Empty a city.

That is to say, remove from it all men, women, and children. Abstract and store their various characteristics — digitally, perhaps. Most of the animal life (pigeons, cockroaches, sewer rats: our unlovely urban fauna) can be
left alone. Domestic pets should be placed in limbo along with the other props and accouterments of the human beings, to be reintroduced with them if or when the time comes.

Before proceeding, we might consider the empty city as it now stands: the street-plans of a hundred neighborhoods somehow melded within a larger, more regular matrix laid out by municipal architects long since dead; the subsequent overlay of highways and railroads at once warping, binding,
and opening up the pattern; the whole inarguably of human design, but in this timeless moment stripped of function or purpose by the absence of its shapers and inhabitants. No one creator dictated all this; without its citizens to explain it, the city is unauthored (like the Grand Canyon, an artifact of
randomly conflicting forces), a grid upon which only arbitrary paths can be traced.

This unauthored quality should be the esthetic principle governing any attempt to generate an alternate population — a new citizenry as well-fitted to the city as that which we have removed.

For simplicity’s sake we might proceed to designate the east-west thoroughfares streets (numbered X1 to X156 ) and the north-south thoroughfares avenues (numbered Y1 to Y198 ). One definition for the center of the city, then, would be the intersection of X78 Street and Y99 Avenue. Since one corner of that intersection is conveniently occupied by a human apartment building, we might choose it for our starting-point.

It would be more difficult to make as arbitrary a choice among persons, to define a center-point for the population. However, we might settle for a randomly-selected member of a presumably representative class, a bearer of the most common first-and-surname in Volume A of the former municipal
telephone directory, “John Clark.”

The time of day can also be selected at random: the calendar date can be designated DAY 1. Given all of the above, and generating arbitrary details as needed, we could restart the city thusly:

8:24 a.m., Day 1:

JOHN CLARK, 32, systems analyst, husband of Althea and father of Arthur and Janice, leaves for work. It is a (randomly but not improbably) brisk morning, and he chooses to walk briskly, swinging his arms and looking
straight ahead to the apartment building’s parking annex on the corner. This is one of the few modes of walking in which one might manage to fall through an open manhole; and at 8:24:29 he does so. This is the effective end of his working day.

But it is just as likely that Clark will respond to the coolness of the morning air by pulling on his gloves, shoulders hunched, eyes on his hands; in this case, he would almost certainly see the manhole and avoid it. Therefore we will also posit the existence of such a possible John Clark, CLARK2 , and follow his progress through Day 1 as well. For instance, at

8:25:02 a.m.:

Clark 2 might be hailed by MARK FORBUSH — fiftyish, florid, and semi-alcoholic, a co-worker of Clark’s just now introduced to the city — for Clark, the one person we have selected from the former population, will expect and require the existence of beings whose salient features are those of the individuals he knew. But note that we need limit ourselves to the former patterns only within a fairly narrow circle of Clark’s close acquaintances: all the unknown “extras” in his life can be new syntheses of the human
characteristics we have stored in limbo.

Forbush offers Clark2 a ride to work which Clark2 declines. But the offer is
a routine one such as Clark has clearly accepted sometimes in the past; so we must introduce (and plot the progress of) CLARK3 , who does accept Forbush’s offer — or to be more precise, accepts the offer of FORBUSH2 , for Forbush1 , having heard Clark2 decline, has already begun the drive to work. Forbush 2 and Clark 3 follow behind him in a 2013 Ford Fusion Hybrid identical to his.

ELABORATION:

Having arbitrarily chosen to follow John Clark and all the possible or potential Clarks, we must introduce other persons to the city as they impinge upon Clark’s day. These persons will cause other persons to be
introduced in their turn, but for the sake of both simplicity and variety (and to maintain our Clark-oriented point of view) duplicates of these non-Clarks, such as Forbush2 , will be introduced only when absolutely necessary. For instance, Forbush1 can both drive past Clark1’s manhole (unaware of him) and hail Clark2 , thus doing double-duty; and if Clark’s
presence or absence in Forbush’s car had no great consequences in the logical order, there would be no need to create a Forbush2.

