Snippets of Memory - The Umbrella Academy

Closer to the Sun

"I know where we're going", I told him.

And as I peeled off my pajamas, with absolutely no trace of modesty around him, I added:

"I feel like flipping off Adele and Gotye too".

---

We were both euphoric during the night bus ride, even though he hadn't taken anything. The City looked radiant through the window, dressed up in its own kind of drag: with glass and steel glam. The skyscrapers sliced the sky into sharp angles, their little red lights blinking against the rainy black night. Neon signs dripped across the windows, fractured and glowing, while the streetlamps cast strobe-like flashes onto the worn leather seats. Time itself flickered on nights like that.

And it came to a full stop when we climbed down into the sewers.

The entrance to The City's illicit - and literally underground - raves was beneath a graffiti-covered bridge. Known to some, spoken of by none. The gate was rusted, already humming with muffled bass from below, and a faint stench of stagnant water drifted up.

You had to walk a while to reach the vaulted main hall, where trance-drenched silhouettes swayed in ankle-deep water. Where lights splashed against the damp walls of The City's guts. Where chaos danced. Klaus was in his element down there: like a techno prince of the underworld. And he was already laughing, even though we were only brushing past the stumbling shadows of those too wasted to keep going.

He'd finally gone with an electric fuchsia fishnet top, some of its white threads glowing under the blacklights. Laced cuffs, thigh-high socks resurrecting his still mismatched boots. He'd gone hard on the eyeliner. With the humidity in there, it wouldn't last ten minutes.

"I still feel overdressed", he said through the pounding bass, which made conversation nearly impossible. I burst out laughing, so he added more seriously:
"I dare any ghost-asshole to cut through this sound. Let's dance until we dissolve, Rinny, or until we start hallucinating".
"Don't stray from the Grill", I told him.

By this I meant the heavy wire mesh that marked the center of this space on the ground. And off he went again, laughing joyfully as he drifted away like a kid running toward a playground.

He had no idea what that same music, that same place, did to my power. To be fair: neither did I, not really. Now I can almost feel it retroactively, that incredible tide of human energy and electronic sound. That strange fusion of the organic and the electronic, where the soundwaves from massive speaker systems made your insides vibrate. Like a temporary merger of humans and machines, resonating for one night with the fabric of space-time.

I know now that, in different circumstances, another version of me would've fully surrendered to that music and those people. Taking control of them all - their nervous systems - through the pulse of electro and techno. But that night, I was one of them.

I don't know how long we danced. Or how many people I pushed away, politely or otherwise. I danced alone, like I always did, letting myself be infused by the blended energies that churned the water with every jump. I was teetering on the edge of dissociation, the kind that came with the lights and the sound.

And yet? I always knew where Klaus was, as long as he didn't stray. Even drowned in the crowd of sweat and strobe flashes. I didn't see him, visually, I mean. I felt him. That golden, vibrating signature that somehow cut through the strobes to reach me. Now I know what to call them. Marigolds, Aethers, whatever. They always let me find my way back to him, just to make sure he was okay.

He never found it strange. He always smiled, even when his eyes were already glassy. And then we'd leave, wordlessly aware of each other again. And once more, for him, the music would become silence.