It’s never dark on the corner of Division and Ninth. I avoid that corner mostly, preferring the dark, admiring how it climbs bravely from every crevice at sunset, conforming to every surface, smoothing every angle, muting every color a bit closer to gray.
Erin fears the dark. Thinks it a monster. Distrusts my fondness for such an ugly beast, furtive, inscrutable, not to be trusted. Like people who keep snakes and giant spiders as pets, feeding them on snuggly bunnies and fuzzy mousies. Their sympathies turned upside-out and inside-down by some quirk of genetics or some horror visited upon them as children, perhaps. Some perversion of hard earned prejudices delicately woven into the psychic fabric through unfathomable epochs in the evolution of our kind. Standards of taste writ large in the stench of countless dead, taken away by creepy and crawly things in the night. The survivors the ones hardwired to fear without reason that which slithers or crawls. And to crush with impunity that which they fear.
She disdains my penchant for late night meandering, alone in the shadows, with the empire asleep. All its decent and forthright denizens, at least. But darkness comforts me. I crave invisibility, anonymity. Empty streets. Faint shadows cast softly by streetlights in the middle distance or, during full-ish phases, by the moon. At first, she didn’t believe me. Thought I must be sneaking off to meet some woman, parked in her car and waiting around the corner. Some slut from a bar. Or worse still, some art school tramp from a gallery. The kind for whom infidelity is some brave, utopian revolution against the tyranny of monogamy. Monogamy but a patriarchal invention by which a man enslaves a woman, ensuring that the seed taking root is his own.
The marquis hangs over the sidewalk, as always. In its third life now, as church, long past its demise as movie house and brief resurrection as cabaret. I glance from the next block, passing at a safe distance, well beyond its range. The message changes every month to some new scripture. Black sermon on white field. Tonight’s message, I recall from my pre-apostatical days, is from John, about the light shining in darkness and how the darkness does not overcome it.
I find myself inside the ancient theater, among the folding seats, looking up at the cone of light, flickering above me, cutting through the darkness, expanding toward the screen, where James Dean is holed up awaiting the centurions while Natalie Wood and Sal Mineo comfort each other and weep and pray. All around me, the gnashing of teeth. The collection plate comes around, and I reach into my pocket for a couple of chocolate covered mint wafers, wrapped in foil, to drop among the popcorn and raisinettes.
And I concede that the poet intends a different metaphor altogether, of this beacon shining salvation among the decay of old downtown, just off the railroad tracks, just down from the tote-the-note lots and across from the pawn shop and around the corner from the neon advertising bail bonds to passers-by in the backseats of police cars and amid the street walkers on the way to hourly rate motels. But I counter that the message itself rests in these very letters marring the field, dark beautiful forms, stark, unapologetic, that define the light, in opposing it, and that the light carries within itself, unchanging and unchanged. I expect the sky to begin flapping in the breeze, tattered and ragged, having been shorn by the terrible magnitude of this revelation. But nothing happens.
Back home, slipping deftly beneath the sheet, I realize Erin, only ever passing that corner in daylight, would never understand, and I forsake the thought of trying to explain.
I close my eyes and sneak back to the bijou.
In the balcony, the beautiful grope verily to a litany of begetting.
Repent for the end is near.
Quiet, please. Take your seats. The second feature is about to begin.
