Part Two: Opening
After class he found himself ordering an espresso at a cafe which was ensconced in one of the campus buildings, with shuffling students there and back again across the linoleum, and some sat fritteringly in recliners, couches, and chairs, with laptops and books placed before them, and their mind set to solving the varying puzzles that had been assigned. David himself had no such plans of studying, and instead brought his coffee to a corner, nearby another corner around which you could reliably hear the chords played by a student from the polyphonic voice of the piano which was placed without expectation in the layout of the floor nearby a window which let the midday sun drift in for rest upon the denizens of the building, uncertain as a negotiation between the dawn and night, as if, at any moment, it would make the decision to pass backward into the awakening morning, or rush forth into the obsidian chalice of night, but for now, sat still in rays around the curiosly pallid and opaque sky.
David unwound himself into a chair to listen to the music student play, and guessed at which would be the theme for today. Depending on the student who sat, and the day, and the time, and the week, and the month, you could hear anything from Bach to Rachmaninoff, and sometimes, even, trepidatiously, the scattering movement of a Chopin piece, but this was not to be the case today, on this quiet breaking of the March cold as it trespasses into a foretelling of Spring, as told by the weeping Nimbostratus clouds, with the rain relieving the duty of the snow, at last, which still fell down shyly across a seperate part of campus, known only empirically, in abstraction, through the wet hair of some students that walked in from the Northern entrance to the building, and unknown entirely by the furrowed brow’d students who had not moved yet since the morning as they pour themselves into study, with dry hair, their back to the fragrant sunlight that came from the clearness of the sky beyond the window at their backs, underscored deftly altogether by the grounding rhythm of the keys that were struck still in learning by the music student of choice today, the solemn grace of Maurice Ravel’s Pavane pour une infante défunte, M. 19, as it was interpreted by the student, at that piano, revealing his work publicly for the first time since he first approached the piece, in early November of last year, now arranged clearly together in the defined tautness of ligament and muscle in his fingers which ran in remembrance of countless past iterations over different keys, again and again, until his body bent to the notes cast on the paper which stood before him on the stand atop the piano, but was ignored, his eyes shut, his vision uneeded, for he now knew the music beyond the page, beyond the keys; it had poured itself into him slowly everynight for almost a half-year now, and moved from his body like sunlight through a breaking cloud—unthinking, assuredly, and with intention. David felt all of this in a second, every sense in him sharp and awake and in sorrowful witness, nothing missed, nothing at all, in his quiet sight he absorbed everything, and felt it evoke itself wordlessly through the multi-voiced piano, which robbed him of the need to speak, to move, to think, which transfixed him as he lay there with a leg passed over an arm of the chair, coffee notes lingering ballet-like across his tongue and smell, penetrating into him and coming back out in the curiously silent exuberance of his appreciation of being.
His eyes had been shut, he had been drifting without an anchor across the sea of the moment as, surprisingly, the girl who had been watching him from across the room for a minute as this all elapsed approached him—it was Emma, who had for the first time, she thought, seen David as he was, in that moment, different from class, from his name, from his gloomy distance as he sat back in the class and pretended not to watch her, which she saw through without giving up herself to his false non-watchfulness.
Hello, she said with a soft arrowed voice which called forth the blood in his deep seated knowing, which knew her, and her voice, without any context needed, as his eyes then rivened open and beheld her face, her face, which had taken the moment from silent revelry to an active demand to participate, of which he was nothing less than grateful for.
They spoke for a few minutes, as David caught himself on the trail of every word spoken by Emma, in their unspoken tangents of implications and references and hidden meanings, like an animal hides behind a bush to watch the hunter fail to see through the fencing of the forest, cast in camoflauge. His quiet probing into the meanings of her words was caught on by Emma, and that he was caught passed over unacknowledged by David, and so the two went back and forth, cat and mouse, and who was really the hunter and who the hunted?
Then Emma stood up, almost elevated, with the sun lingering atop her shoulders like flowers fall when carried by a strong wind onto the land at last, and her hair, her hair, golden, when ravished in light, almost glowed around her crown, as if a halo. He woke from this looking and asked if she had plans later, to which she said yes, to which he retreated, to which she pursued so as to invite him to those plans, opening the way for him to trespass inward, to which he said yes, I’m up for anything, yes, yes.
The caffeine had exited his body and left its dark shadow in his gut which anxiously stirred. He was to meet with Emma soon, at her dorm room, to hang out and listen to music, which they had talked about earlier in the cafe. He had planned to show her another piece which he loved, by Kilgore Doubtfire, titled Escape, which unraveled unto itself like the tide of the ocean overtakes its own current, again and for all-time and forward, around the Earth, hugging it like a nervous mother does her children in winter. But the coffee had wore off, and left him feeling uneasy, or perhaps he was just anxious to see her again, when he had the space to anticipate it, unlike when she suddenly appeared from thin-air without giving him a moment to watch her approach, and now he must approach her. Terrifying. He changed out of his blue jeans and black t-shirt and moved instead into a white t-shirt, with a faded greyblue button-down left unbuttoned, above the pants which he now wore, almost-grey chinos, and white beaten and torn canvas skateboarding shoes, which creased at the edges and bore the bearance of a defiled canvas, one that had been untouched by vision, as a painter does, but instead trammeled upon in mindless travel across the elements of the north-winter, its grey slush and crushed pine needles and sometimes the sticky sugar of booze fallen onto old and oak floors of house parties that he sometimes went to without knowing anyone, as he did now, he felt, towards Emma’s dorm, his heart and gut knotting together with none of the security of a knot, but as if one were biting down on steel, waiting for your teeth to break, for you knew the steel would not.
