"the odd thing is that it's hard not to believe her story."

This is lovely to me, and had me thinking about "The Fall."

New York Times' Lens Blog: "A Photographic Vision in Lourdes"

Urban Decaydreams

Urban Decaydreams

How seldom have I wandered busy streets alone,

escaping to the maddened mobs of my species,

that there I might go anywhere, be anyone,

and lost or dreamt to forget in a flowing sea,

a patchwork of pea coats and shoes, handbags and ties,

this plain padded-cell, the monotony of me,

where dirty crack-whores guard the dirty, cracked sidewalk,

awaiting confrontation or competition

or indecent proposals. Eyes and thoughts stalk

me: I wonder at the difference ten blocks can make,

and if the souls of the street might bring confusion

or cause a sleeping sympathy in me to wake.

Could I have been that struggling artist in her prime,

barefoot, taking collection for her addiction,

if I’d learned to sing “sister can you spare a dime”

in a low and minor key, with a forlorn voice

like nails on a chalkboard, a blade along glass, in

brain and gut-wrenching pain? I guess I had a choice.

For I might have been in business and commanded

a world of stocks and bonds and trades with the graceful

march of a pair of legs up to there and landed

in the rich arms of a married man, if only

I had learned to lie or walk in high-heeled shoes while

holding a smile, though counterfeit, shamed, and heavy.

I must have had a choice because I see my face

in the reflection of a woman in disguise

window-shopping for jewelry that might un-trace

the unpaved path that brought her here until, at last,

she’s convinced her eyes to believe her shallow lies,

while her dark sunglasses conceal her humble past.

So in the presence of my race, I don’t pray, but

I dream; I dream that for a moment, one might have

mistaken me for a someone with a secret;

I tell myself that I have been them all (the un-

and overdone) until a stranger’s glancing laugh

reveals my only secret is that I have none.

Table of Contents/Progress

Eighteen Stories

Table of Contents

B 1 - “The Tunnel” - complete

G - “Reconciliation” - incomplete

2 - “The Mere Players” - complete, but needs major work before sharing

3 - “Last Mistake” - complete

4 - “Last Words” - unwritten

5 - “Highrise” - complete

6 - “Nyx” - complete

7 - “The Wedding Feast” - incomplete

8 - “The Storm” - incomplete

9 - “Newborn” - unwritten

10 - “The Death of a Family” - complete

11 - Untitled - unwritten

12 - Untitled - unwritten

13 - “The Ocean” - complete, but needs major work before sharing

14 - Untitled - unwritten

15 - “The Tower” - complete, but needs major work before sharing

16 - Untitled - unwritten

17 - “The Fall” - complete 

Fathers, Sons, and Ghosts

Fathers, Sons, and Ghosts

             He lies there clothed in a warm, familiar darkness as I, still awake, observe the subtle, steady ebb and flow of a pale bare back, his quiet breaths summoning soft beams of vague heavenly light drifting through the window panes, which leave shadows like scars across his skin.

             They are so much more like children when they sleep.

             Even in the dark, especially in the dark, his room is an orphan boy’s: half-boxed promises collect dust in the corners, blank, white walls stare back, unresponsive to the clean or dirty crumpled boxers, the wrinkled silk tie.

             Even less distressed over that hole—the one where a crucifix used to hang over his mattress—the crucifix he replaced one restless night with a worn leather belt—the belt that just wasn’t strong enough.

             Of course, who am I to say, but I know it’s his father—the unholy ghost who shares this room with him in the dark, the one with the blank white wall stare. The one who knew how to take it like a man and get angry. The one who’d be with him always, to the end of time.

             And now, his son, a sleeping child, knows he’ll never be a god.

             And I, searching in the blackness for a man who’s barely there, for a man who’s barely a man, whisper to his back like a mother to her sleeping child, “Yes, you’re just a man, but if you let me, I’ll be your savior.”

3 - Last Mistake

Last Mistake

             I stumbled in from the balcony through a wall of vertical blinds and let myself fall back over the armrest of a loveseat. The room was dark, save for the television flashes dancing and laughing across the textured white walls. I watched the world stop with an unsettling silence and waited. I waited for something to happen.

             I settled deep into the loveseat, heavy with indolence. Thoughts dissolved, synapses disengaged, molecular bonds, atomic structures fell apart before my smoke-filled eyes. Even the vertical blinds, still swinging in perfect cadence with the dancers on the walls, began to blend together, to lose their own convictions. Every whirling electron, the whole of the cosmos existed within that little apartment.

             For a moment, the universe made sense, the meaning of life, my role in it, the whole bit. I needed a record to remember, to live to tell what I had seen, but my body was too heavy, too tired to find pen and paper.

             Then he stumbled in, disturbing the blinds into a clash of chaos and violence and imperfect madness, his smile ignorant and unapologetic. Overhead his ceiling was just a ceiling stained and peeling, and the cosmos was just an apartment. His hand seized my calf, and I knew there was nothing I could do. He crept and clambered or slithered across me until we were cheek-to-cheek the way I had seen people dance before in movies or in dreams.

             We didn’t dance.

             We rose, we collided, we strained, we resisted, and together we fell, without a sheet or blush to shield our shame.

             And though the cosmos had vanished, I had known its face, and resentfully, I accepted my fate.

             The sun slid in through the still vertical blinds, too bright and too late. He was standing in front of them, an unlit cigarette dangling between his lips.

             There, he almost said, throwing his old boy scout shirt over my bare legs.

             He held out a carton of cigarettes, as though to offer me a smoke, or his deficient conversation.

             Button by button I thought I felt a strange sense of nothingness swelling in me, a desire for a meaning, a reason why, I knew he couldn’t give me, but would only take away as soon as he got the chance.

             A girl in her right mind might have known the right words to say.

             I don’t remember last night at all, to tell you the truth.

