Libby's World

Three solid weeks of staring out his apartment's only window into the falling snow had driven Arthur mad. At least he thought it had been three weeks. His watch had stopped so long ago that the hands had vanished and only the numbers remained -- numbers which, Arthur was almost certain, weren't in quite the right order.

However long it had been, Arthur was done with his apartment. He'd spent all of the time he wanted tripping over children's toys: dollies and horsies and tea cups; all just junk without a little girl's imagination. And the photos hanging on the walls were exasperating. How much time had he lost (Hours? Days? Weeks!) searching the black and white glossies for the identities of the happy looking couple and their pigtailed little girl? An impossible task with their faces whitewashed into obscurity! He just kept drifting back to the damned grimy glass and the hordes of white flakes falling past it.

Even now, as he stared out into the snow yet again, he felt something silently calling to him, almost a sing-song, pulling him through the glass and into the whiteness beyond.

He stood for a moment, nervously spinning the ring on the third finger of his left hand (was he married? ) before undoing the triple-lock on his door and turning his back on the life that no longer felt like his own.

***

Outside, hot air crashed down over him in an avalanche. There was something disconcerting in that but Arthur couldn't fathom what. The snow, falling forever in downy white fractals, barely crested the tops of his Converse. Shouldn't it be deeper, he asked himself. He picked up a flake -- the size of a ping-pong ball -- and squeezed. It snapped dryly, like Styrofoam, and fell away in chunks. He watched them trace their chaotic course back to the ground and fall into footprints. They were small, narrow, made by a woman's foot, and led away from Arthur's door as if they had begun there. He heard the singing again, high and light, clearer this time but still not enough to distinguish what it was.

Unable to resist the siren's call any longer, Arthur stepped out into a city that looked nothing like a city should.

The streets were empty, the stillness astounding, as if the greasy air itself had drowned everything but the snow. The buildings themselves, too, were queer, oddly disproportionate to the image Arthur held in his mind of what a building should look like. They looked as if their features had been painted on, and they glistened dully in filmy, source-less light.

"Hello," he said, startled by the unfamiliarity of his own unused voice. "Is anyone there?" The city and the snow gobbled up his words. They were gone before reaching the far side of the street.

Arthur heard a whisper in the back of his mind, like a guilty conscience long ignored, telling him to be afraid but he wasn't. If anything, quite the opposite. He felt invigorated, excitement that was almost sexual in its potency, by the prospect of plunging into something new and slightly dangerous. At least he did until the earth began to shake.

A cherubic hand, pudgy and round, bigger than the Earth itself hove into view with the lumbering grace of a whale rising from the depths. It cupped the sky with ease. Great vertical shudders lifted him off the ground only to slam him back down again. His legs crumpled under his own weight and he smashed flat into the pavement. Five, six, seven times the whole world shook -- or was it Arthur that moved while everything else remained motionless? Even after the actual quaking stopped, the air seemed to throb and roll, like water in a bathtub. He pictured the garish city crumbling around him like a child's plastic blocks but the buildings stayed intact, an impossibility given the violence of the tremors. Only the snow -- whipping round wildly now -- seemed to have noticed the quake.

As Arthur lay on the ground willing reality back into focus, the universe shook with laughter. He closed his eyes and clapped his hands over his ears but the giggling filled him still. Just when he thought he would surely burst like a ripe melon, the city sloshed to one side and lay mercifully still. He stood on shaking legs.

The footsteps were still there, beckoning him, the song still on the wind. He followed them, forgetting everything but the growing urgency he felt deep in his gut.

***

The bridge lumbered out of the storm like a prehistoric behemoth from a nightmare, its ironwork stretching up and away into the swirling whiteness. It was cold here and that cold banished the unnatural serenity from the air. Everything became instantly more real, clearer, and sharper. Arthur tasted petrochemicals in the air and felt the resistance his limbs encountered as they moved - had they always been there? The singing became a steady whine, a constant buzzing in his ears and in his bones. Only then did he recognize it as music pulled from the bridge's abutments by the water rushing past below.

