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The night sky merges with the bruise-black of the riverside, but the stars, the galaxy of light traffic orbiting him—it’s all across the zebra crossing, the stripes on the road that jar the surreal existence of Pond’s perception into bits and pieces, and then something shatters.
The boy looks at him.
Thanks you for visiting, the words of the waiting staff come back to him, for some reason, as if Pond’s gone back inside to get his bill but he didn’t, he’s still here, swaying concrete under his feet, and he’s maybe seeing things in their most perfect form like the really real and the really surreal—and in Pond’s mind, those are one and the same. Because this boy in blue looks at him from across the road, something about his face suggesting an attention that pricks the night sky, blood culminating underneath the earth like a second pulse, a sleeping wakeful dream, a lucidity that’s almost hypnotic.
Pulled from himself, Pond takes his first steps into the newborn world of wonders; the boy shifts, and Pond’s heart lurches because any movement could mean abandonment, could mean the end is near. The traffic lights turn yellow then red, but the cars and the bikes and the rest of it appear as harmless as sheep, and safe, and impressions of each other rather than something real. Because real is across the road, perched on the railing that divides the road from the river: the boy with hair in his face and a stern focus, his face angular and soft, like a sculpted figure of clay.
Pond is not very fast, he knows. He’s stumbling, his world tumbling sideways then righting itself like a spherical ball rolling about in a spread of fabric that’s being swung in the wind. His skin tingles, his neck damp and cold where a low breeze kisses it. The boy in the blue shirt makes another movement—purposeful and moody like a cat’s—before making as if to turn away, and Pond sees the exact moment their eyes disconnect, feels it even deeper down to his toes. The next moment, the lights flick green, as lights do.
A bus whizzes by the riverside, taking everything along with it: the dreamlike haze, the promise of something, something, something, and, most of all, the boy in blue.
Pond blinks in dismay, mouth parting open, a soft noise of discontentment lodged in his throat. Lemonade and alcohol. He tastes it there, the promise of something, and then the riverside is completely made anew— someone tearing up a page in a notebook with violent precision to reveal blankness.
The world is made new again, and the newborn world spins innocently as if expecting Pond to revel in the promise of it just as he had before, but it’s impossible. This newness is ugly, no longer real, the world doesn’t sway but scribbles over gentle calligraphy. Pond safely crosses to the other side.
The riverside greets him kindly, almost as if in pity. Pond turns to face the full expanse of the road he just walked across, and the diner where he’d been enjoying his solitary evening out on a rare day off work. Some other time, he would entertain the idea of it all being a drunk hallucination, but he knows he can’t trick his body. His body saw him and reacted to him, and its evidence is enough to stand up with full confidence in a court.
It’s really a very beautiful evening, Pond thinks, as sobriety returns in trickles and twirls. He’s not driving himself home today; he is going to walk all the way home. And he’s going to think about the stars and the sea blues.