Oblique Rain excerpts 2

The rain cut sharp, straight angles across the glass encasement of the bus stop shelter. Simon was preparing his intellect for work, listening to the thin patter on the roof and watching the traffic signals smear through the mess of droplets washing down the panes. His translucent reflection eyed itself. The face, he thought, was a fluid thing, different at different hours of the day. At night he looked aged when he studied himself in the mirror. He saw that his hair became disheveled, his eyes bulged and his cheeks deflated, and sometimes he found the creature there so odd he could not recognize him. But early, in the hours after waking up and washing and having coffee and something to eat, and dressing himself, and then sitting for a time in the shell of the bus stop, waiting for the bus to arrive, he looked absolutely young and poised.

From Monday to Friday, invariably, he found himself at this hour seated on the same chlorophyll colored bench under the iron branches interwoven with glass, either baking in the heat of the sun beneath which the bus stop acted only as a greenhouse, or in the cooler, softened light of a swimming, rainy day. Often he thought that he preferred the mornings when it was raining. They seemed muted, hesitating, caught up in a drawn out gesture that reprieved him silently from the agony of a sun-filled day he would undoubtedly be prevented from knowing, had it occurred. The hours in the Great Hall of Records were long and pitch black. Only two small lamps glowed above his head at his desk. The room was kept dark to better regulate light saturation, and with each workstation, circumscribed as it was in its own unique sphere of pale yellow, and set apart from the others at different intervals about the chamber-like expanse, the scene at times resembled to him a school of jellyfish bobbing in the depths of the sea. As he watched them, they became more like stray moons, micro-planets encasing a silent, hunched individual, broken free from their orbits and come to a still there, in the fathoms.

A full bus: ladies and gentlemen in fine clothes and in worn clothes. The perfumes of the people infected him, drifting on the still air. He was rocked and lulled like a child by the steady vibration. A scent from the woman beside him, a strange smell of violets and formaldehyde, and the green light running along the ceiling disoriented him pleasantly. His eyes were heavy, but he was determined to keep watching the rain-streaked windows as he moved along the curious lengths of the street, now becoming fuller with crowds of shining umbrellas and the sheen of rain coats bubbling in a mass at a crosswalk. These, he thought, were the only minutes allotted to him, and he must take everything in. Even the leaves were just then falling from the rows of trees, and in a matter of a month the same deadened sky would pour its cold November snows over the sidewalks and the window sills. The same sleek backs would huddle a little further into themselves and follow the same paths each morning, their footsteps slightly muffled.

In the afternoon perhaps this rain would burn off, and the air would be cleansed, and on his lunch hour he could walk through the gardens letting the new sun touch his arms. Then the autumn flowers would release their perfume, and the trees would stand upright and sway in the breeze and the sparrows and blackbirds would alight on the branches, waiting for crumbs. All of this he dreamt of in the morning, bobbing up and down on the bus, stealing quick looks at the faces of the people around him.

Though his days were sacrificed on the altar of earning his living, the evening was his. During the interminable hours bent over his desk at the Great Hall of Records, what sustained him most was the anticipation of evening, and the light above Lake Embresse, and the whorl of faces that would pass him on the street. In summer it is a drawn out spectacle, the sky absolutely huge, in swaths of orange and red, moment by moment darkening, the peak of Mount Embresse by the minute merging into the dense purple of the night, its rippling, wavering double mirrored in the lake. Simon had also seen, on many occasions, night passing over the city from a vantage point on the heights of the mountain. Then Embresse slowly became draped in a veil of shadow, and street by street a spray of lights unfolded in the shape of a Japanese fan, as if a lazy hand was spreading it out in the lap of the valley, and then he would admire the twinkling pentangles of fire points, strewn out before him like gems on a cushion of night. The lake appeared to be a softly undulating fabric, dark mercury.

In the evening he could lose an hour wandering by the lake and the canal, watching the light changing over the rooftops. And where the water was channeled into the stone arms of the first lock, it roared a deep and diffuse sound, and he would pause there and absorb himself intently, totally, listening only to this sound and watching the water flow and the people about. At times, over his desk working, he would sit dead still, his head would stoop a bit, and he would lift one ear, convinced that from somewhere in the dark hollows of the Great Hall that same sound was emanating, approaching him from an obtuse angle, washing through the dark chambers and hallways at a terrible rate, rushing toward his little desk with a deafening roar and leaving complete decimation in its wake. But soon he returned to his senses, and the sound dispersed in dissipating waves back to the edge of his memory.