I think I watched someone die tonight. Over at Tommy�s. Her name�s Sara, I just met her this evening. She has pretty eyes that she paints around carefully with soft blue powder and never seems to be smiling. Sara is extremely tall and very thin, and she wears platform shoes that give her another half a foot. She�s always taller than the rest of the room, especially her redheaded British boyfriend, Bobby. Sara is, or was, seventeen.
I came over and she was already passed out. A large empty bottle of Smirnoff�s was standing proudly on the coffee table, mocking her apparent lack of tolerance for alcohol. Her long dark blonde hair was sprawled over the arm of the couch. Like an incapacitated angel she seemed. Paler than any angels I�ve known of, but just as silent.
I remember Tommy and Bobby moving her into Troy�s vacant bedroom. I saw her face when they put her down on the matress that lay on the floor. Her mouth was purple, and the rest of her face was turning a sickening yellowish blue. I�m pretty sure she was still breathing at that point. I just sat on the couch and waited. None of the events taking place were registering in my mind, just flitting through like a passing bird and gone before I could examine them. I felt like an adamant constant force, not reacting to anything portrayed before me. I sat with a bottle of I don�t remember what in one hand and a cigarette in the other. I felt like the angel of death, come to witness her falling and take her back in quiet, unnoticed.
I feel like that a lot. Most times people don�t notice I�m in the room before I speak.
I just took this whole scene in, breathing it in with the smoke I was inhaling. It left bitter air in my mouth, stale molecules of a usually refreshing substance. Sara was motionless the whole time I saw her tonight, she could have been dead before I arrived, I have no way of knowing.
It�s like that time I was in the courtroom. I don't recall exactly why I was there.There was a man, a very lonely looking man in his twenties with most of his life ahead of him. He was sitting in the little area beside the bench, cuffed and shackled to his chair. He had his hands clenched together, fingers laced in the manner of prayer. He had been imprisoned for god only knows how long and was in the courtroom that day to see if he was to have his freedom or be condemned to another few years.
Every second that went by in that courtroom, with the stale, ulcerous old men rustling around in their very important people seats looking at their watches, looking out for their lunch break or the next time they could walk the streets with their cellular phones, was agony for that man in the corner. There they all were, the people who had never made mistakes, the people whose parents had their futures laid out for them even before they were born, not even giving a shit whether he lived or died, or went to prison. Each moment that passed that man made bearable by the fact that he might never set foot inside that prison again. That maybe, just maybe he could be unchained and walk out of that courtroom without a police escort.
I remember by the time they addressed him, or rather got to the number he was represented by, he had his elbows pressed down so hard on that railing in front of him that I thought it might break. His hands were still praying, the metal bracelets he wore dug into his wrists. The gavel came down, and right there I saw that man lose his freedom. I don�t even know what his crime was, or whether he had committed it, but I saw the hope fall from his face like a porcelain mask and shatter on the floor in front of him. He rested his tired head on the railing; his arms slumped over in front of him. They took him out of that courtroom even more destroyed than he had come in. The judge and all his attorney henchmen remained unmoved, completely devoid of empathy for the man they had just broken.
