The Ship Immensity part.2

[koala_man]

Click to Read  Part 1    



BLUE

They were both very young. The space of the room, it grew as the silence expanded as if the lights had risen on the stage to reveal the blank room that had once lay hidden. And in it’s endless space there they were, a boy, a girl, desperately young.

The boy breathed heavy still. The orange cloth pressing against his breast as it heaved rhythmically. Around his feet, a pool of bright red blood spread as if it were fleeing from it’s core. The shape of a flattened spider. His eyes had blurred but now he saw everything as if he were looking out through the lens of a camera that had now come within focus. The line in the frame reaching the center of the field of view like the clear dashed lines within the eye window of a sniper’s rifle, landing on to this moment, frozen stark and bare.

“You stopped. Thank God you stopped.” The girl was holding her bent legs, her body looked like a brightly colored napkin folded in a puckered triangle. As the words reached his ears, travelling through the hall of space around them, the boy shuddered and closed his once parted mouth.

“I’m sorry,” voice shaking.

She was silent for awhile.

“Sorry?” A word pulled from the deep bucket of her thoughts, as if the statement had reached her through water, delayed like the broken conversation between television anchors.

“I-I-”

“Beat him pretty badly.”

The bowl of his ears. Her words: a small glass bead rolling round with a light smooth sound as it spun along the curve.

The boy moved toward her; the limbs of his body limp. His head was tilted slightly backward and even though it seemed he had been looking at the ceiling, to his eyes, there was nothing in sight.

The girl watched him as his feet dragged against the floor. The action of walking seemed as if the heels were being pulled by the breast, the way one tugs a heavy rope. Her eyes followed as he halted with a screeching of a car brake. The silence crawled around the sound as if it were made of a million identical hungry insects.

She watched him as he turned, as he dropped, back against the wall, his body propped, the heavy mass like the stuffed body of a scarecrow.

She examined the imperfect blue hair, the dark blonde roots. The heavy brows, deep set eyes. She examined his square face, the chin pointing upward as if the base of his skull was filled with a heavy liquid. He laid there with his palms facing upward. His orange uniform folded at the forearms, at the ankles. It seemed like a material close to papyrus but she was certain it was no such thing.

And then, the eyes of the girl were drawn across the horizontal field of vision to the mutilated body of the dead man. The eyes rested on the dark lump now splashed brilliantly with red, a red that sank deeper into purple as if it were growing old, withering like a flower. She had looked at the veins in her hands and arms, wondering if the color of blood in your body was actually blue and that it, on contact with oxygen, becomes transformed into a crimson the color the robes of ancient Chinese wives, the color of passion, the color of luck, of violence. The girl thought of the boy, his body connected to itself with veins like stitches that carried within them the calming substance of blue blood, the color of the still sea.

As her gaze became still, fixed, the floor seemed to claim the dead body as an extension of itself. And as time marched forward and yet all was still, everything rested in a form that seemed unchangeable, unmovable. The cement floor claimed the beaten flesh as the earth rises in a hill of mud, threatening to pull it back downward into itself, into some unknown void of cement hell. The girl wondered what was under here, what was under them as they sat in the shuddering hold of quiet.

And it was quiet, suddenly peaceful. The crashing of the waves flattening into the unbroken expanse of still azure water. With it, the boy’s breathing seemed to calm and they both sat there in the silence, aware of one another, aware that any moment they ought to speak, their bodies tense like a stretched rubber band threatening the quiet with unendurable need for words.

Within this silence, the boy considered his companion. This girl, she was young. How young, he couldn’t tell. But as we can see, the girl weighs a little under a hundred pounds, stands a little under five feet. Her bones are small. She is frail and thin with limbs clinging together by the innerbud of her body the way a snowflake meets at the center, the way the petals of a flower intersect to where the pollen sits on the tip of a flower’s filament. Her’s was a body visited by yellow jacketed bees. Yellow jacketed, like her.

She presses the flats of her teeth together and the bones of the jaw pulse at the bottom corners of her face, a gesture like perking ears of a cat: she has resolved to speak.

