Bellows (part four)

(Click here for part one.)

(Click here for part two.)

(Click here for part three.)

Of course, every happy city is unique, and every city built to be so, doubly so. Meaning there's always challenges to be overcome; certainly our biggest was the presence of so much poverty in our future riverbed. Then there were the dogs. We'd intended for our wealthy to be cat people, but no. I blame geopolitics. When one of our leaders labelled our enemies as "sleeping cats we could ill-afford to allow to lie idly, dreaming up new ways to scratch and claw at the bare legs of freedom and free thinking," it was inevitable that a fashionable sheen would descend upon dogs the likes of which they haven't enjoyed in decades. What nobody could expect was so much such laxity in the way the wealthy treated their pets. A wild dog is one more ready to fight for what it holds dear, true. But. One day, an unparalleled city, the next, the shock of seeing dogs running free over the bridges and up and down the streets of an increasingly awkward-smelling, slippery downtown. Dogs on the elevators, dogs in the coffee rooms, dogs perched on shop counters, howling at the moon and begging for handouts from every Tom, Dick, and Lilly looking to purchase one consumable good or another. Fast action was required. We recruited a fair number of men from the slums to act as dog catchers and clerks at the county kennels, and I admit we were caught with our pants around our ankles and our hands on each others' backs with regards to the readiness of our street cleaning crew, a gap that was filled swiftly and efficiently though it should never have needed to have been so. Only so many jobs could be created and filled this way. Synergistic problems needn't void each other. If anything, they can elevate a mutual amplification--the suicide rate rose as the working-class poor told tales to the poor-class poor of the foods the rich ate and the games they played, the painful brightness at the core of downtown, like a star on earth you could enter, light so white you could taste it like skyfire. It was beautiful, they would say to one another, hovering near their stoves for warmth, drawing their rags and cloths around their shoulders. We shall never never achieve this, will we? Our gray stone will never shine no glimmer, our hopes will perish inches from fulfillment? Death, dread, and dearth.

Yet! Bellowsville has always been a happy place. City architects have access to tools by which they can judge the prosperity of their creations. One is rarely able to visit one's creation first-hand; work never ends, of course, and though I haven't initiated any new projects since the Bellowsville River began to flow, administration is perpetual, and I consult for firms I've kept friendly relations with, I give inspiring speeches to university graduates and political conventions, I mentor the young. So many students of city planning, I feel, show so much promise for the future of our craft. My mother instilled in me early an unavoidable concern for the welfare and ideals of those who come next, inextricably linking my success in life to the joy my departed father feels in his ethereal heart when he cast his all-seeing gaze my way; where would he have ever been without her, she'd asked? My life is no answer. But it keeps me busy. All the same. And, yet, all the same, through the speaking and consulting and training circuit, as it has kept me on the road from weekend to weekend, I have still always found the opportunity to read the e-mails the citizens of Bellowsville sent to each other every day, to check their Internet usage statistics and their spending habits, to review the film they shoot of each other when their guard is most down, to pry open the spreadsheets that collect the details of what they do and, hence, who they are, and, by and large, through it all, as the preparations for the river were made and the lake was filled with water and cleaned and scrubbed and as the fish were placed, ready to swim and breed and make sense of all of this to the people who needed sense to keep them going, the people were happy, pleased, underproductive, true, but content. Such is success. The city was doing well. My job was one well done.