He pried the window open with a binder. Magenta had left a pile of them by the desk when she had come home that afternoon. It slid beneath the chrome borders of the window with ease and he watched as it slid open with a lifeless whisper, the cold night air drifting in from the streets below. He set the binder back in its place and bent his back to slide through the narrow opening. He didn't need much space. He had flunked physical education, but not from a lack of ability. He had just never bothered to show up. It was nonsense, physical education. Pure nonsense.

Outside, the night breeze beat against the windowpanes of the housing complexes that rose around him. A sea of silent, grey towers stretched away beyond his eyesight, dark and immense. Families lived there, and divorcees and singles and children and prostitutes and crazies and junkies and students and veterans. Everybody lived there. He lived there. Rent was good and it was only ten minutes from the Science Institute, thirty minutes from the heart of the city. He could hear the jangle of copper bells that accompanied the trolley making its way through downtown. Below him, lost in the thick, biscous grey smoke the Sanitation Department had proclaimed harmless, the main artery of the Metro Tube System glided by, a shinny silver steak to passerbies in the streets below.� He loved that damn Metro. Loved its peeling paint and the way he always felt threatened and stupid as he sat by the corner seat, clutching his papers and his folders and staring out at the muddled scenery that screamed past him and behind him and now gone from his sight.

He could feel the gravel beneath his feet. He wriggled his toes a bit, seeking a better grip. He wanted a good look at the city. He didn't get to see it often, not anymore. As a child he would sit in his room for hours, curled up in bed or cross legged on the floor, gazing outside his window as night fell. Magenta was there, quiet and still. Her voice came from the darkness as if it had always been a part of it. Do you like those trees outside? He had never particularly liked them, no. He hated his childhood home. The mundane white washed convenience of it all, children gliding by in unicycles, political affiliations flying from makeshift masts, the drone of a thousand multi-sensory� image sets creeping into his subsconciousness, little blue tainted people watching other blue coloured people. People miles away. People doing things.

Well, he did things. Magenta took a good look around at their childhood town and decided she could never be happy there and she packed him and her clothes and her eye shadow and announced at dinner that she meant to put all of them though a decent education. He never doubted her. He sat beside her in the Metro B headed towards the city Science Institute and put all of his trust in her. It worked out rather well. She rented out a room fifteen feet above ground level, set a green lamp beside their desk and guided both of them through the first year before he woke up one day and realized that he could walk by himself if he wanted to. He didn't care if he walked very far, not at the beginning. All he wanted was solid ground beneath his feet and information in his head.

He amused himself, for a while, with the knife edge thrill of waking up late and spending his few hours awake in a haze built from a bit of everything: liquor, drugs, hanging upside down from the window sill till the blood drummed in his veins and he'd start to laugh, giddy and disoriented. He mixed hard blue drugs with pink powder, yellow liquids, white wine and multi-coloured pills. A couple of drinks before crashing into bed, a few swigs when he inevitably woke up at three am, a few more while pissing and puking away the hours till dawn, and dawn greeted with a few more tips of a few more bottles. He began to wonder if the floor wasn't all that was left of his apartment. The roof had blown away a couple of weeks ago, he knew that. Little men were building a canal along his medulla. Or something. He didn't know. For the longest time, he didn't know anything.

Bloody Hell I knew anything, drugged up arsehole that I was. A siren screamed past in the streets below. The sound made the window panes shiver, pulling him back to reality, to the now. He shifted in his ledge, feeling the rough stone of his apartment building's walls scrape against his skin. His fingers gripped harder at the cool, alien stone. When he looked down at his feet, long, skinny fingers curled around the dark gravel, they didn't seem real. They looked like some cheap B-movie special effect. Bad editing. He made his way slowly along the edge, scraggly blond hair beating into his eyes from the winds that rose from the streets and came, hurtling and crashing into one another, up to where he stood. Darkness was below him. It looked very empty, deep. It looked unreal. If I dropped into it... what would happen? A sickening shiver as my neck cracked? A shapeless mass of blood and guts on the Metro tubes? The seven o'clock news, no doubt: hapless idiot succumbs to the grey depression of our soulless metropolis. Millions mourn, no one cares, nothing changes. Just a dead zap. A fucking smelly job to scrape off from the sidewalk.

Death had never seemed like much of an option. He was too greedy. Gods knew that he was. Death meant never knowing what those he left behind would feel when he died, when they received the news. He wanted to see that. Wanted to see the indifference, the pain, the twisted faces as the tears escaped, the hypocrites who would no doubt say: now there was a fine man, a regular fine chap he was. Death was a cheating, lying bastard. Robbing you of such a spectacle. He stopped for a while as he crept along the ledge and let out a breath. The combined efforts of keeping his footing and his thoughts straight were winding him. He wished he could sit down, if only for a while. But the ledge was not wide enough, merely the span of the flat of his feet. He wasn't terribly tall, nothing incredibly big about him at all. Except his hands. Sometimes he wondered if maybe he hadn't stumped the growth of half of his limbs at some point. Maybe curling up to sleep did that to a body. Maybe all of that eating right nonsense of the nutritionists had some truth to it after all. He spread the fingers of his left hand against the stone walls and frowned at how long and bony his fingers looked.

