A messenger cycled by, wearing black lycra, a dusky red bag slung on his shoulder, with short-cropped ginger hair and a full-freckled face, his thin legs making a slow rhythm on the pedals, his silver eyes unfocused, pushing back the curtain of the now, drilling into the future of the very next, unswervingly. He leaned in close to the curb and turned the corner neatly, sliding between the taxis and disappearing behind a dented white van with a chain and padlock on the back doors and metal panels over the rear windows.

The signal said 30, still. Memo watched the man exhale smoke from his nose, saw how traces of it curled on his upper lip, how it vanished into the air like the mist from the manhole. His next shave was overdue. He was looking at one of the headphone girls.

The signal said 30, still, then 29 finally. Memo began to exhale, slowly, carefully. She had slipped into slow time. Down into slow time the night before, as she was leaving Black Dog Alley. She had become aware of it just at the moment her foot, her left foot, met the sidewalk outside the door. Something was different. Something in the sound of the grit under the sole of her shoe. Something in the light raking down from the streetlight across the street to her left. Something in the smell drifting off the river. The world around her continued in normal time, birds flew, breezes blew, people came and went. But time inside Memo was stopped, or very nearly so, moving so slowly as to be indistinguishable from stopped. She was at peace with it, she welcomed it, actually. Or she would have, if she had been able to think about it.

Twisted together like snakes, they were. Car Cox’s profile was burned in Memo’s retina, the curve and recurve of her nose, the soft swelling of her cheek, the folds in the skin of her eyelid, the hairs of her eyebrow -- each one of them. Her lips, as they stretched open Memo had seen the light on them, in them, through them, precisely and thoroughly, and her brain had recorded it all, permanently. And as each detail seared into her memory, time lost meaning, lost significance, lost it’s power over her. Her consciousness was no longer swept along, no longer floating in the river of time, the change of moment to moment was not automatic, the pull of time was no longer irresistible, time was irrelevant, or nearly so.

She had walked all night, walked across the bridge into the city, walked across the island, walked as the sky pinked and blued, walked as the newspaper trucks made their rounds, the garment delivery trucks rumbled through, then the street people began to stir and with them the first commuters. Now and then she was conscious of her phone vibrating, after the fourth time it happened she turned it off.

She looked up. She was no longer standing at the intersection. The signal was gone. The man with the nose was gone. The two girls were gone. She was standing on a cobblestoned street, next to a rusted basement accessway. There was a small tree in a large concrete urn next to it, painted all white; trunk, branches and leaves, flat white. The hawking call of a solitary gull echoed between the buildings.

She studied the building before her. It had been recently renovated. The street facade was mostly glass, interrupted here and there by painted steel columns, split on their axis. Thick glass was set into the cleavage of the rumpled metal. High above was a single circular window, large enough for a person to stand in and touch each side with their fingertips. Behind the glass was a grand, tall space with unpainted brick walls. Abstract paintings, almost square, were spaced on the walls, Rothkos. She walked up the green-gray honed slate ramp to the pivoting glass door and went in.

There was a counter in an alcove next to the entry. The girl sitting behind it flicked her eyes up at Memo and then down again. She turned a page in her book with the eraser end of a pencil and adjusted her silk tunic. Memo noticed her slightly-too-strong scent as she walked past.

The painting was red. Reds. The painting was larger than Memo. It was only red, but it was all reds; the red of burning sunsets, fury red, the red of broken hearts, of fire, blood-in-the-snow red, rust red, it was red redness of red.

The painting was white. The painting was larger than Memo. White with a black stroke, a violent stroke, a black calligraphic sweep, a word but not a word. A sign but not a sign. A significant gesture, inexplicable. The sharp edge of the black paint cut at the white field mercilessly.

The painting was blue. Cobalt blue. The blue was deep, it was relentless, and it was un-modulated, untempered by any variation, with no evidence of brushwork of any kind. And it was deep, it seemed to go on and on, backwards in time and forwards in time. Deep into her, and far away into space. And the painting was larger than Memo.

There were other paintings and she stayed long in the gallery, standing motionless before each one, while the sun angling through the high round window made a slow-moving ellipse on the bricks of the wall at the rear of the gallery. She was conscious of the softness of her shoes on the sandy surface of the thin-jointed stone floor under her feet.

“It’s like church,” she thought, turning towards the door.



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