The Ordinary Times

Paz

[Love Will Tear Us Apart performed by Dragging an Ox through Water from an unreleased performance on the Jimbo Show on KWVA 88.1, Eugene, OR]

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It was a few blocks back to the hostal, the Paz, just off the Puerto del Sol. Their shoes clicked a lilting time on the cobblestones, an easy polyrhythmic metaphor: the musicality emergent from the out-of-time-ness of their footsteps paralleled the wonder that seemed to emerge from the out-of-time-ness of their lives.

The whole thing was crazy; they knew it deeply, as one knows colors. But they didn’t have the words to say it. Just the galloping click-clack of a slightly longer stride meeting a slightly shorter one.

He drifted forward through time, seeing places he’d go now that he knew he could: the Manhattan Bridge at sunset, the wild ferocity of a thunderstorm in the Rockies, the T over the Charles and down under Harvard Yard to see the ghost of the old Harvard stop, and just days from now when she’d be gone back to Vienna and he’d catch a bus south to a little town in the hills and stay in that sparely beautiful room with a balcony overlooking Calle Toril and the clouds rolling like a constant wave over the mountains, El Torcal de Antequerra, and the old man who called him crazy for eating breakfast in the courtyard in January, but who would shake his head and bring out a basket of pastries and a cup of coffee all the same.

He saw the end of the week, when she’d return and they’d trace this same route back to the Paz, their steps still out-of-time but now also heavy with the urgency of leaving. They’d eat chocolate and drink wine on the rooftop balcony, watch the city shrug and shift and settle in for the night.

The world would be out of time with itself. There would rise a sharp shuffle from busy hammers of laborers, the doleful bells of all the endless churches, the horns of cars and thrum of the occupying army of motorbikes.

And they would dance to and around and through the cacophony. The world would suddenly hit those same beats, the one and the three, for a few moments.