Photo by Evelyn Hofer
In Middle City, in the month of March, at two in the afternoon- the very moment the sun, doing not its normal thing, shifting shape like a self-conscious cloud under the penetrating gaze of a cloud-gazer to end up being like a water clogged baguette half bitten, hid half its illumined face behind an extremely large building shaped itself unlike a usual extremely large building and more like a cancerous comet, elliptical and deformed, the light, filtering still from the half of it that remained peeking out, casting itself in mediocre glory on The Troup, who ventured into the city in parade format atop regal camels and whose front rider carried the special thing in a glass box adorned with emeralds and rubies, to turn them a pale gold- The Chin arrived.
No-one was sure why The Chin was being ferried into their midst so extravagantly but everyone gathered to watch The Troup, who were making their way to where no one knew, march on to the unknown place absolutely no one was not feverishly excited for them to arrive at, quite a few of the gatherers visibly salivating and chomping at the bits at the reality of The Chin being so close to their proximity despite knowledge of its existence having only thrusted itself in their heads upon its crossing of city lines. The Troup placed The Chin within its adorned box in a single story wooden workshop that had been unused but preserved since the industrial era, atop a metal anvil a hole in the roof shone a beam of something brighter than sunlight at day or night, cloudy or no, as if The Chin was a magnet attracting the brighter thing through waves of impermanence and by-gone eras, The Troup then fading into the background to let things be and get on with real world logistics like finding where to stable all several hundred of their camels.
The Chin sat still on the metal plinth and, like how a dice rolled will sometimes land on six two rolls out of two, did what a faceless chin will do when left alone in a box on an anvil one time out of a thousand and began to flex itself before the immediate presence of a city resident who had the face of someone whose consciousness was caged like a malnourished mouse and who breathed hoggishly on the glass box while asking if their partner was really hula hooping under the expressway every Friday night or if that was a lie and were they instead doing other, possibly sexual, things under there. The Chin got on with doing what it did, flexing silently and still, somehow through all that flexing revealing something to the asker who skipped out in a manner simultaneously angry and relieved, another resident immediately appearing to do their own thing, the thing that the residents did before The Chin changing with each individual because no one in Middle City could agree just what The Chin did in return.
Some said it was a fortune teller who revealed to them the future, past, and present of their or their beloveds or friends lives, who told them the answers to important questions like what? why? how? And who?, others that it was a truth teller only, able to describe and dissect the whole truth and nothing but of whatever they asked, it also being said that it was neither of those and that it was beautiful and nothing else and that, drawing on the knowledge of its past that had appeared in all their minds post its arrival, it had been admired in most prominent cities of the world at one time or another- a statistic nearly everyone agreed on coming out that it had been admired in cities like Paris twice, Brazil thrice, Cairo six times, Madrid four times, New York eight times, Berlin once, Oxford once, and London at least, AT LEAST, twelve times- and Middle City was being honoured and greatly advanced above its status to even be chosen to host a thing so alluring and sexy and delightful that it made whoever looked at it never want to look away, it just not being discussed that it also made it so that if the lookers went against their wants absolutely everything not The Chin looked strange and grotesque, the very fabric of their realities seeming to flutter and curve and adjust without ever reverting back quite to what it had been.
What The Chin looked like couldn’t be decided on either, everyone having their own ideas, descriptions being tossed like hopeful frisbees out with no one waiting to catch them; dimpled or cleated, square or round, hard or soft, friendly or suspicious, wealthy or poor, worldly or sheltered, canned or fresh, hot or cold, creamy or dry, freckled or moled, brown or white, purple or silver, green or blue, yellow or red, black or pink, alcoholic or psychedelic, sane or psychotic, groovy or straight, uptight or loose, prone to dancing or prone to singing, coffee or tea, confident or meek, relaxed or uptight, happy or sad, angry or forgiving, strong or weak, ponderous or unthinking, preserved or decayed, tired or energised, more like a table or more like a chair, it was all up in the air.
