Prologue
The quiet moments take forever now.
Michael half remembers unquiet times, when stillness was the boy beside you blinking, the sound a throat makes when it swallows, parenthesized. Brief clicks, he remembers, like crickets at night, birds swooping over shelled fields, the absence of newspapers. But perhaps it is just a disparity in location – Paris sleeps through her afternoons, wearing her air close and wet. New York does not.
Unconsciously, he checks his heart. It is still there, performing it's slow rotations, so he lights another cigarette. From his balcony, magnolias, lilies perform slow pas-du-chats in the heat, and he tunnels his mouth, blowing smoke up. Beneath him a café bubbles jazz, a stray barks, a girl laughs.
And suddenly he is there again, sitting beside him, whistling like a bomb.
Michael shakes his head and takes a deep drag off his cigarette.
Thing I miss most is a goil's laugh. They're so priddy in a way you don't even realize 'till they're gone.
His lungs feel wet. His bones are unsettled. He dies for a cool breeze.
A guttural Model T turns the corner. Jean Shepherd obliges with a crescendo. Alone on his balcony in Paris, Michael calmingly notes the changes, his favorite game, he waits for the sweat on his palms to dry. More negroes in bars, bared knees winking at him like diamonds, men wearing rouge, women wearing wide brimmed hats, street cars extended from America like a hand in greeting. And, of course, there were the more urgent disparities; his German cigarettes, his clumsy French, his bad leg, his inability to breathe properly ever since. The ghost beside him kicks his feet in boredom.
Spare?
What you got?
Michael has to close his eyes and wait.
When he is done waiting, his cigarette is half gone, and he does not know how it has happened. He feels along the bones in his chest, ticking off calamities, noting each and every ridge. Here is Paris. Here is New York State. Here is Catigny. Sometimes he takes the train down to Saint-Jean-De-Luz. Cigarette in hand, shirt loose, he shuffles into the water and scans the horizon for America. It is hiding. The girls seem to like him in Saint Jean, coddle his bad leg and croon in pretty French. He has even made it with a couple. There is no point in lying now. Je ne tene pour le guerre et la politique. Mais je tene pour la danse. Pourquoi ne danseraient-vous pas avec moi?
C'est mon jamb. C'est mal.
Boy. Some set up.
Leave me alone.
Michael shifts, wanting noise.
Pair-ee in the summertime.
She's a beauty.
The air is still and bloodless. The flowers crawl, imperceptible. The moon is waiting underground. Michael turns his head towards New York City, and listens.
Spare?
What you got?
VD.
That's not funny.
Sure it is.
In the quiet that takes forever, Michael finishes his last cigarette and closes his eyes.