             Bitch, he muttered, or something like it, and parting the vertical blinds, he stepped out onto the balcony to smoke, while I sat and waited.

             I waited for something to happen.

The Tunnel, RIP

The Good Latimer Expressway Tunnel

1930-2006

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.

17 - The Fall

The Fall

             Thomas and I stood there on opposite sides of the elevator, staring silently at the golden numbers above the mirrored doors before us. We were like strangers there, forced to share an eight by eight-foot space in the relative silence of lyricless, familiar music. It was a long ride up to the penthouse floor.

             “You'll do great,” he said, glancing away from those numbers to flash me a white, approving smile.

             I knew it was I who should have been saying those words to Thomas—that he should have been the nervous one, the one who needed edification. But all the same, as I watched the illuminated numbers ascending in those small but definite and unforgiving increments of one, I couldn't help but sense that I was falling. When we would reach the sixteenth floor, I wouldn't feel as though I had reached the top. Instead, I imagined, I might feel as though I had landed. No, not landed—crashed. It would be like the time Thomas had jumped from my dorm room window all those years ago. The floor R.A. had been tipped that there was a boy in room 204, and after a few loud, urgent knocks on the bolted door, he had jumped—he promised he could make that jump—and he had broken his leg. It had been I who had cried, not Thomas, as I drove him to the emergency room that night.

             I laughed now to think about it, but then the “ding” of the elevator, marking our arrival, startled me out of memory. My stomach fell, filling me once again with the falling sensation that had triggered thoughts of simpler, happier times.

             Thomas allowed me off the elevator first. Then, seeming to try to correct the formality of it all, he took my arm. Taking my arm, however, seemed to me to be every bit as formal as when he had taken my arm from my father's at the altar on our wedding day. I had hated all of the formality—the formality and the wedding planning. The dress, the flowers, selecting the songs, choosing the rings. It wasn't until we had exchanged those vows—for richer, for poorer—and eaten the Eucharist together, kneeling in front of the altar and an ivory Christ bleeding on the cross, that the world and its trivialities had melted away for me. And then the massive doors at the back of the church had swung open, and I had felt free, happy, and entirely in love. I remember wanting that feeling to last forever. Twelve years later, my husband was taking my arm and leading me down a long hallway to a penthouse dinner party.

             But before I knew it, the Prestons' door stood before us, tall and grand and sealed shut, but with the power to swallow us whole it seemed. For a moment, I allowed myself to feel entitled. We were, after all, the type of people who went to fancy dinner parties in penthouse suites in the city. This was who we were. This was what we did. We would tell friends and neighbors tomorrow or the next day about the Prestons and how lovely it all had been (we would use words like “lovely” and we'd mean it). Better yet, maybe this was the start of something new. Maybe the Prestons would become our friends, the people with whom we would discuss the trivial goings-on of our daily lives.

             But the way Thomas cleared his throat as he rang the bell sobered me to the fact that tonight was anything but trivial. I remember wondering then if I would ever be able to cast aside that evening, the way one can casually mention any other meal. I wondered if I would look back on the night and laugh, as I was now able to laugh about Thomas' broken leg.

             As footsteps approached from the other side, Thomas dropped my arm, and for a moment, I felt a strange instinctive desire to run back to the elevator and ride it back down. But then the door swung open and revealing Mrs. Preston in a sapphire dress that flattered her shapely but aging figure. She wore almost too much make up, as the wealthy and aging are prone to do, and yet there was a distinguishable warmth in her appearance. She, who had hosted Lord knows how many dinner parties, knew how to make one feel warm and welcome. Such was the feeling that came over me upon seeing her. I felt I knew her instantly, that we were old friends.

             “Oh, and you must be Mr. and Mrs. Stevens! Come in, come in! Can I take your coat? Your purse?” She hardly allowed us to speak. I handed her my purse and, with a spasm of regret, realized that it was the same purse I had been using for nearly a year and that it wasn't an expensive name-brand and that it wasn't made of Italian leather. But Mrs. Preston didn't notice, or pretended not to, which made me feel more at ease. I slipped off my coat, and Thomas took it from me and handed it to Mrs. Preston.

             “Thomas Stevens,” my husband said, shaking her hand, “and this is my wife.”

             “Bianca,” I said.

             “Of course,” she chirped, embracing my arms and kissing me quickly on the cheek. Her arms were cold like the room and hard like the marble floors that stretched out at our feet. “Mr. Preston will be out presently. Excuse me while I put these away for you. Make yourselves at home!”

             One could have felt more at home in a Gothic cathedral. Following in Thomas' footsteps, I stepped tentatively into the large living room that flowed seamlessly into a formal dining room. Above the dining room table floated a grand chandelier, which looked out through a large bay window displaying a panoramic view of the downtown cityscape. There was a vague smell of spices trailing in from some unseen kitchen, but the large, white room was silent save for the clacks and clicks of our shoes across the floor.

             I caught a glimpse of myself in a gold-framed mirror, which made the already expansive room seem infinite in size. I scrutinized my new dress and my new shoes, bought just for the occasion. Were they too fancy? No, certainly Mrs. Preston's dress was far more formal, but that was to be expected of her. Mrs. Preston had earned the distinction of wearing whatever she pleased. But my dress with its white iridescent all over embroidery seemed to compete with the resplendence of Mrs. Preston's deep blue evening gown.

Looking away from my reflection to the mirror's ornate frame, I decided to think more positive thoughts. This is what I do. I go to dinner parties in penthouse apartments and laugh lightly and dress elegantly and smile pleasantly. This is where I belong. Why shouldn't I? I caught my own eye in the mirror and saw the same look on my face that I often saw in my oldest daughter's face when I knew she was telling a lie.

             Suddenly, Mrs. Preston was in the mirror. Blushing, I turned around and tried to disguise my self-examination by casting my eyes at the marble floor, then at the vaulted ceiling.

             “Your dress is lovely,” she said. “Mind if I ask where you got it?”

