A Well-Lit Alleyway

A Well-lit Alleyway

Outside the snow falls, flake by billowy wet flake. Though it is midday, the sky is a stage-light gel twilight. Tara stands under a palm tree listing to starboard. Under the crystally-clinky ice-frosted glass of the Phipps Conservatory, the weather is Florida, the Amazon, the Sonoran Desert.

Tara ties her sweater around her waist, and adjusts her bottle-green blouse. Rippled, flared sleeves cascade down her wrists towards a lightweight denim skirt and, incongruous among the verdant pathways of the Grand Palm Court, snowboots leave wet tracks behind. Sean moves up to her back, making no sound.

“Don’t look now, but I think the Chinese Fan Palm likes your ass.”

“Do you like my ass, Sean?” she replies. They laugh the laugh of the jaded. He tags her and they bolt off into the herb garden, ducking through the comfrey-covered tunnel and making the edgy yarrow quiver with their passing.

Beside the cardamom and cumin, they stop and catch their breath and wait for Helm to meander their way. When he meets them, munching on a mint sprig, one leaf tip tattling at the corner of his thin mouth, they three walk out towards the orchid garden. By now the lights are on overhead for nighttime darkness, but the moonlight and the floodlights from Schenley Park blaze off of the massy whiteness and in the plants. “The poor bromeliads must never get any sleep,” comments Helm.

夢

Two days pass, and more snow had fallen. Even though the sidewalks are coated with toilet-freshener thicknesses of salt, the walk to and from classes becomes an ordeal. The wind tears at Sean’s clear face and reddens his off-kilter nose. His red-brown hair sticks out from his Firefly beanie. Snowflakes and rasterized landscapes of ice cling to his jean-jacket-sur-hoodie-sur-thermal underwear and a wispy fog rises from his handknit blue and gold scarf as body heat hits soaked-in snow.

He bumps into Tara outside the Cathedral. All snowcapped brownstone surrounded by chapped, ice tipped trees and snow-filled fountains, the Cathedral of Learning fills the soft grey sky with a simultaneously ominous and welcoming form. “Hey!” he says, only half looking up from the flagstones of the patio.

“Sean! How are you?” He hesitates a little, so she asks, “how was your weekend?”

“Hmm, mostly I had work. We went over to Florin’s house-

“The vampire house?”

“Hnh” he snits. “Remember I’m part Romanian, too.” He takes a clove cigarette out from the jacket and a battered Bic from his cargo pocket and begins to smoke.

“That’s gonna kill you, I swear,” pouts Tara.

Sean’s eyes flash deviously. He half-smiles and closes his eyes. “’Come, sweet death.’” he intones.

“Can we go inside?” she pleads, tugging at the strap of her too-obviously Chinatown handbag and clench-releases her calves on-again-off-again. She tugs a little at her collar.

“Go on ahead, then, but I’m gonna finish this here. I never finish these.”

She looks at him, dissatisfied, from behind Sephora-darkened eyes and walks up the filthy stairs towards the doors.

From the smooth black tube, the mysteries of nicotine-filled incense mix with the sharp clouds of his breath. Crackles of burning spice pff and sparkle and he doesn’t feel the soreness of Saturday’s track workout quite so acutely. Flicking the filter into the grungy slush, Sean turns in a military about-face grinding salt under his timeworn sneakers.

夢

Inside the Cathedral it is a sauna, a blanket stuffed with pillows on a Christmas Eve, a sweater on a balmy March day when the sun cuts without warning through the gloom. Tara is twisting back and forth by the doors, listening expressionless to her music around metallic powder-blue earbuds. “What do you have left?” she asks, pocketing the headphones.

“I gotta print a few things out, but I’m done after that.” He loosens the straps on his backpack with a whir of polyester against plastic. “Why don’t we go to the South Side tonight?”

“Sounds like something to me.”

夢

Sean has exchanged his “poor college student” habit for a more vocal set of clothes. In a mockery of fashion, a three-inch height of denim is cut out from both knees, leaving only the reinforced stitching. His shirt is grey, unhemmed short sleeves frayed with a knife edge, a hastily screen-printed phoenix rising and falling with the corrugation of the shirt. Over all of this is a long raincoat, liner cut to the length of a jacket and tailing sections slashed into a canvas ocean-top behind him in the wind. Tara wears a similarly derelict costume, hers a duct tape-ornamented canvas skirt and a holey sweater both salvaged from the bin even Goodwill won’t salvage. Her hair falls unfastened over her shoulders and down her back.

