Songs for The Lost

Or the Loneliness of Another Million Years-1

OR THE LONELINESS OF ANOTHER MILLION YEARSHe eases the jalopy from the lot and into the street. Its engine labours, sputtering and coughing like the decrepit elderly man who’d lived one floor below his before pneumonia had taken him to a better place. Dawn’s broken over the tenements. Bloody sunlight blinds him as he rolls into the east. His neck aches, and his lower back, too. Spending nights in the car is making an old man out of him, too. He considers his fortieth birthday passing two weeks before and decides he’s getting there besides.

The streets are empty everywhere. Curbed cars, rust-flecked and like relics from another age; garbage overflowing from steel receptacles on street corners, spreading like dirty water into the gutters in all directions; the gutted houses, boarded up with simple wooden planks as if the squatters within sought to keep invaders at bay; the old synagogue that dominates one street corner looking much the same, its heavy wooden doors unwelcoming, impregnable; newspapers stirring forlornly in the intermittent breeze, and he wonders what stories they tell. He wonders what stories they tell and whether any of them would mean much to him today.

I’m the only person left: this he tells himself, relishing the fantasyeven as it’s shattered – a skeleton swathed in rags snags him in his daydream and pulls him into the reality of the day. It waves a bony hand on the toobright air as he rolls the car to a halt at the stop sign before which he has no need to stop, given the nearly deserted nature of the streets about him. He waves in return to the urchin he passes every morning in exactly this intersection, always feeling as though the man represents a gatekeeper of sorts, waving travellers through from the ghetto to what lies beyond. He idles a moment at the corner, leaving his hand raised, in this way communicating to the grubby skeletal man floating inside of his filthy clothes the honesty of his morning greeting. The old man smiles his toothless smile at him, a rare gift of sincerity and one the man accepts gratefully these days.

He gives the vagabond a smile, too, as difficult as it is to muster. Once he achieves this feat, he urges the car eastbound still. He feels very much as though he’s surpassed a great obstacle in forcing the smile from his weary and desolate mood. With this hollow sense of victory filling him he plows right for the sun ascending over the bloodlight-drenched city.

With the ghetto behind him the comforting illusion of post-apocalypse lifts like the haze and stink from the concrete surrounding him.

People abound. Everywhere he looks he finds them, behaving as they do, engaged in all their inconsequential activities and duties; an attractive woman, middle-aged, dark-haired, bespectacled, rushing agilely in her high heels with briefcase in hand (he once yearned for women like this but had long since decided they belonged in the dreams of men different from himself ); a dapper suit-clad man, forty-ish, prematurely snowy-haired and with skin burned pink from weekends spent poolside in the sun (he could have been this man, if he was a wholly different man to begin with); a pair of teenagers drifting listlessly along the sidewalk, a couple sporting identical black jeans and t-shirts and jet-dyed hair, members of the same high school clique and seemingly so immersed in the escape or reassurance of each other that they don’t notice the scornful look delivered them by the trio of road workers standing in the partitioned-off construction area overlooking the sidewalk (he remembers these children, as he was once them, too, and he remembers also the men leering at them for he hated them during his youth as he does now). Perhaps these men will erect a skyscraper between them, he muses, with the help of many other workers like themselves, adding to the vast hive-like and inhuman character of the city.

The man considers these things while observing the sidewalk scene from the driver’s seat of his parked car. The sun burns him through the windshield. He cracks the window but it isn’t enough. Soon he must catch the breeze, such as it is, or risk growing irascible, which happens with him when the temperature becomes uncomfortable, and also when he’s been too long in an enclosed space (perhaps this is why the claustrophobic nature of living in the city repels him, while bucolic dreams of meadowland and forests and valleys watered by rivers and streams consume him). He’s a man of winter besides, and loathes all things summer in the city – the congestion of buildings magnifying the humidity like a mallet smacking his chest unremittingly; the early-rising sun stealing the lengthy delicious nights of the season before, hanging in the west long into the evenings like a punishment; the pervasive stink as the seasonal temperatures cook the garbage in the cans and dumpsters across the city, and simmer the sweat from the bodies of the humanity milling in every nook and inch of all the streets and buildings and parks and bus stations and among the buses themselves, teeming with riders and their multitude of stenches and germs and callous words.

He considers the ghetto as it must be at this time of the morning, and decides he won’t even return there today at all. The sight of the homeless wandering like resurrected cadavers along the sidewalks; the rummies passing in and out of sweaty, miserable consciousness in the useless shade of stoops and porches of the tenements and shabby house fronts; the emaciated prostitutes strutting up and down the sidewalks, watching passing cars with feral, desperate stares; hordes of gangly children emerged like cockroaches from their ramshackle homes to become scorched browner by their time spent outdoors beneath the tenacious sun, lost in their games of hopscotch or army tag or road hockey and seemingly oblivious to their fates as determined by growing up in the heart of poverty and hopelessness – these are a species of dispossessed humanity he can’t bear to witness today, the man decides, being that he’s steadily becoming one of them and doesn’t feel strong enough to loathe himself anymore than he does already.