She lets her arms give way. She speaks as her body loosens: the physical representation of a sigh. “Thank you for helping me.” Her voice isn’t timid nor is it small, although its pitches are high the way a small songbird calls are light like tiny silver bells and like a songbird, her body lightly; it moves in swift beats of shifting perched feet and small wings. The boy is a bit taken aback by the clarity in her voice as if she wasn’t shocked at all. But, she was. Terribly, so that she hardly believed it and so carried a visage and voice of confidence. It was a tool, you could say, the way a photographic camera can keep one person in focus while the crowd around them blurs into black cloud, a stone figure in the mass of dark water fog.

“Aren’t you shaken?” The boy asks, the image of the body when it was animated bent over her little frame flashes in his mind’s eye.

“Aren’t you?” She responds, quickly, the sound of a rubber band on cement. The silence, again and then she says, as if drawn back into reality, a small, a soft “yes.”

And it’s as if she came to his rescue, joining him in uncertainty and fear. He moves his objectless gaze to her, aligning the lines, returning to focus.

“I’m trembling,” he says as he observed his hands and his body as if they were something separate from him. She watches his hands and he is aware of this as he extends them forward, examining the blood now dry and flaking off his skin like rust, like rust on the hooking twistlocks of an old freight ship. They fall amidst his clothes like crimson colored snow.

The girl, she is apprehensive, sensing the foreboding darkness in this measure. She gets up with one quick motion. His eyes rise to her face and he wonders why she isn’t more shaken after her brief brush with rape and death, her role in a killing, her role in its aftermath. He wonders why she isn’t playing the part of the shaken fawn, suddenly protected by the diverted aim of a hunter’s rifle.

“How did it happen? Did you know him?” the boy asks as if he were quickly grabbing her arm before she skipped like a child in front of an oncoming train. He had the urge to grab her and make her sit back down, slow down, return to the lethargic state of thought, away from action, away from movement, away from adrenaline. It was his way of thwarting murder as if it could be gauged in increments, shaven to reduce excess, the way a bartender shaves off the flowing foam that would fall and wet the counter.

She doesn’t answer. She places her hands on her small waist, eyes tossed to the edges of the room as if to say: “Don’t ask me.” He doesn’t inquire any further. He rests his wrists on his knees, lets his hands go limp and he lets his gaze fall, no longer watching her.

“Umm…” She finally says. “Do you have a name?”

This time the boy doesn’t answer her. He lets her question float in the solidifying silence.

“My name is Jing-Wei.” She says and the boy is not sure if she is offering her name as support, as encouragement so that he too will give his name. He doesn’t. Instead, he remains quiet, eyes blurring over the dark mass of the body. She watches him, faces him, a bright line like a color bar in front of the hazy vision of the killing behind her, still like a Pollack painting on a wall.

“Is that Chinese?” He manages to ask, thinking of the foreign cargo, the shirts sewn by the beehive factories lined with Chinese girls.

“Yeah. My parents were from China but I was born here.” The boy remains silent, trying to conjure up the middle aged figures of her parents, their faces if they found out that their daughter had been raped and murder, a fate that they have somehow diverted, like a falling ice pick slipping towards Earth only moments after you had passed. The sound of its fall echoing off of the cement ringing in his ears as he stares at the body, the blood now a color like dried out grapes. Blue, Red, Purple. The boy too has heard this idea, that the blood is blue as it swims in the network of the veins. And he stares at it reaches in pools, blotches and specks around the room, the colors transitioning like a setting sky.

The girl, Jing-Wei turns sharply around; her arms fluttering like a goldfinch. She looks at the body. It hasn’t moved but she can smell the change, sense the warmth of the body cooling. Her stomach revolts against itself. But she can sense the boy’s absorption with the body and this frightens her. She walks over to the dark mass, light footed. She looks down at the body, looks at the body’s face, a face she had first seen this evening. The mouth smirking, the hands moving about in smooth suggestive motions. She had been repulsed even then when she had followed him. Answering his questions in sweet tones, generic voices conjured from the desperate beast inside of her. As the sounds of her own words floated up to her, foreign, she was aware of the lies, their dirtiness and she was repulsed. Repulsed by everything but she blotted it out, blotted out the rank smell of death and she stares at the body, protected by a self made shield that partially denies reality at all times.

