Lukies (pt. III)

 

    The next morning, Gregory sat up in bed promptly at seven o’clock. He walked slowly down the hallway lined with decommissioned radio equipment, taking care not to disturb the twinkling colloids which hung in the atmosphere, and attended to the maintenance of his body in the kitchen. Here, he brushed his teeth in the empty metal basin on the left side of the sink, spitting out foaming urchins of coagulated lukie that were tinged a vague pink from the blood of his gums.

     Outside his back door, he heard a stirring on the wooden porch. Switching off the dim bronze light above the stove so as to obscure his silhouette, Gregory approached the quadrilateral windows embedded in the door and watched through the diaphanous curtain which hung there.

     It was his neighbor, who had moved in across the hall not two months before: a sporty woman in her twenties with blanched skin and oddly thin, yet flaxen hair, pulled tightly flush to her skull and terminating in the back with a bulbous circular bun; this was all too evocative of the round valve handle of a bulkhead door on a mid-twentieth-century battleship – just a few affirmative twists to the left, and the panel of bone enclosing her cerebellum would swing wide open on its hinges 

     She was loaded down with three cotton bags, pregnant with soiled laundry: as she stumbled toward the precipice of the stairs, the rough-spun cotton chafed and reddened her otherwise pale thighs, just below the denim cuffs of a pair of, frankly, obscenely revealing shorts.

     As she took her first descending step, a swarm of agitated lukies came whipping around the stained brick cornice of the building, revolved a few times about one of the stairway’s support beams, and then launched themselves directly into the woman’s face.

     She immediately paused, one foot already stabilized on a lower step, and began a tirade of furious spitting. All the while, the wind was insinuating itself under the strands of her hair that had not quite fallen under the guillotine crunch of the elastic band which held her bun tightly pinioned. These hairs stood on their haunches in mystical obeisance, wavering in a half-sentient salaam, and then joined in with the ongoing harassment of their owner’s chapped lips.

     At this point, one of the swollen laundry bags slid from her shoulder and bouldered down to the landing below, where it crushed the already mutilated remnants of a basil plant into its own desiccated soil.

     Gregory’s neighbor straightened out her spine and anchored herself to the raw wooden handrail with her now freed left arm. A posture of resolution if ever I’d seen one. With the back of her other hand, she cleared her lips of the lukie scrim and took a further moment to pluck each offending hair from her scalp, whereupon she released the traitors to ascend on the rising breeze and depart from her.

     As she neared the runaway bag on the landing, a pair of words pulsed from out of her larynx, bounded over the bollards of her teeth and the weathered barrier of her lips, and then floated up the stairs toward Gregory. As the words passed through the transparent glass, they were swaddled in a cloth of semi-muteness, which depleted them of their already paltry freight of human warmth before permitting them passage into Gregory’s ear canals:

     “Fucking things…”

     With this, the woman plodded farther down the stairs, encountering no further incident, and disappeared into the laundry room.

     Gregory backed away from the windowed aperture, yet held it in his gaze for a few solemn moments before departing from the kitchen.

     Once again in his bedroom, he stopped to retrieve a wadded pair of black jeans, which he had trounced underfoot on the previous day while doffing them. He pulled them back onto his legs, slipped his feet into a pair of colorless sneakers, and shrugged on a green fine-woven aviator’s jacket, which had been hanging on the back of a grey metal folding chair. Then he left his apartment, pulling a plume of slightly ossified lukies behind him in the vacuum action of his closing door.

     Outside, the temperature had dropped roughly ten degrees and the sky had adopted a bruised marble pallor. Here in the street, the lukies adhered strictly to the ground, crackling with a static charge. On his way back toward the EL station at the bottom of his street, Gregory passed one of the trees which had emptied the contents of its pods into the world of his immediate neighborhood (a shaded oasis of red- and yellow-brick tenements, interspersed with eccentric houses designed in a late-nineteenth-century Chicago version of the Art Nouveau style, to say nothing of the odd crenelated castle).

