the cassandra pages: Inner-city Dejeuner

As I drove toward centre-ville today, around noon, the rain had just stopped and lay shimmering on the pavement like a still-living thing, its energy now horizontal and quickly bleeding away under the wheels of vehicles. Meanwhile the buildings of the downtown rose higher and higher as I approached the center of the downtown: the pewter sheen of polished concrete, the dark silver and black of vertical glass curtain walls, one-way mirrors counting upward to somewhere between too many and infinity.

I stopped for the light at Sherbrooke and Jeanne-Mance, and just then saw someone unfurl something colored -- orange in fact, perhaps a heavy curtain, or rug -- from an open window at the very top of one of these tall grey buildings and shake it out, as freely as a washerwoman in a basement, and then the window closed and became anonymous and businesslike again. After the fabric-laden hands withdrew and the window closed I looked down the forty or fifty stories and saw a cloud of white wings rising from the street, still far away -- all of this was far away -- their circling motion chalking an ever-changing calligraphy against a grey slate. How strange, I thought, a flock of seagulls on the ground in the center of the city, what are they doing.

As I grew closer I began to hear their voices: loud, argumentative, celebratory. There were a great many of them and they flew deftly between the cars to the center of the pavement and onto the sidewalk near the feet of a uniformed doorman outside an expensive hotel; rising and wheeling between the tight buildings as a flock, speaking as a horde, but acting as ravenous individuals each after his own share of some yet-unidentified prize and driving off all competitors.

When the traffic stopped near Aylmer, a brown-spotted juvenile landed on the trunk of the red taxi just in front of me, staring boldly at me through the windshield, and it was only then that I noticed a piece of soggy bread on the bumper of the taxi he had claimed, and more bread on the sidewalks and the street, fallen like manna, it seemed, from somewhere too high to see.