In the staff room Corrin took a minute to collect herself, brushing away the metaphysical cobwebs of her recent foggy existence with wide-arching arm sweeps, re-admitting herself to the ward of the “rest of the world” and hoping as she punched-out her time card, grabbed her plaid-patterned jacket, and headed back out that Purgatory would remain somewhere behind her, imagining it as a physical, tangible place, forcing the nerve endings on the flesh of her back-half to feel a separation, a distancing, freeing her to her phantom romance.

He was standing right where she’d left him only turned now to face her. The illusionist hand of the hanging light fixtures had tired of its routine and moved on to new audiences and in the split second before all of his shadow-features revealed themselves she was fist-slammed in the sternum with an unreasonable fear. What if that lack of light had been the hot sun-core of her desire? What if, gone, these now-seen features didn’t hold up to her imaginings, climax reached long before the act played itself to conclusion and the resulting disappointment too great to allow her to continue? She had her jacket on, all set, ready to go, there was no excuse to justify a change of heart to this stranger if she couldn’t go with him into their future, not to mention the dousing of the excited flame, whose warmth and glow she had not felt for so long, she had so quickly let consume her… all of this in a nano-second, making her head spin…

…And then she saw E. Tromal for the first time, head round but chiseled, hewn from the living rock of the earth in an Eastern-European way, black hair strategically gelled upward in tiny punji-sticks, milk-smooth brow ending in neatly trimmed eye-brow windowpanes over icy blue eyes, not frightening, but holding in their two micro-orbits more mystery than she’d heretofore encountered. He was well built under a black turtleneck sweater, bright blue jeans and penny-loafers – odd footwear for rainstorm weather – not bulky in the way of Olympians but bigger than a marathon runner’s iron-chiseled wire, his low-hanging wool coat reaching to his knees, blanking out the peripheral muscle masses, right hand clutching the heal of that long, black umbrella. He smiled as she rounded the end of Tellers Row, something off there, hard to label. She let it slide, all of her pre-feature fears melting away, flowing back to join abandoned Purgatory in the past, because, let’s face it, the man was handsome.

He held out the elbow-crook of his left arm in which she snuggly fit her own. They walked across the white-hot lobby, his loafers and her sneakers scuffling along in tandem, neither saying a world due to some subconscious notion that it wasn’t necessary to speak, only to be, as they were, and nothing more. The revolving doors separated them for a moment, arms rejoining of their own accord underneath the dripping brim of the marbled overhang, still crowded there but thinning out with the dissipating rain, now reduced to a steady pour not uncommon this time of year, the Biblical finality of the storm gone just as he said it would. With a smooth flick of the wrist the newly-acquired umbrella elongated and snapped wide, coming to rest over their two heads like a great puff of Cumulus crossing the sun.

Now that the world had become traversable again new crowds had formed as refugees learning the coast was clear, a great exile toward destinations once prohibited open and waiting to be gained once more. They parted around them, no one looking up, conscientiously side-stepping as with the passing of royalty, no one looking at all, as if neither of them existed in this world, phantom specters roaming about some parallel realm, felt but not seen, something maybe in the air around them, static, that hewed through the jungle foliage of pedestrians, clearing the way. Corrin didn’t comment on this, self-doubt as always the conductor behind the oiled and rusted steering apparatus, sure as sure could be that it was all in her head and to vocalize it would be to prove once and for all the fragility of her mind and scare this (her last chance?) opportunity away, an idea she couldn’t handle, not the thought of his face, that perfect Slavic face slackening and fading into the crowds, that lonely walk back to the bank and the cold salami and rye she’d made every morning in her empty kitchen for the last seven years, the endless hours waiting for another chance that would never come, the eternal bus ride home, lying in bed, staring up at the ceiling and crying herself to sleep, the long-trek into oblivion still on course, all the while cursing, cursing, cursing, all her fault, every last miserable lonely moment for all the years past and all those yet to come. So quick, Corrin, change the subject, get someone else behind the wheel, someone as interested in solving this puzzle next to you, this situation, this circumstance so out of place in your sad history, unravel the mystery, find love? Find something, even if it is just lunch, maybe a good fuck, and then so what if sex was all he was after, he still chose you didn’t he? You were still the one he took back, undressed, licked, kissed, entered, out of everyone, all those other girls He. Chose. You. But maybe more than sex. Who knows, maybe this one is the one, the one to come and rescue you, finally, from the ghost of Charles, to move you onward, forward, away to new places and new things, a new life, a new marriage, there’d be children this time, three of them, two boys and a girl, in that order, must name one of them after the father so first you need to find out what that E stands for, raising kids, happily ever after, even if he dies first you’ll still have lived, will still have those kids so you won’t have to die alone… but you’re getting ahead of yourself. I know you can’t help it, all these years since Charles, all this time alone, so easy to live out those fantasies now that you have a face to fill in the picture. Be here though. Be now. Don’t get so lost, so lost you miss it. It is actually happening! Ssshhh! Be calm, calm, calm. He hasn’t noticed the crazy, not yet, maybe never will, or he has and doesn’t care, either way, either… how about you focus on lunch. Find out where he’s taking you, what you’re doing, having, oh he can have me… please, please, Corrin! Oh…!

