The Silver Cloud
by Douglas Cole
[this is the sixth in a six part series–
read Evening of Earth from the beginning]
The Silver Cloud
I think someone dosed me. My processing is way off. Memory is a vague fog of things. I have no idea how long I’ve been in this hotel. I’m supposed to be doing something. I have the clothes for it. But what is it?
Wind is shooting through the buildings, old red brick hotels with black burned out windows and freight barns with wide wooden hangar doors across the street from titanium structures with long cement stairs and a colosseum—a big empty colosseum. Hardly anyone is around. People I see look old but aren’t. They bear the signs of aging—wrinkled skin, bad teeth, thin hair, but they’re eyes are young. They look sick. They walk with limps and hitches like their bones don’t link up right. And even though they’re walking around, they’re all at a distance, and it feels like the street should be crowded.
On Occidental Avenue I stop under the big yellow globe lights. Wind is whipping the trees. And I can see the silver tower with heavy security where the big boss has his offices, a building looking down into the heart of the stadium one way and right into Pioneer Square the other. A trolley comes by bell ringing and rolling down King Street. It’s good to see the trolleys back up and running. I can’t remember how long they were gone.
A woman approaches me, and she seems healthy walking fast dressed in a black coat and black hat and looking ahead and then directly at me as if she knows me. She smiles like she’s in on a joke. I’m supposed to—I’ve forgotten the code. We’re in an age of code words, here, but I don’t know them or don’t remember them.
And glass intact, the in-lit art gallery though closed has placed one painting in the entrance behind the doors locked as they are with a light shining on the circle in the painting with its murky interior, and along the outer surface a human form is swimming and looking for a way in.
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