I

Alice said she hated me. Maybe out of rage, or some inverted sense of love- like a sock is still a sock inside out. But Alice said she hated me, and I hated the world for it, maybe because of some fly infested poison that had crawled from a street corner and made her say those things, or maybe because in beauty, she was above this world. Thus she had left it, left it all to be hated, declaring it inferior by some...divine light or holy aura or some other clichéd heavenly embodiment. And this vile, tormented sphere was left to waste without her, and leave me to bathe in it alone. The city is this way, not because of its rotten street corners, ones that fall apart like soggy boxes, or because of some dead building, put together by brown and gray patchwork quilts, or that bum on the street... pestilent man who sleeps in the gutter and wishes his life away, looking for nothing but some entrepreneur to strike pity in for five cents worth of sorrow. This is the city, but it is not vile, nor tormented because of this, it is merely the city because of this, but rather the city is tormented, and I know this to be so because Alice said she hates me.
The room seemed to strike a sweet note with me, like that one accented word from your favorite rock melody. It was completely empty, the walls were cold and smooth, that color of gray that hides so far between any noticeable colors, that it simply remains unrecognized as a color. And the walls and floor, so alike that if you were to spin around, I'm not sure you wouldn't try to walk upon walls. Some abandoned basement, below a patchwork building, as if a ghost child had led me across the empty city alley, my being too consumed in thoughts of Alice to notice my own bringing here. And maybe it was this mysterious bringing here that led me to stay. The room was empty; the only peculiarity (if you could call it that) was a small wooden stepstool. It stood alone, as if a man upon the ashes of the world. It was short, with two steps, and a cheap, thin, grained wood, as if one tree in the middle of the desert, but it struck me as some lifeless spirit would, an old woman with pale empty eyes. But it is where I first sat and began to think about Alice.
I remember she used to shimmer in the sunlight like some package of glitter or a new car on a hot day. People would stare at her when she stepped out of the swimming pool, or when we went dancing. I could put aside my anger by wrapping my arms around her, or making some blatant sign at my position. I remember once we went dancing at Ellisburg's hotel, in a dress so beautiful, giving off a light...a radiance it seems only a man can see, one that makes his desire flounder before her, as if to pick her away from the world. These thoughts came to me like small addition problems or useless phrases - without effort. It seemed my thoughts could bloom here, like some magnificent flower. And is seems that, in the process of this growth, time was lost. Darkness had come, light no longer trying to stuff its fat body through the small crack in the door. I had lost myself in thought...so to speak, and the room was now all but pitch black, walls, floor, and ceiling had not only lost individuality but were now nothing, a part of the darkness. It was not until I had begun for the door that I noticed it. One lonely light, draped from a small hole in the ceiling. I assume that, while sitting there, it covered me as if the star of the play. But now the lonely wooden figure sat, the stepstool, the lone soprano, singing his silent song to the empty house. It was as if a bright light was set on the floor above. I'm not as sure now; whether it was human curiosity, or some other collaboration of questions I was seeking answers to, that brought me to stand on that stool. I was tiptoed, a young ballerina, stretching my eye towards the crack of light as if it were a third arm or eleventh finger. And I could say realization floats like a small leaf or crawls like the tide, but I would be lying. It came like a car wreck. While fiddling with the air conditioning, the eleventh finger saw. I saw the sky, the night sky, the stars, it was mystifying, beautiful, intriguing, engulfing. The stars were no longer some foreign plane stripped from the average man's imagination by some cataclysmic void of empty space. I felt as if the night's face had opened his blue lips, and insides stretched from his purple throat to my stomach. It was gaping, immense, but simple and heavy...perpetuating. And it wasn't the sky of the city, one that was rarely bestowed upon us in the first place, due to smog clouds or skyscrapers or some other infernal architectural plague. The sky was different, as if I had seen it from another earth or another pair of eyes. It was as if the stars were speaking, as if I could sit with them and they could tell me answers, answers to my mother's illness, a global catastrophe, or even to Alice. I felt as if I had put my finger on something, the kind of something that would be nothing if it weren't a something, or rather...maintains the most intriguing, mind engulfing pleasures by remaining an enigma, or in short...being the enigma.