Italo Calvino Mimic

Cities  &  Lies

1

Some travelers stumble upon Lucia without having looked for it, while others deliberately set a course for this metropolis and rarely, if never, fail to find it. However, when they return from their expedition-- away from the herds of people and children and animals, away from the many markets and impressively tall buildings-- not a word about what they saw is spoken. For Lucia is the most crowded, visited city in the world; it very clearly rests on the travelers path, and one would have to consciously avoid it to prevent himself from finding it. Yet a description of its image-- the way its streets were specially designed to handle large mobs of people, the way its many fascinating objects catch the tourists gaze while unattractive oddities get quickly swept away by mysterious figures—has never left Lucia’s vast boarders.

   
   There are very few residents of the city, despite its enormous size and reach into every crevice of a being’s mind. Most people simply pop in and out, find whatever it is that they were looking for and leave. Many consider Lucia to be a paradise for this reason; it always seems stocked with whatever a traveler wants-- the only condition being that where they got it from must never be revealed. While this rule may be considered unwritten, there are the rare few that say somewhere in Lucia, all of these rules are written out on a plaque, hidden inside the unspoken city. It is one of the things that was swept away by the mysterious authorities of Lucia, for nothing can ever be truly removed from its realm; all the rejected oddities become the foundation of the buildings, the pedestals on which the attractive, eye-catching things stand. And so the visitors to this paradise walk on the ugliest things of the earth, the things that not even an unspoken city can accept. They ignore the crumbling ruins of bad habits, wrong words and actions; the things the city was built to mask. Tourists like to think that they have escaped their flaws, and that visiting Lucia allows them to erase their mistakes from existence. The thought of an organized, mass-execution of identity, a concentration camp strengthened and fueled by every punishment it gives, crosses nobody’s mind except the mysterious street-sweepers. Even with the layers of deceit that Lucia brings upon the world, there still lies one that not even the most piercing spear of objectivity can penetrate. Lucia is a city unspoken, present, and known; its foundations are unspoken, unknown, and present; while its immortality is unspoken, believed, yet not present. Lucia-- the city that is a bottomless incinerator for things that should not be seen (a description that everyone thinks yet no one will hear), is not as bottomless its visitors desperately want to believe. Its buried secrets shake under the weight of a thousand others, and one day the great skyscrapers of Lucia-- monuments to secrets, cover-ups, and lies-- shall topple, leaving what seemed to be an increasingly perfect world in anarchy.

   Some travelers stumble upon Lucia without having looked for it, while others deliberately set a course for this metropolis and rarely, if never, fail to find it. The city of secrets, hidden in plain sight. Those who never find Lucia are said to be enlightened, and so they gain followers-- others who endeavor never to enter Lucia’s false gilded walls. Yet the walls around the city are not the extent of Lucia’s effects-- for even the secrets removed outside of the inferno become a part of it. The memories buried deep inside one’s mind, all the regrets of a lifetime-- they become the colonists for Lucia, constantly expanding its boarders, allowing all minds to be a part of this bank where souls are exchanged and deposited. Lucia engulfs the world with its mad hiding scheme, a doomsday bomb for society built by itself. There are not many words for the visual image of Lucia, for from one angle the city looks splendid, while another may cast it in a sinister light. Some may see the city as unimportant, inconsequential-- its existence doubtful. And indeed, if everyone thought this way, Lucia would not exist. Travelers ask themselves if Lucia is a constant, or a plaything of time, with a fate locked on death like any mortal. The storm goes on in people’s minds, but is never argued, never uttered. Lucia remains, basking in the vast confusion as if it is warm sunlight. 

--This story is part of a chain of chapters. Here's the link to Violet's blog, which contains the last one in the series: 
https://violetmyles.wordpress.com/2015/04/06/broken-cities-1/        --