To be honest, I don't know what it is. Sometimes I just jolt up in bed, like someone prodded me in the side. It's not quite pitch black out...It's too bright in the theatre district, even in the middle of the night. The streetlamps do it, they turn everything a milky grey colour that doesn't exist, at least not in my experience, except during these hours. I wake up to this filmy unreal colour and I think maybe I'm hearing someone cry, so I get up, and climb across the floor quiet as I can until I get to the big portal window overlooking the street.
You can't open the window. But some of its glass is knocked out, and so I lean through and look into the night when I wake up. I listen. I listen until my ears hurt, and the silence moves by like a train. Sometimes you can hear the air cars landing and pushing off. Sometimes nothing at all. Silence doesn't deafen, it doesn't roar. Silence squeaks and clatters and thumps. There is never a silence, not during these hours.
I come from Treno, that's more or less where I grew up, and there it's always night. Maybe that's why I wake up, old home instincts. The night time in Treno is the time when it comes alive, when you can make a living. Theatre wasn't always a forte of mine. In fact I prefer to be backstage making things work than on stage using my so called skills, but you use what you have in theatre.
I'm using what I have now, looping my tail over one of the skeletal fragments where glass should be, but isn't. I lean far out the window, until it my feet are barely touching the stone and I look and feel as though I'm floating above the street. In these unreal colours in this unreal hour, maybe I am. Maybe I wake up, just to become a ghost.
I wait for the blue light. Sometimes it comes, and sometimes it doesnt. Sometimes I'm not sure what it really is. I'm almost certain it's entirely in my head. When I hang like this overlooking the street, the blood begins to rush strangely in my head and I feel heavy and debased, as if I'm coming apart. You could say the light is because I fall asleep up here, but if I did, I would hit the street and know I wasn't dreaming. I'm not a bat. Hanging and sleeping do not go hand in hand for me.
When I do see the blue light, I think it might be the sun coming over the horizon at first. You can't tell with light, until it gets close, what colour it is. What colour's the sun? You can say yellow, but you know better. Sometimes it's white. Sometimes it's red. Sometimes it might be blue. This is what I mean.
If it was the sunrise, just blue, people would be awake and moving. But they aren't. Everyone sleeps, except the air cars which move like sloths through the treetops.
I don't describe the blue light like a tunnel. It isn't something that comes and engluffs me, it isn't something that makes me feel at home or one with myself. I just like it. It comes over the edge of the horizon like a sun, only blue, and begins to rise into the sky. The higher it gets, the more it seems to worm into itself. It's being unborn, the blue light, and I just watch it go up until it becomes nothing at all. When I'm done, my eyes hurt, and my head hurts, but not because of the light. Because I'm awake at this hour, and hanging out a window.
It doesn't always come. Sometimes other people are awake to see it, and I stopped pointing it out to them a long time ago. Nobody likes to see the things they can't explain, so to them it's always an airship lifting off in the distance. I used to argue, especially with Baku, but not anymore.
During one of the biggest arguments, I told him I would prove he was wrong and follow the light. This was stupid, because it only appears sometimes, and disappears into the sky. It's always the same distance away, and you can't catch up to it. This is why I wonder if it isn't in my mind, simply something wandering around that has to do with my being awake and tired and filling my head with blood.
It isn't these nights that bother me. It's the ones where I lean against the window and look outside, and people really are there. Sometimes it's two kids...I say kids, because they sneak around like they're going to get in trouble, even though I'm their age. I watch them, even though they can't see me, because I'm secreted up here in the hollow dark window. It's the same couple usually, and they meet on the steps down towards the square. I watch and sometimes I can hear what they say, but I try not to. To see them makes me feel sad and happy at the same time. Because I know they're going to get in trouble for sneaking out to be together, I'm sad. But because they think they're in love, I'm happy.
I don't know what love is. I don't think anyone really does. But we like to pretend we do, because it makes us feel good. I'm no exception. I like to pretend. I am an actor, sometimes.
Sometimes it's nobody I know at all, walking outside on the street. Sometimes it's animals. If it's nobody I know, they're always talking to themselves. I don't think anyone wants to be up at this hour. I wonder what they think, if they see me the way I am sometimes, looking for the blue light. Probably nothing at all, because they don't ever look at me or ask me. Cats always look at me. They must think I'm insane, because nobody else does. I sure don't. I don't worry too much about what cats think. If they were smarter, maybe they wouldn't still be cats. Maybe they'd be like the Rat people, or other races.
I've seen horriable things happen at this hour too. I think I saw a rape once. I don't know. How do you define things like that? It was murky grey, and down in the square, so I couldn't see. And sometimes people scream and joke about screaming. Maybe it was nothing, just the couple I sometimes see, playing. Maybe it was something.
I know even if it was something, I couldn't have gotten there and been any help. Because when I wake up at this hour, I'm weak. My body is knotted from sleeping, my stomach is growling, and the bones around my eyes ache. It feels like lying on a brick would be an improvement. In the middle of the night, I'm about as fierce as one of the cats that glares at me. Cats can be dangerous, sure. But people are still bigger, and stronger, and smarter.
Shadows on far off walls always creep up on the corners of my eyes. They're the worst. I think a monster is skulking towards me, and it's only a crate and an unraveled safety net. It makes my head hurt. Exhaustion is the closest I've come to hallucination.
