Feedback Welcomed "The Girl Dressed in Blue Light" Excerpt

Any feedback comments
for this excerpt of my writing project "Girl Dressed in Blue Light"
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PROLOGUE

The spirit of the girl descended upon New York City as a fog that glowed with blue light. Accompanied by rain and thunder, she came down as a force of nature to free him, to free a man named John Good.The blue storm lasted for only a short time and during that time she relentlessly poured over the sleek buildings of Lower Manhattan. She purified everything with a luminous rainfall that ran off the top of great towers and fell like thick sheets of glass, cascading from one roof top unto another. In the distance, the last bit of cathedral light fell upon a sliver of land filled with apartment buildings. The storm was strong and quickly eclipsed the sun.
The blue fog travelled through the concrete canyons obscuring the streets and the base of every tower and skyscraper in Lower Manhattan. Slowly, the fog meandered over the street floor of the Skyscraper District with a life of its own.
The Skyscraper District was an area at the southern tip of Manhattan where the heights of the buildings were not regulated by the City. The steel mammoths were allowed to rise into the sky as far as technology and innovation allowed. From the towers on Governors Island, all the buildings of Lower Manhattan appeared to float on a blue cloud. On this stormy afternoon, a great city lived in the sky, no longer lit by a pale orange sun.
Buried within the Skyscraper District and pass a million windows and doors, the famous East River Building stood at the corner of Broadway Avenue and Amsterdam with a tarnished steel statue fastened to its Tudor style roof. Covered in rain and fog, the bulky metal figure stood on a building that was only thirteen stories high, dwarfed by the buildings next to it which were three and four times its height. The East River Building was unusually thin, only 20 feet deep and 200 feet wide. Only the statue and peaks of the roof poked through a thick layer fog that passed through the urban canyon.
The statue was once a colossus, a symbol that the public below adored and believed. It was a god that protected all that stepped inside the building. Now, it was forgotten, even hated by those that bothered to look at it. Now, it was tarnished.
The steel colossus stretched one hand into the sky while looking down and away. It covered its face filled with despair with its other hand. The colossus listened to the screams that rose from the blue fog. It could no longer protect anyone. It was frozen in place. In the end, it became an ornament sitting upon a building, a building that was currently being used as a halfway house for American veterans who returned from the Freedom Wars in the Middle East.
Many returned, disfigured and limbless. Many had nothing when they returned from the battlefield. Most of the soldiers that passed through the door of the building developed symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. They entered the building with bad dreams that never went away. They gave everything they had to the nation and for that reason they were given a clean room. They were kept from falling over the edge into a homeless existence.
Below the layers of blue fog and along the outside of the building, there was more to see. The building was covered by many ornate stone faces that expressed a range of human emotions: love, hate, fear, euphoria, angst, hope, wonder, and awe. Between each row of faces, there was a row of small gated windows that glowed with the soul of the person living inside.
Through one of the gated windows between love and awe, there was a young veteran, named Christopher Park, with one working leg. The other was cut off at the shin. He walked out of his room with crutches and headed down a single loaded corridor on the thirteenth floor. Chris wobbled down the hallway with ragged clothes and his steps echoed against the green painted chipped walls. The veteran was in his late twenties and wore a stained white t-shirt saying, "I freed a barrel of oil. Outstanding!" He got the shirt for free. He wore large round DJ headphones that covered his entire ear as he listened to Estelle's American Boy. He hobbled down the hallway, bouncing his head to the beat of the music.
Chris knocked on room 1300 and opened the green door to look for his friend.
"John?" Chris called into the room.
This afternoon, Chris had a new joke for his friend, John. The room was dark, so he tried the light switch, but it wasn’t working. Chris saw that the bed was empty and wondered where was John. For a moment, he hung by the door staring at the window watching the blue fog roll across.
“Damn, I’ve never seen a storm like this in my life.” Chris marvelled at the fog. Soon after awe turned into fear. Quickly, Chris closed the door to John’s room and moved down the hallway to find another guy he knew on the thirteenth floor. He needed to tell his joke to someone today. While some of the other veterans used drugs to make the bad dreams go away, Chris liked to use laughter.
Along the way, Chis noticed that many of the rooms on the floor were empty. The floors that were once filled with veterans were now half empty and the interior of the building was falling into disrepair. Chris understood what was going on around him.
Slowly, the floors were being reprogrammed, emptied and redesigned for another use. Since the property was no longer landmarked, the building was finally a part of the Skyscraper District. There was renewed interest in the owners of the building to sale the property.
Eventually, the veterans would be relocated to God knows where. The veterans that no longer lived in the building were released into the streets without means or measure. During the night, the veterans were being moved out, ending up alone. They ended up riding the train line from one end to the other, waiting for the world around them to end.
