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January 17, 2005

Sub Rosa - dead engine

We were at Con Station: Catherine was doing PR because sometimes that's what she does, and I was there because Cathy was there and she was awfully pretty.

Cathy was parading Paula Doves around, a chinless and evidently noted pop-art historian, walking in under a floating neon light flashing “Raining to beat”. Love is there, it’s all right. I disconnected my phone as sis had spent the day hammering me. Red was hysterical, half lost on some faint kids fantasy.

Paula was a small woman, blond, smooth, straight hair streaked with premature gray and flashing at tan like crazy.

We were hanging out at the bar and around the corner with a couple of empty drinks and Cathy was smiling or doing a thing she must have thought was like a smile, the expression appropriate to the situation, nodding in time to the girl’s slurred inanities and I knew something now. They were both human in a way I hated myself for admitting.

I think they saw me as I left, I was practically running. I never saw them again for the rest of the night. Bets were being made and being covered, sis restarted the whining on the wire.

I thought myself into Paula Dove’s favorite examples of style, she had sent some books on Thirties design, photo of streamlined buildings, stadiums, ephemeral stuff distilled of broken dreams, semiotic platforms of cultural imagery. I watched the moon for some time and decided to go to sleep, which I’d intended to do for years. The light came from somewhere behind me and then the voice. Red was in the room, screaming and in tears.

“You let her go?”
“That’s right”, I said, “this lil terror with Tan giving you a hard time?”
“Yes, Indeed”, she answered, and laughed. Just the right amount of laugh.

She went to the bathroom and splashed her face with water then she turned back with something different in her steps passing thru a reflection in the Art Deco mirrors in my corridor and sat beside me. Her lips did not move till she was within earshot.

“... do you like Paula?”
“Sure, but in the sense that... she is a lot of a human fixture or something”

Thru a sweeping sense of relief, I had a strange kind of admiration, a strange pride.

I did not feel like making small talk but we drank and drank and went laughing, just the right kind of laugh.

It started pouring and then raining.
Red shifted into sleep quickly, pupils sealed beneath the faint shades of neon from the window.

The phone rang again.
She just said “Thanks” and then the dial tone when she hung up. She said it right, like a real human being.

© Fortunato Caragliano

Posted by lck at January 17, 2005 02:53 PM