A car alarm is going ON and off...ON and off...ON and off— an intermittent urgency broken by pauses of silent music.
Tonight he's plugged himself with wads of cotton to drown out the conversations, cases of mistaken identity, false intimacies, traffic wailing and beeping its way down the avenue—as if that would make the light change faster. He goes to the window. There isn't one interesting person or thing out there. If it had snowed, things would be different. Snow lays itself over the city like a cloak of invisibility leaving only a resonant light.
*
Today it's unseasonably warm. That means that going outside is the thing. That, or clean up the dead armies. For some time they've been lying very still, rotting in their brown armor, trapped in poisonous motels, or floating in glasses of grey water where they dive to their doom trying to quench their thirst. And the sheets. For months he's been waking up overcome by the odd smell of his own sweat. It's cold in his basement so clothing is peeled off on the bed, underwear removed under the sheets, lost among the bedding.
Someone is always making their point, reminding him that order makes things easier. But he doesn't live in a world of things. He lives in an it-ness that cancels out things—an All Encompassing Nothing, the...whatever, and as far as he's concerned, It isn't easy and It's certainly not interesting, and anyway if he goes outside he'll only find more reasons to stay inside. Going out seems to degrade everything he knows to be correct. Even so, sometimes he does it, goes outside, just to crash into walls that weren't there the last time he went out, just so he can get pissed off.
He once had a Gym teacher—a real wise guy—who gave pep talks before high school basketball games. He used to say that nothing's impossible except trying to lick your own elbow.
Thinking about it now—he wonders about it—the taste of what you cannot reach— Waiting to be conquered.
Halloween is just around the corner.
