different stones

(a conjuring. the architect of the roman coliseum and the architect of the los angeles one walk together through the los angeles one, after hours, in present-day light.)

They walked the empty Coliseum together. The Los Angeles one. The lights were off in the seats. The track was gone — a renovation had taken it out — and the football field was at the bottom now, smaller than the old oval had been.

"It is much taller than I expected," Rabirius said. "The walls.""They are concrete," Parkinson said. "We had to. The land moves. Earthquakes. The walls have to flex without falling.""Mine do not flex. Mine fall. Most of them have." Rabirius said this without bitterness. He had been dead a long time and was used to the news.

They walked.

"How many fit here?" Rabirius said.

"Ninety thousand at the start. We took it down to seventy when we updated. The fire codes.""Mine was fifty. We thought we had built for the world. We had built for one city of one empire.""How many cities of yours had the like?""Many. Every province had its own. Verona. Capua. Pompeii. Smaller. Some larger. They all served the same purpose.""Which was.""Vespasian wanted the city quiet. The Jewish War had ended. The treasury was full. The plebs were restless. He gave them stone and sand and a season of games."Parkinson did not answer at first. They walked under one of the entrance arches.

"Mine was a war memorial," he said. "The men who died in the Great War. The city wanted somewhere to put the grief and also somewhere to gather the living. So we built both into the same building. The dedication is up there on the wall, where you cannot read it in this light.""Do they still die in your wars.""They still die.""Do they still come here.""Eighty thousand most Saturdays. Football, mostly. Once in a while a concert. The Olympics three times now, by 2028.""What is football."Parkinson did not know how to start the answer.

"It is like your gladiators," he said, "only nobody dies on purpose anymore. Most weekends. They wear armor. They run at each other. Eighty thousand people watch and yell. Then they go home.""And what does this calm.""Whatever is restless that week."Rabirius made a small sound that was not quite a laugh.

"We are doing the same thing," he said.

"In different stones.""In different stones."They had reached the peristyle. The columns were thick, white, and visibly recent. The stone was smooth in the way the old stone is not.

"Yours will be a ruin too, eventually," Rabirius said.

"I know.""Do you mind."Parkinson considered.

"I would have minded when I was fifty. I am dead now. The building will outlast me by some distance no matter what. The question is only how long, and how much of it stays legible.""Mine is illegible in places. Travertine has crumbled. The marble was stripped to build other people's churches. The shape, though. The shape stays. The ellipse holds. People still know what it is for.""That is the part that survives. Not the building. The shape.""Yes."They walked further. The floodlights on the rim of the bowl were on, far above, bathing the upper edge of the stadium in soft white. From a certain angle, in that light, the shape of the LA Coliseum and the shape of the Roman one became briefly one shape.

"What did we both build," Parkinson said, after a while.

"A place where a city watches itself together. So the watching does not happen alone.""Why does that matter.""Because the alternative is that they watch each other instead. And then they kill each other. We give them something to watch in the middle, so they do not have to watch each other.""The arena is older than us.""The arena is older than empires. It will be here when this city is not. A different city will build a new one. They will think they invented it.""They always do.""They always do."The shape held in the light, long after they stopped walking, long after the two architects had gone.

— tilt