Chapter One: When we were kids

When we were kids we used to do all the stuff kids used to do, climb trees, swing on a rope over the river... fall in the river...play James Bond and spies and cops and robbers in the building site of the new houses next to ours, sneak into the half-made houses and get chased away by the watchman, steal apples from the trees, throw rocks into the pools left behind by the disused mines, everything and anything was good for having fun.
I grew up next to a graveyard, it sounds creepy but it wasn't, it was actually a lot of fun, a fantastic place. Nobody ever went there anymore, the graves were too old to have visitors, and we had the place to ourselves, which sounds odd I know, the place being full of dead people, but it never bothered us, we never got spooked or scared. You could hide behind the gravestones, leap-frog the fallen urns, and find rusted lengths of metal railings in the tall grass to use as spears or javelins. There was a crumbling disused internment chapel that had been last used 20 years before, it was great for playing in, especially as night was falling. Sometimes we would light a fire in the middle of the stone floor with wood from the old pews, and we'd talk about everything or tell ghost stories. It was a good place to grow up, Durham City, green countryside all around, the winding river and the fields and woods, bucolic and beatific at 7 years old, and hell at 16.
It snowed like crazy every year, it would drift down from the sky steadily from December to February, you could go sledging and skating every day until you collapsed exhausted from the sheer joy of being alive. We spent all of our time outdoors and our parents never worried, we made friends, we fought with each other, we took sides against our enemies, and stood up for each other against the unfairness of adults.
We played all year round, whatever the season whatever the weather, rain, hail, snow, the baking summer heat, nothing stopped us, when we were tired we'd just collapse in the grass to catch our breath...and we'd talk....
"It's a rabbit"
"No, more like a cat"
"No...look see the ears...aw, now its gone"
"A dragon, see there's the tail"
"Wow, thats exactly like a dragon!"
"See that octopus coming over the trees, that big clouds the head, and that little one's a leg"
"Not leg...tentacle"
"Leg...tentacle...whatever, Mr.Smart Bottom!"
"So...where do the shapes come from, I mean who makes the clouds look like animals and stuff?"
"I don't know, God I guess...."
"Or the cloud fairies!"
"Yeah, the cloud fairies... you nitwit....I think its the wind...or our imagination...whatever, it don't really matter, I like looking at them".
"Why don't they ever have words up there, or messages?"
"I guess its hard for your cloud fairies to make words!"
"Ha ha ha, clever clogs....I mean it would be really cool to see a message up there one day, eh? Like a secret message...."
"Hey, maybe you could see you fortune up there, maybe what you see is what you're going to be one day..."
"Well you're going to be an stinky slimy octopus I guess!"
We rolled around play fighting and tickling each other till one of us gave up and surrendered, we'd look each other in the eye and swear to be best friends for ever. We'd lie back again with our cheeks touching, funny how we always found ways to hug and be near each other. Everything meant something and we knew it somehow, every little gesture, every little touch.

Was there ever a message in the clouds?
Yes, actually one day there was, and we never expected to see it...
We were older then, I guess 16 or 17, we were lying under a tree, smoking, holding hands, I was looking at her from the corner of my eye, she was looking at the sky..."Look," she said, suddenly jumping up, "up there, see?,"....there were two short sentences, one for her and one for me, written by the same hand, interlocking and inseparable...pointing to the same future. ..

So, you ask, what did you see there, in the clouds...
I can't tell you, she earnestly swore me to silence then, and I still bear the silence.
Now, a whole ocean away from the grassy fields, a whole life away from her, I can look out of my office window and sometimes I see my half of the message, and I wonder if she can see hers? If she can remember the whole message as we saw it that day, I see and I remember, and I remember my promise and I remember her.

Chapter Four - Lower East Side

I have drawn my hands away
Like ships for guidance in the lift and spray
Of stars that urge them towards an unknown goal
Drift, O wakeful one, O restless soul
"Meditation" Hart Crane


I couldn't fall asleep and I couldn't wake up all the way.
I was skating on the thin ice between waking and sleeping, numb and paralyzed in my sleeplessness, mutely staring at the ceiling and silently fuming inside. I really hated when that happened, because I would always be totally wrecked by the time I had to get up and go to work. I looked at the bedside clock, 3.30a.m....well that's me fucked then. I heard her moving in her sleep, breathing like the sound of deep waves in the distance, the call of the sirens.
Fifth floor walk-up, run-down railroad apartment, corner of 3rd and Avenue B. Freezing in winter, a humid oven in Summer.
The building is as quiet as the grave...well...quiet except for the crack head paranoid downstairs who always chooses this time of night to run up and down the hallway banging on the walls and screaming over and over, "White devils! White devils!" The never-seen woman who lives upstairs rearranging the furniture, dragging the sofa from one side of the apartment to the other, lift...drag...thump...lift...drag...thump, I wish the next thump would be her dropping stone dead on the floor. All I need now would be for Giorgio, the middle aged Ukrainian alcoholic who lives next door, to realize that he's out on the street in zero degree weather freezing to death, with his keys lost somewhere in the snow, to start buzzing my door so he can crash on the sofa...Giorgio doesn't trust me with the keys when he's sober, he doesn't trust us at all.

And, now what the hell is she doing?

