6 - Nyx

Nyx

             The weatherman had told me to expect rain.

             Not just rain—a torrential downpour.

             But the night air was crisp and clear and the sky lay naked across the darkening expanse. I opened my window to it all, thinking, it either rains or it doesn’t. I, too, can predict the future.

             I'll admit, I wasn't exactly the type of person to open my windows, much less sit at them. People didn't do that sort of thing in my neighborhood, if it could be called a neighborhood. It was one of those new mixed-use developments that seemed to invite a stylish group of young professionals looking to dodge adulthood a while longer. The billboards and signs advertising the development showed a group of four or five fashionably dressed twenty-somethings of diverse heritages crossing a fake cobblestone street, laughing, texting, practically fall-over drunk, but with perfect make-up. In the months since I had moved to that anomaly of a neighborhood, however, I had never seen those people. Those people, if they existed, preferred anonymity, hiding behind doors and blinds and curtains inside what one could only assume were stylishly decorated apartments—like the set of some sitcom, where friends gathered, flirted, rebutted each other's well-intentioned jabs, and an unseen audience laughed to fill the silences.

             No, my neighbors, when I saw them, rushed about with stern faces, barely raising their hollowed eyes to meet mine. I knew of course, on some level, that I was no different from all of them, whoever or whatever they were, but at the moment, I wasn't going to admit that inconvenient reality. So I sat at the window with the fifth of whiskey for company.
             Whiskey alone, I've found, has its way of transforming the world from its semblance as a hideous void into something transcendentally perfect and rhythmic. The alcohol seeps into the blood, and in a matter of heartbeats, makes its way to the brain, washes over its visage, and dulls the senses, creating a brief but beautiful glow, a warmth in the body and everything surrounding it. Resting my chin on the windowsill, I felt this warmth rush through me, and I watched in relative peace, the methodic decrescendo of movement and the quiet subsidence of chaos across the twinkling cityscape, the freeway and the suburbs beyond, stretching out as far as the eye could see.

             It was amid the dying bustle that a white sportscar—a Camaro, I think—pulled up to the curb beneath my window, its brake lights casting a red glow over the street and surrounding sidewalk. From the opening car door appeared two long black legs that, only after having ascertained the presence and firmness of the pavement beneath them, were followed by an even longer black body that moved with the grace and fluidity of a snake. The woman slammed the Camaro door shut without looking behind her, and in that same instant, the car sped away into the darkness of the dying city.

             She stood motionless, almost camouflaged against the slick blackness of the street. Her skin was an ebony shell of human skin, her hair was black, her mini-skirt was black. Only her shirt, which exposed a flat and narrow black mid-drift, stood out against the scenery, its silver-sequined fabric reflecting every gleam from every light, however faint, within the span of the fake city-block. I couldn't help but think that, in some way, she looked like an African tribeswoman, standing there tall and thin and elegant, not unlike the images I had seen somewhere of women in Ethiopia or the Congo, carrying baskets on their heads as they promenaded like barefoot peacocks in a midday heat along winding dirt roads, leaving plumes of brown dust in their wake. That was where she belonged, I thought, but here, in the middle of a fake world, a world no more than two years old, she was out of her element, like a caged wild, exotic bird who sang the story of her slavery—the slavery of her ancestors and now the slavery to which she freely subjected herself.

             Despite all of that, she stood with such poise, such confidence, I was sure she was at least seven feet tall in her platform shoes. She could have been a ballerina the way she spun around and stood there in third position, waiting, it looked like, to jeté across the barren street. I laughed aloud at the absurdity of a mother saying to her daughter, “You see that prostitute there? Why can’t you have posture like that?”

             My own laugh startled me, scared me almost. It was as though it came from someone else, from some other corner of the city. The laughter sounded strangely bitter, I thought, or affected in some way. I took in a large gulp of whiskey and tried not to feel it burn as it went down.

             I couldn’t help but think how strange it was to see a woman like her in an area like that, but there she stood between two pink and fragrant young cherry blossom trees. The existence of those trees had, of course, been deliberate. They had been carefully planted, cared for, made to grow straight and tall and beautiful, to be the envy of the other urban developments. People would live here just for the cherry blossom trees. Hundreds, maybe thousands would say, “I'm going to move here. The trees are so lovely.”

             But the architects, the marketers, the billion dollar corporation that had built that little city within the city had obviously not considered the possibility of that woman’s presence, and yet, as the moments passed, she began to seem less otherworldly to me. She seemed to dissolve into the landscape, her feet taking root in the concrete, clinging to whatever soil they could find, and she became, herself, a tree. For some reason, I wanted her to remain rooted forever in that sidewalk, to become a roosting place for mockingbirds.

             Suddenly, a stray homeless man emerged from the shadows of the cherry blossom trees, hobbling toward the woman. He appeared to make some kind of remark to her and gestured at her lightly with his hand. I expected her to respond, I suppose because we have some mistaken assumption that those lower beings of society must surely all love one another and live together in harmonious depravity and deprivation. But she said nothing to him. He again slurred something unintelligible to her statuesque face before giving up and continuing his shamble down the sidewalk.

             Maybe she’s waiting for the metro, I thought, noticing that several moments, maybe hours had passed since she had so much as turned her head. But the metro stop was a good fifty feet down the street, and I wasn’t even sure if the buses ran at that ungodly hour. Somehow, the street and the surrounding air seemed darker than it had been only moments before.

             Time stretched and yawned, and nothing happened. The city was so empty, I felt as though the woman and I must have been the only two people in it. I imagined, for a moment, the great rapture people are always warning and advertising about had finally come to fruition and left the two of us, the sinners, behind on a lifeless planet. Maybe when the dust of God’s wrath had settled, she and I would become friends and break into the houses of all of the respectable, responsible people, gone and dead in heaven now, and we would eat their food or try on their clothes and jewelry and drink their wine before it over-aged.

All I had to do was ask, I thought. She was six stories below me, but I think if I had whispered to her, she might have heard. She might have turned her head up toward my open window and spoken to me. She’d tell me about her nights on the streets and the men she had known, and I’d tell her about my days as an entry-level accountant for a mid-sized corporation.

             But before I had a chance to do anything illogical or embarrassing, I became aware that I was, in fact, smashed and full of nonsense. I attempted to collect myself with the reassuring, if not rational, thoughts with which we so often console ourselves—thoughts like, at least you’re not a prostitute.

I lit a cigarette, feeling a little better about things. I inhaled and exhaled, watching my smoky breath fall, dissipating into the blackness, and wondered if some part of me could ever reach the woman dressed in silver and black. I waited, watching the last foggy remnants descend on the light breeze toward the statue-like woman until, finally, total darkness washed over the street and air.

  

             A blinding morning sun didn’t wake me up—it was last night’s promised rain. Its coolness splashed and splattered across my overhanging hand, which clutched a damp cigarette butt between two fingers. Before finding my way to bed in the faint half-light of the rainy morning, I glanced out my window to find, much to my astonishment, that life had returned to normal. Cars splashed along the street through the newly formed puddles; a few faceless people bustled under open umbrellas and raincoats and newspapers, weaving between the cherry blossom trees; and somewhere, behind the buildings, behind the clouds, the sun was rising. There was no darkness, no great rapture, no seven-foot prostitute beneath my window.

There probably never was, I thought.