PART 1.
This is a short story of sorts that might or might not be part of a larger cycle. If so, this is later in the cycle. Let’s say story 5 of 6 — right after “Lisa and her reflection.” This one is a bit rougher than the other two, but they are getting cranked out in real time, warts and all. Again, more meditations on emotions out there… Probably related to trust, since that is what I am reading a lot about these days. But let’s see where these stories go.
Sebastian considered the tunnel entrance in front of him. It gaped. The old train tracks disappeared into its maw.
Once the tunnel had allowed trains coming from the lower city to engine up a shallower grade and carry commerce up to the heights. Engineers had made their plans, and workers had dug away underground, one team starting from below where the river met the bay, and another starting from here. Over two years they had dug away in the dark, shoveling out load after load of dirt. When the tunnel was completed, trolleys would use the rails to take people out to the horse racing tracks or commuters from one part of the city to the other. Small freight trains would carry up goods, and the tracks, like arteries, connected and branched out, bridging over the river, converging on the beating heart of the central station, and glistening out along the bay. That time was long ago, though. Most of the tracks had been ripped up. The bridge that had crossed the river had been demolished in its middle so that on either end, the tracks ended in space, and the city’s station had been torn down and built over with new buildings and roads and new lives.
The tunnel remained, here in front of Sebastian. Graffiti covered its entryway – bulbous letters and shapes. The outline of hands, a caricature of an octopus passing a cigarette to a deep sea diver. Sebastian, himself, had contributed some of this paint. There. It was partially painted over by a large vibrant arrow that pointed into the tunnel along with huge letters that spelled out “Butthole.” But there. There were the rainbow scales he had spent nights spray painting.
He’d had in mind one of those flying snakes from Aztec mythology, a quetzalcóatl. It was the same night that a large group of his artist friends had decided to hold a free-the-city celebration at the tunnel’s mouth. They’d all worn masks, and beaten drums, and started bonfires. The cops had been called in to break it up, of course, which eventually they had managed to do, but not before the event had become a cause célèbre. Counter cultural types from all over the city had converged on the tunnel, and the party had gone on for a good week. Sebastian hadn’t really cared. He’d spent the entire week obsessively spray painting rainbow scales along the exterior and into the interior of the tunnel, because when he was a kid, Sebastian had pretended that the tunnel’s mouth was a dragon’s lair.
“What an idiot,” Sebastian thought now in the present, standing before the tunnel.
He looked over his shoulder, and then turned to take in the scene from his memory. Lisa had been looking down from there, the low street bridge that passed nearby over the tunnel’s mouth. They had stood there, side-by-side, looking over the concrete and brick guardrail, and the city’s buildings rose up behind them. They were considering what the dragon might look like. A rainbow for scales? A furred head like a lion? Was it grumpy? Was it sleepy? Did it come out at night and fly through people’s dreams?
“Maybe we *are* it’s dream,” said Lisa. “Maybe it is sleeping until…” She trailed off.
“Until when?” asked Sebastian.
“I don’t know. But I think it is dreaming. Dreaming us. Right now. Right here. And it is in there sleeping until the real world needs him.”
“That’s silly.”
***
Sebastian brought himself back to the present. What was silly was the situation that he found himself in. Why did this stuff always happen to him? It had begun simple enough. He had been out with friends. Well no. Wait. Back up.
These days Sebastian lived in a small, one-bedroom studio apartment. It was his bedroom, his studio, his kitchen, and his bathroom. Or rather, the bathroom was one floor down at the bagel shop. Sebastian had lived there a good 10 years, now, ever since moving out from his dad’s apartment to become a painter. At least that is what he told himself. Most of the painting he did now-a-days came from the odd jobs working with crews renovating other people’s apartments and businesses. It wasn’t exactly visionary, this kind of painting – walls and trim, but it did just barely pay the bills.
So, last night, Sebastian was recounting to his friends a conversation he’d had that day with a client.
“So, I said, you would like the window trims in fuchsia? Why yes mam. And then, and then she said oh not that fuchsia but this one in the magazine. And I said, but that’s not fuchsia, mam. Fuchsia is a kind of plant. This here, this is more a sage green. And she said, no, she didn’t want sage green, she wanted fuchsia.”
Sebastian’s friends had cracked up at that, especially when he had told them that this particular client was also opening an art gallery.
“To keep herself busy. That is what she actually said.”
“Oh my god. You are kidding, right?”
“No. No. That’s what she said.”
The group had burst out laughing.
And then somehow, they had gone out hopping from bar to bar, then stumbling from bar to bar, until the evening had given away to that time of night when dumpsters carry malice and windows get thrown open by voices yelling for them to shut up. People are sleeping! Which only made them laugh all the harder. How they had ended up at the gallery, no one knew.
“God, I have to pee so badly.”
“Just go out here.”
“Oh my god, are you crazy?”