As it happens, however, the characters of Clarks and Forbushes are such that if a Clark accepts a ride from a Forbush on this particular day (the Forbush bleary-eyed and irritable from the first of the colds he has all winter), a
Clark will have to make some comment on the Forbush’s dangerous driving and the Forbush will react to this criticism by speeding up until he has an accident. Since the Forbush who gives one Clark a lift will have an accident and fail to reach the office, he will be unable to do double-duty by having lunch in the office cafeteria with the Clark who drove himself; hence the need for two Forbushes. This, then, is the situation at

9:00 a.m.:

Clark1 is unconscious at the bottom of the manhole.

Clark2 has driven to his office on X100 Street, passing five hundred and twelve MOTORISTS and PEDESTRIANS.

Forbush1 has preceded him by a few minutes, passing most of the same persons and sixty-two OTHERS.

Clark3 has criticized Forbush2’s driving, and a few choleric moments later the Fusion Hybrid has jumped a curb and winged a middle-aged newspaper vendor on Y105 Avenue. (He had a good chance of hitting someone, and although newspaper vendor is an increasingly low-probability occupation, any random process for generating millions of people will pull up long-shots from time to time.) The vendor, CARMINE BENTAVAGNIA, is rubbing his hip and screaming through the driver’s-side window at the surly-looking, purple-faced Forbush2 , unaware that the latter has just (clinically, provisionally) died from a coronary thrombosis.

9:05 a.m.:

Clark2 goes to his office but a CLARK4 stops in the downstairs lobby and uses a house phone to tell administrative assistant SHANIQUA MADISON that he is going to run some errands first, while a CLARK5 chooses to go directly to the computer lab.

Meanwhile, Clark3 has left Forbush2’s car, mildly concussed. He just avoids stepping on the hand of JOHNNY WILKERSON (twenty years old and unemployed), who is filching a free magazine from Bentavagnia’s overturned newsstand and will soon proceed toward a diner on Y106 Avenue, where his girlfriend, waitress (waitperson, waitpossibility) EDIE HAVLICEK, will slip him a free breakfast.

9:25 a.m.:

The CROWD (forty-two persons) which gathered around the site of Forbush2’s accident has finally dispersed, each member introducing new characters to the city as he goes about his daily rounds. G.G. McCLOUD, for instance, an up-and-coming young numbers-runner, is single-handedly
populating a string of German or Jewish delicatessans, Hispanic or Korean convenience stores, and Irish or Italian barber shops; ethnic diversity has returned to the city.

Meanwhile, Patrolman VINCE NAPOLITANO is attempting to find a witness said to have wandered away from the accident scene before the police arrived. Said witness (Clark3) — dazed and uncomprehending — is sitting a few blocks away in a bar (open this early to provide coffee to the patrons who left at 2:30), where four sullen ALCOHOLICS watch yesterday’s sports highlights on a dim outsized television; indoor recreation has returned to the city.

At the same time, Clark5 calls his administrative assistant from the computer lab and tells her to make an appointment for him to lunch with Forbush. She is sure that Clark said he was going out to do some errands, but it is the sort of discrepancy everyone ignores every day.

9:55 a.m.:

Errand-running Clark4 decides that there’s no point in looking for a birthday present for his wife unless he goes to the bank and straightens out that problem with his account first—and opts to return to work instead; but there is a CLARK6 who guiltily keeps wasting time window shopping and a CLARK7 who more logically proceeds to the bank. The latter walks directly into Johnny Wilkerson, who is heading toward a job interview. The two men are creatures of different probabilities, and share no logical relation; accordingly, they pass as though not seeing each other, grim and distant expressions on their faces: the manners and courtesies of urban living have returned to the city.

10:00 a.m.:

Clark7 enters the bank, only to find a robbery in progress, the brainchild of preppy wastrel BUNNY WHITEHEAD, who has recruited HIS GANG from fellow members of a drug counseling program his father got him diverted into to avoid a jail sentence the summer before. (Notice how any personal connection at all seems to increase the probability of one’s personal story.) Inopportunely seen by the robbers, Clark7 raises his hands above his head and steps carefully away from the door, but there could also be a CLARK8 who makes a break for it and escapes; incidentally, neither will be hurt, though there could also be a CLARK9 who, while fleeing, will trip over a passing pedestrian’s toy poodle, sprain his elbow, and get savagely bitten.

