[This story first appeared in the anthology Stories from Home, edited by Hayleigh Barclay and Sylvia Hehir (Garmoran Publishing, 2020). All proceeds from the anthology go to The Ambulance Staff Charity in recognition of their frontline work in the Covid-19 epidemic in the UK. Please consider buying our book if you can afford it!]
I can see you’ve heard of Atlantis by the way your head sinks between your shoulder-blades as you gaze fearfully skywards, hurrying about your daily business. Atlantis, the city of the perfect prisms, the cubes, the pyramids, the pinnacles and the lamplight, Atlantis whose streets were paved with gold, I know because I swept them. You imagine Atlantis obliterated by some sudden catastrophe, a tidal wave, an atom bomb, but it wasn’t like that at all. Little by little the city subsided, unnoticed by any but we and the fishes.
I think I noticed the course things took because I swept that course, so the citizens could take it without impediment. I took a pride in my work, to ensure that the cobblestones gleamed perfectly hemispherical in the rays of the rising sun. Several hours before dawn (a dawn scraped clean by giant wind-machines affixed to the tips of pinnacles, whence the term ‘skyscraper’) I rose from my doorstep and strapped a pair of shovel-shoes about my calves. Then I trundled the litter-sucker from its shed and proceeded to polish, scrub and scour until by sun-up the street would have blinded any downlooker with cleanliness. But the citizens never looked down. The citizens’ heads were sunk between their shoulder-blades as they gazed fearfully skywards, hurrying about their daily business. They feared some sudden catastrophe, a tidal wave, an atom bomb; the convergence of parallel lines caused by perspective was another of their nameless dreads. That was why the streets were short, and Atlantis was a city without vistas.
But the truth is that Atlantis was less pure and abstract than the citizens thought. There were accumulations of rapidly-growing weeds at street corners, and so much mud that I would have perished of exhaustion had I swept more than two or three streets nightly.
Then there were the People of the Road and the Hyperactive Children who slept in dustbins and under bridges. These watched the sinking of the city from the broken upper-floor windows of derelict buildings, as they had watched the hurrying citizens every day of their lives. We were creatures of another element, dirt-encrusted, shock-headed, with strident laughs that grazed the civil ear. The citizens were silver-skinned inhabitants of ethereal zones beyond our ken. We envied the tintinnabulation of their voices.
When the city began to sink I found it increasingly difficult to have the streets presentable by sunrise. I started work earlier and earlier till soon I was quite nocturnal in my habits, apart from those golden moments when the first golden rays of the sun’s benediction poured over the golden city. Each night more mud and then water clogged my litter-sucker. Rivulets in the gutters reflected the lamplight at odd angles. And the smell! I had never smelt anything so sickly, like a distillation from the decomposing flesh of a million corpses. I obtained a suction-pump from the Corporation and diverted gallons of evil-smelling liquid into the sewers, but the sewers only spewed it out again through grills and gratings. The Hyperactive Children splashed hither and thither with buckets, but there was nowhere to throw the water except in each other’s faces. The Corporation promised to send a plumber, the week after next.
My efforts at sanitation grew more and more desultory, until one morning I woke with a shock on my doorstep with a wavelet slapping my cheek. I was terrified that the Corporation would blame me for the spreading wetness and dismiss me from my post forthwith. But the citizens’ heads remained wedged between their shoulder-blades as they waded about their business gazing at the sky. They feared some sudden catastrophe, a deviation from the planet’s path, a comet; water did not enter their calculations.
That morning I moved my sleeping-quarters to the upper floor of a derelict building, whence I watched as carnivorous sea-creatures took to battening on the citizens. Not a day went by without some submarine marvel. When the water was a few centimetres deep a swarm of many-coloured eels came twisting and twining over the cobblestones in amorous play. Majestic hermit-crabs took up residence in boots and baskets. A crocodile set up house in an empty kennel, from which it sallied forth to dine on citizens’ legs. With commendable determination the citizens ignored these assaults; newspapers reported record sales of crutches.
When the flood was waist-deep I attempted to warn the citizens of their plight. That I stood on a soap-box to do so was not to give greater dignity to my utterances but to avoid the jaws of crocodiles. Small wonder if the passers-by ignored my supplications, for the appearance I presented was not prepossessing. I wear my hair at shoulder length entwined with bottle-tops and empty sardine tins, my eyes are vast and vermilion-veined, my shovel-shoes disgusting. The only tears my orations drew were my own.
