＃１０３

There is a small red light in the crook of the zigzag suspension bridge across the river, two zigs and one zag to the main white angular construct that the cables run from, that is to say just two bends, and the final zig truncates only about three fifths of the way across the river and a good twenty metres high so that in the grey panes of rain that separate the skyscrapers from each other and slowly fade them out into the hills that bracket the city, the actual concrete pedestrian walkway of the bridge is almost completely invisible and you are left with only the almost-new pearl of the construct visible and that red light sitting neither at the top of the final zig nor at the trough in the middle of the river but at the lower top, i.e. the false peak of, the zigzag, that peak being only perhaps a quarter of the way across.

The red light is brighter than the rear lights of the cars heading away from you on one side of the highway across the river, so you suppose it is a light to warn boats, but in that case why not sit it at the trough of the arched construct or perhaps place two red lights along the concrete walkway itself so that boatsmen know whether their craft is going to clip it? More puzzling still, the red light goes out for some period of time, a few minutes or perhaps an hour, how long have you been sitting here, and at last turns back on. This is not the behaviour of a regular on-at-all-times light to warn boatsmen, nor of one that turns on at 6 p.m. and stays on for the dark, but then what criteria for it being on or off? You get to wondering that perhaps it is a fog light, for it turned off while there was some clearing of the fog and the grey panes of rain and you could see again to the far end of this particular straight of the river that you are nestled at the near end of, see the lights there as the highway continues to wrap around the bend and the hills behind that were much taller and cosier in your mind when they had fog to hide them and make them lush, and now they are just city-proximal hills that do not bracket and nurture so much as they interrupt and get built over.

The red light has that trait of paintings where the eyes follow you. You suspect this is because the rest of things and people are so busy now, making their way across and towards and home from, and it feels like the only one looking at this red light is you, especially keeping in mind that you do not think it so useful to boatsmen, and looking at this red light you feel it looking back. It projects constancy, which is interesting because it turned off not so long ago, didn’t it, and it knows a great deal about you because much of your life has been visible through the windows that the light would well see into. You daresay that even when you are asleep in the next room, curtains shut and the red light’s photons powering into them, even then the red light knows something of you. Perhaps it has a sense of whether you are sleeping restfully or not . . . observes the faintest illumination of your room when you get up to urinate and let the moon and city light in from around the corner of the hall. You don’t feel that the red light judges you as a matter of course, a habit, but certainly it observes you even as meeting its gaze grants you this kind of self-awareness you are having now and in this sense it participates amorally in your judging of yourself. It sees you lose your temper; make decisions good and bad; it must have seen you let your tomatoes die, not that you had the courage to consciously admit this to yourself, but the way you watered them halfheartedly and then not at all as the winter cold snapped over and though they may have died regardless, truthfully it was at your hands that they died early, so that your hands, palm down on your thighs and cold and completely still till now, kind of curl up at the fingertips less than a centimetre off your legs in what is surely the weakest apology ever offered, red light I didn’t mean to let them die, and it says nothing.

Now there are either no grey panes of rain or they have been decoupaged and pressed together because the red light eye pokes out through a single block of cloud that has taken the bridge’s pearl crooks from you completely. There is no depth perception at all; the world could be two dimensional but for a single apartment complex also at your end of this straight of the river, and even that is being captured by this rigid grey that does not fade things or stagger their opacity at intervals but instead seizes them all at once. Several balconies have been taken hostage. You try idly to find them, or people on them or in their conjoined apartments, but find nothing. You are too detached to feel a peeping tom, prying at their abodes this way, this being more of an already-dead last-moments observation kind of thing of this world never built for you and the quiet calm crept in that says it’s gonna be okay to go. There is a lot of love for the world here. In this mental place you are now. A satisfaction that out there are those that feel joy, who have prospects unvanquished by the rain, and that this red light presidium watches over them too and they will be okay just fine.

Well all this staring for a dozen seconds or an hour into unresponsive grey has unfocused your eyes so thoroughly that even cognisance of this fact does not convince you that any refocusing is possible; your mind is asleep, ethereal, and with your hands palm down on your thighs and your body still and worn, not even goosebumped in the chilling night that comes—this is how still you are—memories start to come in. Faces of children you knew and that were kind to you and whom you waited for to turn around at recess so you could sneak blades of grass into their back pockets. The clammy bubblewrap skin of a dying aunt you saw just before her pass. Little cubic dreams you reached at and pipped away as though suspended from the ceiling of a museum exhibition, some solar system of potential you considered and were wondered by till as children do you got bored and wandered off, unaware then of your never coming back. The faces tell you that they’re proud of you, which is what you want to hear, until others come in pointedly silent which is what you think you deserve to hear, and somewhere in their expressions that last decades is that red-light-impassivity making its way through. Sentences played at volume one and twined in on themselves and tremoring. A flood of names, witnesses, travellers of now divergent trail bursting into abstractions of what they meant to you and pasted over film. Grained, scratched life. Everything at fast. A steady stream of fire ants, no, not fire ants but great black ants with little bright red fires in their belly marching away from you in overlaid daydream that fades out now to reveal the westbound traffic back in sight and real. Beside them, a golden serpent undulates toward you, scales compressing and releasing through a slow and wavered beat until that overlay too peels back to headlights of the other lane. The fog is clearing; for good this time. You aren’t ready to let go, of that space, of that readiness, and you try again to see the highway as something more, project nature onto it and crosseye yourself, but all you get are angry red measles pinpricks parallel with still-headlights refusing to transform and defeated you give up.

The red light is gone again—the bridge one, not the brakes. Perhaps a humidity sensor. No, it would still be on. You haven’t the foggiest, foggiest, and a smile cracks over you and releases something. Your pizza must be almost here so with body light and vacant you get up and head inside.