Among the residents that remained, there was one man who did not fight in the wars of freedom in the Middle East. However, he did have scars of his own that covered his entire body.
His name was John Good.
Like the veterans he lived with, John Good lost everything good in his life and ended up in a small pale blue room perched on the thirteenth floor, between love and awe.
Inside room 1300, John Good laid down shirtless with his shoulder blades pressed against the cold checker floor of his small room. His hair was black, short and wild with streaks of grey. Even though his thin body embarrassed him, he liked to expose the long scars that stretched over his back, chest and stomach. The crosshatches over his body needed to breathe. As he stared up at the stucco ceiling stained from cigarette smoke, he tried to figure out what he saw yesterday at the window.
John tried digging into his past for an answer.
Before John ended up at the East River Building, his life was remarkably different. At one point, he was lucky enough to have the only good thing a man could experience in this world.
He had a family, a wife and a son.
These were the things that could have saved him. If he listened to his father and forgotten the past, his life would have turned out fine. He would have still felt his wife's tender touch. He would have seen his son, Adam, graduate from high school. He would have still had his job at the commercial printing company as a printing press operator. If only the love of his family was enough to keep his heart content and his mind calm.
Obviously, it wasn't.
The problem was that he could not forget about the images that popped into his head. You could say that the these images drove him crazy.
He was twelve when he had his first blackout. One day, he was drawing in the dining room on a glass table when he blacked out and fell onto the carpet, like a sack of potatoes. Without him realizing, his mind belonged to someone else.
The first image that appeared was made up of simple shapes. There was a white plain square, centered within a black rectangle. The longer he stared at it, the brighter the white square glowed. Then, he saw another image where he saw a black silhouette of himself at the threshold of the white square. He felt like he was standing at the edge of something. The longer he stared at the image, the more he heard a familiar sound. It was like looking at a white sheet of paper and hearing the crash of the ocean.
All he had to do was forget about these stupid images.
Give them no meaning. Like his father said.
However, John could not turn away. Why would he want to?
Each image felt thrilling. Each had a sense of realism, which his imagination had never reached before. The images gave his life a new identity, a new meaning that he could absorb as his own. When he woke from the blackout, he no longer was the same boy. He forever belonged to someone else.
He wondered if his father saw the same kind of images. He wondered if his father was as special as him.
To be clear, the images were not something he experienced with his two eyes or something he conjured with his imagination. Instead, he saw these images with his mind's eye, as if they were placed there by something outside him. It didn't matter if he was awake or asleep. The images came to him at any time. Each image he experienced, unfolded like a single frame of a comic book that was being laid out for him by some kind of higher power. Each image felt so vivid that that the longer he stared at them, the more he began to sense each one moving with life. It was as if he could step inside each one of these images and breathe.
In the mornings, John Good waited in his small pale blue room for the sun to reach the highest point in the sky. That was when the towers began to reveal themselves to him. That was when he needed to sit up on the edge of his bed and pay attention to what he saw outside his window on the opposite side of the avenue. This afternoon, the blue fog obscured his view, but it did not matter. The fog made him pause for a second, but he continued on with his usual routine.
When John looked out the window of the East River Building, he saw a world that he did not know before.
This was not the New York City that John Good knew, because the two towers still stood. After everything that happened, even he understood that what he saw…was absolutely crazy. The shadow he saw yesterday and the day before, on the building across the bustling avenue, should not exist.
The shadow's existence made no more sense than a man walking in circles all day mumbling absurdities to himself; a television actor decapitating his own mother; the Brooklyn Butcher's stabbing rampage through the city; or the men in Congo and Sierra Leone hacking off the hands of their sisters and mothers--their hands, for Christ's sake! The world was already full to the brim.
Forgive us, for we know not what we do.
These were the righteous words of his father, a caring man, who warned him not to step inside this world.
At first, he thought it meant that we were all doing crazy things, no matter how rational and well meaning our actions were. Even insanity loves company. However, the meaning behind these words was more specific.
Forgive us, for we know not what we do.
When his father spoke these words, he was not asking God for forgiveness, as John had always thought. Come to think of it. His father wore a golden crucifix around his neck for only sentimental reasons.
His father spoke to something else, to something else around which our souls revolved. That something else was not better or worse, higher or lower, or brighter or darker. It just was.
He spoke to a girl and asked only for her forgiveness.
With this one phrase, he warned her of everything that we would become and all the things we would do. He prayed only to her because he hoped that she would stop him.
Forgive us, for we know not what we do.
Only now was John Good able to admit that his father was right. He was right about everything. As he patiently waited to see the shadow of the two towers appear, his eyes shined with a strange delight…
...and the mad man lurking inside him began to laugh.