The Genesis of a Fictional City

Eskor David Johnson’s Pay As You Go is set in an imagined city, Polis, one that takes elements from New York to Chicago to London and magnifies them to grandiose size. Traversing Polis is an intrepid hero of sorts, Slide, whose rare mix of panache, naivety, earnestness, and humor makes him a mesmerizing act to follow through this urban jungle as he searches for a place to live.

Johnson has written a necessary antidote to what is more common of the debuts of young, contemporary writers: books so steeped in solipsism that it is as though man can, in fact, be an island. This is of course not the case. There’s always community to come up against for the good and bad. Witnessing this in full force is one of the great pleasures of Pay As You Go.

I corresponded with Johnson over email, curious about what the novel and its author had to say about notions of home and movement, the genesis of a fictional city, and what fables can teach us of our contemporary life.

DK Nnuro: Labeling the book “a fable” instead of “a novel” is a bold choice for many reasons. I have two questions on this front. The first one is very simple: what is your definition of a fable? 

Eskor David Johnson: I’ll have to revert to those elementary school lessons when you first learn about them. To me, a fable is a universal-leaning story that is very consciously a stand-in for a greater range of narratives. Fables operate closer to the level of symbolism, with characters that can be archetypes and a plot in which many people can see parallels and lessons for their own lives.

DKN: Interesting. Do you remember your first fable? The one you first fell in love with? 

EDJ: First would be hard to say but the one that comes to mind quickest is that of the fox and the bone. He’s walking along with a juicy one between his teeth when suddenly he sees another fox holding an even bigger one, and in an attempt to get it he drops the one he’s holding and it floats away in what turns out to be a river. He had been looking at his reflection in the water. There’s something of that in the novel.

DKN: Polis, the fictional city your main character Slide finds himself navigating successfully and unsuccessfully, is exquisitely imagined. I wanted to liken it to a known major metropolis… wait, it just hit me: is “Polis” taken from the word “metropolis”? Did I miss that in the novel?

EDJ: Ha! Perhaps you did! If it makes you feel better “metropolis” is more of a descendant of the term rather than an ancestor. I was in fact thinking of the word for the Greek city-state, polis, which was their defining unit of civilization, as opposed to the more modern notion of a country. A city-state is both city and country tied into one, and the dominant means by which the people of the time would have seen themselves. Those from Athens were Athenian, from Sparta Spartans. That they all spoke Greek was a matter of geography, they might have argued.

So too with the novel’s Polis, which functions as a world onto its own.

DKN: Yes, yes, exactly what I was thinking. Greek city-states and all. Ha! But in all seriousness, the depths of your imagination…mind blowing! The fact that you conceived of an entire map of Polis. Let’s talk about that!

EDJ: The map has to its credit three of the great artists I know in my life. First was a poet, Diamond Sharpe, whom I long ago sent some pages from an old version of the novel to read, and who commented that she couldn’t tell where things were in relation to each other, and suspected I didn’t either, so suggested I map them out. I made a rough, terrible sketch, which still survives in a notebook today, and that became the basis for the layout. Second was a painter, Dougan Khim, who lived in Chicago while I was in Iowa. During one of my visits to him we spent the day walking through Chicago’s sweeping streets and theorizing as to what exactly a city was, its requirements. We would have sounded quite silly to passersby, but the conversation was instrumental in shaping the detailing of Polis’ neighborhoods. And finally there was the actual map maker, Sarah Diamond, whose handiwork appears at the opening of the book. She was the one to actually take all those sketches and notes and theories and turn it into the beautiful image we have today. When she first showed me what she had done I was flabbergasted. Her talent is immense.

DKN: I think most people would want to say that Polis is a fictional New York City, and there’s enough there for that argument. Why create a fictional city? Why not situate Slide in, say, New York?

EDJ: The problem with picking a real place—and in a long ago brainstorming of the novel it was in fact New York—is all the rules and obligations that come with it. Where stores are located. Accurate street names. A preexistent history you’re better off knowing well before vigilant readers come knocking on your door with a list of corrections. Then there is the similarly well-tread ground of all the great New York novels and having to take into account what has or hasn’t been done in those as well. I ventured 3-5 pages down that path and put the whole thing aside for years. There will be more New York novels—someone is writing one as we speak—but it was not where I felt my strengths were at their best.

Having your own city allows for the rules to be your own. Some of these are technical in nature: I had to figure out a system for the naming of the streets, as well as what kind of people lived in what neighborhood. But the real rules were the intangible ones. The logic by which spontaneous crowds so often form, the sometimes hysterical dialogue, the underlying sense of lawlessness, the tendency of certain characters to monologue. These may not feel like a necessary off-shoot of a fictional city, but they did for mine. What the story gets to say by being set in Polis is “This is a world in which these things happen.”

DKN: Yes! And things happen because there are people, as there should be in a big city. So reading this rightly peopled novel made me think of how much contemporary big city novels—yes, contemporary New York novels—are woefully unpeopled. They are so narrowly focused, as if the big city would ever accommodate these characters’ high degrees of solipsism. But we live in a time where, more and more, we are being encouraged to focus on ourselves and to limit our communities to a chosen few. I worry about this sometimes because perhaps there is something to be learned from communities who might disturb our peace. Slide’s peace, by the way, is so often disturbed. 

