Rise and Skyway

With my rent in the clouds, somehow I floated to a Minneapolis skyway above the mittenless teenagers, the street-callers and parakeets, and teetered between a bank and a juice bar and a jewelry shop that changed my wristwatch battery. I held a palm-sized castanet that clicked like rain with the cloud-hoppers in suits and business sandwiches.

My temporary partner, an actor, coached me on this tightrope above chagrin. I wanted to bring flyers of some kind, but he sagely suggested two or three changes of clothing. Soon the sudden upsurges of people flocking at intersections reminded me of a favorite ride at the fair, the scrambler.

The skyway is columnar, like a spine, and partitioned so that it seems capable of future serpentine movement as it emulates marble. These were my thoughts while discovering that eight hours in the skyway can result in a skeletal crisis.

Nerve impulses race up and down spinal bone, and the skyway emits exclamatory sparks and illuminations at lunchtime. People jaunt through in batlike nerve stretchings, brain-sent and cued, even cuddling without epidermal sensations. At the agency, my supervisor, frosted and wearing a jacket designed for considerable arm-reachings, said that the businesses counting passersby predicted that they would be as oblivious of the castanets as they were of carnal life outside.

The only person I recognized at that wintry branch of the skyway was a pastor wearing a Hawaiian shirt. He had retired from an inner-city congregation where I had heard him contend that the Song of Solomon didn’t belong in the Bible. He didn’t seem sure of what he was seeing, his shirt petals as bleary in the electric skyway as the Northern lights.

In Scandinavian and other mythologies, the world is made from a zodiacal titan and we have been clumping across its body for eons.

Supervisory sorts attempted skyway gauche, showing concern for an adequately dressed-up individual.

“Why are you counting people?”

Why the skyway?

A suited woman whose blouse was bannered for a multiplicity of ties had to know about any omniscience beyond hers. And stretched-out straddling nerves also had to connect the left and the right side of the urban brain where employees might have difficulty comprehending spring-water chic after heavy decimal mesmerization.

Given elevation and voice, a black woman exclaims amid the afternoon fraying, “Look at her clicking! She’s got a clicker in her hand! Hey girl, why don’t you get a real job?”

Within weeks, I am called to the only university campus that is enclosed with skyways. A student in Duluth never need tramp in the cold or the pain or the damp or the decay. When I am not counting students in a classroom, I admire snowfalls and spring rainstorms from a skyway. I speculate about space stations becoming the cranium of a new planet, another giant to live on.

Scheming all the while to drop through a crack of the fitted plates, so subject to fracture.