The girl who drowned so long ago has settled now, swept down in a swirl of toffee hair and less hurtful memories, to where his youth turns gently, in its accustomed tides, and he is more comfortable that way.
The past is past, the future unformed.
There is only the moment, and that is where he prefers to be.
And now he leans forward, to rap, once, upon the driver’s tinted safety shield.
He asks to be taken to the bridge.
THE cab draws up before a rain-stained tumble of concrete tank traps, huge rhomboids streaked with rust, covered with the stylized initials of forgotten lovers.
This spot has a certain place in the local mythology of romance and has been the subject of any number of popular ballads.
“Pardon me, sir,” says the cab driver, through several layers of protective plastic and digital translation, “but do you wish me to leave you here? This neighborhood is dangerous. I will be unable to wait for you.” The question is rote, required by law against the possibility of litigation.
“Thank you. I will be in no danger.” His English as formal as that of the translation program. He hears a musical rattle, his words rendered in some Asian language he doesn’t recognize. The driver’s brown eyes look back at him, mild and dispassionate, through goggles, shield; multiple layers of reflection.
The driver releases a magnetic lock.
The man opens the door and steps from the cab, straightening his coat. Above him, beyond the tank traps, lift the ragged, swooping terraces, the patchwork superstructure in which the bridge is wrapped. Some aspect of his mood lifts: it is a famous sight, a tourist’s postcard, the very image of this city.
He closes the door, and the cab pulls away, leaving behind it the baking-sugar sweetness of exhausted gasohol.
He stands looking up at the bridge, at the silvered plywood of uncounted tiny dwellings, it reminds him of the favelas of Rio, though the scale of the parts is different, somehow. There is a fairy quality to the secondary construction, in contrast to the alternating swoop and verticality of the core structure’s poetry of suspension. The individual shelters-if in fact they are shelters-are very small, space being at an absolute premium. He remembers seeing the entrance to the lower roadway flanked with guttering torches, though now, he knows, the residents largely cooperate with the city’s air-pollution measures.
“Dancer?”
In concrete shadow she palms the tiny vial. Feral grimace intended to facilitate commerce. This drug causes the user’s gums steadily to recede, producing in those few who survive its other rigors a characteristic and terrible smile.
He replies with his eyes, the force of his gaze punching through her intent as if through paper. Briefly in her eyes the light of panic, then she is gone.
Toffee hair swirls in the depths.
He looks down at the toes of his shoes. They are black and very precise, against the random mosaic of impacted litter.
He steps over an empty can of King Cobra and walks between the nearest rhomboids, toward the bridge.
These are not kindly shadows through which he moves, the legs of his narrow trousers like the blades of a deeper darkness. This is a lurking place, where wolves come down to wait for the weaker sheep. He has no fear of wolves, nor of any other predator the city might field, tonight or any other night. He simply observes these things, in the moment.
But now he allows himself to anticipate the sight that awaits him, past the last rhomboid: the bridge’s mad maw, the gateway to dream and memory, where sellers of fish spread their wares on beds of dirty ice. A perpetual bustle, a coming and going, that he honors as the city’s very pulse.
And steps out, into unexpected light, faux-neon redline glare above a smooth sweep of Singaporean plastic. –
Memory is violated.
Someone brushes past him, too close, unseeing, and very nearly dies, the magnets letting go with that faint click that he feels more than hears. But he does not draw the blade fully, and the drunk staggers on, oblivious.
He reseats the hilt and stares bleakly at this latest imposition: