who claimed to see angels and gates of sapphire and streets of gold, or those who, seeing nothing but brightness, were filled with unspeakable bliss, soon came to feel that heaven, in some indefinable but unmistakable way, was unsuitable for permanent residence by the living.

The second reason took many by surprise. Those who flung themselves headlong into heaven discovered that they still carried with them, however dimly, images of the life their forefathers had left behind, down there on the legendary plain. So in the hearts of even the most fervent pilgrims there existed a counterpressure, a tug downward, toward the half-remembered land, the place of origin.

Thus it came about, after the completion of the Tower, that there was movement in two directions, on the inner ramp that coiled about the heart of the structure: an upward movement of those who longed to reach the top, or to settle on a level that would permit their children or their children’s children to reach the top, and a downward movement of those who, after reaching the top, longed to descend toward the plain below, or who, after climbing partway, felt a sudden yearning for the familiar world.

But these two movements, which together constituted a vertical way of life, were offset by a third movement. Many inhabitants of the Tower who had taken up permanent residence in order to prepare for the ascent of the next generation were too old, or too tired, or too distracted by the life around them, to desire a change in either direction. And so, in addition to the upward and downward migrations, which took place along the inner ramp, there was a horizontal life that flourished in the many chambers that stretched away on both sides of the inner ramp on every level, to the center of the Tower in one direction and to the outer edge in the other. The horizontalists raised children, visited back and forth, and engaged in a communal life much like that of the city far below. Metalworkers, goldsmiths, leather workers, weavers, and reed workers set up workshops and did a thriving business. Communities of tenants established small gardens and sheep pens, to supplement deliveries of grain and fruit from the distant plain. Only sometimes, in the bustle of daily life, would a Tower dweller recall the fabled structure stretching high above, impossibly high, all the way to heaven, and grow quiet for a time.

Although the two ways of life, the vertical and horizontal, proceeded independently within the Tower, they intersected at the arched doorways of chambers directly bordering the inner ramp, where travelers passed up and down. After a while the borderers began to offer inexpensive meals to hungry travelers, who were tempted by the great tureens of soup and the loaves of unleavened bread baking in clay ovens to rest awhile on their upward or downward journeys. For an additional fee, posted on wooden signs, travelers could sleep beneath goat’s-hair blankets in chambers furnished with reed mats, wool rugs, or mattresses filled with straw. Sometimes a traveler, weary of the long journey, and yielding to the seductive peace of the chambers, chose to stay and become a member of the horizontal world; now and then a chamber dweller, stirred by the continual movement of travelers making their way to the top or descending toward the plain, joined the upward or downward flow. But in general the two ways of life opposed each other in equal measure, within the great Tower, as if the two lines of force were part of the system of architectural stresses crucial to the cohesion of the building.

Because of the extreme height of the Tower, which always disappeared from view and therefore was, for the most part, invisible, it was inevitable that rumors should arise concerning its permanence and strength. Cracks appeared in chamber walls, chunks of brightly colored glazed brick on the exterior wall broke off and fell onto the outer ramp, where they occasionally tumbled along and startled travelers, and in the high winds of the upper regions the Tower often swayed, causing ripples of panic among the inhabitants, while those who lived on the plain below, looking up, seemed to see, just beyond the limits of their sight, an entire world about to fall. Then teams of workers would swarm up along the outer ramp to repair the cracks, replace the damaged bricks, and strengthen broad sections of the Tower by propping the inner walls with powerful cedar beams that came from the mountains of Lebanon. On the plain below, an early system of soaring buttresses — a stupendous architectural feat in itself — was reinforced by a massive array of additional supports, which extended high over the streets, over the temples and the royal palace, the river and the marketplace, reaching beyond the fortified walls of the city, out into the distant countryside.

Meanwhile reports of heaven continued to sift down through the Tower, and reports of the plain drifted up, at times mingling and growing confused. People began to dream of climbing to the top of the Tower and entering a world of green fields and flocks of sheep, or descending to a land of blinding radiance. In this swirl of downward nostalgia and upward longing, a curious sect arose, deriding the delusions of climbers and proclaiming that heaven lay below — a wondrous place of twisting streets, marketplace stalls heaped with fruit, and two-story houses with wooden galleries running along inner courtyards. But this was only an extreme instance of the many common confusions of that time. Reports of heaven by actual visitors often seemed unconvincing or deceptive, while people who had never left the Tower began to add colorful touches and even to invent journeys of their own. For the tale-tellers, many of whom came to believe their own stories, heaven was always a sensual delight, a city whose great gates were covered with emeralds and sapphires, beryl and chrysoprase, topaz and jasper, while inside rose towers of silver and gold. The imaginary heaven proved far more compelling than the reported one, which was difficult to visualize and in any case had become half dream by the time it reached the lower regions of the Tower; and if the mixture of elaborations, inventions, distortions, and truths stirred in some a desire to see for themselves, in others it produced a tiredness, a spiritual heaviness, which led them to forgo the exertions of the vertical life and to rest content with the milder, more tangible pleasures of a horizontal existence.

It was about this time that the first rumors arose concerning deeper flaws in the Tower. The cracks, the pieces of fallen brick, even the swaying itself, were said to be common and superficial signs, true of every building, whereas the great Tower, which rose so fearfully high that it attained a different order of being, was subject to stresses and strains unknown to the architecture of the everyday world. There was talk of a hidden flaw, a continuous line or fracture running along the entire length of the Tower, somewhere on the inside; and although no one was able to point to the line itself, it was said that, if you listened closely, you could hear, deep inside the Tower, a faint sound like the creaking of many ships in the harbor beyond the marketplace.

