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There’s pain in the way he moves. Glass up to touch his lips, then falling again. There’s painstains on his coat, down by the wrists, and there’s pain in his eyes. Older gentleman: fifty? Sixty? He has aged like movie stars age but furrows are furrows, even if they are roguishly handsome and just deep enough to not be wrinkles. Straightened, windswept, silvery grey hair, not yet thinning, and the remnants of a freshly shaved salt-and-pepper beard, now shadows on his chin. His skin is dark but his eyes even darker. There’s something about him. There’s…
He works through his whiskey slowly while his fellow patrons get drunk. There’s pain in the wrist movement. Old injury? Recovering, from a fracture or alcoholism? There’s definitely something, he’s definitely something, but his charmingly closed-off demeanor has stopped the other bargoes from figuring it out. If someone calls his name he toasts them and smiles. The whole thing has a Great Gatsby vibe to it. He looks but he doesn’t really see . The smile lines by his temples beat a well-worn path from lip to eye, but he doesn’t really smile. There’s a disconnect somewhere. He is drinking alone.
What makes a man like this drink at a place like this? Why does he refuse the company offered? His coat looks expensive in the plain way and the bonewhite of a ironed collar sticks up around a stubbly neck. Is he dressed for an event? Did it go poorly? A man his age should have a family somewhere, right? He drinks like he doesn’t have anywhere to go or anything to do, and so he sticks out in an ocean of escapists. He sticks out like a blinking traffic light at a five-lane highway. He sticks out, and so he is seen from the shadows.
When he leaves the bar around closing he is practically sober, having drunk little, slowly. His feet take him out into an empty street. Downtown is moist with pre-rain. A step along the sidewalk and then a step out, following the white rectangles into and over the street. The one who has seen him follows behind.
The man is hard to spot, despite his pretty dress. The silhouette mounting behind him in the streetlights is easy to spot, despite their anonymous garbs. The two culminate at the end of the crosswalk and the man turns. He is unafraid.
“I don’t have anything,” he states, lying without knowing it. The stranger stops just shy of the curb. They are fantastically large to him, or perhaps there is padding beneath the stained hoodie?
“I’m…” their voice comes out mumbly, mystical, just too loud to justify pretending not to have heard them. “I’m not. I’m not dangerous, mister.”
They take a step back to prove it. He appreciates that.
For a moment, the two of them stand alone together on the precipice; he is not afraid of them, strangely, and they desperately want something from him, though they know not what. Yet. They can feel this in one another - there is a hairfine strand of potential comradery hanging between them and while any sudden movement might cause the moment to break, neither of them make it. The man with the sleek hair feels his pockets for his keys (in case he needs something sharp) and takes a risk.
“What do you want, then? I don’t got no money.”
“Not… No, not money. I… Uhm,” they look down, a gesture that seems comical at their height.
“I wanna talk. I think… I think we could do good talking, you and I.”
There’s an old pain in his left hip when he walks, and he walks with the stranger two feet beside him, leaving just enough room that if this 4am friendship turns sour they can both turn and run. He looks at them while they look down. It’s hard to distinguish a face under the hoodie, which casts deep shadows from the streetlights above, and he can’t quite place them on a spectrum of age or gender. Their skin is a kind of ambiguous grey-ish brown, and this color (or lack thereof) also dominates their hair, and lips, and even most of their clothes; the only visible part of them spared from this monotony is the left eye, which faces him, and occasionally looks up to give him a sparkle of dark blue. They look sick, in a way. Or maybe just deadly tired, because the suitcases under their eyes seem loaded with a millennia of lost sleep. Below the eyes is a flat, small nose, and below that again is a pair of wide, thin lips. The whole composition comes off as extraordinarily plain
They turn into a tiny playground wedged in-between apartment complexes, and the man sits down on a bench. The stranger stands. He is beautiful, and they are not. There are many more differences between them, but none that are more strikingly visible.
“I’ve heard you on the box,” the stranger mumbles, and the man dares a smile.
“Oh? You tellin’ me you listen to Marc Jonathan’s jazz corner? Didn’t peg you for a music lover.”
“Tunes are nice. I like them in voices. Do you hear those?”
“... Tunes in voices? Like singin’? Or just like talkin’?”
“Talking.”
“Yeah, I guess.”
He can’t place their voice, either, and it’s becoming disconcerting. It might be vaguely feminine, but the low volume and hoarseness makes it impossible to tell. Maybe they smoke? He offers them a smoke.
“I can’t,” they say, and he shrugs to take one for himself.