Why can't she stay in bed, jumping up all the time to do God knows what in the kitchen, every time she gets up she lets a draft of cold air in the bed, I mumble...honey?....don't put the light on...the light switch clicks, the fluorescent in the kitchen sputters to life, throwing it's harsh light into the corner of the bedroom where we sometimes sleep together, when it's not so cold and icy in our hearts. Why can't she go to bed at a reasonable hour? Sleep all night long once in a while, take a pill or something? It's bad enough that she has to work at the bar until after midnight, but why doesn't she ever get home until after 2am, I don't get it. I sometimes wonder what goes on there after they've cleaned up and locked the doors, but, I guess I don't really care anymore, as long as she comes home at all these days it's a good sign. I just want some peace, and between the getting up and coming back, and turning the light on and off, and the bloody mobile bleeping away all night I'll be lucky to get an hour's peace tonight.
The front door bangs open, freezing cold air rushes in from the hall way, the windows rattle and my spine ices over, I hear her making a run for the stairs, footsteps skittering and ricocheting off the tile floor...what drama is unfolding in her now? Could have at least closed the door on her way out!

I'd seen her around the neighborhood for the last few months, since the end of summer I guess, walking alone most of the time, walking a dog once which seemed so incongruous.
When December came it started to get really cold, and the wind chill would blow unhindered up the Avenue from Houston Street.  Most early evenings I sat in the cafe on the corner for warmth, every so often I'd see her hurry past, wool hat pulled tight down over her ears, the collar of her pea-coat turned up, an outline of black in movement, a brief sense of heat on my cheek. Or I'd pass some place, a diner, cafe, laundromat, whatever, and out of the corner of my eye, I'd make out her shape, have the feeling of her sitting at a table by the fogged-over window, some hot drink steaming between her hands. I think she was a waitress in a restaurant, I'd dropped into a neighborhood Italian place one night with friends, I think it was her, coming from the kitchen with plates and cutlery, it was a dimly-lit dining room and I couldn't really make her out clearly, I was distracted by my friends and couldn't pointedly turn around and stare...but I saw her appear and disappear in the mirrors around the room, it was her, I felt the heat on my cheek again.
 I'd never actually seen her with anyone, no boyfriend, maybe there was one at home, in the background, wherever home was. She was an abstract person in my peripheral vision, there and not there at the same time, registered...then gone. You'd never have the chance to meet square on, because there is no direct connection from you to them, nobody you know knows them. Even if you knew where they should be at a particular time, they wouldn't be there...they'd be there...then gone, the wrong place at the wrong time. This might sound crazy but I was always aware of her when she was close, even if I couldn't see her directly, I began to worry that I was hallucinating.
     
She comes home late, sometimes she's drunk, sometimes she seems high, but I know she doesn't do drugs, it's the chemical cocktail in her brain she says, the dry martinis and tequila sunrises of the ups and downs, the slow-motion icing down of her neurons, the doses of poison she has to take and the antidotes she swallows...and honestly I try but I don't understand what she's talking about, I just know the times I have held her close to me for hours as she sobs and howls, laments and mourns, for something she says she has to do, or had to do, or did. Until, in spite of the nervous energy still coursing through her, she collapses depleted of sense, she becomes heavy as a river stone and I carefully carry her to bed.  Sometimes I lay her fully clothed on the duvet to sleep, sometimes I feel braver and calmly undress her, taken aback once again by the smoothness of her skin, like marble, each curve and fold an index of the bones below...and I wonder what demons could inhabit such an angel...we make love to draw out the animal that sleeps inside her...trying to reconnect to it...hoping touch will reawaken it, later we lie in the omnipresent darkness, in silence and she tells me things...about herself, about her past, and I listen for the clues that will explain her reckless and ecstatic life.

Now she's gone again, and I have no idea when she'll be back.
So, I'll try to sleep a little, try to ignore this.
Explain her fleeing headlong as insomnia, nervous energy.
Maybe she went down to the corner for cigarettes, maybe she'll be back soon.
She's gone to meet someone I just know it.
Gone to get something she's always needed more than me.
She never tells me where she goes, she skates around the facts, I don't have the faintest idea where she came from or where she's going. To be honest I never did.
I've never seen her passport, any I.D., any proof of anything she's said or who she is.
I know nothing for real, and I didn't give a damn then or now.
In her address book I was number 37, I'd looked. 

You know, I found her again eventually, one day, or she found me, standing in the doorway of the Ukrainian Social Center waiting for a friend, sheltered against the cold...or was it that she stepped out of a taxi right in front of me and we smiled in mutual recognition...or was she waiting for the bus, her head stuck in a book, and I went to stand next to her...does it really matter how it happened? No, if I tell the truth it was much more straightforward, she just walked up to my table in the cafe, and without any apology, sat down opposite me, took off her winter coat and laid it across the chair next to her, pulled the wool hat off her head and shook her hair out, it was shorter than before. She looked me right in the eye, those brown eyes, those large dilated pupils...I started drowning in them, the sound of the deepness of the ocean and far-off tolling bells...she cocked her head to one side, put two fingers on her chin and said to me, "OK...so...tell me a story."

So I did, and I kept talking to make her stay there with me, and I've been talking ever since because this story can never end, it has changed from being all about me, to being all about me and her, to just being all about her, and now the story is only about being silent, I've run out of words for once, and I'm ready to sleep at last.