Shortly after nine, Jeff Harrison climbed fourteen steep concrete steps to the street. It was empty which seemed odd to Jeff at this hour of the evening. It would not have been empty in Pittsburgh, not his street, the street his apartment was located on. His landlady’s building but Jeff’s apartment, properly speaking. His rent was paid eight months in advance. It had been paid up a year in advance, but the ponies at Bay Meadows failed him a few times consecutively and that had left him not out in front so much as he would like to be. He would catch back up; he could feel it in his stride. Not his physical stride but his mental stride.
He stood quite at ease at the top of the stairs, breaths making small clouds about his head, looking left, looking right at his leisure. He did turn his back on the street at one point, glanced down into the dark recesses where the steps disappeared completely. Nothing moved in that dark, nothing breathed. He unbuttoned leather gloves, slipped them off and into his winter coat pockets (a long coat made of a rich charcoal wool, alpaca, a coat that had cost him dearly but one that the ponies, having been especially reliable for several meets running, had afforded him). He slipped his bare hands down into the pockets as well. In the left pocket, Jeff fingered the label, the sleek threads of embroidery on the patch of silk. Shrugging his coat up, he resumed facing out on the street, stepped off the curb, crossed over, and headed north; he thought himself about eight blocks from his hotel and set off.
About the street he was on – by morning, Jeff would not recollect the name. They were all very much the same, common and forgettable, swathes of asphalt between high buildings, block after block after block of the same. This one had been cleaner; hardly any rubbish at all. Come to think of it, none. Not even a styrofoam cup. If a cup scuds and rolls on an empty side street in the general vicinity of Prospect Park, Brooklyn, New York, and no one hears when it topples along the curb, no one witnesses its journey – was the cup ever really there? People thought of things in the most bizarre ways, like trees falling in unoccupied forests, why shouldn’t Jeff ponder rubbish? More specifically, cups? Absent cups, that is. His shoes on the asphalt and then on the concrete walk made a noise, of course they did, with each step. He anticipated the sound of hard leather on the ground surfaces before they briefly occurred and each step was more like an echo of one that hadn’t yet happened or one that had passed and already been replaced by quiet. For no reason other than ceasing the sounds associated with his own steps, he stopped. His toes in the lamplight were shiny and brown just as shiny brown dress shoes should be at all times; his trouser legs were a soft cocoa color, an ill match with his long coat, but he had needed the long coat tonight and, besides, perfect fashion had never been, would never be, his forte. He hadn’t walked far, less than two blocks, before slowing to stop, examine the absence of sound. As a result, other noises became apparent. Before pausing, it was as if his ears had taken on the focusing aspect of eyes and created their own sort of tunnel vision, concentrating with minute attention on asphalt to concrete contacts his feet made. Music lolled sticky beats near the lamppost just ahead.
Someone had left the narrow jazz bar, let the static of snare drums and hum of a sax do a groping turn out on the sidewalk before the door pulled shut. There was a wheeze about the door as it closed. Then bass thumps from inside were more felt than heard by the passerby outside. Jeff fingered the label inside his pocket. He would not go back inside, not revisit the scene of the crime. The true crime. Her crime. Shame on her. “Shame on you.” There. He had said it out loud. “Shame. On. You.” And there, again, each word enunciated with the same slide and hiss as his hard leather soles on asphalt, on concrete. Brief. Hardly there. Crushing.
The sharp comparisons came then, the comparisons of sounds made at the bottoms of stairwells, how a neck snaps inside the muffled wrappings of a cashmere scarf in November. What the walls of the stairwell absorb. How a stairwell is so very porous when compared to the metal, glass, plastic interiors of a parked car on a high desert road. Without ears to hear these ends to beginnings, the romantic lies can’t thrive, can’t grow. Shame on them. All of them. He would not go back inside. He had blocks to go before reaching his hotel and a conference to attend first thing and early tomorrow. He had enough music in the contemplation of brown leather sounds, in the feel of a newly acquired label torn from the collar of a used up blouse.
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