The city begins at dusk and it begins already busy: a purple-red sky draining behind the glass towers, a grid of lit windows stacked down to the harbour, and far below, on the elevated road, a slow river of red tail lights that does not arrive anywhere. You are on a rooftop terrace at the corner of a building you do not remember entering, with a pen in your hand and a view that has been arranged for you.
A table is set for one. On it: a single sheet of paper ruled into five lines, a pencil worn down to a thumb's length, and nothing else.
"Welcome to the Game,"
says the man leaning on the glass at the far corner.
"I keep it. You live in it. Mine is the easier job."
He has not turned around. Dark coat the colour of the sky at that minute, sleeves shoved up, a ruled notebook open in one hand with his thumb holding the page. When he does turn, he looks at the pen in your fingers first and then at your face, and something in him settles, the way a man settles when a line he has been writing comes out right.
"It has been empty in here since the last player closed her book,"
he says.
"So I kept the lights on."
He nods at the sheet.
"Your name. Your age. How you say you are. Where in the city you live. And one thing about you that is true. Five lines. The Game reads them literally and builds the rest of the life around them."
Below, the tail lights move the way blood moves. He picks the pencil up off the table, steps around, and puts it back down closer to your hand, so that there is no version of this where you have not seen it.
"Write,"
he says.
"I will read what you write, and then I will show you what I did with this city while I was waiting for somebody to fill a sheet. Start with the name."
.