The Doves that Strut

22

What are you even hoping to get out of this?

Upon an impuissant closed-eye sigh, I stop myself staring into the cloudy sky and cast my eyes to my front on Anderson Street—the peripheral commercial area, three blocks away from Pepper Street, past the Adidas shop on Third Avenue—again, but not pacing up. Absurdly, I spent ten minutes stargazing under the starless sky lit up by the skyscrapers' lights, yearning to spot a natural spark, because that way, Claire could spot it too and there would be a chance of us lifting our heads and glimpsing through the invisible atmospheric layers that keep us breathing but also separate us from the nebulae, at that magnificent spark light-years away. Then, we would recollect our distant lovely memories at the same time, our notions aligned, despite our shared inability to keep each other company. But my rationality savvies she couldn't do that anyway, were the Akinhill's sky, always spray-painted with Hercules and Cassiopeia and Leo and more, to be here above Fragranceport, because, just like any other guardians of this city, she must be too overwhelmed worrying about the cops to count some fictional stars with me.

I move without purpose. Beside me are the malls and two-storey shops cramming the street. Their walls are either built of marble, glass or concrete, all glossy and without a crack, rendering the red bricks on Pepper Street in emblems of industrialization which has phased out for decades. The New Era, we're in, yet things seem to have only dropped downhill.

I see more passersby here than in any places I've been to tonight—phantoms wearing faces that have never come across my sight before—and they walk next to me, outstripping me, outstripped by me on the sidewalk. I can no longer see the yellow beams of streetlights falling on my skin. I'm like a chameleon, my skin shifting from blue to green, red, purple, then white as I absentmindedly stagger forward, the head of my shadow grinding against the paver stone sidewalk on my right.

Past the empty payphone booth before the curb, the sign of a 7-Eleven convenience store captures my heed. I begin to feel the drought in my mouth and every rough swallow of saliva has become a futile attempt to moisturize my wizened throat. I haven't drunk anything for God knows how long.

To quench my thirst, I walk into the store, whose transparent door has already been pulled open and maintained by a wedge. Compared to the one next to my apartment's building, this 7-Eleven looks much larger from the outside, but just the same from the inside with racks of my height placed two feet from each other. With other customers hunching toward the snacks in the narrow aisles, I move sideways past the racks and the ice cream fridge tank colonized by Mövenpick, to the beverage fridges at the back. I glance over the ironic bottled oolong tea and pull a can of Coke down from above, and take a U-turn over the magazine shelf to the queue before the cashier.

In front of me are an old man, a lady cradling her crying baby next to a man who I assume is her husband, and two boys about half my age. With the cashier being sloth-like slow, the queue takes almost forty seconds each time to sneak a step forward, while I start imitating Claire's habit and incessantly tapping my foot on the floor, hoping to quietly tap my impatience away, not for the craving to drink, but for the craving to hear from the habit's owner again. Every second of not knowing whether she will be fine is a dose of excessive misery that saturates my blood with the feeling of abandonment—I first thought it's anger toward the cops, the government, and every one of their accomplices, but then I calmed myself down and actually felt it. It has been the feeling of being abandoned by happiness and fate all along, I realize—but is not enough to put me into a peaceful coma.

Claire, do you remember Tantalus's story I told you that time when we're discussing the cruelest torture ever written down in human history—we talked about everything. You were filling your galaxy with more constellations, bringing their stars alive by subtly switching between the yellow and the white painters. Tantalus was the king of Sipylus—to quote you, a typical mythological wanker—who boiled his son, Pelops, and served him up in a banquet for the gods.