November breaks up a Northern city into its separate lives. No one lingers on granite planters, strangers stop making conversation, pigeons go unfed. Murk settles over the river and dusk comes mid-morning. Buildings lose their heads, faces grow indistinct. In the evening, trains and buses fill up with individuals, and the bodies layered in bulky clothing shrink from the coming winter and one another. The yellow glow in windows lights them safely home. This is the new center of life: The household becomes the temple, the family the god. Even those who have no home disappear, crowding the shelters. Every November, when the sky turns leaden and the clocks have been set back, the larger body dies and the idea of the city becomes a memory, an accident of warm weather. More than the fall of leaves and the flight of geese, this memory explains November's sadness in a Northern city.

That November in Cambridge, across the river from Boston, people started noticing signs. Teal-colored flyers, recognizable from a distance on lampposts, in the windows of Laundromats and discount clothiers and walk-in clinics, or around the new construction site. Cryptic phrases in small black type.

No One Is Excused.
Do You Know Where You Live?
Who Is Your Neighbor?
You Could Be Anyone.

No one claimed responsibility, and the signs became a conversation piece and source of speculation a terrorist cell with a sense of humor, an ad campaign for a blockbuster movie, a millenarian lunatic.

Their appearance, just at the moment when cold weather and early darkness arrived to close up windows and doors, worked strangely on people's nerves. The signs irritated and disturbed some; in others they woke nameless longings. The feelings were rawest where the signs were thickest, in the heart of the city the several dingy blocks of Massachusetts Avenue, its main artery, growing dingier toward the river known as Central Square. By late November, these nerves and signs were all that remained of the idea of the city.

Copyright 1998 by George Packer. All rights reserved.