Day After Day

Sallowy men, peeling, jaundiced, and grim, lined both sides of the street, waiting, he imagined, for the end of the world. So far, they had been disappointed. They looked it. Cold. The roofs of buildings soaked up the disparate sunlight, leaving the ground dark and chilled. The city was still damp from an early rain, the sidewalks were brown, and droplets ran, necklace-like, around the streetlights and telephone line. At the end of a street, a lone man was yelling: "Dammmnnn." No one listened to him; instinct told them he was a merchant of lies. Lies of colored brilliance: impossible colors fermenting on the bus stop walls, scrawls of light dripping from streetlights, and leavened tears rising to the edge of the sky before descending.

He went underground and fixed his eyes on the mutilated train as it came to rest beside him. Gathering himself, he let the crowd flow guide him aboard. The interior glistened and smelled faintly of plastic. It must be new, he thought, and then, thinking back to the exterior—a canvas of mangled paint and characters he could not understand—reconsidered. He once had a friend who, having been gripped-for, to him, no apparent reason-by the idea of graffiti, had made a few facile attempts. But even those seemed more impressive than the lines that cut across the outside of the car-whose particular unintelligibility seemed ridiculous rather than enigmatic. Much of graffiti's allure collapsed for him when his friend explained what the symbols actually meant: the whole elaborate surface was nothing but unnecessarily intricate "tags," signatures without a page. Of course, if he saw a tag atop a building or on the side of a bridge he could not deny the physical feat of getting up there. But the work itself had lost whatever value it might have had for him, since he knew exactly what he would find if he tried to decipher it. And his friend's persistence seemed ever more incomprehensible.

He never found out—a few summers later, he was shocked when the same friend tried to steal his girlfriend. Though now he would describe the incident as "sort of funny," they hadn't spoken since. Understandably: you don't owe anyone that sort of forgiveness. The logic was cold and plain: "there are three hundred million other people who didn't try to steal my girlfriend; wouldn't it be unfair to all of them if I stayed friends with you and ignored all of them?"

He was at the restaurant a minute too early. His father once told him that popular restaurants were so dark to keep old people out. Our eyes are bad, his father said, we can't read the menus.

He was aware the world was full of these petty cruelties and to treat this one with his attention would be to dismiss all the rest.

Still, whenever his mind drifted to the topic— provoked by some tangential detail, he couldn't shake a particular image, for him verging on tear-inducing, of a wrinkled old man, one, (perhaps, who has he has fought in a war,) overcome with despair from his inability to parse the entrees. He knew it was ridiculous-almost comic, but he could not help but take it seriously.

The band was loud tonight, and he knew every word. He wished instead they would sing something different, or the songs pressed hard against his memory and the images would flow and mix together so that he could no longer differentiate this moment from what had happened the last time he had been there because it was indistinguishable from all of the previous pictures sloshing about as they lost their features and became a dark and impenetrable fluid. It was not really their fault, but he did sometimes wonder if it was intentional: if they themselves wished the nights would blur together and become a single night, dense with the memories and symbols of them all, perhaps—as one might pray-arranged into a meaningful pattern, like a life flashing by for review in a single instant.

And to dream even further that they somehow could collect some figural matter from the eyes of the patrons that flashed with activity before settling down into stupors to be awakened by the bringing of the check or a cup of coffee, a hope that the visions of wherever they had disappeared to might flow from their final glances into the long night and leave at least a faint impression in the fabric of the gray rug or the texture of the tables only to be gleaned later on after much study. But he himself wondered if he would even wish to remember all of the nights, folded together like a cloth into a single surface, or divided in-dividually, poured out into cups to be drunk slowly, singularly, so perhaps his desire was for the whole, an expression of the illusion that something would be lost in recombination, was ill-founded; perhaps the truth was that he wasn't sure there was really anything there to be distributed or united in the first place.

He had told her to arrive at seven. She looked exactly like the picture. Her skin shone, bland and perfect, under the light; her features were digital, not painted with visible brush strokes or smudges or some sign of work. It was as if he saw her through a window of subtly tinted glass. They talked for an hour: he ordered a bottle of wine and then another, spilling some onto his napkin as he poured himself another glass with his steak while she picked at a salad —it was always a salad.

He told her about his job and she told him about hers and the harsh white light of the office glared through their words so they changed topics and talked about college and high school reaching back to the memories-colored by a rancid nostalgia

-gathered for this very purpose: to be displayed and examined; to show that they were both interesting people who had done interesting things and to distract themselves from why they were here.

