Something in Common
A Story of Understandingby Gregory Adams
art by Teri Santitoro
He leans in hard against her, pressing his swollen hand down upon her shoulder, and asks after her price. It is a sly question, formed with a leather tongue and spoken with tubercular breath, from a man who has spent a lifetime asking after the price of things, and talking them down.
Kali reaches out an unhurried hand, snaps the man's neck, and shoves him beneath the table with the others.
Kali is very bored, and this is not a new experience for her. Nothing ever is, and it is in this that her melancholy lies. Kali is omniscient. She knows everything, literally all that can known. She knows everything about the chair in which she sprawls upon, the names of those who had sat in it before her, the man had chosen the tree it was cut from, everything. She knows everything about the bar she is drinking in; she knows that it is the most depraved and wretched room in the largest city in the world, and that it is the lowest point of that city. This was not a metaphor, but a literal fact: the bar crouched at the lowest geographical point in the city. It is as if the city were a long and dark funnel, with the bar fixed like a catch basin at the inverted apex. Each night, the place filled with all of the human refuse that sank, slowly spinning, to the very bottom.
The bar is crowded and dark. It is seeped in myriad and pungent odors, wrapped in suspicious sound, and Kali is aware of the origin of each nuance of every element. The floors are caked in mud and dirt and the clientele are filthier still. There had been two murders here tonight; committed in mute addition to the three men Kali had killed with her touch. One had died by knife, the other by poison. Kali knows all about them.
Across the table from her there is an empty chair, reserved for the Adversary. The Adversary is immortal, like Kali-- he is devil
and demon and saint of disease; his faintest touch inspires corrosion and entropy. He travels with her, had arrived with her, and is equally unmoved by the human drama which clatters and bangs all around them. Right now, he is in the men's room, had in fact been alone in there for a long while, and Kali knows what he has been doing in there for all that time. He is staring into the mirror, staring with an idiot grin upon his face. Mirrors fascinated him. His own image could hold him for hours-- sometimes days.
The Adversary can claim nothing that could be called memory: each moment is for him the same as when he had been expelled from heaven, onto the smoking black crust of the newly formed world. He has no true form (or none that he can recall, at any rate), and therefore each time he sees himself is as thrilling as his first glimpse. When he had gone into the bathroom, he had been a darkly beautiful Cuban boy, with silver-tipped shoes and laughing eyes, and he could be anything at all when he returned, the picture of the boy forgotten, a new shape fixed upon his mercurial form. Whatever his image, the eyes would still dance, for joy is the one constant the Adversary could claim.
Kali knows already when The Adversary will come out, knows what he will look like, just as she already knows that he will kill the young Frenchman who is soon to sit down and begin talking to her. She finds all of it mildly depressing.
A waiter places another bottle of absinthe in front of her, and waits. Kali reaches beneath the table, withdraws money from a pocket of one of the men she has killed, and hands the bills to the waiting man. He walks off without offering change. Kali snaps the top off of the bottle with the long-nailed thumb of her right hand, and takes a long, steady pull.
As she tips back the bottle, the young Frenchman, dressed all in black and looking out of place, asks after The Adversary's chair. He does this politely, and in his native French. That this is not the language of Kali's indigenous land means nothing: she knows better than the boy himself the beating of his heart and the tenor of his dreams: she can certainly fathom his speech. She nods a subtle, uninterested nod, and crosses her long, bare legs. His eyes follow the motion, glide over her firm body. As he sits, he peers beneath the thick curling hair that falls across her face, searching out her eyes. They remain elusive. She sets the bottle down, leaving lipstick traces along the threads.
"I am looking for life," he tells her, although she has asked him nothing. "I am looking, searching, for a meaning to it all." As he speaks, he settles his elbows on the table, and allows his wrists to cross before his brow. The cigarette dangling from his left hand singes the ends of his straight black hair. His feet he tucks up beneath his chair, and he kicks nothing.
He shifts his body and sucks on the cigarette. It is a long, steady draw, and all of his concentration and despair are expressed in the action of it. He holds his breath for a long moment, the shadows and smoke of the bar spinning behind his pale and handsome face. Suddenly, he collapses back against the chair, and expels the smoke with an exhalation so total and complete that it seems to take with it all of his life and spirit. His breath fans out across the table, and rustles her long hair.
"I am twenty years old," he begins. "I have crossed the continents and girded the seas. I have seen--" his voice seems to age with the telling, "--everything. And the world has left me cold." Kali looks up, takes a short compact draw from her cigarette, and leans forward. Now the light falls upon her features. She is light skinned, and desperately beautiful. He has her attention now, but does not look towards her.
"I know this world," he tells her. "I know it from one end to the next, and I have found nothing to recommend life. Existence is a sad and foolish joke." He pauses, and falls into himself, as if the supports which held him erect were at once chopped down. His strong and handsome face disappears beneath his hair, and his body shakes, as if with tears. She watches him now, her dark and endless eyes focused for a rare moment.
"And I think," he begins again, sitting up but not meeting her eyes, "I think that I do not belong here." A slight energy creeps into his tone. "I think that there must be something more to this silly and wasted world of men, for such as me." He turns upon her with great immediacy. "I look upon you, and I know, I KNOW," his voice rises until he is near shouting, "that you feel the same as I, that we are different from all of the rest, that we do not belong in this place, with the aged and the foolish and the mad--" he brings his palm down onto the table-- gently. He looks for the first time into her in the eyes, fixes her with his most intense gaze. "I don't know why I am telling you this, why I am drawn to you in this way. Perhaps, in you, I see something else, something more than the irony of death and the travesty of life. Perhaps in you, I see understanding..." His voice trails off as he leans towards her, and Kali gently reaches out an unhurried hand, and places it upon his smooth cheek. She looks into his eyes, and he into hers. At that moment, the Adversary slides his long, delicate fingers into the French boy's hair.
The effect is instantaneous. The boy's eyes go wide as his tissue and organs begin to liquefy, his flesh decomposing so swiftly as to give off heat and light. Kali holds the boy's gaze as he dies, but it is nothing she hasn't seen before, and it doesn't last. In a heartbeat, there is nothing left of him but a heap of steaming putrescence, and even this evaporates so quickly that the chair is bone dry even before the Adversary sits down.
"I was enjoying him," Kali sighs. But the Adversary has already caught a glimpse of his reflection in the glass bottle, as Kali knew he would, and he does not reply.