A Face in the Fog

Here's my semi-daily update then, I don't think it is entirely without merit. I may be wrong.

That fog is, by now, an almost perfectly understood meteorological phenomena does not make its sudden appearance any less surprising or surreal. To have ones world reduced, suddenly and without warning, to a sphere of a few hundred feet or less, bounded by a milky ephemera, is to some delightful, and to others terrifying, and it therefore comes as no surprise that the motif of fog runs strongly through our literary traditions.
It should also come as no surprise that it has profound effects on the minds of some of those that it touches. Or, at any rate, such is the not terribly comforting conclusion that I have been forced to draw after the encounter I had, that early spring morning...
I was, at the time, working as a third shift tech support guy, sorry, “Customer Support Analyst,” with a company self-consciously called Darjeeling ltd. and located in downtown St. Paul. I was twenty-four, just out of school with a degree in European history and a mountain of debt high enough to drown in. It was not an easy change for me to go from the college where I spent my nights debating obscure points of philosophy and math, cause and effect, over black coffee and red wine in the student dive just off campus to a life of repeating the same inane script to each brain dead late night caller. On top of that I had thought that the dive had bad coffee, I was wrong.
It could have been worse though, I had a job in the middle of the worst recession in years and I had an apartment in Minneapolis, just off of Lake street. I had a good group of friends, I had reconnected with some of the folks I knew in high school and was reintegrating into the community. I was toying with the idea of grad school, with looking for a different job, but mostly I was just floating without direction.
It's a hell of a backdrop for what I believe may be the most important experience of my life eh?
Well, I was walking home from work (six miles, I know, but I've never minded long walks and my car had broken down and I didn't really care enough to get it fixed), it was a little after ten in the morning, the sun was up behind a thick layer of clouds and the air was full of that particular humidity that only comes as the snow melts after an exceptionally cold and dry winter, it's a humidity that is refreshing and vital as opposed to stultifying. I wore my coat open and left my gloves hat and scarf in my bag.
I was always surprised by how few people I saw up and moving around on my walks home. I would clock out at nine and start walking and there would be a fair amount of foot traffic through downtown, along with cars pushing the speed limit driven by those men and women just barely late for work. As I continued to walk however the automotive traffic would begin to taper off and by nine thirty I could probably have napped confidently in the middle of the highway. Foot traffic, of course, ended abruptly at the invisible line of demarcation between downtown and the rest of the world. Most people aren't as tolerant as I am of aerobic activity, I've come to accept this.
As per usual, by the time I reached the point where Lake street crosses over the east river road, enters St. Paul and becomes Marshal avenue on that morning there was practically no one else around. For my entire walk there had been a light pall of fog, enough to obscure the skyline but have no more immediate effect than a heavily overcast sky but at some point between when I first set foot on the winding cement staircase that would take me up to the Lake street bridge and when I exited the stairwell that changed dramatically.
I stepped onto the bridge and into a world that stretched only as far as the light from the suddenly activated street lamp, a light that was killed within yards by a solid wall of roiling gray. I had always before found fog to be comfortable, or even “cool”, I liked the air of mystery that it lent to a landscape, but now I found it to be frightening, confining.
Moisture immediately began to collect on my clothes and skin, and I wrapped my woolen pea coat about me, tyeing it tight despite the heavy heat that seamed to accompany the fog. I could see the railing that the lamp stood behind and knew that it would lead me across the bridge. I hoped that the wind that always whipped down the Mississippi river would do something to clear away the oppressive fog and so I reached out my hand and allowed my fingers to trail along the rail as I took my first, somewhat hesitant, steps forward.
If anything the fog only grew thicker. It was about half way across the bridge that it happened. I was between two of the lamps and their lights, equidistant from me, lost all coherency and were refracted by the dense fog causing the whole world to glow an effervescent green-gold. It was then, breaking the walls of my reality that I saw the face.
It was the face of a young man. There was a cut above his right eye and blood flowed freely across his face, matting his hair and obscuring his aquiline features, his prominent nose and frail chin. His one open eye was the same gray as the fog but burned with a feverish intensity, his mouth was open and the face contorted as though with some fatal rebel yell.
The face turned, back into the fog, as though rallying some great host, and then he charged. He didn't so much appear to step out of the fog as from it, coming into being there for the first time. In his hand he held the better part of a brick, one end jagged and broken and covered with blood and gore, this he raised as he charged me and I barely had time to note that he was dressed well, in a white button down and black slacks, but that he was barefoot, before he was upon me. I raised my arm to ward off the blow but when his arm met mine it dematerialized, back into fog and the body rapidly faded. The face was the last to go, as it had been first, still twisted in defiance.
The fog itself began to dissipate almost immediately, burning off completely by the time I got home, but I was chilled for a long time after. I've changed my life since I saw the face, I've begun to work out, I joined a Silat club at the encouragement of a friend of mine and have begun to get active in underground political circles. It feels like the right thing to do, after all, the face in the fog was my own.