He leans into the car and, fiddling with the controls, tries tuning into the radio but, unsurprisingly, finds nothing to suit his deeply melancholy mood. Only happy music, sad music, excited and energetic songs and those angry over something, all doing nothing in the way of moving him, or the weight from within him. A moment passes when a peculiar electronic squeal erupts from the tinny speakers, a mechanical shriek overwrought with white noise and static before the frequency realigns itself to deliver a smoothly crooning country song’s voice which the man quickly silences altogether. The droning of that short electric cry lingers in his ears, though, as if in its chaos he’d discerned a familiar note, an old voice.

He leans from the car once more. He looks around himself. Of course – standing outside of his unreliable car, sunlight illuminating the streets before him and the tides of humanity rolling over them – he feels true despair prickle him inside.

“Where am I going?” the man asks aloud. The burning air gives no answer. The city, surrounding him with its infinite edifices and maze of streets and alleys and the outlying traffic-clogged arteries of the highways and cloverleafs, only continues its deep humming breathing, indifferent to insects like him crawling along its labyrinth of concrete lanes. The three road workers, near at hand, as one, turn at his words, eye him curiously, maybe a little contemptuously, before returning their attention to the tools laid out in the dust of the yard before them.

Go build your building, the man thinks, hating them and the things they might fashion from the bricks and steel and dust gathered in the construction space. He swallows, finds that his throat is a desert of rawness. He turns one way and then another, an inexplicable desperation seizing him. He finds the small sidewalk confectionary. Its dirty red-andwhite striped awning beckons him, or rather some thing in him; the youth from which he’d sprung reluctantly over the years, eager to revisit just such a place of brief sanctuary and leave with a bag of penny candies in his fist, or an ice cream cone for his summer-dry throat, or a comic book to take him away, or in his teenage years a dirty magazine tucked inside of his jacket, to be leafed through in the security of night, after his parents had went to bed and no one anywhere – except for God Himself, if his parents’ faith in such matters was to be believed – was able to see and judge him.

He moves his heavy feet. They take him across the sidewalk and through the shop’s rattling door. He arrives inside the sweaty room, the delicate jingle of door chimes announcing his entrance. The Vietnamese proprietor looks from the magazine spread across the counter, eyes him warily, returns his eyes to the pages. The man drifts to the back of the store, where the refrigerators make a line across the entirety of the wall. He eyes the bread loaves lining the nearby shelves, his belly growling, but decides his thirst is undeniable. He pulls open a sliding door and retrieves a bottle of cola. He feels it sweating in his hand as he takes it to the counter. He looks to the magazine on the counter while the proprietor rings through his drink. Naked airbrushed breasts, a triangular bushel of pubic hair, a look of agonized ecstasy contorting the young Asian girl’s features as the man fills her from behind. The corner of one of the pages is warped, as though from the hot sweaty thumb of the man leafing through the magazine, lingering on the images to which the issue is now opened. The shop owner tells him how much his drink will cost him and the man hands over the change, not bothering to count it. He keeps his eyes in the magazine. Its nakedness entrances him. Once, seemingly long ago but really not very long ago at all, these images would have awakened desire in him. Now, only a faint something stirs between his legs. A reflexive reaction, a lingering tick like a memory recalled bitter-sweetly and which he seeks to forget but that lingers a little still. And the man thinks, of course, of his wife of years before: the smell of her, the look of her, the sound of her in his arms in the bed they’d shared for a decade before she was swallowed inside one of the city’s countless insatiable mouths, never to be released again.

He’s shaken from his reverie by the shop owner’s vehement voice.

Seeing his glaring eyes, the man tunes in to the situation at hand. “You are short one dollar – I cannot give it to you.” The man’s vulture-like hand covers the bottle guardedly, in a manner which suggests he is accustomed to customers trying to cheat him or barter with him unfairly.

The man nods, seeks the required change in his pockets. He’s relieved to find it (his meagre remaining funds are quickly depleting themselves with just such frivolous purchases as this) and, handing the proprietor the coins, takes his perspiring bottle and goes again into the burning day. Standing on the sidewalk, he spots a forlorn pigeon pecking at nothing in the gutter, a low warbling murmur escaping its throat and sounding utterly despondent in the air. Depressed by the bird’s tuneless song, he turns away from it and trudges westwards.

He ventures there as if compelled by some strange, unknowable impulse within him. Leaving the car in the street, he walks the half hour’s walk to the old neighbourhood. It smells the same as he remembers from those bygone days: greener than elsewhere in the city for its lush elms, but carrying the tinge of the city’s cloyingly inescapable stench of exhaust and foundry fumes. It’s no verdant valley or deep shadowed forest but it’s the closest he can have.

He takes his time. He dawdles on memorable street corners, recalling street hockey tournaments when he scored winning goals for his team; the porch where he kissed a girl for the first time (moon-coloured, the porch then, and surrounded with curling fern’s tendrils whose heady smell mingled with Carolin’s girlish flowery perfume to create a too-rare scent which from that moment on he would associate with things carefree and paradisiacal); the stretch of sidewalk from where he’d watched in horror as the rickety Dodge van had crushed his beloved Chihuahua into the street, fuelling his nightmares for the rest of his twelfth summer.