In Interruption...

Due a family matter on the part of our producers, we regret there will be no broadcast this week. Enjoy the silence, contemplate, and stay tuned for next week

Concerning the Sunlight

  The rain had ceased, which was a boon. The sky was bright and gravid, dark spaces with bullet-holes of streaming sunlight and recumbent water still dripping and pooled about the ragged concrete. A chill breeze sauntered auspiciously, a tawdry phantom of something unworldly.
  Taylor tried to save his eyes from the glare as he followed the paper scrap, each sparkling tear of former rain dancing a mariachi on his tender optic nerves. He was provoked at the back of his mind by a sense of familiarity, but was unable to capture. The sensation in itself was familiar, and when he focused on it he realized he had no memory of the journey in progress. He knew he had the memory -- it was just inaccessible for now.
  The feeling was only alleviated when he knocked on the chosen door, and faced the Asian kid who lived downstairs.

Concerning the Music

  The outer room was unchanged when Taylor stumbled back into it; empty, overbearing in shades and an inattentive bartender. The music was still somewhere at the edge of hearing, but Taylor didn’t recognize what it was. Upon request the man with the paperback managed to scry out some Advil from behind the counter, at no charge. Never able to take pills dry, Taylor bought a drink.
  He toyed with the glass a bit, watching the liquid swirl, trying to join thoughts. It wasn’t such a weighted matter, the loss of the Walkman and the manila envelope, Eric had left him with an address to call upon if ever something like this happened. It was sort of ineluctable really, human nature and the golden-egg-laying goose. No, now it was more trying to analyze the jagged edges of his existence and find a point where they formed a decent hole. The thing with bathrooms still bothered him. He could chalk it up to repeatedly bad experience, but it was the Music that drove him to further attention, and there was where his train of thought met with bandits.
  Sometimes he almost thought he could hear it, he thought he knew that elusive thought or knowledge that he though -- or he knew he thought -- no, thought he almost knew what he was thinking, had the key to that locked room, like the radio signal only needed to get just a bit closer. Just on the tip of his tongue, metaphorically speaking. Had to keep at it.
  And once more he felt his resolve to ride it out, stay abreast, be overwhelmed by the proportion of the wave, felt he had toppled off the board and went under.
  With a sigh, he changed the thought-line. It was best to strike the task at hand while it was still hot, or whatever the simile was. He scoured his coat pockets for the scrap of paper holding the address -- the instructions thereof had long ago been shorn off and incinerated.
  He left some money on the counter and exited.

Concerning the Bathroom, Again

  Mary. It is unquestionably Mary. A slight loving smile on her Mona Lisa lips like affectionate amusement in her errant child, forgiving him for all the times he has screwed up and welcoming home despite. Unconditional. She is too good for him, and in the emotional rush he felt like crying.
  And then something scratched along his synpase like fingers on a chalkboard. His head. Head. His. That was right. Somehow it had been disconnected from his neck, left just sitting on the stump like a pumpkin from Washington Irving. He forced his eyes open to bleak, uninteresting white with a shotgun pattern of black holes. Cold pedestal, cold white tile.
  The bathroom, he realized gloomily. The cenotaph. They had left him in one of the stalls. “Build a summer home here,” he mumbled around the size of his tongue. His body had become liquescent; tried to stand, couldn’t remember how. Tried again, failed, and ended up pulling himself out of the stall and to the basin counter. A look in the mirror didn’t help; vertical motion seemed to fracture his brain like a kaleidoscope. “Sorry my ass,” he told the dismal, ravaged reflection. He ran some water, let it cool and tried to bathe his face and neck.