The Dampening

A brief afternoon shower, not even enough to cool the air, and after it passes Spenser is struck by the way the summer light clings to everything. As if some cloudborne tide had washed over the earth, and in receding, stirred up primal brightness and life, spangling every treetop and rockface and rooftop in a slimy glaze. Pavement, lamp posts, windows— all cast in an unnameable sheen of purple and orange. It’s impossible to imagine a colour that nature can’t produce. The air itself is infused as the sun sinks low, flaring hard.

The air is warm and sticky with droplets of postdiluvial birdsong. Spenser walks his neighbourhood and inhales deeply through his nose. His lungs fill with lilac hues.

The rain has stirred the scents through which he walks. Dirt. Lawn. Street powder and grit from the gutters. Acrid tang of burnt hamburgers on the grill, but that’s ok because it’s summertime and the sun is back and the beers are cold and the kids are happy and lighthearted and they’ve got sugary gums and sweet blood running through their veins so nobody cares about the burgers. At least he thinks this is how it might go, Spenser, walking alone. Wandering without purpose, pulled gently by the unseen threads of his neighbourhood. Each breath true, each breath pure. Feeling a part of this place.

His syrupy reflection glides through the bodywarp of glowing puddles.

Spenser thinks about prairie thunder. Thunderless rain seems impoverished, incomplete, a failed incantation. How he misses prairie thunder storms, the kind that ferment in a blackening mass on the distant horizon, an atmospheric leavening that swallows the sky as it drifts ever closer in the late afternoon. Thunder to rattle door knobs. Thunder that sets the dogs to whining.

He passes a woman whispering encouragement to a grizzled old hound limping happily at the end of a leash. The dog meets his gaze and looks embarrassed as he squats and hunches, then embarrassed all over again when the woman bends at the waist to pick up a greasy pile of shit. The woman doesn’t look at Spenser but he feels embarrassed for her, too. And for himself, crossing paths with them and bearing witness. All these local faces that make up your life. And all of them bound to specific zones and topographies. He has only ever seen this woman here, between the bus stop with the spiderwebbed glass and the blackberry cluster at the corner, only ever seen this dog piss or shit somewhere along this hundred-metre stretch of tired grass. Clearly she lives nearby — how is it that they only meet here? His mind can’t place her elsewhere, can’t picture her tapping on cantaloupes in the produce section or weeding through the bottom of the mystery shelves at the library. Does she think about him in these terms, as some extra in the background of her life as she shoots the same scene again and again?

He spoke to his mother on the phone earlier. Vapid chit chat. Weather. Work. Watching anything good on TV these days? His mother’s voice now sounds like chalk on a blackboard — fragile, powdery. Spenser blames the smartphones for draining these conversations of whatever vitality they might have ever possessed. Texting has stolen our ability to converse, to formulate and sustain conversations. After his dad died, he remembered talking with his mom for hours on the phone, real talk, life and human purpose and the secret genealogies of family recipes. Who were those people speaking and listening intently, cradling phones between neck and ear to free up hands as they moved between kitchen and couch, puttering about with their little lives? Eating, unloading dishwashers, stuffing socks in a drawer. Where did they go? Once we were there and now we’re here. Once there, now here. Now here. Nowhere.

Now here.

Nowhere.

The rain was just starting as they had hung up, and by the time Spenser tied his shoes and made his way out the front door of his building, the shower had ended, the ashen storm clouds drifting north and blurring the skies in their wake.

Cars skim by, tires sizzling on the wet street. Spenser turns back in the direction of his apartment, feeling the slight incline in his calves. He hears the slap of a basketball on a slick driveway behind a fence. Sees a shot arcing over the top of the fence, sees the shot rattling around the rim. More dribbling, another shot slamming against the backboard. Tiny peals of thunder. He does not see the shooter.

Another deep breath. Spenser feeling a part of all this, his neighbourhood, a part of everything. A part of it and apart from it.

A part.

Apart.

A part.

Apart.

A part.

Apart.

_________

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