Rue Saint Dennis

You've settled on a well worn couch, the cushions press comfortably upon your back while Vavaldi's seasons fall crisply from the stereo. Your tea steams upward away from its china; thin line silver is drawn around the quiet septillion rim and up the spine of its handle. An old book of obscure poetry sits open in your lap. As you absently turn the page, one hand holds your place while the other moves for the cup, lifting from its chipped saucer and slowly moving it to your lips. You sip the strong honey sweetened tea.

The shopkeeper stands behind the counter quietly going through a stack of used hardcovers and paperbacks. You watch him open a book, flip through a few pages, read a line or two, and then lightly pencil in a price, on the upper left corner of the first page. On the shelf behind him hot water is being pushed through the filter and dark coffee trickling down into a glass pot.

People trudge, stroll and briskly walk past the shop window; some seem tired and tightly bundled against the cool and gusty, dark, quietly on there way home, while others are wakeful and newly dressed in darks and blacks for the night. You sense the tinge of the wavering levels of blankness, adrenalin or discontent, as they head for some destination; most with high expectations, some with little, save for habit and not wanting to be home alone on this cold night.

You hear a man, beyond the windows view, the singing in his mind sounds like an approaching whistle of a nearing train, Hells kitchen... in a raspy bluesy voice, I'm goin' down to Hells kitchen... His paranoid figure passes the plate-glass window, tilted forward and moving fast. His cool blue jeans are worn, loose and comfortable. His mind flashes to his knife buried deep within his coat pocket-

A girl in a tight black skirt, dyed short black hair, the straps of her garters, swinging quickly past the window. She pants, breathless, Tarde... Je sius tarde...

Gusts of wind blow, slowing an overweight blond woman in a white nurses uniform; she's thinking of cold... froid, and of the mint chocolate chip icecream waiting for her in the freezer. Her lower back aches and she dreams of taking a long hot shower. You see hidden in her mind a shadowy, angler figure of a stiff old woman, being zipped in to plastic and rolled away to the morgue.

The wind dies and you watch outside the cars quietly passing the front of the store. A well bundled American couple, holding hands, leisurely stroll into view. They slow to linger before the shop window; peering in--squinting through the outside reflection on the plate-glass. The husband is tired of walking and wants to return to the hotel, turn on the TV and stretch out on the bed, but his hand traveling to his wife's arm, to move her along, feels a stiffness and hesitance to leave. They enter and the bells up high ring as the door pushes them aside.

"Bon soir," says the dark haired shop keeper, glancing over his glasses and making the woman feel instantly at ease. She loosens her red scarf, letting it hang limply from her neck.

The man is full, he had eaten too much at dinner. He tiredly nods back the couples greeting, while hiking up his corduroy pants by their belt.

Your hand absently turns the page of the book in your lap as the husband and wife part. Their feet to creak on the wood floor, as the couple begins sifting through the store.

Vavaldi's Autumn falls from the small speakers that hang in opposite corners of the room. Your eyes are absently drawn to the source of the sound and than you see a tiny moving speck, then focus and perceive a spider climbing an arid and dusty web attached to the bottom of one. It's brain seems to click and clatter with an automated purpose, but you do not sense the existence of it's mind. You hear the blowers of the dry heat activate and in a delayed instant see the web and the spider swaying to the currents of the newly stirred air.

The woman stops at the travel section, brushes her fingers through her dark hair and then reaches for a large green field picture book of Ireland. She opens the cover flipping past castles and friendly pub scenes. The locals smile strangely at the camera, while holding large tilted mugs of dark rich ale. The captions beneath the rustic photographs are in French and though you see a rudimentary understanding of the language--couvrant... couvert... couvre... couvrons... stacks of conjugated verbs listed neatly in her mind as if on index cards, she seems unable to read or speak your native tongue, relying on her husbands English and his firm hand's grip on her arm to guide her safely through your city.

