Early Lasting Sunlight

J. J. DeCeglie

February 2006

He sat alone at Grand Central. The dull light was good to his eyes and the spinning in his head had stopped since he’d sat down. He was going up to 110th street. It was early, he’d left when she was still asleep. Stolen the beer from her fridge. Drank it walking down 33rd, his head aching like a busted bone, eye’s rare under broken early sunlight sliding past trees and tenements. Trains had come and gone but he just sat. Looked at the shifting reflection darkly, the movie flicker window reel of himself drinking beer on the sly, reading dying Kerouac, the fatal mirror zoom spool then darkness smack when it had passed.

The suck of the void. He felt ill. Sick. No sleep hardly, a ton of booze, sex he couldn’t remember.

People looked at him and he stared back when he could, some of the prettier girls gave him something inside but the rest was nonsense. When he was a kid, home in Fremantle, his mother had come maybe an hour late to pick him up at the station once. He thought about it quickly. He’d watched himself in the window’s reflection the whole time he was waiting for her. Like he was doing now. When she finally arrived he started crying and he didn’t know why. The sadness in him now he knew was past crying. The sorrow just was. It was there and felt like it always had been.

A schoolgirl sat by him. Smiled. She smelt like soap when he breathed her in. Smiled back. She wanted something. He could tell by the smirk. He felt like jumping in front of the next train but knew he would never let that happen. You got any cigarettes she asked him, he looked at her, nodded barely, didn’t speak, said yes with his eyes, made a mark in his book, he reached in his pocket with his right hand, the pack and matches, he lit it in his own mouth, breathed the smoke deep, and then gave it to her, you’d better smoke it in the bathroom he said, she blinked, said yeah, she got up and he caught the next train, up to 110th, the train made him dizzy, the doc said it was from when he’d been beaten that time in the city, his good buddy writer with him, said the insomnia was from that too, he thought it was from the writing mostly, the scrap with the language, the sadness leaking from the pages into whatever living was, whatever it was supposed to be.

When he came up from under the earth it was raining. The sweet scent of the rain on warm sidewalk didn’t smell exactly like it did at home. He wished that it would. Beads of clear water on glass windows and falling off shaken green trees that stand out more in your eyes with grey skies overhead. With the cloud filtered haze. Glare you can see. Flowers and trees brighter and more heady when it rained. He was still drinking beer. He remembered his university back home by the river and the city, how when it rained there he’d always get romantic and suicidal and read alone til he was full, the smell of the fresh wet dirt and flowers, the salty river and old pages of books struck him hard and he would think about where that girl he thought he loved was, who she was with, what she looked like sleeping, or first thing in the morning, with sun cuts through the window slits on her, clean light and blue sky sneaking past wafting curtains.

Did her skin taste like cute salt, her lips and saliva like strawberry bourbon. He was dizzy and sat. On 110th.

He was he here to drink coffee and read in that little place just up the street a few blocks, the girl there at this time had pretty ankles and pretty wrists, clear blue eyes.

Her voice was very soothing and she liked him and he’d imagined sleeping her and wondered what she sounded like in bed. My fucking head won’t quit damnit, he couldn’t tell whether it was the hangover or if it was from that fight downtown with his writer buddy after the book launch, all the beers and word muck. All the people who could talk writing real well but couldn’t write for shit. He tried to avoid a fight but his buddy had started the argument all horrid and had been served up a tidy solid right to the chin then two knees on his chest and he tried to pull the guy off, tried to end the fists mauling his friends face and eyes first in front then into the street below in dull blunts of sidewalk but he’d been slammed with something not a fist in his head and was on the ground being crashed again and again sharp and hard and it ceased sudden so he got up and pulled the guy off his friend with a vice type headlock choking that throat in the corner of his arm bend with all he had but it was over then and they two quit together with hands to the air, so he let go, wised up to the fight’s end, they were both bleeding fast, he and his buddy, his head pumping blood in spurts from an artery cut by the corner of the milk crate they’d used to hammer him with. Spatter pattern on his hand and sleeve held up to it. He remembered being hit four times with it while felled on the cement, his forehead from the force to the back of his skull cracking into the ground once or twice, the cops were there fast, he bleed slickly with sweat sitting against a lamppost with his buddy leaning against him, arms around one another, his shirt drenched cherry and drying hard to his skin, even his jeans blanched blushing with own blood, he looked up at the city bright against the dark of night, no stars in the sky, at the hospital he threw up with concussion, he’d had dizzy sections with nausea ever since.

He remembered his buddy had said the lips on that girl with blonde locks would probably suck your balls right through the eye of your cock. He remembered he said it very loudly. Very deliberately. He remembered that had started the whole dangerous mess.

He drains the first cup of coffee and she pours another straight off cause she was watching him from the counter. Watching him read. He wrote in his notebook at times. Looked out at the rain. He deliberately held her eyes for longer periods so as she would be unsure of him. She was. She wanted to talk to him about things and see what he thought. She would settle for sleeping with him a few times, though she thought they had the potential for much more. She wanted to see what he would be like after they’d finished in bed though. What words he’d form in that time, while they lay together content and warm. She thought he was a writer. Knew he wasn’t from around here cause he had that attractive accent. That strange way of talking which was good cause it was different.

She didn’t know he was an all of a sudden big deal over here. That it had been building awhile. That he would rather drink and read and write alone than what they were doing to him. That he thought he may be finished with love, that it was finished with him. He finishes the second cup as fast as the first. She’s over again just as quick.

You wanna come to some writing thing with me tonight he asks. She says yeah too fast and regrets it, she wasn’t expecting it, I don’t know if you know or not but at the minute I’m having some luck, I didn’t she said, good, he swigged the coffee she’d poured, cut short his sentence than started back up when done swallowing, well it’s at such and such a place at such and such a time and get there early or you won’t be able to get drunk with me. She says ok, she knows the joint, says I’ll see you there. He gets up, looks back, you’re not from New York are you he says as he walks back into the rain, she’s flush and smiling say no, neither are you, she hates work now. Just wants to go home and get ready. He walks slowly in the light clear spit, watches the puddles reflect streetlights whilst trembling ripples caused by misty raindrops, he pulls his hood over wet hair, walks, assumes they’ll be together tonight, wishes for more than that, she is real loveliness, fine and authentic, her eye’s a vivid burn like the blue of a far off planet, honey gold plain hair, she makes me feel what only a few have, makes me blaze with goodness inside, but I’m finished like that, there’s nothing left, he thinks I should write some this afternoon, this rain has put me in the place to do it, my eyes and head feel sorta good just now, the beer and coffee helping me along, some clear prose, stark and true. She gives me this every time I see her. The only spot for it is in the library. It was all he could do, there was nothing else. He took the train back to Grand Central, then walked the two blocks west to Fifth Avenue. The rain had stopped, his head felt steady.

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