Holy City: Chapter Thirteen - Part Two
V put on his still drying shirt and shorts and his new suit and left his hotel room, taking the elevator down many flights into the lobby, which was still busy at that time of night. He walked out onto the street, which had taken on the air of a street fair. The ghosts had competition. Now they weren’t the only ones who sold trinkets and ornaments, many street vendors and many stalls were set up.
The street was a carnival. There was a man with parrots on both shoulders and a lady with bunny rabbits in both arms. There were magicians and street singers and sketch artists and fortune tellers and pickpockets. There were trinket sellers with tables who displaced the poorer trinket sellers from the afternoon, who were pushed further back into the alleys and side streets and less desirable selling spots along the boulevard. There were dancers who either were celebrating the local culture or exploiting the local culture, V wasn’t sure, but still they danced and received coin for that dancing. There were men and women who were willing to do more than dance waiting to be taken back into hotel rooms for the night or for an hour and there were tourists, oh so many tourists, lining the streets with money they were eager to spend.
V looked out of place amidst this carnival. Those citizens who had worn the same type of suit during the workday had changed out of them many hours ago and the tourists were dressed in an entirely different species of clothing. V was the only one attending this carnival in business dress. Fitting his attire, he ignored the jesters of the night. He was on a mission. He wanted to find the woman who tried to sell him a jasmine string earlier in the afternoon. He still had no money to give her, but he thought he had something more valuable to trade.
A search amidst throngs of people was not easy at that time of night. She was not outside the hotel where they had met previously, so V walked down the wide boulevard passing and being passed by happily drunken strangers.
V ventured from the main streets to the outskirts of the party, exploring the margins of the page. He saw a group of trinket sellers, recognizing them as part of the crowd that were selling outside the hotel many hours ago. In the back of the group, resting on a crooked bench on the edge of a cracked sidewalk and talking casually to a man with a grey beard who was holding a young child in his arms, was the woman with the jasmine strings. V approached with optimism. She did not notice him at first and did not recognize him when she did notice him.
“I can buy one of your jasmine strings now,” V said smiling too broadly. Now she recognized him from earlier in the day. She thought this stranger who once insisted he had no money might be trying to make fun of her again, or maybe it was a game, a sort of initiation to one of the rich people’s clubs they had in Vitesia, or maybe it was even worse and he was one of those do-gooders who never leave her alone to live her own life.
“I have a key. I have a room in the Figueroa Hotel. You can stay in my room so you do not have to stay out on the streets tonight. I can trade this key for one of your strings.” He held the key out.
The woman looked coldly at V, now even more insulted. But as V stood there continuing to insist with his key like she had insisted with her jasmine strings, her insult turned to confusion. Was this guy really serious?
“What am I supposed to do with a room in that place?”
V was still holding the key out.
“One night in there isn’t going to help me. I need money. Not a night in someone else’s room.”
“It’s not someone else’s. It’s yours now.”
“It won’t help. A room for a night. It won’t help anything. I’ll probably end up arrested.”
She shook her head with a near violence. V put the key back in his pocket. “I’m sorry. I thought it was a good idea.”
“Well, it wasn’t.”
“No, it wasn’t.”
“Do you think it’s funny trying to give me your room?”
“No,” V hung his head embarrassed a little.
“A temporary solution to a permanent problem is not a solution.”
“I understand.”
“Do you?”
“I’m beginning to.”
“When you have some money to pay for a jasmine string, let me know. I am an honest woman. I do honest work.”
V put his hand in the pocket of his expensive new suit and felt the key to his room. It was still there, but of less worth than before. The woman was not. She had left V moving on to chase the end of the parade. V followed in that direction, only for a few steps, until he was back on the main street. He stood on the curb at the end of the action and watched.
Groups of four and five passed him by. These groups, most homogenous in one way or another, of the same class or ethnicity or religion or some kind of invisible marking known only to the members of the group, rushed excitedly in directions away from where V stood. V watched them, wishing to join in. He wanted to go back to the lobby of the hotel and look into that mirror behind the hotel check-in desk to determine which group he should join, which group would allow him to join. But there was no mirror to look into where he stood on the street, so he sat down on the curb and continued to watch, listening to snapshots of dialogue as groups passed.
V marveled at how untouched this society was from the war that was being fought between the three nations, the war that was ravaging Alexandria. He wondered why. Damasia seemed to be a nation in a permanent state of war, if they weren’t fighting the two other nations they would have to find a fourth nation to fight or fight amongst themselves. Yet here in Vitesia, which had mobilized just as many, there seemed a nightly party in the heart of the capital. How long would this party last, V wondered. Was it one last desperate all-nighter before a rude morning wakeup call, the last carefree days of a lost generation. Or was it something else, a more permanent state of existence that flattened all existence into a constant search for the next euphoria, the next experiment, the next high.
An old man who was eighty-years-old and looked eighty-years-old sat down next to V on the curb. He wore a brimmed hat that had lost its shape many decades ago, curling down around his head, its sides no longer with the strength or will to hold themselves up. He wore a brown suit, baggy in the legs and old and patched in the arms, which was several generations older than the out of fashion suits those in the shelter wore. It was a suit that must have been in style when the man was young and in his early twenties so many years ago. We never truly get over the fashions of our younger years. V looked over to the old man and wondered if he had been wearing it every day for decades, even after he had retired, even after he no longer had the need to put on the armor of work each morning.
The man looked back at his seatmate on the curb and took out a pack of cigarettes from his breast pocket and turned to V and without words offered him a cigarette.
“I quit.” V said.
The man took the pack back and then pulled out a cigarette for himself and lit it.
The two men, one twice the age of the other, sat next to each other without saying anything for the longest time, both watching the parade, this flotilla of all kind of humans searching for one kind of desire or another. V was not sure if the old man was one of the trinket sellers, trinket buyers, or something else, whether he lived on the streets or in the shelters or maybe even the high rises.
“Humans move in groups like birds move in flocks.” The old man said to V without looking at him as they both continued to watch groups of partiers move in their coordinated patterns. V did not look back to the eighty-year-old man who looked eighty. He just nodded at the observation and kept watching.
The carnival wound down. The number of passersby slowed and then stopped. Eventually, all of the birds flew away and it was just V and the old man on the curb. The old man turned to V and smiled. “I guess the show is over,” he said. He got up slowly, very slowly from the curb. V stood and helped him. The old man teetered then steadied. He looked over the street, all the way to the Figueroa Hotel and back down in the other direction towards the shelter where V stayed the night before. “I was born on this street,” the old man said, “and I will die here.” My entire life has been lived between 23rd and 42nd street. Nineteen blocks for eighty years. Not so bad a bargain, I guess.”
Then the old man laughed a little at a joke he hadn’t said out loud and shuffled away. He did not go towards the Figueroa Hotel and he did not go towards the shelters, he drifted towards the darkness behind, into shadows V could not see into and disappeared. V realized the night was over and it was time to return to his room in the hotel.
Next Chapter: Chapter Fourteen
Previous Chapter: Chapter Thirteen - Part One