Georgia, Chapter VII — The Sunset, the Neon, and Every Illusion Available Late into the Night
The sales department opened before the sun was completely dead.
But for twenty minutes, Batumi sold nothing.
Not by choice.
The sun had simply taken possession of the display window.
It descended over the Black Sea with the shameless competence belonging only to things capable of magnificence without an editorial plan.
Orange.
Red.
Gold across the water.
People became silhouettes.
An empty lookout tower stood against the sky.
A woman walked along the shore.
A mother held a child close to the waves.
Two people talked beneath the pier while light passed through the columns and made whatever they were saying seem important.
Perhaps they were making a decision that would change their lives.
Perhaps they were trying to remember where they had parked.
Sunsets make no distinction.
They grant cinematic dignity even to administrative conversations.
On the beach, figures stood still before the horizon.
Some alone.
Others close together.
None needed additional lighting.
Everything was already there.
The sea.
The sky.
The bodies.
An indecent amount of beauty distributed free of charge, a serious market failure humanity has tried to correct ever since inventing balconies with panoramic views.
Even the traffic on the other side of town received absolution.
The sun dropped behind the trees, cars remained trapped, and for a few seconds even a traffic jam looked like a scene worth remembering.
The men kept honking.
Transcendence has very clear limits when someone cuts you off.
I photographed the last light again and again.
As though it might truly be the last.
It is a common compulsion among photographers.
We know perfectly well the sun will return the next morning, yet we behave like relatives at a station watching a train leave for the front.
One last shot.
One more.
This one has a different cloud.
This one contains a person.
This one may say something about time, loss, and humanity’s need to assign depth to a burning sphere while the Earth simply keeps turning.
Then the sun touched the water.
Disappeared.
And Batumi immediately reclaimed control of its image.
The first signs were already lit.
The market on the corner turned red and white.
The crosswalk collected the headlights’ reflections.
People crossed carrying bags, umbrellas, phones, and that particular expression of someone who only wants to reach the other side without becoming the tragic detail in a stranger’s evening.
Rain began polishing the asphalt.
That was when the night became truly photogenic.
Rain is a city’s design department.
It takes an ordinary light and duplicates it.
Stretches the red of traffic lights.
Lengthens the yellow of headlights.
Mixes the blue of signs with the green of pharmacies and turns a dirty puddle into something a photographer will kneel in the middle of the road to capture, risking a death as spectacular as it would be difficult to explain to the insurance company.
Every advertisement gained a second copy beneath it.
One in the world.
One on the asphalt.
Capitalism had discovered duplication without paying for more display space.
Batumi changed its skin.
By day the towers reflected the sky.
At night they produced their own.
Purple lines.
Blue borders.
Red windows.
Entire facades drawn in light, as though the real architecture weren’t convincing enough and needed makeup before going out.
Darkness hid the unfinished concrete, stains, repairs, and voids.
It left visible only what someone had decided to illuminate.
Night lied no more than day.
It simply had better direction.
A bridge became a corridor of white lamps.
A woman crossed it with a small dog and a grocery bag.
Around her, buildings flashed like spaceships freshly landed from the future.
She was probably going home.
So was the dog.
Science fiction, seen up close, often includes someone who needs to buy dinner.
Along the bridge rails, the word *Welcome* repeated hundreds of times.
Welcome.
Welcome.
Welcome.
A city that repeats how welcoming it is that often begins to resemble a man on a first date who insists too much that he is a good person.
Perhaps it was sincere.
Perhaps it had simply invested heavily in the sign.
A blue bus stopped near the crosswalk.
The driver looked at me through the window.
Behind him, a tower drew red rectangles against the black sky while a couple walked arm in arm along the sidewalk.
The city promised an extraordinary night.
He had to finish his shift.
That is what keeps every show standing.
Someone sells the exception.
Someone else drives the bus.
Pictures of the night prefer neon.
Life, meanwhile, continues to have schedules, bags, stops, and back pain.
I walked among the illuminated buildings.
Some signs promised restaurants.
Others beauty.
Others alcohol.
One said *ZEN* while using enough electricity to make inner peace impossible.
It was perfect.
We have turned even serenity into something that has to flash in order to be noticed.
Farther on, an American car had been suspended above a club entrance.
Below it, the words:
*GARAGE NIGHT CLUB.*
Beside it, exchange rates ran in red and green.
Dollars.
Euros.
Rubles.
Turkish lira.
Money translated into other money while, a few yards away, a club promised to translate boredom into desire.
It was the night’s most honest image.
Currency exchange.
Identity exchange.
You enter with a currency, an outfit, a loneliness, and the hope of leaving converted into something more valuable.
Casinos work the same way.
They don’t sell gambling.
They sell an alternate version of the future.
The one where you walked in out of curiosity and leave rich, weightless, finally avenged for all the mornings you obeyed the rules and received nothing spectacular in return.
The fact that almost no one lives that version is a statistical detail printed in dimmer type.
Night doesn’t need you to truly believe.
It only needs enough hope left in you to buy an attempt.
Batumi sold attempts.
A lucky hand.
An encounter.
A table.
A room on the thirtieth floor.
A more beautiful body.
A photograph capable of proving the night was better than you remembered.
Desire is the perfect customer.
It keeps no receipts.
It doesn’t read the terms.
And it comes back even after being treated like shit.
I felt no contempt.
That would have been too easy.
The lights were magnificent.
The city possessed energy, ambition, and an almost moving talent for making visible its need to be chosen.
