Shadow film 1+1+1

The Instant Vanishing of One who left a Shade Burned

She sat on the steps of the Savings and Loan where they had agreed to meet. It was a very cold morning and her breath seemed to crystallize upon meeting the morning air. As she waited she held an image of his face in her mind, framing it with imagined garments; a multicolored scarf with bits of yellow that privileged his almond skin, a blue winter coat that showed the brightness of his smile. In fact she had no idea if he owned these things. She had not yet met him.

As he walked to the department store he felt his thoughts loosen and gently fall from him for others to pick up. The war, his mother’s sickness, the complex network of rules for the rationing of food and goods that somehow, though very fragile, contained a logic that had become everyone’s life. All this floated from him as he walked in the brisk afternoon sun. At the store he stood before a mirror, lost in what were not yet thoughts, but more like shadow ideas of this life or that person. To most anyone watching he looked like a man trying on a scarf he had not yet bought, carefully wrapping it around his neck and shoulders.

A welcome intrusion to his reverie was a gaze caught on the surface of the mirror. As if expecting this visitor, his eyes met hers with a smile. He unwound the scarf he could not afford, folded it and put it back on the display table. Turning to look in the direction where she had watched him from he saw that she had gone.

It was half past four when her phone rang. Her heart quickened at the surprise. It was the reflection telling her he had found something of hers at the store, which was how he got her phone number. As his warm voice spoke into the receiver she looked through her handbag. She had indeed dropped her address book shortly after being caught in his eyes. After discussing mutual locations they decided to meet at a bank halfway between their homes the following morning.

She did not sleep well. As she lay on her back in the dark listening to the radio speak quietly about her country’s young heroes, she thought that this is what war was like. It is the same as ever, though slightly different. People still lay awake in the dark, still agree to meet strangers in the morning in front of familiar buildings, still shop for scarves. Only his face broke her meditations on war, on the announcements of pending victory for her country. His face brought peace. Finally with the pale light she rose, feeling a bit foolish as she dressed nicer than the occasion warranted. She locked up the apartment and headed out to meet him.

As he walked down the street he caught his own reflection in the passing window, and he remembered how her gaze in the store mirror the day before had in some way unified what had been broken. The unreality of life in wartime had infected him to the point where he felt unreal. The line of sight in that moment through the reflected surface of polished glass brought a moment’s respite from the power outages, the long lines for provisions, and with the softest touch, from fear.

The sky ripped in half that morning. The heat and wind alone killed eighty three thousand people instantly. Can we even say they died? They simply vanished. To where? She left a shadow behind, burned into the pavement by the heat of the blast. Maybe she let go of her shadow in hope he would someday find her. Thinking of her smile in the mirror he vanished with the light, leaving not shadow or reflection.

Shade Released 

The bus stood still at the corner of McAllister and Lyon for the duration of three light changes before the lack of motion stirred him from his thoughts. The Bus driver had stepped off the bus, being ahead of schedule and needing some cigarettes from the liquor store. So he grabbed his things and decided to walk the last three blocks home

This intersection was where a year before he had been thrown up against the rusty, metal grating that protected the window of the store before being handcuffed and put into the back of the patrol car. It was about the same time of night, and as he cast a glance at the store, he was too tired to think of that any more, and he started home.  For fifteen years he had lived on this street and knew it and many of its inhabitants well. One corner up was the lazily named McBaker market, run by Mohammed, whose three sons he had seen grow from boys to young men. A Christmas poinsettia planted in front of a faded and chipped Victorian to his right had by now grown into a tree whose rich, red colored blossoms pierced anything that would block light, be it night or fog. One block up was a sad and empty storefront not rented since the very nice man with a shy son had been shot and killed in a robbery. He had heard this shot while he was watching the evening news. The neighborhood drunk who went to Antigua every few years to sober up still stopped to make talk, whether drunk or sober, using the street like a living room. For the first block these were his thoughts.

After crossing the intersection of Baker and McAllister his reverie looked home. Clay, who he had first encountered hand painting the leaves of the tree in the front in metallic gold, once lived in the storefront at the base of his building with his boyfriend Curtis. He had become fast friends with Clay and took to having long conversations and coffee together on Saturdays. Jude lived in the flat above that. He bred designer fish in a laboratory he built in the glassed in back porch. In fact it was with Jude he was arrested the year before when the cops mistakenly thought the long talk the had together on the street that warm night was in fact a drug deal. Jude fought injustice instinctually without pride, and the two of them had been in courthouses together more than once, mostly losing. Cleo lived in the tiny basement apartment behind Clay and Curtis, and though she kept mostly to herself, she would always join the others in the building in the backyard shared by all. This backyard had two plum, one quince, an almond and a eucalyptus tree and it was once a lively place of gardening, cooking and visits from neighbor kids who would hop the fence when they heard all the laughter.

For some years this had been gone. Clay and Curtis had moved to the Mission district, Both Jude and Cleo were evicted in the on going gentrification of the neighborhood. Only he and his roommate remained in the top flat, which had absorbed a certain sadness into its walls. He remembered it was such a rainy night when Jeff had died that his cries were stifled in the downpour as he sat on the back steps. Blue glitter from Jeff still surfaced when he swept the floor all these years later. Dominique had become a victim of her addictions, dampening her acerbic wit and fire like intelligence. Rocco and Malcolm had died years before in the first wave of what was then called “The Gay Cancer”, later AIDS. Darryl had tossed himself from the bridge some time back.