The Troup who’d ferried The Chin in and then faded into the background didn’t stand around in the background waiting to protect it once in, they left it be to be in on its own terms and were to be seen strolling or spending around the city, living their lives as if their lives when with The Chin was all work and the moments they managed to be estranged were all the down time they got and so you better believe they were going to walk and sit in coffee shops and eat croissants and pain au chocolates and plates of expensive eggs, all of which had been far nicer, they were heard whispering, loudly enough that surely they were only pretending to whisper, in other cities more renowned for their coffee, croissants, pain au chocolates and plates of expensive eggs. Besides, The Troup had no need to protect The Chin on its anvil, no one ever dared touch the glass box it was contained in and even if they had they would have found the end of their touching motivation an unsatisfactory one, the box not really being glass but some other transparent solid piece of matter, one that couldn’t be broken through by hands or feet or will of mind but only by something yet to be discovered in any of the conscious, cosmic, or spiritual worlds and that had only been guessed at in the unconscious world of the worm, and, besides all that even more, it wasn’t just that no one dared, it was also that no one wanted to, as it was enough to just see The Chin as it was, receiving what their person personally received from a visit to it.
There was none of the clamour or fuss that usually would pervade a mass line composed of a city full of people wanting to see the something they wanted to see not sometime but NOW because there never was a mass line to see The Chin, not once, not ever, never, the workshop it was housed in, despite always having quite a few people walking up to it in a relatively orderly fashion, each patient but ready for their turn, swallowing each one upon their turn, those people disappearing at the entrance like they were not just entering a door but actually vanishing into a space not of the physical but the metaphysical, a space where time was up and down, where twenty minutes could be a split second and where a split second could be a year, each one then appearing just as instantly in another part of the city, breathless and excited and run down and angry and sad and aroused and all the other emotions that a truth teller, fortune teller, Helen of troy like beauty, and several of the other things people ascribed to The Chin as it was, could cause them to feel. Animals sometimes, and no one could tell what was purposeful and what was simple animal wanderings, wandered into the doorway of the workshop, vanishing to never appear again, as if they enjoyed the metaphysical space The Chin provided so much that the normal, physical space, they’d come from was just too depressing for them to ever want to return too, as if the space they wanted to stay in was a space where running wasn’t tiring and the sky was sometimes ultra-violet and where, and this is just guesswork, sometimes a sheep would lap at a cheek like the cheek was a four mile track and the sheep a trainee marathon runner.
So it was that animals began to vanish from Middle City, the wild dogs and cats of street corners and market stalls, gone, not replaced, but very forgotten, the only animals to remain completely being the pigeons of the parks and buildings, those grey and purple and green things lingering to watch the toing and froing of the city folk whose own chins began to be not their usual colours but red and purple and sore all over because all were attempting, with the softest sculpting possible, to rub their own chin into whatever the form The Chin took on for them, the pigeons watching them so intensely it wouldn’t have been beyond possibility that they cared, their eyes, beady as a bead of sweat dripping down a volcanologist’s visor clad forehead, gazing as if those gazes were tales that signified something when, really, they signified nothing, nothing and nowt.
The cities that The Chin had been in before- resting, with the smugness of an aristocratic crawfish whose daddy loved it, in some of the most famous and admired museums, cemeteries, galleries, hotels, squares, restaurants, barber shops, salons, delis, and cosmetic surgeries around- had all prospered tenfold during and after its stay, like how the words of a great poet or the songs of a great songer or the buildings of a great builder rise up the simple settlements and culture their origins decree they call home, The Chin rose up whatever multiplicity it resided in to heights previously untold, the city livers in those cities, after visiting it, largely going on to do great things, splendid things, artistic and inventive things that then pushed their cities to venture down the sad slope of progress. So where was the slope for Middle City?, where was the prosepration?, where were the great ideas in the visitors of The Chin?, they seemed missing in action, the people of Middle City after visiting The Chin receiving only what they went in wanting to receive and nothing more, no extra toppings being sprinkled onto their lives, no nice sweet bits to sweeten them or the city, which, if anything, seemed to get greyer even, darker, the concrete walls and floors getting so much more concrete it was too much and the hardness of them became brittle and began cracking at the slightest touch, the steps of children forming great cracks that stretched from Lozells all the way to University station, thin cracks at first, hairline cracks that simply receded the ground from where it had once sat like the youthful hairline of an inbred and wealthy man, but ones that eventually became almost chasmous.