Shit... You hear the thump of a book dropping to the floor and the husband propping it back from where it came. Seeming, embarrassed and lost now, not quite sure where to go, he sidles back up to his wife, as if hiding behind her skirttails. His hand slides around her waist, he pushes his steel rim glasses closer to his face and then absently watches the glossy pages turn and the stills of Ireland go by. You catch a clouded image of a young college girlfriend with jade green eyes, as the poem, Ephemera falls into his mind. Yates... He Mindlessly watches a few more pages turn and his hand slides back away from his wife's waist and his eyes begin to search for the poetry section.

Leaning back into the couch, you sip your warm tea and with a cool rush of relief, kick your shoes away from your feet. A group of men are laughing as they pass the store, as two women, one with dark and one with light hair trail behind, in an outwardly more subdued fashion. As your eyes follow the group to the left, on the other side, a efficacious presence becomes apparent. The bells above the door ring as the door swings into the shop.

You see the face of a girl. She stands like a refugee in the doorway, her eyes hold yours and you feel the dulled pain in her feet. She has been walking the streets all day, upon being waken, in a grassy vacant lot, lying among the trash and beer bottles, by a homeless man. He had screamed, above the noise of a passing garbage truck, in rapid-fire and twisted French, in to her ears, as his fingers grip tightened around her thin arm. Her stomach feels hollow and hungry and her face had been burnt by the sun or wind. A large army green knapsack and sleeping bag, weighs down on her back. She slings it from her shoulders, it hangs from her left hand, pulling at her left shoulder joint, and sways softly against the worn planks of the wood floor. She eyes the large, soft chair seated at the corner of your table and you see forming in her mind a jumbled and contradictory image of home. She'd love to sit. In her three days in Montreal from the train station to the parks to business sections where the business men walked in their stylish suits, with their hairspray stiff hair cut too well, well kept park benches called to her and invited her to sit, to rest, but as she did, she felt seen and unseen currents wash around her as if she were a clot in a vein or an airborne virus caught and waiting to be broken apart.

The shopkeeper, pencil in hand, glances over his glasses. "Bon Soir."

Taken aback, she looks up to him, feeling his eyes, sinisterly undressing her, as if he is peering into the workings of her mind. "Hi," she answers with a quick nervous smile, as she both wonders and feels silly about the prospect of using French. A subsiding feeling, whispers, Paranoia... as she ducks away from his glance. Her focus returns to the large worn leather chair and she wants to climb into it and fall asleep. The shopkeepers eyes drop back to the book on the counter and she walks toward you. With an inner sigh she drops her knapsack safely at the base of the chair. She idles there for a step, next to the wrapped bundle of all her remaining belongings, but the rows of books comfortably catch her eyes, drawing her to them. The floor creaks as her feet step to the nearest shelf, simply as if she were moving in her socked feet on the rug of her childhood home. Her eyes sweep vacantly through the stacks of fiction.

You hardly notice now the vague images of people passing the window, absently catching a thought here or a bit of conversation there, but know your unconsciousness drinks in the raw brunt of it, offering haunting bits of it to your conscious self, by influencing your actions or manifesting in your dreams. For now, your attention dwindles again to the anthology of poems in your lap, but as you plug into the beginning and channel through the circuit of words, like a train's whistle, the spoken words, Hells Kitchen, continuously echoes through your mind to obscure the meaning of what you read.

As you finish, your eyes begin to blur. You close and open them and with a slight shift can almost see through the girls eyes. Her small hand moves to a thick, battered black book, it's title had long since faded from its spine. It seems very old. As her small fingers clasp slides it from the shelf, it stirs the musty smell of many years, while it breaks it's connection from the grid of books on the wall. She imagines it had been sitting in an old woman's small home, remaining ignored and untouched for decades. She pictures the same woman lying dead for days, until being discovered and some time after the funeral, someone's hands just going through the dusty house, to dismantle the lost logic of the woman's home, to crate away all of the years and acquired belongings, allowing some minor currents to eventually carry this book to this small book shop on the west side of Rue Saint Dennis. It seems like a book that will never be bought.

