The Fate of Droplets (iv)

Oh, and for further note, I was unaware of the difficulty of commenting. If you have a GMail account or some other Google account, you can use that to log into BlogSpot in order to post comments. Sorry for the inconvenience, I thought that this format allowed for anonymous comments.

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The night passed a little too rapidly into a blur. I thought perpetually of Mona, trying to touch her hands or shoulders, then later her cheeks or neck; I paid too little attention to Henry who floated anxiously between small conversations and vaguely familiar faces; and I drank too much after I discovered the brand of whiskey Jessica's brother served at the bar. My behavior was not problematic, but I can now recall only snatches of the evening. At one point, I stepped outside with Thomas to join him for a cigarette. The night air felt warm and stimulating now, my senses felt sharpened by a somewhat suspended appreciation for space and time. When Thomas exhaled, he breathed overhead, but it settled down on top of us again; I exhaled to my right, though I enjoyed the aroma and mystique of smoke as it came around us, clouding me all the more.
“Why are you thinking that we are influenced by foreign forces?” This question surprised both of us, as I had not expected to say it and Thomas had apparently believed the conversation concluded. He looked at me sharply, halting abruptly his smoking; then, as if he might slide the gesture under the carpet, he inhaled and breathed out lengthily.
“Why do you say that? You provided two interpretations of my argument.” He eyed me, as if I might surrender ground of which I was unaware.
“No. You clearly made your choice before the argument began. Maybe you didn't expect to have the argument turned back on you.” I stated it soberly, clearly, and this—I now believe—provided me my anchor to the moment, locking it into memory. An image came to mind when I spoke, of Thomas with a cigarette in his left hand, a flintlock handgun (I have always fallen back on their allure) borne in his right, only to have it flipped back and stolen from him; then, in the image, he laughs at me.
“You may be correct.” His tone was elusive, as if he was slipping out of character. “I have been able to see a good deal of the problems that surround this society, the ways we fight one another, the difficulties of organizing between party lines, the circularity of classroom arguments; they fascinate me but also frighten me. They ought to frighten more people, I suppose.” He sighed, looked forward and down, as if spying something at the edge of the garden before taking the final drag on his cigarette. The smoke from his mouth shot slowly but steadily forth, like a spear or stream carving into something hard. “This fracturing, this severing of one person from another cannot always have happened, or else we would never have succeeded at building societies of this scale, cities of millions, a planet of billions. I wonder, if something about our cohesion is breaking down, then how could it be something within us? Wouldn't it have to be from outside, the way salt interacts with water or a magnet on iron filings?”
I had stopped moving, listening intently, watching the clean, aggressive movements in his face. Now that he had stopped, it took me a moment to catch up, but all he did was see something at the edge of the garden that wasn't there, lost somehow in himself. I gathered my thoughts, considering the basis for his claims. My thoughts hiccuped and stuttered in my head, working their way around one another, as if in a dense stew, thick and slippery.
“What would be doing that sort of thing, though? You can't make a claim like that without defining the force that acts in such a way.”
Thomas turned his head, too fast for my eyes to follow, and I was struck with dizziness and saw some potency, some shimmer in his eyes that wobbled my already wobbly frame. My right hand, with the fading cigarette butt, slid behind me and caught the edge of a cool, iron table. When I gripped it, the cigarette ash brushed against my hand and I felt its painful heat on sensitive skin between my fingers. I loosened my grip, dropped the cigarette, and nearly fell. Something peculiar about Thomas and his eyes, his speed and his tone moved me and I could not turn again to face him for a long while. When I looked at him again, his eyes spoke of uncanny age, as one sometimes looks when a family member dies or a friend abandons you.
“I don't know what that would be. I couldn't tell you.”
He lied, but spoke as if to tell me he were lying to me; as if, had he spoken truthfully, I would not then have understood the truth out of disbelieve. Now, I reflect on his face, the lines of his expression, the depth in his voice and can intuit its meaning, its clarity; but then, with my dizziness and distraction, I could only let the reality of his statement percolate into me, like soil absorbing rain water. I hardly knew it was there, but the knowledge seemed to know where to go and I would later discover it the way one learns of a dream when one meets the waking counterpart to a character one dreamt.
