The farside of the park was riddled with dragonflies and goatsbeard in equal numbers floating under the iron red parabola of the sky. Calvin turned the tape over in his tape player and hiked up his socks by the picnic tables, wearing a safari hat and oversized aloha shirt. The park looked the same as it ever had, although the street performers had all been replaced with charred black circles in the grass, the trees had dropped all of their auburn leaves on top like cherry blossoms. Rolling up his pant legs and returning to his feet, Calvin let out a sigh like the tiny hole in a balloon and walked down the moonlit path.
His arms insisted on forming a bow shape, the tepid weather not quite sweater weather to the conscientious survivor. Flanked by insistently waving birches, a phone booth stood next to a series of portojohns. The door jostled in the hum of the wind, and shaking it open he stepped inside and inserted a quarter. Picking up the receiver, he heard a voice already on the other end.
“This isn’t the time to be out here,” It said. A familiar voice, the grave clout of an authoritative man. “What are you wasting your time for here?”
Calvin was startled, and looked around disbelievingly for a source of his surveillance. He hadn’t noticed the overlooking hills, the small ransacked townhouses in the clear sky like hoovertowns in the city. He performed here once with a Shakespeare company, acting out the role of Othello once for an audience entirely formed of passerbies.
“What else is there for me?” Calvin said, devoid of tone in his voice. He belonged here as much as the dragonflies did, paperthin creatures floating like singed paper. “What can I do?” He implored.
The voice on the other end coughed, a reverberation sounded in the chamber like a penny down a well. “Ok,” It let out. “There’s no reason for you to keep going, nowhere left for you to go. The world’s a beautiful place. You are swimming against the current, let things change.”
Calvin thought about the vague message from the authoritative man. Lights from the city flashed like lightning in the sky, the underground members were shooting their fireworks off and making their presence known. Calvin breathed in, pressed the phone to his ear and said: “I have to make a phone call. Call back later.”
He hung up, picked the phone back up, and put two quarters in the slot. He felt the coin hit the bottom of the return, and dialed the number again. He had done this every night since he could remember. Days of collecting food wherever he could get it, drinking in the room, staying in the semipopulated colony of the hotel. He wasn’t used to conversations anymore, when the ringing had finally went away in his ears the world came back in an underwater, muted like the inside of a tunnel.
The electricity in his room was off, he’d sit out on the patio when the daylight waned and transformed into a perpetually dimming glow. He missed the comfort of the electric glow less and less, the world around him turning into an island, free of the bustle and concern of time. Now, it was only light or dark. The dark was never all encompassing. It felt like having a nightlight in the sky. Perpetual sunset.
The phone rang again and again. No answer. No answering machine. Just the ringing through his ear like a pipe cleaner probing the inside of a mollusk. A shrunken man sat somewhere in the inside of his head, unreachable, tethered to a coconut tree. The sound of the wind against branches simulated an ocean effect.
Calvin pretended the cool breeze against the outside of the booth was purifying his ego. Briiing, briiing. It was like those Buddhism books he kept reading, if he took in enough and chose to believe it, it would have no choice but to take. But he was already submerged, inculcated with the distant shimmer of a different sun. He let it ring for a half an hour, rejoicing in the soft singing. There were people in the park, he could hear them chattering away like primitive man, rediscovering fire.
He leaned his head out of the booth, and squeezed out in a sideways shuffle. Hanging the phone with care, he walked closer to the beach, unconcerned with the shadows dancing between trees or the cacophony in the now far off city. The phonebooth rang again in the distance, and he saw a man with a blue windbreaker descend upon it in a dead sprint.
Calvin wandered through the morning, trying the key he had found on every hole it would fit into. Don Ho took him through the streets. He passed crumbled archways, hackneyed tents, bohemian paradise.
A girl with a basket of poseys ran through the street alone. She hopped along like a flower girl at a wedding. There was an open manhole cover at the end of the block. She was going to fall into it. No she wasn’t, Calvin thought. What are the odds that she would jump right over it, sprawl out down it like a swan dive. No one followed her, she came from nowhere.
Sitting up, Calvin looked away. He tried to fix his eyes on the window pane across the street of an old store, unknowing his concern. He rose to his feet and turned the tape up, finding his way back around to the entrance of his building. In the reflection, he saw the manhole cover open, inviting.
Wallace was entertaining guests in the lounge. A gray haired mess of a man sprawled out along the red vinyl couches, fingerless mittens grasping at the hood of his jacket, pulling it tight over his face. A man with a bowtie and ruffled sleeves stood prophesizing into an effervescent skylight. The speaker system hummed, the muzak still present but disconcerted.
No comments:
Post a Comment