Something bright dances in vision as her arms shift, the white lamp filtering through her silhouette like a small blinking light on the body’s inner jacket. Her eyes are caught by the flash as if she were a fish hooked on a line. The girl bends down a little further. Something falls from the pocket of her yellow jacket. It hits the ground with a small thud. Her head jerks toward the sound. Bending her knees, she picks up the fallen cell phone. The boy watches as she lifts the phone incased in yellow, a small charm dangling off its head. However, Jing Wei’s eyes are glued to the blinking light on the man’s coat. She lifts her small pale hand, slowly reaching toward the body, apprehensive as if the corpse would suddenly jump at her and grab her. Or perhaps, it is just the fear of death, a fear like a sensation the stretches in a rank fog like giant, translucent hands over another’s body. This fear growing as the living watch the other consumed in the curious crawl of mortality.

But the girl doesn’t think about this as she moves toward the blinking light. She wraps her finger around it the smooth surface cool on the tips of her fingers as she pulls it out. A stack of money pinned together by a metal clip. She looks at the note’s faces. A hundred dollar bill. She flips to see the contents. Another hundred dollar bill, another, and another and another. The girl’s eyes move slowing back to the body when she realizes the amount of money she has in her hands, suddenly, the weight of the stack seems heavier. Her heart flutters. The edges of her feet warm, the toes, the heels. Her nerves jerk as she reaches quickly at the body, pulling open the jacket. Her head buzzes to see more clips, more stacks of money. She pulls them out as if she were extracting seeds.

The boy watches her, aware of what she is doing.

“Theres-theres...” her eyes rest on the face of the dead body, the creases on the pale fleshy visage becoming deeper, sinking into some unknown depths. The skin splattered with darkening blood. Her mind wanders to who this man is. Is he a gangster? She entertains the thought but she doesn’t dwell on it. Instead, she lets her eyes fall on the stacks of clipped money like a bouquet on her lap. “So much money,” she manages to say.

The boy doesn’t respond. He doesn’t need to. The girl, Jing Wei, she can sense the change come over him. The hand that hangs off her wrist is trembling, her limbs feel like vibrating jelly with cartilage for bones. She looks at the pile and it feels like her life had been a pen drawing a line through time lingering here, it’s still ball leaving a widening black dot, a massive dot, a dot that weighs down and glimmers in metal dashes.

Jing Wei doesn’t look at the body although she can sense the lump becoming firmer as if it were a mountain sitting still in the corner of her vision, a mountain that stamps the surroundings with its presence regardless of whether or not it is the center of view. The boy suddenly gets up, hardly wasting the time to stand up erectly, he almost crawls quickly over to the girl. Leaning on bent wrists, he looks at the gathering of clipped money.

“I wonder why he has all this money.” He says, so lowly it would seem that she wasn’t meant to hear it.

“Does it matter?”

“I…I guess not.”

They sit there. Still. Like statues, even, if their breath wasn’t rising and falling, pushing and tugging violently at their chests. And there is million ideas racing through their heads, none substantial enough for words, none that they can express, their hands tremble as their mind jitters between dashes of cognition.

“Imagine what we-” Her words are cut off. The small cell phone that had only recently crashed to the ground was ringing a delicate melody, its digital pop cutting through the strange gloom that gathered under the fake, white light. She jerked her head toward the nexus of sound, watching the patch of yellow plastic that shielded the phone from view. The boy considered the ominous occurrence of the ring. Jing Wei reached for the phone quickly. With awkward speed, she removed the phone and held it in front of her face as if she were examining a needle. Recognizing the caller, she pressed the button to deny the call.

The boy watched her as she firmly pushed down, a blue charm dangling off the phone. A ship. Perhaps, a cute little blue boat even. The charm swayed back and forth as if it were sailing on a sea of yellow.

