Eros and Death -- fiction, notes, and non-fiction

He leans over the balcony and looks past his bare feet at the rotary vents and motor-casings that speckle the roof-top of what must be the hotel's kitchen. Closer to the horizon, a grey strip of highway supports whishing mid-morning traffic as it slides into and out of Seattle. Parked cars and trees too young to support themselves form a mottled pattern over the dark asphalt of the hotel's freshly laid parking lot. Someone walks alone, into view, out from under cover of the kitchen roof's straight eves. The cars are growths on the striped black; the transplanted trees are growths only as cancer is a growth; the figure of the short-haired woman finding one of the cars is like that of an ant.
He looks almost straight down again, at the humming air conditioner twenty stories below, above the kitchen. How big would the service-mechanic be, standing next to it? How loud would the hum be, way down there?

What would it be like to fall down there?

What would it be like to end? Of course, he thinks, we all know that there is no 'like' to non-existence. But what a feast of living in that final moment, no? The rush of air that he only imagines, looking down there at the gravel-topped roof, actually makes his real blood rush with a cold, hot, liquid airy feeling with the texture of fine sand suspended in blueish water on the breakfast table.
What would it be like to just step off? Something behind his heart mumbles that mantra from the catechism: 'but of course, I won't really jump...but of course, I won't really jump...' even while something before his heart anticipates the fulfillment of the hot blue sandy rush that his imagination promises. He wills the anticipation stronger, making the imagination more vivid. Vertigo? Some blood must be leaving his head, because he feels dizzy, as if the skull is gone and the brain is blowing up like a helium balloon. What is the end like? What is the end like? Praying at the back of his heart that logic cannot possibly do it, he tries to intensify the anticipation before his heart to its limits using only the grammar of emotivation, the mechanics of thought and language. Is the abandonment to language stopped short in the prayer behind the heart, or is this reservation only the most entrenched of all the grammars?
He wants to shout for joy and to buckle his body in unrestrained sobbing. He does neither. The imagined rush of air recedes, blows past, trails off into the gentle breeze from the coast, filtered through the fingers of Seattle's sparse sky-line. He steps back into the space behind his heart and inhabits it for a moment so as to calm the alcohol-burning of his veins. Much less exciting; much less taxing. He stays there, in the home behind his heart, only his finger-tips holding a crack in the door as he peers curiously into the cold and darkness outside.

He walks down the main street of Population 12,000. Shaggy earth-toned boys and glooming black-toned girls filter down from high school: it's 3:20. He sees her half a block away and they are walking at each other. She is not black-toned, nor gloomy, though there is something dark there in the eyes. Their eyes do not part after a second of neighborly contact. They burn still stronger as the space between them compresses like a spring to only a quarter block. The growing friction between them evokes a heat in his blood. He notices his groin. He tries to compose a smile that is not of the world of old ex-hippies and young skate-rats that peoples Main Street now. He tries to make it friendly without being dumb, happy and not silly, warm but uncompromising. She succeeds with her... --; is it a smile? Can you call it a smile? -- whatever it is that he looks at her with, she turns it back to him, pounding his eyes with her own like pistons driving tingling blood through veins he had rarely used before and almost forgot were there. The pressure on those pistons was blasting through old rotting cellar doors, into subterranean corridors that had been left sealed in hopes of better times.
Five seconds pass and he could address her now as a friend greets a friend in passing. But those eyes boring into one another forge a closeness and a distance that clinch the silence. The tension of this spring, all that might be said but goes unsaid, all the desire unfulfilled and all the possibility unrealized cannot exist beyond the point and the moment of their passing. But a spring springs, it's physical law. Unused, its energy must all be consumed, and as the still-point, the point of no turning back approaches, molten flames wash over all his body in exuberant dissipation.
After they pass each other by, all flame is gone, extinguished. He savors the unpleasant coolness like evaporating ether that suffuses his skin in the breeze of her wake. The curb at the end of the block stops him before a moving car gets the chance. He takes his breath now, poor kid, and watches the sleepy loitering of teens and the sleepier shopping of adults, wondering what, if anything, he must now be missing.

He stood up, standing in the center of the room under the light, looking at me. I stood up, too, half smiling, but also, in some strange, dim way, a little frightened.
'Viens m'embrasser,' he said.
I was vividly aware that he held a brick in his hand, I held a brick in mine. It really seemed for an instant that if I did not go to him, we would use these bricks to beat each other to death.
Yet, I could not move at once. We stared at each other across a narrow space that was full of danger, that almost seemed to roar, like flame.
'Come,' he said.
I dropped my brick and went to him. In a moment I heard his fall. And at moments like this I felt that we were merely enduring and committing the longer and lesser and more perpetual murder.

-- James Baldwin
Giovanni's Room, p. 157