Meanwhile, Johnny Wilkerson finds that the office where his job interview is to be held is empty. (The simplest possible development; he will assume that the company has gone out of business.) But our population explosion cannot be stopped. He folds his stolen newspaper open to the want ads, pulls out his cell phone, and begins making calls. It is not logically necessary to assume that all these calls will have answerers, but it is statistically likely that some of them will, making Wilkerson something like a boy broadcasting pebbles of fish-food across a quiet pond, creating outward-radiating ripples of activity; ringing phones people offices in previously vacant parts of the city, and from these offices are whole districts born.

Circa 2:00 p.m.:

John Clark1 is discovered in the manhole (still unconscious) by nine CITY SEWER-CONSTRUCTION WORKERS as they begin their day’s work. What with calling the ambulance and everything, they feel they can hardly be
expected to get much done today, and will probably knock off early.

Clark3 , by contrast, has regained something like consciousness in the bar where we left him (the big TV now awash with soaps). He fingers the abrasions left on his face by the shoulder harness he was wearing when Forbush2 jumped the curb. Mistaking them for rope burns, he will spend the next few hours buying drink after drink under the impression that his brother-in-law has somehow inveigled him into trying rock-climbing again, that this time Clark was the only survivor, and that he must break the news to his wife, who is not likely to take it as impassively as THE BARTENDER does.

Meanwhile, Edie Havlicek, Johnny Wilkerson’s girlfriend, has called her sister’s husband, ERNESTO VARGAS, a clerk at an insurance company, and asked him for some money to tide Johnny over. Ernie flies into a rage, and after agreeing to lend her two hundred dollars, petulantly engages in an act of occupational sabotage, sending a whole sheaf of incoming mail through the paper shredder. Among the unopened letters destroyed is the check that would have renewed the Life and Auto coverage of one Mark Forbush.

CLARIFICATION:

Coincidences will happen, given random permutations of elements such as we have posited and a view broad enough to take them all in; as the system increases in complexity geometrically, the coincidence level must
eventually become Dickensian. Any resultant irony is just an illusion based on a limited perspective; but then, it always is.

2:32 p.m.:

Clark1 , the prime mover finally moved, briefly regains consciousness before an emergency operation on his broken spine. “Bright,” he says, or perhaps “Light.” He is pronounced dead at 2:57.

This brief outline should suffice to establish that an entire city can be populated in the manner proposed, and that as a story-generating mechanism it would then run itself. We do not have to grind on hour-by-hour to, say, 2:00 p.m. of Day 7 to be confident that life will still be logically
unreeling. For the record, though: at that time there could be eight dozen funerals in progress, including one for Forbush2— at which Clark3 will be standing with downcast eyes, guiltily unable to keep from thinking about rock-climbing, especially after seeing Forbush’s grandiose headstone — and one each for Clark1 (a different manhole, and softer) and Clark9 (also dead, in his low-order-of-probability way, from poodle-bite complications); BUNNY WHITEHEAD12, the one whose father did make bail for him again, will be signing copies of his new book, Bandit, at the department store where Clark6 went windowshopping, while off-duty Sgt. Napolitano, who has been hired by the store to guard Whitehead’s life, shifts his feet disgustedly; Carmine Bentavagnia will wake up sweating from a dream he was having behind the counter of his corner newsstand — a dream in which he was screaming and screaming through the driver’s-side window of a 1984 Ford Fairlane at his long-dead father; while across town, Mark Forbush1 will shudder at the perfectly justified feeling that someone is walking across his grave; and CLARK257 — the Clark who filed a minority report on the cost estimates for a software upgrade on Day 2 and was fired on Day 4 — will
leave a big tip for Edie Havlicek at the same moment that CLARK8008 — the Clark who yielded on Day 5 to a moment’s fleeting temptation and has restructured his company’s computer system to divert thousands of corporate dollars into the bank accounts of fictitious persons he has created — will be mugged in an alley by Edie’s boyfriend Johnny.