“Who was it?”

“Bill collector. Nevermind. They’ll leave a message.”

And after she finished this almost casual sentence, they were silent again. Returning to the position of watching, each partaking in their unique form of voyeurism as their eyes were glued to the cash, a voyeurism that brushes on the verge of action and yet, cannot move, destined to be deprived in distance.

“Bill collector.” She repeated. The phrase hung in her head like an old echo from her other life, the life drawn thinly by a pen. And she shuddered at the mundane realism, she shuddered at the darkness of a life that should have brought excitement but had only brought it’s own form of boredom. She walked the streets at night, hands gesturing toward danger, inviting danger the same way hands run down the sharp edge of a knife and manage never to get cut. She paid rent. She paid bills. She watched television, ate cereal, washed the dishes, brushed her teeth, like everyone else and yet she was different, different but still the same.

But not anymore. There was a dead man, a dead body, a body like a lump of dark earth. There was a strange blue haired boy and then there was the pile of money, still warm from its extraction from the dead man’s flesh. Her life was different. The pen now lingers.

“There’s so much money here. We should take it.” She suggests. She lifts her eyes to the boy. He is watching her. His gaze is wide and desperate. And she can’t tell if he agrees or disagrees. She waits but he says nothing.

“I-I” She pushes her lips inward, bites down slightly and manages to say: “I could really use the money. No, I really need money.”

Silence.

“You don’t understand.”

“No, I understand.”

Relief.

“Good….thanks.”

Silence.

“How about you? Do you need money?”

From the field of vision, the space between them is like the low point in a valley. The cement of river cutting through the body of a mountain, creating twin hills. They lean toward each other, bent heads almost touching. One curving hill tipped with black, the other with blue.

“Yes.” A small word, soft even, delicate as it concedes.

“You can probably guess what I do. Why I know him, know guys like him.” She is opening up to him the way a morning glory opens and he raises his eyes, willingly following her to the belly of the bud. And she can tell that he wants to understand. The urgency revealed in the stillness of his gaze as he raises his head parallel to hers.

“Yes.” Soft.

“You don’t have to pity me.”

“Yes.”

“There’s no reason to.”

“I know.”

“I’m sure your job is just as bad. I’m sure your life is just as disappointingly dull.”

The boy doesn’t question the strangeness of her words. He doesn’t question the reason why she became what she was. He doesn’t inquire about her motives. He doesn’t inquire about her needs. They were both young and although these needs may be different, they were still the same.

“I want to buy a boat. A freighter.” He says.

“A boat?”

They laugh awkwardly. The conversation reaches a peak of strangeness, bursting back into reality in a giggle.

“Yeah. A big boat. A boat that can go anywhere, in any weather.”

Laughter. She imagines him at the edge of a large cargo ship, leaning over the bars like a seaman in a movie, one leg bent, his chin up to the wind, blue hair flowing in motion like water in the breeze. And she thinks that his hair must look like waves in windy weather.

“My uncle used to have a big boat.”

“Yeah?”

“He was a fisherman. When, I was young, he would take me on that big boat. It was painted a deep blue and on the front edge it read in English: “Immensity.” She said the last word as if it were written on a marquee in glittering letters. “I had so much fun on that big boat. I never did any fishing. I just ran around on the deck playing with things, getting sea sick, watching the water pulling back along the edge of the ship as it rose above sea level, trailing in blue ribbons.”

“Did you go anywhere?”

“No, not really. It seemed to me that he only went out far enough to get fish. But, it did seem to me that if he had wanted to go somewhere, he could have gone anywhere he wanted to. He certainly had enough fish to keep him from starving!” She laughed to herself. Her body rocking slightly. From the slight and sudden motion, a stack of clipped money fell off her knees. She watched it fall but instead of picking it up and placing it back with the rest, she continued:  “Yeah, it smelled pretty bad but I didn’t mind. It was very exciting being on the ship ‘Immensity.’”

