We stood by the canal where the delivery drivers rested in the backs of their cargo bikes, asleep with the parcels. Adam watched the sweet breath in their bodies. How safe they must feel to be able to sleep like this beside the road. He noticed how his vision was returning, but different now: staticky, flickering. He thought that there was something wrong with his eyes, some shard or spark, the presence of dark particles. It looked as though the air was beginning to flake away.
He did not understand what we were seeing. Some toxic transubstantiation, part of him thought. A new level of deadly smog, suspended matter solidified and falling to earth, as grey as ashes. The image was like an old film about the future, a lost promise told in the colourless, grainy texture of the past.
It was more than that. All that had been veiled was dissolving.
I watched with him as the city disintegrated. A car horn sounded behind us, and we stepped forward. The grey static kept appearing. Adam expected to fall through the screen like glass, but he trusted me now. I had taken him so far already. How sweetly his limbs answered to my impulses.
We looked down into the water. The willows dangled their naked branches over it like string. The canal was beginning to freeze over. At the edges, we could see the white film encroaching. The sight of water steadied him; I let him look for his reflection. There were grey fish down there, suspended in a small pool of liquid, living on within their shrinking limits. I was not like them. I could let him go. I reached out a hand to push through the air, which shattered gently.
There was nothing there, nothing beneath what was there. There was nothing to mourn.
Adam saw that this hand was not his hand. Nor was it entirely foreign. We remembered to breathe, even as the air was fragmenting around us. It landed on these numb fingers, settled delicately there like birds landing on a distant shore, their wings worn still by a long journey. It looked like ash until it melted.
It was only a rare fall of snow.
I smiled, and pressed that cold hand to his lips.
I caught his breath.