EDJ: Absolutely. And I happen to hold the view that a city should be where you go in order to have your peace disturbed.

New York in particular has undergone a shift that I am hardly the first to put my finger on. It’s very possible to have a more quaint, sanitized experience here than many imagine, provided you have the money. A lot of people find a handful of friends, a rotation of similar neighborhoods and restaurants, and those will constitute the main ingredients of their experience. They’re not entirely to blame. The economics of the city have made it unforgiving for the conditions for enlivening randomness—cheap housing, a healthy population of artists, political engagement—to thrive. I often joke that I missed my era here, and should have been alive and in my 20s for the New York City of the 1970s.

So it’s made its way into fiction, so much of which can feel like staid domestic dramas, despite the many other kinds of drama available in the city. To be sure, many of these are good. But many not. It’s a shame, since there is so much to be gained from trying again and again to capture a metropolis on the page, no matter how incompletely. The truth is that for as much as I’d like to flatter myself about the inventiveness of Polis, thousands more (and more unimaginable) things happen in New York every single day. It’s good exercise for the soul, and for empathy, to try fitting it all into a few hundred pages.

In many regards I admire Slide for his ability to be disturbed, and to incorporate such disturbances into the fabric of his life. He could have simply said no to many of the situations in which he finds himself and ends up complaining about. It’s his willingness to be open that defines him, a heightened version of a quality I hope to cultivate in myself. Though admittedly if I gave into disturbances as often as he does, I would not get a lot of writing done.

DKN: Fair enough. Still, what are your thoughts on allowing our peace to be sometimes disturbed by certain communities?

EDJ: I believe that the ongoing project that is democracy is in some sense centered on this. Democracy asks that you imagine yourself into the place of others and recognize in that imagining both the beautiful differences and essential similarities that place us on even terms. It is why cities are naturally more democratic places, given that its citizens have to more often take into account the lives of others dissimilar to their own. Currently I live in Harlem and I joke that Black people here treat the sidewalk like it’s their living room: there’s always someone on the phone yelling all their private business for everyone to hear. That’s other lives rubbing up against yours. That’s texture.

Those who live in cities can be quite self-satisfied in interpreting this open-mindedness as a sign of greater moral value, but it doesn’t necessarily have to do with them. Some are the same people who would otherwise keep to themselves and not go out of their ways to meet anyone different were they to live in the suburbs. It’s the city, our agreed circumstance, that does the work of disturbing our communities, which would otherwise homogenize if left on their own. I do give people credit for moving here in the first place. The trick is to keep moving, keep being engaged, even when you’re already physically present.

DKN: We are both recent immigrants to the US. This thing about texture, a. About other lives rubbing up against yours;. K keeping moving, keeping being engaged. What might recent immigrants be able to teach other Americans about these things?

EDJ: I sometimes worry for writers who are only of one place, none more so than American ones, who have a kind of glorious insularity. My favorites are the writers who learn other languages, travel the globe, move from one place to another, and return to their page with these incongruous notions of the world vying within them, and so try making sense of it all. 

Yet the thing about American hegemony is that no matter where else you may be growing up in the world, you are also growing up in America, whether you realize it or not. In the West especially. I found that when I came here for good at age 17, I already knew and understood so much of the culture simply from TV and fascination. So almost by default I had two worlds, and two ways of seeing the world, to access. The interplay between those plays out in my fiction not so much on the level of plot, but on that of language. I have remained stubbornly Trinidadian in my outlook on things.

So if there is a lesson we have to impart I think it’s mainly that simple one of the importance of variation. America can be a good part of a balanced diet. It’s not the entire meal.

DKN: That takes me to a few of my curiosities about what the book suggests about finding “home” or making “home.” But first, I’m interested in how you define “home”? Can you share with us your own journey towards “home”? 

EDJ: Another quick anecdote about Dougan, by way of vamping. He really is a phenomenal painter, and at one of his shows he was asked by someone what he was trying to say in making one of the pieces on display. Not knowing what to do, and in a truly genuine sense (he has not a snide instinct in him), he had to point to the painting and reply that that was what he was trying to say. In some sense, for me, the novel is what I am trying to say in response to the question of what home means to me. That said, I will still attempt a more succinct response.

It’s the first and most consistent question the book asks, I think, from that early moment that Slide complains of his first apartment that he can’t quite hear his heart while in it. That notion of being able to hear yourself and of finding a space where your better instincts more often win out against your worst ones, has been essential to what I consider home. For me it’s been somewhere I know I can consistently write, see my friends and family often, make feel beautiful, be inspired to cook and exercise, go for walks, and have animals—those of my own or that I mind for friends. Sunlight and wood floorings definitely help, let me not pretend. But home is where you hear your heart. Sometimes the oldest answers are the best.

DKN: Are you able to hear your heart wherever it is you are laying your head these days? 

EDJ: Yes.