Part 2 of "Night Index" by Guest Author Ryan Madej -.

.....and here's the rest of the story!

There has been a terrific response to Ryan's story when I posted Part 1 on Saturday past. If you missed it then pleased scroll down to the end or go HERE!

My name is Ryan Madej and I began writing in my teens. Just this past summer I finished my fourth book entitled The Threshold and the Key, the final volume in a novella/memoir cycle that I’ve worked on for the past 20 years. My style is in the experimental vein because I find that playing with form in the fragmented way that I do plays to how I think memory works. The short story I’m submitting was originally published in Infinity’s Kitchen no 6, that showcases works to an American audience. It’s my pleasure to show it to my fellow Canadians.

Night Index....continued,

  H: Halcyon
 
Where the fuck is he? What is taking him so long? But I digress. I find comfort in the past as most people do by drowning in the familiar. Over the course of the last few months a kind of bomb has gone off in my mind. A time bomb. Literally a bomb that erases the present, insofar as only the immediate is of any interest to me, and the rest of my days are spent living in situations that are only tangible through the lens in my head. One piece in particular has been floating around as of late, taking me back into that deep fluorescent gray sphere of my memory. I must have been about ten years old at the time, wandering around in the garden trying to catch those cabbage butterflies with a makeshift net, feeling only the deep swell of well being that is common amongst most kids, only there is something wrong with the scene as it progresses. The longer I play the wind picks up, the clouds gather, and I come to realize that perhaps this didn't happen at all. My idea of memory is only a disguise for imagination, and the longer I wait for him to come see me, the more I know that what I see through that lens, the more it needs actualization. 

I: Icicles  

I'm surprised she hasn't texted me yet. Perhaps I'm just taking my time in order to push her buttons. The streetlights have just come on and I realize I'm running late, knowing that she will be pacing back and forth in her apartment pissed off that I'm not in her arms. Good.  As we draw nearer, the more my feelings for her linger in an odd space between strong affection and coldness. If nothing else I've achieved a sort of control with her. I can hang over her now like those icicles on the eaves of houses...

J: Jealousy

 
Third cigarette. I decided to open the bottle and drink a little in order to calm my nerves. Maybe he has decided to forget me and fuck some other girl. The topic did come up once when we were lying naked on the bed and turned away from another, me looking out the window of my bedroom, and his eyes gazing into the mirror in the corner, perhaps staring at the curve of my back. I asked him if he would ever tire of the games we played with one another. Without turning over, he said in a soft, almost boyish voice that he didn't know but that every game, no matter how intricate and pleasurable, would inevitably end with one side being defeated.  I asked him what he meant. All he did was chuckle.   
K: Kabuki 

As I walk over the High Gate bridge, brightly lit and empty, I feel a void inside me. Nothing. Odd that she wouldn't make an effort to try to contact me in order to see where I was. Perhaps our relationship is different from others—yes, definitely different. But different how? What is it about us that make us unique? The way she looks at me when I touch her is more the look of a little girl than a woman, and perhaps that is what I find to be the most appealing aspect about her. How she wriggles beneath my hands as I stroke her skin or touch her breast as though she is resisting me. It is responses like that—subtle and intensely erotic—which make me believe they hide something about her. I will never know. Like a kabuki dancer upon the stage acting out the movements of a story, she covers her inner world with beautiful make-up.

L: Letters, Lies

 

We were having a drink on a rooftop bar during the summer—a night suffused with a sticky heat and a growing mutual drunkenness—when I think he asked me if I had ever received a love letter from someone. My head swimming with whiskey, I asked him to repeat the question. Instead he produced a folded piece of paper from his pocket and handed it to me, his eyes three quarters closed and his breath thick with the smell of Bombay gin. Leaning back in my chair and lighting another slim cigarillo, I put the letter up to the dim patio lantern and began to read: Funny how in this age of distances and isolation I came to find you across those great distances on a computer screen. Lonely is no longer a word I know since I found you. I remember laughing. I also remember how incredibly empty his words sounded. But again, I found him interesting despite his tacky lies. When I looked over at him again something silver flashed in his hands. He smiled and showed me the tiny knife he was playing with in the growing moonlight. 
 
: Millennium 

 

 

I see her apartment off in the distance, the pallid light coming from the living room in thin streams. Pausing in the street, more deserted now than before, I lean against a lamppost taking a flask from my coat and sip slowly. Looking up at her balcony I have the feeling that I won't return here after tonight. Just call it a hunch. Maybe I have grown tired and bored in much the same way when we entered this new century and realized I have gone nowhere but inward away from the light. Many people claim to know where they are going and how they will get there.I've just let impulse drive me to where I need to be. I throw the flask into the street.

