We met beneath a violet night, Chicago, circa 1936, Barabbas and I. Sitting within a parlor he approaches, hands me his handsome face, hand someone your face, he says, and the end is written in the smile. I glance about and he pulls me back with his heavy tongue. His eyes incessantly drop into his drink then to the women, walking, passing by. His words are the words I wish I had the words to say. Let us walk he says, it is too beautiful of a night

The luster of his face spreads to his thick oily hair as he brushes it with trembling hands- suspenders and jacket, his pants neatly rolled I ask him too many questions. I should be sure, he says, of the man which rests somewhere within. His confidence stands tall like the buildings we pass on this pivotal night.

I imagine the room he as taken, he says I have taken a room up north. He shows me the rooms he has seen, the paintings he has left on the wall, the flowers which fall from time to time in the rooms he has forgotten- he painted them so it would happen that way, a yellow center which curves to an oily black, at the bottom of the lake where the verdigris will finish what he has begun.

In a night a friendship begins, in a decade it strengths, to then live at the bottom of Jupiter’s well, where the water tastes of an endless cosmic night.

He holds his life curled within his hand. It is over he says, if he were to open his palm. He walks like rolling clouds of thick black smoke. He talks and I walk beside him Barabbas, the ghost, the spirit of the old way.  If there is to be salvation he says, it is with women, the machine song softened by the threading vein of their shared loom song, the furnace and the factory will vanish in the wake of their distant voices. It is madness we are approaching and we must live no matter how many skies have fallen. 

It was in Paris that he met her, Paris in the daylight, he says, an antiquated candle from the heavens, she stands tall and bright on a giant steel thigh. He sits and orders softly, sipping, the rumors echo from a dark alley of a war approaching. Mysterious, he tells me, the sound of freedom. He sips again; the oil, the bread dripping- with him a rucksack, a book and a pen.

He outlines the way she bends, the way her foot pulls the air, the way she displaces gravity. From within he is weightless. He draws the way her arms rest like a lady, he points to her elbow; he is bemused at the bend. Her skin, he says, is a rich soft white. She blushes as he lifts his chin and smiles.

He cleans his pipe, stuffs it heavy with leaves, incessantly puffing; Barabbas the train, rolling, the steam floats past, stretches, tumbling atop the ocean. It is as I remember; I remember it is Sunday. I spoon from eyes sleeps leftover kisses, tumbling, dusting my chin.

When the sun falls into the water, he reads of what he has written and a world erupts.