Just To Be Cold--1940

"Uh," said the Jared Colquite.

______

What if there was no one left to revere Orson Welles but me? Would I acquire some deep sense of meaning in this world? . . . No. I’m afraid that I would not. But so far it has not been proven, because I have not had the chance to ask everyone on the planet about their feelings toward a certain crazy from the forties. My Century-Twenty-One role model--from a different century.

The room was dark before I turned the light on. But not just dark, it was black as pitch; all sense of space and time had been swept away to make room for pure, silty blackness. I didn’t care for its slightly stuck-up attitude, and the light took care of all that. When the shadows had all retreated to less dangerous areas of space and time, the room they vacated became positively friendly; although I was quick to doubt its sincerity if it had let such nastiness hang around.

Thin, spidery wall-paper held tightly to the walls and met the crimson carpet in shiny tacs. Everything was exquisite in its needless intricacies; plush armchairs covered in lacy lilacs; stupefied rugs of general delinquency in their ability to perplex; and superficial paintings of epic proportions.

I could say I liked it because it distracted quite successfully. Yet before I could become entirely free of any thought besides spidery lace and the impossible way a tree can become a julep, there was a crash that saved my mind.

“Is that a wedding ring?” someone asked. Someone was sitting against the wall behind a wonderful armchair. She looked fairly comfortable.

“What was that crash?” I asked, shoving my hands into my trouser pockets and pretending like I hadn’t been almost eaten by pictures of innocent flowers.

“Woke you, didn’t it? Lucky, I say.”

I shook my head, forgetting that could imply I disagreed. Clarifying with a quick, “Sure,” I sighed at the girl on the floor. How had I found myself here?

“Is that a wedding ring?” she repeated, beginning to get to her feet.

“Where?” I asked, entirely distracted, and glancing behind me at the closed door.

“On your hand, stupid,” she laughed.

I looked at my hand. “Oh, that’s just--I mean--It doesn’t mean I’m married.”

She laughed. “I hope! You look about fifteen,” added the girl, glancing at the ceiling half-heartedly. I didn’t think I looked fifteen. I wasn’t fifteen. “What happened, then?” she asked, stepping past me to the door. “We’d better get out of here. At least until you realize where you are.”

“Sure, sure,” I said absently, trying to grasp the fact that I was confused. Everything seemed vague. I followed her out of the room and found myself in a long hallway that ended in a glass door. It was growing dim on the street, but the lights didn’t pay it any attention. Thanking them seemed in order.

“You didn’t answer. What happened?” she asked again as we found ourselves strolling along the sidewalk.

“To who?” I said, my eyes becoming glued to the chapped hands of a homeless person a few yards away. The pavement was chipped with high-heels and painted in the filth of what the heels scarcely touched, however hard they tried.

There was a cold silence where I could feel her eyes on me. “Why, to you, of course. Isn’t that who we were talking about?”

“I don’t remember us talking about anything. I don’t even know who you are.”

“Do you know who you are?”

“Cliché,” I snapped, walking a little faster.

“What I meant was, why are you wearing a wedding ring?”

“Because I didn’t get married,” I blurted, not even sure if that were the correct story. I wasn’t married, was I? But I wasn’t not-married, either. I was clamped between the two. What happens when your fiancée vanishes after you’ve said “I do” and before she says it? Is that even what happened?

“So, you’re wearing a wedding ring to signify the fact that you aren’t married?” she muttered, rubbing her hands together and then blowing into them. It was cold, wasn’t it? My hands were in my pockets and my jacket was very nice. “Are you sure that’s what it is? Perhaps you’re just wearing your engagement ring on the wrong--no, you’re too young to be engaged.”

“I was engaged,” I said slowly. “Before she put this ring on me. So, does that mean I’m old enough to be engaged, even though I’m not?”

“Even though you’re not old enough?”

“No, even though I’m not engaged!”

“How old are you?”

We were coming up on a much more choked street and the sidewalk was losing its homeless and gaining something I found much uglier. All empty space and people wanting to fill it. They weren’t just there because they wanted to be--or because they didn’t want to be--they were there as a bookend, and they didn’t mind it.

“I’m nineteen, or something. Actually, I don’t know how old I am,” I said, faltering. “Not exactly. Somewhere around nineteen or twenty, though.” I glanced down at the girl beside me and I suddenly felt horrible. My hands began to shake and my vision flitted in and out of “horror movie” and “bad photograph”. As I stared at her, she changed from beautiful, to pond-scum ugly. Her hair jumped from filth to light. I wanted to ask her who she was, and who I was, and how I had gotten in that room, and how I had begun to tell a nasty story like my own as if it were a droll piece of the evening news. I was terrified.

Of course I passed out.