The other cities The Chin had been in had things to show for it- Paris, the Eiffel tower, London, St Pauls, Hamburg, the Reeperbahn, Amsterdam, its circular architecture once described as comparable to the rings of hell, Glasgow, the murals of Alasdair Gray, York, the castles and yesteryears of sorcerous times, and so on and so forth- but Middle City got nothing to show for The Chin’s presence other than a cracking of the ground and a loss of animals, the people seeming to withdraw rather than flourish, to suck themselves into themselves like they were dying of thirst and themselves were bottomless and well sprung wells, the people only knowing, only noticing, one concrete thing outside of themselves to have changed in the lives they lived, or that lived them, that being that The Chin was there and always available for viewing. It didn’t matter what it looked like or what it was doing or what it could do for the one watching it, it was there and available for the people of Middle City to look at, free of charge, the greatest public service there was, akin to handing out heroin to all the herons interested in such bountiful things, and so they took their medicine as all good people should because they had ailments- deep seated ones, emotional ones, physical ones, all sorts of ones- and they wanted those ailments soothed and improved.
For a long old while, The Chin remained as it was, and the people frequenting it remained as they were, and all the cities that it’d been in before frolicked and stayed just as improved as they’d been before, and then, without anyone really noticing, something became slightly different, the every-dove-needs-some-love combined flapping of the pigeons who stayed, the population of the animals having increased greatly due to lack of competition, creating a force akin to a widowed whirlwind, created a perpetual breeze in the city that sped along streets with the light whistling of a nonchalant nun but ruffled a distinctly smaller than expected amount of hairs, a distinct lack of life slowly permeating the fabric and fibres of the city’s tapestry. The people still went to their jobs, still ate their foods, still drank and smoked and did other people style stuff, but there was a dead-eyedness to their doing that either hadn’t been there before or at least hadn’t been noticeable, their minds being not on the chins here, there, and everywhere around them and attached to their family and friends, but only on The Chin whenever they weren’t with it.
The pigeon population, which had already become five times the human one, grew and grew until they got to be so many that several open areas and spaces in the city had to be avoided by the public because, and who would have thought this, pigeons turned out to be very territorial in large numbers and began to peck whoever walked through and around the spaces they’d claimed, peck right into their skin and bones until those skin and bones recoiled, the avoidance continuing until the time came when, like a clock whose hands were in a race with each other, nobody had the slightest bit of time to give further thought to avoiding pigeon pecks because their bodies began, one by one, to copy all the animals not of the common aviary type. The people entering the space where The Chin resided, standing in the doorway and disappearing with nary a pop to signal their disappearance, just as they’d done ever since The Chin’s arrival, except, not like they’d done since its arrival, they’d then not reappear and would instead stay in that space, whether by choice or by force was unknown, their own chins lost in the space of the place. Like supply and demand, as the population of Middle City dwindled, the interest in visiting The Chin somehow grew, the people into it becoming more so, it becoming more like it was theirs alone and not shared with the masses and, whereas before visits to The Chin had been exclusively one on one visits- the conjugal details of which never to be discussed in explicit detail- they then began to include other people so it was that wives and husbands and lovers and friends and everyone your mind could set itself too as having ones close enough to them to drag, dragged their people down to The Chin and subjected them to questioning of the severe type before what was then seen as a higher power, possible answers and possible lies and possible nonsense being taken as gospel answers or gospel lies or gospel nonsense and revealed to all those listening until those listening began to listen no more because they were either embracing or punching or turning away from all that’d been revealed.
Like a cup with a small hole in the bottom, Middle City dripped towards empty, and as it dripped, all of everything within it began to drip into a meaningless void, a space conducted by strings and a mad man puppeteer, its residences beginning to be not so much residences but mere structures where once residence had taken place and its offices acting like giraffes, great hulking monstrosities that loomed head and shoulders and a cut above the rest to take bites from the architectural tree of the sky above, vehicles lining nearly every road, all those cars that drivers had once taken Oedipus-like pride in keeping clean and serene and gleaming and straight on the narrow, becoming crooked and dull and chaotic in their lining, sticking out into the roads at angles like the set of a dystopian future film. Pavements emptied as the gaps between one wandering soul and the next got larger, as if they all were on a great conveyor belt with individual speeds set at incompatible paces, there always seeming to be someone around and heading right in same direction but remaining always untouchable, distant, a great migration of people streaming like the wind towards the place they were always heading, the workshop where it resided, The Chin- yes, lord, yes! Take me now Lord!- which was waiting, with the batedness only a breathless chin could, always for them.
