The Wine Dark Earth

by | Wayne Kyle Spitzer-4

We are no longer proceeding through the market slowly, cautiously, but are in fact fast-walking—double-timing, as Benny would say—out of the enclosed portion of the piazza and down a corridor full of craft stalls—into a space which stretches, or seems to; into a state of mind: like when Jimmy Stewart looks down the stairwell in Vertigo. Nor does anyone still believe it was the wind that disturbed the produce; or that, as in my own case, the dogs somehow followed us onto the concourse (in perfect silence, apparently, like ninjas). No; the feeling now is that, as evidenced by what I saw (or think I saw), we have been met by something new; something unknown; and that we are, beyond a doubt, no longer alone.

Not, of course, that we ever actually were alone—not really. How could we be, when the weight of everything, everyone, gone before us presses down like thunderheads—like the countless tons of water displaced by Sarpedon? How, when everything once coveted by the Vanished—the shirts and hats and watches, the rings and bracelets and sunglasses—still lay about us everywhere, like the piles of personal effects at Auschwitz? When, even on the sub, the ghosts outnumber the living—and by a comfortable margin?

How, indeed, when the atmospheric pressure has become such that we are finally as of the dead, only walking. That we are all just lost—each and every one of us, and worse, that we are beholden. To the Flashback and our own worst natures. To the black and yellow predators who may even now be near—such as on the other side of this wall—stalking us like psychopaths; herding us like cattle. Tensing before they—

And then, like a miracle, we’re out; we are out of the market and into the open, into the rain—where I can breathe; where we can breathe; and my thoughts vanish like ephemera, like smoke, at least for the moment. Then we’re crossing Pike Street and into a narrow alley—the alley between Starbucks and Patriot Foods; which is scarcely three feet wide—en route to the loading dock and the “proverbial bank,” as Will put it. En route, at a clip, to the luckiest break of our lives.

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