My nose was bleeding. A lot. I didn’t have anything I could stop the bleeding with. Blood dripped down my chin and onto my lap. Out of desperation I reached for a sheet of printing paper and wrung it out into my nostrils like a cheap minotaur. In my haze it made sense. It did made sense because the bloodstream stopped. I kept it along out of fear that if I took it out it would resume the bleeding. I sat up from the armchair I didn’t even know I had and went to the kitchen to drink some water.
The hallway was much more narrow than I’d remembered. The paint in the walls was scraping itself away and each step I took the bits seemed to sizzle. I’d never been to that side of the house before. I turned away just before reaching the old wooden door, which was ajar. I returned to the dining room where the weird armchair was, just besides a desk with mountains of papers upon.
“The other kitchen”, I mumbled.
I went to the kitchen. The regular kitchen which was just next to the dining room, below a single stairstep. The mild flicker of the golden light welcomed me as I pressed the switch and acknowledged this was my old kitchen. Where I’ve been cooking for years. What was the other thing? I was a little puzzled but I attributed it to my general standoffishness probably caused by the nosebleed.
“Nucan water”, I said out loud as I grabbed the bottle from the gray fridge. I hadn’t closed its door when a piercing screech invaded my ears and made me shake to my very core. I turned my head around, alert, as the heavy front door opened and let the shining sunlight beam into the brown carpet. A middle-aged woman in a trench coat slightly waved at me and said “hey”.
“Hey, honey”, I said, waving back to my wife, Nucan water still in hand.
“Nucan water?”, she asked.
I nodded and took a few sips, not looking away from her, who was putting away her stuff from the pockets of the trench coat. The ponytail she had was so beautiful I just wanted to caress her and invite her to my lap so we could chat trivial things in the comfortable 8 feet long couch I’d purchased last week.
I looked at my reflection at the tinted microwave door. I no longer had the stained paper into my nostrils. It wasn’t in the floor either. I left the Nucan water outside the fridge and went directly to collect the shoes my wife had left scattered around the floor. She slumped onto the couch, letting a loud sigh out her minty breath I didn’t smell but knew she had. I placed the shoes next to the entrance and went behind her to massage her shoulders and touch her hair as she sluggishly took off the heavy trench coat.
“Roman has corona”, she said flatly.
Roman? Who is that? I couldn’t recall anyone named like that until she turned her head around to take a glimpse of my aloof, confused glance. Then it hit me. Roman was one of my childhood friends, with whom I retrieved contact after a coincidental meeting I had with her wife once in Riverside. She’d recommended me Nucan water. A split second anagnorisis hit me like a heavy wind upfront. The wife mistakenly assumed my weird staring was because of the shock of the news and not my (not so) casual obliviousness.
“Roman has corona”, I replied with a weak voice. As I spoke I remembered also that I had lent him a wrench some time ago, and my wife was to pick it up back yesterday.
“Look, don’t worry about it. We’re probably fine”, she shrugged it off.
“Sure. Do you want apple pie?”, I said staring away from her. There was something in her voice that seemed off. Plus: what the hell was corona? The beer? The Toyota? Whatever it was it sounded like we should be concerned somehow.
I went to the kitchen to fetch the apple pie. Wife hadn’t answered anything yet but it didn’t matter. I opened up the fridge door again and all that was inside were copious amounts of Nucan water. Bottles. Cans. Bags. Everything was Nucan water. I scratched my head thinking where the hell I’d left the apple pie.
“Of course”, I whispered to myself, grinning. I had left the apple pie in the other kitchen. I throttled my pace as wife and me looked at each other, smiling, like the stupid, obvious mistake I’d made trying to reach for the pie in the wrong kitchen.
The static sound of the lightbulbs was denser than ever as I half ran through that run down hallway again. I pushed the ajar wooden door of the second kitchen just to find a spotless, illuminated room equipped with everything a kitchen needs.
“Why do we have two kitchens anyways?”, I rhetorically asked myself, giggling at our opulence. The apple pie was sitting inside the oven. It was still warm. I took it out and went back through the hallway like a waiter, to find that she was gone. Lights off. I sat in the armchair and fell asleep with the apple pie just beside me, above the pile of papers among there was my blood-stained paper from before.
● ● ● ●
The heavy smell of starch invaded my head as it was the first stimulus I got since a very long time. My lips were swollen as I felt the collide on them of the air blown out of my nostrlis. It immediately followed by a crackling sound, which was obviously connected to the increasing heat sinking in the room. I tried to open my eyes but to no avail, as I couldn’t also come out with any words. I didn’t feel any pain, but I was feeling pounded as I noticed my heart stomping into my temples. Cornbread. Fireplace. Wounds.
My breasts were tightened as I could feel a protruding pain in my lower abdomen. The fog sunk again into my ears as my exploding joints began to numb once more. I was so sleepy. I was about to drift off when a female voice calling out my name shaked all my senses back into normal.
“Mary! Wake up, sweetheart, or you gonna be late!”
