The Auditorium

The weight of summer hangs on the city’s shoulders like a mantle. I was told once, in grade school, that the oppressive heat of Verona was partially what caused the bloodshed between the Montagues and the Capulets. I believe it. The heat makes people irritable and rash. Everyone is on edge, waiting for the rain. I cannot think in this heat. Sweat beads along my brow and makes my glasses slide down my nose. 

I was in a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream once. What was it? Freshman year? Or was it Sophomore? I was Lysander. It wasn’t anything other than you’d expect for a high school production of a classic: a varying mix of talent, hand painted set, crowd of parents and begrudging siblings in the audience. And it was so hot. So hot that the actors fanned themselves with their programs and palms of their hands. The flies had buzzed in the auditorium and the windows fogged with condensation. I remember standing there in my homemade tunic and tights and listening to the flies weaving in dizzy circles around the room.  I waited in the wings for my cue and all I could hear were the flies. The city is this auditorium. Always the din of the crowd, the heat, the noise. The anxious feeling of hundreds of eyes on me. I feel as though I’m always surrounded by noise.  It presses into my temples, drills into my brain, tears at my skin. I just want quiet. 

God, I’m depressed. 

I’m always surrounded by noise. The honking of cars, the rushing clatter of the subway, and chatter of voices, an occasional shout rising above the din. People blur past me. Sometimes I feel like the rest of the world is in fast forward, moving at 2.5 times normal speed. I keep a firm hand on my bag as I walk. A man talking loudly on the phone jostles me with his should and I stumble. He glares as if it was my fault. It must be the heat. The world is glittering around me. 

I’m dying as I walk these streets. I’m suffocating. 

Classes are monotonous. The rush of warm air on the subway. Dropping my keys as I unlock my apartment door. God, my apartment is still. The slanting rays of sun reflect off the windows of the buildings across the way and slice bright patches across my carpet. It smells musty and the walls hardly muffle the traffic below or the movement of people living above me. Even though I left the fan on all day, the air is thick and muggy. I throw open a window and the noise of the street intensifies.  

 I sit by the window smoking and watch the reflection of the sunset in the windows. Purple, orange, blood red. Night falls, and finally, it begins to rain. The smell of the heat leaving the asphalt reaches my window and I inhale it with my cigarette smoke. It’s delicious and soothing. I watch the rain fall under the glow of the streetlamps.

At ten, Delaine arrives. She has porcelain skin so fragile I’m surprised she hasn’t shattered yet. She looks like Snow White. I suppose she is my girlfriend. I’m twenty million miles from her, half way to Mars. Whenever she reaches out, her words slip through me. When I try to touch her, she shoves me away. There is not much love left. We both know this, but for some reason I can’t leave her. She has grown around my body like the vines along the side of an old house. 

“How was your day?” 

“It was fine.” 

Our conversation is dead air. There is no need for it. She’s not here to talk to me anymore. 

I pour her a drink and taste it on her lips when she kisses me. The liquor burns and the sensation is hollow. I can hear the rain outside and I wrap my arms around her. I hold her tight in the semi-darkness of the living room, reaching desperately into my heart to find the butterflies I once felt from her touch. I want so bad to love her. How do I make myself love her? When I’m with her, I still feel so alone. When was the last time we talked, really talked, leaning over the table in engagement? Laughed over something mundane? Just sat comfortably together? 

“I love you,” I say and feel nothing. She doesn’t say it back. 

But still we sleep together. Kissing feels too intimate now. More intimate than sex. 

Her dark hair cascades like spiderwebs over the pillow. She sleeps beside me, skin reflecting the light from outside. I sit up in bed watching Delaine’s lips move softly with sleep. She is beautiful, but it is a removed beauty, something one must admire but not touch, like a painting behind velvet ropes. 

I disentangle myself from the sheet and stand, the memory of drunkenness pounds at my temples. We had drunk too much earlier. The ground had pitched as we moved together. I collect my clothing from the bedroom floor, as though I am the one sneaking out of a strange lover’s home, and dress in the quiet dark. I wish she’d left but it was too late. I didn’t have the heart to send her out past midnight. I feel around the bedside table for my glasses before remembering I left them in the kitchen.  

God, it feels like my brain is full of fog.  

I open the window again. Light another cigarette.  

Even at this hour, even this late at night, the city is full of movement. It’s well past three am, but the street is full of taxis swishing through puddles and the merry laughter of drunken revealers.  

I went to a party a couple months ago. Suit and tie kind. Delaine invited me. I remember swimming through a sea of people until I could escape out to the balcony. There was a man out there with his tie undone drinking Hennessey straight from the bottle. He had sea glass eyes and long dreadlocks tied up in ponytail. 

“Are you alright?” I asked.  

“I will be soon.” Even though almost half the bottle was gone, he sounded stone-cold sober.  

“I’m Ambrose.” He extended a hand.  

I took it. “Ludo.” 

“This is the emptiest party I’ve ever been to,” said Ambrose. It was packed with people, but I knew what he meant. He had extended the bottle to me, but I gently declined.

“All trust fund babies and people pretending to be them,” I replied. I wasn’t innocent. I am the latter. “We might as well be standing alone.”

“The whole city is empty,” he had answered. There had been traffic on the street below.  

“Things like that are easy to ignore. I carved out my life in this pattern. Now I have to live it.” Ambrose had slowly blinked his sea glass eyes then took another long drink from the bottle. “Excuse me. I have people to pretend to care about.” 

He’d left then and I never saw him again.  

Sitting by the window, feeling the cigarette calm something in me, I wonder where Ambrose is. Who he is. Perhaps he’s a fairy. Oberon with his homemade spider silk wings, waiting in the dark shadows of that auditorium. There was something otherworldly about him. He was right though. The city feels so empty even though it is alive.  

I lean far out the window. For some reason, tonight I feel like I could fly away.

“Come back to bed.” Delaine is standing behind me in the dark, a blanket wrapped around her shoulders.

I shut the window. There’s much in this empty, empty city I have to live with. At least the heat is gone. I flick cigarette out the window and watch it fall down, down, down to the street below. 

I’ve never felt more alone.