Tango by Michael Gallan

Introducing the protagonist…it shouldn’t be difficult. The issue is in choosing the moment from which to mould him. I have several favourites….the “bathroom scene at evening” is a particular peach. As the sun sets it casts a light beyond colour into the room, and our man stares at his outline in the mirror, the glow hitting him, sink, and tile indiscriminately. He imagines his merging with the tile; how the sudden cold stone acquiesces to his eager blood. He allows himself the notion that the softest hint of his power, the slightest twitch of his eye, is enough to separate, and to recreate things as they rightfully should be. That’s a whopper all right.
Some, however, would be more enchanted by a nocturnal scene; the shade is spectral almost-blue now, although the subject of our discussion doesn’t know this: having just turned off the television, his world has been compressed into a small square of echo-light where the screen once glared…everything else is darkness. Only if you’re very quiet will you hear him whispering his own name, perhaps feeling that, if there is nothing else, one must fill the void with things that one understands. Only when he can appreciate his world in some sensual way will he make his way to bed.
To your taste? Either of these instances would open a pigeonhole into our man; however, as is the way with moments, his has chosen itself. I find myself the voyeur of a kitchen scene, morning. The air is young; the colour tactile. He is carving Achilles from boiled egg. There is a woman, undoubtedly…a wife, perhaps. The stretching of the air between them suggests a common distance. A far cry between their then and its now. She watches the ceiling, from which a piece of abandoned cobweb hangs...barely. The breeze that makes it swirl can have no logical source, unless in the filling and un-filling of space around his digging hand. The woman motionless…glue-eyes believing the sway of broken flytrap, the one thing in the room that might actually understand the earth’s rhythm. He watching her watch…her pupils in minute movement, little affirmations…declines…suggestions. He might call them his own, these twin globes. They’ve guided him as he could never guide himself. Like his, her eyes have celebrated the gradual blurring of corners.
She weakens her breath, fearing the frail rope’s fall. She knows that a sigh would be too much for it to take…yet this is not like his illusion of power; it’s a fear of clayed clumsiness. Her hair is tumbling into coffee steam…but, for our fool, there is no world outside brow and crease; the secrets of the universe are hidden by bluegreen skies. His head is still drunk on sleep, enough that he will allow himself another draught of complacence…he owns those spheres, and there is no secret so deep that it can be hidden. What he sees in her eyes is not his reflection but his successful plantation. But things mustn’t change...
…he will say the words.
Like plate on plate he coasts the air between his head and hers. The world leans in anticipation. He whispers softly,
“Wife, there’s a man looking through the hall door…”
A curse on me! My neediness brought me too close! I am a weak observer that cannot observe unnoticed. I will fold back… smooth over…
…I swim back through ink, to where my breath mists on the applewood door. This time I retreat to the shadow. The king of our prose is coasting as before, and we just about manage to glimpse the words that spill like over-perfected wine from his lips.

“Wife, we should get away. You remember that holiday in the mountains? That was nice, wasn’t it? The air is so clear up there. Would you like to go back there this autumn, see the leaves fall?
No?
No, possibly not, you’re right. Best not to retrace old steps and all that.
Yes, yes, of course, you are right…
You are always right. Still, it was a wonderful time…”

We wait. We wait, and watch and listen. But the shudder and the shimmer do not come. The universe does not shatter and restore itself for small change. Even from our new distance, we know that she is silent, and does not avert her gaze from the swaying of string. Eventually she rises, and leaves the room to find another space… to press herself against the walls. They will grant her no entry. Her colour and theirs will not be compatible, and it is not evening, and brick is not tile, and it is not the bathroom.
We cannot follow, for our eyes are on him, not her. On his eyes as he watches hers turn away. Her back is somehow unfamiliar and, as she leaves, she pulls the shades of two, five, even ten years with her. The scene’s colour is still indescribable but it is only half what it was. Intimacy trails like a gown of tattered ribbons from her shape. Oh yes, he is awake now and nature is greedily snatched by each of his senses…the last to waken is sight, and it sees only TV static where her silhouette once shimmered. Desperate to know something, anything, he rushes to her place, as if to shield himself in the fading shape of her absence. Only now does he see the cobweb.


The noose is whirling a dervish into the room and, although it is her name that he would whisper to recreate, he can hear only the echoes of his last words. The drone rises as the web fragrances the air with a tapestry of forgotten moments. All of the ghosts of himself, from young manhood to hobbling elder, spin from the ceiling, each saying a similar thing, each seeming as unfulfilled and unfulfilling as the last. Their chorus steals the air from about him; his name and hers become tasteless. Now the words of each son, husband, father, grandfather and beyond have become indecipherable, crowding each other with their emptiness. Soon he is on the ground, gasping for space, for light, for power. There is no mirror, only is the reflection of his own past, present and future…but he cannot fade into his own skin, the light will not allow it. There is no common colour, and is not evening, and he is not tile, and this is not the bathroom.
This noise is almost unbearable…yet, in the rumble of his voice, there are brief moments of clarity. Promises overlap. Words become one. United they are an incessant sentence, the inevitable question that a life in Technicolor had somehow helped him avoid. I cannot watch any more and turn to escape to my own rock-solid existence, but not before hearing the coincidence of a word and a last breath. Finally the spider’s ironic legacy falls to the floor and captures its prey. Even in my escape I understand my foolishness. I was wrong to think imagination great enough to encompass a moment that was not my own. In claiming his eyes I made his mistake. Even the walls see and I am not unwatched. I am guilt, in pillage of sight, sound, smell, touch, taste...that question was only his to hear.
The answer was yes.