The snow seemed unable or unwilling to touch the bridge's steel and the black asphalt of its roadbed bed but Arthur didn't need the footprints to follow anymore. At the center of the bridge, in the shimmering halo of light cast by a single lamppost, stood a girl wrapped in a long knit sweater. She clutched her thin arms across her chest and shivered. Visions of flesh and heat flashed through his mind's eye even as something dark and dreadful perched upon his shoulders. He approached her cautiously, as if she might catch his scent and dash away. The closer he got, the more recognizable she was, as if more bits of her were cementing themselves in reality with each step he took. Something peculiar about the shade of red -- bloody brown really -- of her hair tickled the edge of his memory. He wanted to turn and run but his feet would not follow commands. They drew him ever-nearer, compelled by the song of the bridge, compelled by mindless lust.

"Hello," he said, shocked at how much harder his voice sounded in the crisp air than it had in the snow. The girl said nothing, just turned to regard him with sad blue eyes for a moment before returning her gaze to the river. He followed her stare but saw only blackness, emptiness so complete it made him feel like he was pitching forward into nothing. Is this what she saw as well? It couldn't be. It hurt to look at nothing for long, like it was sucking at his eyes. He peered over the bridge's railing -- wanting to see blue-green water churning around the abutments -- and gasped when the blackness stretched up to swallow him.

Images and sensations burst in his head like fireworks: the gelatinous warmth of his girlfriend Elizabeth's left breast in the fumbling grip of his inexperienced hand; the giddiness in the pit of his stomach as he said "I do" to her in front of a congregation of their family and friends; the joy that had stolen his breath as he watched his daughter, dear, sweet little Libby erupt from her mother; the lustful heat he'd felt in his groin when he'd first met Jasmine churning like curdled cream with guilt and the certainty of what he was about to do -- a lifetime of memories he'd lost pouring back into his head from a cosmic decanter.

He fell away from the railing and cracked his skull on the pavement. Arthur coalesced around the pain.

When he opened his eyes again the frail girl stared down at him with those blue eyes -- so pitiful and wide -- a rivulet of what he thought to be drool running from her lavender lips down over her chin. Jasmine.

"Where are we?" he asked. The fear in his voice tasted bitter but it was real for, now that he knew who he was and where he should be, this counterfeit city, this soulless simulacrum he had thought to be idyll, was exposed for the nightmare limbo it truly was. He looked back down the bridge from where he had come and saw the painted facades of the buildings and the cotton candy snowflakes falling from the sky. None of it was real! It couldn't be! There were people in cities, loud, angry, obnoxious people; glorious people and . . . Life! This place, so empty, so false -- as if created by the mind of a child who had only a vague notion of what a city was -- was sterile and dead.

"Come to me Arthur," Jasmine said, her voice bubbly, flowing around the brackish water spilling from her mouth. She slipped the black sweater from her shoulders. Underneath, she was nude. Her nipples stood out hard and black against the icy blue-white of her flesh -- the color of death. Veins filled with frozen blood traced their way under her skin like indigo trickling over pearlescent marble, over the pregnant swell of her belly toward the dark V of her pubic hair.

God help him! He felt himself stir at the sight of her even now!

"I'm sorry," Arthur screeched, scrambling to his feet. "I'm sorry!" he yelled as he ran, first toward the dead girl and then away as he passed her by and left her behind. The glutinous air burned in his lungs as Arthur raced away from the stygian metropolis and the phantasmal apparition it had spawned. He ran knowing that if he could just reach the end of the bridge, everything would be set right, everything would be okay. But halfway across the bridge the world ended. Arthur ran headlong into the edge and bounced off.

He staggered back a step and came on again, his senses deceiving him into believing that there was nothing there -- and he hit the barrier again with the same effect. He'd run into nothing; a wall of intangible glass that barricaded his only way out.