“I’ve actually never been on a moving ship.” Sounding forlorn, she Jing Wei replied enthusiastically: “Really? But you work here, don’t you?”

“Yeah, but I don’t work on the ships. I do menial tasks mostly. Sometimes, I operate the cranes to get the cargo off of the ships. I never load. I only remove what somebody else had already placed there.”

“Hm….”

“I’d like to do it.”

“Load?”

“Maybe that too…but be on a moving ship, feel the water beneath me knowing that there is thousands, millions of leagues under me. The depths of the unknown stretching as deep as time itself.” The boy, now was the one that sounded reverential. “But mostly…Mostly, I want to feel the adventure of going somewhere. I’m sure it will feel like running really fast, the adrenaline pumping through your veins. Riding a big ship like a freight train…”

Both of them became silent imagining what it would be like to travel the wide oceans on a large metal ship.

“I have a friend, a friend that takes pictures,” the boy added. “He’s a stevedore. He loads ships, rides them out to different places. And, he takes pictures.” Jing Wei watched him as he talked. His eyes fixed to the floor between him and the lump of the dark carcass. They glowed as if they were fixed upon a flickering candle and as he spoke, it seemed that the body that laid beside them was merely another object. “These pictures. They’re…amazing. He shows them to me all the time. The images, they get stuck in my head. I see them all the time and all I can think about is going there, seeing them in person.”  The boy saw the pictures before him, the world in an explosion of images emerging from the foam that trails off the tip of a cargo ship at sea. “Photos have a strange way about them. They seem to transform the world, show you something that you can’t see with the naked eye. Almost as if it reveals the world behind your vision. The strange thing you sense but can’t really see, it’s there somehow in the photograph.

There’s this one picture he showed me. I remember the day almost perfectly. I had been logging the shipments, filling out the forms and he came up to me. ‘Hey, Gum Drop’-That’s what he called me,” the boy made  a motion over the mass of blue hair. “ ‘I got another picture for ya. I think you’ll enjoy it.’ He handed the glossy little picture to me. It was a picture of some city, I don’t know where but it was in the desert someplace, some place like the Middle East or something and you could see the yellow ball of the sun hovering over the buildings. The sand was in the forefront of the picture. It could have been nightfall but it seemed to me that it had to be dawn, I don’t know but it just seemed like it was…The building were all kinda white, with pink and blue stripes but at the very edge of the photograph was a small slither of water. It somehow gave me the impression that you could sail right up to that place. It was like a dream that picture. Like it wasn’t real and yet it was, like it was the only real  thing. I felt then holding that glossy picture, the stevedore next to me inspecting my face expressions, that I had to find that place. Wherever it was and go there. I needed to go there, ride that big cargo ship out there and see the sun rise over some foreign city.” The boy was quiet for moment. The two round orbs of his eyes glowed. He was silent now, the lips parted slightly to reveal the teeth gleaming from the gloss of saliva, the image giving off the impression of alertness, of energy and focus. “But young men always dream of these things. Going someplace…far off.”

“What did your friend look like?”

“Hm?”

“Your photographer friend, what did he look like?”

“He was a middle aged white guy. He looked kinda like him.”

Even though he was facing the dead man his eyes didn’t rest upon him nor had the girl attempted at another a glance.

“I’m a prostitute.”

The boy didn’t say anything. He sensed that somehow she didn’t want him to and so he remained silent, waiting for her to continue, sensing the brimming urge to relate, to communicate buzz off her as if she were charged with electricity.

“I went to college. I dropped out. I had to. I couldn’t stand being there. Those rooms, they have a way of making you feel trapped. And, ever since I left school, I haven’t seen my parents,” Jing Wei shifted her weight and continued: “I can’t seem to face them or maybe…I don’t want to face them. It seems there would be no point.” The boy rested his eyes on Jing Wei’s pale face. Strands of her hair had escaped the gathering black mass and hung over her brow and cheeks as if they were running streams of mascara. “I can’t feel sad about it. In a way, it’s what I wanted. I felt I was being encased in wax. Like I was aging and yet, going nowhere. It was if I was running on a treadmill but it was going so painfully slow that I could barely even sweat.”