The city in general, the neighborhood and flat in particular were once so full of love and life, he remembered. Walking home this night, an inventory of past loves, pleasures and current losses moved through him, and he watched his shadow pass from back to front under him as he went past the lamps, a single shadow that slid like this before being extinguished again and again. His mind quieted as he focused on this lone shade. At the next lamp two shadows emerged from beneath him. Without panic he knew what was happening. One hand held a gun to his head, while the other wandered his body. He watched these two shadows merge and part in this quick dance, while thinking it would be sad if this were the last thing he saw. It occurred to him to raise his eyes and watch through the reflection of the drug rehabilitation house. What was astonishing is that he never thought he could do this to himself. There was a flash, a deafening ring, and the silky flow of blood down his neck.

Through the reflection in the window he watched his body fall, leaving him standing alone. He had no idea why he had a gun in his hand. Though he was at his flat, he saw a bus coming up from Divisadero. He hurried past the storefront where Curtis and Clay once lived, making it to the bus stop in time. It was going out to the beach where it would be empty and black, both sea and sky, and he would be free of both shadow and reflection. 

SHARDS

The Street lay out before him, an obsidian plane broken by thousands of shards of light. He could see by the frequency of their blinking that the street was busier halfway up the block. Passerby walking bunched and bustled around unseen obstacles, thereby blocking the sun’s light on to the bits of broken glass and sharp, metal fragments that shimmered in the sunlight. At this point these stars on the ground blinking were all he could see. Garret could tell by the warmth on his neck that he was on the sunny side of the street, and that his chances of being guided by these reflections was greater here, and that with luck  a car might pass, or even better, he may come across a shop with a long window that caught the sun’s light.

Garret’s sister had told Jay at a café last week that he had come back. She told him that Garret had been discharged before his tour was finished because of some medical or psychological reason related to an explosion that had killed three fellow soldiers and left Garret blind. Garret had taken Jay’s heart when he enlisted . For two years prior to his departure, Jay had felt for a little bit every day the quiet and secure joy of knowing he was loved. The unexpected ferocity of emotion between both of them when Garret told him he was leaving for Iraq had reduced Jay to a burnt husk whose cinders drifted until he was lo longer.

The hostility to their love existed before them, waiting in the very air they breathed to someday sacrifice them. So it was without discussion that that love was kept in shadow. Being both from religious parents-- Garret’s father was the pastor of a small but aggressive congregation whose flock balanced the hopelessness of their impoverished lot against an army of invisible enemies; homosexuals, health workers, on down to the most petty of government bureaucrats, none of whom any of them had met, while Jay’s unmarried mother had constructed her threadbare respectability by compulsively sharing her experiences as a born again reformed drug addict and prostitute to the amusement, horror and sense of righteousness of that congregation into which she would never fully belong by virtue of her 17 year old, illegitimate son, Jay.

With a loan secured from his father, Garret had secured his first apartment, and it was between those walls that he and jay experienced the riot of senses and emotions of which new love is comprised. Jay would visit the small, one room apartment after school under the auspices of having Garret, a former student and team-mate from his school tutor him. Lying in their bed, in the shadow of the dark apartment, Garret would watch Jay through the bathroom mirror as he prepared to leave, and think of an inverse world that existed just behind the polished surface of glass. This world, he imagined was one where himself and Jay would walk untroubled. He found it surprising that reflections stay so close to the surface and border of the world they reflect, and that they do not simply walk deeper into the reflection and happily vanish.

Within the smaller circles of people of an already small town the need for enemies, whether real or imagined soon laid siege upon the young lovers. That the Pastor’s son, a promising, handsome graduate at the top oh his high school class would settle for a job at the local video store, spending all of his free time with the bastard son of a former prostitute soon appeared to the town like a wart, and a cloud of fear began to eclipse their formerly carefree afternoons together. It was even rumored that a note with an undercurrent of violence is what lead Jay to halt his afternoon tutoring lessons. It was a larger and more diffuse threat of violence in search of an invisible enemy that provided Garret a reason to vanish, which he took advantage of by enlisting in the army and going to Iraq.

It was under a sun so total, so complete that it cast no shadow where the landmine exploded. By eliminating all shade it was if the sun demanded witness to these atrocities. In the hospital under the bandages Garret saw only blackness. When he had sufficiently healed and the headwraps removed he saw only shards and scraps of light, in which he hoped to see the reflection of Jay.

Jay had been watching Garret walking down the street, one arm out, seemingly feeling the air for something invisible, the other tapping a cane as he pursued his fragments of light. He followed at a safe distance, slowly gaining confidence in his invisibility until moving up close behind Garret. He did not know if he would say anything. The light had turned red and Garret was about to step into the street when for in instant he thought he say Jay’s face in the passing reflection of a car window. The moment all went black again he felt a hand on his arm from a stranger who held him from harm.