Meanwhile the inundation augmented. Each afternoon I watched an old woman rise from her weed-matted bed and don a crayfish instead of her hat. One lunchtime I observed a group of three businessmen in conversation at the centre of a public square. An immense purple-spotted octopus approached them, extending its tentacles. One of the businessmen ran away screaming (I later learned he had narrowly evaded a conger eel in his kitchen sink the night before); his companions attributed his discomposure to marital problems. Their last muffled words as they were drawn towards the octopus’s beak made reference to the severity of the divorce laws.
Buses broke down, the failure of whose engines was attributed to anything but diesel-dilution. A rumour spread that some foreign plot was at work, which accounted for the missing persons and failed machinery. The police made extensive inquiries.
My new apartment became crowded, first by Hyperactive Children, then by People of the Road (who paddled dustbins and umbrellas to the broken bathroom window), and finally by the businessman with marital problems. Meanwhile I grew to love the salt sea-stench, and experienced as the waters rose a corresponding elevation of the spirits. Perhaps this was caused by the rainbow-striped whelks which encrusted the city’s prisms and pinnacles, perhaps by the angel-fish that spread wispy tails to cast shadows across the golden cobblestones. Perhaps it was due to the moonshine that licked the ripples on the surface of the flood now the lamps were quenched. In the past we were forbidden moonshine, for the motions of the moon are asymmetrical. Now she revealed new lights and shades in buildings previously familiar in all their permutations. The pinnacles lay propped against the velvet night like cardboard cutouts which would fall flat at a gentle touch. Albatrosses hung in the dying breath of the wind-machines.
Soon Atlantis was almost empty of citizens. Even we, the earthy ones in our derelict blocks and forgotten attics, felt our superfluity. For some nights we had been aware that the metropolis was shifting in its sleep, twitching and flexing its muscles at the point of waking. Soon, we felt, our paths must diverge from that of the city.
The Hyperactive Children spent their days diving from rooftops, balconies and flagpoles while the People of the Road kept watch for sharks. I too accustomed myself to a maritime existence, often diving to depths unrivalled by the Persian pearl-fisher. I had resumed my old occupation of cleansing the streets, this time from the debris of half-eaten accountants, undigested politicians and bone-dry lawyers. I discovered that a few of the dead businessmen still rose at seven each morning, trod their parallel lines to the office and worked till five in the afternoon. I suspect they had been dead for several years before the deluge. Tormented by the possibility that they might walk thus for ever, I ended their careers by breaking their alarm clocks.
The morning of our last day in Atlantis dawned clear and cloudless, despite the failure of the wind-machines. I mentioned earlier that the buildings looked almost two-dimensional at night; this morning they were flatter than ever, and in some districts had lain themselves down in overlapping rows, forming patterns underwater like a golden carpet.
At midday a school of porpoises entered the city, each with a brilliant sapphire nose, and gambolled in the shadow of our habitation. Occasionally they rose on their tails upright from the water and watched us with a gaze quite different from the skyward gaze of the citizens. We survivors looked at each other, then with one accord plunged into the rocking billows, arms outstretched to grasp the proffered fins. When every Atlantean had straddled a porpoise, with a flick of their tails the school shot out of the city and into the open ocean. I turned for a last look at Atlantis.
Just as I had been the first to notice the encroachment of the sea, so was I the last to glimpse the golden city, as the two or three buildings not yet horizontal subsided beneath the waves to assume their places in the pattern. What happened next has haunted me ever since. Perhaps it was an illusion, perhaps a spout of water caught the sunlight as the city settled on the ocean bed, perhaps a fleck of spray blurred my vision, but I could swear that where the last buildings had collapsed a sudden turbulence broke out as if some leviathan had stirred in the crystal depths. Then, vast and majestic in the afternoon blaze, a giant goldfish shattered the surface as it launched itself in a hundred-metre leap, scales burning as it rotated, metallic eyeballs flashing at the sun.
Since that day, the golden years have composed themselves like scales or well-laid cobblestones over my memories of the sinking city. I have passed my time with the Hyperactive Children exploring the nutmeg-scented islands of the Archipelago, still mounted on the blue-nosed sea-pigs. On the whole I shun the larger conurbations; for sometimes the sight of a bustling town will spark to new life some recollection of Atlantis, and loose my tongue in prophetic utterances whose meanings I myself can hardly guess. Too often on these occasions it becomes clear that my listeners and I tread parallel lines that can never meet. Then the tears in my beard are bitterer than seaweed, and only the crooning of the porpoises can soften their sting.