             “Inez Boutique,” I said in a matter-of-fact way of which I couldn't help but be proud. The truth is, Thomas and I had gone shopping together earlier in the week, we had rung the buzzer, we had been allowed entrance, and he and a saleslady had helped me pick it out. It had been my first time in Inez, and I had felt a twinge of guilt as Thomas swiped the credit card for a dress I might not ever wear again. It was only the second time he had picked out a dress for me. When we had been on our honeymoon in Colorado, walking through a crowded shopping center, he had seen a white gauze peasant dress in a window, and he had insisted on buying it for his new wife, who, he said, he wanted to spoil rotten with pretty things.

             “It's lovely!” Mrs. Preston repeated, more enthusiastically this time.

             “Well, my children won't keep this dress lovely for long,” I said humbly.

             “Children?” A deep voice echoed from the marble floor to the high vaulted ceiling. But we hadn't heard anyone walk in behind them. Thomas and I turned to greet Mr. Preston, finding him wearing slippers, a button-down business shirt, no tie or coat, and a look of concern, maybe even disappointment.

             “Yes,” Thomas spoke up, his voice cracking slightly, “four, in fact.”

             “How did I not know this?” he sounded betrayed and jovial at the same time, as only a drunk man can. The top two buttons of his shirt were unbuttoned and his sleeves were rolled up to the elbows. Thomas now seemed grossly overdressed in his rented tux. It occurred to me then that just as lavishness was the privilege of the rich, so was slovenliness. The only people who had to worry about anticipating and executing the correct degree of dress formality for any social occasion was everyone but the rich.

             “Well,” Thomas said, searching for something in the pocket of his rented tux, “I try to keep family and work life separate.”

             “Don't you find that hard? Most men your age haven't the discipline for that.”

             “Well, I missed the third one's birth,” he said, looking over at me, reddening slightly. “It was the week of the Kohns trial.” The word “Kohns” still brought back the pain of childbirth. But I smiled at Mr. Preston. It was all going to be worth it, I thought.

             “Well,” said Mr. Preston, smiling, “that's what this profession takes: sacrifice.” Thomas breathed an audible sigh of relief at these words.

             The Prestons, of course, had never had children. That had been their sacrifice. I knew this somehow without having to be told.

             Mrs. Preston, who had perfected the art of diffusing awkward situations, offered to show me around so that the men could “talk business.” As Mrs. Preston showed me from room to room and discussed the artifacts along the way, I had to remind myself that I was in an apartment and not an old European cathedral. Each door opened into a guest room or a sitting room or a library that seemed to sprout off the hallway on command. As Mrs. Preston closed the doors, each of those small worlds evaporated back into the nothingness from which they had materialized. The guest rooms—there were three—each had king-sized beds, though Mrs. Preston didn't offer to show me her and Mr. Preston's bedroom, and thus I was left to imagine the magnificence of their bed. Thomas and I had recently upgraded to a king-sized bed. We had come a long way from sharing the twin-sized bed we had shared on several drunken occasions in my dorm room. There had been a kind of romance then, too, I thought. Not grand or glamorous or anything—but our bodies had been inseparable then. One couldn't roll over without waking the other. Now, the great divide of sheets and comforter and mattress kept each of us oblivious to the other's existence. It suddenly struck me that that was what we had been striving for all along—more space, more square footage. And the more space there was, the further away Thomas seemed to be.

             The evening progressed pleasantly enough. There had been a mild confusion about where Thomas and I should sit at the Prestons' long formal dining room table, but finally Mr. Preston had set himself at one end of the table with his back to the grand bay window. After his wife sat at the opposite end, Thomas and I sat across from one another on the table's longer sides, and a man in a tuxedo took away the extraneous chairs before bringing out soup and baguettes and filling the glasses with red wine.

             The wine seemed to bridge whatever gaps I had sensed earlier in the evening. I was more convinced than ever that we were turning a corner now and that any misgivings or insecurities I had felt earlier had been mere illusion. I chastised myself for not having more faith in these nice, normal people. They were, after all, made of flesh and blood—not marble. They were no better than Thomas or I.

             “So do you have a nanny to watch your children?” she asked. “Oh, I hope I'm not prying too much! You must excuse me! Mr. Preston always says I'm too familiar!”

             “No, not at all! I stay home with the children,” I said, sipping from my wine glass, which had miraculously refilled itself throughout the evening. “I worked as a teacher until our first was born. We decided this was how we wanted it.” I looked over to Thomas, but he was deep in conversation with the increasingly gregarious Mr. Preston. “But when we are out—like tonight—we have someone watch the children.”

             “Is she any good?”

             “Oh, yes. As far as I know,” I said, thankful that I had not disclosed the fact that my mother stayed with the children when I needed a sitter.

             “Let me tell you, hold on to her,” Mrs. Preston said emphatically. “Good help is so hard to come by. I don't know what we'd do without Philip. But we've had some horrible ones, and my poor friends, too!”

             “Yes, I know how it goes,” I lied.

             The dinner was served on gold-rimmed bone china. It made me think about our fine china, collecting dust on the top shelves of our kitchen cabinets. We hadn't received anywhere close to the full number of place settings for which we had registered before our wedding, and it had been so expensive, I always feared using what little we had and breaking it somehow. We would use it someday, I knew. Maybe someday very soon.

             I subconsciously watched the moon rising between two skyscrapers throughout the evening. I sometimes felt that the moon was peering at me, like an inquisitive eye between the slats of a backyard fence. As the night drew on and the wine replenished itself, the moon rose imperceptibly. By dessert, it was so high as to be barely visible, crowning the view from the bay window.

             “What a lovely necklace! What is it?” asked Mrs. Preston, leaning forward, and squinting her eyes to see. It suddenly struck me that Mrs. Preston had been interrogating me the entire evening.

