Breakfast at Midnight

by Louis Armand

  Through the open window I could see the dockside all lit up under floodlights. Silhouettes of people walking along the street. I thought I saw Regen there and struggled not to call out. I ran back down the stairs. Drunken voices spilled from the nightclub out onto the sidewalk. I followed the lights along the water to the bridge. A night tram stalled ahead of me, blocking my path. I saw people staring at me through the windows and realised I was standing there still half naked – face and hands smeared with dirt and blood, clutching a battered old suitcase.

  Then the sky opened up and the rain came down. Lightly at first, then heavily. I staggered blindly into the headlights, water in my eyes. Fearing I’d lost her for good this time. It began to pour. I could see almost nothing and what I could see didn’t seem real. I told myself she wasn’t there – that she was a hundred miles away, cringing beside a road somewhere, mad with fear. But halfway across the bridge she was there again, leaning against a concrete railing with the city lights behind her. She was wearing a black coat – the same coat she’d worn the night we left the Ace of Spades. It drooped under the weight of the rain soaking it, slipping down. Her hair clung to bare pale shoulders. I lunged at the traffic, trying to get to the other side. Horns blaring. And for a second she stood there almost in front of me, naked, her coat at her feet, high heels teetering. And then she was gone.

  24. TRÓJA

  It’s ten years ago. I’m standing on a bridge in Prague, watching the river haemorrhage into the lower reaches of the city, its turbid waters cascading over the weirs. Black rain drags across the sky. Distant police sirens echo along the quays. Darkness closing in like nightfall across a vast jurassic swamp.

  I’m standing there holding a battered suitcase. In the hot rain I’m shivering and the shivering doesn’t stop. The red eye of the TV tower floats above the city. Black shapes rise and fall. I’ve been standing there for hours, watching the red eye blinking its futile Morse. The rain soaks through me. Wrapped in the darkness of a city that doesn’t belong to me.

  For the first time I begin to realise I’m utterly alone. I stand there waiting for something to take its course. The shape of Regen’s coat lying sodden at the base of the railing and her shoes beside it.

  From the other end of the bridge, a pair of blue revolving lights drifts through the rain. A dumb sense of ending comes over me. I’m exhausted, empty. I begin raising my hands, like they do in films. But the revolving lights don’t stop. I blink after them. Sheets of water spraying up off the road as a patrol car glides past. I stare after it in confusion. Red taillights receding.

  A siren wails across the island. Lights flicker through the trees. I stand there, squinting through heavy slanting rain, arms half-raised in the air like a scarecrow or a lunatic. One of the escaped crazies from Bohnice, waiting to be picked up in the street. Somewhere someone must’ve made a mistake. They must be looking for me by now. They’ll come back. They won’t just leave me like this.

  I let my arms drop. Put my hands together, palm-up. Rain water spills over them. Where does all the blood go? These are the same hands I owned when I was a child, only bigger now. A child afraid of the dark, of the man under the bed. How long ago? Regen, holding my hand in the night, guiding me between her thighs, making me forget. Calling me her love.

  Was it really her? The streetlight where she was standing before is nothing but a blur. I stare at it. Eyes groping through the rain. But there’s no sign. The shape of her coat’s gone, her shoes. I can’t see them. Down below the river churns. I clutch the railing. Struggle against vertigo. Under my feet, the bridge casts impenetrable shadows, straight down into an abyss. The sound of rain across the water like the swarming of bees.

  I turn and keep turning without knowing what else to do. I imagine footsteps. Regen’s voice. She’s somewhere ahead of me, behind me, on the other side of the bridge. I follow each sound hopelessly. Water sloughs across my feet. The rain’s unrelenting. Headlights loom and swerve. I’m standing in the middle of the bridge, clutching Regen’s suitcase. It’s the only thing left. Then all of a sudden there’s a flash and an enormous roar and something hissing up in the sky.

  I trudge along the bridge to Libeňský Island. An exit ramp slopes down past an auto bazaar. Orange light flickers across the windscreens of parked cars. Behind the bazaar there’s an inlet. A river barge, lying low in the water, is on fire. Flames withering in the rain. A dozen car alarms are screaming in chorus like some apocalyptic symphony falling on deaf ears. I watch the fire die down and then move on. The sound of alarms fading. The rain taking possession of everything.

  *

  Time folds back. Six months ago, below decks on the barge tied up at Libeňský Island, listening to Blake talking his talk. The sense of a circle closing. The end returning to the beginning. I’d come back – to the bridge, to the island – in search of ghosts. In the full light of day, everything looked brown, faded, overexposed. I tried to see it as it was in my mind. I kept coming back to the wrecked barge lightning had struck all those years before. An old Greek lived there. He watched me come and go, sizing me up, until one day he made a proposition.

  The barge was really just a shell. Everything that’d worked had been ripped out. There was only a cabin, a galley, a shitcan and a pirate cable wired into a fuse box. It suited me like that. The rest of it was sound enough not to fall apart and sink. Back then, that night in the rain, only part of the hold had burned, under the deck plates. The lightning had gouged a hole that’d been welded back over. But the scars still showed.

  I began reassembling things the way I remembered them. Bits and pieces. I went to St Pauli’s and watched the girls, looking for a face. I drank. I walked the streets until they became familiar again. Sometimes, at night, I wondered if there was anyone still out there looking for me. Whoever I was. A dead man on the Amazon. A ghost inside a camera at the bottom of a river.