Flipping through its pages, words pass her eyes. She imagines reclining on a couch before a warm fire with her cat and bundled in her grandmas red and blue afghan, while her eyes channel through the quixotic book in her hands. She lingers on a page. The words staring back at her, seem meaningless, ordinary, but somehow runeous, like reading them would set a chain of events in motion, or to help conjure a magical feeling of purposeful well being. And then her tired mind betrays this comforting but probably false line of thought. She chides her gripping for the magical, feeling that it is no better then being Catholic, fearing purgatory, hoping god will take her away to a celestial place. Her shoulders slump as she pushes out a lingering breath. She wisps her long dark hair away from her eyes, imagining that it, the book, at least helps to imply at a reason for the author's life, something more then she may ever attempt to accomplish. She turns to the first blank page, the price is penciled in faintly at six dollars and written in thick antique-black script, in the center of the page is `To My Dearest Emily. Emily's not an elderly name and the lonely old woman now grows young in the girls mind. She imagines herself, in the woman's place, being born at the turn of the century and having this book presented to her by a young man or more pleasantly, a young woman suitor. She sees herself sitting in a spring dress, in the warm sun, on a hill, while a pair of smooth, gentle hands lay the book in her lap and delicately push her shoulders to the ground-

The man standing a few shelves over from her, lets out an abrupt rattle of dry coughs.

The girl blinks and feels a burning in her eyes. She thinks of the air getting colder and of the Autumn leaves falling, back home on the graveyard by the woods, by the water, of being warm and of her apartment sitting abandoned, with the imagined sound of her faucets drip into a forgotten bowl or pot.

Hells Kitchen...

Power gives way and the lights of the shop and the city flicker---the music ends and the compact disc player shuts off, making some dull electronic noises. You feel the hum of the cities machinery and appliances subside for a few beats, to be followed by short burst of dead peace. A lonely wind blows hard against the large factory made plate-glass window, to be followed by the crowded room noises of other peoples thoughts and voices. They begin to take form in your mind like a sugar rush or the edges of a bad dream. You feel like a part of a large dying organism, with all the minor pains and the soreness of its limbs. You try to focus on the husband's reading from a volume of Yates, ...and not they stood by the lake once more--turning--he saw that she had thrust dead leaves...

You feel the girls tired eyes slowly burning, as she closes them and blinking open again to the clutter of words on a page of the book. She feels her mind caught in a sleep deprived paranoia, but the comprehension doesn't seem to help her now. It would just take a few metered breaths, but it is as if she has forgotten how to control them. She tries to reason. ...I can just sit here and read this. No need to go... Her hands shake slightly, with an edge of fear or anticipation.

The shopkeeper closes another book and as Vivaldi's Winter ends, he moves to change the CD. His finger rides down a small stack of thin plastic cases, he chooses one. He opens the player. The shiny disk of Vavaldi, blinding you, flashes reflected blue light into to your eyes. You hear a fresh disk dropping into the carriage. He presses a button and the tray slides into the black machine and it begins a quiet churning, as if the disc is being chewed and swallowed.

The husband finishes the poem and it isn't as he had remembered. It had once moved him very deeply. He recalls finding it soon after a break-up and feeling comfort in the few tears he found leaving his eyes, He still may cry from time to time in the darkness of a movie, where no one might suspect, but only a few isolated times for some fictional lives. Thinking of the name Lisa, he sadly closes the book and blankly stares at the other titles lined up before him.

The fresh CD generates its spin, as the laser begins to read the deep and shallow pits on it's seemingly flat mirrored surface. Rachmaninov's lush piano fills into the dead space, coming from the speakers, dramatic and unremittingly Russian...

The tips of the girl's fingers absently brush over a span of books. She thinks of this lone lit shop nestled within the enormous grid of the city and wonders how long she can hide here. How late is it open? Her feet, like her pen, in the battered and long since lost and useless tourist guide, had traced and retraced the lines of nearly every street, past the drones of people, all seeming notoriously on their way Somewhere and with exception of a few free drinks, some old walls and a refined Chinese woman doing Tai Chi in a vacant lot, in the penned in few blocks, of what was called China Town, she had failed to find a heartbeat or a mind or even a place to stay.