Tonight, I lean on the stone and metal where a windowpane should be, and watch the streets. I can hear the air cars clank, but not in landing. They're bobbing on their docks, thumping against the railings. It sounds like steelworkers a mile away down a cave. You hear everything at this hour. The cringes and stretchings of silence. I hear the breathing of the people I've called my brothers for years behind me. We sleep like a coop of hens. Some of us curl up in the loft, like me. Some of us stay on the floor. We all tuck into ourselves and take no notice when the others get up. Baku even looks like a hen, leaning back in the mangled sofa-chair in the loft. I wouldn't be surprised if in the morning, he laid an egg.
Chickens make the strangest sounds, actually. Did you know they can sound afraid? I bet you didn't. Nobody thinks about a chicken sounding scared.
Down on the street, a little person shuffles by. He looks lost, and confused, and maybe scared. It's hard to tell completely in the dark. I just have his walk in the dusty light to judge from. All kids his age walk unsure. Where are you going, where have you been? I wonder and lean over the ledge of the sill, pressing my stomach against the metal. It bumps up against my hipbones, because we're doing a play that involves a sick man, and to play a sick man you must be thin. Baku believes in realism. If he could, he'd posion me before showtime.
The person doesn't need to know that. I need to know though. I need to know where they've come from, why. They're young so why are they out at this hour? Too young to be meeting a lover. Too old to be sleepwalking. So I talk to them. "Morning!"
I sound much more alive and real than I feel. That's normal, it's hard to feel real at this hour. I feel like a spectre, all eyes and fingertips, and no body at all.
My morning spooked him. He's like me, anyone awake right now is always a surprise. He looks up, because I guess he's afraid, and steps back and forth on the street. It's hard to run somewhere I can't see him, and I think he realizes that, but after he starts talking. So he sounds mixed up. "It's still dark out, right?"
I'd guess so. I've been up only a little while now, and I don't think the blue light is coming tonight anyway. It won't unless I hang out the window in that particular way, which I haven't. So I don't waste time and state the obvious. "Where you going to?"
He has orange eyes. I can see them in the light the streetlamp casts. They look gold, because it bleeds into them, but I can filter out the colour lies. "Noplace in particular, not now anyway. Just ...you know... around."
"Around the theatre district. It's hours before the sun comes up. Have you slept yet?" I take care of him, because I don't want to have to wonder if the screams I might hear a few hours later are someone joking around, or someone hurting him.
His head shakes, and the folds on the hood he's wearing flop around. He's very alive, and very surreal, and I am very tired. "I've been walking around for a while."
"You know Tantalus?" This is how I make sure he's not going to get upset. This is how I know you won't get upset. I make sure he knows who I am, and what I do. He nods, because we preform in the square on saturdays, and if he's been walking, he's from the Theatre district too. "I'm Zidane," He nods and the eyes open up a little, in a sort of recognition, as if we've been friends a long time. We haven't, but I won't tell him that. "This is our place. You're welcome to come in and get some rest, if you want."
I can see him start to move in that confused refusal people sometimes give. They get confused when you help them, because they're not used to it. The world is very give and take, and maybe it's just the insomnia that tells me to act differently. So I don't listen to him, I listen to it, and take one careful jump off the window ledge back to the floor inside. The loft wraps around to the window, but the ladder is far away, and my legs take the shock with only a little protest. Baku makes a snorting noise in his sleep, but doesn't wake up. Nobody else moves.
The door makes a sound like a hundred of the air cars when I slide back the bolt and open it, but unlike me, everyone is well into their deepest sleep by now and won't be woken up by it. The orange eyed kid looks surprised when I step outside, but I don't let that really register. I can see he's got on mostly dark blues by now, because the light turns them greenish grey.
Neither of us says anything, because it's too early and too late at the same time. He's been walking since the sun dipped under, and I'm swimming somewhere between subconcious and sanity. Once he steps inside, I bolt the door again and suddenly we're speaking an unmarked sign language. It has a lot of nods and pointings, and putting your fingers to your lips. I can tell by the way he moves, he ran away from home. Probably trouble in school, nothing he seriously wanted to leave for. Just something to frighten his parents. Looking for his own blue light.
He's louder than I am when he walks, but he didn't live in Treno. No, he's from here. Right here, land of air cars and the Regent. The Twins don't even stir when I worm a blanket out from under one of them and hand it to the orange haired boy. He tip toes to one of the first level chairs and begins shedding layers of clothing. Underneith I see he wasn't a boy at all. She doesn't look like anyone I'll ever know, and collapses into the chair without another word. I'll never learn her name, and she'll be gone when I do wake up, because I'll have gone to sleep the hour before she leaves.
Tomorrow, she will go back home, dressed as a boy, and her orange eyes will get into another fight. But this one won't be a reason to run off. I could wait, and give her a goodbye. I could sleep now, and catch her. Maybe it's her birthday. I'll never know. Because I trust the others, my brothers, to say good-bye to her and hope she makes it through whatever life she lives.
I could sleep now...But instead, I think I'll lean through the window again and listen for far away sounds. The air cars will clank together and the city will grumble and my eyes will begin to stick together when I blink. The sun will eventually start to crawl into the sky, and unlike the blue light, she will never shrink and never disappear completely. I feel like I'm swimming in a pool of cream and water, and my ribs are sensitive and cold on the stone.
The only thing I dislike more than waking up these hours, is to wake up to these hours, and find nothing to think about.