The power, the finality of words, never ceases to amaze. Running along, punching my way through powdery sand to escape the encroaching waves, Poseidon churning the sea just off to my left, I say it aloud, in the dimming light of another sunny day in California, to the glistening seaweed, bunched up, a welcome hazard on an otherwise fairly monotonous run.
I do not yell, as the notion, long known to me, hidden beneath a veil of self-doubt and pity, finds its way out with a whimper. “Let her go”, I say, meaning initially the hottie jogging in the other direction, instantly applying it to her. I realize that I should just let her go, let the notion of having her again as a girlfriend, the urge to wait for her, shunning new potentials, burying myself in doubt, the desire to separate myself from the reality of singledom, live in a fog of deception and a poorly-focused mental picture of who I think I know her to be, whom she very well no longer may be, all these things I find myself letting go.
One by one, these weights fall from my heart. When I arrive home, it is as if I had jogged around the block, left knee tingling a bit but still a solid mile of asphalt running without any significant pain or discomfort. Self-diagnosis, given a fairly good understanding of the self, one’s pain tolerances and the minute communications the body provides us with that hold the clues to many if not most physio- and psychological problems.
I now find myself more lost than before, with more weights on my heart, perhaps supplanted from the realities of financially-struggling bachelorhood into my fogged lense of heart-broken existence. Perhaps I’m just full of shit, and have no idea what the hell is going on, but at least the false, detrimental hope for a mending of wounds and realignment of our two selves has been given up for dead, one month now after our parting of ways, the forced schism of our love.
Ah fuck it, I’ll do the fight for free.
Burning sunlight awakens him into the pain of hangover, faint dreams extolling the alcoholic blunderings of a dimly remembered month. Sitting up abruptly in bed, he realizes that this is not his house. Fuck, he thinks, look around. OK, there’s a female passed out on the couch, seems like she moved there hastily during the night.
The clock reads 6:18 am, early enough that the other partygoers will most likely not see him leave, ducking out the back entrance he reconnoitered on one of the few semi-sober moments of the past week. He realizes that he had done so for this exact moment, this bright morning, alcohol still coursing through his veins, still legally drunk, but clear of mind, lucid from the hour of drunk sleep he collapsed into. He is looking to exit through the kitchen on his way out, and therefore passes through the drawing room, where he sees blond hair spilling up over the arms of a somewhat soiled loveseat, attached to the body of a girl he is convinced he slept with at least once in the past week.
Name, name, ah fuck it. There are more important things to do, he says to himself, now that this time has passed, now that he can escape in mystery. They may think he wandered off in the night, and fell off a cliff, into the dark ocean far below, but then again, he would have been too drunk at any point during the past seven days to even be able to leave the house, let alone scout a way around the fence, short in length but considerable in height, that had been erected thrown up around whichever gated community this was.
The ocean was a nice reference point, with his face pointed squarely in the opposite direction, he eventually finds his way to the guard house, and somehow convinces the gentlemen there that he is merely a good, tax-paying citizen out for a stroll, and does not need an armed escort to the edge of the property.
“Not an escort you say?” They want him to leave very badly, as he is obviously drunk, and standing just slightly to the side, as if very weak. “Well hows about you open the gate, and I can see myself out.”
Their automatic weapons trace him as he heads for the cross street.
While never a captive of his previous hosts, his escape of sorts from the party that never ends will raise some eyebrows, will burn some bridges with people of That social mode, not that he cared much for Their ideas anyway. Too much intrigue, forced to sleep with just the right older women to even get invited to the Fortnights, as they call them, two solid weeks of any and every designer and pedestrian drug you can think of, including alcohol and fine hashish.
Planes, planes overhead, hot damn. Must be near the airport, he thinks, and where there are planes, there are car rental agencies, perhaps some that even still take cash. He’ll of course have to present some kind of proof of credit, just in case he manages to completely fuck up the car. But who ever plans to do that? It sometimes just happens. He calls a cab, and two minutes later is cruising along at two hundred kilometers in a bee line for what was once called, John Wayne International., now ubiquitously, even officially, known as JayDub. The compartment of the cab is large enough for two, can produce more seats if necessary, and has as decent cargo space, should it be needed. He tries talking to the computer driving them along, but only gets single word answers in reply, one “I don’t know, sir”, before calling it quits and checks his pockets. He loves to check his pockets, especially while working on a walking hangover.
Johanna steps out of the climate controlled maze she has spent the last four days traversing, the delay due mostly to quarantine drops, mandatory for travelers from the newly re-emerging Baltic region, breaths deep the air, traces of hibiscus and smog competing for attention, the sweet air of home. A cab comes screeching to a halt a hundred yards away, and she checks her timestamp:
7:10 am.
Not many travelers at JayDub, normally, this early on a Tuesday, but she is excited at the prospect of getting home as quickly as possible, fully certain she will find her son asleep in his bed, far from outside of the reach of a woman who up until six months before (she had done some research during her time in quarantine) had been chained to the ceiling of her cell for five hours a day under the her countries’ previous ruler’s of idea social and cultural realignment, which basically boiled down to torture, humiliation, rape, or at least according to what few eyewitnesses made it over the two story fences, past the robot sentries, and was not directly a puppet for the regime. You could tell those, she knew from experience, as they generally tried to jolly things up a bit with stories of a worker’s paradise, where everyone had a job, a house, and a vote.
Most of them broke after the mites, cleverly crafted and hidden directly on certain dopamine receptors, had been removed. Without the tiny machines tricking them into associating their memories of their homeland with happiness, and they saw things through the filter of critical thinking, shock hit like a ton of horseshit. Some went completely insane, some shrugged it off, some begged to have the implants reinserted.
Somewhat flushed from her short run to the cab, she sees that the person has still not exited, and seems to be embroiled in an argument of sorts with the onboard computer.
Something seems familiar about the man, and, as she rotates around the vehicle to get a better view, her heart flutters, palms go dry, then just lightly misted.
This is he, that wonderful, unapproachable ladies-man she had hated and loved at once in her freshman year of college, now almost fifteen years hence. With the new regenative techniques, he didn’t look much older, in fact wouldn’t look much older for another two decades, but that was beside the point. Perhaps he had a point of contact with their old professor, perhaps he could help her track down the one man, who, should her son’s possible captor be telling the truth, possessed the knowledge to cure her antagonist, get her son back.
"Hey, wait a minute, I know you." She nearly jumps out of her skin at the voice, suddenly so close behind her. She had been so wrapped up in thought that she hadn't realized the cab is gone, leaving her alone, on an otherwise deserted pedestrian platform, with this man she adored from afar half a life time ago. "No really, I'm convinced I've seen you before, somewhere. You are, in fact, the finest, most pure and honestly attractive woman I've seen in quite some time!"
Whoa, tiger, he thinks to himself, don't lay on the charm too thick now, she might just fall for it. Damn this hangover. His internal censor must be swimming in a vat of Jack Daniels, somewhere past the medulla oblongata. Fuck it, what’s done is done, he thinks. “I’m Demetrius Oh, and don’t ask me to show you my Oh face, that’s just plain embarrassing.”
Demetrius, of course! How could she have forgotten? He seems a bit drunk, at least he smells that way, she thinks to herself, and it sounds like he’s been talking to mindless, drug addled models for a little too long; he’s barely making any sense, and is making some pretty outlandish suppositions.
Oh well, at least he doesn’t appear to be violent.
No comments:
Post a Comment