-Shut up!
The actual words, shouted so as to echo round the coppery glass and reddened wood of the bar, struck the desired rude note, though directed at no one in particular. The off-duty cherubim looked about, gemstone eyes tender with hurt, and left off their half-assed grooming of one another. Even the barstooled couriers of disaster paused in their sullen snarkhunting tales and grew quiet. Except for the continuing echo in the foaming shell there was utter nothing to be heard.
A green-draped trolley floated past the window, its display of shorthaired secretaries miming a selection from the Kama Sutra (rocking in the balance of their dancers’ butts, knees mid-air and bent, bare feet pressed sole to sole, a ribbon of black velvet dangling its hanging bridge from mound to mound, crotch to crotch, thin ribbon stand-in for the absent penis anyone might have been forgiven for imagining they’d actually seen).
The big witty girl tending bar lifted down her jacket from its hook beside the mirror, dark green and amber and clear-glassed bottles baffling with the sheen of movement. She was finished picking apart a generous clovebutt left in the ashtray, folding back the paper with a bobby pin and probing the sog of the nude leafy cylinder with a toothpick. She’d found something more unsettling than the passage of time but her expression, caught both in the mirror and floating on the eyes of the customers, was a smile of steely, exemplary discipline. From the bottom of the register a packet of bills for the bank run, the rubber band’s repeated snapping, a thin sound, lilting to a sound not unlike a cicada’s clicking or the rosary-crunch of dry leaves outside an open window round about siesta.
Except for the scorpion-prick of the rainstarved rose her never having been properly kissed burned as a motive now noteworthy if previously unexamined. Laziness, drug addiction, any old excuse would do when the wood gleamed red and the glass ached with coppery light. A serpent glides in dust, the smell of rain trembles down from the sky.
Mary had begun to move towards something at the far end of her mind. Cowered round with mist as it always had been but taking firmer shape at moments, as if the mere act of not looking away might please it to reveal its true form to her. Like certain types of music she’d never taken the trouble to examine, the shroud of fog at the far end (or seaspray might be; gown shot full of holes) was not a something to be penetrated or got through so much as an ingredient she could possibly taste and understand, a hidden but necessary ghost-track smoothed in and out of the music by the hand of an engineer not easily shaken by fashion or reason. Just because it can’t be heard doesn’t mean it isn’t part of what you listen to. Mary has the merest of details to go on, and thumbs down the list of distinguishing marks before daring herself to get up, go over, and strike up a conversation. Pause, and consider if there’s an ambiguity she’d do well to look at more closely. This particular world, for instance. Wood, gold, red. This particular world trembling underneath something, a noise like an overhead rush-and-stop, a ceiling fan in the room above or anything else quite as simple, as unremarkable, but no one would be able to tell her if she were to ask and their stopping to listen till they heard it themselves would cause it to sound suddenly altogether different: more virginal, less godly, a growing anxiety that only purring machines suffer from, a pale, watery sound, blood pumping in one’s ears, the first night in a brothel and the figure in the narrow corridor striding slow on thin defensive heels about to ask directions, about to exchange an envelope, about to query the results of that morning’s tests.
Mary loved looking at the play of light where it was captured and torn apart in the various primary colors of the drinks being set before her. Blood red, nightsky blue, huntress green, siddhartha yellow, toadbelly white.