The slow drip of the time it took for the herd to travel to The Chin didn’t work in conjunction to the time it took for the individual to disappear, the disappearances being mooted and discussed all around, conversations happening between the ones walking, shouting ahead and behind, about what was going to happen to them upon their arrival, feet clapping off concrete floors, voices echoing off lonely statues and making it so there was quite a hubbub around the dwindling city, their knowledge of their disappearances not making them not want to visit The Chin, it, in fact, increased their desire to experience just what it was The Chin wanted to subject them too, curiosity raging like a caught cat in their chests as they marched, a disorganised band of soldiers heading straight for the shots with smiles upon their lips.
The Troup that had carried in The Chin, having abandoned their leisure when the people’s disappearances started, were almost motionless as the migration went on, sitting on plush chairs placed in sporadic places on roads no car drove down- the chairs all identical, dark brown wood making up their backs and legs and seat, a vibrant red cushion having been placed atop the seat to perch just below their troopish behinds, a troopish behind, made the way it was by frequent camel riding, being firm and muscular, almost feline, and so strangely inflexible and not in any way accustomed for firm in return wooden seated chairs- their faces held by their right hands as the people passed them by. Their faces were cold as they sat and held, because why wouldn’t a face be cold after lifetimes of ferrying a chin around?, and they did nothing to stop the people from going to their vanishing, their sitting and passive watching like that of watchmen watching an empty street, with attentive boredom that suggested they would make perfectly sure the street would stay empty until the end of their shift inevitably came, the only thing they did to break the monotony being a coin flip every hour on the dot, all of them, simultaneously, flicking strange looking coins not seeming to be made for spending up and down the same amount of times as the hour it was so that within the hubbub of all the people cheerfully discussing their disappearance, if one pricked their ear just high up enough, they could hear the soft PING of nail on coin action signalling the time.
If one had looked down at the city during that final dwindling time, surveying the migration towards the workshop from the position of a birds eye, the mass of the remaining people walking resembled the ligament-less spine of a giant, the individual bones drifting like feet-in-splits apart and remaining, mostly, in their shape only by force of will until, as it inevitably had too despite the slowness of it all, that ligament-less spine began to shrink and contract rather than stretch, the ones venturing to be disappeared lessening as the population ran themselves out, the mouth of the workshop from the bird’s eye view appearing as a deep dark horizontal hole that everyone was throwing themselves into, a hole with no bottom, an endless hole so endless that falling was the norm and if you stopped falling not falling would feel like falling had before, destined to never to be filled.
The pigeons gathered en mass to watch the last person in Middle City disappear- the person in question believing it was a holy object, the sacrificed chin of a deity, and that all who looked at it enough would become deity’s themselves, and so they were dressed in simple holy robes, grey and tattered and hanging to the floor in preparation for their own holiness to enter them, stepping into the temporal time of The Chin with complete faith in what they believed- and the sheer quantity of them made it so they were like a moving blanket of grey and purple covering the cold-not-at-all nearby buildings and benches and walls, covering too the gathered Troop who didn’t move as they landed. A stray feather lying on the ground nearby to the doorway of the workshop lay just as still as a grandfather clock missing its grandfather as the last of the city’s populace went away and, for the brief second following the vanishing, absolutely everything was as still as that, as still as a statue stuck in ice and waiting to be thawed, as still as the eyelash blown far from the eye it’d been a part of all its life and trapped, trapped, trapped, under a solid stone, never to be seen again, that brief second of stillness being the briefest of the brief and the movement that followed lasting a whole while more, The Troup, discarding their chairs, letting them fall away behind them, walking themselves into the workshop and, with no fanfare, lifting The Chin again, carrying it out of there and, with a whistle to summon the camels from the stables they’d been housed, then out of the city, a parade again with no music besides hoofbeat until they got to the city borders and a very real music began a rump-pump-pumping, a broad blast leading them with its notes in the direction of the next city to receive the honour of The Chin, the sound of them fading away from Middle City, their presence fading too, the place their noise and presence had taken up being filled in as if with childish hands not wanting to ever stay within the lines by the blanket fluttering around, cooing the night away.