Reprieve
Sunday night in downtown Cologne, and the dark cobbled alleyways leading me hither and thither up down and past little upended cafes and small murmuring restaurants. I walk into an oldtyme jazz bar, the grizzled keep approaches. “Ein bier, bitte.” Above me, a shelf of ancient steins, evil statuettes and colorful flags all around. There’s a three-man band adlibbing with their instruments on stage. A cigartoking bloke in a peasantbeard and fat leathers stands guard, the sentinel of the tipjar, a saxophone case. He puffs puffs, gulps from his healthy mug and peers suspiciously seriously in the direction of everyone. Meanwhile, my draft arrives. I fumble with the coins in my pocket, clap four euros down and sip at the foam. I wipe it off my lips with my sleeve, get a table by the window and feel a little better being off my feet, raw and blistered, primordial things. I feel a little better and yet a little leifer, liver, stormplagued thoughts deepmingling in the scurl of my heart. The veils of my memory slipping themselves off. Stumbling dints of biting consciousness arrest my ears forehead eyes, the wounded emblems of night, disposed of their meaning. I lift my drink, cheers to nothing; this cheap grail mocking all my secret failures and maladies. In the hallway, a papierkrattler mask hangs, and you pay for that. The Mother of God melting of the clock, and you haven’t paid yet. The sweetness of sound, a bass guitar, the Germanic bloodbabble of the libbylush lit hush of people around me. Their forms wavering in all of their quietcreeping perversions. A tipsy frau with bad teeth. Bacillus Cereus in a filigree light. I finish my beer, drink one more and walk back outside into the cold aching streets gently upwardly curving, my sore feet taking me along the Rhine up three stairflights through a squareful of scrabbling pigeons to the floodlit cathedral. It’s the best, I have found, to come here in the evening. The doors are still open, gargoyles lunging over me. The priest nods as I walk past him and sit down in the last pew, halfdrunk. Faraway, the christfigure looks tiny on the cross, a soft reddish candlelight glowing upon his offering – his suffering, wretched humanity. I have given up on Christianity, but not the myth, or the monomyth. And as I sit here, half in darkness and half in light, I marvel over the gothic architecture and the six hundred plus years it took to build this shrine. Stainedglass, nave and majestic columns; softperfumes of gesturing color. I fold my hands in my lap, ask for nothing from any god, but still, I feel warm in here, serene and strangely uncursed.
J.A.C. (Journeyman’s Anti-Chronicles)
