we are really in the dark.

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<center>
His soul stretched tight across the skies
That fade behind a city block,
Or trampled by insistent feet
At four and five and six o'clock;
And short square figures stuffing pipes,
And evening newspapers, and eyes
Assured of certain certainties,
The conscience of a blackened street
Impatient to assume the world.

I am moved by fancies that are curled
Around these images and cling:
The notion of some infinitely gentle
Infinitely suffering thing.

Wipe your hand across your mouth and laugh;
The worlds revolve like ancient women
Gathering fuel in ancient lots.

Preludes, Thomas Stearns Eliot




Gabriel Rainer</center>

<font color="#000000" size="1">[ January 16, 2007 06:58 PM: Message edited by: midnight radio ]</font>

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He was a doll with its mouth parted, rosy-cheeked and red lipped. Marianne said that in his better moments he always looked doll-like, cherubic, even when he was hissing whiskey breath and pink-nosed from the drink. At his most inebriated, he was clumsily harsh, hissing out rhetoric, babbling in Shakespearean tempos, treading the boards of their New York home like Hamlet working out an existential crisis. At all hours of the night, he worked creativity in stark lines and fine angles, all computations and pencil lines drawn immaculately straight by the simple tick of his hand. What a piece of work is man, she would remember, in those early morning moments, you hunched over your work table with the glowing light on full blast, your eyes tired and hung, your brow furrowed and your fist clenched like someone threatened to take your sword away. The fierce, the furious, the sleepless, the brave. Pretty Gabriel photographed on the deck of a nameless boat, his hair shipwrecked and his eyes masked by Dior sunglasses. Pretty Gabriel and Marianne on their wedding day, blushing virgins both, busy limbed and doting. Gabriel designing and overseeing three buildings by twenty-six. A department chair at Parsons Academy at twenty-seven. At twenty-eight, a mess of limbs on the bed, nude and drunk with another man who took the money and ran when Marianne materialized in the door like a watchful ghost. Gabriel divorced by twenty-nine. Gabriel alone at thirty, stumbling bar to bar, sketching mad on the chalkboards at Parsons, behind his skinny glasses and pink mouth. The money rolled in and ended up stuffed in the pockets of pretty hustlers with sharp hips, clawing for their own private Idaho. He knew the insides of motels like the back of his trained left hand, like he knew Nico's collection from grayscale photos and elaborate histories. New York had nothing on him now, teetering on the edge of magnificent failure, a Prague project in the works that crumbled under his hands, a chair position that was up for review, a body on the ledge of losing everything, kicking up a dust storm of nothing.

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In Amsterdam, Gabriel felt enclosed. The streets were crushing, narrow like the cabin of the plane he flew in on. The yellow house was low celinged. He stooped and avoided the corners of doorways. His gawky legs were left sticking out of Stellan's neutral toned sheets, uncovered by the short, stiff blankets.

In the morning, he rose first. Downstairs, he heard Isabel stirring, bustling with phonecalls and papers. He dressed quietly, sliding his legs into the sweats left on the floor in a pool. He wound his way back into the waking world, stretching the t-shirt over his head. He laced shoes on his feet. The sensation was simple and familiar.

Outside, the weather burst ironically with life and flora. The streets were lined with bicycles he wished he owned. It made him long for something simple -- a life in a narrow yellow house in another country. A bike with blue chrome and long, stiff spokes. A bell. As he started to run along pavement, he missed his dog, Lloyd. He missed chess with Thomas. He didn't understand how he could want to abandon things he missed so much.

He wound corners and hopped curbs. He shoved off from brick and dodged slow moving traffic in the Jordaan district. He edged past people who must have been familiar town figures to the residents. A man with a red knit cap. A boy with a balloon. Sun was just coming up and the town was already alive, slow, crackling, shaking off the dust of a city-wide sleep.

He didn't remember the last time he had been to a funeral. Years, he imagined. Marianne's aunt. A stout German woman named Katrine that he had never met. The whole event had been stiff and sour with little emotion. He remembered Marianne's veil and the immoveable slips of her hem. He compared it with Lucy's simple hat and airy black skirt. The stiff hem of Isabel's dress was more fitting, more stark and German. She was the impenetrable one, though the whole affair had felt as oddly out of place as Katrine's funeral. It was respectful and solemn. If there were any wet eyes, they hid it well.

He rounded the last street a good hour later and came up to the yellow house at a walking pace. By now, the downstairs was alive with the morning, despite the events of weeks past. Isabel worked in her study. At the stove, Aemilia prepared breakfast, stirring and spooning batter into a skillet. It hissed and crackled. Lucy scrubbed the counter as clean up and Holden sat in the living room and pulled Antonia's sweater over her head. They all played their roles. They all managed their individual moments as easily as predicted clockwork. Only Stellan remained.

He padded up the stairs slowly, without notice from the whirlwind of people below. He preferred it that way. They were all sweet people. Overwhelming, he thought to himself. They were more alive than other families he knew, even when they were silent, they were buzzing with recognition for each other. It was a strange, electric connection.

Upstairs, he slipped back out of sweats just as easily as he had slipped in. Glasses were fixed still on his head and when he pulled them off, the boy in the bed had a hazy, angelic halo to him. He looked sweet and content. In these moments, Gabriel recognized what it was he saw in a boy so eager to admit that he had bartered with hustlers for blowjobs, a boy whose art was thrilling and alive, a boy half a decade younger than him and with more critical acclaim than the architect could have ever hoped to drum up. There was a simplicity about Stellan that held Gabriel's lungs like a cold hand. No matter how out of control the architect could spin (though he struggled to keep everything within boundaries. A schedule, a run, little free time to spin to the bar and thusly into oblivion), the artist would remain just as beautifully untouched by time. The marks that the world left on Stellan Marek didn't show. At least, he hadn't seen any yet.

When he climbed into the bed that was too small for them, he dragged knees up beneath the boys and slid his chin against the dip between shoulderblades. His mouth coursed comfortingly along the nape of a neck. He hummed a lullaby, wordless, simple. A sign of presence. He was here.