The music brought him into himself again. The clarinet's haunting refrain glistening over a sea of streetlamps and stars, the world outside under a living blanket of night while the muted trumpet pierced though the fog of the city. It was as if this was the moment the night was created for, living endlessly every night to be discovered by the one soul who appreciated and understood this city. Ah, then the voice. Not an angel, no, this was something much more human and nowhere near the twisted splendor of a creature sycophantic to its heavenly creator, but only fleash and bone. Her voice rang out true and clear. Never a wrong note was sung, but each phrase and cadence giving out emotion that only the very lived could sing. Hers was a voice of hope, retrospect, and longing for something she never had. If angels sing the glories of Heaven, then this was the glory of the City. He closed his eyes and imagined a world set on the brink of disaster, but only this moment could bring it back. Then death came as if to shatter this dream, and shatter it did. The city changed but the memory lived on, forever framed in the meaning of music, this Lady Day's music.

Stood in firelight, sweltering. Bloodstain on chest like map of violent new continent. Felt cleansed. Felt dark planet turn under my feet and knew what cats know that makes them scream like babies in night. Looked at sky through smoke heavy with human fat and God was not there. The cold, suffocating dark goes on forever, and we are alone. Live our lives, lacking anything better to do. Devise reason later. Born from oblivion; bear children, hell - bound as ourselves, go into oblivion.

There is nothing else.

Existence is random. Has no pattern save what we imagine after staring at it for too long. No meaning save what we choose to impose. This rudderless world is not shaped by vague metaphysical forces. It is not God who kills the children. Not fate that butchers them or destiny that feeds them to the dogs.

It's us.

Only us.

Streets stank of fire. The void breathed hard on my heart, turning its illusions to ice, shattering them. Was reborn then, free to scrawl own design on this morally blank world.

Was Rorschach.

I find myself being drawn into something which pulls you, inexplicably and out of control. It's hard to fight but you fall, falling ever and deeper until you crash. What is it? Travel the world, see it's sights and sounds or live by the status quo of the small minded people that thrive in situations that require no thought, just a blind faith hurtling towards the end. Ah but life, ever a journey, ever a mindless train-ride of freewheeling ideas and revelations, punctuated by short lived hopes, aspirations and memories.

New York

The Bronx - the houses gathering and gleaming in the sun, which was falling now through wide refulgent skies and tumbling caravans of light down into the streets. New York, he supposed, was home - the city of luxury and mystery, of preposterous hopes and exotic dreams. Here on the outskirts absurb stucco palaces reared themselves in the cool sunset, poised for an instant in cool unreality, glided off far away, succeeded by the mazed confusion of the Harlem River. The train moved in through the deepening twilight, above and past half a hundred cheerful sweating streets of the upper East Side, each one passing the car-window like the space between the spokes of a gigantic wheel, each one with its vigourous colourful revelation of poor children swarming in feversih activity like vivid ants in alleys of red sand. From the tenement windows leaned rotund, moon-shaped mothers, as constellations of this sordid heaven; women like dark imperfect jewels, women like vegetables, women like great bags of abominably dirty laundry.

"I like these streets," observed Anthony aloud. "I always feel as though it's a performance being staged for me; as though the second I've passed they'll all stop leaping and laughing and, instead, grow very sad, remembering how poor they are, and retreat with bowed heads into their houses. You often get that effect abroad, but seldom in this country."

F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned