In the alternate hours—unkept by any clock, but recognized by meat and marrow and the thump-thump-surge of blood in arteries—the Alternate City exerts itself. It is an X: an independent variable. An unknown value. Descartes, in his Géométrie might have recognized this urban phenomenon. The atemporal, alternate city is a function of geometry: it is—as some may say—an anti shape, a shifting, shifted, and shifty x emblazoned on all of the maps of reality. Phantoms live here, though they may call themselves by other names. In the alternate hours, always dark and always unkept by any clock, he stirs from nocturnal ennui, dresses in what ways the weather may dictate, and descends three flights of creaking stairs punctuated by the two solid thumps of doors closing behind him. The first thump is always the closure of his apartment. The second is always the harder, heavier, harsher sound of reinforced wood: a normal door, but in alternate hours, he may leave it and step—for a while, at least—into the other city. And always—stirred from nocturnal ennui—he walks with cigarettes in his pocket, the absence of thoughts crowded into the space behind his eyes, and speaker-buds snuggled in the hollows of his ears. Though it may seem that he listens to the idle distractions of music, the ear-buds are silent: their umbilical wire carries nothing from the unpowered iPod nestled in his pocket. It is never music of mundane pedigree that he hopes to hear. It is, instead, the alternate city itself. The iPod is useless in its un-alternate city design, but in the unkept hours in the shifted city, it functions in accordance to other needs. There are whispers beneath the slap-slap sound of sandals on aged, gritty concrete. The alternate city is a dusty place, a grimy place, where the dandruff flakes of his own reality has blown through open doors, and settled here, to stir fitfully at his passage, to wedge itself in shoe-treads, or in the sweat-spaces between city-grimed toes, allowed moments of breath in cheap, durable sandals. He ignores the grit, the grim, and the sound of his own footsteps. He listens, instead, to what comes through his ear-buds. The un-powered iPod sends him city sounds. Though his eyes are not accustomed to the frequencies of light here, his little electronic music-maker can pick up city-sounds, translate them into something his ears may register. Now, he walks through deserted streets that are alive with the sounds of conversation and traffic, the Doppler-shift of droning diesel engines going this way and night-time party-hounds angling toward night-clubs, bars, or house parties in the gentrified ramshackle of trendy neighborhoods. There are others like him here: fellow travelers who have learned how to feel the alternate hours. They’ve learned, as well, how to walk into the alternate city, where only the body of the city may be seen, but not its citizens. He is a ghost here, as invisible to the citizens as they are to him. He is a phantom, though he surely has another name for himself, for what he is, and he makes a game of listening to native voices and—occasion—reaching out and touching an unseen, unseeable body. It is thrilling to reach out and touch invisible flesh, realizing that it is he who goes unseen. A ghost. A phantom. A figment of the local imagination. But now, he touches no one. He simply walks, listening to people he cannot see, hearing lives he cannot lead; he finds peace in such actions, and peace is everything that the alternate city at alternate hours means to him. * There might be a full story somewhere in this fragment; in looking at the 6, 7, and 8 layer overlays I’ve created over time, I've come to recognize a single place...I hope to write about it. Soon. Sort of. But not today. As always, thank you for viewing, reading, and commenting, and I hope you’re all having a great week/end.