Gold Coast
They wake simultaneously in a hotel room on the thirty-seventh floor, neither of them sure of the time, both still a little drunk, a little numb from the silence that has grown between them.
“Look at the sky! Look at the light!” she exclaims.
He’s already seen it — how could he not? The enormous bed faces a wall of windows. They’ve left the drapes open. The wall of windows now seems like a wall of sky, almost indigo, shot with iridescence as if veins of a newly discovered precious mineral have been exposed. It isn’t dawn yet. It’s still a gradation of night, but night with tomorrow already luminous behind it like the silver behind the glass of a cobalt mirror.
He can see the sky reflected in the windows of all the surrounding buildings that tower up to form the glass cliffs of the gold coast they’ve drifted to. He knows that every city has such strips, and he distrusts them. No matter how authentically elegant they might appear, he thinks of them as illusory, removed from the real life of cities, as places that are really no place, reflections floating like illuminated scum on the surface of a river. He remembers how, as teenagers, he and a buddy spent their nights exploring the gold coast in the city they’d grown up in, and the mixture of awe and contempt they’d felt toward it.
He no longer feels superior to gold coasts. He wonders how many of his fellow sleepers are sitting up as he is, silently peering out of highrise rooms in which the drapes have been drawn open on tremendous windows, windows for giants, scaled to encompass the winking horizon of the city. He both envies those still sleeping peacefully and pities them for missing this nameless, early sky which he knows already will be more unforgettable than any dawn he’s ever seen. He wonders which of those two emotions the future will reveal as the more accurate. Once, shortly after they’d become lovers, she told him, “I’m not sure if meeting you has been the most lucky or unlucky thing that’s ever happened to me.”
He had laughed.
“I wasn’t kidding,” she said.
“I know,” he said. “I’m only laughing because that’s exactly what I was thinking about meeting you.”
“See. Maybe that’s what happens when it’s fate. One always feels what the other is feeling, at the same time, together.” She laughed too.
“Kind of emotional telepathy, eh?”
“‘Emotional’ makes it sound too glandular,” she said, rolling her eyes, speaking in the teasing way she had that made for private jokes between them. “I’m not talking about something in the glands; I’m talking about something in the stars.”
Now, beside him in bed, she whispers, “Why did we have to see this together?” It isn’t said cruelly. He understands what she means. She means they’ve seen this unsuspected sky only because of each other; that it’s something more between them to remember. And he knows that he doesn’t need to answer, that it’s as if he’s merely overheard her speaking to herself, almost as if he isn’t there any longer, as if she’s awakened alone, at an unknown hour, along a gold coast.
Transport
A kiss crosses the city. It rides a glass streetcar that showers blue, electric sparks along the ghost of a track — a track paved over in childhood — the line that she and her mother used to take downtown.
A kiss crosses the city, revolves through a lobby door into a rainy night, catches a cab along a boulevard of black glass, and, running red lights, dissolves behind the open fans of wiper blades.
Rain spirals colorlessly out of the dark, darkens all it touches and makes it gleam.
Her kiss crosses the city, enters a subway tunnel that descends at this deserted hour like a channel through an underground world. It’s timeless there, always night, as if the planet doesn’t turn below the street. At the mouth of the station stands a kid who’s gone AWOL and now has nowhere else to go, a young conga drummer, a congacero, wearing a fatigue jacket and beating his drum. He has the pigeons up past their bedtime doing the mambo. He leaves his cap of small change behind him on the pavement and steps onto an escalator that carries him down in time to the tock of his drum. The more fervently the congacero drums, the deeper the escalator conveys him. He has it doing a rumba, a cha-cha-cha, a guanguanco, and finally, possessed, unable to fold back upon itself, the escalator becomes a staircase flowing like quicksilver, a shimmering waterfall, an anaconda slithering through the kingdom of sleep. It will transport him deeper than sleep, deeper than dreams, than nightmares, than the nod of junkies, than comas, until he steps off onto the platform where the newly dead, their souls still shaped like their bodies, mill about in confusion, waiting to be taken to their next destination.
“Is anyone in charge here?” the congacero asks, the way a foreigner in a city might seek directions. Despite the mob of souls, his voice echoes as if he’s called into a void. He drums now to invoke whatever spirit governs this place, a beat so compelling that the arrhythmic dead begin to sway as if they feel the accompaniment of their own hearts again.
“Iku la tigwa un bai bai,” he chants over his drumbeat, magic words in an ancient tongue that, he’s been taught, will beckon the iku, his dead ancestors, who might intercede for him. But the only response is the hollow silence that his drum continues to punctuate.
The loss of the woman he has descended here to find has taught him that eternity is not a presence, but an absence. His drum shapes silence into time, keeping time where there is none to keep. Time is his song and his power. Drafts from the tunnels swirl about him. In spite of the bone-deep dampness, he’s begun to sweat. Sweat, impossible here as tears, patters the drumskin that he leans above with his eyes closed and drumming hands nearly invisible.