John Smith and Murder in the Upside-Down City, Part 1, a short story by Joe Nobel

The upside-down city shocks everyone the first time they see it. John Smith was no exception. He looked out the taxi window upon the skyscrapers hanging down like so many stalactites from the ground above. Or, was it stalagmites? He couldn’t remember which was which. The road from the airport passed by farms and suburbs. All the houses clung from the rock above, as did the trees, playgrounds, and fields of corn. But, the city was almost more than his could eyes could absorb.

His taxi rode upside-down on an upside-down road. Grooves with recessed rails just under (above) the surface held the taxi in place with hooks, preventing the cab from plummeting down (up) into the sky. John Smith gaped at the buildings as they approached. His seat belt dug into the crevice between his thighs and belly as he hung upside-down, preventing him from falling up to the ceiling.

“First time to the upside-down city?” his cab-mate asked, who by coincidence, was also named John Smith, and also by coincidence was the passenger next to him on the flight in.

“Yes,” John Smith answered, too nervous from looking down (up) to the sky and the rolling landscape thirty thousand feet below (above). When the plane had landed on the upside-down tarmac of the upside-down, airport his cab mate John Smith assured our protagonist John Smith that everything was as it was supposed to be. Before the plane could fall up (down), steel meshing shot over (under) the plane keeping it pinned securely to the upside-down ground. Passengers were asked not to walk on the ceiling. Instead, cables at foot and arm length ran the length of the aisle for passengers to grab hold of as they deplaned.

“Here for the convention?” John Smith’s taxi companion, John Smith, asked.

“Yes, what else?” John Smith answered.

“This is the second time the John Smith convention is being held in the upside-down city,” John Smith told John Smith. “It was held here back in ’98. That was my first time. I was petrified. It might sound crazy, but they claim no one’s ever fallen. They don’t even have safety nets or nothin’. People just don’t fall, at least not on purpose. There’s a couple of suicides ever year, I hear, but no accidents. I guess the locals are too fuckin’ scared to let go of the safety lines.”

In a short while, the taxi pulled up to the curb in front of the Astoria Hotel. A bell captain, hanging by his feet from a cable a few inches above the sidewalk, opened the cab door. He guided John Smith out, the John Smith who had not been here before, and showed him how to hang his feet from the cable and to hold on to a second cable three feet above (below) that.

“I’ll get your luggage for you,” the bell captain said. “You’ve got enough to get used to without holding your belongings.”

Then the other John Smith, the one that had been here before, just swung out of the cab, being an old hand at this.

The hotel lobby was filled with John Smiths lined up at the front desk waiting to check in. John Smith was glad to be away from John Smith. All John Smith talked about was how many John Smiths there were in the world. How they’d all convene on the John Smith convention like vultures hovering over a carcass. To this, John Smith had asked John Smith why he came. John Smith answered that, besides the convention, he had some other business in the upside-down city.

“Name?” the clerk behind the desk asked.

“John Smith,” some John Smith said.

“Let me look that up for you.” The clerk typed something into his computer. The keyboard was attached to the counter with Velcro. “Ah, here you are: room 802. It says you are already checked in. Don’t you have your key?”

“No,” John Smith answered. “No key, and I didn’t check —”

“Here, let me get a new key-card for you,” the clerk answered. A bellhop will bring your luggage up shortly. The elevators are just around the corner.”

“Um, thanks,” John Smith answered.

“Oh, and one more thing, there’s no walking on the ceiling. There’s a ten dollar housekeeping fee for every footprint.”

As he left, John Smith heard the clerk ask the next John Smith in line his name and say, “Let me look that up for you. I see you’re already checked in...”

When it came to his turn, John Smith took the elevator down to the eighth floor. From there, he used the cables running along the floor as foot holds to make his way along the hallway. He saw dozens of John Smiths filling the hall when he turned the corner. There were John Smiths of all kinds: tall ones, short ones, fat ones; John Smiths in business suits, John Smiths in cutoffs; long haired John Smiths, short haired John Smiths, and bald John Smiths. There was even the pink-eyed scrawny John Smith with whom he shared the plane and cab, trying to weasel his way through.

“Excuse me. Can I get by?” our John Smith pleaded. “I’m in room 802.”

“So are we all!” A large John Smith turned to John Smith and shook his head. “It looks like the computer put all the John Smiths into the same room.

“But, there must be thousands of us!” John Smith cried.

“Four thousand, three hundred, and eighty seven, to be exact,” Another John Smith said. “Hi, I’m John Smith, the actuary. I’m from Peoria.” That John Smith let go of the safety cable with one hand and reached out a hand to John Smith.

“Nice to meet you,” John Smith said, letting go of the cable with his own right hand with trepidation. They shook hands.

