Sebastian’s Babylon, Chapter 4 Daniel Ryan Adler
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wo weeks later, Sebastian was walking under a blooming linden tree. He’d planned to meet Lexi and had shown up fifteen minutes late to find that she was still not there. A waitress pivoted between tables, ponytail swinging, legs scissoring like a ballerina’s. He might have had better luck asking her out. A text: “Sorry. Tons of work at the office. Rain check Sunday?” He didn’t believe her, but forbid himself from sliding down the rabbit hole of distrust. He put his phone away and ordered the duck confit. While sitting outside, a breeze shook the linden blossoms onto his head. Sweat trickled down his back. Once, walking beside his mother in the fetid August heat, he had wished for January’s cold before he realized that he didn’t want that, but something between the stink of summer in
the city and the icy wasteland of late winter. For a three-year-old, each season is an epoch, an eternity of waiting. As a man, twelve weeks seemed endurable; he could savor each month for its ripening or decline in the season, especially if, as Shakespeare said, weather reflects people’s mood. Back in his library, he admired his bookshelves full of varicolored spines. The Alchemist’s Handbook lay open to a diagram of the distillation process. He shifted the plastic skull on his desk sideways, jaw unhinged, to balance the red carnations that reminded him of Lexi’s neck, her vanilla, peppery smell. When it became too much, he studied his print of Kupka’s Abstraction Colorée, its representation of organic creation and lyrical subconscious. Apollinaire too had recognized Kupka’s genius, and as Sebastian
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