The Downtown Mobile Blues

At Some Point Later

Flies don't usually perch like that, sitting on the soap bottle lid like a show dog on a pedestal. The fly regarded me with raspberry eyes, rubies cut so small and fine. Eyes that saw the garbage can, the corpse, the unattended tooth brush sitting beside a spotless white porcelain sink. Eyes that stared up into mine and seemed to signal comprehension, even communion. I made a face and flicked it away. How dare he? Bow up to me like that, like an equal. Saucy scavenger. Stale toothpaste eater. But is that fair to me or him? A fly is a fly and behaves like a fly. I am me. Do I not struggle at living, do I not get by? Constructing an existence from scraps of experience, morsels of memory, dribbles of knowledge.



At Some Point in the Beginning

"Hey. Hey, what's wrong?"

The girl's face hung blank before me, apple white by the jukebox light. Her eyes reflected. a phosphorescent purple, a colour the room had never seen. Light that simply wasn't there. Her lips trembled and parted, dry as strips of paper from an old hornet's nest. Air hissed from between them, a punctured gas pipe's whispered issue, a lunar wind over the grey marble of her tongue. My hands went up to the sides of her head and bunched her brittle black hair in my bony fists. Not to tug but simply to shake.


"Hey, that thing's got you. Ok? Listen to me." 


Shake, shake, shake! 



 "That thing's got you again. So listen! Snap out of it! Do you hear me? Come on now. Come on!"


I didn't even know what I meant. The words were someone or something else's words. I picked them up like a radio signal. My brain was the antennae. My mouth, the amplifier. And my consciousness trapped between the two like a hostage with a gun to his head, reading a ransom note into the mouth piece of an unfashionable model of Nokia cell phone. The purple light poured over the arc of her irises and swirled around to make a full circle of reflection, as if a black and white tv were flashing off and on just over my left shoulder.


"I said, snap out of it!"      

In an excruciating instant, he eyelids fell like shutters blocking out the moon and stars. Blocking out the bar's secrets. Two pale smudges of light. There, then gone.


"Uhhhhhhhhhh.........."


The paper lips quivered, oiled and shiny with spit.


"Uhhh? Whhhhaaaatttt? Ohhh. Um, heyyyy...."


My hands traded her hair for the tops of her arms. I kneaded the sinew and muscle and gristle and imagined I heard grinding noises.


"Hey."


I looked at the holes where eyes used to be.


"Are you, like, ok?"


Filaments of real light returned to her eyes. Hazel with pinpricks of blue from the beer sign over the bar, red from the doorway, green from the neon sign in the window. Colours with readily traceable origins. She looked at me, wondering why a strange girl was touching her, I suppose. Trying to pick an emotion and dedicate to it. Pissed off or confused? Coy or repulsed? In the end, she chose ambivalence. Finally, she answered me.


"I guess. Who are you?"


I had so much to tell her. Where the hell should I start?