“Jing Wei-”

“No, don’t feel sorry for me. There’s no point. I starting hooking because I thought it would be exciting. Oh, you understand right, Gum Ball?...You understand the need for excitement, the need to feel like you’re going somewhere far off, foreign, exciting, some place strange…”

“Where-” The boy cut himself off. Jing Wei met his glance. Her eyes were unblinking and they stared forward with such ferocity, he felt compelled to finish his sentence. “Where did you want to go?”

“It wasn’t a place exactly. I wanted to find out what it felt like to run on  a tight rope, to go to the depths of chance, to swerve next to death and not care whether I was harmed or not.” Silence again. Jing Wei now picked up the stacks of money and held them to her face. “Of course, I wanted the money. I wanted lots of money.” With one hand she squeezed the metal clip and with the other ran her thumb down the width of the stack, watching the bills flutter into a green wave. When the wave ceased and became again the slack stack of sinking dollars, she continued. “Money seemed like a fast track for excitement. Maybe, I could’ve bought a boat and gone someplace where the sun hovered over a desert city, a city with a skyline of pink and blue.”

The girl’s voice trailed off. And as they descended into silence once more, the boy’s thoughts returned to the bloody dead man. He had reminded him of his friend, no doubt. In fact, he had even entertained the idea that it was him but the boy knew that that couldn’t have been possible. His friend was out at sea somewhere, probably some place in Asia picking up cargo off of some Chinese dock, snapping pictures with his Canon camera. But he didn’t seem like the kind of guy that would pick up a young prostitute and yet, the boy had no idea what kind of man did that sort of thing. He knew that there had been many men like this man that had been acquainted with Jing Wei, many men with stacks of cash coming to her for her services, many men that Jing Wei had used unsuccessfully to bring herself closer to life, each one like a failed attempt at suicide.

The boy considered what Jing Wei had said, the way she talked so easily as if she had wanted to purge something out of her. And it came out awkward and jumbled. He saw her standing under the streetlight, the gleam of the city skyline miles behind her mocking her with its long golden teethed windows. A skyline that from a distance watches her lure men with the soft tapping of her white heels, her small hands jammed into the little plastic jacket. He saw her breaking the walls of her dull University life with the sharp edge of one of those heels and he saw her life reach a small peak of excitement only to descend where his life had rested; a life that rested in the dull blue that clung to the sea water as it falls into the horizon. Their lives converging in that line of blue that looked oddly and suspiciously like grey, that grey that suggests distance and only suggest, never admitting that it’s curious haze had promised anything.

And they sat there, reliving these details. The murder had been their first occurrence of real excitement, their first chance to break out of the mundane hold of their tedious and lackluster lives. The money could deliver them and yet, at what price?

“You know, we wouldn’t be able to take the money if we tell the police.” The boy’s voice came off like a whisper as if he wasn’t sure he even wanted himself to hear.

“I know.”

“What should we do?”

Jing Wei sat there quietly. Perhaps, she was thinking. Perhaps, she was feeling around herself the way he was, trying to find in her what she truly felt. The boy had the impression that there had been a sea wall constructed inside them, a wall that controlled the ebb and the wave. He fixed his eyes there, the vision in them growing raw as he tried to make out if whether the water was rushing in or receiving. And yet, he could not tell. He could not see how he truly felt.

Jing Wei removed the phone from her pocket. Cradling it in the cup of her hand, she examined the small rectangular digital face, the white dashes revealing the time. It seemed that it hadn’t moved. The blue charm rested against the back of her fingers. On its small shape, the boy rested his eyes. The Ship Immensity, and yet it seemed so small. Her story, her charm, her dream being born again somehow. And yet somehow, it was linked like the small charm to the weighty mass of murder and deceit.

The money could deliver them, he said to himself and yet, he remained silent.

“Imagine what we could do with the money,” her words coming out of her just as softly as his words had.

“I know.”

