PHI: Chapter I

Chapter I

"Thou must take another road," he answered, when he saw me weeping, "if thou desirest to escape from this wild place." - Dante (Inferno)

It all started when the sunsets became relatively longer. That time of year when the biting Winter returns to flirt with Spring. The city I live in is halved by a broad river, currently under a layer of ice that has slowly thinned with each progressive dissection of our passing sun. Crossing one of the three bridges spanning it at even intervals, I help it melt by tossing stones off the side, puncturing holes in the weakening white crust as I go along. Perforating the ice locked river below. North bound flocks assure us that days of a more pleasing temperance are on their way. With warmer temperatures and an ample amount of time to waste, I am able to stop each day at the nearest bench and watch our fiery deity's rise and fall over our urban angles. Downtown, buildings stand as colossal mirrors where smooth columns of golden light explode against metal and glass, sending shards of divine shrapnel hundreds of feet in every direction.
The choices I’ve made in life have led me to sleeping on the fourth floor of a parking garage three blocks from the State Capitol Building and its palladium of benches and palm trees. I guess anyone in my particular situation could claim the same, but I am a survivor in this structure of mildew and concrete, a fading blip on society's radar. Old enough to have faded back into anonymity after my first burst of radiant color that was being a child.
Waking up from a demi sleep, I instantly feel the cold wind peeling away flakes of skin from my cheeks, already husking from the cold night before. The sun warms me but continues to burn the raw pink tissue away. Day and night both fight my body without respite. Greeting the day in a parking spot four stories above the city's early morning traffic, I stand up and stretch towards the ceiling and listen to each stack of vertebra slowly crack and pop. Peering out over the city from my unlikely perch, I take it all in. The morning sun clothes the entire scene with wisps of a clean light that chase the shadows back into the allies and dumpsters. River bending softly, my eyes trace it's flow away from me to the south. On the other side of Assembly St., a wall of grey buildings stretch up towards the sky, blocking the muscled horizon to the North. My lips are chapped and stuck together. Wetting them with my tongue, I reach into the pocket of my jacket and retrieve a bent cigarette and a book of matches.
The nicotine pulls me from the pre-conscious haze like a jump start. As I light the morning's first savored breathe, the smoke plummets into my lungs, sending bubbles of calm streaming into the base of my skull. I twirl the cigarette in my fingertips between hits and notice the filter has a glossy red stripe. I lick my bottom lip and taste the reason why. Suffice it to say, when the blood dried last time, it looked like a lip ring.
I periodically wick out the warm, oozing liquid with my tongue. The strong iron taste reminding me that I'm not malnourished. I keep the wound until my immune system throws a net over the whole mess. Exhaling slowly, I lean against the cold concrete and take note of the things around me. Knuckles white, the sign of thin cold skin stretched over cold thin bone matching a numbness my eyes don't see.
Slowly walking over to another vantage point, I adjust my trusty back pack for another day of adventure, if you would care to call it such. A gaunt face peering four stories down onto the street below, I listen to the rhythm of water falling from various objects. Imagining a lone drop sliding off the utmost leaf on a very tall tree, I see a lone bead crashing against the leaves below it. This process repeated ever increasingly down the tree brings thousands of droplets into the growing pool of water below. Water returns to itself with absolute acceptance.
Looking back over my shoulder, the black shadow my body keeps from the sun stretches across fifty feet of concrete, ending at the flat tire of an old brown junker. Paint peeling back around the wheel wells, it reveals the rusting metal underneath. I spin a tarnished silver ring on my middle finger with my thumb. As the stale tobacco crackles towards my lips, I squint, getting a better view of the sun. It gradually turns blue, burning the backs of my eyes.
Last night’s torrent left a few inches of water everywhere. It started pouring as the sun set, creating an apocalyptic, yet incredible trick of light aptly named "fire-rain." As each drop fell from the mile-high cumulonimbus overhead, they looked to be set ablaze by the sunset. Combined with the humidity already held in the air, an apocalyptic radiance set the world on fire. Down below, dark puddles have collected around curbs and tree stumps. The gray bottoms of clouds that still loom overhead are reflected off of their glass-like surface, pictures with oily rainbows. They hang in the air ominously on a rain hiatus. With the right perspective and enough water, everything standing in the street's built-in mirrors become symmetrical, the inverted domain keeps my half from falling into space. Streetlights, parking meters, trees, buildings, the church's spire a block away all reach toward the earth's core. That Hadean realm.
