Walking around Brick Lane around 2am, most bars and venues of inebriation are shutting down, early -- but supposedly typical of the city. Drunken trios, double-dates and dude-couples are staggering through the streets, announcing their presence with two noticeable medical symptoms: lack of voice control or alcoholic voice amplification syndrome, and Tourettes, given the slurring and swearing. You can hear the soft echoes of the clumsy tapping of impaired footsteps down the Lane's recently rained stone-mosaic sidewalks, neon-lit by Mediterranean restaurant signs.
About two blocks from the designated terminating-end of this alley of carelessness and enjoyment, I almost run into someone turning onto Brick Lane at the streetcorner. If it was an aggressive bum or a mugger, I would have surely been in a less than opportune position. But the stranger isn't intimidating, it's not even at shoulder-height: it’s a child. A young girl, no more than 14 years old, her round head draped in a pink hibjab, eyeballs tethered to the kaleidoscopic screen of her Gameboy DS. She's completely shut off from the world about her, a manifestation of purity and innocence in this dark, dirty, drunken landscape lurking with jolly drunks as well as typical sketchy night owls.
While she's got digital blinders on, she's not oblivious, as she turned around the street corner, she was able to navigate and whizzed around me without moving her head or eyeballs; maybe she gets her autopilot sense from a cab-driving father. I wanted to somehow tell her to go home, or ask her where her parents were, but she was walking quite fast for someone with short strides, and was the size of a pink gummi bear while I was still thinking what I should do, or say. I'm still wrapping my head around the fact that theres CHILDREN on this block, at this time, while she marches with her slouched head and slumped shoulders drawn into the light glowing from her Gameboy, her beacon to the end of the tunnel of sin and darkness.
There's a large Muslim population in the area, evident in the apartment complexes as well as the restaurants, fast-food kebab joints, and the late-night hosts grabbing liquor behind off-license counters. But I still wonder what she was doing out so late, by herself, and how common it might be to see kids that young running about at night in the city. And I wonder if its more of a subconscious defense for her to be completely mesmerized by her DS, to block out the sin about her, masking her eyes with the colorful popping graphics by Nintendo programmers.