“We could get a boat and sail out of here. Maybe we can get a cargo ship or a fishing boat, either way. Imagine what we could do. I could by a humongous new wardrobe. Jewelry, make up, nice furniture, a large library, all sort of things. We could even buy a house. Just imagine what we could do… ”

“I know.” An image in his head flashing:  A hovering sun disc of dawn. A sea, a bed of sand, a skyline rising out of it in pink and blue. And how many more images could he see? How many nautical miles? How many nautical dreams? How many nautical adventures? Nautical. The word hung in his brain, sounding strangely like a derivative of naught.

“But no one can know what happened here. And that would make us guilty.” She gathered the stacks of money together, building mini skyscrapers on the cement floor. “We would no longer be victims. We would have a motive. We would be killers, murderers.” They stood there in various heights. She continued, unconvincingly: “But we know the truth.”

But did they? The boy’s eyes watched the stacks of money, the gleaming clips reflecting his blurred image: his face, his mass of blue hair. And sensing the weight of the boat around him as they sat in its belly now scarred with the flowering spray of blood, the sense of immobility crept up in the boy like a panic causing within him the anxiety that if he did not do something, this boat would never sail, would never leave the cement dock that it was bolted into with large rusted chains.

“Okay.” He said finally. “Let’s do it,” his voice sounding urgent. “Let’s take the money. Let’s go, run away, me and you. Go some place far, sail the seas and never look back.”

“Okay…okay.” Her black eyes fixed upon his, gleamed like two pieces of stone. “Let’s do it.”

After they spoke, a tense silence followed. The boy looked at her hesitantly. For a moment glancing at his hands, his wrists. Flakes of red blood still clung to his skin and a memory came floating back to him.

Years ago, a school teacher asking the class whether the blood in your veins was red or blue. The teacher had been strolling the length of the classroom, his hands folded behind his back like a scientist observing the behavior of chimpanzees.  Blue, the children all said, staring at the network of cerulean veins in their wrists. No, the teacher said. Through your skin, blood appeared blue but in reality, blood was red. Always red. These last words coming out as if they were coming out of the parched lips of a grave robbing ghoul.

BLARING WHITE

A rising ghoul, a monster that fed on the dead.

But now, we’re going backwards in time and yet, we’re not. It is night, always night, never changing.

We see within our own vision:

The boy is standing there, the fire extinguisher in his hand, smashing the skull of the rich man, the rapist, the photographer, the wall that imprisons him, imprisons Jing Wei.

The boy is opening the door, seeing the man hovering over Jing Wei’s body. He can hear her make the sound like a songbird being smothered.

The boy is running. The boy is looking at the identical doors, making a choice, listening.

The boy is standing there looking out the glass windows at the dock, looking out at the skyscrapers, the sky line, the city that curves in a distance, the city that is so far away. And the boy hasn’t really moved. There was only a smudge in his vision. A mere defect of the eye that caused him to think that there had been people on the ramp but there had been nothing, just the shifting of water and the blaring white lights that lit up the harbor, lights tossed off of the spires of the tallest building of the metropolitan crown. Nothing.

His mind had raced, following the thread of a storyline. There was no man, no body, no money, no Jing Wei, no key chain, no Immensity. Where there had been three characters, two characters. There had really only been one.

The boy sat back down on the sofa and watched the blaring white overhead lights reveal the dirt within the crevices of the control board. The old sofa swallowed him as he sunk down in spinning confusion. He looked down at his wrists that were buzzing with aftershock. He was certain that he had felt the adrenaline pump through him as he beat the body into a crimson spray, the blood unfolding outward like an exotic flower. But there was nothing. Nothing. Only the fantasy remained, a truth that blared like unforgiving fluorescent lights. The boy raised his eyes. The city beyond his vision: a skyline watching with a silence so distant, so ominous; a silence hovering over jagged teeth. Then, he feels, we feel an exhale like the scent of dead fish release between these teeth. Carrying over to the dock, a whisper escapes and glides across the surface of the dark water flow, a whisper that says bitterly, sweetly: Immensity.

And it was so far away.