City of Roses is a serialized epic firmly set in Portland, Oregon: a wicked concoction of urban pastoral and incantatory fantastic, where a grocers’ warehouse might become a palace, and an antique bank is hidden beneath a department store.
Sorcerers have always held the anomalous position, at the edge of the fields or woods. They haunt the fringes. They are at the borderline of the village, or between villages. The important thing is their affinity with alliance, with the pact, which gives them a status opposed to that of filiation. The relation with the anomalous is one of alliance. The sorcerer has a relation of alliance with the demon as the power of the anomalous.
Recently, I went to see a Rothko exhibit with my friend Adam. We were in Paris, and the city was gray and cold. On my way to the Fondation Louis Vuitton, I walked through a wooded area. I looked up, and there were pine trees. For a few moments, I couldn’t walk because I was so flattened by the sight of these enormous trees. They were bare of needles. The scaly bark was an ashen purple. The branches were dark as they spread out over the milky veil of the sky. I used to run through pine forests with my cousins. The pine tree is an indelible image of my childhood. But something about seeing them there, when I least expected it, thousands of a miles away from the pine trees of my youth, the trees which had been cut down to pay for booze and which would never be replaced, all this time and distance away from those lost trees, to have encountered them in Paris, my life so radically transformed, startled me.
Happy Labor Day! Today is for me the fourth of a four-day weekend, so I feel I’m doing the holiday justice—though I have been engaged more than usual in the work of self-promotion over the course of it, which is in itself laborious. Ah, well. Let’s get to it:
Her name was Opal. She didn’t become a friend. She was more like a rival. She had flour to the elbow like long white gloves and she clicked that stud while she waited for me to get to the end of a sentence I was in no hurry to get to the end of, because the ordering was the point and the pizza was a formality. “The Pig Kahuna.” Back bacon, thin pineapple, red onion, chopped cilantro, hot honey. I told her how I wanted it built and she built it, layer by layer, with the flat, unhurried patience of a woman dealing cards she knows you can’t afford. The hot honey came last, always last, and she held the bottle at a height that made a thin line of it and I watched the line and she watched me watch it. There are women who will make your food exactly how you asked, and there are women who will make you watch. I ate the slice standing up. I did not taste it once that entire year.
“Closed,” he calls, at the jingle of the bell, but he looks up to see her shutting the door on this side of it, so very small in a long tan coat, her wooly scruff of greyed hair loose, uncovered, leaning on the curled handle of an orthopædic cane, and slung from a shoulder a big brown scaley purse. “Young man,” she says, her voice incongruously large, and deep, “could you tell me if Gordon is available?”
“We’re closed, ma’am,” he says, there by the work table. “Just hadn’t managed to lock up yet.”
“Let him know H.D. is here.”
“I’m afraid he isn’t. I’ll let him know you were by.”
“He hasn’t been, for a couple weeks now, has he.” She’s looking about at all the shoes mounded to one side, lined up the other. “What was your name, young man?”
“Christian Beaumont, ma’am.”
“Well, I am Ms. H.D. Brown, of the Albina Community Bank. You are familiar with the work of the Albina Community Bank?” He shrugs noncommittally, head down, making his way from the counter between the shoes toward her, past her, to the door. “I have found it, from time to time,” she’s saying, “to be of some benefit to consult with Gordon when something untoward occurs. I must say, today, it would seem the most unusual and unsettling occurrence is that I come to find my old and good friend isn’t here, in this shop he’s kept for I couldn’t tell you how long.”
He’s turning about the sign against the glass from CLOSED to OPEN, he’s reaching for the handle of the door, “I’ll be sure to tell him you’re looking for him.” The bell jingles as he swings it wide, but she’s rooted to her cleared patch of floor, leaned on that sturdy cane. “How about yourself, young man?” she says. “Noticed any unusual occurrences, these last few days?”
“Very enjoyable bit of urban fantasy kit—”
“…a flicker of sharp impressionistic scenes skittering atop a deeply imagined alternate present.”
“Who else could cause an LLM to hallucinate Emma Goldman, John Berryman, and an Irish sea god?”
