All of Me by Bailey

All of Me by Bailey

Silas watched his hands, jittery from too much espresso, shake in the smoke clouded haze that permeated every corner of the dim room. The bar was more so a decrepit hole in the wall rather than an actual establishment but the drinks were cheap and the music was good. The bitter yet sweet scent of cigars filled the air. Background conversations and the soulful notes of the saxophone amalgamated in Silas’s mind as he sat nursing a glass of wine.
It was a quarter past nine. He was supposed to have met his date an hour ago but, rather unsurprisingly at this point, she had never arrived. Silas sighed heavily. One more failed romance in the long line of them that followed him. It seemed as if everyone but him was having a lovely time in the god forsaken city. He watched young couples stroll past in the darkening twilight outside, hands clenched tightly together, laughing faces turned toward each other, and he was stuck here alone. No love. No muse. No spark. No one to rely on but himself.
As Silas walked the desolate streets, the weight of the city’s eyes weighed heavily on him and seemed to settle between his shoulder blades. He paused under a street lamp, his head dropped forward, and he leaned back against the metal pole. He brushed his messy too long hair out of his eyes, trying to tuck the ends beneath his cap, and stood staring at the dark buildings around him. This late into the night, every window was black, none coloured with the yellow glow of light. Silas was the only one still awake.
A gusty wind blew through the street and gracefully plucked the tweed hat from Silas’s head, carrying it into the night and unleashing a torrent of tangled black hair. He stared dejectedly after his cap before pushing himself from the lamp post with the bodily disposition of a man far his elder, and continuing on his merry way. Misery was engraved into the lines of his face, causing his mouth to turn down at the corners, and it shadowed his under eyes a sickly purplish colour. The skin of his face seemed to droop toward the ground, his flesh pulled taunt over sharp bones. As Silas walked he saw a dead blue jay lying in the gutter, the violent wind fluttering its lifeless wings. He thought about what it felt when it had died. He thought about how it was a reflection, a self portrait of himself. Broken wings keeping him caged in his own desperation, lying in filth. He wondered what it would be like to fly. He wondered what it would be like to be free, if only for the briefest moment in time.
Silas turned onto a narrow alleyway and entered an unassuming doorway, climbing up a set of stairs and unlocking the door to his apartment. The small room was barren. Peeling, dirty wallpaper, stained floorboards, a mattress on the ground and, the only thing with any life, the wooden roll top desk in the corner, with a window above it that looked out over the city skyline. The desk overflowed with scraps of paper and notebooks, all thrown around haphazardly, and multiple bottles of ink balanced precariously on the stacks of manuscripts.

All of Silas’s internal world and humanity was coalesced into the corner of that room, every idea and emotion and dream sprawled out across the countless pages. And most of it was entirely worthless. The words that clawed themselves out of him and so desperately clutched to the paper stayed there in between the fibres of the page. They never made it out of his minuscule room, never had the opportunity to grace another person’s eyes, to burrow their way into someone’s skull and reside there for the rest of their life. They made no profit, had no material worth for Silas, and yet their existence and expulsion from his minds was so incumbent to his life.
Silas settled himself on the stool in front of his desk, moving a stack of papers off of it and onto the floor, adding to the already tumultuous written landscape that surrounded him. He drifted in between the line and pen strokes as if he was a vessel being tossed to and fro in the ocean.
He stared out at the dark silhouette of the city, tracing the jagged peaks of buildings with his eyes and getting lost in the architectural dichotomy of the sprawling city and the vast ocean that it bordered. He stared at the city to eliminate the blank page lying before him because, for all the poems that surrounded him, he had not felt that true artistic spark for years. Each piece he wrote came out ugly and jaded, choppy phrases sewn poorly together.
Silas was failing. He had slipped deeper and deeper into the recesses of the vague shadows in his mind, getting lost in the contours of terrible half formed thoughts, losing all prominence and relevance in poetic circles, of which he only had a nearly imperceptible amount to begin with. So he stared out his window, waiting for his muse to appear from one of the dark alleyways or door fronts. He waited for the spark of inspiration to inflame his heart, and bring meaning to his existence.
The next evening Silas found himself back in the same bar as the night before, music flowing from the jazz quartet in the corner. There was one a tenor saxophone, a trumpet, a piano, and a drummer. He found his attention drawn to the tenor, and the deep soulful notes he drew from his instrument with such depth and precision. The music washed over Silas like ocean waves, crashing against the rocky shore of himself, smoothing out his hard edges and releasing the artist’s spark within himself.
The sax player was dressed in fine but worn clothing, his collared shirt threadbare, his brown trousers patched at the knees, and his boots scuffed. A decade ago his garments would have been the height of fashion, but now they exuded a sort of antiquated charm. A striped tie was around his neck, cream and rose coloured. His hair was a mass of messy brown curls that fell into his eyes as he played, and looked as if he cut it himself.
Music flowed from his saxophone, a pure undiluted rhapsody. The notes moved in startling ways, jumping across common scales and key signatures, and becoming something that was truly its own unique thing. It took every preconceived music idea and created a conglomeration of them all, metamorphosing into a creature that breathed the sweetest life into the dim bar. It transformed the decrepit room into a place of rapture and zeal.
