“The Marivaudian being is […] a pastless futureless man, born anew at every instant. The instants are points which organize themselves into a line, but what is important is the instant, not the line. The Marivaudian being has in a sense no history. Nothing follows from what has gone before. He is constantly surprised. He cannot predict his own reaction to events. He is constantly being overtaken by events. A condition of breathlessness and dazzlement surrounds him. In consequence he exists in a certain freshness which seems, if I may say so, very desirable.” - Donald Barthelme, “Robert Kennedy Saved from Drowning”
He watched the woman watch the rooftops from his spot on the concrete step. It was not its inhabitants, nor its creators, its provenance, nor history that interested her. It seemed to be the way that the building met the sky: Just that sharp edge, sharper still against endless cotton blue.
Idle and sitting at a table in the street, she turned her head towards the trudging city folk and then back to the rooftops. The air was still yet strands of hair picked up around her; as if lifted by the rifling of curious urban phantoms, passing silently through streets centuries older than she.
(He recalled a time sleeping on a sofa in the lounge of his parents’ house. He had lain in the dark as a rushing approached above and had sluiced through the timber and brick as a flood might. It was there inside every grain and every pore for only seconds and then it was gone. The geese moved on towards the river and he once again lay there in the quiet).
She checked her phone and then looked to the sky expectantly. A plane crawled across high above leaving behind its serrated chemtrail. A thousand pairs of eyes moved over the pavement below, occasionally squinting at the winter sun that crouched low on the rooftops.
This sprawling quotidian tapestry and she at the centre as though weaving it from the inside outwards.
The woman looked up towards him and he fixed his gaze above upon the glass edifice that framed her until she looked back at her phone.
(The time he last saw her, sat at the foot of his bed at night with her back bare and jaundiced from the cityscape blinking neon at the window. When he woke again she was gone and a vestige of her shape lay concave in the sheets like a chalk outline. Rubbing his eyes he had moved through the house and through three tube stops to the pool.
Standing on the wet tiles, he watched the rubber caps submerging and breaching in strange unison; a fairground of shrinking blood vessels bound in polyester. He stared at the vermicular surface before being folded beneath it and let his body drop to the tiles as he had when he was a child. Lying there, facing the writhing troposphere of the pool above, he noticed something move through the water towards him. Freed from a pounding wrist, a watch came to settle on his chest. His ribcage creaked and a few bubbles escaped his lips.
Before resurfacing, he noticed that on the back of the watch was engraved, ‘not resistant to water’. He turned it in his hands to check the time and to check the time it would be forever.
He had handed the watch in to lost property on his way out).
He looked back to where she had been sat and she was gone. Shouting rang through the street in her place as a man in a dusty suit relayed some garbled edict. He was mankind’s saviour, he claimed; he was a conduit of celestial power. He made little sense. Although everyone did listen to him: even the pigeons were silent to some extent, milling about prostrated with their beaks grazing the concrete. It was that quiet reverence reserved exclusively for the mad and it was everything the speaker had ever wanted.
Contemplating the man in the dusty suit, he on the concrete step felt reduced to an outline in the speaker’s periphery. Or lost entirely, as if the last memory of himself had left the square after the woman. He sat, fidgeting and sweating, waiting for something to happen alongside an endless belt of others that felt the same.
Bright planet spinning in its swelling dark vault and he had only ever sat and waited.
Godfearing or not (he had never cared to decide), as he continued to sit and listen to the man in the dusty suit, he began to wish for some sacred intervention. He could not recall what had brought him to that step or indeed from whom or from what he had been made. Yet it was clear to him that whether born from deity or from the belly of the earth, both he and the speaker were the progeny of the same. For just as much as the man in the dusty suit wished it too, he prayed that he would remember this moment at least.