By Nathan Greene
Moises Moroes, the killer, they later called him. They said it not much later but later enough that I never heard it. I only saw Moises in the afternoon station. He wore a dark brown waxed jacket over a white mandarin collared shirt. It was so white that I knew he hated light just from the color. Moises stood by the door to the platform. The faint blue Denver sky fell on him through the high windows, while the low glass doors welcomed in train passengers. These visitors passed Moises, the killer, who leaned so imperceptibly against the bleached marble beside the bronze door that most visitors never saw him.
Three great chandeliers softened and shadowed Moises. But Moises never turned up towards the metal ribs and circles. He never seemed to see the station at all. Unlike me, sitting in a linen dress across the lobby, Moises ignored the wind on glass, the ringing from the lobby workers by the elevator, the scarred flagstones. I remember thinking it all had history, burned or chipped on a hammer, as the structure decayed and regrew, over the years.
Moises, by his scowl, lived without past. He kept a long dark face. Staring at Moises, I thought how a prism cannot color light without turning it, no matter how pure the glass may be. And Moises Moroes was very pure. So I watched instead the wealthy travelers. Or the poor ones who acted wealthy to mollify the guards by the doors. I doubt the guards thought a man like Moises Moroes might be there, hidden by Union Station. Many other people bent and beetled between the lower reaches. They seeded in the brown and green leather chairs, working and eating and laughing in the cafes. Moises poised beside them. The odd buttons and lapels on his shirt shone brighter than the walls of the station at noon. I appreciated the shirt. It reminded me that the other travelers conceived the place differently than Moises and me, them brushing briefly in and passing. Moises Moroes lingered in his own gothic. His large eyes hated every face bathed by the station. I wondered if he sought forgiveness.
Afterwards, they said Moises grabbed me as the train entered. I heard we bounced together on the platform and rolled towards the rail. Rose petals fluttered above, one claimed. I had no flowers, but I still imagine the perfect curved edges flickering up with the lights above the ghostly faces of the other passengers. As if the station elevated, while Moises and I floated down. I suspect an underworld lives beneath the platform in Denver. Moises held me there, delicately on the shoulders. My neck broke on a C vertebrae. But it may as easily have been Moises who ended on a rail beneath the neon red title for Union Station and the pale terminal clock. Or perhaps we are both still tumbling. I like to think of that and how high the petals, which were likely not petals, and the ghosts not yet ghosts would have risen. Most of those who saw the violence called me ‘her’ or ‘Remoir.’ They called him the killer of. But some believed Moises the killer for me. Those few glimpsed a faint woman crying by the track for her lost lover, that evening in Denver. It is not mine to distinguish.
From my angle in the station, Moises appears as much a lover as a killer. Many other faces show on trains. They remind me of angels. Perhaps they are only humans lit overhead. But I think of them as angels, arriving with us, into Denver. We stroll through the quay. The angels sift towards the station, and I approach a long-lit train, not the last of the night, and Moises follows with a flower, red and bending in the light. He must have picked it in the morning.