Despite all these potential details, and so many more than we could set down, we have in fact been very restrictive. We have fissioned John Clark only at times when random decisions or accidents might plausibly have taken him down different paths. And we have dealt only with John Clarks who might exist after 8:00 a.m. of Day 1.

We have ignored infinities upon infinities of other variations, those rooted in the past: the John Clark who lost his wife on Day -11 and has not yet
found the will to return to work; the John Clark who chose to go into a startup with his college roommate and is today far too wealthy to live in this city; the John Clark who took up rock-climbing, as he always wanted to do in college, and spends his weekends on local mountainsides; the John Clark who did press SHERRY FEINBERG a little bit further in high school and therefore wasn’t a virgin his freshman year in college, who consequently avoided that harrowing two years’ addiction to JENNIFER WILSHIRE, but also didn’t attend that wretched party Jennifer threw after exams and accordingly never met his beloved Althea, but some years later entered instead into marriage with MAVIS QUENTIN, clinical psychologist, with whom he is inextricably miserable; the John Clark whose brother George is still alive, a forest ranger in Oregon; and further back, the half-John-Clark-to-be whose X-chromosome became linked with another X instead of with a Y, and is consequently known as Janice; and much further back, the John Clarks resulting from different ancestors and therefore called O’Haras, Woctowiczes, Kinskis, N’Kamas, Fishbeins, Yaboods, Santinis, and Smiths, who were (by no means respectively) hunchbacks, artists, grandmothers,
epileptics, nurses, undiscovered geniuses, wigmakers, weavers, jai-alai players, stormtroopers, midwives, champs, chumps, and — going back to even earlier divergences — chimps.

Clearly, the line has to be drawn somewhere, and an arbitrary commitment to an authorial point of view associated with one main character would permit us to ignore all the unClarkish Clarks above. And a good thing, too, for there are practical limitations of space. It is simply not feasible to
allow secondary characters to go on generating tertiary characters, etc., for very long at all. In practice, if we take every opportunity to fission Clark after 8:00 a.m. on Day 1, we will have 9800 of him by sunset (who would have constantly bumped into each other to everyone’s astonishment, were it not for workarounds too tedious to detail here) plus a supporting cast of just over a billion —three times the estimated population of the U.S. as a whole, a total more than sufficient for our purposes.

To reduce this theoretical billion to a handier number (and to eliminate almost all the duplicate characters arising from parallel lines of probability), we could employ a random culling process to liquidate 9998 of every 10,000 persons, leaving us with a very plausible city population of just over 200,000. We must, of course, posit that there be logical relationships among the survivors wherever possible. Most will be able to link up with duplicates of (or at least rough analogues for) characters to whom they related before the cull. A few thousand will find themselves redundant or otherwise without a logical place in the new matrix; of these, some will succeed in finding jobs, lodging, etc. before their pocket money runs out; the rest will be processed by the authorities, through channels that might well have been designed with them in mind, as “schizophrenics.”

This, then, is our new population, all their life-stories “unauthored” yet at the same time clearly the product of human choices. And if we wish to stick to our chosen viewpoint character, we are in luck: there is a better than even chance that at least one John Clark will have survived the culling process. He might be, for instance

This John Clark

—who was five years old, accidentally left alone, outside in the airless hospital corridor, when his younger brother George died of pneumonia (never to be seen again), no visual memory to mark the incident except the tracing and retracing of interchangeably blank tile patterns in a long
long row;

— who entered college as a Philosophy major, but who graduated in the computer sciences and has never regretted the change;

— who makes a decent living as a systems analyst for a public utility and reads trashy science fiction at his desk;

— who, while mentally rehearsing and trying to understand the perverse misbehavior of one of his non-sentient machines, attempts to beat the light at the highway underpass between X99 and X100 Streets at 4:25:05 on our New Day 1, ramming his beige Camry head-on into another beige Camry in an accident that was technically the fault of the other driver (now — 4:25:06 — deceased);

— who is himself virtually unhurt, perhaps a bit deafened, perhaps a trifle dazed, fazed, mazed as he stands by the wreck, finally hearing and recognizing the tick, tick, ticking of hot auto metal as it cools;

— who watches a police officer remove the driver’s license from the wallet of the dead man; who gives him his own, and observes the officer’s subsequent astonishment as the licenses are compared;

— who drifts footlessly over to the officer’s side, and sees that the dead man was also a John Clark (that common name, and with no middle initial to conflict with his own), born in the same year as himself, with the same heritage of black hair and grey eyes, and not too different a height and weight;

— who takes his own license back and keeps pulling it out again to make sure that it is the right one, as he waits for the bus that a woman in a nearby drug store has invoked from a printed array of numbers, letters, and times; who gets on the bus at 5:32.

