Ben lives in a room below Mirage Station on the subway.\u00c2\u00a0 Every hour after dark, the train rumbles past and dust falls from the ceiling.\u00c2\u00a0 During the day, it\u2019s more frequent.<\/p>\n
Ben lives in a room with a lock.\u00c2\u00a0 He believes he has the only key.\u00c2\u00a0 There are other locked doors on his level, none of which are numbered, none of which you\u2019ll find on any official map.\u00c2\u00a0 As far as the city is concerned, these little rooms don\u2019t exist.<\/p>\n
Electric is stolen from wires somewhere, and either nobody notices or nobody cares enough to do anything about it.\u00c2\u00a0 So Ben lives in a room with a light bulb.\u00c2\u00a0 He\u2019s also got a mattress made up of rags and snatched pillows and bits of cloth.\u00c2\u00a0 There\u2019s a shower and a toilet down the hall, shared by eight or nine people who, for the most part, don\u2019t know each other\u2019s names.<\/p>\n
The strangers around him either are things or were things: one a painter, one a poet, one good with numbers and another good with locks and keys.\u00c2\u00a0 Not all of the strangers living in rooms around Ben\u2019s room are murderers.<\/p>\n
Ben lives in the room in which he was born.\u00c2\u00a0 He\u2019s never lived anyplace else.\u00c2\u00a0 He\u2019s never wanted to live anyplace else.\u00c2\u00a0 He misses his mom.\u00c2\u00a0 She\u2019s dead.\u00c2\u00a0 But he knows she\u2019s someplace safe now, someplace warm, and it doesn\u2019t bother him in the least.<\/p>\n
He lives in the room by himself, and the only thing he owns, apart from three changes of cloths and a Yankees cap, is a violin.\u00c2\u00a0 It\u2019s dingy and stained, and one string is missing, but you almost can\u2019t tell when he plays it.<\/p>\n
Ben plays the violin a lot.\u00c2\u00a0 He improves, albeit slowly.\u00c2\u00a0 He doesn\u2019t actually know any music for violin, and only knows a few other songs besides, so mostly he makes up melancholy melodies to help put him to sleep.<\/p>\n
Ben likes a girl.\u00c2\u00a0 She\u2019s a real girl, he thinks, because she doesn\u2019t live in one of these rooms, and she\u2019s been to the streets of Midnight, under the stars, and she travels by train as though its only purple in having been constructed was to shuttle her from one place to another.<\/p>\n
Ben lives in the place between places.\u00c2\u00a0 At the same time every day, he ventures near the subway platform so he can see his real girl in her pretty blue dress or wrapped up in a red coat or glowing in a bright yellow blouse.<\/p>\n
Ben lives in a room, in a world, which lacks color.<\/p>\n
The girl has seen Ben.\u00c2\u00a0 She smiles for him, sometimes.\u00c2\u00a0 She waves, four fingers moving one after the other in a way that reminds Ben of oceans he\u2019s never seen.<\/p>\n
The girl is younger than Ben, but not very much so.\u00c2\u00a0 He wants to play a song for her on the violin, but he\u2019s afraid he\u2019ll frighten her and she\u2019ll never come back to this platform.<\/p>\n
Ben lives in a city of a million souls.\u00c2\u00a0 He knows.\u00c2\u00a0 He\u2019s counted all of them passing on the subway.\u00c2\u00a0 He\u2019s also counted twenty-nine dogs, three dozen cats, and a hundred and eleven ravens.<\/p>\n
Ben knows a lot of things no one else knows.\u00c2\u00a0 He knows about Elizabeth, under St. Lazarus\u2019 Cathedral.\u00c2\u00a0 He knows what happened to the Spider Dragons–both of them.\u00c2\u00a0 He knows how long it takes the maintenance men to get the lights back on at Mirage Station.\u00c2\u00a0 He knows what happened to the Palais Royal.<\/p>\n
Ben lives in a room under the subway and dreams of a girl.\u00c2\u00a0 But there are things he does not know.\u00c2\u00a0 Ben doesn\u2019t know how to speak.\u00c2\u00a0 He doesn\u2019t know how to play violin, either, but he puts notes together fairly well.\u00c2\u00a0 He does not know why they call it Paladin\u2019s Court.\u00c2\u00a0 He does not know what\u2019s inside the Historical Society building.\u00c2\u00a0 He does not know how many strangers fall gently to dreams when he plays his violin.\u00c2\u00a0 And he does not know the girl returns every night to that same subway platform to listen to his lullabies and dream of speaking to a boy who cannot speak.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Ben lives in a room below Mirage Station on the subway.\u00c2\u00a0 Every hour after dark, the train rumbles past and dust falls from the ceiling.\u00c2\u00a0 […]<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[9,6,1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.darkfluidity.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/422"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.darkfluidity.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.darkfluidity.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.darkfluidity.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.darkfluidity.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=422"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.darkfluidity.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/422\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.darkfluidity.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=422"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.darkfluidity.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=422"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.darkfluidity.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=422"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}