It’s easier than ever to enter this city, this station, this stopover; everyone off — and they all have their maps still handydandy with Selected Retail Outlets writ large. There are separate marked gates, each reserved for each and every kind of ingress or egress, rest assured; abandon all hope, but not humor: there’s a Low Gate, for the penitent; here, the entrant or extant must stoop to enter and exit, if exit’s ever allowed…a process of humility, this purely indifferent deference, a making of modest if not an abject denigration; then, there’s a High Gate that’s the source of much controversy; two opposing interpretations obtain: the High Gate is for a pompous entrance, many hold, with hubris, intended for the use of the visiting clergy and for the accommodation of guest Heads of State; alternately, a few say, the High Gate is for the exclusive use of the awed, the obeisant and penitent, and here amid this modesty many have found an unseemly double of the Low Gate, though various mapmachers have agreed that the humility of the High Gate is a stranger, possibly holier, humility than that of the Low: this High Gate is so high; okay, everyone, How high is it…? disappearing into a cloudbank, that an entrant appears almost insignificant in comparison, is made to feel so, is made so. There’s a Wide Gate for a willful entrance, that’s for the young, and the healthy. There’s a Narrow Gate, which is for the intestate dead, who’ll never leave either: here, the entrant must squeeze past the others, with all the others at once (how it’s really no narrower than the Wide, only that more than one person may pass through at any one time), their arms held in, head to chest, must bow through the opening, soulthin, stepping down upon heads, the olden pave of each other’s sick skin.
And then there’s the Tourist Gate, which is incredibly low and high, incredibly narrow and incredibly wide all at once, whatever you want, we aim to please. Next to it, a bocher’s selling postcards imprinted with the likenesses of their parents’ parents’ parents unknown; there’s an older woman in a formless shift, skinned over tightly with one of her own products, she’s hocking tshirts, emblazoned with the slogans and logos of earlier regimes, acronyms who even remembers their alphabets, what’s that say, what’s that mean; there’s a crockery dealer, the tshirt saleswoman’s small, fat husband whose face has a hundred noses, all but one of them buboes: as for him, he’s selling the porcelain of their kin generations dead, commemorative plates, spoons from longemptied, raided, Kitschen cabinets; you better believe their stalls have all the relevant permits, notarized twice. A gaggle of Guides loiter there on the other side of the Tourist Gate, holding umbrellas though the weather’s not yet been scheduled. Sh, the storm’s not until Thursday. What’s your Friday look like. One of them waves to her Group, walks over to them, meet & greet. All the Guides are required to speak at least three languages and have at least three names, or it’s that they all share the same in three languages. Then there’s the language they talk amongst themselves, that and the language of money. Don’t make the mistake of pitying them — they’re all on enormous retainers.
An itinerary schedules the unveiling of monuments to the past — a past none of these entrants ever lived.
Doesn’t matter.
This Tour Group comprises old friends by now, from the aeroport, acquaintances from the plane, and even before: old homes; who sold who a house, a condo, a car whether used or previously owned, who knew who from this Lodge, that fraternity with the handshake to prove, who fixed what in whose houses, who worked in whose office with whom, who was a volunteer for what cause, and then those two what’re their names we met at which benefit for what do you call it…here, though, they only nod, grumble, shuffled exhausted, smalltalked to silence, out of their territory, out of their depth. Here, at the Tourist Gate, they stop, at the line marked a shock of white across the stones; they nod again, shuffle with their papers some more.
An inscription above the Gate’s been inscribed twelve times over again the last who can tell how many centuries, roughly the same words though each time in a different language, until the words took on new spellings, newer meanings, newer words, until even the intent, the message, was inevitably altered.
To what.