I opened up my eyes like two plates, and stared at the ceiling for two infinite seconds. The ceiling was lavender, more purplish in the shades were the morning light couldn’t reach through the curtained windowpane. Hanging from a white beam there was a row of sprinkling balls, feeding through the sunlight and changing the bright spots so slightly, as just tilting my view a micrometer would cause them to twinkle like magic tiny spots glowing above me. I was late for school.
I stood up in a spasm, my mom still gripping gently of my left arm. I yawned and acknowledged the strangest dreams I’ve been having since I didn’t know exactly when.
“I’m up!”, I said with the clearest voice I could craft. I put my slippers on and walked to the bathroom to brush my teeth. I shut the door behind me and turn the lights on. The bathroom began to ascend as I grabbed the toothpaste and squeezed it onto my pink toothbrush.
“You’re gonna be late. You’re gonna be late. For school. You’re gonna be late”, echoed all over again in my head, repeteadly. The bathroom kept going up, as my tinnitus became prominent.
“Not late for school”, I answered myself as I lazily began to brush my teeth while looking at my reflection.
“I look so pretty.”
The bathroom was no longer a bathroom. It was an elevator, and started to quiver violently. “Fuck, I’m dreaming again. Now I’m really gonna be late for school.” I groomed my sandy blond hair a bit, then sighed and hopped once. Nucan water.
● ● ● ●
I woke up in a heavy fog. I was (un)welcomed by the buzzing of several flies floating around. Next to me there stood a foul apple pie. I reluctantly disposed of it by throwing it out the window. There was no armchair anymore, just my old rocking chair. I sat again and began to doze off again until a chilly air went into the room from the gaping hole located on the far end of the wall, around three feet away from the front door. It creeped me to the bones so I rapidly stood and began questing for some plank I could nail to the wall and block the flux.
A thousand needles pierced at every joint I had as I started to sweat profusely. Disoriented as I was, I could only manage to find an old plywood plane behind the nook of my desk. I grabbed the toolbox and, though I didn’t need it, noticed the wrench was missing. Just went on with my task and nailed the plywood plane to the wall, which stopped the leaking cold from entering my home.
Short of breath, I inspired a few times before turning the lights on and checking the time. 3:43 A.M. said my watch. I went into the kitchen and drank half a bottle of pineapple juice directly from it.
“Where are you, son?”, I mumbled as I trudged back to the dining room with a watery pounch. I went upstairs and threw myself into the messy bed, instantly falling asleep again.
It was noon when I woke up. I didn’t feel so wrong as the night before. A quick shower was just what I needed to begin the day nicely. I didn’t even need shampoo anymore since I’d cleanly shaven my head. I went on with my day. I planned to have breakfast at El Trigo. I hadn’t gone to El Trigo since I didn’t remember when.
It was a nice drive. The day was pretty cool at 73°F and I was in good spirits enough to turn the radio on until reaching destiny.
“Qué pasa, Baldy!”, greeted me Rodrigo, the owner of El Trigo as he saw my car pull in the driveway.
Tacos de carnitas and a diet Coke; pretty standard. The food was nice and the atmosphere as welcoming as ever. I stayed a little longer than I should have, thinking about the sort of weird dreams I’ve been having since I couldn’t remember when.
As I was leaving, Rodrigo yelled as he smoked a cigarette sitting at an outdoors bench. “I don’t mind if you tag along with Jennifer next time”, he smiled.
Who the hell was Jennifer? My face obviously a land of utter confusion.
“Jennifer! Your wife. Bring her with you.”
“Whoa. Yeah, absolutely. Sorry I hadn’t heard you right.” What the fuck was happening to me? I can’t forget the name of my wife of 12 years without realising that I must be developing some serious mental issues. I smiled and drove away.
It was my day off, luckily, but that incident haunted me the rest of the drive. I wasn’t paying attention or trying to reach a destination, just driving around aimlessly.
“Jennifer. Jennifer. Jennifer”, I was muttering as the radio static stood in the background without even me noticing it. Where was my wife, anyway?
“At work”, I answered myself the dumb question I’d made in my head.
I parked in an empty spot to text her. As I began writing the realisation kicked in. My wife’s name was Mary. Jennifer was my mom who’d been deceased for years. I somehow mixed up the associations triggered by, I hoped, a clearly confused Rodrigo, not trying to think that was some kind of nasty prank of him. My head ached.
“Man, fuck all those stupid coyotes”, I said out loud while yawning, after having texted my dear wife. Suddenly I was sleepy as fuck again. I didn’t even have the energy to drive home after noticing I was like 6 miles away. How long had I been driving? Fortunately my friend Roman was like three blocks from there. It wouldn’t be much of a bad idea to visit him, chat a little, taking a nap at his house. He was unemployed, and we reunited some time ago thanks to me casually meeting his wife in an expo.
Roman did not have a cell phone, and calls were awfully expensive so I just went into a public phone cabin to call him and ask him if he was okay with the idea.
