Sector V was a new animal. Below an under-construction building like a toothless monster, employees smoked dope in clusters of threes and fours. The promises the city makes, the pressure of days, oozed out of the steadily darkening sky as if some vitality was being lost with each passing second. Hearts grew anxious to hold it in. Muscular strain spread around the corner block, bunched up in the neck and shoulders.
Flung to the ground cigarette butts chased one another under the bridge. There was a lack of life in the general surroundings. The crowd was homogenous. Traffic limited. At the metro, they gave you a slip of paper with a bar code instead of a solid ticket.
Everything seemed like a prototype for something that had not yet been manufactured. Here a new class was coming into being. A certain recollection of shared griefs flickered during commuting hours. Hard night shifts, the pros and cons of respective companies, cafeteria coffee, and the brand of liquor for the weekend. The tune had been threshed out so much that it had become a humming drone, a low sort of chamber music that calmed you with its familiarity.
Every once in a while, a slim tall man brought up a hiking trip. This created an air of suspense that nourished the travelers as they bundled into cabs in the early morning. All it took was this idea of a trip to hold in your palm and look at like a snow globe. Within were verdant Himalayan slopes, sunshine, and flowers. Flowers of the wild mountainous kind – the ones that won’t listen to you or to anyone else, harbor secret dark insects and snakes, grow in poisonous water, or survive on the very lack of air – the ones that laugh in the face of your urbanity.