She feels like an invading virus, being hunted and haunted by some anonymous thugs, the sirens, crowds, the monsters lurking in the shadows waiting for her to finally stop walking; where the red brick walls grow tall and curve in, high above her and the churning of the machine of the city grows steady in her ears, while she waits for the corrupt hands of an old man to reach out of the sky and pull her up like a weed from his garden-

Earlier in the day, she had been walking down Rue Rachel, headed toward a building that stood, far away, in the middle of the street. It seemed to be tipping, as if it were slowly collapsing to the right in some syrupy time-frame of its own. The guidebook told her that it was designed to be this way. The straps her knapsack were cutting into her shoulders and her legs felt dull and distant as if they were growing unreal beneath her. She stopped to rest, on a green wooden park bench. As she sat, two windows, set in brick, above a shop caught her eye. She took out her sketchbook and began to draw in the arched tops, the reflection on the glass, the shadow of a proletariat woman doing dishes inside. She began penciling in the brick around the window-frames, as the presence of a shadow settled like a hand on her shoulder. She turned to see a frail old man, his hollow cheeks looking like those of an old German soldier. He had stopped to watch. She smiled an uneasy, I'm not really an artist smile at with a kindly smile returned, but there was something of an intrusion about his imaginary hand on her shoulder. She tried to sketch some more, but her shoulder and upper back tensed. A fat woman than sat on the bench next to her. The girl felt the need to inch away from the woman and shy away from the cold shadow of the mans hand on her shoulder. She looked back to the arched windows of the building. The magic was lost and her pencil had since stopped as if suddenly dispossessed from purpose. The graphite stood in an unfinished corner of a page, rubbing a clumsy identical spot into the paper and she felt the two people watching and waiting for more. Feeling stunted, surrounded and unalowed to rest her tired legs, tension began to rise in her back, from the base of the spine, middle back and slowly spreading out to the muscles of her shoulders.

Standing her peripheral vision, like a tall man in a dark cloak she saw the mountain... The lone green body of Mount Royal pushing up away from the concrete and buildings, sitting firm and watching over the city--she hadn't actually gone to the mountain. It stood aloof, tall and mysterious, it seemed to beckon to her with promises, like this city once had, when she had boarded the train at Penn Station to cross the Canadian border. Mount Royal... She might find a road or path, but what will she find when she's nestled inside climbing through the fairy tale, dark trees and woods and the wolves racing to beat her to grandmas house. Her tired feet will wearily bring her somewhere near the top, she'll eventually find a clearing, and then will she encompass the entire face of the city? Will it speak to her and tell her where to go? She got up abruptly to separate herself from these two people who seemed to be intentionally cageing her to steal, sift through and categorize her thoughts.

As she moved closer to the mountain, it seemed to keep it's distance, like Kafka's K. trying to get to the Castle. The houses and buildings were becoming more picturesque. The children playing in the streets seemed to be extras on a movie set, giving her a main character in a foreign film feel. She saw herself walking in black and white, past the interlocking bricks of all the houses and the vacant or knowing looks of all the people and a crouched old woman tiredly sweeping her porch, seeming a week away from her death bed, stood in some foreshadowing way, somehow drawing at the viewers mind, pulling at the missing pieces, implying at the desperation and hopelessness of the bigger picture.

The Girl found herself drifting and growing tired as she finally came to a large green field, with people walking and playing Soccer or football. She began to trace the sidewalk around the expanse of the mowed lawn, where beyond, were the trees of a woods and above, rose the mountain. She continued walking toward it, but the suns warm hand settled on her shoulders and its pleasant weight was pushing her to rest, sleep beneath the shade of a tree.

She dreamt she was a man in some forgotten, mythical borough of New York city, like the isle of Avalon, it seemed settled between our world and the next. His apartment was an old studio, her cat was there, lapping from an illumed blue crystal glass next to her bed. Opposite from her reality, he had fled everything in the outside world to come home again.

When she later woke, the sky was colder and darker, the soccer game had since broken up and the mountain looked dangerous and uncertain like a dream, a place that would take her in, promising a view from the top, but with damaging distractions along the way. With a waning determination, tired legs and growing fear, she got up and took three more uncertain steps toward, but a suppositious dread, the lack of the proper plot advancement or even your mind's post-temporal urging, made her veer away, to turn around.