“Where are we going?” She sounded nervous. Did she sound nervous? What did nervous sound like? It sounded like this. Damnit. I knew it. You’re rushing, letting the mask go already. I knew you would screw this up…

“Actually, I was thinking we could go to my place. It’s close to here. I could cook us something.”

Under any other circumstance any other woman would have hesitated, maybe not have heard any direct alarms, but the caution flags would certainly have ruffled in the breeze, signs of an indistinguishable something looming ahead, but not Corrin. For her it was a re-affirmation of everything lapping about her thoughts because this was exactly what she’d been fantasizing about behind her glass barricade, this dark and mysterious stranger come to liberate her from her prison cell, thinking again that even if it was just sex, to take advantage of her, use her, that it still meant she was desirable, enough for one man meant enough for another, fueling the hope that had come in conjunction with dreadful desperation to define her.

“Okay…”

The arm she’s been holding onto, at first a hand-hold, the rung of some enigmatic ladder to grace, has taken on a new identity, transforming into a black-clad fishhook, one to which she has nibbled curiously for long enough to surmise a state of no-threat, chomping down hungrily and though this fantom fisherman has not given the farewell tug, hasn’t sunk the barbed end through her gills to reel her in for the kill she is no longer free to roam wherever the currents may take her, that a limitation of mobility has been attached, physically, but more so to psyche, a dream cage where illusion reigns, truth an idle jester to which no great importance has been ascribed.

The rain is gone, the clouds morphing into great cathedral skylights, the pedestrians shedding their work week skin for King’s Kourt garb, lace and stocking, frills and ancient jewels, bowing as the two pass, the stolen black umbrella now a dove-feather parasol lolling back on her King’s Royal Shoulder. She adjusts her crown, placing her free hand on the bend in that almighty hook, the waist-low tail of her plaid-jacket billowing in the soft breeze created by the awed cooings of the parted masses in a wide-sweeping train of silk mottled with white swan plumage. In the marbled lofts flag-hung brass horns take up the call. There are faces here that she recognizes, or at least believes she recognizes, faces she hasn’t seen or thought about in years. There’s a middle-aged man standing to the left, his gray-peppered hair thick and wooly, smiling a wide-toothed grin, the crows feet at the corners of his eyes shaping a print of unending merriment, her father, died almost fifteen years ago, aneurism in the bath, always happens in the bath, and there propped on his shoulders a young girl of maybe five or six, snuggly fit in a mother-of-pearl Communion dress, hair done up in pigtails dappled with freshly plucked blossom, smelling of late spring and new growth, eyes sparkling the innocent sparkles of youth, heavenly flower girl, her on the day of her father’s second marriage, the one that had promised a forever of beginnings without end and only lasting three years, the hag nowhere to be seen, thank God for that, and the pair fading back into the crowd as Royalty doth pass, almost gone as she turns to face them, hanging back long enough, wisps of ethereal smoke, for him to give her that old reassuring wink. There are others here too, school teachers clapping with beaming pride, Corrin turning out as beautifully as they’d always said she would, her maternal grandparents abandoning their wheelchairs to stand and applaud, her happiness healing away all ailments. Someone, a college lover she thinks, steps forward and with graceful bow hands her a lavish bouquet, lilies, orchids, roses of every size and color-combination, bunched up and around each other, large as a Volkswagen but she has no trouble holding on, holding high. Next to her E smiles vacantly, taken by the moment, showing the world his new queen for the very first time. The sun is shining to the tenth power, the world as gold, liquid in the shifting rays reaching down to touch every last awe-struck cheek, wings sprouting from beggars’ backs, taking to the air to rain white petals down on the road ahead… And here’s Charles standing at the end of the row in a polished black tuxedo with that knowing grin. She feels a tear ripple and fall from the corner of her eye, seeing that handsome face, the face of the Past come to bid her final farewell, to usher her onward into the future…

Thunder borborygmies in the distance, the cold-steal sky a well wrung sponge dripping its last few drops. It’s a harsh contrast snapping back from Technicolor to a landscape existing in the opposite, the rain bleaching everything it’s touched, a water-color streaming southward. E. hasn’t noticed her absence or if he has doesn’t show it, walking in erect silence through the thinning crowd, umbrella still up, a superfluity in post-Rain-dom. Gulls are flying inland in the wake of Hell’s fury, cawing and swiping at each other in air deemed “safe,” arguments coming to them in staccato, bent fenders and blame to be placed. Those non-English speaking immigrant owners stand in cleared store-front entryways with hands on hips or leaning on broom handles, breathing deeply and mumbling either curses or prayers in foreign tongues, it’s difficult to tell which.

