Urban Planning: Case Study Number Four

by Tim Horvath

The life of an urban planner is at once both more and less exotic than it might appear.

Raedmeon is a city built by a committee, riding in on slow, lumbering beasts of burden, and Weston a Committee Man if ever there was one. Among his secret joys is the way the dry cleaner folds and boxes his shirts, the new-map sensation of the creases cascading over his shoulders and chest each morning. He likes that he knows what the competing interests in the room are at any given moment: Camilla Barber's predictable cooing about "sustainability," Martinez's operatic enthusiasm for x, y, or z, swelling with his Adam's apple in the hour before lunch, then retreating into an afternoon of spent indifference.

Each night, the ancient elevator hoists Weston up to the sparse apartment where he finds himself amidst light and shadows, a furnace that talks him through the night in Hephaestian tongues.

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