EARLY ONE MORNING last April, Seattle Police Officer J. Cannon was called in to investigate an accident involving a single car and a maple tree in Wallingford. When Cannon arrived at the scene, he was met by a man who was "very fidgety" (this is according to Cannon's written account). The man explained excitedly to Cannon that he had arrived home at around 2:00 that morning, and had heard "voices in the yard" he "didn't recognize." He said he also heard "scratching noises by the tree and saw a car that was up against the maple tree." On top of that, he was convinced that people were "raking and sweeping in his yard."

As the officer listened to the man's account, his heart sank; he realized he was dealing with what the police call a "mental." He informed the man that he saw neither people "raking and sweeping in his yard" or a car "up against the maple tree," and turned toward his patrol car. But just as he was about to leave the scene, the man began "screaming" and "pointing over by a tree," saying, "There they are! See them? There! Over there by the tree!" Officer Cannon reluctantly took a brief look around and told the man, "I do not see them." He then pulled out his flashlight, just to prove that there were absolutely nothing but trees and spring leaves in the man's garden. But the man grabbed Cannon's black flashlight from his hand, "and began to run around the yard after imaginary people." After some effort, the officer "was able to grab [his] flashlight and run for [his] car."

This late-night incident was by no means extraordinary; hundreds of reports like it were filed last year. Every day in Seattle and other cities (Tacoma, Everett, Bellevue), cops like Cannon are lured away from the quotidian pleasures of cracking down on drug dealers, arresting prostitutes and johns, investigating bank robberies, settling domestic disputes, and calming hysterical accident victims to this other place, this underworld, this infernal region where everything they learned at the academy -- from "the fundamentals of criminal investigation" to "obtaining admissions and confessions" -- is rendered useless. The moment an officer encounters a "mental" who claims to hear voices in his head or says some mysterious "they" is after him, all the crestfallen cop can do is call an American Medical Response vehicle, or, like officer Cannon, "run for [his] car."

UNREAL CITY

In theory, the job of the police is to patrol and maintain the border that runs between individual desire and universal reality -- universal reality being law, logic, and reason; desire being the stuff "in our heads" that wants to find expression, form, and motion "in the world of facts." When a person is speeding to a job appointment or a date, or cracking the code on a bank safe, they are effectively breaching this borderline, and it's up to the police to arrive at the "scene of the crime" and mend the rupture. They restore order by handing the person a hefty speeding ticket or sending them to the slammer to pay their "debt to society." This is why managing a city is so difficult (New York City has 30,000 cops; a city of cops within the city) -- because there are so many desires (millions!) that want to materialize and have to break some part of the border to do so. It's up to the city's finest to keep a constant eye on this long and great wall, maintaining and patrolling it at all hours. But this is the happy picture of police work. When they drive out of the police station after roll call, into the concrete and glass city, they not only have to maintain the border between social order and individual desire, they also have to deal with another wall that is more complex, more frustrating, more demanding. This is the wall that exists between the real city and the unreal city -- the city where the "mentals" live.

There is not just one city, two cities, or even three cities; there are endless cities. This is what Eleanor Kaufman pointed out when she said in her introduction to New Mappings in Politics, Philosophy, and Culture that the "various forms of navigation around the city," either "by foot, bus, or metro," may cover the same "real space, but the mode in which it is covered -- and the forms of perception this mode entails; the social, physical, and economic factors that inflect it (its unique mapping system) -- is radically different from the others." But the experience of the city isn't entirely defined by real "social, physical, and economic" factors and events layered onto "real space"; there are also totally imagined "social, physical, and economic" factors and events layered onto this "real space." There's another dimension, another city, which -- though active and experienced by thousands of people every day -- is invisible to most citizens and cops. This is the unreal city, the phantom twin city to our real city -- or better yet, the phantom twin city to the city we and the cops have agreed to call real in the game of law and order.

