I should tell you the truth. That “he” was me, and the morning ruptures kept arriving until the ordinary had no place left to hide. I woke into them like a swimmer reaching air. A small gasp, a faint ringing, then the room opened and the lanterns made their quiet weather around me.
Downtown called in the afternoons when the sun came through like cheap cymbals. I carried a canvas bag of tags cut from rinsed cans and a Sharpie that bled through my thumb. I walked from the Seaholm stacks toward the Central Library, past the steel letters that spell out nothing in particular, past the butterfly bridge and the tourists with the rented scooters. The wind off the lake smelled like a key turned in a lock. I had the feeling that if I looked up too fast I would catch some force in the act of arranging the clouds.
We had begun to mark each lantern with a number, a sigil, and a special link. The tag was a thin rectangle of aluminum, a hole punched in one end, a stamp with its number, and a short link hand-lettered, the L leaning like a person waiting for a bus. Anyone could hold up a phone and fall into that lantern’s personal corridor. A story lived there, and the story kept growing the way roots find a seam in concrete. I wrote them late at night. Some were a paragraph. Some kept me up until I followed them into whatever dawn wanted. This one you are reading belongs to a lantern too. If you found it, then you already touched the tag, you heard it click inside you.
Lantern 037 hung in my window that faced Shoal Creek like a minor star refusing to move. Listening Vessel. The basil inside continued to bloom without permission. If I struck an E on the keyboard it answered from somewhere in the paper ribs. Not a sound exactly, more like the suggestion of a note the way a river suggests a road to a fish. I had a small recording rig I built from old bicycle lights and a solar charger, and I took it with me when I went to walk the city. Music for the roots, still my working title, and it kept turning into music for my own head, which was fine.
At Republic Square a woman with a tired dog asked if I was selling the lanterns. I said not yet, or yes, but it is a different kind of selling. I said each one had a story and the story was the price and the story was also the change you get back. She nodded as if that were a normal thing to say. She scanned the tag on 119, which at that time did not exist except as a drawn circle in my notebook. Then she told me she used to read at the Paramount on Tuesdays when they let people practice onstage. Her dog leaned on my shin and I thought about switching all the lanterns to a softer wire.
On Congress, under the Driskill’s shadow, I met a man who knew every downtown oak by the sound of its leaves when a bus went past. He said he had tried to stop drinking by learning the city in a new way, one sense at a time. He showed me where the wind from the hotel’s ducts made a perfect draft against the back wall of a cupcake place, a place no one would notice unless their shirt lifted as they walked by. We hung 044 there for a day. Its link led to twelve sentences about forgiveness that I do not remember writing and that still make me uneasy when I read them.
By evening I would be circling back toward the library, that ship of glass, and the water on the steps where kids race the scooters like small sacrificial boats. The sky went over to pink and the bats began to push themselves out from the bridge, thin as dark lace. I had the sense again of the city changing its mind about me, and then changing it back.
We want a thousand, I kept saying, like a vow you practice into shape. A thousand lanterns, each one with a story you can walk into, each story with a thread that leads back to the plant that keeps breathing whether you watch it or not. This is not marketing. It is not a scavenger hunt. It is a way to hold the world still for a second so you can see the curve of it, and then set it in motion again. We will wire them inside paper moons. We will coax pothos and sweet potato vine and basil to swing their wet green cursive inside the light. We will number them and stamp them and give them links that open like a mouth about to speak.
Later, at Waterloo Park, the sky gone that shade of blue where you believe almost anything, I sat with 037 and listened. The hum came and went. In the reflection on my phone I could see my own face inside the circle of the lantern, and inside that, the words of this story scrolling like minnows. I thought, if there is a heaven, it will be a city that remembers your name by the way you breathe. I thought, if there is no heaven, this will do.
We are stitching the place together. You can follow the trail of tags from Seaholm to the Second Street shops, up to the Paramount’s cooling bricks, across Congress where the buses sigh, along the creek where a shopping cart sleeps, and back past the library into the dark. Each tag holds the link, each link opens a room. This chapter, this little filament, is tied to a lantern among them. Somewhere out there it swings, counting time in its own language, waiting for you to look up. When you do, it will look back. And if you listen close, it will hum.