Seven

It’s a small splash of colour hiding underneath the eave of a window in the poorest part of the city. Just a few words stencilled red on a clear patch in the neighbourhood’s grime, a vivid intrusion into the otherwise dull and monotonous apathy of an alley running the boundary of a housing unit, itself reaching up and into a last remaining clear space, grasping for fresh air and sunlight. The building reminds him of his own, a build by module stack of walls that make a furnace in the summer, and a refrigerator in the winter, largely intended as a gate to the keep the poor off the streets and away lest footpaths of respectable places become beggaries.

It’s been… a year(?) since the day he sat in the sun and read the small book, his obsession growing and forcing him onto the streets when he can spare time to watch, and listen, and wander further afield that his usual routine of home, workshop, people. He looks in secluded corners and over the walls of closed gardens. He sits and watches parks and passers-by, his curiosity peaked by the unusual and the banal alike, falling into a rhythm of observation and notation. But always he searches for that one small truth he feels hides from him and other people, the hidden city within the city, the dominion of the animals and birds, the insects and creepies that lie tucked beneath the veneer of human spaces, a universe of fellow travellers without voice or marker in the world of people.

In looking for that secret that he finds the splash. He’s pushed back some cardboard rubbish stacked haphazardly near the wall, assuming there will be a home for a rodent or small cat, some refuge he’ll catalogue in his mad census of the city’s underworld, perhaps a nest partially built, or a horde of small objects taken from the world above. At first he ignores it, assuming it’s a blob of paint spilled from discarded rubbish, or perhaps an older layer again exposed to the light by the actions of weather or a passer-by. But when his search for life is exhausted he rocks back on his heels and glances at the colour. It’s a simple thing, nothing more than three words impressed on badly-laid concrete, a small command or code laid out by an intention and provenance unknown.

It registers slowly, the colour forming into shapes that take their time making their way into words he understands, but which were perhaps destined to trigger that age-old and familiar unease. He looks away, pushes the hair out of his eyes, and looks again. Three such simple words… why does he feel the hairs on his neck rise, a tingle in his viscera?

He stands and backs away from the wall into the alley, taking his time to look around the walls, the way, the windows above, questioning whether this is a trick or trap. Despite cautiously looking around the lower reaches of the buildings lining the alley it’s the only graffiti of its kind, so he returns, and crouches again, this time checking the paint is dry, asking himself how long it might have been there, before muttering the three words to himself.

“Awake the Sleeper.”