“And, I’m John Smith the axe murderer,” the large John Smith said, offering his own hand. “Retired.”

“Um, pleased to meet you.” Our John Smith shook hands with the axe murderer John Smith. “I’m from Fairlawn, Connecticut.”
A shout came from the door at 802. “This is my room. I got a reservation. Go away.” That angry John Smith slammed the door.

“I’m going back to the lobby,” a John Smith said. Thirty other John Smiths followed him. They all crowded into the elevator and some John Smith pushed the down button, and they descended up to the lobby.

It was now chaos around the front desk, with hundreds of John Smiths clamoring for their rooms. The clerk kept issuing the same key cards to room 802, insisting to each John Smith that he’d already checked in and this was a replacement key.

“I have NOT checked in!” many John Smiths complained. Nonetheless, the smiling clerk issued them key cards to room 802 and sent them on their way.

When the batch of John Smiths from the elevator descended on the front desk yelling that they all got the same key, the man at the desk cried, “Of course you have the same key, you’re all John Smith, you’re all the same person, the computer says so. What do you expect me to do!”

“Give us all different rooms, you dope!” one of the John Smiths yelled.

“I can’t,” the clerk called back. “The whole hotel is blocked off for some kind of John Smith convention.”

“See, this is why I hate being John Smith,” John Smith, the plane and cab companion, who was the scrawny pink-eyed one, said to John Smith (our John Smith). “You don’t know how many times I’ve gotten mixed up with some other bozo John Smith. I even spent a night in jail because of this name.”

“Like I asked, why did you come?” John Smith asked John Smith.

“As I told you before, I have some other business in the upside-down city, if it’s any of your business, John Smith.” He said the name with derision.

The desk clerk called in the hotel manager, not knowing how to handle so many different people with the same reservation. It took the hotel manager over an hour to get all the John Smiths into their rooms. John Smith got a nice suite on the twenty-fifth floor with a grand view of the upside-down city’s business district. He could also look out and see the clouds and vapor trails from jets and the farmland neatly arranged into little square parcels below. He wished he was on the first or second floor where he felt more of an affinity with the ground, even though the ground was above him and not below. He looked at his bed firmly bolted to the floor above. He wondered how he could sleep on it until he noticed the Velcro straps. He shook his head and felt like crying. He’d never get over his fear of heights here.

---

The following morning, John Smith sat in the Astoria’s coffee shop. He’d had a horrible night’s sleep strapped to his bed. He couldn’t turn. He couldn’t adjust his pillow; whenever he tried, the damn thing fell to the ceiling and he’d have to climb down on a rope to retrieve it. His coffee arrived upside-down attached to the waiter’s tray by Velcro.

“Milk and sugar?” his smiling waiter asked.

John Smith watched the waiter place the coffee on the Velcro’d surface of his table. Plastic wrap over the top kept the coffee from spilling up. He wondered how he’d add milk and sugar. Or, how he’d drink it without spilling the coffee all over his upside-down head. “Um, no thanks,” he said. “Can I have a slice of that pineapple right-side-up cake to go.” John Smith figured that he’d be able to eat the cake in the privacy of his bedroom and not make a fool of himself like he would if he attempted drinking his coffee upside-down from an upside-down cup.

He could easily distinguish the locals from the newly arrived conventioneers by the way they attacked their coffee. The newbies stared at their cups, clueless as he. The locals just put the upside-down cup to their lips, folded back the plastic wrap a sliver, and took a sip.

One of the John Smiths dropped his cup, and it crashed to the ceiling.

The voices in the restaurant hushed as everyone glanced at the broken china and splattered coffee stains up (down) on the ceiling. Then everyone turned back to their conversations, pretending not to have noticed the faux pas.

John Smith noticed, though. He looked over at the John Smith who’d spilled his coffee and noticed him slumping up in his chair. His arms dangled up towards the ceiling and his head just bobbed back and forth until it came to a stop like a pendulum at rest.

John Smith (our John Smith) made his way with his feet hanging off the cables three inches above the floor to the John Smith’s (the one who dropped his cup) table. It took a moment for John Smith to realize that John Smith was dead. He checked for a pulse on John Smith’s neck to be sure. He looked up at the ceiling; a hotel worker was already mopping up the spilled coffee. Poisoned, John Smith thought. Another one.

“Waiter!” John Smith yelled out. “Call the police.”

---

John Smith sat on a swivel chair bolted to the floor of the upside-down city police footquarters. He strummed his fingers on the armrest waiting for the detective sitting opposite him to look up. The desk between them was cluttered with papers, held in place with magnetic paperweights. A stained coffee cup sat teetering on the edge of the desk with what looked like week-old coffee. A Pink Panther figurine taped to the desk sat prominently in front of his name plaque: Pierre-Augustine Lupoux. John Smith wondered how to pronounce the name: Lou-pox? Or, Lupo?

