Distrust That Particular Flavor

Terminal City

I’VE NEVER HAD quite this difficult a time before, trying to think of something to say at the front of a book. I’ve had a box of prints of Greg Girard’s photographs here for entirely too long now, and every time I open it, and start looking through them, it’s as though my head falls off.

I’ve never seen anything like them. I have, though, imagined things not unlike what they depict, though never at anything like this resolution. In my novel Neuromancer, when the protagonists visit a decrepit surviving fragment of lower Manhattan, hemmed in by my sketchy description of Bigger, Globally Corporate Things, I had something like these photographs in mind.

But really, every time I open the box and look at them, they shut me up. Lump in throat.

Liminal. Images at the threshold. Of the threshold. The dividing line. Something slicing across accretions of cultural memory like Buñuel’s razor.

Documents of the Gone World, captured, one thinks, the Tuesday before it went entirely. Something so aching. The record of something which we know, instinctively, shouldn’t happen. They really shouldn’t do this, but…

Erasure. And look what they’ve erased. Wiped clean. Catch this last (and in my case, first) glimpse. Adios. “One little whoops and a push.” Gone, then.

And beyond the shattered matchstick fields of progress arise these shoals of cheap-ass concrete thunderheads, these arc-lit mesas apparently designed to emulate downmarket Japanese consumer electronics.

At the time of this writing, I freely confess, I know little more about Shanghai than these images. They came upon me, as it were, in the night, unexpectedly.

I know, and knew instantly, that I will never forget them.

I had long treasured Ian Lambot and Greg Girard’s City of Darkness, but in its case I had already seen other, and as it happened quite splendid, photographs of Hak Nam, and knew that that place, that near-infinitely interstitial universe or black hole, was indeed Gone.

Phantom Shanghai is the actual vanishing, the hideous twenty-first-century urban hat-trick itself. I think of the line of dawn rushing through desert, causing stones to explode. It is almost more than I can bear to contemplate, though the images themselves are so gorgeous, so extraordinary, that of course I look and look.

These images truly are, in that particular coinage of J. G. Ballard’s, terminal documents. One might compare them to Robert Polidori’s images of Pripyat and Chernobyl, except that what Girard reveals is so much more possibly the fate of so many places, hence so much more terrible.

I go back to the box, look again, and again am struck silent.

“Pictures or it didn’t happen,” they say on the Internet.

One of Greg Girard’s pictures is worth some ridiculously high number of my words. If you want to have an unforgettable experience, find this book and see why I was rendered basically speechless.

“Terminal City” was some rail magnate’s early suggestion for naming Vancouver. It’s a very lazy title for this introduction. I wish I’d thought of something better.