This unreal city and the real cities have the same street names (Pike, Pine), the same buildings (Safeco Field, Benaroya Hall), the same parks (Magnolia Park, Discovery Park), the same bodies of water (Lake Union, Lake Washington), and even the same underground bus tunnel. Topographically, everything matches. And locations or structures that have significant symbolic value in the real city -- Gas Works Park, the Space Needle -- retain the same value in the unreal city. Where the two part ways is in the arena of events: Events in the unreal city wildly differ from events in the real city. For example, in the real city, Paul Schell is mayor. He is midway through his term. He recently panicked and made some poor decisions regarding the WTO conference and New Year's Eve celebrations, and it is highly unlikely that he will be our mayor in the year 2003. In the other city, he is an alien from another galaxy (Andromeda nebula) who is using the city of Seattle to conduct a complex social and biological experiment, and if we don't find his spaceship soon (which is somewhere at the bottom of the Sound), we may never foil his evil master plan. This is the difference between the real and unreal cities. The events don't correspond at all. While a downtown deli employee is laundering money made from the "unlawful use of food stamps" and a homeless man is busy trying to fish out a dollar from a pay box in a parking lot in the real city; in the unreal city, Jesus Christ is in the Space Needle demanding better service from His unfortunate waiter and Satan is pursuing a terrified soul up an escalator in Pacific Place Center. The unreal city is as complete as the real city, but it is as substantial as a mirage that appears in a dream after the pleasures of sex.

THE GARDEN OF EARTHLY DELIGHTS

So what exactly does the unreal city look like? How can one describe this invisible city pressed up against our city, which repeatedly frustrates law enforcement officers who have encounters with it? Cops never like patrolling the border between the city of facts and the city of fiction. It's exasperating and tedious work, which is obvious from the tone of the reports they write regarding their brief border skirmishes: "Outside, I spoke with [the 'mental'], who was unable to provide his name between gibberish and non-sequiturs. He was babbling and talking about, among other things, lost puppy dogs, bunny rabbits, daddy, etc.," wrote Seattle officer J. S. Babcock on October 19, 1999.

"The suspect was very irrational and rambled on in disjointed sentences. At times she affected a British accent. She swore profusely," wrote officer C. Woo on October 18, 1999.

"The woman appeared to be delirious. She talked about her being a 4th grade teacher at Highline Elementary. She also talked about how much she [liked] teaching and enjoyed kids. The woman is actually a waitress at the Keg," wrote officer C. M. Cook on July 3, 1999.

Picture, if you will, the 15th-century Flemish painter Hieronymus Bosch's famous and most puzzling work, The Garden of Earthly Delights. This triptych, which represents the third day of creation, has a middle panel described as a dream world that teems with bizarre creatures and events. This middle panel is as close as one can ever come to matching the dense riot of colors, fantastic events, and terrifying monsters that make up the day-to-day world of the unreal city. It is a land full of strange and vague forms walking on water, floating through parks and graveyards, and flying across the downtown skyline. It is a world of "excruciating insanity," if I may borrow an expression from Nabokov. It is a world that never ceases, never ends, but seems to grow with no direction or purpose except, possibly, to one day take over our city and reign as the kingdom of lunacy.

Because it is impossible to read all the police reports that concern the unreal city, and because most events in the unreal city go unreported (the unreal city does not have a daily newspaper), it is difficult to create a faithful impression of what this intense and fantastic place is like. I'll have to fuse a number of incident reports I have collected over the months into one picture, one moment. This, in a way, is what the director of Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Robert Zemeckis, did when he tried to give the audience a sense of what an ordinary day in Toon Town was like; he compressed all of the lunacy into one, vertiginous, seven-minute sequence. So let us enter, you and I, this other world -- bracing ourselves, as Bob Hoskins did before entering Roger Rabbit's crazy city -- from its symbolic center, the Space Needle, which, as I said earlier, is as important to the other world as it is to our own.

It's early in the morning (6:30 a.m.), and God (the King of Heaven) walks up to the Space Needle and begins to violently pull on one of the building's door handles. God is unable to open the door, and so He continues to yank on the handle until the tempered-glass door shatters. God then walks into the Space Needle's lobby

and passes out on the floor. As God sleeps, a woman who lives in an apartment on Third Avenue in Belltown awakens, goes to her kitchen, and notices, as she is about to open a can of something yummy, that her small can opener is acting strangely. When she holds it up against the morning light, the can opener suddenly says to her in an evil little voice: "I hate you and I want to hurt you and I want to cause you pain." She throws the can opener back in the dark drawer and calls the police to come and arrest the mean can opener. While the cops are racing down Second Avenue to her home, the son of God (who is still passed out in the lobby of the Space Needle), Jesus Christ (who was born in a manger and is known in Galilee for His amazing miracles and sermons), walks into the regional FBI office in the downtown federal building and threatens to "rape all the [special agents] in the office and make them [His] bitches." When Jesus is asked to leave by special agent Owen Murray, He turns and walks "through the wooden door." (Later, Jesus Christ is seen chilling out on Aurora Avenue, talking to God on His cell phone.)