He arrived to her building, where she waited, friendly as ever, and he noticed that in the half-dying light of the bending colors of the horizon, which turned a muddied red, almost orange, with streaks of distant and quiet purple, as it journeyed into dark, put Emma under a new light, darkened her skin from pale and healthy vibrance into an almost tan tone, which made her blue ocean-froth eyes break out in contrast, nearly sharp, at least when she looked at him, and said hi.
Up they went into the dorm room, into the elevator, when for the first time they were close enough to smell each other, although his nose was unwise to the arrangement of fragrant, as he just haphazardly wore what his Mother bought him for Christmas, an Armani Aqcua Di Gio, which emanated from the spray of his exposed throat in the breaking of the March air as it turned almost-dark, and was ambient without insecurity, and was cold, deeply white complex as it journeyed longer into her nose, which spoke of almost-salt, almost-kindness, and was, in the end, mysterious and lonely as a barren white-tree fell by lightning long ago and which rose out from the soil still without leaves in a passed-by field near David’s homeland, and which subtly provoked Emma into a lingering curiosity and carefulness, mystified by the smell, as he was hers, which he didn’t have the words to describe, but thought was sweet and smooth like rose-petal flowers on an untouched hill, and utterly transfixed him in its pure invitation.
The elevator opened to the twelfth floor, where her room was, as they entered it over the multi-colored flecks that rode the dull grey bottom of the carpet, and into her room, which hosted plants, books, a bed, a chair, and a loose arrangement of minimalism, that barely brought itself together, somehow shallow and profound all at once, like the surface of the sea is, as it travels all across the Earth, but did not reach down into its depths to know its core, a strange knowing which saw widely but not deeply, which knew dark and light at once, as it did the night and morning, but never the leviathans that swam down into its heart, but yet was still moved by it.
They sat down, and listened to more pieces by the piano, and talked for a while, and strangely came close and yet not close enough, when Emma brought out something of interest, something she enjoyed and which David hadn’t experienced yet, tabs of LSD in a wrapped foil of aluminum. It was offered to David and he said yes, as he would anything she offered, and especially as he had no knowledge of this mysterious substance, and therefore no reason to fear. One tab each, one on her tongue, her tongue, and one on his. It tasted like nothing, and was swallowed without hesitation, as he looked at her, and she smiled and the dark light behind her went darker still, as they both waited for themselves to be moved.
The night came within 45 minutes, and with it the LSD sunk deep into the sinew of their souls, as the unraveling begun, to show them themselves from afar, like one does in the reflection of their back that showed itself in the conversation between two mirrors, one before your face, and the other behind, and together, yourself, stretched back into the back and forward into the forward for ever and ever, with no end in sight. The piano themes continued to play, Emma turned on some vaguely red light from bulbs that hung around the rim of the room, and as the profundity of the night unfurled itself to David, finally, and again, at last, as it did then, and now, again, here in this room with the image of the past that had embodied itself better in the now, and just then, as he begin to wonder at time, as he looked at her, he began to almost cry out, for he felt, then, that he had at last beheld beauty, the profundity of its surface, the glimmering light on water, which traveled from the dark reaches of space onto the calm and shimmering embrace around the earth, as it did on her face, which deepened and became profound as he considered its making, like one sees a painting, not just the image, but what was made into it, the way the paints themselves were fashioned, the relationship between color and light, objects and desire, what they had struggled to say since the artist had suffered to find his voice, but had done so at least, for this canvas, this painting, her face, which stretched back to the dawn of time itself, as his did, his eyes waiting since then for this moment, to see hers, at last, to see it! Her face, in its surface, held the entirety of what had been emerging, in the depths of all the love that had fashioned like the hands of many painters working together on a vast and unfinished work of art, but had conspired, for a moment, to resemble a finished product, with her lips, which held countless words of poetry and love that brought her ancestors together, with her legs, which spoke of her father and mother running towards each other again and again, and her eyes, which reflected countless witnesses of life which had at last reflected back into itself, into the mirror, and managed to chisel back into what it say through itself, as man cleaves himself free from formeless rock and into a statue, as she did, finally, in the silent words of her body, which held all the profound sorrow of the world’s birth, captured just now, and dying as it flies through mortality, as seen by Michelangelo as he drafted Pieta, the likeness of which was held on her face.
All this passed by in a moment, as he looked at her. He struggled to say anything. She had been looking at him all this while, which lasted the span of a second, and probed into eternity. He wanted to say it all. He settled for you’re beautiful.