She seemed to like this more, he noticed —they always did, so he continued: he told her the wild stories of his youth that were, in fact, not so wild and some were so stuffed with details that had been invented and accumulated in the retellings that they hardly qualified as memories at all and charitably perhaps were the general memory of a generation which she had doubtlessly heard before from voices different than his, but to her it seemed not boring but reassuring to know what life was like for a certain kind of man because it fostered the illusion that it "really was like that" and so that life also could only be one way for a certain kind of women like herself.

She started to tell him about her dreams. No one wants to hear about another person's dreams. But he had not dreamed in years

— a harmless side-effect of indulgence, he had been assured, so he listened with more interest than before. She had been in the desert on the run. She was trapped in a spaceship. She had lived quietly in a small cottage suspended in the air.

He could remember dreams from when he was younger: falling, his teeth crumbling into dust in his mouth, and they seemed stale and cliche in comparison-but he was not sure if hers really were more interesting or whether they reflected a sort of permeability: whether those images, which were more strange in the subconscious than on a screen or stage, were a sign there was little distinction to be made between her mind and the world at large and this worried him. He who held his mind back like a castle besieged with the gates lowered and manned by soldiers intending to prevent the intrusion of anything from the outside. He would not be swept along with the world though he remained firmly within it as if by accident: muddling between its boundaries, but wishing all along for the indifference of a monk or a buddha or a frothing madman locked up in the uppermost cell of a damp and stoney asylum.

Behind the restaurant, a cat rummaged through the fresh trash finding a piece of undercooked chicken ladened in heavy sauce to which clung a number of small green leaves. Satisfied, he beat a quick retreat before the stray dogs that lay about the alleyway during the day and now slept beneath the back step of the restaurant having been well fed by the generous dishwasher could involve themselves in his adventure.

The band ended eight minutes before eleven: within the margin of error he had made averaging them across the hundred nights he had heard them before-the anguished screech of the violin fading into the ambience of glasses shifting across table-cloths, whispering voices that rolled out for a moment into the ambiance before being drawn back into pockets of mindless conversation, the shuffling of waiters discreet and invisible. He gestured for the check robotically-with no more thought than a kicker swinging on an extra point in the last game of a losing season-signing and tipping with barely a glance at the words burned into the receipt or towards her (that would wait), and in one smooth motion once the bill was returned drew his credit card back into his wallet and rose from his chair. He took her back home with him. They watched something childish and then watched each other rising and falling. And after seeing her home in the morning he never spoke to her again. He would perform the same set of actions, outwardly ritualized (but who is looking), inwardly devoid of content, several dozen times from the start of the new year to its emptying out in the bitter cold of December when he would shiver coming up from the station behind the restaurant and later would feel the warmth of her skin.

The last woman of the year-December 17th-arrived at nine at the restaurant with the sign that glittered gold above the sliding glass door and the wooden wine rack that rose to the ceiling blocking off the reception from the tables where it was dark.

She had been there before and heard the band before and he suspected as much (as he did with all of them), though he was not always right and nothing about her looked different from the others, not even her eyes-which he had seen before several times—nor her vicious smile, nor her cold demeanor (which so often masked nothing), nor the cadence of her step, no, it was a pure game of repetition: he felt as though he was performing the moves of a chess opening that had become automatic-straight from the book. The flickering of her presence did nothing to disillusion him. And so they ate and talked and he laughed at her and she laughed at him, both for something stupid, both drawing back their throat muscles somewhat artificially and articulating far too self-consciously. But they were not looking at one another so neither noticed. And he took her home and (thank God) she was no different and he remained the same.

Sleeping beside her he dreamt he was dead. Everything around him was shadowy; whatever he fixed his eyes on seemed to dissolve into an ashy dust. But when he looked down at his own body it remained the same. Yet he was afraid to be seen; afraid that she would see him like this. It was odd: he had not been afraid in a very long time. But now he was afraid of her and his arms shook as he lay beside her; his eyes welled with moisture.

Yet it was not her; it could not really be her that he was afraid of, he thought. A pair of eyes into which he could look and see weakness, see a drive to be looked at and desired and transformed into an object. A drive he had seen before and never feared. But he could not shake the feeling that as he looked into her eyes he too was being looked at. When he touched her skin another person who might dare to feel his skin in turn was there beside him. Who might dare to look and shake her head. It could not be her who slept beside him, he knew that well enough, but he was afraid because he could feel, in the presence of a pres-ence, a dreamed dream, that she did exist. And when he found her-this stupid little judge of sorts—he did not know what he would do.

Owen Yingling