People say that the shy and scared hide in shadows and secluded corners, that agoraphobians dwell in their own cocoons, safely locked away from our everyday humdrum. They might be right. Most of the time. But the shy and the scared are lured forward sometimes, to the clattering beat of a new twelve incher, to the clattering beat of high heels, and to the clattering, shattering strobe of the slitter on a punch drunk crowd's glitter, sputter, sweat, spit, smiles, strips, body shots and acid trips. Whenever the sun sets and the zoo is on. At midnight in anything from the fancy uptown establishments to the seedy underground improv clubs, it was the same old story, night after night. The pulsating jungle of basements, back beats and bass drums thumping new truths into the scattered souls of the everyday gloom.
This is where they go to forget, to be all that they wish they were. This is where they let alcohol and pheromones mix and overdose on each other, where new chapters in comedies and tragedies are initiated. Night after night, drink after drink. Beat after beat after beat... It's here, in the night, that the hidden comes forth. But still remains just as hidden.
She danced. There was no other word for it. No poetic orgasmatron of syllables and sex that could intensify that sight. A black hair like a waterfall swayed back and forth across her bare back and the opaque blue halter top scattered with deep blue spangles clung on for dear life against the rhythm of her twisting torso, threatening to slip loose at any second. The short, pleated silver skirt slapped her upper thighs like a curtain in erratic draft. Her feet moved to their own melody, and her lips, her blood red lipstick, mimicked a monologue that nobody could hear.
She danced, in every sense of the word, a combination of ancient traditions and futuristic ideals, clashed into one body in motion, always finding a new form for her balance between madness and structure. She danced alone, in a sea of other writhing forms, none that could touch her, none that could ever compare with the girl in the silver skirt. She was not there, not in their world of debauchery and skin parade, although she looked the part, wore that mask to blend in and stand out all at once.
This was her moment, her chance to escape, to enter the cocoon and live her own agoraphobic utopia for a few, vibrant minutes. This was where Aki hid from things. Things that did not match her pace, things that tilted her universe the wrong way on a daily basis. Things that made her feel that creeping sense of not belonging. This was her home, her hideout. Where everyone could see her.
Aki danced, and the world, the command of her destiny, somehow still belonged to her.
----
Like a fish on a spear. There was no difference. He thrashed around, sputtered and shook, while some thick black liquid that didn't look at all like what she had expected human blood would look like seeped from the multiple entry craters and from the corner of his astonished mouth. He shook so heavily that the black liquid slobbered all over her like the drool of one of those bloodhounds that always looks so depressed.
Then she saw that it indeed was as red as blood ought to be. Finally, just like the fish, the long silvery fishes she and he used to catch down by the quay at eight in the morning on weekends, the trembles stopped, and the bulging eyes went blank. Then his head, until then carried rigid by panicked sinews, slumped down to one side, and a flood of accumulated blood and froth came out, running down his chest and left arm. It dripped off his fingers and down on the seat.
Everything was silent. Just seconds ago, her world had been filled with the frenzied shattering of hardened glass, the bending of steel frames and the shrieking of tires against the dry asphalt. And then the surreal, wet series of thumps, articulated through a momentary pause between the impact of the windshield and the front of the car smashing into the refuge and coming to a stop against the mid highway concrete barrier. The wet thumps of the seven long reinforcement bars that had rocketed from the truck in front of them, cut through the windshield like butter, and through the driver even easier, before embedding themselves in and through the driver's seat.
The long, ribbed iron bars went through the man with surgical precision, one trashing his left shoulder, another entering just above the left collar bone. One punctured his lung and two took the route through his intestines. One last iron bar pinned the jacket of his right forearm to the seat behind him, and two other bars barely missed his head and throat.
Not that he needed them. Impaled on five spears, he died rather quickly anyway. But it gave him just enough time of spectacular spasms for Aki to start thinking of the fishes the man and she had caught with sharp sticks in the shallow water of the portside lagoon down south, at her grandparents' villa. Her father had promised to tell her why they could flop around like that, even after they had had their heads cut off, been opened and gutted. But it slipped his mind and then slipped hers too. Now he would never be able to explain, unless you could count his own sickening struggle against the inevitable, a very hands-on lesson.
Because the man in the driver's seat was that man. Aki callously, almost absently, watched her father die an almost aesthetically intriguing death, and held a curious finger to his limp, red dripping hand for a tentative prod.
It took nine seconds for the first iron bars to start slipping from the top of the truck, until that incredible silence up on the refuge. It took Aki five minutes to start screaming. And then another ten after the ambulance arrived for the medics to pin her down, so they could give her a sedative injection.
----
It had been a long journey in space, but not nearly a long enough journey in time for her. The pulse, the noise and the mess-up from last year was still echoing in her ears. She could feel the sting in the palm of her hands as if it was only hours ago that her tiny world of make believe safety came crashing in with the windshield of her father's car. It was as if no six months had passed from that flurry of confusion and fear, as if the man she had loved like a god all her life just recently were eradicated in an explosion of steel, glass, blood and crushed bones. It's funny, she thought in a moment of clarity, the only thing I can really recall in real time is how that fucking truck blocked my view of the Nikon building. That truck with its concrete armoring bars, and that hatch opening in the back. Slowly, ever so slowly.
