chapter 6

The city of lights, Paris, in the dark side of earth during the long days of the year.

A young man is standing across the street from a rounded tree park and up the avenue from where a broad, flat faced apartment building split the avenue in a two-way fork. The streets, with their broad white markings, are barren except for him, an old taxi, and an elderly lady walking down the street with her groceries. The bread stuck out. With her shawl she had looked the same for the last hundred years.

He’s walking towards the apartments; his face freckled with spots of streetlight that poked through the arbors. Most lights are off. There is a bus stop out front, where the building rounded out and split the street. An orangey, dirty light flickered above it. Behind that, the front doors of the apartments lit by cheap white-blue lights that attracted nats and robbed the skin of pigment. They tend to buzz. In the summer when even the night felt humid, these lights made it worse.

Third floor window, the one he kept eying as he crossed over lines in the cement sidewalk, flickered with a crossing shadow. He steps off the curve as the old woman nears the far corner, across from the apartments. He walks briskly, sending ripples up his slacks and his loafers clicking, jogging slightly with the buttons buttoned.

He jumps up onto the opposite curb, pulling a tiny cellular phone from his pocket and, without looking hitting send. He holds the device to him mouth like a walkie-talkie and looks with pride at the apartment window.

Ring….Ring….

The older woman stops for a minute, huddling her belongings a little closer on the corner as the yellow taxi turns left in front of her. The windows are rolled down, or else she should have seen her reflection and not the worn brown leather of late modeled Mercedes.

A voice clicks onto the cell phone.

“hello?”

He slows his footsteps, collecting his thoughts and his plan in the shadows of the trees.

“hey, you left kind of early”

“yeah” the voice says. “I do that sometimes”

“you didn’t say goodbye” he says..

“I do that too, don’t see the point in it really, it just brings sadness into a room, even if its not an important good bye you know, its never an upper”

“I am almost at your place…” he says. “Wait” he’s almost on the corner where the old woman is crossing. He closes the phone and keeps the corner of his eye on the third floor window. He can tell, without looking, that the moving silhouette has quit shifting, settling in the corner of the sill. Watching.

She looks down on him from her tiny window lined in lace and pealing white paint. He leans into the old woman and says something in probably broken but nonetheless charming French and the old woman hands the bag to him. She watches from the window as he crosses the street, nodding and forcing small talk with the little old lady. Our watcher step back from the window, wrapping a robe tight around her nightgown. She scurries to the door, barefoot against the aged wood marred with dark signs of age, down to the street level where the blue cold lights lit her door. She cracks it just a bit, peering with a single green eye down the block to where she sees his coat disappear into the apartment of the old woman. She breathes cold night air through the three inch gap before she sees him reemerge.

She lets the door clunk close quick and hides behind it, listening through it for the click of his loafers that grow louder. She reopens the door as he reached for it, catching him in a slight look of surprise.

“hi!” he says on the exhale. “Wow”

“Hi” she says, letting the door open with its own nonchalance.

“come out”

“come in”

“come out”

“come in” she cant help but smile, thumbing the cusp of comedy and annoyance. She puts her arm out for him to take, as if to walk inside, and he, as if to comply, offers his arm as well. Grabbing her arm he pulls her out from the door onto the sidewalk close enough to dance, but she can’t hear the music.

“what are you doing?” she asks.

“I…don’t know” he says. Staring not in her eyes like black and white movies with clicking projectors had taught but at her lips. Thinking not of some kiss but of the science of their scene. If indeed the light he stood beneath turned the white paint of the building a powdery shade of blue then, by all means, it should distort all colors. Her lips, even a vibrant red, would look dulled by the blue. But they did not. He is sure she has no idea that curling from the lines of her face and nape of her neck shined a violation of the physical world, as he knew it. A tiny little wonder that gave his face and mind a tiny bit peace as the door clunked closed and hid the sounds of fast feet ascending stairs.