             “Oh, it's just an old religious medal,” I explained, tugging at it with my finger, as was my nervous habit. I felt like half the night had been spent explaining myself. “It's St. Bernadette. I got it when I was in France.”

             “So you've been to Paris!”

             “Oh, well, yes,” I said, omitting the fact that I had bought the medal during my visit to the grotto in Lourdes and that it had been fifteen years ago during a summer study-abroad program in college, that I had only spent a total of twenty-four hours in Paris that summer.

             I was half-listening to Mrs. Preston talk about how she and Mr. Preston had visited the cathedrals their first time in France (but hadn't been back to them since) and half-watching the moon rise out of view when Mr. Preston stood up in his chair, blocking most of the window. He tinked his wine glass with his dessert spoon four times, and Mrs. Preston stopped mid-sentence. The moment was here at last, and I felt my stomach rise into my chest again.

             “Well, let me tell you, it's been a pleasure having you Stevens this evening. Hell, let me cut to the chase. You know why you're here. I don't know why you need to sit here at dinner for three hours just to hear what we all know I'm going to say. I suppose it's because Thomas—” Mrs. Preston shifted uncomfortably in her chair, and Mr. Preston staggered slightly, “is one hell of a hard worker. And he knows what sacrifice is. And I've said it before, and I'll say it again. That's what we need at Preston & Thurman. A man who puts his work before his own wants and desires. It's . . . it's selflessness that this business needs! You know—it's not so much a business—what we do . . . it's a vocation, a calling. You don't do this for a livin', not like this, unless you're damn-well meant to. Well, look at me, getting all poetic. I said I'd get to the point. So, Thomas, it's with pleasure, on behalf of this firm, that I make—”

             At that very moment, I felt the blood rush from my face. Just outside the large bay window, a white figure fell with what I can only describe now as deliberation. The figure—I couldn't tell if it was male or female, it all happened so fast—fell with its arms and palms held outward, as though soaring, and looked down beneath its feet toward its destination.

             Before I realized it, I was standing before my half-empty dessert bowl, still staring out through the large bay window, and everyone else at the table was gazing at me in silence.

             “What is it?” Mr. Preston looked behind him, half-shocked, half-confused.

             “Did you see it?” I was looking at Thomas and at Mrs. Preston, who appeared to be more shocked than Mr. Preston.

             “See what?” Mrs. Preston said, squinting her eyes at me.

             “The person—” I was still looking at the window. “The falling person!”

             “Are you sure it wasn't a bird?”

             “Of course. I'm sure it was just a bird, Bianca,” Thomas placed a hand on my elbow. Then he whispered urgently, “Sit down, it's fine.”

             “No, it's not fine!” I said, yanking my arm away from his hand and moving toward the window.

             “What the hell?” I heard Mr. Preston behind me.

             “I—I have no idea,” Thomas was saying, sounding both apologetic and shocked.

             Mrs. Preston joined me at the window. “You couldn't have seen anyone falling, dear,” Mrs. Preston said, trying to gloss over any awkwardness as usual. She placed her cold hand on my bare shoulder.                          “There's no way anyone could have gotten to the roof. There's no roof access over here. I assure you. It's impossible!” Mrs. Preston leaned her head against the glass in her effort to look beyond the lower apartments' balconies. “See! Nothing there, my darling!”

             I was suddenly disgusted by her familiarity, her falsehood. “I know what I saw! It was a white—a man or woman—falling. The arms were open, palms out. I swear, I'm not making this up. I'm not.”

             I turned to them. Their gazes were piercing and yet somehow distant.

             “Someone's down there dying—dead! I saw them fall!”

             Mr. Preston looked legitimately frightened. He stepped toward me, “Dear, I think you've had too much—”

             “I'm not crazy! I'm not drunk!” My body was shaking and my stomach felt permanently lodged in my throat. “I can't pretend I didn't see what I know I saw.”

             I cast my eyes at Thomas, then at Mr. and Mrs. Preston, then at Thomas again, searching his face for a sign of compassion and recognition. But his eyes seemed filled with venomous tears.

             Then I knew. I knew what I hadn't been allowing myself to know for some time.

             Without saying a word, I strode across the expansive room, every clack of my shoes resonating in the cold marble air. No one said anything to stop me, or if they did, I didn't hear them. I only knew then that I needed to see the sidewalk close up, to confirm to myself what I knew I had seen.

             The elevator doors opened, pouring forth an untimely soft jazz. I jumped in as though I were running away from something, rather than toward something. The doors closed in front of me, revealing to me a quivering, pale reflection. As the elevator fell sixteen stories, I feared what I would find—blood, a corpse, nothing.

             The elevator doors opened themselves to me again, and I burst forth across the lobby and past the doorman. And after pushing through the revolving door, I stepped out into the pale silence of the moonlit street.

             I stood there for a moment, taking in the vacancy, the void. My breath froze in the coolness of the night air in quick, small clouds. I must have run out onto that sidewalk, where nothing stood except me and two stone lions, mouths agape, flanking the apartment building's front staircase.

             “Is everything fine, ma'am?” I whipped around to find the doorman descending the staircase. At this point, I was beginning to question myself, what I had seen, what I had done. I tugged at the medal.

I nodded.

             “You look pale, ma'am, are you sure you're alright?”

             “Yes,” I said. “I just wanted some fresh air,” nodding again and gesturing for him to go back in The doorman didn't look convinced, but he stepped back in through the revolving door. Still looking around the sidewalk for some evidence of what I had seen, I felt a strange feeling sweep over me. It wasn't relief, and it wasn't exactly fear. It was solitude, and yet it was comforting.

             I slowly regained composure. A car or two swept the cold night air around my shoulders. I had forgotten my coat and my purse, I now realized. But that door had closed forever, I thought. I couldn't go back.

