He and She
I’m staring at the sidewalk, watching the cracks pass below me like an escalator. My feet trudge onward, pushing up little bits of the thin snow cover at the toes. It’s cold, and despite my arms wrapped tight around my waist, my shoulders hunched against the frost, and my warm breath rising like a chimney cloud, I still feel the bite of winter. I blink, and my eyes fill with water. The sidewalk blurs, and then refocuses. The only place to look is down.
She’s on my left, watching the concrete rolling up beneath her feet too. Between us, we’re looking at the entire scope of the path, and perhaps, if we pooled our knowledge we could find interesting patterns in the cracks, or mysterious designs in the snow. But instead, our feet trip and tumble over the ground, erasing what was written before, and carving new patterns behind us. But we don’t look at these either.
***
The last time I was warm was some time ago, sitting in the dark on a couch at a party. There was music, loudly forcing its way out of the speakers and running down the length of the furniture. It rattled me, and I felt my ear drums pounding as if someone had dropped a timpani down the stairs. A plastic cup, half full, sat on the table in front of me, throbbing to the same beat. It wasn’t mine, but I picked it up anyway and drank it down. I was thirsty. I leaned back on a pillow and tried to count the marks on the ceiling. There were just as many marks as on the rug of on the couch. There were little marks everywhere.
“Hey,” a voice said, and I felt the couch rise a little as someone displaced the cushion next to me. I looked over.
“What’s up?
“Hey,” he said over the music “Have you seen my drink?”
I hadn’t, I had no clue which drink had been his.
“No,” I said, “Just get another one”
“We’re out of cups”
“Get one from the kitchen then, or something.” Anything to get whoever it was away.
“Hey man, are you okay?”
Now he was concerned about me. I smiled, and sat up a little straighter to show him I was fine.
“I’m good.”
“Whatever man, don’t throw up over the couch okay?”
I wasn’t about to throw up over the couch. I wasn’t feeling sick at all. I was feeling tired, and I wanted to go to sleep. But I wasn’t about to keel over. I was waiting, that’s all.
She came over to me, right after the guy left to find another plastic cup. She sat down in the depression that he had made, and put her arm around me, and leaned her head against my shoulder. I put my head against hers, and we drifted out like that for a couple minutes, holding fast against the pounding and shaking. Then she lifted her head and looked at me.
“Wanna go?”
I nodded, and she got up, and grabbed my hand, and led me to the door. I found my coat underneath hers, at the bottom of the heavy pile. I wrapped it around my back, and then took my hat from out of my pocket and pulled it down on my head. Then she opened the door, and the cold elbowed in, only to be thrown back as we stole out and shut the door behind us. It had just stopped snowing then. Inside, the music didn’t stop, and no one inside saw that we had disappeared; vanished into the quiet night, gone just like the Indians.
***
I raise my head for a second, and stare at the walk ahead. For a moment, there is a clean feeling, and the mist from my breath curls in front of me and hovers in my path like an apparition. Then the cold comes back, and spins past my nose and cheeks, and forces my chin to bury itself into the dark cavity of my coat once again.
We brush coats as we walk, and the harsh sound surprises me. I pull me elbow back and so does she and I drift to the right. I don’t say anything. The sound reminded me of the music at the party, and this bothers me for some reason. It grates against me like sandpaper, and as I walk, the grace of the movement vanishes, and all I hear is the scrape of my feet upon the ground, and the prickling of the cold on my nose. I don’t want to walk straight anymore, so I stop.
She stops and turns to me, and we glare at each other’s collars, unwilling to explore out of our burrows.
“What is it?” she says into her coat.
I look up.
“Let’s cross”
She looks at me puzzled.
“Here?” she says.
I look across the empty street. The street lights tint the whole scene a dull orange, and the picture looks surreal. Nobody has plowed the road since the snow last dusted it, and there are no tire tracks. I haven’t seen a car yet. As if a reply, I step out onto the road, and begin to cross. I go slowly, not straight across but at an angle. She follows me without a word, a step behind, as I plod onward.
***
I can’t remember when we stopped talking. I was tired, I was irritable, I was probably a little bit drunk. We had walked out of the yard, down the street and out of earshot, before she started speaking, quickly but quietly, holding forth on the party and whatever drama had occurred. It wasn’t important, and we both knew that, and I was too exhausted to give anything more than the usual monosyllabic answers. She didn’t say it, but she seemed disappointed that I wouldn’t speak to her. I would have spoken to her if I had wanted to, but right then, I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to speak to anybody. Her voice had trailed off, perhaps as we crossed the park, and her arm had extricated itself from mine and sunk itself into her pocket. My hands pressed against the bottom of my coat, and stretched the fabric taut against my back. I was warmer like that.
***
I’ve stopped walking across the street, and am now walking across the middle of the road. The road is smoother than the sidewalk, and there is more space. It’s the middle of the night, and it’s snowing, and the road belongs to us. In the distance I see the lights of a stoplight, steadfastly flashing even though no one is there. As we near it, I watch it turn green, then yellow, than red, and the green again. It turns yellow as I approach the white line. I slow down. It turns red and I stop. She comes up next to me, and follows my gaze up to the light.
“It’s red,” I say, “We can’t go.”
We look at each other and she nods.
“I like the reflection of the light on the snow.” She says.
“So do I.”
We’re quiet for another set of seconds, and I feel suddenly very cold. I lean closer to her, and our coats brush again.
“It’s starting to snow again.” I say, looking up.
“Yes it is,” she says, leaning her head against my shoulder.
We stand like sentinels, watching the tiny flakes spin and flip past, like the stars, then suddenly red as they fall through the beam of the light, and then pure again as they settle on my nose, and in the hair which trails down her back. I brush some of the snow off her hair and the light turns green. We walk again.
I want to say something, something witty or literary but an unseen pressure pushes up against my lips and holds them shut. As we walk down the invisible line on the lonely street, her arm in mine, the streetlights bowed down and hanging over us like a vault, and through the haunted ceiling falling a million particles of dust, it seems to me that the music is being played in rests, and that in this moment, the silence is the poetry