Mona came out then and whispered, “You should go see Henry. I think he's upset.”
I looked at Mona, as if asking who this Henry person was, then I remembered everything and felt an intoxicated shame fall on me, the shame of abandoning your charge. I excused myself with mumbles and immediately caught sight of Henry, who was sitting at an upright piano in the far corner of the long living room. The room stretched out, surreal and terrible, as faces and bodies danced around one another. My head and eyes took a moment to adjust and the disparate pieces aligned and I found my way to Henry who seemed to frantically read the lines of music in each song. I reached out and set my hand on his shoulder, pushing on him with just too much weight to suggest my state.
“How you doing, there?”
He murmured, or perhaps spoke words I could not make clear.
“What was that? Speak up, its loud in here.”
“It's all wrong. They're all going about it wrong.”
I thought I smelled something strong on his breath, but it may have been from me.
“Henry,” I shook him gently and he turned to me, his eyes drawn long on his face, “do you want to get on home, to get out of here?” Henry stared at me, eyes dull and stupefied, as if cowed into simplicity. “Just tell me and we can go.”
It was obvious to me that Henry needed to leave. Something had perturbed him, had stirred or shaken him and I doubt even he could have then put a name or finger on it. I then thought of Mona and desperately wanted him to deny it, to say that he was alright, or even better, that he might leave on his own. These thoughts were followed by silent curses to myself which galled me sufficiently to act properly.
“Henry, let's get you home, okay? We'll make some tea and chat until you feel better, okay?” I spoke to him like a child, or perhaps a drunk, of which he was neither. He noticed this and stiffened.
“I can go, Lex, you can stay. I'm ready to leave but you're not.” Strength returned to him and he began to stand.
“No Henry, we go together.” Words I both thank and regret. I may have gone on happy and ignorant if it were not for those words.
Mona came over to me and rested her hand on my shoulder, I started at her touch, then leaned my head such that my cheek grazed the back of her hand. An electric shiver ran from my cheek through to my toes and I sighed. I busied myself with adieux and the light talk of future plans, found Jessica whom Henry and I both thanked, then Mona kissed me goodnight at the door and we parted.
Henry's anxiety gave his walk jolted and skittered, and he reminded me of my brother after he had been hit by a car while cycling. Then, like now, he had spoken in quiet phrases that did not connect into clear thoughts or sentences, but carried a strange, foreign poetry. Words about light and smells, about the strange odours (he said it that way, as if I could hear something old or unfamiliar in his voice) that people carried with them. For a while, he spoke almost clearly of the old characteristics of people, the way we once stayed in place and could identify one another by accent and smell; he sounded increasingly distant, as if he himself were traveling somewhere across a sea or a vast mountain range while his body remained behind, walking next to me in the cloud-laden night. It occurred to me—after we made our way to his apartment where I prepared tea and sat with him, wanting to focus on something besides Mona and the way her hands danced—that he sounded like the receiving end of a radio transmission, he spoke from a different setting, reporting to me what he considered about him.
I said very little and had difficulty discerning his words, hushed and garbled as they were. Eventually, he calmed down and began to look more directly at me before beginning to nod off. We finished the tea and I helped him into bed but he became anxious again so I left the room, confused and sobering, only then beginning to connect the worrisome behavior with something that might be wrong. I resolved to return the next day and check on Henry, hopefully find him in better, more explicable spirits. When I heard steady breathing in the other room, I made my move to leave.
Just outside the door, a young woman came out and looked around suddenly, wobbling somewhat. She had long, auburn hair that swung with her scanning movements.
“Have you seen a guy leave recently?”
“I just came out here.”
She looked far away down the street and whispered, a little loudly, “Too bad,” and she swung around and scaled the stairs again. I wondered at her concern, her comment, then chuckled to myself. I stumbled to undo the lock on my bicycle around the side of the building and heard someone leave the apartment, the door clanking back into place. This person whom I could not see ran, loudly, clumsily down the street away from me. I finally left, biking in the opposite direction than the runner, thinking lightly to myself that perhaps the young woman's pursuit was more earnest, or perhaps she and her quarry had missed one another and now he was leaving. Both, I later learned, were wrong.