Sebastian was the one who had pointed with what had seemed incredible logic that there was sure to be a bathroom in the gallery, and if he got in, he could let them all in to use it.
“Go ahead, Sib.”
“Do it.”
“Yeah, she does want to help the arts.”
So, one crashed window later, Sebastian had found himself in the interior of the building. The others had chickened out, like they always did, but he knew they were outside, ready to run if anyone happened by.
“Oh my god. I can’t believe he’s doing this.”
“Sib man, he’s crazy.”
“Has he always been like this?”
***
Like this? No. Sebastian had not always been like this. Once upon a time, Sebastian had not been like this. This would be burned away, for this was not Sebastian, but he did not know that yet.
What he did know is that day after day something was cramming and squeezing out his present so that he couldn’t connect the dots. Or rather, it was as if all he had were the dots. He knew all about pointillism in painting, but weren’t all the points supposed to add up to something? He was a young man on the verge of 30 with each day echoing the next, like the night-after-night walks he took through the city – so many late-night walks with his headphones filling in the sleeping brownstones and tall brick building; the music filling in the stilled and barren playgrounds; the music filling in the lone figure who was always just ahead but gone when the corner was turned.
One night he stopped to watch a group of men, oddly at 3 am, playing soccer under lights. Shift workers, no doubt. They moved this way and that in some strange and quiet dance, quiet because the music filling his head coated it all. He had turned away and continued his walk, the lights of the streets like so many vertebrae of a gargantuan whale washed ashore and now eroded away into these bleached bones of avenues and alleys.
***
“Stop it!” said Sebastian in the gallery. He pushed the thoughts from his mind and cast his eyes about.
The gallery resembled every work site he’d ever been on. Plastic drip clothes, sawhorses, all the tools of the many renovation jobs he had been on since dropping out of high school. Along one side of the room, though, he saw a set of stacked canvases leaning against the wall. No harm in checking.
He strode over and flicked one canvas after another, letting them drop to the floor. Horses in a pastoral setting. Red-coated men on a fox hunt. An ancient Grecian temple sequestered in a grotto.
“Crap. Crap. Crap. Why is the world overflowing with so much junk?” Sebastian muttered. And then he stopped.
The painting was a still life. Nothing special. A tabletop with several pieces of cloth draped and bunched. It was clear that the painter was especially proud of their ability to paint folds, and it was also clear that this was why the painting was here, stacked with the other hotel lobby-quality works. But it wasn’t the cloth or the precious folds that had caught Sebastian’s attention. It was an object off to the side. An afterthought. It was a small gold locket. Just that. A small gold locket with the initials WR engraved on it.
The next thing Sebastian knew, he was unscrewing a can of turpentine and dumping its contents over the pile of canvases. He pulled a lighter from his pocket, and as simple as holding hands, as simple as trust, as simple as a pair of eyes meeting another – as simple as that, he tossed the lighter on the pile of paintings, turned, and walked out of the gallery.
That night as he walked home through the city’s streets – alone because of course his “friends” had panicked – he could just, just barely feel something. It was as if the lights and shadows and rarely passing taxis were the cloth from the painting, folds and layers, and there was a true form underneath there somewhere. He was so close at that moment to feeling it. It was there. He knew it. There in the shadows of the conically capped water towers on the roofs of the buildings; there in the quiet storefronts; there even in the street grates. All night he walked, feeling his way like a dog on the scent. All night, just like every other night.
***
The buzz of his phone is what wakened him the next day.
“Sebastian man, you’ve gotta disappear!”
“What? What are you talking about?” A dreamless sleep still lingered over Sebastian.
“You’re lucky the whole place didn’t burn down! Just the inside torched. But man, what were you thinking?! You left your lighter there. You know. The one with your name on it!”
***
So, here we have Sebastian standing in front of the tunnel’s entrance. He has a backpack at his feet, and he is considering the shadowed, graffiti-covered mouth in front of him. He knows that during the colder seasons, the tunnel is a popular location for the city’s homeless, and it shows. Around the entrance are two waterlogged mattresses. There are tin cans, old blankets, and the charred evidence of fire pits. And yes, it smells vaguely of urine. Any chance that anyone’s in there? He doesn’t think so, not at this time of year, but who knows.
Sebastian’s plan, as much as he has one, is to walk down through the tunnel to the lower city. And then? Well, he’d see. He had always wanted to take a hitchhiking trip. See a bit of the world. Keep himself moving. Keep walking. Who knew. Maybe he’d meet that dragon.
Taking a deep breath, and smiling with that old memory, he shucked his backpack over his shoulder and entered the mouth of the tunnel. Oddly enough, as Sebastian began his descent, he heard someone practicing a trumpet from a window up and behind him. That and the morning cars rushing over the nearby bridge. These were the sounds that sent him on his journey, along with a vision of two friends who once imagined dragons.