“Look, no offense, but you didn’t flag me down to talk about my radio show, did ya? I’ve been around. I can tell when someone has something on their mind.”
He lights the cigarette and savours the color of the flame for a second. Things are bleak otherwise. The stranger nods, slowly.
“I wanted. I wanted something. It’s… Hard for me to talk.”
Marcus, for that is the man's name, makes a noise like therapists do when they understand you and want you to keep talking about it. The stranger fidgets. The left eye is blue. What is that condition called? Hetero-something?
“I want to. Talk. But it’s hard to talk. People… Don’t, see it the way I do,” and they’re speaking like someone exercising great restraint, piquing Marc’s curiosity and worry at the same time.
“Don’t see what the way you do?”
“Everything. There’s… There’s so much broken glass, out there, and there’s even more mirrors beneath, and I can- I can
see
-” they stomp their foot and Marc jumps, brought back to reality in a sudden, cold rush. What is he doing? Out in the middle of the night, alone, with a stranger that looks like they could break his neck on accident? The smoke is too long between his fingers now and he can’t wait for it to burn out so he has an excuse to get going. They see this. They notice. They despair.
“Don’t go,” they whisper quickly, exhaling vitae with their words and bringing down the fog about them once more. The string between them reforms.
“Don’t- Please, I- let me give you my words,” they hiss, and he watches them produce a receipt from a pocket to scribble on. The next thing he knows, he is holding an e-mail address.
“Whatever you do, don’t lose me.”
And they turn, and they walk away, and soon he is left alone with his pains and cigarette on a playground bench.
His days move in a caffeinated drum after that. His job was so desired when he was young because it was low-intensity, okay-pay, AM radio relaxation with some records he likes. Liked. The money went directly into things he wanted because it didn’t need to stop at a wife or children on the way, building the life that every man wants. Wanted. He grew slowly but he did grow, and the boy who longed for nightshifts with his feet up has become a man whose wasted youth lies stretched out like roadkill behind him.
Ah, all those days that came and went. Little did he know that those were life itself.
Maybe this is why his painstains look so crusted over; these are not wounds of impact, but of stagnation. Laysores. He is covered with friction marks, pressure dips in the skin of his soul. He used to be nothing and now he has become a comfortable nothing, and he feels… Wasted, in a way. He feels like nothing. He feels small and forgotten, anonymous, like the stranger he met that night on the street. They have been the only new thing in his life recently. Maybe that is why he emails them.
Hello,
This is Marcus, from Marc Jonathan’s jazz corner. I hope I read this address right. If not, I guess this message is just going into the ether.
Are you the stranger I met last friday?
He pauses, drumming on the keyboard. Is there anything more to say? No, not really. The stranger had been very insistent on talking to him without actually saying much at all, so he’s left without a conversation starter. Fuck it. Fuck it, right? Who cares. He doesn’t. It doesn’t matter to him at all if they get this, and if they answer, and he’s not refreshing his e-mail every minute for the next hour, no way.
They reply at midnight, which is when his show goes on air. He manages to read them during a sponsored ad break.
yes, we met before
im sorry
i live alone in a house that is not of cards but unfinished anyway and drafty
i need a friend and i think you need a friend too
there a re five cats
thank you
The ad break is not long enough for him to digest that and formulate an answer, so he puts on the white-tooth mask of a gumless radio host and powers through. How easy the mind falls back into well-known paths. How easy it is to shut off, go autopilot, and let your experience wrangle your mind into submission. He manages an hour before the next break, and by then he knows what to write.
Whoever they are, they might just be right. Maybe he needs a friend.
Hello again,
No need to be sorry…
They go back and forth like this, and he finds himself continuing the conversation even when his time slot is up at 4am. The Deb of Night has a recording studio separate from him so he doesn’t have to leave when it’s her turn; he stays, with his cooling coffee and computer, and de-strangers the stranger from the playground. He learns their name is Laddy, which makes him smile because he thinks it sounds like one of Santa’s elves. They live downtown, not far from the bar they met at, and their house is apparently under renovation right now. They say it used to have no roof. He tells them about his own place in Hollywood which isn’t bad at all, especially with all the extra space he has, and when they next reply the headline is not “RE: RE: RE: RE: RE: Hello” any more, it is “alone”. He cannot explain the icy feeling in his guts as he opens it.
its not too late to be something now
theres lots of time left in the world
you dont have to be alone
It takes him aback like things rarely do these days, and for the first time since their virtual conversation started, he looks at the clock. 6:43 am. He thinks, and thinks, and keeps hovering over the “delete” button without answering, but before he makes his mind up they send him something else.
the sun is coming up i need to go
dont lose me
… and he realizes they might have a point. Better to sleep on it.
