They say goodbye and hang up as another gust from the sea kicks up and blows into the minivan, bringing along up from the shore a small white and gray gull that lands near the van and looks at Gene from the side of his head—maybe expectantly, but gulls are hard to decipher. Gene responds by digging through his lunch refuse again for a fry and tosses it to the bird who deftly jumps into the breeze and catches the morsel in mid-salty-air with maybe a thankful cry—maybe triumphant. It’s easier to be happy when you don’t want much, Gene thinks. Then he thinks, I hope I don’t get killed by ten million pounds of sludge from New Jersey, though. “You wouldn’t know what the hell hit you, buddy!” The gull looks on—maybe suspiciously—maybe like he would know what ten million pounds of sludge looked like. Then Gene wonders how long it will be before he’s ever happy again.

Often when I believe this is about to happen, the colors of the strange awesome things I used to dream knock loudly on the front door of my apartment. They fill the peephole like out a submarine I’m peering and when I least expect it. That is, they always show up when I am about to knock something over, but I never know when that feeling will come over me. The colors are such a nuisance; I try to keep them from coming. But sometimes I can’t help but think about a small child alone in a large, dark house and then I think that the child will surely spill something and not know how to clean it up, or even know that it doesn’t matter.

And if you know that nothing ever spilt never matters, then why wash the bedclothes? I think. Surely all that is unkempt of the bed has come from you. Skin. Sweat. Fluid. Visions. I keep washing gray sheets and piling them on the bed. I always need more. Bloodshot eyes that don’t close stare at the dark whitewashed ceiling under the pressure of one hundred pounds—sheets so thick they soak the nightsweat up like a sponge. That is often when the toys rattle—when their toy eyes glow bright colors and blink like fireflies in the room and move all about.

I hate never sleeping and yet I can’t stand to just close my eyes.

I beg for the world to make it easy. I ask if it would be okay if I weren’t crazy, but I know that the piercing eye of the world, the Sun, sooner or later will part the blinds and firmly say, “No.” (Just between you and me, I think the Sun is a jerk—he never gives a shit about my plight–just keeps coming around to check on me and then taking off for the next appointment. Mark my words, modern men have no friend in the Sun.)

The only thing I like about the visit from the Sun is that the colors no longer barricade the door. They get bored pretty easy. Then I can leave. I wear 3 pairs of colored sunglasses that blend out all the color. Some people don’t like it, but frankly I like to see in gray. Mostly I don’t look anyway.

“Uh… right now?” Gene has just been listening to one of his favorite sounds gifted his apartment. When storms come in from the South, they inevitably cause the oversized lid on the art deco street lamp to clunk under its own loose weight. He liked to leave the door open as the winds kicked up. Hell, he liked to leave the door open to invite the storm inside; yes—for a cup of whoop-ass. That was the pleasure: open the door to the danger, let it come in. For him, the streetlamp had become a kind of novel bell; impending storm coming. She’d probably not even noticed it, he realized, her chin straining up to rest on his spine and shoulder.

“The thing is…”—how to put it—”I don’t want to fuck you while the storm is coming in…”

This is a way-bold statement for their budding relationship and he sees the surprise she can’t hide from her face. Had he said the word “fuck” in her presence yet even? He’d no idea. But her face is not marred by shock; it is genuine uncertainty he sees. He twists his neck around and smiles—nothing menacing here—and she giggles. Then he turns away from the screen door, the clunking of the street lamp, the sky split in half between bright blue and rolling gray, and wraps his arms around her. She lets him take her in and in her way, a way she hopes he notices, she presses her face against his chest and stares thoughtfully at the front moving across their little city. She does like storms that arise, too. He squeezes her and after a nervous breakthrough says, “I want to fuck you when the storm is here—when it’s banging on the windscreen, in full effect.”

She decides to play the straight man, “Oh, I see…”

He squeezes. “You know it.” He bends his head down and quiet, “You better think the storm is me.”

She leans back from him and waves her hand Scarlet before her face. “Oh goodness.”

He won’t live up to it, so he smiles too.

Shara sees the stumble and knows she must recover lust. “I’ll wait for that, you monster.” She waits, his face is creasing in a way that’s coming around, and then she adds, “You fuck me like the front of weather.” There’s a long pause of eye-looking and she adds, “I can’t predict the weather.”

But the weather is coming.

