"The City of Your Soul" by Robert Reed

The usual Robert Reed questions apply. Is the writing style provocative or precious? (Answer: yes.) Is this misogyny or just heterosexuality? (Answer: yes.) Has something occurred or has one posture merely followed another? (Answer: ...yes?) A city disappears, but then the disappearance disappears. Like the fake fakes that obsessed Philip K. Dick when he wasn't too busy being a shithead (he talked about sneaking in to Disneyland at night and swapping out the mechanical birds for real ones), a disappearing disappearance is a negation, a self-canceling-out, but at the same time not: it's a presence, a persistence, of a kind with no more than an infrathin separation from that of any other thing-that-exists. Questions of truth and mattering (as in, what matters? what does not?) take on more and more importance as they become more and more unanswerable, unless they're not important at all. People discuss it fruitlessly on the internet.