Most of the city’s underground—that’s how hot it’s gotten up there—great descending galleries, complex, reinforced earthen walls, the temperature a steady fifty-five degrees— apartments tiered four levels down, the underground river bisecting the city, lit blue or yellow or green to denote neighborhoods, help drunken passengers on the ferry find their way home. Up there any trees left have been taken by fungus, and no mere rainstorms come anymore—just torrent, unsettled soil, foundations of shorter buildings shifting— and the taller ones leaning forward, as if peering down, as if expecting to glean some meaning from seeing old couples walking quietly, obdurate in nostalgia, on their above- ground evening passagiato, the men’s hands clasped behind their backs, the women a few paces behind, as if the path they trace—a script cryptic, enigmatic—would one day, by dint of repetition, translate itself into sense—a ratcheting backward into the old dimly- remembered dream of verticality, cool stone, temperate breeze. You impute more to buildings than is there, you say, but I say that it can’t be said that buildings have no intelligence. Memories of the old life above ground are fading, so at night they auction stories here, and the rich send their representatives to bid for them. Therefore the cellars of the rich are lined with stories, some of them my own. I don’t mean stories I’ve invented or read; I mean stories of things that happened to me up there, things I’ve told out loud—the fistfight with the man slapping the prostitute on the boulevard, the drowned dog eddying in yellow light, the first time I ran for my life. I never had the sense that these were “mine,” exactly. All stories, once told, belong to all of us. But in the buying of them, the storing of them, I do feel that part of me is lost, and in fact all of us, when we try to tell our auctioned tales again, stumble on the words, cannot keep the thread. Friends of mine often leave their homes late at night, cross neighborhoods, blue to yellow to green, find the fine houses where their stories live, then pace in front of those houses, bright light flaring from windows like hyperbole. It’s as if merely being near their stories can coax them back, but I tell them it doesn’t work that way. The common ones remain locked in the cellars, the sexy ones in the vaults, and the ones heavy with irony go to the poorly-lit libraries. It is my belief that our auctioned stories speak to each other at night and are changed, exaggerated in a kind of desperation at their captivity. There’s a story I want to tell called “The Bastard and the Bishop,” and it is partly about me—but if I tell it, diaphragm its sad breath into the air, and if one night, many years from now, at a fancy dinner party you hear a story called “Ten Bastards and an Archbishop at Eighty-five Degrees,” say my theory is right, won’t you? And remember me, think of me: I was the first of the former bishop’s bastards.