2004-07-09 - 6:35 p.m.

3.

She seemed to be a creature of perpetual motion, continually evading close inspection, until she finally parked herself at a listening station to place a pair of headphones over her ears. She closed her eyes, as if it was necessary to censor another sense to intensify her experience of the music. Taking advantage of this, he moved to a spot directly opposite her line of vision, though still maintaining a discreet distance. He watched intently as her expressions responded to inscrutable vibrations: the flicker of a smile, the flash of empathy, the eyebrows raised in question and a chin nodding an answer. He thought about how all music inspired dance, even if the dancers were the components of a face. Then suddenly, he saw her wincing, as if in pain, and her eyes opened. She glared at him, or rather, through him, glassily. He didn’t know if she had finally noticed him, but she walked away, hurriedly, as if somehow embarrassed by the theatricality, or rather, the nakedness of that stare, which reminded him so much of a breath-starved gasp. Something had clearly wounded her. He resisted the impulse to follow her out of the store, and knew that the answers to his questions lay in the music she had been listening to. He put on the headphones; the song was still playing; he closed his eyes and listened. Where was she now? With each phrase of the song, he knew she was travelling further and further from his grasp. But he let the music engulf him; wasn’t the warmth on his ears the same warmth that had been passed from her body, might he not also find himself injured by whatever cadence or word that had pierced her so violently? He was conflicted; on one hand, he wanted the song to burrow into him as it did into her—what image of love is as forceful as an arrow puncturing two hearts? On the other, he felt that he had to resist those vocals full of plaintive yearning, that persistent melancholy—because he had to prove that he was the stronger of them both, and thus worthy. So he breathed in, and as the song progressed he felt that he had to do battle with not only the song’s persuasive sorrow but the fact that his trial was useless, his heroism utterly make-believe: if he were to open his eyes there would be no prize to claim. Later, as he left the music store empty-handed, he consoled himself with the thought that he and the girl carried inside them the two estranged halves to a sad, sad song.

4.

Every Saturday afternoon she can be spotted at her void deck with a book in her hands, sitting at a stone table inlaid with blue mosaic tiles. But there is always a distracted air about her, and after some careful observation one can see that she is exhibiting the symptoms of waiting. This can be inferred from the way her attention flits from the book, to her watch, to the lift-landing, in various combinations of order. But one can sense that the book is only a decoy, it warps the otherwise ruthlessly straight sprinter’s line between the points represented by the lift-button and her watch-face; it softens the directness of her quest. It acts in lieu of the stalker’s pillar, which she can hide behind with breathless excitement, and which prevents her from lurching forward to confess everything, her tone changing from proclamation (‘Do you know that I…’) to blame (‘Don’t you know?’). For there comes a point in every infatuation where love wants nothing more than to accuse—where the beloved’s outline was previously traced with tenderness, now it is circled with a red marker, identified as the source of suffering. The finger, denied its desire to touch, it still is capable of aiming an indictment. After six fruitless weekends, she feels she is entitled to this hurt. She turns a page and suddenly she hears boots announcing his arrival, and then she sees him, carrying with him jungle musk and inarticulate memories of five and a half days severed from civilian life. She imagines that tanned skin burning under the dense foliage of his army uniform, the hidden blaze that would leap out if one of his buttons were loosened. She wants to pour water over his body, tend to his cuts, place a finger on his lips as he struggles to tell her the terrible things he has witnessed: of heat strokes, impossible commands, how easily someone else’s weakness transmutes his frustration into cruelty. The lift swallows him up, and once again he has failed to notice her. Is this enough for her, this image of the woman, faithful to a meticulous fantasy, each Saturday waiting for the return of an imaginary lover from an imaginary war? She picks up her book and begins to read. As a pillar, the book gave her cover, encouraged restraint. Now she only wishes that it does what all pillars were meant for: to hold up, bear weight, avert collapse.

previous - next