Francis Mckee:
Day Sleeper. That’s what the sign on the door said. It meant Mardi worked nights. Slept days, worked nights. The sun goes down and she enters El Cerrito. The sun comes up and she’s back in her room, the secret place of the stairs, the green bed, cedar beams, the roar of the passing trucks on the highway outside.
When all was said and done there was nothing new under the California sun. Beckett said that and somebody else. Wasn’t it a song too? Mardi read a lot at dawn and in the evening before setting out. She worked as a projectionist at the Cerrito Theatre on San Pablo Avenue and after screenings she did extra shifts serving food and beer until the place shut for the night. It’s true she was home by 3 am but she was still wired and too awake for sleep. Spikenard oil helped a little with that. She’d rub some on her chest and swore her heart was slowing down as it seeped through the skin.
The best thing was watching the movies, though, over and over. Last week, it was the remake of Breathless. Richard Gere as Belmondo, in blinding tartan trousers pursuing a wild Jerry Lee Lewis kind of west coast revolution. Destiny and tragedy. He died at midnight, every night, and it was a beautiful, inevitable thing. She played the Byrd’s Turn, Turn Turn, over the pa when the lights came up and she was sure the patrons got it.
The almond tree and the grasshopper, thought Mardi. Ever the silver cord be loosed….
