He thinks he sees her sometimes, in the barest flash of sodium streetlight off auburn hair between the strokes of night, but when he crosses the street to find her, she is already gone. And now he sits down at the diner on the corner, the scent of coffee rising from the freshly brewed pot before him to form phantom curlicues in the still air. The buzzing of the decrepit neon sign by his elbow proclaims delicious hot food in a hurry around the clock, three lies for the price of one, and he hangs his hat up. It has been another night of hard work-- another night of half-spoken hints, half believed answers, an oblique sliding around the true point of the conversation. Lies and unworded promises are the currency of the night where he works, and he is tired of it all. He picks up the pot and pours; the hot black liquid smells like ambrosia, as the radio behind him strikes the hour and begins to read the news. There is still death in the middle east and corruption in the courts; nothing has changed in the time since he heard it last, and he is darkly satisfied that the world is as it is. Not the way it should be, but it has been a long time since he has believed that the world can be saved. The sugar dissolves into the black liquid with the barest hiss as he stirs.
She has passed him twice already tonight, screened by the rain and hidden by her umbrella, close enough to touch him, as she has so many times before. But she has not. He is not ready, and until then, she will bide her time. And so she watches him for a long moment through the rain-blurred glass, and finally she turns away and disappears back into the night.
He can feel her out there; it has become an article of faith for him that she will always be just around the next corner, waiting for him to finally find her. She was his beloved once, but he lost her to the night and now she is his love and redemption and vindication in one alluring package that comes with satisfaction guaranteed. All he has to do is find her. And so, between his work, he asks questions that burn his street credit, promises favours that he will always have to keep, his monomania an occasion for secret amusement among those who know him. He thinks he sees her again, her lithe figure an indistinct shape in the drizzle, but when he runs across the rain-slicked street to put his hand on her shoulder, it is merely a startled girl who was there when he wanted it too much to be her. The rain is picking up as he pulls his coat tighter around him and lights up in the lee of a building, the flare of the match bright in the gloom, the end of the cigarette turning into the glowing eye of the nicotine demon. The neon signs in the city square are indistinct in the rain, turning the scene into a surrealist painting, a Monet, a Seurat, depending on how hard he squints to see what happens. But all he is doing is wasting his time. It is time to return to work, to the shadows within the shadows,
She knows the truth, that he has to learn to recover what he lost with her before she can come back to him, that while he now knows more about humanity than he ever dreamed, that knowledge is cold, rigid, a solid picture of what is always changing, and while he knows enough to make him successful, it will never be enough to quell the burning desire in him to seek what lies beyond certain knowledge, because he will never turn that burning light upon himself to see what lies beneath his façade.
He remembers her now, curled up into his own warmth in the lee of the building, as the wind blows past him, the rain drumming against the pavement, remembers her gift of seeking out the truth behind the lies of the night.
But the thing about knowledge is that every scrap you gain merely shows how much more there is to be found, and she had kept looking, further and further, until one day she disappeared forever into the twilight and he never saw her again.
His cigarette is dying as he taps the ash off the end, takes another drag.
Still. He can sense the ebb and flow of people around him now, a knowledge that he gleaned from her, and it has made him… successful.
But it is not a success that he is proud of; all it has made him is the king of the night.
And no matter how hard he tries, he cannot seem to break the barrier that she breached before him, to cast off the last of the chains that lock his mind.
He turns his mind away from the train of thought; piercing the illusions of others is easy, but to pierce his own creations--
He raises his eyes as the cigarette goes out into the rain; he thinks he sees her again, but he cannot be sure, not in the dark, and so he lets her walk away.
She sits down on the park bench now as the rain ceases, her hands in her lap as she waits. The time is almost right now; he is almost at the brink of the understanding she has been waiting for-- but not just yet. It would be so easy to reach out and show him, but that would also be wrong, because the first thing that she has learnt is that to think for someone else is the greatest crime of all in this world of sin. And so she sits, and watches, and waits.
He is on the move again; sometimes it seems as if he has not been still since she left, that all he has been doing is bouncing from place to place and job to job like the steel balls in the pachinko parlours that are all the rage in this godforsaken city. And he is tired. There is a whirlwind voice inside his head that is shouting at him, telling him that the world is wrong the way it is, that what he sees is only the barest edge of what could be. He has run from the knowledge, run from the pain for so long, but he can run no more; he is tired, and the pain is waiting. And so, in the end, he turns the gift upon himself.
She can feel it now-- the flash of insight that she herself experienced, the anguish he is going through that makes the one she felt seem the merest twinge of guilt. It is what she has been waiting for, what she has expected for so long now. When exposed, cotton-candy lies become razorblade truths, and the other side of the gift has always been this: while others can no longer lie to you, you, too, can no longer lie to yourself. She sits and waits a bit longer, until the sky begins to lighten and the deepest of the shadows has faded, before she comes to her feet and shakes out her parasol. And she seeks him out.
He is suffering; the illusions he has carefully woven around his psyche have been ripped away in one night, and he can do no more than huddle in a corner of the alleyway that stinks of the business of a hundred drunken men in the night, the grime of the streets clinging to him, his eyes staring into nothing before he feels her fingers touch his shoulder, tilt his chin up to see the face that has haunted his dreams for so long now. "Come. Come with me, and you need never be alone again."
They have left us now, butterfly lovers in the new dawn that he has waited for for so very long, that she has waited for him to join her in, both of them finally whole again. The night still waits, but they no longer care; let the night have its secrets and lies. It is all the night has.
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