             But I had to go somewhere. I turned back toward the building with the intention of using the front desk phone to call my mother, the only person I felt I could turn to now. Thoughts flew through my head—thoughts of escape, separation, divorce. There was an impassible distance between us. I looked up toward the top floor of the building. Thomas was up there, somewhere. What was he doing? Had Mr. Preston finished his speech? Was Thomas even thinking of me?

             At the top of the stairs, I looked in front of me at the revolving door and, for a moment, I saw the figure again, inside.

             No, not inside. Outside. The falling figure, I then knew, had been me. I watched my reflection flash on the polished glass at intervals.

             No, I wouldn't call my mother. Not yet, I decided. I would go back. I would get my purse and coat, and I would call a taxi, or something.

             But before I made it to the door, a blackness permeated the reflection. It was Thomas, carrying my purse and coat.

             Silently, he stepped through the revolving door and placed the coat over my shoulders.

             “I saw it, too, Bianca” he said, solemnly and simply, looking into my eyes. “I saw it, too.”

5 - Highrise

Highrise

             Five stories below us, people were scurrying along the busy weekday sidewalk like cockroaches across a dirty kitchen floor. A blob of saliva hung dangerously from Luke’s mouth, threatening to plunge a hundred feet below where it would land into a beehive on the unsuspecting head of some affluent woman lunching at one of the cafes below. 

             “No, don’t do it!” I said in a girlish voice, unwittingly betraying the flirtatious undertones I had been trying to repress all afternoon.

Luke’s air conditioner was broken, but the open windows allowed a breeze to invade the quiet room, lifting the white opaque curtains and fluttering the pages of the magazines scattered across the coffee table.

He sucked the glob of spit back into his mouth and then imitated my previous words in that falsetto voice men always use when they want to sound mockingly feminine.

“That was attractive,” I scoffed. I looked across the ledge of the window into the apartments and offices of the hundreds of nameless faces I passed on the streets everyday.

“Well, I was trying to entice you to make mad, passionate love to me. Most women can’t resist a man who spits. At least that’s what I've heard.”

Evidently, Luke was the kind of man who still called it “making love.” He had used the phrase several times within the span of the four hours I had known him. “Making love” meant nostalgia of more romantic days, the days when movies were still in black and white and women were filmed close up in soft focus, the days before they simply called it “doing it,” or worse yet, “screwing.” He even looked like the kind of guy who would call it “making love.” He had a certain Bohemian appearance about him, though he was well-groomed; he was intelligent without being pretentious; he was sophisticated without seeming prudish. He had a habit of biting one side of his lower lip whenever there was an awkward pause in the conversation; he ran his hands through his tastefully-long brown hair whenever he was trying to look confident; and whenever he smiled, which was rare, a small dimple formed in his left cheek. It was when he smiled that I could see the little boy he must have been at one point in his life.

Even as we sat on the window ledge of his beautiful downtown loft, I sensed that he was one of the many people who would drift in and out of my life, leaving behind only a subtle memory or two. His overall impact would be minor. I knew that in a matter of months, I would have difficulty even recalling his name. But maybe one day, as an old, wrinkled woman lying in my warm bed, looking back on my life, I would remember Luke, along with the beauty and carefree liberation of my younger years. And maybe one day, Luke, as an old, withered man hidden away in some obscure corner of the country, would remember that summer in Houston when he met—What was her name? Maggie? Or was it Maddie?—and wonder what had ever come of her, if she was still alive.

But at the present moment, we were in denial of anything that might remotely resemble human vulnerability, including romantic sentimentality and the distant but ever-looming threat of old age. Right now, we had neither pasts nor futures; we were simply two twenty-somethings hanging out a window of an apartment, flirting beneath the covers of witty, acrimonious banter.

“Sorry about my air conditioner. You’d think as much as I have to pay for this place, that they could at least keep the air up and running, especially in the hottest month of the year.”

“Yeah,” I said, hoping to keep the topic of conversation as far away from “the weather” as possible. Nothing kills conversation like the weather. “So . . . do you bring girls up here often?” I asked nonchalantly as I walked over to his coffee table and mindlessly tossed around the strewn magazines.

Though the question was ambiguously flirtatious, it was something I had often wondered about the guys I met at parties or at clubs. In some minor way, it mattered to me whether or not I was simply one of many, even though I, myself, had a terrible habit of dating a man for a week or so before growing bored with the relationship and springing to the next prospective guy-of-the-week a few days later. I found that in the matter of a week or two, it was possible, if not altogether unavoidable, to exhaust all resources of conversation, interest, and sexual attraction intrinsic in the initial connection between two people. I had become one of those fabulous metropolitan women on TV I'd always envied. I blamed it on my youthfulness, or my upbringing, or the culture, or whatever other justification I found readily available and at my disposal. Though the pattern of my romantic life probably accounted for my ability to interpret a person in the matter of a few short hours, it also resulted in my failure to achieve true intimacy with a member of the opposite sex, though love, I felt, existed out there somewhere. It was waiting, and one of those days, I'd find it, probably when I least expected it.

“Hardly ever,” Luke said with more seriousness than I had heard him speak all afternoon. “I’ve lived in this apartment—let’s see—about a year and a half, and you’re only the third girl who’s ever been inside. And the other two were whores, so I guess you should feel pretty honored.”

“Yeah, I guess I’m in good company, aren’t I?”

“You most certainly are. In fact, I’d rather the prostitutes were here with us. They sure were a lot more fun than you.”

“I’ll bet they were. And they were probably a little more pricey, too, I imagine.”

“Well, it was money well spent.”

“Well, maybe I’d be more entertaining if you paid me a little better. I mean, a girl’s got to have some kind of incentive to hang out with a guy like you, especially in a hot, smelly apartment like this.”

“Touché.”

Luke was evidently the kind of guy who said things like “touché.” He said things like “making love” and “touché,” and, though I had only met him at the Rothko at about ten that morning in front of an abysmally dark canvas, I felt as though I had known him much longer.