 

 

N: Nihilism  
I'll be ready once he does arrive. After all this time together I've finally learned how to see, and by opening my eyes wider than ever before, I understand what I must do. In order to move forward, one must break the mirror and walk barefoot over thepieces. Only then can I truly understand what I've been trying to destroy all these years without regret. Perhaps deep down he even wants me to do it for him, because maybe he is thinking the exact same thing. Nothing left. 

O: Origins  
Someone once said that this universe is possessed by war and games. I would go so far to add that in the midst of that great miasma of energy that brought us here to this point in time, death would have to be the third.

 

P: Pipe dreams

Images change in my head. Moving away from those of his beautiful face and into that place where butterflies play and roses bloom. Some call that paradise. I call that an impossibility, even though the images are so clear and alive. I step outside onto the balcony and breathe in the emerging night air, all cool and dead, and look westward seeing only the faint glimmer of the day that passed...That and what I thought was real with him.
 
 
Q: Questions 
I ask myself: Where did this all start going wrong? Answer: When our eyes met under the glare of those black lights. 

R: Rain

 

 

Why is that when we are so close to the end of a given situation that our minds give way to distant memories? Even now, especially now, I remember the presence of rain as that natural process stirring my thoughts as the vivid darkness set in. The sting of leaving this apartment in the middle of the night when the streets were still and filled with deep puddles, mysterious unwanted tears matching the landscape, always indicated I was heading somewhere I didn't want to go. Not this time. Tonight the cycle is broken. Tonight I act. Tonight I transcend.
 

S: Snakes

The lobby has several chairs that sit beside a small wall fountain whose vertical ripples remind me of a dream I had of snakes, or rather of one snake in particular. The room— it always tends to be a room with no windows or doors for quick escape—is dimly

lit and the snake lies coiled near a slow burning candle, rearing its sleek head as I approach. We study one another in way that is uncanny as though we share some sort of symbiosis, then the mouth opens. Only then do I accept that I will not survive...I

close my eyes and smile.

 

T: Tears 

Turning off the lights, I sit down with my head pressed to the door, listening for the elevator door to open and his soft approach down the hall. My bitterness has turned to tears. Large, salty tears that run down my cheeks and neck into my cleavage. I can almost feel his fingers there, and I shudder to think that he touched me so many times. I try not to breathe deeply so any tiny sound reaches my ears, even my heartbeat which seems dangerously slow. Somehow, I knew this night would be memorable.

 

U: Unicorn 

As I ride up in the rickety frame of the elevator, the sounds of Vangelis flood my ears—Memories of Green, Blade Runner soundtrack. And as the sounds give way to the scrutiny of memory, the vivid image of Decker's unicorn comes to mind in

much the same way it did to him, almost like a dream. Just as he may have thought the image was not really his, but planted there by those who created him, I begin to think that nothing has ever really been mine...even her.

 

V: Vendetta 

One can only assume what they will do in any given situation until they are actually  confronted with that situation. Now, as I hold the blade in my hand, I give in to what I've always felt: a desire to see an ending.

 

W: Walking

 

I like to walk in silence, for in silence one comes to know the slow moving current of the universe and the dynamics of change. Someone told me that once. It might have been her, actually. Sounds like something written on a fortune cookie, but a

grain of truth nonetheless.  The hallway is still; I must tread lightly so I don't destroy what I have just created. All I have to do now is walk through her door.

 

X: X-rays

 

Once the mirror is broken, the reflection is gone and one can truly see the other. Or rather, one can now see through the other.

 

Y: Y chromosome

 

My hand grazes the doorknob and my breathing slows. She never locks the door, for she is the inviting type and I'm always welcome. The man, or in this case insect, drawn into the web of the widow spider, suddenly paralyzed and put to sleep. How tired I've become. She has sensed my fatigue and prepared a bed for me to lie down in. Thank you for everything.

 

Z: Zenith 

I can almost taste him now. Lightly licking the edge of the blade, my hunger pangs reach their peak. Tonight, I dine alone.

 

 

Thank you Ryan for sharing your story. Well done!
 
For any of you readers that want to reach Ryan, send him an email at ryan.madej@outlook.com



Please leave a comment below and/or your name for a chance to win a copy of Wall r War to be drawn for January 31/2018.