A great full city of concrete, or some sturdy material, but certainly full—everywhere a narrow winding pathway up stairs that took you past crammed-in little houses, their glassed doors good for nothing but peering into the cascade of lit spaces inside: the forshortened rectangular antishadows of windows, which fell on a table, slid off, and jumped up another glassed doorframe, only to bite down into another room and a small samovar.

Narrow walkways with a rambling design, three-foot-walled on either side, lead up along a bank of little buildings to the city's top, where quiet freeways arc on either side of you and underneath: giraffes, lots and lots of giraffes. Big giraffes and baby giraffes, long-necked giraffes that never take the chance to pop their giraffe necks over the three foot walls and maul you. Kids play with giraffe cubs in the sunlight over a giraffe court (in lieu of a basketball court).

At the beach a tanker will give you a ride to all the city's coastal access points, or over to the infinite industrial edge where a fen of other tankers floats, stretching out of sight. Kids play on the tanker, too, while you try to see the coast.

In one house whose glass doors you peer into, a stately, short-necked giraffe-of-sorts, tail like a shrub of small tails, is propped on a table, reading studiosly. It's name comes to mind: cebru corba. A dangerous cebru corba reading studiously, paying you no heed.

And outside you wrestle with a giraffe cub while children laugh and joke about the stranger, and the cafes are always open but the chairs are always on the tables. And the beach is dark and tattered but it's open and wide. And the empty freeways are only there, it seems, to shade giraffes from the sun.

This was the Alaska of my dream.