In the present, her eyes come into focus on the words of the book in her hand. She's tired... She doesn't have the six dollars to pay, but knows that she can't leave it here. Not now. It is in fact her book, her new guide. Some internal logic builds inside that she could actually come to understand. She thinks of the movements of the shopkeeper and the shifting throngs of the city, but is afraid to turn away from the shelves. But what could happen---what could really happen to her now? Her hand stealthily slides the book beneath her shirt and jacket, forcing her to leave it to physics or fate.

But your hand shivers in anticipation as it reaches for the tea cup. Your throat is dry. You drain the remnants of the now cool liquid and feel some relief, as the shopkeeper seems not to have noticed the girl and is quietly returning to his pile of books.

Weeks before Montreal, she had sat as the lotus, on a threadbare west Asian rug. Slits of early evening moonlight fell across the open space--seeping through her open blinds. The slow dripping of water fell into a dish or pot. She heard feet carefully walking up the stairs and then a slow knocking at the door. She unfolded her legs and got up, stretching her arms and body toward the ceiling, bringing a rush of blood to her head. As her arms slowly came down to her side, she waited for confirmation, as the first set of knocks had then settled into the uncertainty of her memory. The Faucet regulated a drip of water into a mug or pot. A slow knock sounded--murmuring again into the room. Her socked feet carried her, stepping across the rug, on to the cold wood floor. She stopped at the foot of the door. Her hand moved to the cool of the knob. She turned it and swung the door, bringing more light in to the room.

Misses Whitman's aged, Katherine Hepburn frame stood in the doorway. "Can I come in...?" Her eyes swept past the girl, into the room.

"Yes," she said, taking two steps back and allowing the old woman to pass.

The woman stood uneasily in the dark as the girl closed the door. Mrs. Whitman's frail hand, from a half a century of memory, automatically flipped a switch on the wall, but brought only the dim light of white Christmas lights, from behind a tapestry sized, dull, blackish-tan tie-dye, that hung from the ceiling. The room was only mildly less dark. This seemed to make the old woman nervous.

"Sorry," the girl said, as she moved to turn on her crystal Salvation Army lamp, that sat next to a worn green couch.

The room was lit.

The girl moved to the kitchen-space, takes a kettle from the stove and begins filling it with water. "Would you like some tea?"

"Thank you... That would be nice." Said the woman as she moved to the table, pulled out and slowly lowered her body onto the kitchen chair.

The girl sat at the other end of the table.

"I can't let you live here anymore."

"I realize that."

"You haven't paid in four months."

"I know."

"It's not that I haven't been patient."

"I can be out next week, if that's OK."

"I would normally let you stay, but I have someone for the space.

The girl and Mrs. Whitman drank their tea and the woman's feeble mind fell to the history of the mansion that had been since cut into apartments, voicing how Marlin Monroe and Arthur Miller had lived in a house on the property for some time and later how Marlin and Jack Kennedy would meet here and how Marlin was a nice girl and how terrible it was what had happened to her. Mrs. Whitman had, by now forgot that she had thrown the girl out and was just thankful for the company and the warm tea.

After, the girl took a walk through the tall grass and past the smell of the rotting apples that littered the old rusting playground, past the woods on either side of her and smells of the grapevines, to the water of Mount Sinai harbor. It was like a still sheet of glass and she saw the ripples and a vague white form of a swan angling across. A distant wind blew, carrying the autumn smells of the first fire place fires, and thoughts of an island hidden somewhere in the mists. A modern house stood to her right as a reminder that this one hundred and forty acres were destine to be cut apart and made into waterfront condos. The mansion would be knocked down soon enough and the quiet and strange and artsy people would scurry like bugs beneath a rock, not too long after she herself had gone.

"House," she yelled at the house deriantly, but then her shoulders sagged. The girl knew that she couldn't just find some other apartment, even if she could find somewhere as calm and hidden from the streets and strip malls of Long Island. She convinced herself that unseen forces dictated that it was time for her to leave, time to find the vague figure inside that she felt was her true unmembered image and thus conceived to shed all of her belongings and to travel.