That Book Your Mad Ancestor Wrote by K.J. Bishop Page B

advertising the homes that were to be erected there in the near future. Both the built and the unbuilt were a long way from the exuberant follies near the Medina, which I had driven past on my way out here. I counted only four or five very simple, very similar designs. They reminded me of the houses children draw when they are young and want to convey the idea of a house before they have learned to observe architecture. Here was uniformity reminiscent of the desert city I had visited when, chasing the cure to a malaise of the heart, I had gone overseas. I would have taken them for housing built for the poor, had each home not been as large as a block of six or eight flats. I read the billboards: 5 bedrooms, 3 living rooms, 2 rumpus rooms, ‘laid-back living’.
    This was a large country. I imagined it would take a long time to fill it up with rumpus rooms. Perhaps the lack of character and distinguishing features in these new dwellings bespoke a relaxation, a giving up of the attempt to bring the history of other countries here. They certainly suggested a love of the first three dimensions and disinterest in the fourth .
    As for the streets, they appeared to have established their layout during an all -night bender. Their illogical twists and turns might have been following tracks made by wandering beasts, lunatics, or devils; and, as if to make up for absent history and myth, these rambling roads bore the names of gods, heroes, monsters, characters from legend and folktale, and distinguished persons from the old world. They were arranged in sets, one group of streets with Arthurian names, one with names from the Arabian Nights, and so on, as though someone had hoped that the Age of Chivalry, with unicorns and dragons, perilous enchantments and good manners, or the Baghdad of Harun al-Rashid, with its Gate of the Willow Tree, Gate of Darkness and Gate of the Moon, its riches in treasure and poetry, would be brought into being on this ground through the agency of these captions. And who was I to say it would never happen?
    I could hardly recognise this country as my own. But I had grown up not far from here, in a modest house near the freeway to the airport.
    Now I was back, and looking for a job.
    I ’d found something in the Western Mirror , a tabloid I’d picked up on a train. Between the lonely hearts and the auto ads, my eye was caught by this:
    MUSEUM OF APERTURES. OPENING FOR A CARETAKER. EXPERIENCE WITH DOORS AND WINDOWS NECESSARY. KNOWLEDGE OF FAUCETS, DRAINS, INTERVALS, CAVITIES AND ORIFICES A PLUS.
    There were no contact details. I tore the ad out anyway, carefully, making a neat hole in the page.
    And through the hole, on the next page, in a box hidden among advertisements for floristry courses, I saw:
    32a STREET OF ALL THE OTHERS, NEWMEADOWS WEST. NO PHONE YET. SUNDAY 11 A.M.
    It was Sunday today. I navigated by following the names of guides and conveyors, such as Ariadne and Charon, and those of the sleeping princesses and others who were objects of a quest.
    Coming to the end of Hermes Avenue, I turned left into Rapunzel Street, along the further part of which I had already driven. Passing the street from which I had first entered Rapunzel, I completed a counterclockwise circuit of six streets. I intended to go to the end of Rapunzel and turn right, where I hadn ’t yet been. However, as I completed the circuit a thing of great interest happened. All the street names around me changed. The layout and the houses I passed remained the same as before, but the streets bore names from the Qabalah. Coming to the end of Rapunzel, I checked the sign and saw that it was now Hod Street.
    I abandoned my plan to turn right, and drove around the circuit a second time. The street names altered again, now to delightful titles from the texts of the alchemists, like Green Lion Lane, Crescent of the Peacock ’s Tail, Corascene Dog Court and Armenian Bitch Alley.
    These shifts were both heartening and disheartening; they