“You know,” he said with a sober face, “I was joking a second ago. I made all that stuff up about the prostitutes.”

“I know that,” I smiled. I felt like I already knew him well enough to tell when he was joking and when he was serious. He was growing on me. Part of me hoped that I would still be in his apartment this time next week. Maybe it’ll be different with him, I allowed myself to think for a moment. But even then, I knew that a week or two later, I would find myself rejecting Luke’s call on my cell phone as I sat in a candlelit restaurant with some guy named Alex or Charlie or Matthew. In a way, I felt sorry for Luke already.

“How rude of me. We’ve been sitting here sweating for half an hour and I haven’t even offered you a drink.” He stood up and crept toward the refrigerator in his kitchen, which was larger than my entire apartment. “See, I guess I’m not used to having girls like you up here. Prostitutes don’t require too much watering,” he said, disappearing behind the refrigerator door. Then he added thoughtfully, his head rising above the refrigerator door, “At least I don’t think they do. I don’t know. Maybe that’s why they began to wither after a few days.”

“Enough with the prostitutes already,” I said, half in earnest.

“What, is someone jealous?” he asked.

“Yeah, that’s it. You got me.”

“I knew it. The prostitute story always gets the girls jealous.”

“What girls?” I asked. “I thought there were no other girls.”

“Oh yeah. Yeah, that’s right,” he said. “So what’ll it be? Bud or, uh, Bud?”

“What? Beer? You don’t have anything else? I’d be happy with a water.”

“Nope. Beer’s all we have. You could get water out of the tap, but at your own discretion. I wouldn’t trust the pipes in this place. This building’s kind of old, I think.”

“Um, beer it is then, I guess.” I was slightly troubled by the fact that his refrigerator was packed with nothing but booze. It seemed unlikely that anyone who called it “making love,” or said things like “touché,” or meditated in the Rothko, or decorated his windows with white, lightweight curtains would stock his refrigerator entirely with twelve-packs of cheap beer.

He opened two beers and walked toward me, handing me a can. He looked perfect standing there with the sun coming in on one side of his face and the wind stroking his brown locks. I took a sip and smiled. “So. Do you always drink at two in the afternoon?”

“Do you always go home with complete strangers?” He turned his head and spat out the window.

All I could respond with was, “Touché.”

  

             The rest of that afternoon is only a series of faint images, which, in all likelihood, are only fabrications invented by my mind in its effort to piece together that fragmented day, to make sense of what happened next, or maybe simply to bring comfort or justification through some kind of narrative structure. At any rate, I have learned that memories are only superfluous remnants that overstay their welcome in the mind. It is possible to know without remembering anything at all.

             All I really remember is waking up alone, naked in the white sheets of a stranger’s bed. It was dark. An alarm clock on the nightstand read 11:34 in red block-numbers. The roar of the city outside had quieted to a soft, almost sensuous purr.

             I turned on the bedside lamp and searched the sheets for a note. I had grown accustomed to waking up next to notes. But I was completely alone. I waited, watching the time change minute by minute on the alarm clock. After about half an hour, I grew nervous. The loneliness of the room closed in on me. I had to escape it.

             I got out of bed, gathered my clothes from the crumpled pile on the floor, and dressed myself before walking over to the window ledge where we had sat flirting earlier that afternoon, where several empty beer cans now sat abandoned. My purse still lay where I had dropped it, under the window, but my billfold lay beside it, open. There was nothing left inside—no money, no credit cards, not even my driver’s license.

Without a word or thought, I picked up my purse and my empty billfold, stepped out of that beautiful but sparsely decorated apartment, and walked down the hall where I took the elevator five stories down into an empty lobby.

             Outside, the warm city air was still, and my mind could think of nothing except that it would be a long and lonely walk home to Montrose. As I walked, I stared down at the dirty sidewalk, watching the lines in the pavement pass me one by one. Each slab of cement was speckled with its own unique design of dark stains, which had once been soft, pink blots of bubble gum, spit out by some naïve schoolgirl.

I watched my feet move slower and slower, until they refused to move at all. I dared not raise my eyes to the faceless strangers who brushed past me.

B1 - The Tunnel

The Tunnel

My Guide and I crossed over and began

to mount that little known and lightless road

to ascend into the shining world again.

He first, I second, without thought of rest

we climbed the dark until we reached the point

where a round opening brought in sight the blest

and beauteous shining of the Heavenly cars.

And we walked out once more beneath the Stars.

The streets of Deep Ellum were lined with an eclectic array of nightclubs, restaurants, tattoo parlors, bars, and intimate concert venues. During the day, the place was reminiscent of an old, forgotten ghost town, but as the sun set over the downtown skyline, everyone from fake-ID-toting high school girls, to wannabe Rastafarians and rosy-faced middle-aged businessmen flocked to its boulevards. As dusk settled in, the sidewalk filled with an unnatural blend of rap, rock, and reggae as music seeped out the open doorways, and the smells of deep-fried food, cigarette smoke, and alcohol saturated the air. Stereotypical bald, portly bouncers stood like permanent fixtures at many of the thresholds, calling out to us from the shadows:

“Hey, ladies. It’s ‘Ladies’ Night.’ That means a three-dollar cover charge. You and all your friends.”

We only smiled politely and moved on. Usually, Jenny, my best friend, added something to the effect of, “No thanks, we were just on our way to meet a friend at All Good Cafe,” or “Sorry, I just spent all the money I had at the record store.”

On more than one occasion, we were approached by a mob of evangelicals donned in identical white t-shirts who paraded around the streets of Deep Ellum, carrying a seven-foot tall white cross made from two-by-fours and chanting in unison some clever catchphrase designed to convert all of the sinful heathens who frequented that questionable neighborhood. “Have you accepted Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Savior?” a pimply teenage boy inquired one evening.

