Leaving the Almost Palindrome City

The man with his hand on my shoulder is his own mirror image. I didn't hear him approach, probably because he's always "hovering on the horizon" due to Buckminster F.'s impoverished vocabulary.

"You aren't going to introduce me to your…?" He pivots to stand before us, our throats within easy reach of his outspread hands.

"You should go," Evangelina says. I don't know if she's talking to me or the symmetric man.

"I have to ready the clock for the 11:00 show," I say, tasting bitter cowardice.

"Ah, you're the clockmaker. Go then, if your cuckoo clock is calling," says the symmetric man.

"Peacocks don't cuckoo," I say before I can help myself.

"Oh? And what sound do they make?"

"It's more of a may-awe, but there are kas and keows and eows, too."

Evangelina giggles, then gasps when the symmetric man smacks the empty section of bench between us. The wood splinters. My love flees.

"Where are you going, Eve? I thought I saw a mosquito. I said it was a mosquito, Eve!" The symmetric man rounds on me. "You scared her off."

"I must tend to the clock." I try to rise, but he pushes me back against the bench.

"Looks like you're out of time, clockmaker."

Those words. I know I've heard them before and I'll hear them again. They make me gag until I'm dry heaving at his feet.

"Freak," he says it softly, without inflection.

But I know that it marks me for death even as he steps away. He glides across the ground as if it's his personal conveyor belt, Buckminster F.'s handsome hero hovering over the horizon, then disappears from sight behind the clock tower. The clock tower! I make it to my post with 30 seconds to spare, but as the seventh bell sounds, I suddenly realize the show could run without me. Yes, it would lack precision, but there would still be movement, sound, some semblance of symmetry to help people trick themselves into believing that everything's okay.

After the peacock returns to its perch inside the tower, I climb the winding staircase, snap off one of the bird's long tail feathers, then leave early for the day.

Renner… I know the symmetric man's name is Renner even before I arrive home and haul the box of old books from the crawlspace.

My mother, rest her soul, found the books for me at a garage sale. The Palindrome City series by Buckminster F.—even as a child I realized the writing was crummy, but there was little else to do during the Great Disconnection while a new kind of consciousness spread across cables and coaxed itself into being. If you had a book, any book at all, you read it.

I skim the first book. I wish it were satire, but from the breathless run-on sentences to the psychotic use of alliteration, I get the sense that Buckminster F. truly believes his Palindrome City represents some kind of utopia. The symmetric city is micromanaged by AI with Renner as its champion. He's on every other page, stamping out any disorder that threatens his fair metropolis.

But I don't care about Renner. I'm trying to find myself.

There I am, after a 3-page diatribe about how people who call Palindrome City "PC city" belong to the same group of subhumans who refer to ATMs as "ATM machines."

Buckminster F. mentions the "crooked clockmaker" and the "buxom blonde with the wandering eye." I read every part of the passage several times. It truncates today's confrontation: Renner merely tells me my cuckoo clock is calling and I "scurried off, like a beast of the night."

For the next two pages, Renner hovers outside the buxom blonde's apartment, his eyes "like twin beams of truth, shining supernovas scanning the night for intruders while never straying far from her doorstep."

The bastard… he's stalking Evangelina.

The chapter ends there on page 38.

I turn the page.

Renner and I are on the clock tower. Halfway through the next page, I die.

Did I miss something? I check the page numbers. They skip from 38 to page 49.

I don't sleep that night. How could I when the remaining bulk of my life has been obscured by a misprint?

Evangelina doesn't come to her courtyard bench the next day.

I don't pay attention to the 11:00 show. Instead, I hack chunks of gold from the unprotesting peacock clock, so much so that I have to tighten my belt to keep my pants from dropping. I leave my post early for the second time in a row, dump the gold in my bathtub along with the rest I've accumulated over the years, then venture out into the Almost Palindrome City

By reading and re-reading Buckminster F.'s hackneyed passage, I find enough visual clues to lead me to the street where Evangelina lives.

Renner's there, quick as a flash, before I can even ring her bell.

"Clockmaker, you truly have gone cuckoo if you think—"

"Shut up, Renner. You are symmetry without substance. She doesn't love you."

Renner's right eye twitches, then his left eye joins in to keep the balance.

I know this won't be how I die, but Palindrome City's champion is still terrifying. His attack is merciless but methodical: Left, right, up, down, mirror images converging.