lined with books. There were two radios, one in the kitchen, one here, both
playing the. Water Music. “I'm not in your way, am I?” she asked. “No, no, it's fine”
he ...
Sybil By Ryan Frawley Copyright 2011 Ryan Frawley Smashwords Edition
“Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit.” - Virgil
The room was full of glass. They call it a bachelor suite, or a studio, as though they are filled with amorous young gentlemen and inspired artists instead of lonely old men and addicts in various stages of recovery. A small bathroom, a tiny kitchen, and a single room, less than three hundred square feet. This one full of glass and light, old doors and windows stacked up in the narrow passage between the kitchen and the rest of the apartment, so that a man encumbered by a heavy tool belt and harness could barely squeeze past. The light from the grey clouds rolled around the walls and the glass windows and doors as though it were summer. She had a sofa for a bed and a wooden chest for a table, and the wall behind her was lined with books. There were two radios, one in the kitchen, one here, both playing the Water Music. “I’m not in your way, am I?” she asked. “No, no, it’s fine” he replied. “I’m not doing any work here today, just a visual inspection. We’ll put the new windows in tomorrow.” Lightly he rested a hand on the worn wooden frame. It was a corner suite, the old brick building rising in two towers from the city’s most notorious intersection, one window gazing onto the street eight floors below, the other facing a neighbouring apartment. He
could see Ted working in the suite next door, hanging half out of the empty window frame with a thick rope trailing behind him. He could see the street below, crawling with viral life even on a winter afternoon. A skinny blonde staggering down the street, followed by a man wearing a Calgary Flames hat. Subsistence crack dealers slinking between doorways of vacant stores; shrieking covens of the mentally ill; the Carnegie library in its anachronistic Romanesque splendour with the faint light gleaming in its stained glass windows, sheltering twitching prostitutes and teenage crackheads in the perpetually damp alley behind. The stink of garbage and brown piss. Chaos enough to birth a galaxy of dancing stars. The hunch-backed community of the damned, itself now doomed to development, yesterday’s slums transformed into tomorrow’s million-dollar condos by Olympian sorcery. The addicts, the whores, the homeless and the poor retreating from the bulldozers. Coming soon: Starbucks. He thinks “That’s quite the collection you have” he said, nodding towards the bookshelves. “Hmm?” She half-turned to follow his gaze. “Oh. Yes.” Turgenev, Dickens, Virgil, Shakespeare, Voltaire, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy – row upon row of works he’d either read himself or wanted to. “Not many people read the classics anymore” he said. She smiled palely, the wrinkles rising on her lean face, and looked at the floor. Time corrodes even the mind. He ran his hand along the warped windowsill, carefully removing a glass of three tall flowers in murky water. The wood was old, twisted by forgotten rains and the weight of years. The entire frame had to go, right back to the brick. The moss was thick and green on the roof of the decagenarian library. The skinny woman with long blonde hair was screaming silently at the bearded man in the Flames hat. A police car cruised through the alley behind the library, splashing through a pothole and showering the junkies cowering behind the overflowing dumpsters with black mud. A car honked at a muttering old man pushing a
shopping cart across the street. In memory, even such scenes as this might acquire a burnished beauty, glowing like a wooden rail polished by the trailing hands of history. Even our suffering becomes dear to us in time. He thinks – “OK. We’ll be back tomorrow. You might want to clear out while we work, though.” “OK” she whispers. To slide down into darkness is easy; to climb back up, much harder. We each bear it in ourselves, our own desolation, our own squalor, our own dismal piss-stinking alleys. But if we cannot bend heaven, we might at least move hell. He watched the cop car crawl to a halt, a door open, two tall men in black get out, walking quickly towards the bearded Flames fan, each with a hand at his hip. Time grinds everything into dust. Awe does not always come on wings of fire; sometimes it comes through a quiet radio in a small room high above the city. It’s squalor and disease and ugliness down there, and the fear of those who have nothing that the little they have is about to be taken away; but up here in this tiny white space, it’s Virgil and Handel and flowers.
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