| Oct. 27th, 2005 @ 11:44 am How Bella and Chain Met |
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Bella and Chain met cute. At the time it didn't seem that way. It seemed frightening, gruesome, humiliating for Bella and appalling for Chain.
The City's streets were laid out by sodden boosters who had heard rumors that Modern Cities had Rational Grids with occasional grand avenues cutting across them at mathematically precise angles. But the city lay at the nexus of really quite sincere slip faults, and it was dissected by a jumble of thrusting hills, which had disastrous effects on the grids. Streets that climbed straight up the steepest faces of hills and ended abruptly at sheer cliffs. Other hills where the streets gave up the attempt to meet their further ends and curled up to die in cul-de-sacs and pitiful urban oxbows.
Bella was bringing home her groceries on the back of her bicycle and she came round a blind turn going too fast to see that the intersection she came into ended in a short cement wall. It wouldn't have helped to see it at that point. She couldn't have stopped anyway. She was able to drop the bike before she would have hit the wall -- Chain said, much later, that it looked as if she would have gone over the wall. And on the other side of the wall was a drop, and the drop went down about four stories to a landscape of roofs which echoed the City's own.
Chain had a delivery and had just labored up the cross street. He saw Bella coming a half a block away and pulled up short so she wouldn't careen into him. He wasn't thinking of her safety at first, just his own. But when he saw that she was not taking the turn, much less making the turn, he dropped his own bike and started over to where he thought she was going to crash. So he was standing in just the right spot to take the force of Bella's flying tomatoes and one durian, which was poor payment for the services he rendered over the next several hours. She came out with her body only lightly damaged and her self-worth seriously bruised.
Chain did all the right things. His instinct was to lift her and cradle her -- which would not have been easy, as she was not a tiny girl -- and smoothe her bleeding brow. But he knew better, and while the lady with the big spotted boots made the call to 911, he checked her in situ and wouldn't let her get up. He knew what to check, and her signs were normal, but her gashes were pretty bad. She was pretty well winded, and let him keep her there until the EMT asked her some things and had her sign a paper. The only trouble she gave him was when he refused to let her get back on her bike. And that trouble was short-lived because some friend of her showed up with his delivery truck. The friend shoveled her, the bike, and what was left of the groceries into the truck and they grunted off, leaving Chain covered in tomato, durian, and her blood.
The friend was her boss, and he never explained how he happened to be on that street at that time, with a nearly-empty truck. In the truck, Bella babbled, about the street, the stupid stupid stupid way she had taken it, the fact that she was not harmed, the durian she lost, the guy who had gotten it all over him, and how was she going to thank him? She had no idea who he was.
Chain, who got the delivery in three minutes before the deadline would have passed and three fortunes destroyed forever, knew who Bella was, and where to find her, because the EMT had asked her those questions: "Are you okay? What's your name? Where were you going? What day is it?" She hadn't gotten the last one right, but only because she had thought it was Thursday all day. By the time it was Thursday, Chain showed up at The Open Book to ask about her, and the rest was almost inevitable, though Bella resisted and so did Chain.
Later Bella was as suspicious about Chain's fortuitous presence on that particular hill as she was about Hugo's, but his reason for being there was iron-clad and completely in character, which was unusual for him. Not much else he did was in character, even considering that he was a bicycle messenger, and bicycle messengers in this City are frequently rumored to be without character altogether. Anyway, as it turned out, it was Bella's presence on any given street corner which was questionable. Most of the time.
Bella moved in with Chain when she discovered that his flat was in the same block as her place of work. This was another fact which gave her pause once the role of coincidence in her life became of concern to her. But there was a reason -- which I will save for later. She liked th flat, anyway. It was a fairly large studio cobbled together of what had once been several minuscule single occupancy rooms in an old fleabag residential hotel, so there were windows every seven feet along an interior airshaft wall and more windows overlooking the street in front and the paved pocket handkerchief yard in back, so there was a lot of light for Bella's "real" work. She was an artist, and she had never had such a congenial place to art in. And Chain was easy about it, didn't want to dedicated some space to being entertaining space or something. He did not object to Bella's wholesome and creative young friends coming over but he wasn't about to invite any of his bike messenger comrades over for beer and profanity.
So that's how we find them, at the beginning, young lovers in their first flat in the City, watched over by Chain's dog.
"Why is your dog named Monkey?" Bella asked the first time she came over, but it was just a way of making conversation, since she figured that Chain had merely exercised his right to irony in this as in other matters.
"I don't know, I figure he pissed off the Buddha or something," Chain said. absently, concerned at the moment with imagining how Bella's belly would look with a piercing on it. A discreet little golden ring, he thought. Or better, a trompe l'oiel, with the appearance of a tiny beast emerging from her navel. |
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