     The tree in question was only a block south of where Gregory lived. Its domed root system was visible to the average passerby from several feet away: these were not the distinct tubular roots which grope for a more horizontal purchase of the soil and to which most are accustomed, but rather a coagulated umbrella of tortured bark, frozen in its own special sort of defecatory agony, lacking a definition of parts. In the canopy above, the once green footlong pods, hanging among a gallery of spiny, serrated leaves, had shriveled and curled back upon themselves, revealing at their inner apex, where the pod walls met the junction of the stem, an incandescent jewel of sap. Despite the overcast skies, the inner light of these jewels dazzled Gregory’s retina, causing his grey irises to collapse into pinpoints. He averted his gaze from the arboreal pageant and proceeded farther down the sidewalk.

     Once he had gained the mouth of the street, he turned toward a titanic concrete overpass that stood nearby and walked into its black underbelly. This structure doubled as the local EL platform and the Interstate 90 traffic bridge. Overhead were corroded steel girders upon which, at any given moment, anywhere from thirty to seventy pigeons would usually be roosting. But today, there were only a few, perched in odd, isolated positions and regarding Gregory as he passed below them with an affect either of brilliant, intellectual hatred or merely the dumb liquidity of pigeon eyes.

     In even, diagonal lines corresponding to the placement of the girders, Gregory’s path was striped with pigeon shit, layered upon the concrete in various thicknesses and states of yellowed encrustation. He navigated these bands of cloacal filth with the smart bipedal kinetics of a hurdle jumper until he arrived at a musty stairwell leading up to the back entrance of the platform.

     At the foot of these stairs, he came across what appeared to be a sleeping pigeon bearing a rare lactic down. Its breast extruded before it, provided a pillow upon which it lay its dormant head. But as Gregory knelt down to it, a new array of details resolved themselves to his now dilated pupils: the bird was not sleeping, but was quite dead. Its beak had been separated from the rest of its skull by a swollen tumor of lukies that must have accumulated during its flights through Gregory’s neighborhood before dramatically expanding. Moreover, what had initially seemed a sheening coat of porcelain feathers revealed itself to be a further colonization of lukies upon the creature’s corpse. Its naked white skin was slightly visible under the hoary accretion which had overtaken it – indeed, it was utterly featherless.

     Having looked his fill, Gregory stood erect and, tilting his head upward for several seconds, stared wildly into the empty box of sky enclosed in a rectangle of shuddering, slimed cement just above the stairwell.

     Then, for reasons which I am positive I shall never have the privilege of conveying to you, Gregory returned his eyes to the site of the overridden pigeon and, sweeping his leg back to its anatomical limit, gave the corpse a brutal kick into the street. An immediate car, streaking past the elephantine struts of the underpass colonnade, drilled the pitiful object with its front and back tires, whereupon the erstwhile animal exploded into a shimmering dust cloud and oozed up and away through the narrow gap between the interstate and the train platform, no doubt drawn there by the tornadic pull of torrential traffic, tearing both toward and away from the Chicago ‘Loop.’

     Gregory then bounded up the tainted, yellow steps. At their summit, he entered the automated turnstile, ratcheting through its mechanism – the iron maiden of the urban peon. Just as he crossed the borderline at which the platform opened out onto a view of the moaning interstate, the structure beneath his feet began to quake. The distant shriek of pulverized rails trebled in volume. Just a few seconds more and a blur of raw, riveted aluminum and stolid polycarbonate windows whisked past Gregory’s face. The train came to a hoarse stop.

     Amid the degraded gonging of the handicap-accessible intercom, the doors of the nearest train cabin rolled apart. Gregory ducked inside and wedged his body down in one of the few available solo seats, which was bolted to the floor at one end of the car. Immediately adjacent to this seat was a scabrous emergency door, plated in the same beaten aluminum as the exterior of the train and plastered with visually intuitive warnings and hieroglyphic escalation plans for what a passenger should do in the inevitable event that his life should come under threat.

     The hulk of the train shivered and dinned, reengaging with the electrified third rail and overcoming its inertia. Then it set off down the tracks.