After some time wandering, you eventually come to Checagou, but it is not the city that other traveler’s have told you about. The reason for this is that every twenty years the city is rebuilt. What was once a chicken yard is now the hollow and metallic spine of an unfinished skyscraper. What was once a crack in a brick wall is now a smiling salesman. What was once a funeral parlor is now a tattoo parlor and flesh that was once grieved now behaves like a carnival.  So, if some traveler had told you that you should visit an elegant park or an admired musician, you might find an empty parking lot or a stage set with mannequins and actors instead. At every turn, the city that once was is now refashioned, manufactured, and generated into something else entirely, as if the mystifying drawings of an architect or the imaginings of a sleepwalker have suddenly taken form. Upon entering Checagou, you will find men and women at its gates who make their livelihoods as tour guides, but you should be wary of them. They only offer lost memories.

Of course, there are a few hundred workers who spend nearly their entire lives drifting and buzzing through the outer and inner workings of the city. They dress like cadmium bees and search for new ways to improve the city’s metabolism and refashion its logic and design and art. The entire process takes nineteen years. When they are ready to rebuild, they hire thousands of financers, bricklayers, welders, and poets, who understand the passing of time and the inception of new generations, which is another way of saying that they are also mothers and fathers. Only this select group of workers can unravel the layers of the old city, the concrete labyrinths, the fiber-optic nerves, the effigies, the shadows which blanket the streets like vast flower petals. And once they do, they then can begin the repetition of creation, which, give or take a few days, takes the entirety of a year.

And so, you can see quite easily that the citizens of Checagou get lost in memory more than anybody from most any other city. They stand in parks or on corners in small groups and debate the true memory of the city: the howl of a train, a flush pink skyline, a single firecracker at night, a child in an alley laughing, an endless party, a streak of soot, an electric blues guitar on a shelf, a thuggish winter, a candied summer, a celestial rooftop, a geometry problem written on the sidewalk like a poem. All the things that have already come to pass. The city’s tour guides, peddlers of lost memory, repeat these debates for weary and callow travelers.

And ultimately, what is the rhyme and reason for all of this rebuilding and amnesia. It can only be this. I remember coming to Checagou and finding a man by the lake who was telling onlookers that you can’t predict human behavior and that if you tried people would just do the opposite of any given prediction, if only to prove it wrong. He said that this demonstrated that human nature was erratic and mercurial, and that any great city should follow suit. So, I’m sure that the citizens of Checagou listen to this man by the lake as a blueprint or even a muse for their own mad and forgetful conduct.

Photo by Flickr user wvallen