Of the four of us, Jenny was the only one to speak up. She told him that we attended school at a Catholic college, that a couple of us had been going to Catholic school our whole lives, and that we were all, to varying degrees, Christian. “Are Catholics really Christians?” he asked. “I didn’t know that.” The rest of us were eager to move on, but Jenny was busy cheerfully enlightening the boy about early Church history, the Reformation, and the like. By the time she had concluded her little lecture, Jenny and Mark were on a first-name basis, and he had gladly given each of us stickers saying, “Smile, Jesus loves you.”

“Rachel! You have to come get your cards read with me!” I suddenly found Jenny pulling my left arm toward a woman sitting behind a small card table on the corner of Commerce and Malcolm X.

“Tarot?” I asked, planting my feet into the pavement.

“Yes, Tarot. Come on, you don’t have to take it seriously if you don’t want to. It’s just for fun. And besides, it’s only five dollars.”

“It’s not fun. It’s creepy . . . and stupid. And besides, I’m completely broke. Where’d Caitlin and Diana go?”

“They’re using the restroom in All Good Cafe. And you wouldn’t be broke if you didn’t spend all your money on those cancer sticks. That's such a waste of money.”

“And getting your cards read isn’t?”

“Fine then. I guess you’ll just never get to know all of the magical things your future holds,” Jenny retorted, as though that was supposed to hurt me. Then she smiled sympathetically. “Anyway, at least stand with me and watch me get mine read.”

“Fine,” I grumbled.

Soon, we were standing in front of a plump, longhaired, middle-aged woman wearing a tie-dyed shirt and shuffling a worn deck of Tarot cards. A single stick of incense burned in the middle of her table. Madam Capricorn was her street name, as I learned from the small, laminated sign duct-taped to the front of the table. I stood there with my arms folded, shivering as I watched Jenny lay a five dollar bill on the table.

“Would you like love, career, or life?” she asked in an Eastern European accent as she fondled the stack of cards.

“Love, of course.”

“Okay, love in general, or for specific person?”

“Just in general,” Jenny said matter-of-factly, as though she had her Tarot cards read everyday. A final shuffle of the cards and then Madam Capricorn prompted her to split the deck. She flipped through the cards with some strange, confusing methodology that looked made up.

Finally, three cards lay face-up across the width of the table. Madam Capricorn then explained to Jenny what each card meant. “Yes, yes, you have very bright future ahead of you. When you walk in, you—how do you say?—you light up a room. And soon, very soon, you will fall in love. But he—he is already in love with you. Yes, everything in your love life looks good. Very good.” Jenny was grinning ear-to-ear. I rolled my eyes and signaled to her that it was time to go.

We were turning our backs to walk away from the table when we heard, “Wait a minute!” I looked back over my shoulder. Madam Capricorn’s Eastern European accent had fallen away, revealing the Texan accent I had heard so much growing up that it didn't even sound like an accent to me. Her eyes were wide with intensity.

“Don’t you want your cards read, too?” She was looking at me.

“I’m sorry,” I said, more determined than ever not to waste a penny on that woman's gibberish. “I just don’t have enough money with me tonight.”

A sudden gust of wind almost scattered her cards into the street, but even as she secured them with her hands and arms she continued to stare at me. She seemed to be studying something on my face—beyond my face—, and some wildly imaginative part of me felt as though she could see the dark mysteries of my soul. After a few seconds, she said, still in her natural voice, “Well, you girls be careful tonight, okay? Just be careful.”

I half-smiled at her, and we turned back around. “See, wasn’t that fun? Don’t you wish she had read your cards?” Jenny was still beaming, as though she hadn't heard what I'd just heard.

“I think she put a hex on me or something. I’m really not feeling so great,” I muttered, staring ahead through the swarming masses.

The panhandlers loitered at the outskirts, and each one had his or her own unique tale of tragedy. One old man, in particular, whom we encountered over the course of several trips to Deep Ellum, always seemed to be dying of AIDS, emphysema, bone cancer, or some equally tragic condition. Jenny, Diana, or Caitlin inevitably gave him some of their loose pocket change, for which he repeatedly uttered, “God bless you, miss.” He was one of the skinniest men I had seen in my life. Jenny, of course, was patient and sympathetic as she listened to the entire duration of his life story while I, growing tired and ready to return to our dorms, kicked at the curbs with my hands lodged deep in our coat pockets.

Though I never mentioned it to the others, I felt half-sorry for the man. I could hear my mother’s voice, my inner voice of conscience, berating me, “He may be lying, but it only means he must need the money more than you do. Or else he wouldn’t be begging on the street like that.” But as much compassion as I felt swelling up within me, nothing, not even pity, could overpower my fear of him. So when I saw him approaching us, I walked away from the other girls, pretended to be on my cell phone, and allowed them to spare him some change, all the while hoping he was lying about it all.

  

             The wind blew relentlessly that particular early December evening, even on Main Street. It whipped the dead leaves and independently-published news pamphlets in tiny dust devils around our ankles. Smashed cigarette butts rolled down the sidewalks like tumbleweeds until they fell from the curb to the street and finally, into the sewage drains. Flyers shivered in the breeze, beating themselves against the blackened telephone poles, each of which was impaled with a thousand rusty nails.

             As we turned the corner, the gusts grew stronger than before. My jaw chattered uncontrollably, and I tightened my coat around me. I paused for a moment to try to light a cigarette, using a doorway alcove as a windbreaker, but it was useless; the wind assailed me from every direction. I realized how filthy I felt, as though the grime and soot I sensed in the very air of the city had now penetrated through my clothes and onto my skin. I was positive I could feel my hands crawling with deadly bacteria and disease. But these worries were pushed out of my mind as soon as I realized that the tunnel lay ahead of us.

