The Nameless City (working title)
an excerpt

The increased noise of cars was instantly noticeable, as there were four lanes there instead of two, and instead of an endless train of apartment buildings, Martin saw that shops were scattered liberally about. There were still apartments, but most of these rose high over the shops that took up the ground floors, and there were several buildings that appeared to have multiple shops stacked on top of each other, such as the first floor grocery with second floor bookstore with third floor diner that he saw on the corner.

What impressed him most, however, was the color of it all. Neon signs and store trims shone their dazzling insistence into the street, where their reflections dissipated and returned again through the movements of the rain. The reds of car brake lights coalesced and shattered into images that entrenched themselves in his dark corners, images like slow sex in front of hearth fires, bloody pools of broken hearts, and port wine kissed from the surface of a lover’s lips. These whispered to him, saying that of all places built on this earth, here he was truly home.

The city was covered in the dark hand of cloud, rain, and deepening evening, but it was somehow unique to itself, lovely and innocent in its natural state. This wasn’t the half-grey, washed out sort of darkening you got when things were cloudy and it chanced to rain, nor was it the kind of darkening you got when night draped its lacy veil over a city to gift a sensual kiss goodnight. It was beautifully and brilliantly between the two. Instead of washing things out by letting too much brightness filter in, or covering everything so vastly that the city lights were forced to paint the world in the extremities of their contrast, this darkening was a rich tapestry of mystery and the potential that dwelt in its pulse. The wet sheets came over the whole of the place, turning purples into the half-blood color of royal robes, blues into deep things that spoke of turquoise-tinged sapphires hidden below in the earth, greens that ripened from baby thoughts to the leafy theses of lost forest wisdom.

He stared at it as though closing his eyes would reveal it all to be a tattered dream, and this wasn’t far from how he felt, for even the eternal soul of his awe would suddenly fade into a pedestrian brevity, into something more mundane, as he continued to look on. Memories were now darting back to him, now jolting away in quick spasms, now swimming alongside him in the tempestuous ocean of his heart, and he knew that no matter how foreign these things seemed to him in his present attitude, they were already long in and of him. His amnesiac dilemma couldn’t possibly last forever under the weight of these reminiscences, and he allowed himself the chance to hope. He had remembered who he was and had begun to acclimate himself to the thought of his job; how much longer could it be before the realities of L and Rose were released back into his care from whatever temporary prisons they had been confined to?