That Mary was gone and would not be back was not the point of greatest sorrow. But that her decision was harbored alone, out of earshot of the voices that might otherwise have held her, in thrall to even the most banal phrases, this was the lash that fell the hardest. It was only the voice now that Dion remembered, while the sentiment and the mind which had informed her actual words, these were already forgotten.
Alone now, he is ravaged by the anonymity of her favorite pubs. Careless laughter is still easy enough to find, but it startles in its shrillness, drowned in shallows one had not dared to guess at before. Winter sunlight falls with greater intensity of brightness without her shadow to bear some of it into a place of sullen warmth. The streets are empty and the temptation to be drunk before ten a.m. is given in to with less and less willingness to resist. And what is there now to resist? The shell is hard, nothing will pry it open again.
How curious. That one should be so mired in another’s personality that the desire to die would spread like contagion.
He lights a cigarette in a narrow doorway and watches the trucks ascending the long ramp towards the freeway. Alien city, the more he knows of you the more a stranger you become to him.
In a familiar bar his fellow strangers flourish round him in their downward spiral, like Theseus, doomed to descend ineluctably the braid of flawed judgments. Ignoble, without any of a hero’s traits, humanity in extremis, thus infinitely more tragic than the end of that king who leapt to his death from the citadel of his city because he had bad luck with women and because leaps into the void ran in his family. Dion squanders his money, hating it for its uselessness to the dead, drinking his talent dry, for a pint and a cigarette are more to him than even the most elegant sobriety of Wyat’s sonnets. He is crucified on the boards of his self pity, and he can no longer delude himself that anarchy is a harsher discipline than self control.
Dionysius, last of the groupies, lifts his hand to the evening wind.