             The crowded streets that night had forced Diana to park her car on the other side of the tunnel, in a relatively quiet street. When we had arrived in that neighborhood earlier that evening, there were still a few traces of lavender lingering in the west. We had entered Deep Ellum through the Good Latimer pedestrian tunnel, adjacent to the dipping road but raised by about ten feet from the racing cars of the expressway. The catwalk was like its own small tunnel within the larger one. Inside lay a thousand chocolate-brown shards of broken glass, flat pieces of damp cardboard, a few stray soiled articles of clothing, and several crumpled piles of old newspaper. The reeking odor of urine overwhelmed the air, forcing us to hold our breaths for the minute or two it took to power-walk through to the other side. We had agreed, at that point, to find a different route back to Diana’s car at the end of the night. Our alternate route would be the tunnel’s narrow sidewalk, which immediately flanked the busy street where drunk drivers raced by on their way home from the clubs, recklessly swerving around the curve and each other.

             At the front of our single-file line, Jenny skipped around and flailed her arms like some kind of fanciful mythological figure. She was always doing something slightly embarrassing like that. She looked straight up into the sky and exclaimed into the wind, “Isn’t tonight glorious? I mean, look at those stars! We never see stars like that in Baytown, do we, Rachel?”

             I glanced above at the stars, silently twinkling in all their cold isolation in the darkness, and then immediately returned my eyes to my feet on the sidewalk. It was a beautiful night, and I almost allowed myself to enjoy it, but I was far more concerned about accidentally stepping into a pile of broken glass or losing my footing and stumbling onto the street into the traffic. “Yeah,” I muttered from the back of the line, “It’s great.”

             I became aware of the tunnel’s intimidating presence. It neared us with each step we took, its mouth gaping and ready to swallow whatever dared enter its depths. At least, I consoled myself, the tunnel would provide some relief from the wind.

             “I guess it’s always too polluted in Baytown to see the stars . . . who'd have thought you could see the stars better in a big city?” Jenny asked rhetorically, still looking high above at the sky, her neck arched in such a way that it made my own ache just to look at her.

“Yeah, guess so,” I said under by breath between shivers.

“Damn pollution!” she apostrophized into the open air, presenting her middle finger to the night sky. “That’s what I have to say to you, smog!” She turned around and smiled, enjoying the humored reactions she had received from the others. Jenny’s eyes then returned to the sky, careless of where her feet carried her, and as the tunnel closed in around us, the vast, sparkling abyss disappeared.

  

             The tunnel's walls were covered ceiling to floor with murals painted by some nameless faction of avant-garde, freelance street artists. Rising up on my right was Jack Nicholson as the lunatic from “The Shining,” hungrily glaring at me from between a latch-locked doorway. Beside him there was Angelina Jolie, whose silicone-injected, pouting lips the artist had humorously overcompensated.

But I scarcely paid any attention to the many murals along the walls; I could only look down. I watched the glow from the cars’ headlights and the darkness of my own shadow grow in intensity upon the painted concrete. With each advancing car, I felt a growing anxiety, and my mind flooded itself with dark imaginings. I expected, with the sound and light of an approaching car, the sensation of an incredible blow from behind, crushing my thighs, shattering my kneecaps, and pinning my body against the giant slab of concrete. The last image my eyes would rest on would be Jack Nicholson’s madman grimace on that cold, hard wall of that reeking tunnel, as dark, red blood pooled around my feet, overflowing off the sidewalk, into the street, and down into the fathomless depths of the city's sewers.

             I attempted to shake myself out of that self-induced nightmare, but it was impossible. Cars seemed to be screaming through the tunnel at ninety miles an hour. The vibrations of deep baselines filled the walls and ceiling and buzzed through my bones and organs. I could hear their tires rumbling over the pavement, coming closer and closer. Reverberations assailed us from every direction, and I became nauseated with fear. Every part of me, save my feet, which somehow managed to move along the sidewalk, felt numb and paralyzed.

I raised my eyes to look at the others up ahead of me, who were strolling down toward the tunnel’s lowest point. I watched Jenny gaze in amazement around the tunnel at the countless murals. A part of me envied her seeming oblivion. The big city always had a way of making me feel lost and small.

Suddenly, something in my peripheral vision caught my eye. On the wall on the other side of the road was written in large black letters, in a capitalized font which demanded to be read: “FEAR CONTROLS KNOWLEDGE . . . KNOWLEDGE CONTROLS FEAR.”

I turned my eyes ahead again, and watched Jenny. Every move in her step spoke a phrase of fearlessness. She lived like an immortal, unafraid of death, its pain, its mystery, or its permanence.

             Then, in a sudden flash, I felt the violent thrust of a car beside me. Something, it must have been terror, knocked my shoulder against the wall. I then watched the car disappear as it rose out of the tunnel, the pitch of its blaring horn lowering into the distance. My heart was either racing or had stopped all together. It was only seconds later that I felt a slight sensation on my arm. I began to realize that the side mirror of the passing car must have grazed my elbow; but, I felt no pain. It hurt no more than Jenny’s firm grasp on my arm as she dragged me to Madam Capricorn’s table earlier that evening.

             A swift rush of adrenaline melted my entire body, and for the first time that evening, I laughed. Death had always been just inches away, and it always would be. And somehow, because of that, it was nothing to fear.

I looked back up to see that Jenny, Caitlin, and Diana were looking back at me over their shoulders. “Are you okay back there?” Jenny called out.

“Yeah, I’m fine,” I said, controlling my laughter and wiping my eyes with the back of my hand.

We continued our journey through the rest of the tunnel without incident. I walked more leisurely now, taking time to discover the numerous murals. My mind envisioned an artist standing on that very sidewalk some years before, painting his intensely personal piece, uninfluenced by the styles and subjects of the many paintings surrounding him. I wondered how long he stood up there on his wobbly ladder amid the noises of passing cars, engrossed only in his own little creation, as though nothing else in the world mattered.

A moment later we had reached the other side of the tunnel, where the silent, starry sky opened up to us once again. The wind now seemed gentler than before, and, for a moment, the whole world was quiet and still.