I check my watch, a silver Kenneth Cole I received for my birthday two years ago. The glass is etched with scratches, obscuring the green stains of oxidized metal underneath. My jeans are still soaked up to the back of my knees from trudging through last night’s storm. The wet denim turns dark blue and shrink-wraps to the back of my legs. With the wind quickly cooling any heat produced, my calves would shiver if they weren’t already numb. I turn and head downstairs. Cay park is where I’ve spent my time and it‘s about this time everyday that I return to her. Everything is quiet in the city except for a few cars in the distance, their tires slicing through the street's thin sheet of water.
Instead of taking the garage's elevator, I spiral down to the bottom of the concrete helix on foot. The color coordinated floors tell me where I'm at. A blue stripe around the top of each column designating the fourth floor. Red the third, yellow the second, and green the first. Vehicles that were left here overnight intermittently dot my left and right. All is quiet save the slapping of heel to sandal that echoes through the complex. I emerge slowly from the entrance and turn left onto the sidewalk. Looking left, the streetlights are green as far as I can see, giving a lone rumbling garbage truck about five blocks down uncontested passage through the urban corridor. The library hasn't opened yet so I decide to head towards the city park. The sunrise is coming up and projects a shadow from each row of buildings onto the parallel structures behind. When I walk, I try not to think as everything I remember of family and warmth have been set aside for good reason. It’s been so long since I’ve seen them that I begin to forgot what they look like. They are only represented by blurred faces in my mental snapshots, fading memories in my mind. My face bearing no emotion, I listen to myself breathe. Every thought shuts down because the risk of dissuading myself from the pursuit of adequate shelter and food is not something the body will chance. I close my eyelids and see fireworks.
This state is visible in every visage of someone who’s down here with me, crawling the floor of their mind’s cave. We are automatons. Emotions take away too much concentration from a body that is already preoccupied with the prowl for our subsistence. The mind collapses as a soft “bing” signals autopilot, ready to take over the rest of the flight. Watch someone in this setting closely the next time you get the opportunity. They are confronting themselves at their worst or ignoring themselves entirely. We are awaiting our chance, our miracle. Salvation does not hover in the rafters, above those who believe God carries concerns about it's grand creation being left to the intentions of men. It happens swiftly and silently, in the dark desperate situations where we face our worst selves. The greatest changes take place before we even recognize it.
Oliver’s Gospel Mission is one of a few depositories for the dwelling impaired. In the middle of downtown, it provided the quickest access to the rest of the city. There was a bus stop a few blocks away and I found no difficulty in finding it. The fare to ride was a different story. I learned to walk, far. My favorite soup kitchen was across town and I found how quickly I began to enjoy the journey each day. My community shrank to a manageable colony of quick footed urbanites. My mentors and friends are a mixed lot. users, drifters, winos, and the occasional sot that was as goodhearted as he was unlucky. Oliver’s was once a firehouse. An old, three story brick building where the smell of piss and body odor floats in the stale air, assaulting our nostrils. Fluorescent lights crack and sputter, ultimately dead but holding on in vain.
The bathroom mirrors are smeared and cracked, toilet seats crusting with semen and piss. The main room is used in the evenings as a chapel, where ministers in the local area come and donate their sloppy second sermons. Sermons meant to motivate, sympathize and encourage fall on deaf ears. This particular audience is gazing at the minister's jewelry or slumped in an upright slumber. A cackling laugh erupts from the back rows from some goddamn nut I haven't yet put a face to. Demons hunt in this old firehouse and ironically, they have a penchant for fueling fires. They assist us in destroying ourselves. Easy pickings. When we go to sleep, my eyes peer deep into the darkness over the bodies strewn around me. Through a view askew I squint into shadows, looking for eyes, reassuring myself I'm not being watched. Before I shut down, I fall to low whispers professing terrible purposes.
The vaulted ceilings provide a fitting ambiance as sound waves are trapped and battered against cold walls and old hard-wood floors, never finding release into the starry sky above. At night, we sleep on stained, royal blue gym mats tossed on the floor. The ceiling has large glass windows that open up to the starry sky. I could see the night again, and I peered through the frames with an earnest attempt at finding a reason for my circumstance. With a cerulean track jacket luckily able to serve as a suitable blanket, I lay on my back with my eyes pointing away from the Earth. The fluorescent bars of light are shut off slowly, from the rooms back to its front. Remnant energy escapes as a dying hum. The floor of this once heroic firehouse is pock-marked with dozens of middle-aged toddlers and a lost boy.

Thank you all for your support! - Narly