A Moment of Difference

The apartment’s living room was a wide rectangle. Across one of the wide sides was an equally long single pane window which looked into the shabby courtyard one floor below. In the courtyard, the circular fountain had stopped flowing many years before, the grass had turned yellow and just the hearty oaks continued to thrive. Daylight was beginning to break into an electric spectacle of brilliant blue. It came in through the unobstructed window and added a tint of dim light to the room.
He sat on the tall wooden backed chair stolen from the kitchen. It was the only bit of furniture in the room. He sat nearly straight, but for the small hunch in his upper back. An unfiltered cigarette hung from his lip, just as they had hung from the bristly upper lip of his father. He took a long drag, holding the cigarette with his thumb and index finger, his eyes rolled across his loot, they rolled across it like a pilot surveying the curvy hillsides far below.
It had been a good night, a productive night. There were a few TVs, one old VCR and three nearly new DVD players. In addition, there were a handful of CDs and a few necklaces. One of them had some pearls on it and he made a mental note to check their worth.
This was what he liked about his job, the tangibility of it all. The rock solid possession. There was no abstraction, no maybes, just good solid atoms that came together to form recognizable shapes. He would sit on the same chair every morning, when the light was just cracking through the horizon, he would sit back with a swirl of smoke and ash about him and survey the bounty.
He likened it to being a hunter and having something tangible at the end of the day, having something to show for the effort, something earthly and real and solid, something he could pound his fist on or throw across the room. It was real and he liked it.
He avoided numbers on a check and their abstractions. He didn’t play around with banks that promised money on little slips of paper. They were all promises, and above all, he hated promises. Promises depended on someone to fulfill them, they implied vulnerability and trust and patience. He dealt only in the real as much as he could help it.
The TVs were real. He could plug them in and watch them or sell them or, as he sometimes did, throw them from the window in a fit of madness. He would watch them splinter and send their screams through the courtyard and he would know they were real.
He had no time for the objectless, for the illusion of accumulation and wealth. The world would not provide for him, the world would not keep its promises, so he made sure to take what he needed. He never asked, he just took.
When he found he needed something, he went out and got it. He took it. He made it happen. The night shadowed his intent and he moved through it like an animal, sniffing out what he needed, finding a way to shift past the obstacles unnoticed and then, as the light changed to blue, he would slink back into his cave, bringing with him the prey he had killed.
He needed… he took. He wanted… he took. There was no need for patience, no need to slave away as a salesman or beneath the hood of a car. If he needed it, he would get it. It was simple. There just wasn’t time for patience, a gentle finesse, or even a polite “please.” It was now or never and he never waited an extra day.
The light came through the window in a brilliant mess of blue, it caught the smooth glass of the TV set and he saw his reflection. There he was, in his chair, in his white T-shirt and rumpled blue jeans and short brown hair.
He saw himself and remembered another. The man he had seen walking past the bookstore two nights before. It was so dark that night, but the man’s white hair was shining in the darkness like a gleaming orb of promise and knowledge. He himself was hidden behind a car on the other side of the street, hidden in the dark shadows of the city, waiting for the perfect moment to take what was about to be his.
But for a moment, he forgot his intent. He watched as the old man walked slowly past the dim illumination of the store’s window. Walking as though there was nothing else to do, nowhere else to be, nothing more important than the one step he was taking at that exact moment. The long white hair fluttered slightly with each step and each one was taken with a deliberate slowness. It was a slower gait than any he had ever seen, almost like a dance of liquid.
For a moment that seemed to continue forever, the man walked, trailed by little specks of white light and a blue trail of dust. The man took the world like a drop of water smoothing a stone. It took more than a moment for him, more than a lifetime perhaps, but the man could ultimately bend the world into the shape he envisioned. It was not now or never, but just a matter of time.

The Hidden Group

She sat with two long metal poles in her hands, knitting on the subway. As the emerald green yarn glided effortlessly through her fingers and the needles, she occasionally raised her eyes and surveyed the semi-full car. It was just past rush hour and there were enough orange plastic seats available for everyone, although a single man in a black leather jacket stood by the doors, waiting for the next stop. Sometimes she looked up at just the right moment and could see through the window another speeding train. It was illuminated in the dark underground, full of people like her, moving at the same velocity, though the same territory. They were so close in those moments, she could almost make out the title of a book that a young man was reading, she could feel the sadness with which a middle aged woman looked out the window into the tunneling darkness. They were so near, yet, they were on a slightly altered path, just a hair’s difference than her own at that moment, but within a matter of minutes, the trains would curve and they, all of them, would arrive at completely different destinations.
Her knitting needles moved quickly along, moving more out of habit than intellectual direction. Her mind wandered as her slender fingers moved… what neighborhood was she under at this moment? What moved in the night? She imagined a young black woman crying as her lover turned and walked in the other direction. She imaged a man holding onto the leash of a large white dog, walking slowly as the animal stopped every couple of feet to smell a bush or wall. Maybe there were couples walking arm and arm down the city streets, watching for the taxis that rounded corners without mercy. She imagined it all as her body was transported further by the second.
The high rents of the city prevented her from living there. Her destination, her home, was in the industrial wasteland that clung to the edges of the city like a lingering cough. The void, as it was called, stretched for miles. Warehouse after warehouse stood like lifeless block soldiers, one after the other in dutiful formation. Their shapes were the only remains of a once thriving port…that, and the air of ghosts that sometimes moved between the buildings on cold, quiet nights. She lived there, in a huge warehouse with thirty other people. They had come together like an army of grateful rats fleeing the city, happy to have a place to call home. There were other communities of squatters in the other buildings, little communities of young artists and travelers and hobos. All of them kept a low profile, keeping up the appearances of decay from the outside; they let the plaster fall, they let the weeds continue to grow, they let the scattered trash mount and add needed color to the land.
But once, she had defied the normal code and she had taken a midnight stroll. A mile from her home, she saw the white lettering of a banner flapping along the side of a warehouse and the constant thumping of drums. She remembered that travelling shows and groups would occasionally rent the warehouses from the city. She had her explanation, but she still walked towards the building. The resonant beat matched the time of her steps. There was a glimmer of yellow light coming from the huge sliding metal doors, someone had not shut it all the way, or perhaps had not known to close the latch. She came closer and curiosity compelled her to look, she approached soundlessly and put an eye to the slit with a faint tinge of guilt that excited her even further.
Inside, she saw a long line of drummers forty feet away. They were topless and sweating, each man’s firm chest glimmered like moonlight on a dark pond and she beheld them in awe. A dozen arms raised in unison, then came down, beating the taught skin of their drums with such delicate precision that it seemed as if the earth would open with the sound of their demand. A cold, icy wind brushed past her back. The night covered her in its dark wings, its hard kiss stayed firmly planted on her shoulders as it pressed in on her heart without mercy. She stood, barely breathing. Her hands were numb and her nose was stinging in the wind, her lips were nearly frozen in an inbreed expression of ecstasy, awe, and fear.
The women were naked, save for the black lines and dots that decorated their skin. There were at least twenty in a large circle. Their arms were free and they swung wildly with grace, creating long streams of golden light with the flaming poi. Their faces were alive with flickering shadows and their hips moved like spiraling snakes on an ecstatic journey though time. And although their arms moved unhindered through the air, their ankles were tightly bound in thick silver cuffs. There was three feet of thick metal chain that separated each leg and each woman was connected to the others at her sides by another six feet of chains. They moved in slowly together, closing the circle with each careful step, each foot moving in precise time with their men who watched attentively from behind. Each drummer seemed intimately connected with a dancer, each dancer was held firmly to the woman beside her. As a whole, they seemed bound beyond matter and the surrounding walls, held tightly beyond the flesh of their bodies or the fictitious borders of their minds. Their eyes were half-closed, almost droopy, but their bodies appeared fully alive, moving with a knowledge that seeped from a deeper brain, from the hidden consciousness that flowers while the machine clocks off. They moved with the force of moving planets aligned with many suns.
She watched through the crack, wondering what they would do if she was caught. Maybe she would be cuffed by the ankles and forced to serve them. Would she be kept in the lion’s cage, a mistress to all, licking the beads of sweat off their skin through the black of night? Would they paint her in stripes and teach her to move like a serpent with legs? Would this group become her village? Her tribe? Would she take on their scent and comb their black hair? Surely they came from a place of pure blackness, a world were sounds take the shape of colors and movements light the night with their brilliant vibration. She watched them, knowing that this was the dominant force in the world, that everything else was a shadow, a long distant relative that perhaps had a memory of where it had deviated, but had no idea how to retrace its steps, to find itself once more. She heard the clang of metal on asphalt and turned to see a single sardine can tumbling in the wind. Above her, the lights of the second-floor came on. There was a silhouette in the window, a slim man with a long head of black hair piled in a bun atop his head. The man looked out into the night, to the small group of stars that flickered softy though the sky. A rock came towards her, a small pebble landed at her feet. She looked up to find its source, the man in the window was watching her, the tables had been turned.