Of course, the road had an actual number, but this was not what he wondered. He saw a map of the United States, the world, in his mind. Like any particle of gas in a chamber, his path could be tracked and shown to be different from any other. There was a line that traced the northern hemisphere illustrating his striations and bounces and chaos. Surely no other human path could match it; snowflake indeed. He was unique and as the movement and dynamics of everyone he knew washed over his mind and he saw the mess of it all, he realized too that he was unique and meaningless somehow at the same time.

It did not bother him, this meaninglessness. It was never made real for him, not the vacuum wind of air being sucked out of the cabin of the truck where through the just-rolled down window he flicked his cigarette. No, the air was not the ghost. The air, for all its flora scent and beneficence, let him go, but the ghost followed him, rode in the car in the empty passenger seat. He knew it and knew it well and though sometimes it could seem cold, more often he bathed himself in the warmth and comfort of the anonymity of its missing. He knew well the insecurity of standing in front of people and talking and seeing in their faces their disapproval. He much preferred the knowing that if unidentified to anyone, he was never someone to be taken notice of.

“Of course I do,” Allen said.

“Okay. It just seems like you do all the driving,” Jamie replied. She was keeping her voice down because she was at work and there was a customer looking around.

“The other day you got all pissed because I didn’t want to drive down.”

“I know.”

“Well, somebody has to drive.”

“Yeah…”

“Incidentally, you left some pictures at my place.”

“I did?”

“The roll from the botanical gardens?”

“Oh yeah! I totally forgot about those.”

Allen thinks about keeping the picture of his reverie almost afraid now that it would give the secret away if she looks too closely. “Anyway… today’s just so… I just really want to see you.”

“Yeah?”

“Wednesday night was just stupid.”

“Yeah.” They both pause for a long while. “Well, you know, you can ‘make it up’ to me.”

Allen laughs a little, the phone crackling, the signal maybe bent by electricity hanging in the atmosphere. He liked it when Jamie baited him, and he can almost hear her smile through the receiver because she knows he knows. “I love you,” he says instead of taking the bait and smiles, staring at the Styrofoam carton that his brunch had recently occupied.

“I love you too.”

The pair enjoys a pleasant, pregnant moment of silence.  
 

“Listen, I gotta’ get back to work.”

“Okay. I’ll see you around five.”

“You sure you remember where it is?”

“Yup.”

“Okay. I’ll be there.”

Allen laughs again. “K’bye.”

“Bye.”

So there he and Jess sit in said unnamed cafe having dropped off the unnamed fish eating sandwiches and looking through the Times for something to do tonight. Jason turns to the Metro section and spots an article about how the Famous live in New York. He laughs because he knows the drill—everyone does: Here they come. Don’t look at them. And he never does. For all the Famous he’s seen in the village, he’s never once said a word to any of them. Would they even see him if he did say something?

“I’m sorry to bother, and I don’t usually do this,” (likely!) “but I really loved you in __________.”

The imaginary Starlet looks at a point in the air somewhere just behind Jason’s head. “Hey thanks. I had so much fun making that picture.”

Then, feeling gregarious or maybe just needing to fill up the awkward silence rather than just saying goodbye to the pretty living art, he’d probably try to be too friendly. “So, do you live in the Village? ‘Cause I live in the Village.”

And the Starlet would be visibly uncomfortable and hem a little bit, “Um… well…”

Jason would totally accommodate the Starlet, “Oh don’t worry about it. I know you all like your privacy. Just—you know—just makin’ chit chat!”

“Okay!” the Starlet would say, relieved. Then her order would finally show up and off she’d sail on the breeze of casual glances. “Bye.” She wouldn’t say something like “See ya’ around,” of course, because that might imply that she did in fact live in the Village.

Jason is staring at the corner of his table. He looks back to the paper.

“It’s always easiest for the stars to blend in with the super cool of the hottest neighborhoods, like DUMBO these days.”

“Wow,” Jason says, “you know it’s cool when you don’t even know what the hell they’re talking about.”

“What?”

“DUMBO?”

“Oh. Down underneath the Manhattan Bridge Overpass.”

“Seriously?”

“That’s what it’s called.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“That’s where we should be heading tonight.”

“For real?”

“It’s the new Billyburg.”

“But it’s Brooklyn.”

“It’s, like, one stop.”

“I dunno.”

“Aaaand there’s a place there I want to check out called Superfine. You’re coming.”

“All right.”

“You’re a sorry excuse for a hipster.”

“You’re damn right. You didn’t even hear what the article said!” Jason reads her the line.

In her best cheerleader voice, Jess responds, “Haven’t you heard—it’s the supercoolest!”

“Dear God.”

“We’re going.”

