A Bridge

1/1

The door opens and the night takes him. He has drank enough that everything comes easy, one movement to the next, the pavement and the cars parked next to the road, his breath. Orange fluorescents tower above him, bleeding onto the surface of the unmoving canal. The air is one or two degrees warmer than his body, and humid, so that within moments of leaving the bar his face is already damp with sweat.

He was drinking alone; he usually does. He knows no one here, and he thinks he probably never will. Loneliness is a familiar state, as embracing as the mid summer air. He wears it easily.

The bartender was the same way: older than him by at least twenty years, thin, with deep lines etched at either side of his mouth and a head scraped mercilessly bald. They had not spoken much, a few words over the course of hours, but he'd recognized something in the older man. More of a kinship than a connection, a glimpse into his own future. The feeling was odd, but not unpleasant.

Now he is passing the bridge. To his left is a multi-tiered highway. Concrete walls dilute the noise from passing cars to a kind of background static. The canal stretches below him, ink-black save for the reflected lights. He stops there, leaning his arms on the railing. A part of him wishes he had another drink. He looks down into the water, and at first he cannot understand what he's seeing: a sense of motion and depth; faint, bulbous discolourations beneath the water's surface. He frowns, runs a hand through damp hair; jellyfish, he realizes. Hundreds of them, drifting in some invisible current, as if migrating inland.

He has never seen anything like it. The amorphous blobs and their slow, hallucinogenic movement are a picture from another world. He watches them, his own shadow superimposed on the water, and thinks of nothing. Behind him, cars pass on the highway, cutting paths through the borderless night.