The way the man played his saxophone transfixed Silas, the pure emotion that flowed from the instrument imparted in him some sort of ecstasy that he hadn’t felt for many years. His mind opened, countless ideas flowing through it and catching in his brain like flies in a spider’s web. His hand itched to pick up a pen to put his thoughts to words. Silas abruptly stood up, nearly knocking his chair over, and hurried out of the bar into the cold night.
Back in his apartment Silas poured himself a glass of wine liberally. The liquid pooled on his tongue heady and thick, the fruit pleasantly numbing to his mouth. He emptied his glass much too soon, and savoured the rush of intoxication that filled his head. In a drunken stupor he swept pens and papers from the surface of his desk with abandon, no thought of where they landed, creating a hurricane of words that fluttered down around him.
Pen clenched tightly in hand, Silas wrote. He wrote and wrote and wrote, words spilling out of him in tendrils, manuscripts flowing like waves across the pages that never seemed to be enough to capture the weight of his sweet emotions. In the forefront of his mind, the tenor player resided, lending his majesty and grace to the words that came from Silas in such wondrous formulations, the likes of which hadn’t occurred in many years. The tenor player was there infusing his music into the rhythms that bled out across the paper, the words pouring out of Silas so violently and yet so euphorically, the smooth jazz fusion of the tenor’s playing and Silas’s poetry becoming one with each other.
Silas wrote into the wee hours of morning before finally collapsing onto his mattress, still wearing his clothes from the prior day. He plummeted into a heavy, dreamless sleep, not waking until around midday. He pulled himself out of bed and shuffled to his desk apprehensive about what he had written last night. Silas eyed the pile of papers awestruck at the sheer mass of it and when he thumbed through the poems, reading snippets of them here and there, his astonishment was even greater. These words, these poems, were sublime. Raw and emotive and so filled with life. Silas dared to say that they were masterpieces.
He gathered up the entire mess of papers, unedited and stained with ink blots, and left his apartment with them not bothering to make himself presentable, only stopping to toss an olive overcoat around his shoulders. He made his swift way to the publisher’s, catching a streetcar and then walking the remainder of the way, passing through alleyways between towering buildings that seemed to be the city’s ribcages, supporting the infrastructure and keeping it all from tumbling down and crushing them all.
Silas swept through the doorway in a fluttering of fabric and paper and dumped the full mess onto the receptionist’s desk. She looked up at him through horn rimmed glasses, clearly shocked at his rude behaviour but he had no time to apologise. He breathlessly set up an appointment with an editor for the next week with the rather tentative promise that the poems would be read by them. He swept out of the office with the air in which he had come in, bell tinkling above his head, and ducked into a bar down the street to order a drink before he made his way home. Later, with the alcohol buzzing pleasantly in his veins he wandered the city with no ending point in mind, crisscrossing main roads and alleyways aimlessly.
That night Silas returned once more to the bar, eager to see his tenor player. He took a seat close to where the band was playing so he could more closely observe the ethereal figure that was behind such stunning music. He had come equipped with both a pen and notebook and he laid the tools of his craft out before him beside an espresso.
As the man picked up his instrument, Silas leaned back in his seat and closed his eyes, ready to listen and absorb the music into his bloodstream. The reed was moistened, the neck strap adjusted slightly, a deep breath was taken. And the man began to play. As it did the night before, the music swelled, becoming a living thing that filled every corner of the dim bar. Silas gladly lost himself in the ebb and flow of the song, focusing all of his attention on the tenor sax, yet still appreciating the conglomeration of all the instruments together. The quartet was sublime but the tenor player was without doubt the star of the show.
Silas picked up his pen and let himself be lost in the music, spilling every part of him onto the page. He wrote and wrote and wrote with such an obsessive hunger that everything beyond this current moment, this current word being hastily scrawled on the page, seemed entirely meaningless to him. If he could not write, could not listen, then what was the purpose? The pen moved across the page with astounding speed, messy marks almost unable to catch up with the flow of Silas’s thoughts. The music crescendoed, and Silas did as well, the lilting rhythms becoming one with him, immersing him in a world of his own creation.
He stayed in the bar until closing time, happy to simply sit and let the music wash over him and cleanse him. Most of the other patrons had gone, yet Silas had remained, until the stars came out overhead and reeled across the midnight sky. To him, it seemed as if the tenor was playing only for him, only to him and his heart.
Before he left he returned to the bar and inquired about the musician. The bartender obliged, telling Silas that the tenor player’s name was Oliver, and that he didn’t know the last name. Silas thanked him profusely and left the bar, his spirits soaring like doves through the blue summer sky.
Oliver, Oliver, Oliver. The object of his admiration and enrapturement. Oliver, Oliver, Oliver. His inspiration and muse. He had several more poems written from tonight’s excursion and quickly went home in good spirits. Along the way the name of the sax player repeated like a litany in his mind. For the first time in a long time, he felt free and unstinted in his work. No more awkward rhymes and endings, no more dragging vocabulary or metre, simply unbridled words flowing, flowing, flowing from him in a raging river. That night he slept well and dreamed happy dreams.
