EXCERPT FROM SILENCE
OR
The Golden Thread
OR
The Commercial Booths for Men’s Hearts
Skyler ignored her, drawing her attention back towards him. He took the target for him and him alone, to see a touch of her in action, to find what had been lost by him. He had driven from Berkeley’s monstrous trains, the Golden Gates, the Tea Gardens, its buffalos, and had come back to an awaiting home. He thought of the highway strands, the proposed cigarette bans and the tapping of his feet while Alexis laughed to a melody drowned in electric keyboard riffs.
Alexis sang.
She was the commercial booth for men’s hearts, a Hispanic seventeen year old drop-out with a manager and a talent written all over her swaying comportment, her distant eyes and her ingenious sound. When Skyler first saw her it was from behind, an image escaping him, his best friend describing her youthful candescence by mimicking the palpitations of his heart with his simple hands and chest, singing: “va-voom va-voom va-voom.”
He ignored her at a friend’s birthday party, where the people around him were white with decay, some of them dying, the rest jealous. He remembered it: an illustrious four attempting a game of pong using Christmas lights reflected off of a dark television screen. Skyler (himself) standing by, refusing to grant his eyes the privilege of sneaking to Alexis’ face, that countenance of mystic boredom swallowing in large gulps, squeezing her lips with her fingers. Her eyes were struggling to be resurrected. Then her music—as fair as a diva’s, vivacious, pop starry-myth. He was drawn to her for every part that made her whole, yet her wholeness was a remote anomaly. He had admired her, had felt her essence slip him by, but his desire was to know her, to reach for her as if stretching for the crescent moon, looking for something to grasp before another phase-shift and an empty sky.
In a circle of musicians, a musical genius nearly bed-ridden by cancer had been their stringed metronome, while with closed eyes each one sang in euphoric grandeur. They became traveling spirits in the dark, all at once gliding over water, to the Middle East, to meet a real virgin, to gasp in surprise. When the party died Alexis left all of them with hands shaken, but she gave Skyler an abrupt embrace, setting her head on his chest as if to sleep upon him. He—he who had never said a word to her, who had never given her a glance, yet in purblind singing they were betrothed. Skyler followed her outside as if to retrieve a coat from his car. He walked ahead, waiting for the superstitious hello that he knew she would let fall from her lips. They met and walked along in late night chatter. He fed her lies like twiddling a string for an anxious cat.
“I’m just looking for…” she said, not a nervous cell on her body.
