‘The King of Strangers sits on the floor and believes that the earth is his throne. He shakes his legs, so restless is the King that his home travels under him. Leader of trailer parks and mobile homes, of sun-bleached beer cans and abandoned mailboxes, the man will not suffer sleeves or shorts. The man will not suffer.’
-excerpt, Unattributed Writings on the King of Strangers
I am pulled across a makeshift bridge, set precariously between broken windows 26 stories above the earth, by men with buzzcuts and carpenter-style jeans. I am taken into the shifting building, now settled, and into an elevator that moves upward in jerks and twinges as though powered by men (it is). I am pulled out of the elevator and cast out into an open space.
The floor is curiously dark, the ceiling curiously high. As I find my bearings, I see that the ceiling above me, and many ceilings above that, have been torn away to create an amphitheater of ruined offices. A man dangles his legs from a floor high above me, backlit and silhouetted. He looks forward, through the tall glass and out over the city of strangers.
The man gestures and the building begins to move again, sliding noisily between its neighbors. Engines rumble below. The man turns his head to me and I feel the gray, commercial carpeting curl uncomfortably below my palms.
The floor is not dark- I am in his shadow.
“What brings you to my city, traveler?”
I try to think of a believable lie before realizing I don’t actually know the truth.
“Somebody wrote about it,” I tell him, “In a travel guide.”
People begin to mutter, strangers that I hadn’t noticed, standing on the floors between he and I. The building jolts and an office chair rolls out from behind the King of Strangers. It falls several stories and shatters at my feet. I stand and take a step back before tripping on a ledge. Upon closer inspection, it’s the edge of the man’s shadow, which seems to sink several inches below the lit floor.
“Just a week before this, one of my men was looking for a traveler without a shadow,” he says.
“I have a shadow!” I tell him, and I wave my arm, hoping that the counterfeit is paying attention. It remains motionless and then, as though snapping to attention, it raises the wrong arm.
The King of Strangers gestures again, his shadow bringing its massive hand to the dark wriggling arm behind me. It plucks the limb from my shadow and darkness spills from its body, leaking into the carpet. My shadow shivers and tries to crawl away but the Black Tailor’s stitches hold it in place.
The King of Strangers continues:
“My man was the shell of himself, weighed down by a past that wasn’t his own. I offered that he stay here, in my city, but he refused. He left in the night, afraid that he might subject us to the thing that walks the path behind him.”
“He brought that on himself,” I say. My shadow has curled into a ball, its crooked limbs pointing inward like a dead spider. I resist an urge to do the same.
“He admitted as much, himself.”
“Why are these building on tracks?” I ask, trying to gain some sort of footing in the conversation.
“The city was built on a chessboard and my men and I are playing the machine. It draws power from our moves in order to make its own. We ride in the white queen, toward an unsuspecting pawn.”
A squat building stands in the tracks, five blocks down.
“What happens when we reach it?”
“Disaster,” the King says, “It takes months to clean up a lost piece.”
“Why play?”
“To win,” he says, “To see if there is a prize.”
“If there isn’t?”
The King ignores me and we creep closer to the little store in our path. It’s a pawn shop- the rich mastermind behind this place had a sense of humor.
“What are you going to do with me?” I ask.
The King says nothing, and then he says: “Everything has an end, from the individual to the cosmic. There is a path-”
“A path you burn.”
“A path we widen,” he says, “A path we create. Do you think the forest provides trails to its campers? There have always been men that go ahead, to cut back trees and stomp out the ground, to make sure that no animal too wild crosses paths with a person too unwitting. There would be no path without the strangers, there would be a beginning, an end, and a great horrible expanse between them. When we finish the game, we will know if this city is our end. I think you know, already, that it is yours.”
The strangers take hold of me, again. We leave the building to its slow collision course and drive to another, where I am locked away with my dying shadow to await the return of the Stranger I know.
I escape in the night, breaking one of the seven remaining pieces of Alice’s coffin in the lock. Four days pass in the City of Strangers before I’m able to retrieve my bag. The shadow drags behind me, warped and deflated, leaving a splattered trail of darkness that I fear will out me, but the strangers give up the hunt quickly and return to their game.
On the fifth day, just hours before I locate the bike, I hear the jingle of a belt buckle and feel my hair stand on end. The Stranger I know has arrived with the thing that haunts him. I write in the darkness, in the blood of my new shadow, a message only I would understand. I address it to my worst self.
I tell it where I’m going and I prepare for a long ride.
-traveler