Like God and Jesus, FBI agents are very busy folks in the unreal city. The agents have multiple operations going all over town. One is on Yesler Way, where they are watching a man who wants to go "G-Land" (whatever that means). Another is in a bookstore on Broadway, where, at this very moment, they have closed the store doors and are having a little chat with an uncooperative civil employee, who has figured out their evil master plan. They are warning him that bad things will happen to him if he doesn't keep his big mouth shut. Another operation they have is on 21st Avenue and Jefferson, where they are watching a homeowner who just became wise to the surveillance. The homeowner also knows that the FBI wants to hurt him, so he keeps vigilant watch out his window for anything suspicious, and is startled when a car drives by. Not far from this closely watched home is a sad white man who lives in a small apartment on 24th Avenue and Columbia. He is in a deep depression, not because the FBI are after him, but because his family -- who are very wealthy ("millionaires!") -- have abandoned him to live in the "ghetto" with all these poor black folks. When will his family save him? When will they arrive from the sky in a silver helicopter and whisk him away to a happier home beyond Lake Washington? All he can do for now is wait, and look at black people walking up and down the street, and drown his sorrows in whiskey.

Crimes of a spectacular kind abound in the unreal city. Indeed, if we go to the Safeway on 15th Avenue and John Street, we will find 10 fighting ninjas toting high-powered rifles, silver swords, and black masks destroying consumer products and slashing defenseless customers. A very lucky man manages to get out of the supermarket, and to his relief, spots a police car parked across the street, near Kidd Valley. He desperately pounds on the car window, informing the officer inside of the mayhem raging in the Safeway. He gets into the back of the police car and begs the officer for a bulletproof vest and a gun belt. "The ninjas," he warns, "are also on the roof of the Safeway, and in a truck in the parking lot, and in the bushes across the street." Later, at lunchtime, a man walks into a restaurant on 23rd Avenue and Martin Luther King Way, bleeding from wounds "all over his body." He has been shot by a gang of ghosts, who have just driven by his home. They shot him with big, loud, ghost guns, and to make matters worse, he doesn't know why the underworld has sent a team of phantom hit men to kill him. What has he done to displease the king of Hades so?

Across town, in the University District, we find a peaceful setting on 52nd Street and Roosevelt Avenue: trees, a home, some bushes. Here, an alien from another galaxy (Andromeda?) is very pleased, because for lunch he has found a big deciduous mulberry bush not far from his new home on this green and blue planet. Mulberries, he says to an earthling, are the only proper food for his alien system. The alien munches some berries and then takes a bowl home for his alien family. Farther out, near the city's boundary on 145th Street and Lake City Way, a man whom everyone wants to kill -- and who has, in fact, been murdered once already -- feels he is "no longer here presently," and that his body is gone for now. Once it returns, he believes, he can "fight and be threatening towards others."

Meanwhile, back in Capitol Hill, a man in the QFC on Broadway and Pike Street is walking down the breakfast foods aisle when suddenly three boxes of "Toaster Pastries" leap off the shelf and land in his arms. These evil little Toaster Pastries order the man to carry them out of the store at once, to the freedom that beckons beyond the automatic sliding doors. Fearing for his life, the man does as he is told. Just a block from this grocery store, another man walks into oncoming traffic on Pine Street, causing cars to abruptly maneuver around him. A concerned passing motorist escorts the despondent and confused man to the sidewalk so he won't get hurt. The man then walks down the sidewalk, stumbling and falling at every step. Finally he sits down on the street corner at Belmont Avenue and Pine, and cries because Satan, the prince of darkness, is after him. Satan wants to destroy him because he knows that he is a lesbian.