In his dreams, they stand at the edge of a clearing. Tall. Wide. Not at all as frightening as they could be. As they should be.
He wakes up at 5 pm and feels better.
After that, they keep in touch. They e-mail constantly over the next week and despite Laddy’s odd flavour of language, they get along. He discovers what he reasons to be a bug in his computer, because Laddy frequently answers questions that he was thinking about asking but didn’t actually type out, and he figures he did type them out, but that they got lost on his copy of his own sent messages. Technology is strange. After this week he feels safe enough to meet them again at the local diner.
They strike an impressive figure in the fluorescent lights above the doorway, but he gets the impression that he’s the only one to really notice them. People are too busy with their own shitty fried food. It’s 4am and he has just gotten off the radio; the diner is populated with drunks and night workers, like him, and every single one of them fail to notice the giant moving among them, gently touching elbows and scooting sneakers to get to his booth. He smiles. They nod. They don’t seem to have gotten any more sleep since he last saw them.
“Coffee?”
“No.”
“Fries?”
“No.”
How strange, to bathe in the silence of being spoken to. In words they are quick and short and he is lucky if he can wrench more than five syllables out of his companion, but in silence they are deep, on the borders of being fathomable. The dark blue eye does not remind him of lakes or oceans, and it especially does not remind him of anything resembling the sky. It is plain in its blueness, just like they are unnoticed in their impressive size. If the two of them carry a conversation it is not one he can remember, but still he stays until the morning shift comes to replace fries with omelettes, and still he feels like he has been heard and understood. How strange. How comfortably strange.
“Are you goin’ back Downtown?”
“Yes.”
“Hey, mind if I come with? You could show me the place. I’m curious about that new ceiling.”
Laddy brings their two, huge hands together, and Marcus watches thick fingers play around each other, fidgeting worms fighting for dominance. It’s worrisome, seeing someone like that be nervous.
“N-no, that… That would be not good. I need to sleep.”
“Yeah? You pullin’ graveyard shifts, too?”
“In. In a way. I can’t be awake after the sun, I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”
They are sorry. Marc is too. As he watches them disappear into a taxi and down the road, he gets the unavoidable feeling that something is wrong. Well… He supposes they haven’t know each other for that long. Secrets are secrets. It has been a while since he made a new friend, he has completely forgotten what building a relationship from scratch feels like.
He can’t sleep when he gets back to his apartment, the air foggy with seeping AM sunshine. He has a bottle of sleeping pills he was prescribed a couple of years back, but he brushes his teeth in the bathroom mirror without looking behind it, and his pajamas follow him under the cover without aid. He wonders at himself. His body. His mind. He thinks and he wonders, and as the sun gets brighter on the other side of his blackout curtains, he figures something out.
He knows he could have had company at the bar that night, before he met Laddy. There is no person on this earth too strange to be approached by a gaggle of drunks when the bartender gives the chugorder before closing. No, he could, but he refused, and it has roots in his old pains. Deep inside, he desperately wants friends. Even deeper inside, located somewhere to the left of his ribs, beyond the subdermal kingdom of excuses and what-ifs he has spent a lifetime building, there are still leftovers from that antisocial rhetoric that got him to where he is now. Getting to know someone means becoming vulnerable to them. Getting to know someone, no matter how great they are, means taking the highs with the lows. There is commitment. And, for all his superficiality, Marcus has had a long time to get to know himself; he knows it’s not worth it. He has survived on his professional relationships and the occasional connection with a bartender. One could argue that he has been happy this way.
And he wonders at himself as he waits for sleep to keep him company. Wonders at this turn of events; the new person, the wildcard, the crack in his well-built walls. Laddy is wondrous for nothing other than their ability to have reached out to him, and gotten a hand back.
there’s lots of time left in the world
you don’t have to be alone
He has the next two days off, but his regular timewasters look colorless. On a regular wednesday he might put some records on, sit down at his desk, fiddle a bit with that poetry collection he has been on-and-off working with for the past two years. Feed his birds, clean the cage. On days off he generally just kind of mills about and waits for sunlight. He supposes he could go to a bar again.
But he’s
tired
, and it
bothers him,
and the ancient aches of being forced to remember how much of his life is behind him keep him in bed until the clock ticks past seven, and through his daydreams and avoidances he can’t help but remember what Laddy told him several days ago, that there’s plenty of time left. Has he always been itching for hourglass sand? Or is this something new? He tosses and turns, unable to decide if he wants the blanket on or off or half-on, half-off, and when he recognizes the onset of a small anxiety attack he finally gets out and goes to his computer.
