On The Corner Of Some Street

I borrowed a portable phone from a midget who was playing darts with an Asian-looking fellow and tried to reach you. I’ve tried to reach you all evening. The bartender, Louie, with his towel, his little three-day-beard, and his dripping beer glasses, told his dreams to a little faded flower at the end of the bar. The girl seemed young, young enough, and yet still utterly unreachable, she just ‘happened’ to be here, out of nowhere. She looked around, casually, like young girls do, checking out the other customers – I couldn’t quite get what she was up to. On one of her wrists: some angry Aryan scars. On the other wrist: a little tattoo, a red rose, dripping blood from its calyx.

Rain hit aggressively against the windows. Louie was daydreaming again, (too late really, it was way beyond the evening all ready, way beyond any evening if you asked me.) Judging from that eerie smile, he probably was dreaming about the young girl and himself. A heavy flash of rain against the glass. Louie woke up from his disgusting fantasmas, why he himself did not know. He dropped one of his beer glasses. I could hear it crash on the floor from here. For a brief moment we exchanged looks, but they were looks of doubt and loathing. I didn’t belong here, that’s what he’s thinking, I thought. And I went out of here.

Again I tried to call you, this time from a cell phone on the corner of two shopping streets. Someone walked by, just some one, John Doe, yeah you, Mr. Anonymous, the damned and the lost have so many names here. They are the children of the night, isn’t that always written on the back of cheap paperbacks? Our children they were once, our forgotten memories, our repressed vices, dropped out of the Eternal Womb we called night.

I walked on, a little dazed and confused. Red light fell on me out of some window next to me. And I thought by myself: could it be that the same drizzle that hits me in the face right here and now could also have caressed your skin, at the very same time?

In one of the alleys I could see a figure, lying with its head in a puddle of water. The man, at least I thought it was a man, moved some, then burped loudly, and gave me the finger.

I drove on, on the wheels beneath my feet; I didn’t want any trouble, not now, not tonight. Besides, the look on his face scared me: his eyes were bleeding, just like the little tattooed rose on the wrist of that girl at the bar.

Why was everybody bleeding this night, I thought. Are we ourselves the Horsemen of the Apocalypse, but have we been thrown off by our own jealous horses? Are we the Messengers of Doom, but who had read the message, meant only for the Big People who controlled us, early on? We were carnivore, that was for sure, and we were lonely. Very lonely. This kind of horror could not be adapted for the big screen. It was too personal, and besides, it was too horrible to believe.

The women I just saw behind the windows, bathing in the red light, had pulled up their skirts even more when I went by. One of them had a bottle in her hands, filled with rainwater. Another whore’s skin had the colors of a classic casket. Brothel or mortuary was there really a difference? I mean, once you were inside, you were screwed for life. And to make things even more embarrassing: you had to pay for it, to get screwed for life. Who would still deny that life was a bitch?

My heart ached when I crossed the street and left the women in the windows behind me. It was as if the ladies of the night (yeah, our children have grown up, right underneath our own hands…) with their marzipan breasts and stiletto-heeled-shoes walking all over my grave, in an endlessly long polonaise.

In the distance, beyond the streets, a dog barked. The moon was silent. The rain gods were laughing hysterically.

On the wall of a lingerie store I saw a piece of graffiti. I was startled because it was your name, written in black and silver paint. Loathsome, I touched your name with my fingers. You were here in front of me, on the wall, like a piece of faded art, fake, all devouring, post modern bullshit.

But as I touched the wall, the cement started to crack up and loosen. There was a rumbling sound; the lingerie store shivered on its foundation, and then the bricks started to fall down and within a few seconds the whole wall collapsed at my feet.

For a moment I saw your face clearly in front of me, but without any regret. If I had you on the phone right now, I probably wouldn’t have been able to hear you properly anyway.

Wind, rain, and dark unidentified cries from out of the gutters. Nobody was here to be a witness. Nobody was here to be you, for just a moment.

Desperately I looked across the streets, in trashcans, underneath car wrecks, behind rotting wooden boxes. I even looked inside myself, but there was nothing more to see than a treacherous void, a Nothing, a dyslectic vacuum.

I searched and searched. No corner, no alley, no hidden sideway was save. But was I myself really safe? The world at my feet was empty, a barren wasteland, as far as my eyes could see.

I passed a young couple. They had buried themselves in each other’s arms. They didn’t notice me. Of course, I thought, that’s what love is all about, seeing no one except yourself and the person you use as your mirror.

In my case, the mirror was cracked, and probably kitsch.

Somewhere, out of an open window, I could hear music flow. The sounds of laughter and small razor straight lines of coke. Voices of people filled with bourbon, straight up. Electric gibberish, atonal marimba tones, falling like drops of water. Just the blues, baby, I thought. Just the fuckin’ blues….

The people I heard singing and laughing were the ones to watch out for; they were the judges and executioners of our society. Not the society, people above sea level have no executions, they have government-funded-euthanasia. It was our society, the other society, the one gothic bands are singing about, the below-society, the society that would sprout after sunset and die again by the first hints of new morning light.

‘Hail the nightfall,’ the radio would blur, ‘hail the executioners…’

Could I help it? We invented the bastards, didn’t we…? A victim always made up his killer, or her killer, otherwise sooner or later someone else would do it. Can you imagine someone else is picking your executioner? Your filthy degenerated scumbag neighbour, or his deluded wife, picking out a rusty axe for you, your specially engraved dum-dum bullet, a thick wet sailor’s rope? You’d die right there, of disgust, and they would have won, wouldn’t they have…?

They sit or stand and dance, or lie down with each other, and they wait. Wait, and doing nothing. Nothing at all. And all of a suddenly, some times, just some times, they let themselves go. They run around in the streets, shouting, chanting, grabbing a young bit of misery by its neck and lynching it. Yeah, lynching it. Lynching misery and despair. Would they cry? No, they wouldn’t know how, would they…? Not crying, it was more than a game. It was a way of survival. It was a way of life.

I stood in the middle of the road. All was empty around me. All was death. Wherever you were, with whom you were with, one memory of you in this weather was better anyway than the rest of a whole life without one.

A flight of glass flamingos flew over, enlightening the sky for a brief moment. Then they crashed in a low hanging cloud. They exploded in mid-air and seconds later it rained white and pink pieces of broken glass.

A few minutes later I bumped into the midget again. He’d won the darting game from the Asian-looking fellow. It had earned him some money; how much he couldn’t quite remember. But was that a loss?

The dwarf wore a black felt hat on the back of his head. He smiled, all of a sudden. And nodded. ‘Some day,’ he said to me, ‘some day, all of this will be over. Some day, all will be fine.’ And then he said: ‘You know.’

I asked him if I could borrow his phone one more time. He nodded again and offered me a drink. We’ll find a place somewhere, he promised me while looking around. The night was filled with bars and cafés, but in most cases the people hanging out in there were dead. Dead as the night itself. They would bleed from their ancient wounds and from fake, post modernistic tattoos. We would be easy victims if we didn’t know what we were doing. But what the hell, what else could I do at this hour?

Much later, beyond the sunrise: still no response from you what so ever.

Yorgos Dalman has published in America in Samsara Quarterly, Flesh & Blood, The New Absurdists and The Cafe Irreal. Currently he is also translating the works of D. Harlan Wilson (The Kafka Effekt & Stranger on the Loose) for the Dutch magazine market.

Email: Yorgos Dalman

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