If the city is a blight, and the suburbs a cancer, then the empty husks of brick and mortar must be the atrophied heart, beating out a few final spasms. The muted roaring of life-blood: one way, than the other, every day at eight and five. Broken circadian rhythm of a working-class people. It’s there in the middle of it, the hollow centre, where the bits and pieces pile up. Where anything not light enough to get carried to the sparse extremities, not strong enough to make its own way out to the peripheries, or just lost in the colour and motion, stays, sticks, grows. It’s there and it’ll spread like mould at the bottom of an old filter. It’s there in those cracks and crevices, those basements and alleys. You’ll find the noise and light, the quiet static hum, the white noise that gives that telltale air to the place in your memory.
It’s in those places where things intersect, where the borders get fuzzy. Uneven and fluid like the outline of the vapor rising from my cup, as I sat watching the street light filter down through frost covered glass. Watched it burst through, diffuse and refract; the sharp beams of pink city night scattering across the room and getting lost in the cloud of steam, swirling and disappearing with every breath in and out.
The ceramic warmed slowly, almost living, moving, foam making the outline to infinity as entropy stared through my skull. The illusion of life was lost when the cup touched my lips, cascading sensations on taste bud, the rest of the world fading for a minute. The espresso machine hissed, clicked and returned the room to one of those familiar silences: when there’s nothing left to talk about and there’s nothing going on. That place at the edge of consciousness when you can tune into the details, when you can focus on those few bits that get lost in the static. The same insubstantial pieces that tie your shadow to your hand, the ones that make you realize you’re living life in the 60-hertz cycle of a dim electric sun.
He spoke to me then, from behind the banister, the space heater, the well-worn tables and chairs. He pointed; a derelict, half-standing, glassy-eyed. He didn’t register. Like a bad patch of brickwork, like a hole in the road. An outgrowth of the city, a symptom, statistic.
I didn’t have smokes, had a few pennies cash. I looked back down into foam, the vapour, the empty space between the condensation and the still black surface tension. Anything. He spoke again, pointed, asked for me to stand.
So I stood.
He beckoned.
I went. Leaning over the railing, down towards his table, I saw a spot of blue paint, tendrils reaching to the four corners of a card. A horse. His mane turning into airy blue flame, losing itself and fading into monochromatic silence. The animal exploded from the page, like the final time-lapse shot of a flower in bloom.
He said his name in a language I can’t pronounce. A dreamer, a seer, a victim of muse. He saw it, asleep, in a vision. Four sets of four, the cardinal points, horses and mighty warriors. He was there, his spirit-brother, there in the middle, lost, confused, endless green field. They were closing in, four sets of four, closing in from the places where the wind carries the spirits, where the sky meets the earth and the sun rises up, from where all the waters flow. Four sets of four. He cried out, he — the horse, cried out. Cried for salvation from the pointed spear tip. Salvation from biting arrows and heavy club. He came, out through his dream, taking his brother in his hands, lifting him up. He awoke.
He’d known his own name. Eleven years passed before the paint-wetted horse hair could be asked to trace his brother’s shape. Eleven years, though, when they passed he didn’t say. The spirits were there, inside him, coming through in bursts. His eyes would focus, he could talk, ask questions, spin tales. They’d leave, leave him there bleary-eyed and lost, covered in paint and grease and dirt. Then he’d leave, leave to find something, anything, to coax them back or at least make the world a blur, taper the jagged edge into a dull pain. So I left too. Into the streets, the wind, the glow of false daylight.
It must be hard to see the spirits now. The smog, the traffic, the garbage and dirt, making them nearly invisible. They were in books now. Our books. Took the life from their myths and pressed it between pages, like leaves and dead butterfly wings. Put their world in a bell jar, sent it home to the Queen. We said we were doing all we could. It must be hard to see, through blurred vision and hunger pangs, through the souls of the dying, slowly blowing their brains out trying to escape.
