Novel

It’s 4 PM, the heavens are pissing on me, and I need the cigarette. I stand under the awning of a cozy French caffe which gently casts a warm light on me as I flick my blue Bic pathetically and snort in frustration when a fat drop of water plummets from the edge of the awning and douses the nozzle of my Lucky Strike. I discard the thin white parcel and post another one in between my lips, huddling into the thick glass window of the bakery like an emperor penguin in order to avoid any chance of water damage this time. I hunch over, and as I raise my useless, wetted lighter, I look up through the window of the caffe and make eye contact with an awkward looking middle-aged man- the sole customer, who had been watching me passively with watery eyes as he sipped from his expensive coffee. I wave my lighter at my cigarette suggestively and nod towards him, trying to communicate my desperate need. He stares at me, a broad shouldered, rain-soaked teen standing outside his favorite caffe on Madison Avenue and glaring at him from behind grasping tentacles of sodden hair. He continues to look at me and tentatively reaches for his almond croissant. He doesn’t want any trouble. He just wants to take a quick respite in his favorite little caffe during the thunderstorm and then go about his business facilitating the sale of souls to large wall street corporations. And for the center section of his hair to grow back. I shake my lighter angrily at him and go back to trying to kindle my cigarette. He takes a bite from the croissant.
“Hey. Need a light?”
I jump and nearly drop my cigarette as a loud, tenor voice materializes from the grey smog of the thunderstorm behind me, and turn around quickly to find Solomon, from school, standing underneath the awning and holding out a plain silver zippo. I lean in as he flicks the top of the chrome square off with a meticulously practiced jolt of his thumb and wrist, igniting a long flame there in the metal. I inhale as much cancer into my lungs as I can, closing my eyes in ecstasy, and exhale a thank you swimming in a cloud of smoke towards him.

“Don’t mention it. You’re Daniel, right?”

I look at Solomon, and suddenly remember how bizarre of a person he is. I learned from a young age that the world repeats itself over and over again like clockwork- in the way it orbits, in the way it’s climate rises and falls(until now, obviously), in its seasons, it’s bone-crunching earthquakes and heaven-tearing hurricanes, but most of all, earth repeats itself in its people. We are all destined to meet the same people over and over again, like a bad card crawling its way across the table to you every time you are dealt a new hand. This is the real reason why people start to get bored so early on in life (especially the perceptive ones)- after a while we start to realize that we’ve already experienced almost everything the world has to offer. Then we begin to extend ourselves as we can into the weird and the murky, desperately searching for something new to feel. When I was a young child, my one and only friend was the daughter of my mother’s best friend. She and I were close, but ill-suited to each other- she was meek and cheerful, and I spent most of my time showing off how gloomy I was and throwing tantrums. However, one of the most fascinating things to me about Abby was her mother, Amalia. Amalia was small, thin, pale, and gaunt, with dark black hair and eyes which glimmered out from purplish sockets as she watched you, like a vengeful witch. One thing I will say for my younger self was that I was as perceptive as a sly little hawk, and this allowed me to realize from the first time I met her that there was something very skewed about Amalia. Her house was dark, chaotic, and pungent with a bitter, earthy smell which I always found impossible to place. The floor was heaped with various articles of clothing, like heaps of bodies which she had discarded when she got bored of playing with their corpses. Underneath her bed their resided a completely unorganized collection of random objects which watched me and Abby as we “played” in the bedroom. Every closet I opened exposed some new kind of psychedelic horde stacked precariously amongst skewed drawers like it had been stored there by the Mad Hatter. I was dismayed to find that she had an entire room stashed in the back of her house filled with different pairs of shoes which hung from every square inch of the ceiling and walls like sleeping bats. Amalia enjoyed reeling people in on thin, deceptively strong fishing lines of emotions, cutting them open with admirable precision, and playing with the feelings inside in the same way that a scientist plays around with an experimented upon rat’s intestines- with cold interest and vague repulsion. She was chaos, evil and completely befuddled with its own existence, capable of producing only a small amount of love , and I knew it- I even told her I thought she was spewed from hell once. Soon, I began to notice that people like her exist everywhere. Deeply unhappy humans who shift forms- dark, viscous fluids which drift about the world and amuse themselves by executing small chaoses and hiding themselves in other people’s skin. At first, this realization drove me to a large loss of my faith in humanity- after all, how can humans be considered good if so many of us are so fundamentally evil? But then, later on, lying in my bed in the darkness and staring out of my window at orange lights, I realized that evil doesn’t exist, and that some people are just deeply unhappy, bored, and tired, in a way which allows them to separate themselves from hindering moralities which purpose a clear path of righteousness and one of evil.

