Stars Rise

XIII. Leander Meets Us

Between bare backs and suit backs Leander pressed, pushed gently against a body in a wool jacket, a woman's outflung arm, a man's wayward elbow.

Too steady light blanketed everything so none of it cast a shadow, not so much as a penumbra, and the thick concert audience crush of bodies seemed unending.

Progress slowed. Music blasted a rest of silence and a blare of noise and dancers pushed back. Deja vu of pulling Daia by the calloused and unresponsive hand through to the stage, only then lights had flashed, gone out, erupted back in. Daia never cared how close they got but he'd wanted her to. As if fulfilling an unfulfilled desire of life he struggled one shoulder through and then the other. At some point the crowd's resistance to let them in always became enough that Dianthea would halt where she was and press down the heels of her boots, he couldn't pull her forward any further when she dug her heels in stubborn like a horse being pulled by a weak human. Odd that one society would banish the flashing lights and another lived for them.

Death's a lot like sleep, Louis Reveur had said. Maybe for him. If this was death it felt like waking. 

Perception amped high, he felt his breath enter and exit from his lungs. Silk sleeves wrapped his arms to the wrist, the collar around his neck, artificially warmed air against his cheeks. Never felt so alive, like every molecule sent a distinct message to the brain.

Never felt so awake, brimming with energy as if he drank too much coffee but without the jitters and without the fog in the first place the caffeine was meant to lift. The feet in his shoes stiff laced too tight, getting sore fast, the pressure of the patio floor pushing up against his soles as gravity tried to drag his body through it. He elbowed someone on his way through, feeling solid. 

Muscle, bone, skin, hard and powerful.

Like a sleepless insomniac night, like trying to sleep, forcing dreams to come with open eyes. What he wanted was to sleep, if sleep meant the real world, if it meant gray morning slipping through the fog and between the blinds in his apartment bedroom and slogging cereal down like a grownup boy child before straightening his uniform and crowding on the bus with everyone else. As if he were trying to fall asleep through insomnia he begged his mind to return to the best bus seat, aisle directly behind the second pair of doors, as long as the window seat was taken by a passenger, as long as the passenger didn't smell, so he wouldn't have to get up, preferably if his stop was before the stop of the person in the window seat. If he could press his mind back to that place, he'd be minutes from the best part of the day. Like none of this had happened. Clean slate. Wasn't he supposed to have three chances? No one even gave him a second chance.

As if insomniac, his eyes stayed open; instead of the fingertip smudged metal and beige plastic and faded bus advertisement his field of view filled with black night and high saturation colors, masks in deep magenta, blue and emerald, the colors those bus ads had maybe been a year and six months ago when first printed.

He tried to go back to San Francisco anyway, like trying to fall asleep, if you didn't think about it too hard it would happen, but you had to let the mind relax. His mind didn't relax. He had orders to follow. His brain refused to let go of the orders, he pushed his way through bodies politely with his objective firmly in mind, mind racing with options on how to achieve it, and you could never sleep like that.

Against his will, which was struggling to land his consciousness back in his bus seat moments before the beginning of a fresh Monday, he found himself asking for directions. "Excuse me," he said, taking one woman in a silk and beaded magenta mask aside and whispering so her friends wouldn't hear, "I'm looking for Mr. Ilan Potestas." It was as if someone else were steering.

"He's there, the one without a mask," said the woman, and she leaned around Leander and pointed with a long outstretched finger. "I wouldn't bother him though. Bad temper."