“So, Mr. John Smeese,” the detective said in a strong French accent, “you have reason to suspect zat ze other Mr. Smeese was poisoned, yes?”

“I do,” John Smith answered. “I am a detective from the Fairlawn Police Department in Fairlawn, Connecticut.” He presented his badge across the desk. “I am on the trail of a serial killer.”

“Really?”

“Detective Lupo, there is a John Smith killer on the loose,” John Smith said.

“You must take zat very personally, no?” Lupoux cocked an eyebrow.

“The first John Smith victim was a down-and-out homeless man in my town of Fairlawn. Stabbed to death. No one thought much of it. I was assigned the case in 2000, being the new kid. No clues. No witnesses. No suspects. I was ready to file the paperwork into the cold case file when I chanced upon an article, about another John Smith of Bridgeport who was found dead due to a fall off a highway overpass. At first, the Bridgeport PD suspected a suicide, but this John Smith had much to look forward to. His wife told me that they were planning a trip to the Orient for their 25th anniversary, his business was taking off, and he was expecting grand-children. He didn’t fit the suicide profile.

“Then came the others. John Smith in Poughkeepsie, a cabinet maker, died of carbon monoxide poisoning. John Smith in Schenectady, a paramedic with a crowbar to the back of the head. John Smith of Troy, a teacher drowned. John Smith of Scranton, slipped on a banana peel. John Smith of Toledo, a factory worker who fell into an industrial cake mixer. John Smith of Ann Arbor. John Smith of Kalamazoo. John Smith of Milwaukee who died of a supposed heart attack on a flight from Chicago to L.A.

“The killings then continued on the west coast. First in San Diego. Then Anaheim, Santa Barbara, Carmel. A particularly gruesome killing in Alameda. The list goes on. Portland. Tacoma. Seattle.”

By now Detective Lupoux’s interest had perked up. “But, for what reason iz somebody keeling all ze John Smeese’s?”

“That, I don’t know. But I do know he’s here in the upside-down city at the John Smith convention. There are four thousand, three hundred, and eighty-six John Smiths for him to chose from.”

“Ziz eez terrible. What would eet do to ze image of our upside-down city! Please one moment, I have to consult with mon capitain.” Lupoux grappled along the handholds in the floor to his captain’s office. John Smith watched their grave discussion from the open door. They looked up at him occasionally as they spoke.

The captain, a stout man named Brubaker, called John Smith into a meeting room along with Lupoux and a half dozen other detectives. They wrote out their facts on a white board; the name of the next victim: John Smith. The next victim’s whereabouts: the Astoria, Biltmore, Charlton, or one of the other hotels in the convention district. They knew nothing about the perpetrator, his appearance or his motives. Only that he was walking among the John Smiths this very moment.

“It’s not much to go on,” Brubaker said, “but, Loopey and Smith, go and find him before he kills again.” The rest of the detectives sniggered.

John Smith looked at Lupoux and wondered what was so funny.

“Zey make joke at you,” Lupoux told John Smith when they were alone. “I am, how you say, unlucky. My last two partners died, shot by ze bad guys.”

“Oh, that’s terrible,” John Smith said. “How many partners have you had?”

“Um, I have had two.” Lupoux shrugged his shoulders.

“This is not my day,” John Smith sighed.

On the way back to the hotel, Lupoux gave John Smith a running commentary about the wonders of the upside-down city.

“And here, we are renovating ze central park. Notice the men planting trees. Zey have to attach the roots just so, so zat ze trees do not pull loose and fall up. And there you see those excavators attached to the ground, they are digging out a new lake. It will have a water fountain and some fish. A flower garden will be around it. Very nice.”

“But, how can you have a lake upside-down? Oh, never mind, I don’t want to know.”

“And here, we have our stock exchange,” Lupoux said as they drove past an eight story building with an ornate brownstone facade. A pair of gigantic bungee cords, each five feet wide, had been draped under the building and were attached to the bedrock with stakes. “Ze building’s basement is crumbling, and while ze renovations are happening the building his held in place by those. Just in case eet would snap loose.”

John Smith looked out of the upside down window as they drove past.

“And, zere,” Lupoux pointed, “zat is a really great deli. We go zere for lunch, no? And on ze other side of ze street, a good restaurant, if you like Indian cuisine. All you can eat buffet. I take you once for dinner zere, okay?”

John Smith wondered how the buffet trays might be held upside-down to the upside-down tables. And, how the upside-down patrons would serve themselves in their upside-down serving lines.

“And zat is our bowling alley. Very difficult game when ze balls keep falling to ze ceiling, no?”

... to be continued ...

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Joe