In the mirror of the car I saw Mr. Geary watch a passing truck. I unsaw it because it was in Ul Qoma.

But pass through Copula Hall and she or he might leave Besźel, and at the end of the hall come back to exactly (corporeally) where they had just been, but in another country, a tourist, a marvelling visitor, to a street that shared the latitude-longitude of their own address, a street they had never visited before, whose architecture they had alway

If someone needed to go to a house physically next door to their own but in the neighbouring city, it was in a different road in an unfriendly power. That is what foreigners rarely understand. A Besź dweller cannot walk a few paces next door into an alter house without breach.

(Only rubbish is an exception, when it is old enough. Lying across crosshatched pavement or gusted into an alter area from where it was dropped, it starts as protub, but after a long enough time for it to fade and the Illitan or Besź script to be obscured by filth and bleached by light, and when it coagulates with other rubbish, including rubbish f

Such polite stoic unsensing is the form for dealing with protubs—that is the Besź for those protuberances from the other city. There is an Illitan term too, but I do not know it.

All of us—twenty-one lawmakers from each state, their assistants, and I—were meeting at a juncture, an interstice, one sort-of border built above another.

The scents of Besźel Ul Qomatown are a confusion. The instinct is to unsmell them, to think of them as drift across the boundaries, as disrespectful as rain (“Rain and woodsmoke live in both cities,” the proverb has it. In Ul Qoma they have the same saw, but one of the subjects is “fog.” You may occasionally also hear it of other weather conditions

With the particular colours and script of its shop fronts, the shape of its facades, visitors to Besźel who saw it would always think they were looking at Ul Qoma, and hurriedly and ostentatiously look away (as close as foreigners could generally get to unseeing). But with a more careful eye, experience, you note the sort of cramped kitsch to the b

was true. A political irony. Those most dedicated to the perforation of the boundary between Besźel and Ul Qoma had to observe it most carefully.