Bloodred

He walks into the lobby of the Empire State Building. The massive rippling of his bloodred robe dies away in the stagnant interior of the room. Security officers spy him immediately and reach for their walkie-talkies. Tourists waiting in line, young and old alike, are afraid. Children move insinctively behind their mothers and fathers. Mothers think of whispering something to their husbands. Fathers look casually away from the man, as if nothing is out of the ordinary. "This is New York," they tell themselves. The grand lobby will soon be decorated in Christmas splendor, a tree with heavy boughs bearing bright tinsel and stringed lights to take its place against the engraved marble wall.

He is "escorted" down a bland white hallway toward an unknown backalley exit. He no longer resists, his vacant belly slamming feebly against every side of his aging body. His head lowered, he hears a thunderous sound and feels a chill dampness on the tip of his nose, as the men with walkie-talkies forceably release him back into the wild of New York City and shut the door behind them.

The meow of a cat stirs him back to a living state. He begins to discern the presence of multiple cat whines as he lifts his head from the concrete pillow. In a box of cardboard between two dumpsters he sees a litter of kittens, nestling closely against the sleeping mother. The man in red extends a withered hand toward the calico cat, and the damp brown fur merely dents inward. His head bowed low again, his mind conceives a prayer for the sleeping mother, but a desperate resolution stifles it.

He looks up and sees the overcast sky, obscured first by coulds, further blotted out by the mighty fortress from which he has yet again been ejected. Were he a younger man, he would have risked all to climb his way to the top of that abominous edifice. But even now, his hands can distinguish no handhold along the sleek blackened wall. Now more than ever he senses the great gap between heaven and hell. And it puzzles him that this structure points its way upward, sometimes violently piercing its way beyond the clouds, sometimes seeming to stand only as a beacon and an arrow toward earthly deliverance. In one instant he wishes to topple the building down, to conquer the monstrosity and bring it underneath his feet. In the next he desires nothing more than to abandon his lowly existence, to slip into the elevator and let it project him to escape velocity.

He girds himself tightly in his robe and retrieves the dead cat from her place of rest. The kittens weakly cry and raise their noses into the air. They are hardly able to open their eyes, too young to understand their unwonted plight.

Despite the hunger in his stomach, he steps forth from the alley and walks down the twilight streets as a man with purpose and conviction. Wind and rain slap his cheek, but he does not resist. The lifeless creature dangles from his firm hands. His robe tussles and drags behind him. A police car creeps toward the robed man as he walks along. Momentarily, it matches his pace. The man turns to face it. He walks. His stare is hard and unflinching. The sinister creeping object that has haunted him at every corner for his entire life no longer causes him fear and trembling. The car with the moving red and blue lights, keeper of order, oppressor of the outcast. Follower of death. It would arrive at the scene of tragedy and all traces of the devil would be hidden. Where did those men in blue uniforms hide the devil's face? All places in the city were tainted with evil, stained with sorrow. The creeping car with the blue and red lights roamed the streets day and night, searching for the devil's face that it might be studied, collected, and painted over. The man in the bloodred robe faces the police car until it speeds away and around a corner, persistent in its relentless hunt.

He walks for a few hours until his hunger finally causes him to stumble. He enters the doorway of the nearest building, a dilapidated tenement house, and finds the entrance propped open by a phone book. He enters an elevator, his hands still clutching the dead calico cat. He transfers it to one arm and uses his free hand to push the button for the highest floor. The elevator automatically shuts its black wiry gate and, like a knowing Charon, ferries him upward. Shortly after, the elevator stops its rising motion and releases the robed man. He exits and walks down the empty hallway, but stops to gaze on a space of graffiti that he is unable to read. It is an indecipherable enigma to him. And yet he somehow knows that it carries the secret of his life's existence.

He finds a stairwell leading upward and follows its path. The stairway is narrow and unlit. It turns a corner and goes up seven final steps to a closed door. He opens the door and walks out onto the tenement rooftop, the highest place he is able to reach. He walks to the edge of the roof and looks down upon the streets below, searching for substance among the moving shapes of cars and people. All he sees is a constant, baffling world of motion, overshadowed by miles of immovable edifices, a landscape completely lorded over in darkness.

He remembers the day that the two highest towers in the city were brought down to the ground, when the sky was filled with a colossal plume of smoke, and the people wailed and moaned. The beginning of the end. The highest point of a corrupt mankind, the pinnacle of a damned earth, a fortress of steel rising to the threshold of an eternal kingdom, strewn about the cursed ground.

"The first shall be last and the last shall be first!" are the words that trail away in the wind and rain.

Setting the dead cat gently upon the ledge, the man pulls a dagger from within his tunic. With inexplicable tears in his eyes, he forces the antique blade beneath the damp fur. A tiny stream of blood is released. It begins to trickle over the edge of the stone railing of the rooftop and drop its way down toward the sidewalk below. He loses sight of it in the wind and is unable to see where it is landing. Drops of blood, raining down. Scattered. He would do more if he could. He would stand at the edge of a cloud in order to cover all of New York in the calico's innocent blood.

He will sit here and look up into the evening sky, past the subways where the devils roam, past the honking of horns and the treading of feet, past the top of the Empire State Building and the buildings larger than it. He looks for a break in the overcast sky, for even the smallest access point. He would shed his bloodred garment, even his hungry limbs, in order to squeeze through the blanket of darkness. For the tiniest access, he would condense his spirit to a morsel. If only to survive.