9/06/2010

A transit of Venus

It’s a Monday morning there about eight or eight-thirty and I’m sitting atop an unoccupied desk at the office leaning my head back against the partition separating this cubicle from the next one, as I wait for this girl I work with to wrap up some test run with an ERP application or something, which I’m supposed to oversee but I’m not entirely sure.

“Hung over or still drunk this time around?” she asks once she notices I have my eyes closed as if basking under the fluorescent light above. I’m figuring that can’t be good in any way but to hell with it, really.
“I don’t know,” I shrug without opening my eyes, then pinch the bridge of my nose between thumb and forefinger. “Little bit of both, I guess.”

Last night, see, I was sitting at this plush sofa at the lounge of the nightclub, talking with this really cute girl I’ve been sort of interested in for the past couple of months—we were watching the bartenders work, trying to figure out who’s gay and who’s not—when I dared her to go over and hit on the one who looked like Clark Kent (albeit a very big, built, muscular Clark Kent), just to be sure.
She looked at me and said, absolutely, she’s take up the wager for a ticket to see Cats: She even has student discount and pays half-price (she reasoned).

“You’re on,” I told her, all cool and all that, but somehow it seemed a lot more amusing before she actually went up to the bar and started whispering something in Clark the bartender’s ears and he whispered back in hers, both giggling as they went, then she came back a while later with a big grin on her face:
“Nope,” she said with a sneer, “Definitely not gay”.

She raised her hand as if calling for a high-five then sat down by my side: She said his name was Francisco, then reminded me I owed her the ticket to see the damn show.

Someone took a picture of the group as we’d arrived that night:
The dancefloor was closed and being used as the entrance to the club, so that you’d come in through this large empty room with all the multicolored LED lighting embedded on the wall, blinking, flashing on and off, changing colors—our silhouettes pitted against the concrete columns like tiny Venus blotted out in transit against the glare of the Sun—same thing when we left, the whole thing seasonal, cyclical, purely incidental—the sheer logic or reason of the moment scattered in the night, like buckshot or an archipelago.