  But no-one ever came. No-one except Blake.

  “The truth always catches up with you,” my mother used to say. Some people say it’s the past that catches up with you. It doesn’t matter what you call it – there’s always something that’ll figure your number out. And when that happens, there’s no getting away. Maybe that’s why I’d come back. Tired of running. Secretly wanting someone to step out of the shadows and say the game’s up.

  In La Paz, none of that mattered. Bit by bit I confessed everything. It was the turning point. Blake was the stranger I’d never expected to meet again. He tended my confessions with care. Fed the nightmares that produced them. Sold me my curatives. “Live each day,” he said, “as if what you do cancels out the day before.”

  But nothing ever cancels out anything. I knew that now, watching him sit there across the galley with his camera and half a bottle of booze in front of him. Telling me that everything’s part of a machine. That things happen, but what happens isn’t what matters most. It’s the fact they keep on happening, regardless.

  “Learn to be like a machine,” he tells me, “and you won’t have to suffer. Look at the world. It’s the only option anyone’s got left.”

  Later we’re watching the afternoon settle-in over the river. The fishing line’s still hanging slack in the water, beside the green deckchair, where I’d left it. The place seems smaller now that Blake’s there. Like another voice in your head that begins as a whisper and gradually crowds you out. He stands at the bow looking down into the shadows of the river, camera slung over his shoulder, its lens pointing back at me.

  “You’ll never catch anything this way,” he says, kicking my line.

  “Doesn’t matter.”

  There’s a grappling pole lying on the deck beside the line. Blake picks it up. Then without warning he pulls a .38 from his jacket, aims it straight down into the water and fires. The shot echoes through the trees, birds fly up into the air. Even before the echo’s died, he thrusts the grappling pole over the edge and heaves it back up with one hand. There’s a mutilated carp twitching at the end of it. He drops it at m
y feet, wrenching the hook free. Blood spatters across my boots. He tosses me the pole, slipping the gun away.

  Our eyes meet. “Everything,” he says. “Everything matters.”

  *

  Or what matters is that there’s always more than just one path to the truth. The truth as it seems to be and the truth yet to come. There’s no such thing as original sin, or of any other kind of sin – there’s only what a person commits. It doesn’t matter if you know why. Waiting for the dawn the way you wait for revelation. But dawn reveals only unseen things, not the unknowable. Standing in the shadow of a sky that spreads out like an ocean, and everything that lies beyond it, and everything that doesn’t.

  Here, in this present time in which I think and am, I tell myself I’m alone. I call out but nobody answers, not even an echo. It must be some kind of dream, this world I pretend each day to inhabit. A world made out of fragments – of things desired, remembered, seen. A whole mirror maze of nonsense. In the fairytale that I am, there’s no more Hänsel and Gretel, no evil witch, no mother dead in a tree, no father butchered in his sleep. There are only reflections. All of them unreal.

  But the world isn’t a dream, and I’m not alone here.

  I turn to Inessa and see in her eyes a reflection of all the things I’ve never been. My lips tremble. I want to tell her how much i hate myself, my history, my cowardice. But they’re nothing but words, after all. And words, like the truth, are pliable as wax, to be re-moulded by the barest fraction of a caress.

  Below us a whole panorama is emerging from its shadows. We’ve climbed the steep road up the hillside that looks down over Trója on the city’s edge. Does she even know why she’s brought me here? Standing on a ruined terrace, a stone balustrade with a stone lion above vineyards sloping down. To one side, the zoo. To the other, the river arcing away towards the east beneath its bridges. The grey shape of the city rises on either side. On this dreary Bohemian coast, we stand and watch the seagulls wheel above the water, swooping and diving.

  I wonder if this is what it means to be at peace. Immersed in a scenery to contemplate the big thoughts by. To reach out through your eyes into the soul of the world. Something unbounded, vaster than music, forever beyond our grasp. Like God. Or death. But when I look at that bleak winter of a city, all I really see is a meat grinder giving birth to a bloodied mess.

  Inessa stirs beside me. “It always seems bigger than it is,” she says.

  The river? Prague? The world? Life? All of them perhaps. I follow her gaze down along the quays. A lone figure is riding a motorcycle along the shore road towards the river bend. I picture Blake, hair on end, on his black Enfield, like some Mephistopheles on speed. He’ll be waiting for me, I know. But the night’s made my decision: there’s no going back now. When something’s born, you cut the umbilicus. When something dies, you bury it.

  *

  I don’t know when it began to rain again. It came down lightly, almost like a mist, barely wetting our faces as we looked at one another and then up at the sky. I reached out with my arm and held Inessa closer to me.

  “you’re right,” I said, not sure any longer what it was she was right about, but whatever it was I felt we must be in agreement, in concord.

  And so we stood there in the rain in Trója, on the ruined terrace looking out over the small fenced-in vineyard. The centuries-old vineyard that’d survived it all – occupation, war, communism. A miracle. Or a madness.

  A group of gypsy children were shouting at one another from a yard nearby, their voices blown about on the breeze. Someone was hanging laundry on a balcony in the greyblue project down in the valley. A tram rattled over the rail bridge above the weir.

  At the river bend, the long narrow fingers of the docklands stretched out of the early morning haze. Beyond, a vista of tenements and tower blocks spread across the horizon. We looked down at the grape vines clinging to the earth so tenuously, and wondered what they were doing there.