This John Clark, and not the one waiting for the light to change in Chinatown on his way to the hospital in the lower X40s, waiting in the ambulance and patiently, because that one is dead and ever shall be, no —

5:32–5:53 p.m.:

This John Clark stands and then sits in the bus, investigating the faces he sees minutely but circumspectly, looking for some evidence of minds and souls remotely like his own. The bus takes an unfamiliar route; the dim world beyond the windows takes on puzzling contours: that far corner of the Municipal Building is difficult to reconcile with what is surely the terminus of the Cross-County Highway, while his home block follows almost too soon, just across the street from a tailor shop Clark barely recognizes, though it has clearly been there forever.

He steps out into icy air. It is dark, and he wonders about muggers—about the whole class of people in whom one believes without ever having seen one, a class which he suddenly realizes includes the couple who are playing the stereo in Apartment 1A as he goes up the stairs.

6:02 p.m.:

He is home. All the lighting has a fake, wan look. Clark’s son Arthur, two years old since Day -5, is standing by the baby’s crib; Clark absently musses his hair (which he remembers as having initially been blonder, much blonder). He is late for dinner, and so preoccupied that he has given no reason; angry, his wife asks none, and clicks each dish into place with sinister precision. Everything Clark sees he inspects, finding more scratches, stains, flaws, and cracks than he remembers, but all too aware — now, if
never before — of how infrequently one ever really looks at anything.

6:17 p.m.:

Althea talks about how her replacement is said to be doing at her old research-library job, and Clark does not rise to the argument she wishes to have. Silence.

“Are you okay?” she asks him, and he thinks to ask “What’s the number of our insurance guy?”, and much more has to be said before he can ask again.

6:31 p.m.:

He suffers Dave Liebowitz from upstairs to flash a penlight in his eye, although Liebowitz is neither a provider on their medical plan nor even a friend, just a wifeless doctor who makes conversation with Althea on the stairway whenever he can.

“He seems okay,” Liebowitz says.

Clark notices that he has been referred to in the third person and broods over the “seems,” but keeps his own counsel.

6:42–7:23 p.m.:

Althea makes the telephone calls necessitated by the loss of their car. Clark realizes that her efficient flat telephone voice is not her normal voice.

7:23:01 p.m.:

Less affected? Realer?

8:40 p.m:

After pretending to read a book for the better part of an hour, Clark goes into the bathroom, turns the taps all the way open so that no one can hear, and vomits neatly into the toilet. He immediately feels much better. He brushes his teeth, gargles, and at the statistically early time of
8:44 says, “Let’s go to bed.”

9:33 p.m.:

Much has happened, but little is proven.

Althea is asleep, her hand resting protectively on his shoulder. He turns his neck so that he can taste one of her fingertips, delicately salty, one real thing. He knows why children are afraid of the dark.

10:00 p.m.:

Uneasy sleep.

Day 1 is of course a cross-section in time as well as in probability. As before, there is nothing to prevent further extrapolation if desired. Given all of the above, for instance, and assuming that baby Janice gives her three little
warning murmurs at the usual time, we can project that at 2:05 a.m. Day 2, habit will roll Clark out of bed in the darkness and take him — by no means awake — to the baby’s side before she can begin to cry in earnest.

And no doubt he will check her diaper with the back of his left hand, and lift her, and rock her, all without an idea of where he is or what he is doing. And since consciousness returns in stages, history lagging behind experience — the philosopher and the mystic lazy and slow to wake — all the shades and speculations of a day like Day 1 will return too late to disturb John Clark’s epoch-making rediscovery, in the blue glow of the nightlight, that the baby’s wise eyes are Althea’s, and that her chin, so stubborn and so dear, is
unmistakably—and quite naturally—his own.

And this might be our story.