room. But there was no one around to answer besides the bag lady,
who had fallen asleep in her chair. Roy shrugged disinterestedly.
So Colin smoked as Roy watched the ambiguous curling vapors
twist, twirl, dance and beguile. It was not long before a familiar shape
presented itself, one which he often found in wall smudges, spilled
coffee and cumulus clouds; anywhere where the fluid was given form
by way of friction. The smoke tongued his eyeballs, making them
grow moist. Then, in a sort of backwards homeopathy, his tears
precipitated his grief.
Roy stood up and exited the room, striding back past the kitchen,
where Bennie was watching Mexican wrestling, to the bathroom. But
Leona was in there wiping rat off her clothes. He stepped out to his
little garden, walled-in on all sides by neighboring buildings. There
he lay on the grass and looked up into the stratosphere, an ocean
inverted, blue, fifty miles high. He thought of Ellie with her blue
dress pulled up high over her head. A tear or two escaped from his
dammed eyeballs. Then, after the wave passed, he wondered if there
was some connection between the color of the sky and the fact that
there was no such thing as a blue food. He picked a coffee cherry off
the bush and chewed it. It was terrible. He ate another.
Leona stepped into the garden to hang her damp dress on a
coffee tree, then knelt down, spreading her immense white body onto
the grass next to the brown one of Roy. She rolled over and fleshed
him like a fruit, he hard inside her like a pip.
The Rastafarian arrived not long afterwards with Undergrounds’
modest weekly shipment. Like a moon reflecting through the rushes
of the reed sea, his wild eyes glittered behind a dancing thatch of
dreadlocks. Ducking low under the doorway he pulled in a trolley of
crates packed with freshly-roasted beans, wiped his brow and sidled
up to the bar for a drink. Colin walked around and fixed him a cup of
herbal tea.
“Where’s Roy at?” Niles asked. He looked around the room, but
the only other person there was the bag lady, asleep on the floor.
“He’s in the garden with Leona,” Colin replied, “Making
applesauce.”
“Well, tell him his account’s past due. Past tense. Passed out.
Soon to be passed away. The man’s unhappy with him.”
“All men are unhappy, Niles,” Colin said, “That’s the secret of our
success.” He popped a Peter Tosh tape into the stereo. “Say, Niles,
ABYSSINIA
8
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