MORNING SERIAL
INSIDE the bar it was a breathless submerging into edgeless blacks, thick dark purples, and the diamond sparkles of chrome and glass. It made me feel slightly nauseous at first, and then anxious, as if I was slipping into an amniotic sack. And for all I knew everybody else in there felt the same way, as it was impossible to make out any more than thirty per cent of a face at any one time. The whole room was a merciless battle against the subtlety of shadow.
Illie was greeted warmly – as was I, as his guest – by almost everyone we passed, after the hefty gentlemen on the door. The owner, who was another Russian or thereabouts, came over and showed us to our table, and he and Illie talked quickly in Russian for the thirty-or-so steps it took us to reach it. Whether he was ordering for us I did not know, but beer and food soon arrived without any look at menus or a discussion about allergies or anything like that.
“It does not take long to get to know people here,” Illie said, leaning across to me in our half-moon booth. The music in the place was a low ambient dance vibe, the sort of drawnout bass lines that get under your skin rather than come down on top of you. Illie pointed out at one point that he liked this music – I guessed he liked this more than the Sibelius he had been playing in the Bentley – he said the music was like paint, and it filled all the cracks but didn’t hide any protruding features. So conversation, to Illie, was a protruding feature. And by that measurement, it could be as ugly or as attractive as a human face.
“Did you bring Francis here?” I said. This was the first burning question of the evening. I could not, with all the power of my imagination, place Francis Benthem in this blackness.
Illie laughed, his head rocked back, and he nodded at me vigorously without saying a word, his eyes lighted with mischief and maybe more than a few stories of his nights out with Francis.
“But not as much as where we’re headed,” he said.
> The Golden Orphans by Gary Raymond is published by Parthian www.parthianbooks.com