Agrippa. A Book of The Dead by William Gibson

Walking home through all the streets unmoving so quiet I could hear the timers of the traffic lights a block away: the mechanism. Nobody else, just the silence spreading out to where the long trucks groaned on the highway their vast brute souls in want.

VI.

There must have been a true last time I saw the station but I don’t remember I remember the stiff black horsehide coat gift in Tucson of a kid named Natkin I remember the cold I remember the Army duffle that was lost and the black man in Buffalo trying to sell me a fine diamond ring, and in the coffee shop in Washington I’d eavesdropped on a man wearing a black tie embroidered with red roses that I have looked for ever since.

They must have asked me something at the border I was admitted somehow and behind me swung the stamped tin shutter across the very sky and I went free to find myself mazed in Victorian brick amid sweet tea with milk and smoke from a cigarette called a Black Cat and every unknown brand of chocolate and girls with blunt-cut bangs not even Americans looking down from high narrow windows on the melting snow of the city undreamed and on the revealed grace of the mechanism, no round trip.

They tore down the bus station there’s chainlink there no buses stop at all and I’m walking through Chiyoda-ku in a typhoon the fine rain horizontal umbrella everted in the storm’s Pacific breath tonight red lanterns are battered,

laughing, in the mechanism.

END

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