These Dreams of You

~ ~ ~

He glares at the tall ale he’s barely sipped. Lately he’s heard that everything in London is spiked with a new and dangerous intoxicant. He brushes a brown lock of hair off his forehead.

If he allowed himself to say so, he would admit it’s an impressive bare bottom — and only when he spies the ends of blonde hair peeking out from under the rather chic habit does he fully realize this can’t be a real nun. In another lifetime, as a devout Catholic he would have had to stifle a flash of anger; now it only embarrasses him. It isn’t that he’s no longer given to flashes of anger in his life. It’s that over the past two and a half years the anger has become reserved for outrages greater than the irreverence of young people, when the anger isn’t subsumed by grief.

Brushing the hair out of his face has become a nervous habit, almost a twitch. it: reads the newspaper across the front, above the altogether too comely nun, in the large red lower-case letters which he discovers inside the newspaper stand for “international times.” Sounds communist, he thinks, which also once would have provoked anger: subversion and heresy in one swoop — and he manages the smallest and most rueful of smiles. Though he knows little about the current music, he recognizes under the masthead the variation on Plato that serves as the newspaper’s motto, and can’t help feeling his admiration stirred: When the mode of the music changes, the walls of the city shake.