Breathe in atmosphere,
tinted stark with asphalt,
gravel, dust, and dreams.
Then tell me not.
Dance with the beat of footsteps,
to streetlight stroboscopes.
Then tell me not.
Tune to the city,
hear her sing.
Then tell me you can not feel,
can not taste life
on the tip of your horizon.
Tell me,
you can not taste the tears,
the shiver down her spine.
That you never fall
to her embrace,
her sharp seduction.
It started like it always did. In a taxi. A yellow cab, branded with the Big Apple cliché chequered stripe and the skid marks of one too many close encounters in the hectic inner city traffic. Like the opening scene of some movie, speeding over the Brooklyn Bridge just as the sun sets in a haze of light smog and heavy history in the west. It was hunting time in what used to be my life. Thursday night. Fridays and weekends were for the suburban kids, the clueless, styleless losers, flooding the clubs and bars with their parents' money and lack of sense for the soul of the places. No, it was on weekdays that the real people played. Those who know where things happen and how to be a part of it. Yeah, I know. The fact that I was as much a fake, a tourist intruder on extended cab ride commute, never crossed my mind. You'd be amazed how easy self-delusion can become a habitual virus, how easy it is to slip into the "right" fold of such a dichotomy, if you wish for it bad enough.
So it was Thursday, at the threshold of yet another meaningless night of make believe and masks. Chilled champagne silver buckets, flaming rum straight off the bar, green absinthe shots, white insane lines, all acting as the framework, setting the scene for everyone to drab a diversion. Taking drugs might help for some, but it never helped me. I needed release, plain and simple. First class flesh, exclusively wrapped, gym toned and more often than not artificially enhanced. Women, sometimes men, whatever mood I was in, caught up in the same pointless feedback loop as me. Every night was a matching game. Find a willing stranger, play a few hours of make believe games, drink, chew the fat, drink some more, and then off to whomever's apartment was closest.
Sex was mandatory. Sex was the whole focal point of it all, the only goal that still mattered. It was city life in its most depraved glory. Straight vodka, strange pills, coke lines, VIP lounges, sweat, perfume, design hysteria, glitter hyperboles... all boiling down to stellar rutting, shameless sex like in high budget hardcore movies. It was a quest for the perfect fuck, something we would never experience, simply because there is no such thing.
Or so I thought. I know better now. I know that it was nowhere to be found on the seedy spectacular that is the Manhattan scene. A carnal experience without a strong soul attached to it is just masturbation. Expensive and redundant wanking.
The city came closer, opened its mouth and devoured me as the taxi left the bridge and dived in among the skyscrapers. Its steel and glass forest towering high around me, but all the action, all the steaming life was right there on ground level. A colourful anthill of beautiful people, cars, beggars, conspicuous whores, ties, neon lights and island after island of blaring, pumping music passing me by. Most days I would have eyed the opportunities. I had an address, a street name and number that didn't really say much to me, but Binder had assured me that this was the place to be tonight. Binder usually was right about that kind of thing. He knew the ins and outs of New York's upper levels like nobody else I know. I guess he still does. I don't see him much these days.
Anyway, I was too slow, sometimes too high to ever keep track of what was hot and what was not, so Binder was my guide to the labyrinth of status and style. A labyrinth with twists and unexpected turns that that night led me to a long corridor walled with the tackiest cyan velvet, where the staccato of an electro funk beat hung like a curtain in the air. It was the music of the month in a business that changed faster than the seasons where being on the edge drove producers and designers alike into a cocktail diet of Prozac, Stoli and good old Amsterdam White.
There she was. At first, just another moving shape in the sea of bodies writhing to the beat, a flurry of naked limbs and glitter in the stroboscope freeze frames. But there was just something that locked my vision right there, something in the way she moved. As if a bubble around her had granted her a time zone of her own, where she set the tempo. Tacky, I know, but I don't mean it in that Hollywood clip template for first impressions kind of way. No, there were all those little nuances that were…just…slightly…off. Her hue a little too warm for the room, her movements not quite matching those of the other dancing people. The level headed side of my brain tried to tell me that the pills I never could remember the names of, that I had popped just before hailing the cab, were finally kicking in. It wasn't that I shunned drugs. After all, your local over the counter pharmacy can keep you high for weeks if you know how to mix it right. I just didn't trust anything that neatly packed.
The other side of that brain was going on autopilot, measuring up the potential for nailing her to the floor of a hotel room by the end of the night. But there was something else, a tiny part of me, wondering just what made her feet move to a beat that was not echoing between the walls. And what made her hair, a fascinating too white mane interrupted by strands of red and auburn, flow through the air as if in slow motion.
And why did she look straight at me? Her eyes, those eyes, there is something not quite right…
