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From
"The Lamb Lies
Down on Broadway"
by
JJ Sargent
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He loved
circling the block around the Square
at night. It was like swimming in an electric sea. He’d
move along slowly and
squint his eyes until they were tiny slits carved along
the distended arches of his
ruddy cheeks. He was mostly ignored when he walked like
that, but when he was
noticed, folk would wonder why exactly was this guy
walking around smiling
with his eyes closed. But Steve could see where he was
walking, and he’d
see rainbows squashed between his eyelids so that the
light was unfocussed and
the colors runny like translucent gel.
In moments like that, he felt strangely transcendent,
as if he were moving away
from the gritty sharply focused world of the Square into
a place where none
of New York mattered. None of the car horns or the
people, the dodgy barkers
who huddled in the doorways of the pawn and porn shops,
the tourists they
tried to scam, the ghosts in the basement at the
Exotica. That’s what he called
them. That’s what they were. Living? Dead? Even they
didn’t know. They were
always there, though. Perhaps they were not exactly the
same, not that it mattered
who they were. It was enough knowing they were there,
Steve thought.
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