Batumi didn’t merely want tourists.
It wanted to be desired.
Like someone who spent too long feeling peripheral and, the moment attention arrives, orders a dress brighter than anything else in the closet.
You cannot blame it entirely.
Being ignored doesn’t make you pure.
It makes you hungry.
The problem begins when attention becomes the only proof that you exist.
When every corner must be photographed.
Every building has to surpass the one beside it.
Every club has to shout louder.
Every night has to convince you that real life is happening precisely in there, behind that door, provided you can afford admission.
I knew that hunger well.
A photographer also wants to be chosen.
He looks at the world, selects a portion of it, and hopes someone who sees it will choose him in return.
Look at what I saw.
Look at how I saw it.
Look at me without making me enter the frame.
Perhaps that was why the night attracted me so much.
We were two liars with a good eye for color.
Batumi illuminated its insecurities.
I adjusted the exposure.
In front of a restaurant, two women sat inside a rectangular structure surrounded by warm light.
They looked enclosed in a display case, or in a frame already prepared.
They talked.
Smoked.
Behind them, signs promised food, beauty, and some fully equipped version of happiness.
And yet the liveliest thing was the conversation.
Not the restaurant.
Not the design.
Not the lighting installed with precision to persuade passersby to stop.
Two people sitting across from one another.
That again.
Everything else was scenery.
A little farther on, a dog ate from two plastic trays placed on the ground.
Above him, the lighting was perfect.
Behind him, the Alphabet Tower became a column of colored dots.
The city sold experiences.
The dog had found dinner.
Neither seemed interested in the contradiction.
I stopped to photograph him.
Everything returned there.
The towers.
Tourism.
The lights.
The stray dogs.
Vertical wealth and hunger at sidewalk level.
But also someone who had left food.
The city could be indifferent and kind within the same square yard.
That is why final judgments work so poorly.
Batumi wasn’t good.
It wasn’t bad.
It was inhabited.
A woman sat on a wooden chair beside her goods.
She held a phone in her hands.
Beside her were neatly arranged flowers, containers, bottles, and small objects waiting to be bought.
Behind her flowed cars, headlights, and people headed elsewhere.
The city earned money through her too.
Not only through casinos and hotels.
Through a small sale.
A long shift.
The time spent sitting and waiting for a customer while the phone offered a window bright enough to enter for a few minutes.
It’s easy to talk about the nighttime economy while looking at the towers.
Harder to remember all the people who stay awake so someone else’s night can feel free.
Drivers.
Waiters.
Cleaners.
Vendors.
Guards.
Women seated beside a row of flowers while somebody else orders champagne and calls the evening an escape.
One person’s freedom almost always has someone else’s working hours.
It kept raining.
Cars crowded the intersections.
Taxis moved among the signs.
A sign pointed toward *Terminal B*.
People went in and out.
The night wasn’t still.
It carried bodies, money, goods, desire, and exhaustion from one side of the city to the other.
I kept walking.
After a month, I knew some streets.
Not enough to belong to the city.
Enough that I no longer saw them as I had on the first night.
At first I had photographed the towers because they were large.
Then I began watching the people passing beneath them.
I had photographed the statues.
Then the men waiting for the bus.
The future.
Then the laundry hanging outside.
The markets.
The strawberries.
The dogs.
The people sitting before the sea without producing anything.
It had taken me a month to lower the lens a few feet.
Perhaps that was the journey.
Not traveling far.
Learning where to look.
All that time, I had tried to decide which was the real Batumi.
The elegant city along the waterfront.
The Soviet one of weathered apartment blocks.
The city of markets.
Of dogs.
The free city of the sea.
The nighttime city covered in light, determined to turn every desire into a transaction.
The most irritating answer was that they all were.
A city has no authentic face hidden beneath the others.
It has hours.
Contradictions.
Areas it displays and areas it leaves to rot.
People selling the future and others trying to reach the end of their shift.
Like us.
Human beings also love talking about their true nature, as though somewhere there existed an original version uncontaminated by fear, money, desire, exhaustion, and terrible romantic decisions.
There isn’t.
We are everything we do at different hours.
Generosity and calculation.
The light and what we choose not to illuminate.
The need to be seen and the fear that someone will look too closely.
Batumi had not hidden from me.
At first, I simply knew how to recognize only the things already prepared to be photographed.
That night I raised the camera again.
The exchange signs flashed above the wet street.
The numbers kept changing.
Cars passed.
Someone entered a club.
Someone else waited beneath an awning.
The sea, a short distance away, had become a black mass unable to reflect almost anything.
For once, it refused to cooperate with the photograph.
It felt right.
I had already collected enough.
Hundreds of images and no conclusion simple enough to sell as truth.
It was the best possible result.
I hadn’t come to Batumi to solve it.
And it hadn’t spent a month waiting for my judgment.
We had merely watched one another.
I through a lens.
It through hundreds of windows, storefronts, and eyes whose names I would never know.
The next day I would begin packing.
The city would continue.
The cranes would begin moving again.
The strawberries would be arranged in their crates.
Laundry would cross the streets once more.
The dogs would choose another doorway to sleep in.
Someone would sit before the sea.
And at sunset, all those lights would come on again, perfectly on time, promising people who had just arrived that a different life could begin in there.
Perhaps it would be true.
For someone, at least.
Behind me, a sign kept flashing.
Batumi didn’t say goodbye.
It had no time.
It was already selling the next night.