City Windows

A Story by Jessica Elaine Stevens [Faiteach]

Three short vignettes about the city.

(wilderness)

The city is a struggle for survival.

So many people living together, pressing in on one another like a crowded subway car. The simplest things become coveted possessions; the smallest infractions become a call to war. The wilderness is no longer quiet woodlands or peaceful, sleeping meadows. The wilderness is steel, stone and gasoline.

You can tell by the taxis.

Watch how they drive, how they flicker, bright yellow fish, through a continuous stream of lesser, more passive swimmers. They fight, they snap, they bitterly trumpet their frustrations. Stop. Go. Stop. Go. The lights turn red. The engines tremble. The white line is a checkered flag; yellow noses bob forward slowly, tires anxiously grip the asphalt. You almost hate to see the red turn green.

If you climb to the top of the tallest towers, you can see them, bickering there in the streets. The other cars fade out of view, but those bright yellow taxis keep going, ceaseless.

Up above a certain level in the New York atmosphere, you enter a formless miasma. You can see where the air ends, and the city smog begins. It’s like that ever-present cloud that encircles the chronic smoker. It swathes the skyscrapers in a blanket of mystery, making their struggles for Heaven appear more tragic in their eternal failure. The sun casts down its light and the smog dilutes it, makes it paler- more sallow. There are no clouds because there is no sky- the towers of industry have scraped it all down.

(midnight)

This is more about Boston than New York.

I hate riding in trains at night. The aboveground trains always leave the cabin lights too bright. In the subway it hardly matters- you’re in a tunnel, there’s nothing to see beyond your reflection in the window. Above the dark burrows of the subterranean railways, it’s a different matter.

With the glare of the cabin lights, the night outside your window becomes a cloying, inky darkness. The only survivor of their persecution is your reflection - pale and misty-eyed and full of shadows. Your eyes become greedy, grasping for any image- a light, a shape, a landmark, that survives the obliterating blackness. There are only glimpses, startled breaths of sight: streetlight, streetlight, streetlight, streetlight, the dotted outline of a house all decked in holiday cheer, streetlight, streetlight, headlights, a line of cars going by, streetlight, streetlight-

darkness, panic! Are we moving? Do we exist? Where are we going? Is Eternity somewhere up ahead? What shape is the world taking, out there in the shadows?

Tunnel.

streetlight, streetlight, streetlight, streetlight, streetlight, streetlight.

The muttered clacks of the rails underfoot slow to a murmur. The furious rumble of turbines, harnessed and tied to a pair of rails, quiets to a long, exasperated hiss. A voice speaks in a new and entangling tongue.

Station. Stop. Stare. People come, people go. In the putrescent glow of the overhead lights, everyone is sick. Everyone is tired. Are they going home, or will their night be that much longer than yours? Where have they been? How do they think? What do they see? God forbid they see you.

Staring is only taboo because of the fear of being seen.

Garbled speakers speak. The train sighs.

streetlight, streetlight, streetlight, streetlight, streetlight, streetlight-

darkness. The growls of the train come much closer, purring in ears clogged with headphones and music bought cheap online. There is nothing- only your face, staring into the eyes of a specter.

Tunnel. And-

City Explosion! Lights everywhere- a feast of color, shape- so much light it forms a symphony. Cars are moving, trailing after one another in strings of red and gold. Billboards drink in excess the spotlights strapped to their heads. Skyscrapers radiate, glittering with more glitz and luminescent glam than the throat of a Silver Screen diva. The world has come alive! In the pregnant darkness, life took shape and blossoms in a magnificent bang of glowing beauty. The world burns bright, illuminating, blotting out the envious shine of stars overhead and-

darkness. Tunnel.

Rinse. Repeat.

(pride)

The city is a proud animal.

The city is a woman.

She is an expression of man’s power, of his endurance and his callous marriage to progress. She stands erect, pushing her glittering face onto the skies. She stares into the eyes of Heaven. She does not blink.

She is arrogant- undefeatable. Enduring.

I can’t tell if this is reassuring or not.

A woman is many things. She covers her face in make-up and sheaths herself in the armor of pretty clothes. She wears baubles and jewels to add that extra shine. She is powerful as long as she believes in the powers of her token trinkets. She is beautiful as long as she adheres to the occult teachings of her magazines. She is confident as long as someone else tells her so.

In Time Square, the woman’s face is every face. She simmers with feline sensuality. She bubbles with buoyant life and vitality. She giggles with gaiety; she broods with Bond-like intensity. Everywhere there are billboards- billboards that glow and blink and move and sparkle. The cars hardly have room to move in a sea of flesh, watched over by the scintillating gaze of a hundred advertisements for a better life, a better love, a better taste, or better sex.

A woman is many things.

Beneath the lights of Time Square, the subway screams.