Silas kept up this routine each night for the next week, until his meeting with the publisher. On the allotted day he dressed well, even taking the time to comb back his hair into at least a slightly acceptable look, and donned a pair of leather shoes and a suede cap. He carefully gathered his new poems into a briefcase and was on his way.
He chose to walk the entirety of the distance to the publisher’s office, the brisk stroll lending a healthy rose colour to his cheeks. Around him people led lives that he would never be privy to, would never know the details of. It was a comfort, really, to lose oneself in a crowd, to become just another passing face, another person without an identity joining the endless flow of traffic, and to drift through the thronging masses unseen and unheard. It was in these contemplations that Silas lost himself as he drifted through the city, being stripped of his individuality until he was just another inhabitant, just another life for it to consume in its bottomless greed. It was comforting, really, to know that nothing one did could ever alleviate the constant motion of time.
Silas arrived at the publishing house and was taken back to the publisher’s office almost immediately by a pretty receptionist. Thankfully she wasn’t the same one whom he had rudely dumped his poems on the last time he had been here. Her high heels clicked pleasantly on the tile floor as she walked. She opened the office door for him and ushered him inside.
He handed over his new poetry and sat down in a comfortable but worn leather armchair. The publisher leaned back in his chair and silently appraised Silas before giving him an offer. If he could write more poems, in the same vein as he had been, and deliver them back to his office in two months time, he would have them run in a small local paper, and perhaps have them bound into a book. Silas’s eyes widened at the proffered sum of money and accepted the offer hastily. Soon after he left, leaving all of his poems with an editor who would tidy them up and make them presentable for the press.
Silas went home, detouring to walk along the river. The events of the morning ran through his mind over and over again, the insidious offer playing back. If he wrote more poems about Oliver and his music, which would be a simple feat, he would be paid and published. It seemed like such a one sided exchange, an offer that had been impossible to refuse.
Back in his apartment he contemplated the barren room. For all the years he had lived here he hadn’t added an ounce of decor or anything that reflected his personality, had opted instead for peeling wallpaper, a mattress lying in the corner, threadbare furniture, and naked light fixtures. The only personal aspect of the room was his beloved desk. He went over to it and shuffled through the poems that littered it. They were all terrible. Devoid of life and love. They were nothing like his new poems, it was no wonder he hadn’t been able to have these published. What person would want to read such filth?
With no conscious thought he gathered all of them up into his arms and dumped the entire mass into his stove. The papers overflowed from it and he had to pack them down quite firmly to fit all of them into it. Silas struck a match and sat before the potbellied stove, watching all of his poems go up in flames with a sort of grim satisfaction. He sat there until all that was left of his years of poetry and work was a pile of grey ash. He felt empty as if a great burden had been lifted from his shoulders, one that had weighed him down since he could remember.
As night fell over the city Silas ventured out from his abode once more, and walked to a stationary store not far from where he lived. There he bought both a new cloth bound journal and a pen. With his new conquests he went back to the bar, ready to keep up his end of the bargain. He was greeted by silence. No music played from the spot he had come to know so well in the corner, no soulful saxophone note wafted out into the street from the half opened door. Nor was there any chatter or conversation from within the bar. It was only the bartender resignedly wiping the bar down with an old rag, and Silas came in from the street utterly confused by the lack of music.
Silas strode up to the bar and inquired after Oliver. He had moved on, Silas was told, gone to someplace where he would be paid better for his gigs and where he wouldn’t be playing in such dingy establishments. He had gone to seek his fortune away from the few streets where Silas had spent the majority of his adult life, holed up in grungy bars and his barren apartment. Silas turned away without another word and left the bar. He stood outside of the door and looked up and down the street, trying to think of where to go now.
It did make sense, he supposed, for Oliver to leave, but what was he meant to do? It was quickly darkening, stars beginning to peek their faces out from the distant horizon, and people were exiting the streets for the night, going back to their warm homes. Silas remained standing in the shadow of the bar, looking up at the towering buildings around him. Now what? Now what? That was the question wasn’t it? Silas almost laughed if only he could have done it without crying. Of course, when he was beginning to gain back his life, any recognition or mild success, it was taken away so abruptly.
Just that morning he had been in the publisher’s office, face aglow with possibility and yearning, that sweet taste of youth in his mouth, more alive than he had been in sometime. And now he was here, outside of a decrepit bar, alone in the streets, and wallowing in his own desperation. Really, there was only one thing to do.
Silas unfolded his body from the wall and straightened slowly, his joints creaking like those of an elderly man. With slow shuffling steps he made his way down the dark street, alone, always alone. As he walked it began to rain. He could have ducked under a store awning, but he didn’t see the point of it. He continued to walk, the rain pelting down on him, the city’s gaze weighing down his shoulders. Tears began to leak out of his eyes, but the rain washed them away leaving nothing behind them, no memoriam of his agony. In this manner, Silas walked on.