They had laughed at him, the academia anaemics at the Science Institute, for being so bony. Skeletal. He didn't care, most of the time. He had abandoned most of the drugs during his third year. Having squeezed all that he could from not knowing anything, he set out to learn as much as he could. He was greedy in his academics. Everything interested him. He tried botany, pure biology, genetics, chemistry, physics, nuclear sciences, photon studies, anthropology, history of everything he studied. He excelled for as long as excelling interested him, failed in order to observe how far he could go, how low he could come. He endured the taunts and the jeers for the same reason. He provoked and listened and shrugged it off and shouted back till his face was blue and he'd be crying like a fool. He wrote a rather lengthy essay on the effects of peer pressure and unacceptance in his fourth year, won the recognition of his sociology professor and a beating in the arts lounge that removed him from the institute for six long weeks. He loved them. He lay in his bed with his face puffy and swollen and the pillows propped up behind him and Magenta spoon feeding him and all the while that he cursed them he loved them.

He had lost his train of thought. He didn't know where he was. He looked around, trying to find his window. It gaped out at him from the right, a toothless, crooked grin in the darkness. A smile stretched its way along his lips and he edged closer to it. The gravel beneath his toes came loose and scattered down into the blackness. It was getting cold. What kind of idiot stepped out into his window ledge in a dressing gown? What kind of idiot steps out into his window ledge, period. He yelped as his fingers curled around the frozen chrome and glass of his window. Bending to crawl back in proved much more difficult than stepping out. Not much space to manoeuvre from out on a ledge. He decided against dignity and threw his body unceremoniously in by placing one foot in with his back to the window, then allowing the rest of him to slide in. He grit his teeth to keep from grunting and bit his tongue to keep from crying out when he crashed onto the floor, legs doubled beneath him and his elbow striking Magenta's writing desk. He cradled it against his chest and lay as he was, huddled and tingling from the cold and the adrenaline rush, for a while. He had no idea how long he had been out there or how long he lay on the floor before he picked himself up. He drew his dressing gown tighter about him and padded to the bathroom. He splashed some water on his face and spit out the taste of pollution and masonry dust.

Magenta slept in a tangle of sheets and red hair, one arm resting over her eyes, the other crushed beneath his pillow. He slid his hands into the pockets of his dressing gown and watched her as she slept. She didn't look beautiful at all. She looked hideous and misshapen, a disaster completely unaware of itself. He shrugged off the gown and padded towards his side of the bed, sliding beneath the warm covers as slowly as he could. The excitement of standing out on the ledge was still with him. It tingled in his veins. He wanted to pull Magenta close, kiss her awake and make love to her. He wouldn't mind the morning breath, the groggy half denials, he just wanted to feel her close, to tell her that he had stepped out onto the ledge and thought about a lot of shit and that it had felt good and that he felt more alive than ever and wanted to crawl into her and feel the warmth of her skin next to his own. She had turned her back to him, her ivory white shoulders pointed and abstracted in the half light. With a sigh, he drew nearer and put his arms around those shoulders, his cheek resting against her bare back, and he lay there with his eyes open and his heart thumping in the darkness.

He felt her shift. "Riffy...? Did you get up during the night...?" Her voice sounded gravely, half awake. He doubted she'd even remember asking in the morning. He tightened his arms around her and wrapped his legs around her own. They felt soft and warm. He smiled.

"Yeah. I got up to get a drink of water. Pissed a bit. Go back to sleep, Magenta." And he kissed the hairs at the nape of her neck and felt her smile and snuggle backwards into him and he could feel drowsiness stealing over him. He doubted he'd even remember answering in the morning.
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coda

Written at the UCF Computer Lab II during my 3:00-4:00pm break and finished at home, plugged into, of all things, Roberto Carlos (if you don't know who he is, don't worry), and from roughly 6:00-8:00pm. One of my room mates was watching some seriously twisted sock-puppet show in Mtv and Chicago Hope on, well, a non-Mtv channel. My other room mate was voluntarily sequestered in his room, listening to Depeche Mode and studying chemistry. Go figure I'd be the terminally un-hip fellow listening to Mr. Carlos. Ah well. I'm burning out my Pseud's Corner RealAudio file, anyway.
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� February 22nd, 1999 Team Bonet. The Rocky Horror Show and those perennial favourites Magenta and Riff Raff are � 1973 that perennial favourite from New Zealand and the UK: Richard O'Brien. I apologize to Mr. O'Brien for putting my thoughts into Riff Raff's balding head. But thanks for reading! You, of course, not Mr. O'Brien... unless you happen to be...? Nah. ::insert here creepy feeling of what if?!