I sat in a café listening to garage rock. The vocals were gritty, muffled, like ambient noise in a shopping mall. If you sat on a sofa at the crossroads of a mall’s corridors and tried to carefully listen and distinguish the specific words and melodies within that mass of sound, all you’d get in the end would be a buzzing headache, like having your head surrounded by bees or flies. The garage rock was making him a little dizzy too. He paused the playback, and the sound switched to the café’s Christmas hymns and jazz from old films.
The sound made you drowsy. Outside, the sky was darkening bit by bit. The café was like a self-enclosed little space. Had the people who walked in really considered the possibility of walking back out? It felt as if everyone here could live here for the rest of their lives; what happened outside no longer mattered. All that mattered was cake, seventeen-dollar milkshakes, and the drowsy yellow light from the lamps.
The gray hat on the Santa Claus model drooped down; at this point he was no different from a dwarf. His smile was no longer an admonishment but a lure into an inescapable abyss. Santa Claus is coming to town.
Are you listening? You who live beneath the gray floor. I know you’re fed up with the dents all over it. How about lifting the cover in the floor and killing everyone here? The light split into several beams; I don’t want to see this light… I never want to see this light again…
I heard the sound of a fuse burning. The sound was low, thin, sharp. A little like the sound of a car starting, raised a few octaves. A few foreigners in front of me were probably still laughing about their friend’s love life. I felt a wave of revulsion. There was no eros left in this little space, only the floating smell of cream and wax.
I burst out the café door. Outside, snow landed on my body, melting very fast. I think my life may not be much different from this snowflake. Tonight’s moon was as clear as an image on a screen. Could I fall from this fragile sky and shatter into countless pieces of human residue?