Anyway, they had finally made their way down to some actual water, which was the important thing. She looked down. Wondered, why here? She was sad. Always, mostly, sad, but special sad today. Short bus sad. He saw a bench that had obviously been left there just for completely insane people to sit and pointed, as in, "Sit, there. See. We are here. We are going to sit here now because this is obviously here for crazy people."
She sat. As instructed. She looked down. Not really very responsive. "Let us enjoy the waters," he says. She stared some more, shell shocked.
"Look," he said. "All they were going to do was give you an organ grinder and maybe a bed and a corner to go woo woo in."
She kinda shrugged. Looked down at the water.
"What would the water do?," he says. "Tends to run down hill, I guess."
She stares. Not even a crack of a smile.
"They got nothing for you in those places," he says. "Forget them."
Maybe a shrug. The water runs beneath a bridge and the car sounds ruminate madly over their heads and the birds are chirping and he tries to listen for the sound: The talking waters.
It speaks. The water says what it says to special hearing only dogs like him get.
"Yeah, we could chase ourselves silly around this f**cking demoralized state, which has always, always been this way, anyway. It can't take care of the supposedly mentally ill. They got nothing. Nothing! Not for you. Not for you."
She agrees, looks at him, with those shocked blue-green gorgeous movie starlet eyes. Horrified at how little they could do. Horrified!
"Listen," he says. "The water ... listen ... the water speaks."
If his heart wasn't broken already, he could lose his mind here, he thinks. It would be worth it, he thinks. For her, he'd say anything, do anything, feel anything, stand in the way of anything.
Anything had been happening for some time now.
"Listen. Listen ...," he goes on, emptying his head out now, obviously running way too of mouth today. "Yep, we could go around, do all that, we could chase around and get you some kind of public lunacy assistance and they could put you in their cages but they got nothing for you. 'They' haven't had anything for about, hmmm, 6,000 years ... but listen for the water. Listen. Listen ..."
A giant truck rolls over the bridge and it interrupts everything with its dust up of total grinding death world in motor grind f**ck you planet sounds. Then it's gone and the world of the living returns. The greens. The birds. The tweeting, Tweeter-like. He thinks of Tripoli, burning.
"Hear that sound, that trickling rickling sound. Now listen, inbetween those sounds, and inbetween those sounds," he goes on ... "We can chase around to get someone to do something but to give you another number to call, or, you could decide to live."
The sound of the water, he told her: "Life. Life. Life ..."