You never know whom you might meet in the city. In a small town, you’re less likely to encounter people or things or situations you haven’t encountered previously. These people or things or situations may be wonderful or horrible, in either city or town, but cities have the numbers, the turnover. To a writer of fiction, this is extremely handy, a city being able, more or less believably, to mask excessive coincidence, producing, as Doyle taught me, whatever the narrative might require.
Should the populous mechanism of the fictive city fail to produce phenomena of sufficient weirdness, our literature of the fantastic often turns, quite reflexively, to dead cities, our most profoundly and mysteriously haunted artifacts.
Many deserted cities probably never were engines of choice. To stand in the vast plaza of the pre-Columbian Monte Albán, for instance, is to know that Monte Albán was about decreasing choice, narrowing it. Monte Albán was a control machine, an acoustically perfect environment with magnificent lines of sight: a theater of power. We don’t know why Monte Albán was as abruptly deserted as it may have been. Perhaps the show failed, finally, to come off, and no other was available, or possible, within that inflexible, uni-purposed structure.
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