Free Boundaries by T.M. Wright Page B

New York city and Fred Collins—who had spent all of his adult life as one of its policemen, and had therefore passed a lot of time on its streets, watching its people—had a good eye for spotting the longtime Batavia resident, the visitor, the newcomer. He knew many Batavia residents by name, others simply by face or reputation.
    He knew the patterns of their movements through the city within each month and season. He knew the drably dressed welfare mothers—usually with passive, obedient children in tow—the young singles, who seemed to breeze through the stores and malls, and then breeze out, back to their three-room apartments in one of the city’s outlying apartment complexes; the transients, who—few though they were—were like transients everywhere; the young marrieds with infants strapped to their backs or belted into Perego strollers.
    Fred Collins thought that he remembered Anne Case in the city, thought he remembered her moving quickly from store to store on that squat and white-walled main street, hugging close to the buildings, head down. And, in his memory, she was dressed as if to hide, even on that warm summer day, as if to be within the walls of her clothes.
    But there was something good and childlike about her, he remembered (or thought he did), a warm and very appealing simplicity.
    She would have been easy to pick out, easy to remember, even if he had seen her only once.
    But he knew that he had never seen her until the day of her death, when there had been sixty-three stab wounds clustered around her stomach and back, and a look of peaceful repose in her eyes.
    But he manufactured the memory, anyway, and thought it was good, thought that it comforted him.
    He called to her in it, "Hello, Anne. Fine day."
    But she did not stop as she moved quickly from one store to another on that squat street of white walls and storefronts. She merely turned her small, pretty face toward him, the glimmer of a smile and recognition came to her, and then was gone.
    ~ * ~
    On the Other Side, there were cities that were both like and unlike other cities; they were places where people congregated. There were restaurants, museums, theaters, things nostalgic.
    Wood predominated in these cities, but there was also brick—made from earth and water, baked in the light—and the roofs of the houses were tiled with flat stone. A panorama of the cities from some high point would have shown these flat stone roofs of various pitches and sizes, and the walls of many colors beneath.
    Cars did not exist here, though people could occasionally be seen standing on corners, near the roadways—which were made of brick or flattened earth—with their arms outstretched. This behavior could continue for what would seem like a very long time to an observer from some other place.
    In the museums there were artifacts on display which were in actuality manufactured things made from memories dulled by death and transition. There were replicas of washing machines, stereos, TV antennas, telephones and telephone booths, automobiles, floor lamps, children’s toys of various kinds (teddy bears, rag dolls, building blocks, tricycles), guns, cameras. None of these items were functional. They were fashioned from various materials—stone, wood, earth, paper.
    There were books here, too. They were written in longhand, in various languages, on paper made slowly and methodically by hand from wood pulp. The words and sentences in these books were fragmented and often unreadable except by the people who had written them. One such book, written in English, began:

Link own freon at the moreover blakness diskribing us. Sewwee rise UP!!   . . .  

    It went on, at very great length, to describe the effects of the Emancipation Proclamation as seen through the eyes of a young black man. In life, the author had been a white professor of history at Dartmouth College.
    Another book, by a woman who had written fiction for various literary magazines, read, in