2 A.M.

That 2 A.M. fresh air. Dignan is on the mattress beside me, struggling to get through Gravity’s Rainbow and giving up, getting no further than I did. My chin rests on the pane of an open window, my right arm extending onto the garage roof. I let the drops plop down from the eaves and soak the tip of my cig, and mingle with the grease in my hair.

I stare at nothing in particular. Mostly streetlights shimmer in the lane. Rivulets gush along the curb and spill under manhole covers set into the sidewalk. Twice a car – different each time - plowed by, entering and exiting the frame squared by my open window of the street we had just moved onto.

A clump of silted ash crumbles off the tip of the fag and I look back over my shoulder.

“Hey Dig, pass me that bottle, will ya?”

She passes me a bottle of shampoo and I squeeze out the last squirt and rub what I can into my scalp and stick my head back out as far as I can just as the rain picks up.

She throws Pynchon’s skull-crusher onto the carpeted floor beside the bed, picks up the empty bottle in the groove around me and trick-shots it through an open doorway into a wastebasket in the bathroom.    

The volume’s turned down low. Goodbye Lenin’s on the plasma.

A single shelf juts above the bed; A painted piece of wood with supports the last owners drilled into the drywall. Slaughterhouse-Five, The Virgin Suicides and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time are the only novels on the shelf, and a volume of Ghost in the Shell is on the table by the bed. The mattress itself is bare, the sheets drawn back and the mattress cover, having come off, lies crumpled in one corner of the bed. Dignan looks up and frowns. She lifts the manga, searching for something, then slides onto the floor, groping under the bed. She pulls out a copy of Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting, smoothes out a bent corner of the cover and slides it onto the shelf. Then she kicks Pynchon’s robbed Pulitzer under the bed.

“Give it an extra good kick for me.”

She gives it another punt, the toes of her right foot just barely grazing it.

Myself, I’d sworn off reading. I’d only just, that day, finished The Prague Orgy. By Philip Roth? Suffice it to say, there were no orgies, no plot, and I threw it down in disgust.  

I let go of my snuffed-out loosie, burnt halfway to the filter, and let it run down the sloping roof to the gutter. The shampoo’s stinging. With eyes shut, I hear my fire-crotched sex fiend in the room behind me throw on Veruca Salt. I shake my head and lather up with half my body practically on the roof – the edge of mattress under the pane splotched and in patches practically soaked – when I hear “Idiot!”, and she grabs my legs to pull me back in. I re-position myself under the eaves, rubbing my fingers into jet-black hair until I figure it’s clean enough.

I finally pull myself from the window and towel off. The T I’m wearing, all black but for the cover art of Outkast’s ‘Aquemini’ on the front, is soaked around the neck.

Dignan switches off the chicks who sing ‘Seether’ and focuses on the movie, jambing the volume button before tossing the remote on the mattress. The movie’s in German, so we end up only reading the subtitles anyway. She leans over:

“You know, it was after seeing Goodbye Lenin that Tarantino decided to cast Daniel Brühl-”

“-In Inglorious Basterds.” She sez this every time.

“Yeah.”

“Tell me something I don’t know.”

She shrugs, exhausting her well of trivia.

I think for a second. “Ingrid Bergman died at midnight on her birthday.”

“Huh.”

“I guess that’s a good time as any to check out – the moment you turn 67. She was so good, even the cancer politely waited on her.”

Eyes glued to screen. “What kinda cancer?”

I jiggle my chest and she glances over.

“Here’s lookin’ at you, kid.”   

I again grab the towel between us and wipe flecks of water off my arm and pull the window mostly shut. I still like the muted patter of rain, but not so muted as when it’s shut.

Red pops in a Softies CD and suggests a game of Go. We slide onto the floor and bring out the board.

The patter of rain on tiles and glass and a steady clicking of smooth black and white stones on a wooden board, not to mention muted German dialogue from the Wolfgang Becker movie we periodically look up to glance at, culminated in Dignan, around noon the following day, telling me that in that moment, she thought: “This is what Hermann Hesse must’ve felt like when he wrote Siddhartha.”   

At one point she asks if I want one and when I say yes, she gets up and goes downstairs to get us a couple Mike’s Hard Lemonades from the fridge. I look at the digital clock and point to it when she gets back.

“Want to...?”

“Sure.”

She stops The Softies.

Sometimes, if we’re both up at this time, she’ll get out an acoustic and pluck out Elliott Smith and I’ll sing “2:45 AM”. We do this for a few minutes and by the time we get back to the game I’m bored with it. She places a white pebble on an intersecting line and I pass her a black one and then another, conceding the game. She puts away the polished pieces and set and presses play again. We finish listening to The Softies and by then the movie is almost over, too.

I flop onto the bed and lie back and open the window a little wider. She flicks the switch and turns on the dark. I start to drift. Dig stays awake and watches FLCL.