The City: A Novel
Dean Koontz
Hold every moment sacred. Give each clarity and meaning, each the weight of thine awareness, each its true and due fulfillment.
—Thomas Mann, The Beloved Returns
Prelude
Malcolm gives me a tape recorder.
He says, “You’ve got to talk your life.”
“I’d rather live the now than talk about the was.”
Malcolm says, “Not all of it. Just the … you know.”
“I’m to talk about the you know?”
Malcolm says, “People need to hear it.”
“What people?”
Malcolm says, “Everybody. These are sad times.”
“I can’t change the times.”
Malcolm says, “It’s a sad world. Lift it a little.”
“You want me to leave out all the dark stuff?”
Malcolm says, “No, man. You need the dark stuff.”
“Oh, I don’t need it. Not me.”
Malcolm says, “The dark makes the light stuff brighter.”
“So when I’m done talking about the you know—then what?”
Malcolm says, “You make it a book.”
“You going to read this book?”
Malcolm says, “Mostly. Parts of it I wouldn’t be able to see clear enough to read.”
“What if I read those parts to you?”
Malcolm says, “If you’re able to see the words, I’d listen.”
“By then I’ll be able. Talking it the first time is what will kill me.”
1
My name is Jonah Ellington Basie Hines Eldridge Wilson Hampton Armstrong Kirk. From as young as I can remember, I loved the city. Mine is a story of love reciprocated. It is the story of loss and hope, and of the strangeness that lies just beneath the surface tension of daily life, a strangeness infinite fathoms in depth.
The streets of the city weren’t paved with gold, as some immigrants were told before they traveled half the world to come there. Not all the young singers or actors, or authors, became stars soon after leaving their small towns for the bright lights, as perhaps they thought they would. Death dwelt in the metropolis, as it dwelt everywhere, and there were more murders there than in a quiet hamlet, much tragedy, and moments of terror. But the city was as well a place of wonder, of magic dark and light, magic of which in my eventful life I had much experience, including one night when I died and woke and lived again.
2
When I was eight, I would meet the woman who claimed she was the city, though she wouldn’t make that assertion for two more years. She said that more than anything, cities are people. Sure, you need to have the office buildings and the parks and the nightclubs and the museums and all the rest of it, but in the end it’s the people—and the kind of people they are—who make a city great or not. And if a city is great, it has a soul of its own, one spun up from the threads of the millions of souls who have lived there in the past and live there now.
The woman said this city had an especially sensitive soul and that for a long time it had wondered what life must be like for the people who lived in it. The city worried that in spite of all it had to offer its citizens, it might be failing too many of them. The city knew itself better than any person could know himself, knew all of its sights and smells and sounds and textures and secrets, but it didn’t know what it felt like to be human and live in those thousands of miles of streets. And so, the woman said, the soul of the city took human form to live among its people, and the form it took was her.
The woman who was the city changed my life and showed me that the world is a more mysterious place than you would imagine if your understanding of it was formed only or even largely by newspapers and magazines and TV—or now the Internet. I need to tell you about her and some terrible things and wonderful things and amazing things that happened, related to her, and how I am still haunted by them.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. I tend to do that. Any life isn’t just one story; it’s thousands of them. So when I try to tell one of my own, I sometimes go down an alleyway when I should take the main street, or if the story is fourteen blocks long, I sometimes start on block four and have to backtrack to make sense.