“Fine.” Jason continues absently flipping through the metro section and turns past a Chanel ad with an exotic, blonde German woman in it, so beautiful, so sheek, that he doesn’t even notice her.

“You will,” Gene says, as he looks up to eye the CCTV camera on the corner of the ceiling of the porch.

“Do you know someone who lives here?”

Gene looks slightly surprised, then looks around and shakes his head, “No.”

“Okay.”

“That’s not the point?”

“Really?”

“Yeah. I don’t know anyone in this building, but I do know that they have a security system with the camera outside the front door and all and it makes them feel safe…”

“And?”

“Look, if you’re going to employ me in your services, you need to understand a very basic principle.”

“Okay.” When she says this, she tosses her hair over her shoulder, like she does just about every two minutes. And even though he sees it for what it is, he can’t help but helplessly watch as she does it. It’s a tick—the sign of a present irritant and at having to wait for his various obtuse “explanations.” Still though, he keeps tying the balloon to a rock, and tries to take a deep breath because every time she does toss her hair, little particles of sweet-smelling womanliness cast off into the atmosphere and he just has to catch a few. But he returns to reality after tying of the knot on the balloon string. He’s made the placement just right and the balloon floats up just in front of the camera, blocking its never-sleeping eye.

“See?”

“Uh… you blocked the camera.”

“Yeah!”

[Interesting Flower #1: large purple flowers that look like cups.]

Allen stares blankly.

[Interesting Flower #2: really light blue with lots of small flowers]

He strokes his chin scientifically and emits, “Um-hm.”

[Not an interesting flower.]

Allen looks perplexed. Why photograph that one? Jamie had thought they were all mesmerizing though.

[Interesting Flower #3: large clumps of small yellow flowers shaped like dust mops.]

“Ah yes, the rhoden… aram modi… menicus.” Then he snickers. His fake Latin was exceptional.

He pauses at each flower whereas before he would have tucked one and another of the photographs away looking for photos of people doing things. He didn’t know anything about the numbers of petals or the difference between a pistil and a stamen. There was nothing to recognize except for the brilliance of the colors in the sun that day. It had been beautiful, clear and blue and left Allen to wandering absently. But if he had been walking in thought of some kind up ahead of her, Jamie would holler after him, “Oh my God! Look at these gorgeous Dendrobium orchids.”

[Allen leaning into the frame of the picture with his eyes closed in bliss at the scent of several large saucer-like flowers.]

He furrows his brow and tries to remember the smell. There was an essence of brown sugar that he could remember but he didn’t know what to name it.

In most of the pictures he was in, he was mugging the camera, his smiles exaggerated, his eyes wide as if nothing could bring him greater joy than… yes, flowers. Then, Allen found one picture that Jamie had taken without his knowing.

[A curved line drops from one edge of the photo to the other: a hilltop overlooking a pond. Near the crest of the hill, beneath a tree, sits Allen, lost in thought.]

He remembers that thought, a decision about the future that he was pondering and an unspoken prelude to their argument three days ago. Things with Jamie were moving forward and he had been thinking about that. His face in the photo looked relaxed, the distant horizon in the photograph printed next to his nose.

He wondered, as he looked as the tank cars, painted on with chemical yellow Helvetica letters patterns like “HKKX” and “LMTR,” what would happen if the worm tottered and fell to one side? When the tank cars fell on him in the strobed darkness, tipped and stamped like mad 2,000 pound pushing toddlers, would they emit foul chemicals or prove to be empty? In the asphalt beneath his feet he could feel a difference in the weight of cars that passed over gaps in the tracks. He could feel it in his ankles along with the ringing from the bells and slowly strobing red lights. All the sensations together felt heavy-handed and God-like compared to the digital slide presentations with their diagrams of neural perceptual systems that he’d seen only earlier in the day in a seminar. This was the sight, the sound, the feel of a proximity to chaos, no abstraction. How quaint the equation would’ve looked by comparison, with its smooth curves and network diagrams. His neurons were never meant to handle this level of intensity and he felt it in his brain. This was the sense, not the explanation, of things falling only proximately into order.

Then, a few empty hoppers traverse the intersection, their lack of freight or ore reverberating into the warm evening, and the whole mass dopplers into the distance, taking the chaos with it. Another moment and the lights and bells stop and Gene finds himself again in an empty intersection in an industrial part of town. It might as well be a parking lot. No one is here and the place grows more quiet as the train moves on. He smiles, the whole intense length having, in the end, been a moment of sign, of zen, no different than striking a gong and listening carefully to where the sound goes.