As night falls and the real city prepares to sleep, a man in Discovery Park screams when he sees billionaire Bill Gates leap out of the bushes and run after him. Gates wants to kill the man because he is about to reveal to the world that "Microsoft stock is worthless," and that it is all "Bill Gates' fault." Gates wants to make sure this man is dead before dawn. At dawn the next day, back at the center of the city, at the point where we entered and soon will depart this other world, Jesus has just awoken after camping by the Space Needle overnight. Jesus walks to the Needle and starts to furiously bang on the glass entry door of its ground floor, screaming about how She has to save five people who are buried underneath it. Jesus, who has saved many lives before (so the Bible tells us), is desperate to save these suffering souls under the Space Needle, because Her father, God, who passed out in this building's lobby the day before, made Her His only begotten daughter, so that whoever believeth in Her will have everlasting life.

This is the city that lives, thrives, and breathes next to ours; the city that sent officer Cannon running for the safety of his squad car. It is a city that has its own order and reason (or a complete lack of it, depending on your view), and yet its phantom presence not only threatens our palpable city, but also places its very existence into question. The fact of the matter is, it is not the unreal city that has to worry, that feels jeopardized, but our city of real events. Cops who patrol the border between the real and unreal cities keenly feel this vulnerability -- the "mental" people are in the habit of questioning the rules, and questioning the legitimacy of the police. In Ballard last October, an officer turned in this report: "Officers attempted to calm her down and let her know that we were there to help her, but she continued to yell for assistance from 'real officers.'" And in November in Wallingford, a cop recorded that a man "didn't recognize my police car as being a police car." The other city is always challenging our city's claim on reality, and this puts us on the defensive, making us uneasy. Of course we are the real city, and Mayor Schell is not an alien with a spaceship at the bottom of the Sound. But why can't that other city see the truth of this? Why don't they just accept the facts? "Never, never, never, never, never!" the unreal city seems to say like old, mad King Lear. Indeed, we can recognize them but they never recognize us.

JESUS IN THE SUPERMARKET

At any moment, any one of us can lose hold of the real city and fall into the hell that is the other city. And once you are there, no one really knows how to get you back. "This is not an exact science," says Jim (who refused to give his last name), a unit service coordinator at the Harborview Medical Center's overcrowded psychiatric ward (this is where exasperated cops deposit all the "mental" people). "It is not like when you come in [to the hospital] with a disease or a broken leg, which we can understand and fix. This is another ball game. It is still kind of vague and not easy to figure out. There is no clear way, no single book on how this works. It can be caused by trauma, a medical imbalance of chemicals; it can even be genetically caused. We really don't know." And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the essence of the problem, the reason why my heart pounds every time I hear a voice or noise I can't account for. No one is safe; no one is secure; and if you fall into the pit, all the hospital (the real city) can do is offer you a jaded social worker or some hardcore drugs like the anti-psychotic Haldol, which is known among some local physicians as the "Budweiser of anti-psychotics." Haldol helps calm you down and reduces the intensity of the visions swirling around your head; it is currently the industry standard, the "first in line" when attempting to repress the visions and the voices of the other city. (It is also popular because it is "injectable," which means doctors can force a patient down and jab her/him with a needle.) However, hardcore anti-psychotics have hardcore side effects that range from "extra-paramental symptoms," (fidgeting and twitching) to "tardive dyskinesia" (abnormal movements, involuntary squirming). It's clear that once you have fallen, you never return. You are gone forever.

And so, what if on one fine Sunday, you are in the QFC on Pine and Broadway shopping, and you see Jesus Christ (halo and all) shoplifting fish from the seafood section? You might panic, step back, look around, and then creep up to the checkout counter to inform the store attendants, the manager, everybody, that "Jesus Christ of Galilee is in the seafood section." When they say there is nobody in the seafood section, you then recommend they try the wine aisle: "He is sure to be there, trying to shoplift wine for His big beach party." Soon, an Officer Hammermaster or an Officer Hell arrives at the scene of the imagined crime. She/he looks at you, listens to your story, shakes her/his head, and says, "At this point I decided he was mental, and took him for a 72-hour psychiatric evaluation at Harbor view Medical Center."

It could happen to you. It could happen to me.