Cal Bannerman

Idols lost

I don’t remember what day it was. All the calendars were run through and we lost count quicker than you might expect. I remember that the sky was pearlescent pink, except for a slowly widening circle of blue up above, the wind too gentle even to lift the hairs on my arms, and that the woman on the balcony already looked part of the landscape.

I was crying soft tears into my smile, because I’d remembered the tune of a song from our childhoods, and she lit me a cigarette in her own mouth, so I had to move out into the freer air to take it. Against the sky her hair hung cropped like streaks of black lightning. She took the moss and vines of our building in her hands, absentmindedly, releasing their oils to soothe her callouses.

In those days I would make up stories about her callouses. Like how she had rubbed nimbus clouds from her thumbs to water the flora dismantling our city. Or wiped the devils from my eyes. That night she touched her pinkie to mine on the railing, just to let me know she too was made of skin, though I noticed that the coolness at the base of my spine had not been there until then.

Smoking my cigarette became easier, more enjoyable as the wind picked up – I used to hate smoking in the closeness. Funny that now there’s little choice. I remember blinking, and the first of one trillion stars was suddenly visible, the pink of the sky a purplish bruise deepened to endearing black eye. Come morning it would yellow and be gone.

Since the lights stopped coming on in the evening, since televisions went static, in the absence of headlights on the freeway, I’ve seen a thousand nights – each more breath-taking than anything that came in the days before. For the first few months after the kettles stopped gurgling, she and I would watch the night sky like it was Sumida River Festival. Though sparklers and Catherine Wheels and bangers and rockets could never have matched the sight of satellites and space stations falling from the atmosphere. They streaked like comets across our peripheries, space-race kindling, crackling golden on re-entry, plummeting to the earth with a distant suck of air. Occasionally one of the older models would shatter against dense air like an apple thrown at a wall. The satellite broadcasting its starlight against the black in a million pieces, and she would inhale, hold her breath, sometimes my hand, and we were happy.

That night was less exciting, more peaceful. Several of the planets were visible. The city libraries had died long before I was even born, and no one read paper books, not in my lifetime. For all my searching then, I could find nothing that might explain why the planets twinkled like rainbow suns. I thought maybe their lights had yet to go out. That maybe when they did, the people there would see our dull, blue-brown orb, illuminated by its moon. Maybe they’d think it was beautiful, too.

That night the growing breeze distracted me from my reveries. Thoughts of people gathered silently in buildings built of authors and understanding, paying reverential study to the pure art of learning, escapism. Thoughts of her, how she was before, who she wasn’t any longer. The wind finished my cigarette for me, and I moved to ask her if she’d stay for another. I think now I understand that she was already gone. She’d worn a smile thin and strong, chin tilted starward, cheekbones set. Her eyes mirrored the skies. The whites of her knuckles, clamped to our balcony railing, receded, her pallor returning to lustrous black.

I thought of sunbathing in public parks on a shared blanket – grandma’s crochet – and of saké by lamplight in the fog of the river; of lazy Wednesday evenings, when those words had meaning, when we’d recline on the couch and stream reruns of our favourite shows. I thought of libraries, transcendent with colour, the smell of binding, sound as eloquent and absent as in those other idols of society lost: temples and shrines. And I saw her there, sat at a desk, though it must have been imagination, not memory. I saw her and I think I called out. She raised her finger to her lips, caught my gaze, winked.

When I opened my eyes again she was gone. Just my cigarette in the ashtray, the barest impression of rough hands left in clammy signature on the railing. Summer winds moved on, back toward the coast.

Today, she is deer in the tall grass, saplings on the rooftop. She is sunset over the old harbour, a chirrup of birdsong. She is the air against the nape of my neck, in the hairs of my arms; the breeze which carries my call, returns in reply. At last, she has found her place as part of the landscape.

Cal Bannerman is a writer and bookseller, currently residing in Glasgow (though their heart belongs to the lowlands). For many years their focus has been on poetry, regularly performing at – and for a time hosting – spoken word nights. Most recently, however, they have completed their first novel, and are now working to take it to publication. Instagram: @calbannerman