The Rendezvous

Witnessing a snowfall for the first time in a long time, Lilac recorded the feathery flakes falling from an indiscernible sky, swathing a sombre landscape. Most trees had shed their amber leaves to submit entirely to the oncoming winter, the piercing cold of which discouraged her from leaving the inn where she was convalescing, after a perplexing episode.

Observing the picturesque surroundings from a windowpane, she identified herself as a homebound cat. When, a fortnight later, she ventured out, it was to meet a blind date at a bijou bookshop.

Lilac struggled to engage in any persiflage beyond the dreich weather and the decadent music playing in the background, for she was held spellbound by the unmatched suavity of the erudite gentleman. Notwithstanding the ease with which she comported herself in her earlier rendezvous with other men—of which there were many—she presently desired a moment away from his percipient gaze, in order to reclaim her superciliousness. After all, she had not expected to meet someone in whose presence she would unwittingly add salt to her tea. An enchanted Lilac was mortified!

An unforeseen blizzard had blurred the fragile streets and disrupted the railway services, much to the confusion of the radio operators, who were puzzled by the nature of the failure. At the adjacent streets, utility poles fell aslant, in unison. Transfixed still by the brief but gauche encounter with the flawless man, Lilac was nonchalant to the prolonged urban bedlam surrounding her at the railway station. The crowd or its cacophony was but a nonentity to the bewitched.

During the circuitous journey back to the inn—though drawing the conclusion that she was out of his league—she was over the moon to observe that at last to someone she was drawn, with someone she was smitten. What made the night a trifle distressing, however, was that she had not heard from him since the meeting, and from such inaction on his part, she plaintively inferred that the attraction was unrequited. Two days later, she relinquished her ego and laid bare her feelings to him through a telephone call, adding that she would like to see him again. The response, infused with an otherworldly static, was in the affirmative.

There was a nip in the air the evening Lilac travelled by train to meet the object of her newfound fascination. Catching her reflection on a windowpane, she adjusted her posture and slackened the tension in her lips; she wondered if anyone noticed the purposive alteration. Briefly she was amused at what she was becoming. Her body had become inure to the wintry climes.

Upon seeing the man of her desire, all her agitation translated into an embrace—the recipient of her warmth was as cold as winter.

They walked to an estaminet, where, to obliterate her acute sense of self-awareness, she ordered a firewater at once. Soon, there were no inhibitions, and soon, she submitted entirely to him.

Ambling along the graffitied walls later that night, when she remarked that their intimacy was strange considering that they had met only once hitherto, he responded that that was called chemistry. She did not hear from him after the meeting.

The Unseeing

One dawn, Lilac found herself sketching a silhouette of an anthropomorphic figure descending from a celestial sphere. The golden light of the rising sun shone on the globe on the canvas, deepening the blight on the sketch—the ghastly figure. The product of her all-consuming engagement with pencil was one that convinced her to never dabble in artwork. A young bird perched on a branch of her beloved tree poised herself against the wintry breeze.

Still swayed by the mystique of the gentleman, discarding her ego once more, she wrote to him. From the revelation she had made to him when they last met—albeit in an inebriated state—she supposed that he must have gathered that she was besotted with him, and thus her wanting to see more of him would not nonplus him.

The Revelation

How utterly strange, she thought, as she read wooing messages from other men, while she was on the train to meet the man she was going to woo. The train was, she observed, for the most part, clean and capacious, with large windows through which she caught a glimpse of children walking into the dark woods and sepia farmlands flooded with smit-marked sheep—and perhaps a glowing orb of a vivid orangish light descending from the sky. No sooner had she begun to mull over what she thought she just sighted than she drifted off to sleep. When she was awakened by the clunk of her head against the windowpane, a trifle disoriented, she briefly believed that she was still at the inn.

The departure of familiar surroundings brought in Lilac a sense of forbidden relief. Having arrived earlier than the appointed time, she went to her place of solace, where she covertly primped in front of the mirror. As people drifted in and out of the lavatory, she wondered if her embellished countenance betrayed the agitation that she had failed to obliterate.

Out on the Christmassy street, every being seemed to her a spectator of her impending union, discerning the tension behind her powdered face, sneering at her predicament. Accelerating her pace in a pretense of aiming toward a decided destination, she wished that she was invisible. When, at last but at the appointed time, the object of her passion emerged, she was struck by a déjà vu. Beholding his sunlit ethereal visage, she found her body—suddenly an external entity—drawn to him like a moth. The apprehension that she had felt earlier was rendered absurd upon his timely arrival.

Standing before a giant Ferris wheel that was concluding a ride, observing its long rotating spokes sharing a common endpoint, Lilac wishfully wondered if her approaching journey with him would culminate into something beautifully concrete. The taciturn man beamed, and she felt a twitch of delightful unease, as if he was privy to her innermost thoughts.

As they silently sailed through the cerulean skies on the giant wheel, embracing the divinity of the moment, she fancied the likelihood of their union. Then considering the futility of such whims, she tried to brush the thought aside, but the moment was such that one was inclined to think of love and the other world.

The first swing of ascent of the wheel sent her into raptures—a castle in the sky established its place in her reality. But such preoccupation was short-lived, for when the chair in which they were seated reached the top, she surmised that she discerned something that was hidden from view during the previous rendezvous, and the first swing of descent filled her with an ominous dread—her heart pounded with a recollection of a bygone episode.

Swaying between infinity and emptiness, drifting from hope to despair, the subsequent swings of ascent and descent made her question the veracity of the entire affair, while her supposed companion remained stationary, unaffected. Tormented by the toing and froing of the ride—or perhaps the mind—she seized his still hand, whereupon an acute electric shock jolted her towards the edge of her chair as if by some force of repulsion and now, when the chair reached the peak of the wheel, she perceived the very body of her companion distorting into enormous streams of oscillating violet signals, producing an agonising static that subdued the surrounding sounds of merriment, and illuminating the firmament above her with a familiar flash of orangish light.

The man—or the semblance of one—had evanesced in the crisp air.