On the bus, chaotic Chinese characters bar the window, a downstroke and a crosstroke, by their seat. As they pass the last of the hospitals, the already low light of dusk gives way to the pinkish amber of the sodium lamps, and down below across the bridge over the Monongahela the twinkling lights cower under the Equitable Gas sign. They ride silently until it is time to alight from the bus near the white wrought-iron gazebo of that stands off from Carson Street.

They head as though to Tom's Diner, though they are not particular. Drunks knock about, swaying in gaggles of drunken pigeons to music from the strings of bars, lurching towards the open doors of tattoo parlor upon body art shop. They pass the Vespasiana, the pay-toilet kiosk, doing brisk business after so much beer drinking.

With a crunch of broken aggregate, a man slips out into their path. Holding his hands in a gesture of good will, he stops them. “Do you want to find a rockin’ party?” he asks, his voice less-than-exuberant. He is hard to describe, corduroy blazer and jeans masking a face and form guarded by a patch slouch hat.

Sean looks at him, eyebrows arched. “Where is it?”

The man gestures again, this time towards an alley. Unlike many alleys on the South Side, this one is well-lit. The man, though odd, feels trustworthy. They nod and thank him and head for the canyon bounded by fire escapes and brown brick.

“Are you sure this is a good idea?”

Sean looks to Tara, confident smile ablaze. “Yup. If worst comes to worst, we’ve both got cell phones.”

Tara rolls her eyes. Single file they press up against the side of the alley without touching the wall, stepping over bottles here and there and other items consigned to a slow descent into obscurity. Limpid puddles of melted snow in sagging concrete or potholed asphalt ripple as they step over each one. “Where did he say it was?” Sean asks under his breath.

The first and what seems to be the only door in the alley is that dark brown that feels like black, with rust damage on the metal frame and some prominent gouges of its own. From inside they hear a happy hardcore beat, muffled, but still distinct. Sean opens the door and they enter a blacklit fluorescent-paint-spattered hallway, once medical offices or examination rooms, and follow arcanely painted black arrows (all swooping curves and points constrained by the general outline of an arrow.)

Through a door at the end of the hall they reach what must be the club. By the door a man stands casually. There is no way to tell if he is an employee, a patron, or perhaps something of both, but in any case, he bars their way lest they give him ten dollars. They figure that he is collecting some sort of cover charge. The room spreads out before them, narrow in some places and betraying larger rooms beyond. There is still evidence of walls and floors knocked out to build a dancing space, wires hanging from ragged gypsum remnants that stick out like wings cut off from the walls. Where the second floor once was, slouching precarious mosaics of tile and glass that were once bottoms of rooms now lean towards becoming the sides of the room below. A few places have been carelessly railinged to create balconies, and on one of these, more a dais built of one large plywood sheet tacked over a receptionist carrel, the DJ runs his esoteric devices and spins his turntables in an adjoining area. The floor is clean for the condition of the place, and dancers jump barefoot, turn without care for the space. Girls with glistering eyes dance in ecstasy, boys leap and kick and caress. In one corner clouds of smoke pour out of a huddled mass of people, wafting the smell of cigarettes and sundry across the entry room. To their left, through a more conventional doorway, there is a bar and a lounge, huge cushions strewn about haphazard tables. Sean pulls Tara out to the dance floor, and they lose themselves to the melody, the rhythm. Happy hardcore gives way to Paul van Dyk’s “The Politics of Dancing, Volume 2” and they are carried away for hours, BT, Oakenfold, some even more cerebral stuff but all with the beats and the riffs intensified for their footwork. No hiphop, no dancehall, no big band or ballroom mars their tantric adoration of the cascading electronica and warbling harmonies.

In the lounge, they flop down on some cushions before Tara assumes the lotus position and orders hot chai. There is no limit to what this club has. Sean stays lying on his back, stomach rising and falling, looking up at the starfield with its zodiac figures in fluorescent and oil paints all across the ceiling.

“Sean,” Tara begins, her voice small and thoughtful. “Would you ever go out with me?” She scoots around without disturbing her pose to look down at him.

Without opening his eyes, he responds, “I guess so. Like I’ve told everybody, though, I’m not going to go out with anybody until after college.”

“Right, right, but I mean, otherwise, you would consider me attractive.”

“Yeah, I guess. Why the sudden fixation?”

Tara looks at him, sighs, and shakes her head. She drinks a long, slow pull from her chai. Cinnamon and nutmeg perfume their nest, as the music skirls on.