Laddy answers him instantly. He invites them over. They say they are already on the way.
“I can help,” Laddy says. They’ve been playing with his birds for a while, but Marc doesn’t mind the lack of conversation. Just having another beating heart in the room helps.
“With what?”
“The pains.”
Marcus does not know about his own pains the way Laddy does, and the description makes him uneasy.
“What pains?”
“The… The pangs, the pangs of- I- I have something, wait here,” and they exit the living room into the hallway. Marc can hear them unzip the canvas bag they came with. He strongly suspects they’re about to offer him weed, and he might not mind that, but when they return they’re holding a bottle of something pinkish-red.
“What’s that?”
“C… Uh, it’s,” they turn it over and read the label, but that doesn’t seem to help. “It’s, ah, c-crushed berries, juice. With cold?”
“A smoothie?”
“Yes!”
“You’re offering me a health drink?”
“Yes, yes. I have a lot of it. It helps me.”
“... Helps you with what, exactly?” (but he takes the bottle anyway, sees it has been opened.)
“Helps with the pangs. The tip-tap-dripping of headfaucets. I want to help you.”
Being a logical human being with a self-preservation instinct, the man does his best to formulate a reason as to why he should absolutely not chug this opened gas-station bottle of raspberry smoothie. The seal is broken but the inside looks full, so Laddy did not take a sip. It’s said to help with non-descript “pains”. They’re trying to slip him something. But, then again, why? To rob him? He already let them into his house, and this is kind of a long con to play for simple burglary. Kidnap him? Kill him? They could have done that without drugs, considering they’re big enough to have to scoot sideways through doorways. Reasoning aside, he has the distinct impression that he should trust them, the same way a socially inept child refuses to believe their new, cool “friends” talk behind their back. He’s… Well, he’s not old, per say. He’s certainly something. He’s lonely. He chugs the damn smoothie. And.
Finally.
Finally.
Finally, the world becomes as beautiful as it ought to be.
Finally, the sandcastles of his personality come tumbling down, reveal real steel beneath.
And finally,
finally,
the low-burn ache of being nothing and having no one is doused, making him feel big, making him feel important for the first time in a long time, and it is not until the stiffness of his fingers, wrist and hip leaves, that he realizes just how suffocating it was.
He gasps as the bottle leaves his lips, feeling the sweet, tangy aftertaste of berries on his tongue. There’s something else, too. Something coppery and strange. Honestly, he does not care.
“Did it help?”
“Yes,” stuttering, deep. Has he never taken a breath before? This feels reborn.
“I am glad. I want to help.”
“Thank… Thank you,” and how has he never noticed them like this? Laddy is not beautiful in the same way that makeshift rafts are not beautiful, but he looks at them with the joy of a man who thought he would drown. He feels important, but only because Laddy looks at him like he is important. This is something. He is, still, something. Is he in love? It doesn’t feel like any love he’s ever had before, but he was never much of a lover to begin with.
“Come,” they say, and he follows. His tapering behind them might have been doglike in the eyes of another beholder, but he knows his own strength, now, and nothing can diminish it. It feels like nothing can ever touch him again. They lead him onto his tiny balcony which is currently inhabited by a lone chair and an ashtray on the floor. The moon is large. The city is large. Laddy is the biggest of them all, but he is right behind them, and by god does it feel like he belongs there.
“What you feel now…” Laddy says in their slow, hobbled way, but they are louder between his ears now than they were. “What this is, it is. I. I did, I did a bad thing, but it will be a good thing.”
It will be a good thing. Yes, he feels this. He is hatching. Shedding. God, this will be good, but Laddy turns to him and Laddy’s bright blue eye has dipped beneath red. Even in his euphoria he alarms at the blood. Are they crying? Crying
blood?
It unnerves him and he reaches out for their arm, wanting to be told that this is okay, because if it is not okay then this moment needs to end and if it ends he is sure he will die. Laddy puts a massive hand on his, smiling through with their eyes even as the scarlet breaks free.
“I am not like you, but you will be like me. And it is. It is bad. This is very bad, but for you it could be good. I’m sorry.”
He doesn’t hesitate.
“I forgive you,” he says, earnest, pleading, and he does. Even if he can’t see the full crime yet, and even if he can’t know the full verdict, he does forgive his friend.
They stand beneath the large moon. He is beautiful, they are not. There are many differences between them, but not as many as there used to be.