But the dead come from the walls, warmed all day by the filtered light of this drowned city. If they were really dead, they’d rise from their graves, but they aren’t really dead. They never were. Delicate Phoenician wives and Moro children who look more like us than we’ll ever admit. They feed the dirty cats and kick pigeons. They bring coffee to your blind aunt and she thinks it’s you. They are unmistakable from everyone else. * * * Sometimes I see others like me. Walking through their private layers or stoking themselves up to head to a train station or plaza, any sort of crowd. I see them waiting in a group inside an empty hotel. Their faces are sky with clouds moving across. I ask them what they’re doing, but no one can tell me. I don’t know if they’re lost, too, or if it’s only me. It’s a different city for each of us. Some are in pain and some are frightened and some are followed. Not everything here is abandoned or broken, some places are so full of life it sucks you in.