What had the dwellers in the plain expected of heaven? Some had hoped to penetrate a mystery, others to outwit death — as if, by appearing bodily in heaven, they would no longer be required to die — still others to take part in a grand adventure, some to be reunited with those who had been buried in the earth, others to feel happiness after a life of hardship and sorrow. If heaven did not directly disappoint every expectation, it was also somehow not what most people had looked forward to, during the generations of hope. What could they make of that white radiance? One difficulty, debated at length by the temple priests, was that the heaven witnessed by travelers was not necessarily the true heaven, which some insisted was inapprehensible by the senses and could be known solely by the spirit unencumbered by the body. According to this argument, even those pilgrims who saw shining towers and heard choruses of unearthly music were deceived by organs of sense that could not but distort the experience of a nonterrestrial and immaterial place.

In the midst of such discussions, it was perhaps not surprising that the Tower itself should be called into question. Troubling whispers began to be heard. Was it possible that the great Tower didn’t actually exist? After all, no one had ever seen the entire structure, which kept vanishing from sight no matter where you stood. Except for a handful of visible bricks, the whole thing was little more than a collection of rumors, longings, dreams, and travelers’ tales. It was less than a memory. The Tower was a prodigious absence, a soaring void, a pit dug upward into the air. It was as if each part of the visible Tower had begun to dissolve under the vast pressure of the invisible parts, operating in every direction.

A time soon came when all those who had been alive during the completion of the Tower passed into the enigma of death, leaving behind a new generation, who had never known a world without the perfected Tower. The other Tower — the striving Tower, the always rising and changing and ungraspable Tower — retreated into the realm of hearsay, of legend. Now the new Tower was the stuff of daily life: an immobile Tower, rigid with completion. Though not without splendor, it lacked the sharp mystery of unachieved things. Even the ascent to heaven no longer seemed remarkable, though travelers still returned with tales of a dazzling radiance. As for the descent to earth, it had become little more than a humdrum journey, a change of residence such as many inhabitants of the Tower undertook from time to time.

And a listlessness came over the Tower dwellers, a languor of spirit, punctuated by bursts of excitement that quickly died away. People began to say that things had been better in the old days, before the Tower had brought heaven within reach. For in those days, they said, the dwellers in the plain lived in a continual state of joyful anticipation, of radiant hope, as they stared up at the Tower that grew higher and higher in the bright blue welcoming sky.

But now a shadow seemed to have fallen across that sky — or perhaps it was a shadow across the heart, darkening the sight. People began to turn elsewhere for the pleasures of the unknown and the unseen. It was a time of omens, of dire prophesies, of feverish schemes that led to nothing. Passions swept through souls and ravaged them like diseases. A mother strangled her child when a man with wings whispered in her ear. A young man, declaring he had learned the secret of flight, leaped to his death from the outer ramp. One day a group of plains dwellers suddenly decided to escape from the Tower, which they said crushed them by its heavy presence. With tents and walking staffs they traveled across the countryside and out into the desert. Months from home, wandering exhausted in a strange land where cattle had horns twisted in spirals, where stones had the gift of speech, they looked up and saw the far Tower, rising forever into the sky like a howl of laughter.

Others, rejecting flight as useless, argued that a new work was necessary, an all-consuming task as great as the Tower itself. In this way arose the idea of a second Tower — a reverse Tower, pointing downward, toward the infernal regions. People were struck with astonishment. How could they have failed to think of it before? The land of no return, the abode of death: the mere idea of it filled them with strange, delicious shudders. Everyone suddenly longed to wander in the domain of darkness, beneath the earth, where dim figures brushed past with haunted eyes. A wealthy woman in a high chamber held an Underworld party, to which guests came dressed as dark phantoms and pale corpses. Dim oil lamps cast a gloomy half-light. One young woman, of high beauty and mournful eyes, wore only her own flesh, as a symbol of all that passes away. Meanwhile an architect and three assistants drew up the plans of a new Tower; a committee gave its approval; teams of laborers began digging inside the base of the old Tower. They had gone down nearly two hundred feet before interest began to waver, excitement turned elsewhere, the project was abandoned forever.

In this atmosphere of weariness and restlessness, of sudden yearnings that collapsed into torpor, the Tower itself was often neglected. Here and there old cracks reappeared in the bricks of a chamber wall, the inner ramp was riddled with hollows, glazed bricks on the exterior wall lost their luster and were severely damaged by wind and rain. Piles of rubble rose on the outer ramp. The workers, whose task it was to maintain the Tower, seemed to move slowly and heavily, as if the atmosphere around them had thickened; sometimes they sat down and leaned their heads back against the wall, closing their eyes. A rumor arose: the workers had all died, only their sad ghosts drifted along the spiral paths. In the innermost chambers, the Tower dwellers often felt drowsy and would nod abruptly into sleep, like children falling into a well. Later they would wake suddenly, looking about with startled eyes. Down below, in the city, a young girl dreamed that she was pouring water from a jar. As she poured, the water turned to blood. Inside the Tower, the sound of creaking ships grew louder.

One afternoon a boy playing in a street beside a whitewashed wall looked up at the Tower and did not move. Suddenly he began to run. In another part of the city, a woman drawing water from a well raised her eyes. The handle spun round and round as the bucket plunged. High up in the Tower a pilgrim on the inner ramp reached out a hand to steady himself against a wall. On a table in a high chamber, a bowl of figs began to slide. Down below, on one of the buttresses, a row of sparrows rose into the air with beating wings, like the sound of a shaken rug. A wine cup rolled along the floor, smacked into a wall. A wagon, beside a sack of grain, fell through the air. Far away, a shepherd looked up from his flock. He bent his head back, shading his eyes.