Stupid bitch.
—
I went into a crouch, leapt up through the ceiling, rose higher and higher through the night air, everything below growing smaller, smaller, more schematic:
Turrets, cupolas, finials, walls of glass, yards, greenhouses, separate shingled studios, sheds, pools, cabanas.
I swooped low, rolled over onto my back.
Because I could.
And because it calmed me.
To be called “stupid”? “Stupid bitch”?
By this undersized, foul-mouthed lout?
Who brought harm to birds?
And associated with hideous, low companions?
No.
No, thank you.
It was sometimes good, when rattled, to think in the highest possible register.
And, by this, preserve one’selevation.
So:
The low-hanging midsummer clouds had fled and thecanopy of trees overhead resembled a vast mouth in mid-laugh, framing a panorama of twinkling stars that, given the staggering wealth below, seemed to shine upon the neighborhood by compunction, as if hired for the evening to do so.
(Yes.
Better already.)
The streets of his neighborhood below seemed, in their affluence, to be asserting their right to be lazily curved; they lay like tremendous snakes, traceable in the darkness by the irregular contour of ornate carriage lamps, one per spacious lawn.
Beyond the neighborhood lay a forest.
Beyond the forest lay a six-lane avenue.
Along that avenue I went, ten feet or so above it, right down its middle.
The world along it was like the world I had known and yet not like it at all. Some tendency suppressed and kept within decent bounds in my time had been unleashed and any shame about it so intensely rationalized that it no longer occurred to anyone that the swollen ugliness everywhere was a direct result of the heedless indulgence of some pervasive acquisitive hunger.
If I might say it that way.
Greed, greed, one could taste it in the air.
The gas stations were not the simple cubes of my time but garishly lit fortresses of glass, the enormous signs looming over them seeming to quarrel with one another by way of hideous scrolling slogans (“Special Heinek 6-PAC $12 Fri–Mon LottoMondo YES!!!”), the commerce proceeding therein possessing a fierce yet desultory quality, as if all pleasure had been wrung from the exchange, the money below changing hands with afeeling of mutual resentment, as if obtaining it had been too hard on the one side and the need for it too great on the other for any joy to pertain around the transaction.
In a vacant lot, among long reedy grasses, lay an abandoned couch.
I dropped down onto it.
Well.
