Emergence

Uncertain why, the boy walks down to the river. About him the night city swirls, its clamour and shine and pitiless gaze splashing up from all sides. Early still, well after the ebb of that first homegoing tide but still lively and teeming in the bars and on the streets, work-freed revellers eddying on the pavement, lured by unseasonal warmth. The weekend starts here.

But not for him.

He can't recall where he was before this. Glimpses only: a man in a tall hat, and another on a horse. A bowl of soup. An old woman in tears. There is no coherence, no sense, and though he thinks from time to time that one glimpse or another has swum into focus, he is always wrong. But the undertow tugs at him bodily, pulling him down to the river, and so he finds himself on the bridge.

It seems to him he remembers the river differently. It was wider then, and darker, and unbridged here. In place of the warm evening was a bitter, bitter night, and thick ice covered the water from bank to bank. There was carousing at the frost fair, and harsh drink, and harsh words. For a moment he can almost, almost, remember the terrible, grinding shriek of the ice breaking about him, the cold dark. But no, that was someone else, someone in a dream.

He gazes out over the sluggish water, oblivious. Behind, a young couple, hand in hand, flag down a passing cab, which lurches into the path of a lightless cyclist; ritual obscenities are exchanged. Bass throbs from the moored party boats along the embankment in a percussive collage, no individual song distinguishable. Camera flashes pop inside the wheel capsules, promising dull pictures of their own reflection on the curved glass. The taxi departs with a diesel growl, and for a moment, there is peace.

Somehow, the boy finds himself sitting on the wall, legs dangling over the side. The blackness below is overlaid with a delicate net of tiny lights in constant, dancing motion. Individual motes flicker in and out of existence like careless thoughts while the net remains stubbornly whole, indifferent to their comings and goings. As he watches, it slowly detaches itself from the surface beneath, becoming no longer a pattern in the water but a jewelled blanket floating above it -- at first so close that the difference is barely perceptible, but then higher and higher until, without having moved at all, it hangs just under his feet. So beautiful, so complex, so alive that it seems to the entranced boy to speak, in some language of light he has only forgotten, to whisper words of love.

There are people around who see him jump. The alarm is raised; in vain. As the water closes around him, the boy smiles, wrapped in warmth and comfort against the chill depths, safe in the arms of catastrophe.
Posted by matt at September 23, 2003 03:08 PM