But Solomon is, I have to admit something completely new to me. He dresses in dark, muted clothing which somehow melds to the rich brown of his skin and accentuates the incredible lankiness of his limbs. On his head there is perched a large, black fedora which is at a slight angle around his seemingly oversized head like Saturn’s rings. Underneath the brim of the fedora are two impenetrable black holes- circular sunglasses which give him an expression of constant observation and patience. His upper lips is oddly thin compared to the thick, curved cushion of his bottom lip. He sports no facial hair and balances a large black umbrella with a spindly frame which seems to mirror his own on his razor-thin shoulder. The black canvas hovers behind him in the onslaught of lashing rain like a species of gliding spider, poised to pounce on his bony back and sink its fangs into his neck. Solomon carries something with him- it is the feeling of an open patience with something electric and explosive underneath the surface, constantly, frantically ricocheting about in his body like a bullet as he watches me. The feeling both calms me down and sets me on edge.

“Yeah. You’re Solomon?”

“Sol. Hey, what are you doing now? Come to the park with me. I have a couple of joints.”

“Uh… I was kind of walking somewhere, thanks though.” For a minute I am about to re-enter the maelstrom of icy water which howls in the street and continue walking down the wide, cement channel aimlessly until I am so thoroughly saturated with water that I can’t move, and I lie down on the soaking pavement like a besodden fish corpse, but something in my mind stops me, and I turn back around.

“Actually, you know what? That sounds great, thanks. Uptown or down?”

Sol grinned, exposing an uneven set of bright white teeth blaring out from his monotone clothing, gesturing with one long, bony finger uptown. “I thought so. I always know when somebody needs to get high.” And we step out into the storm. The sky, bulging down towards us, is swollen and dark blue like the bloated and beaten belly of an old alcoholic whose deep, roaring snores are the low, bone-jittering thunder which echoes amongst the towering, rain-slicked tombstones lining Madison Avenue. Every now and then, a bright, searing flash of lighting explodes its way across the bellies and lights our two singular bodies battling the wind and rain amongst the endless sea of gray mist- turning our small forms black and purple. At first we walk in silence, Sol with one lengthy arm extended in front of him, brandishing his flapping umbrella like Napoleon gesturing with his sword as he leads a charge, gripping the rim of his hat, me holding onto the thick lapels of my overcoat, bowing my head and squinting into the rain as I push my way forward with the bottom of my coat flapping around my knees like a cape. But then a searing gash of lighting explodes in the sky, opening the heavens and turning Madison Avenue into a hellish night beneath. Just for a second I look over at Sol, and see him looking back at me maniacally, with only a slightly crooked series of pearly whites and a double image of the lighting reflected like spiderwebs in his sunglasses visible . Something inside me suddenly releases, and for a minute, I stop, stunned, with cold rain running down my face and into my open mouth, and then, with a sudden backlash of confused, wondrous excitement exploding from my solar plexus, I deliver Sol’s insane smile right back to him. He cackles into the wind like some kind of a mad witch, and, folding up his umbrella, begins to sprint down the Avenue, his long legs extending first forwards and then back in a way that seems oddly disconnected from his body as he bounds over to a cab stopped on 74th Street and calmly steps onto the hood of the car and then off onto the street on the other side without slowing his pace. I barrel down the street after him, shouting and swearing into the wind with a constant contracting and expanding feeling of delight in my pounding heart as I careen over the hood as the car tries to pull forward, fall onto my forearms and knees, pick myself up and continue to run. We chase each other madly down the street, howling and shrieking at the sky in some kind of tribal mockery of the world, kicking over trashcans so that fluttering pieces of sodden paper flutter into the wind like dirty butterflies and blend in with the background. Sol grabs a tall metal sign when he gets to 78th Street and swings around, taking off his hat and tipping it to me as he charges up towards the park, and I follow. We make it to the low grey wall which divides what now seems like the mystical, pagan world of Central Park from the dreary, grimy, Stalinist-Russia looking streets of Manhattan. Sol grabs the wall with his arm and slingshots the lower half of his body over the wall with the momentum he gathered charging across the road towards it. He disappears for a second, and I clumsily jump up onto the wall and jump forward without so much as a single glance at the floor. I fall into the grass joltingly, but I am already up, and Sol is standing there, looking back at me over his shoulder and laughing with glee . He gestures with one hand for me to follow him, but I am already running. We hop over two low, wire fences and charge up a hill, then cross one large road and enter a much more overgrown area of the park, where long, bare branches reach out over the path like slippery, bony fingers grabbing at us as we run. We make our way down one hill

The old, wooden door opens with a sickening creak, and I hear the girl’s quiet whimpers emanating from the darkness. I step into the dank, humid room and the LED light from my phone sweeps across the wall which is sagging and perforated with bright white scabs of mold so that it looks like the back of an unfortunate, disease-ridden invalid. The blaring circle of light settles on the pale, naked body, curled up, with her dirty, mousy brown hair cast over her face so that one eye glints, yellowish, out from between the locks. Her fragile body, curled up in the corner of the room looks like some kind of