(alley)

XIV.

         Just around the nighttime bend there is an alley between two generic, modern, colorless brick buildings. The alley is dark, and clean; the perfect blacktop pavement is wet and shoddily refracts sourceless white light.

         On the street before the backstreet before the alley, I can hear tires nebulize puddles, I can see small rain that swirls around on currents of air, floats like dust, slow like humid smoke; I can see it as it rides across the shaft of one whitish yellow headlight. It's too heavy for mist, too light for rain, too wet for air and too much to breathe. Too warm in my lungs, too clammy on my cheeks and hands and shins. It must look like that all around, the way it feels, but it's invisible without the tirelessly straight white conical beam or the bright, and surely hot, white bulbs embedded on the bellyside of the marquee. Those tiny bright bulbs are bright, but they do not emanate, oddly; they have little glare but leave tiny burning afterimages in my eyes.

         The car with one headlight picks up a lady; I cannot look at the car, I do not look at the lady. My feet sport black ballet flats, the inside walls of which lean far over the insoles, shaped by six thousand pounds of size eight flat-footed wear. They are wet. Clearly I have been trouncing through street puddles; there are a few muddy bits, wet debris clinging to the yellowish white flesh of my feet, from halfway up the shin and down.

         The nobody driver puts the car in drive and glides forward, past me, to my backward and away forever. I am walking on perfect gray sidewalk, perfect square-looking rectangles one after another, doormatting formal romance and expensive sophistication and whitish lights. The curb is flawless, without a chip, without the evidence of the ice pick of the forgotten angry corner of the city's busy mind. There are two small holes in the back of my black legging, half way down my right hamstring. One tiny hole a thread away from its older brother, above the hem, where the weight of the city's lungs leaks in, licks my clammy skin. The center of a mysteriously radial wet spot on the fabric, where water makes a black blacker than black.

         I round the bend, walk up a slanting backstreet. I'm with a group of people, the Harlequin kid included every other time I look. We're walking to somebody's apartment, and the dark is perfect for a camera---it's clearly night but every part of every one, every detail is illuminated for the camera. Like in movies, when a nighttime scene on a street always shows the pavement to be wet, even if it had not rained. It registers better that way.

         There is a piece of plain, thick-crusted cheese pizza in my hand and I am doubled. I stop. I'm no longer holding the oil-stained pizza box. Was I ever holding one? The group continues to walk. There's no longer a bite of pizza in my mouth. Did I swallow it? Was I ever chewing?

         The slice of pizza is still in my hand. The kids are still walking, they're still walking to someone's apartment but they're still in a group surrounding me. As if they're walking impossibly slowly, but I can't tell. I look to the right, I'm facing the right so now it is my forward, and I am standing there, the kids still frozen behind me, the pizza still in my hand. In front of me is an alley, dark and clean. It's perfect, it's striking; there's no place for the mice to hide or the cats to sleep or the trash to live or the smelly dark spots to spawn and prosper. It's devoid of anything, except remarkable blacktop pavement and a mist of shoddy whitish light. And it's encased on three sides: two colorless brick buildings forming the alley, and one clean, glass wall for me to look through. It reminds me of the penguin pen at the zoo, how most of it is fence for one to observe from, but there's one eight or ten foot span of glass so you can see them underwater, too.

         This glass wall is admirable. Even the three thumb-sized fingerprints spread upon it. It leaves one struck with a quarter inch impression. I cannot figure it, I cannot figure if this slick spotless alley through the glass is more mysterious than a filthy alley with no details, where no light reflects and so much is hidden and generally one wouldn't want to see.

         And just like that I am walking again, the wondering ceased and my attention traveling elsewhere. The pizza is no longer in my hand.

         I have turned to the Harlequin kid. He is mute, but we discuss finding sharpies. We speculate about when to get them, and how we will pay for them, and I can tell that the Kid is thinking that he'll keep them, that even though we are talking about obtaining them together, he's really just enlisting my help for something that maybe he'll let me use before he parts ways and goes home. He doesn't live with me any more, but all the more reason he'd leap at the chance to get some markers if I pleaded for my parents to sponsor me, me whom he would in turn plead with to sponsor him. More vexingly, when I point this out, he gestures abstractly, such that I experience him to mean that I "can never think to remember that I wouldn't understand." It always works, see.

         The discussion ends abruptly and we retreat to our proper minds. I muse on the idea of pleading with my parents to sponsor a new pillow. I peel the 100-thread count lavender pillowcase off of the pillow in question. I want to show my mother the mold growing there, but I know she'll just see it as a stain of drool. We are tight on money and a new pillow would be superfluous.

         I have arrived at the apartment gathering. I sit down next to two others on the left side of a denim couch such that I am center-most with the kid sitting down next to two others on the right side of a couch to my left. We are in front of a large square late 90's TV. The long lost terrifying Lolita friend of mine capers across the oatmeal-colored carpet with a bowl of blue corn chips. She introduces a friend of hers whose terrifying face I cannot look at and cannot look away from. She's a young Asian woman with non-shelled purple snails for eyes, she's a monster that would eat you, she's a ghost that would ravish you. And I'm oddly okay with her. She's DJ-ing tonight, and after shaking her hand, I hop over the turntable, scratching the vinyl at a gradual angle obtuse to the grooves as I go. I run over to the stairs, looking back at the snail-eyed girl. With one last gaze cast like a net over the room, over the ocean, over to the monster, I cast away, leave to go upstairs. I bend over on the stairs and plant my hands two steps above my feet. I ascend on all fours. But by the time I’ve gotten three quarters of the way to the top, I’ve lost my mission, I’ve forgotten my purpose. So I swing one leg over the banister and slide down till my butt hits the post, and then I clamber off to the floor. I traverse the worn wooden floor to the mail bin where I discover a tampon for the first time again and naïvely conjecture its possibilities. Icy wet spots percolate through my socks; the grown-ups track snow in from outside and forget to take their boots off until after they've reached the kitchen.