His fists beat at the barrier until they would have bled had they been hitting anything. His knees gave out before his arms did. He slid to the pavement, pressing his forehead against the nothingness that block him, straining to see the world beyond.

"I'm sorry," he said to Jasmine, defeated. She'd been crying when she jerked the wheel of her car and sent her Cavalier through the bridge's railing - just a scared little girl in an impossible situation who couldn't think of any other way out. Now, here in this place, she'd been transformed into a spiteful angel of vengeance.

"I'm pregnant," she'd said, black mascara scarring her cheeks, snot running from her nose. "The baby is yours."

"It can't be," he'd said. "I'm married. I have a daughter. I have a life! You can't do this to me!"

She'd turned to him, eyes wide with shock, and he knew then that his life had never been about him but about the people whom he touched.

"I'm sorry I ever met you." He said, his words ringing true in the crisp air.

"She doesn't love you," Jasmine said, her tremulous voice soft in his ear as if she were whispering at the nape of his neck even though she hadn't moved. "Not like I do."

He felt her cold, dead fingertips trace along his jaw line, like they had done so many times in life, and shivered.

"Stay away!" Arthur rolled to face her but the anger built up inside him would not come out, only fear. "Stay away!"

Jasmine opened her mouth to speak again but her words drown in a jet of murky brown water. "I want you, Arthur. Stay with me. Stay forever!"

"No!" Arthur screamed. "I didn't want this! I didn't mean for it to happen! Not this!" He found his feet again and was running, this time for the bridge's railing and the blackness beyond - the only way out.

"I'm sorry, Elizabeth!" he screamed as he dove over the railing and the swirling black void swallowed him whole.

***

She jumped as the doctor placed his warm hand on her shoulder. "Are you sure you don't want to go home and get some rest, Elizabeth?" He looked too young to be a doctor but then again maybe she was getting old. Only thirty-five, she'd felt that way a lot lately.

Elizabeth straightened in her chair, rubbing her own cold hand over her face. Libby was coloring in a book on the floor, the crayon scratching quietly on the paper like the hushing of falling snow. She looked up at her mommy with pale green eyes -- eyes that were far too old to belong in the chubby face of a little girl and smiled a gap-toothed smile.

Arthur lay in the bed beside Elizabeth, motionless, as he had been, except for the mechanical rise and fall of his chest being inflated by a pump. He looked so wasted and frail, nothing like the boy she had fallen in love with and certainly nothing like the man she had married.

Through the window Elizabeth saw the first flakes of the coming winter storm glowing in the sodium arc lights atop the hospital's parking garage.

"I'm fine," she said, her voice thick from silently crying herself to sleep, damming up the tears so Libby wouldn't see. "Really." The doctor nodded and closed the door as he left.

"Mommy?" Libby said.

"What's that honey, a giraffe?" Libby nodded, dropping her crayon, brown pigtails bobbing.

"Is daddy gonna' to be okay?"

Someday Elizabeth's little girl would find out how her daddy ended up like he was. She would hear stories from strangers and there would be the newspapers if she ever went looking. She would ask questions, questions that would get harder to answer as she grew older, and Elizabeth would lie. She would lie so that, hopefully, her little girl would never have to learn that her daddy had traded them for a few nights with a tramp almost young enough to be his daughter herself.

"Sure he will honey. Daddy's going to be fine."

Libby nodded again, a sagely gesture for such a little girl, and stood.

"Can I shake it again?" she asked, a tiny smile budding on her face. Her little hand reached for the sno-globe resting on the blankets by her daddy's still one. Daddy had bought it when they'd gone to the big city to visit gramma. Libby had picked it out herself. Inside a perpetual blizzard fell on a plastic miniature.

"Sure, honey," Elizabeth said. "Daddy would like that."

***

Arthur stared out the window of his apartment, his feet anxious to go for a walk, at the white flakes falling. The sky began to darken.