The day like the street is clear, quiet and empty, but they appear as if out of a fog. They are faceless, raceless, blank; the barest suggestion of a sex, for their voices when they speak are male and their bodies not feminine, but it’s an undiscovered country beneath their clothes and I couldn’t swear to more than guesswork. One may have a beard, or not — my mind wanders.
The gun is grey, a flat, unflashy grey, and square and blunt as a Volvo. It swallows them whole, a void in reverse — it floats of itself, gestures of itself, makes its own demands in a colorless, unhostile baritone.
We are beset by ghosts.
They dissolve back into the street, whatever, whoever they once were. They leave behind asphalt, jasmine, drying sweat — the bay blowing in patient up the hills. Like breaking water, we are suddenly home again, returned to a world of bodies, relationships, causes.
The rest is impassioned, dry theater. We know the forms, but not the meaning, police on a sunny background.