Suspicious

He laid down under the tower, and stared up at the dark blue, early light sky through its iron. This was as personal as he needed to get with the tower, under its arc, near its foot. It looked suspiciously sturdy. It was cold, but he was drunk and still had a liter of wine. His lips and teeth were the same red of a bulls mouth in tauromachy. He drank the wine like it was blood for him, like he was losing it through holes in his skin, like he needed it to stay alive. His own tongue felt like it should hang out of a mouth like a bull's that is being killed. The sun would be out soon with the Parisians. He was not good at dying.

He let the earth spin him into the sun, under this tower, this defiance, like he was hiding comfortably under it. Still on his back, he let the morning street cleaners come into earshot and then couldn't bear it. He had no idea what day of the week it was. It didn't matter anyway. He piled his skeleton up and walked. Marcel was sure he was already dead, that he was cast into a purgatory, heaven or hell that looked and behaved like the world he knew around him. The woman who squatted over a stream of urine that ran down the slope of the street he lived off of was a sentinel, a psychopomp. With her dirty and dried skin draped naked with a veil of a white dress and her endless stream of urine, she kept a sinister and quiet guard that he didn't challenge. She didn't seem to acknowledge him when he passed anyway.

It was endless, and timeless. When he went to the ATM, it gave him money. When he took money to Chateau Rouge, they would give him Skenan. When he woke up, he was usually in his or a familiar bed, though sometimes he would see a ceiling and have no idea where he was. He liked the idea that a Lama once said that the experience of not knowing where you are or even what you are when you are first waking was the closest that most men would ever come to achieving enlightenment. The nebula that were his eyes, the smoke and mirrors that made this funhouse so surreal became comfortable. Sometimes he woke up alone in the dark coiled up in the bathtub, the water a cold serpent wrapped around him.

Marcel's heart beat at night, over the radio, over the traffic on the street outside his slatted window covers. The acrid exhaust sometimes crept in. He cast it back out by lighting a Lucky Strike. He would lie awake, sometimes just waking at night and collect his escaping nimbose afterlife with whatever was between his small fridge and his small table.

He seamed his way through Paris streets, not knowing where he was, and impossibly lost because he was in a perpetual state of Jamais Vu. He knew how to go by Metro, but walking a cardinal direction was never easy. He stopped to get a strong short coffee for a euro. It went down smoky and hot, and burned. The day was starting and he needed to get out of its way. The keepers of this hell were not sympathetic. The streets filled with persons hurrying along with breads and papers and bags. There was a quiet hum, that roared loud in ears that had fallen in love with the quiet birds just before they start at dawn. He drank a stomachfull of wine. Then he woke up in his bed, with swollen lips and a dry tongue.