Charles is the only dream not to leave her, hovering somewhere behind and to the left, an odd thing, she muses, that the past always seems to exist in that direction, and he isn’t judging or scowling or being anything negative, just watching, keeping an eye on things, more of that “ushering” we talked about earlier. Occasionally she is able to unglue her eyes long enough from her dark escort to cast them his way but he’s a crafty ghost, dropping into blind spots, remaining a constant thought but nothing more. E. smiles down and she returns the favor.

They leave the main strip, heading East, the X on the treasure map an Eden not far off, someone, she’s not sure who, perched up there in the crow’s nest beginning to hop, one salt-encrusted hand clutching his hat to his head against wind and excitement, pointing and hooting, a strange Dodo, at the first mirage-hint of land on the crystal-blue horizon. She throws an absent-minded glance to her watch, the wrist on which it sits resting in that fish-hook crook of arm, reading it up-side-down, oh, inverted world.

“How much time do you have?”

“Oh? Hmm… What?”

“For your lunch break. How much time do you have?”

“Oh! Oh, don’t worry about that…”

So he didn’t. They rounded another corner. She’d lost track of direction (a certain old man’s hair would have come in handy here). They could have been anywhere in this great-city-maze, but, my darling, my dear, darling, darling, you can take me anywhere you want, it doesn’t matter where we are or where we’ve been, not where we’re going only as long as it’s together, always and forever together, my dear…

“It won’t be long now.” Won’t be long now but no longer will it be ‘won’t belong now.’ Do you see Charles? Do you see, Charles? You didn’t leave me to live and die alone. It was temporary. I wouldn’t have believed it, believed that you’d condemn me, not in your nature, that nature not yours nor in you, to be so cruel, no, too kind for that, always were so kind, and don’t think that my dear, darling E. here (E. E. must define the E.) is meant to be a replacement because you who are not so easily replaced should know better, jealousy does not become you, green makes you look pale, sickly, Red works though, Red for Love, Red for Romance, Red for the dawn signaling the beginning of a new beginning and would. you. just. look. at. this. house!

They’d rounded the last roundable corner prior to destination’s realization and here it was, our crow’s nest lookout grabbing that hat with two hands now, jumping madly, “There she be! Hard to port! Hard to stern! We’re comin’ up fast! Ho!” It’s an old Victorian style construction with what appears to be three stories though it’s hard to tell with the different levels staggered about like they are, a serpentine wrap-around porch with silken support columns, chimney to rival Three Mile Island done up in fine-mortared red brick, tiered slate-shingled roofs tilted and pitched in perfect heavenly triangulation, stucco siding, cream trim, the hint of a gazebo out back, horse chestnuts hemming in the immaculately close-cut front lawn, breaking up the Hollywood palms roaming up and down adjacent side-streets. In all the identityless surroundings this Haven shown as a bright and illustrious Rose (forget kindling, this was pure gasoline for her fire-desire dream world), lifting her heart, if you can believe it, higher than it’s already ready been lifted before. E. didn’t break stride at the cross street (tactfully ignoring the dark-blue sedan parked half a block East, the two shadowed forms coming to attention behind the disfiguring light-refracted windshield important, but not now… a funny thing, time) so when Corrin stopped to open-mouth gape at the house before her the barbed end of that fishhook got its good, gill-sinking hold, tugging the fisherman back a step which brought a laugh out of her, one of those hearty-chuckles that he joined in with, my how those eyes do Blue, smiling with his whole face, so beautiful. They crossed together, lunch the farthest thing from either of their minds.

The scent of the yard (which weighed approximately seven hundred and sixty nanograms) was sweet with dew and fresh cut grass, mixing somewhere behind the scenes with the blood-metallic ozone after taste of a good, hard, rain, their soft-soled shoes scraping on the sement walk, porch-steps and porch-boards creaking in an old country way, E. fishing out his keys, releasing her arm for a torturous moment to unlock the plate-glass front door, Corrin smiled anyway, the cause a hand-carved St. Peter lawn gnome guarding just to the left, a foot-and-a-half tall and grinning up at her. She caught a last look at Charles and the door swung shut behind them.