The Fairy King
On the ineffable kinship of strange
[Free-range fiction, for a change. This one’s for my freaks and geeks.]
Summerween. Street carnival. Folks promenade in costume. Kids trick-or-treat between vendor carts. A punk band plays. A while later, a rock band gives us a long jam session. After dark, the blazing implements of a fire cabaret light the mouths of alleyways.
There’s an air of grotesquerie and familiarity, like we’re all extras in a Rocky Horror Picture Show. Costumes veer between home-made fairies and elaborate clowns. It’s warm but the air’s moving.
Let’s turn the temporal dial and zoom in. Eight in the evening, still daylight on the longest day, but the sun’s behind the buildings now. The band plays, a few rare covers, early 90s alternative and grunge, and then ... the guys get into their own songs. Think Zeppelin but crunchier, think Santana but rawer, think music that makes you jump jump jump or else spin out into something like concert dance —
Then tune the spatial dial. One person, two feet, red pavement. Think a couple checks to see if you tore a callus off but mostly just going for it on the hot bricks, not caring if your feet bleed —
Think finding your way into rolls and falls on the bricks, soles of your feet black and hands and ankles getting that way —
Think pulling off your hair tie and, just for a second, looping both hands into it, held high —
Think gathering others in with glance and gesture. Lanky teens, old folks, everyone, using your eyes to show them: Look how beautiful this is. You can do it. It’s yours. Dance is life.
Then think of one man, silent, watching, not quite watching, gaze always just past you — small, neat, dressed neither rich nor poor, a cipher of a man, a blank slate — that stillness in the midst of noise and motion.
Unreadable.
He walks away and you finish dancing the set because how not; the moon is in its first quarter and dance is Jesus and Goddess and reason and imagination and the only true language of praise —
You let the last chords carry you to the ground.
It’s now full dark.
You scout around for that small, still, watchful man and there he is sitting a couple dozen yards off on a stone bench on the edge of the long blocked-off street, no phone out, no social media, just — waiting.
Of course you go there, because it’s his privilege to be courted — isn’t it?
After approaching this cipher of a gentleman, this blank slate — neither old nor young, rich nor poor, fair nor dark, more or less expressionless, about my size — I initiate a fairly innocuous conversation: “Do I know you?”
He answers that I do not. He doesn’t smile, but his eyes smile.
I carry on the conversation just as I would at a poetry reading or gallery opening except: He’s sitting on that bench, remember? Instead of joining him or remaining standing, I sit at his feet.
No reaction, no surprise. Mild as milk, as if barefoot ladies come out of the dark and sit at his feet every day, he continues the pleasantries.
“What’s your name?” We give each other first names.
Then, because I saw how he watched the band, “Are you a musician?”
Nods. “Classical, though. Viola, cello.”
“Do you have a Facebook or anything?”
“No.”
“Then I guess I’ll see you around.” I stand and go.
By morning, I have learned his email (this is my city; I know things), sent him an email and received an answer: a picture of him in gear for a particular kind of kink.
Alien, unexpected in particularity but:
It’s that gift of trust.
I don’t need your ropes and trappings. And though I’m often lonely, I can live without much touch.
But I do need to know our body language will tell each other we’re safe to step off the edge to somewhere strange.
If instead he had asked, with that same expressionless courtesy, for my hand and then drawn a line with his knife down the palm, that also would have been a gift.
The next day, I look again at the photo. Maybe I was more right, and more wrong, than I knew.
Those really are his wings.