“Sure, buddy. Are you okay?”
“Yeah, I’m fine. I just didn’t sleep well last night. I was lying awake at like 4 A.M.”, I said to him, and trying as well to believe that myself.
Roman greeted me with an odd half bro-fist half handshake and made me come in. The condo hallway was long and narrow, and paint was missing in several bits by moisture eating away at it. The wooden door that gave entrance to his apartment was weirdly familiar. Of course I’ve been in his house before. We entered and he offered me something to drink. We both drank sparkling water.
“Sparkling water is the best. It’s like cleansing your mouth but for free”, Roman said.
Sure thing. The bits of tacos and diet Coke went away with the sizzling stream down my throat. We chitchatted a little until I could no longer keep my eyes open, then he offered me his bed. I stood up dizzy and he stopped with his hand.
“Hey. This is yours”, said Roman while holding a wrench with his extended arm.
I looked at it, obviously confused.
“You said Mary would come here later in the week to retrieve it, but since you are already here, take it. I no longer need it, thanks!”.
“You have corona”, I answered. I didn’t know what that meant. Roman laughed.
“Baldy won’t have a drink just before going to sleep.” “I’ll leave the wrench right here”, he said while placing it on top of the table where the empty glasses of sparkling water rested.
I fell asleep almost immediately.
● ● ● ●
Smell of cornbread. I was sitting on the couch. I wasn’t asleep, I was just looking into the distance. My thoughts wandering around as my wife dragged me off from my drowsiness.
“Mary, I love you very much”, I said as she presented the cornbread to me in a proud manner.
“I love you too!”, she responded with a gleeful, genuine smile, his sandy blond stripes of hair out of his ponytail framing his pink face.
“Where is our son?”. Maybe I sounded a bit rude but that was the first thing that came into my mind.
“Corey, are you finished yet?”, Mary yelled through the stairs.
“I’m ready, ma!”, said my son, descending the stairs with a whimsical, contagious energy.
“Come here, big boy!”, I welcomed him as he hugged me. He liked to loosen one hand from the grip and touch my bald like I was a dog. I let him, obviously.
Everything was so real. I had been torturing myself for weeks, having bad dreams, and becoming delirious out of the blue. What for? I had a beautiful family, a beautiful life. Nothing was taking that away from me.
I went to work, my part-time at the turnpike, as usual. But today the freeway was empty. I’m not saying there was low traffic. It was completely empty. Not a single vehicle went through the turnpike the first 15 minutes. I’d never seen anything like that before. I asked my cos why was that, if they had maybe any info that I ignored, maybe the thing was closed. But then so why were we at work if there were no cars to charge? Nobody knew anything. Moreover, nobody acted like it was an odd thing. Jamal was like “yeah, low traffic today” and kept scrolling his blackberry.
The first car was an ambulance. Sirens were off but nonetheless the driver obviously was in a hurry, since he handed the bill and drove away without the change, as fast as he could. After that, traffic began to normalize. Maybe it was nothing at all, and I’ve been so paranoid, so out of myself that I went on with the work.
Later that day I arrived home and had a perfectly normal dinner with my family. Corey said that they teached him the solar system, and was fascinated with the fact that the Earth was just one of several planets spinning around the same sun.
“Saturn looks really cool. It has rings. Do you think people could drive their cars around Saturn from the rings?”, he asked.
“Maybe in the future”, I said. “You never know what is possible and what isn’t. When I was born computers didn’t even exist.”
His eyes and mouth went wide open out of sheer surprise. He obviously couldn’t conceive a world without internet connection. Let alone without computer devices. I felt and old savvy philosopher trying (and failing) to teach my son about the limits of the possible and the impossible and how those limits kept being pushed further by the new discoveries scientists made every year.
“I want to be a scientist so I can design a machine so I can let people drive around Saturn. Maybe build a house in the ring. I like space. Nighttime is better.”
I could sense myself all the hope in his eyes. For a moment I really believed he could do all that stuff when he grows up.
Night went on. We sent Corey to bed and spent some time alone with Mary watching old series in our new 8 feet long couch I’d purchased last week. She started to grab my thigh as I started to pass my hand through her soft sandy hair, now loose.
“You tried that Nucan water thing?”, she asked out of the blue.
“No, why?”, I answered alterning my glance between her green eyes and her playful grin.
She stood up and came back with a glass bottle and two cups. It looked like moonshine but it said Nucan water.
“Fancy some? To lit the mood?”.
“Pour me one, lady”. I hadn’t been aware the Nucan water was an alcoholic beverage. I thought it was just water. Some kind of fancy water like Perrier or something like that. I’d never heard of it until Roman’s wife gave me a bottle. I didn’t even recall it being made of glass.
We drank a little. Then we had sex, on the couch. It didn’t grind at all, thankfully. We weren’t even drunk, but we owed ourselves some moments of intimacy.
After it we went to bed. It was the best day I remembered experiencing in many, many weeks. To be honest I didn’t remember much either about past weeks. Or months.
I tucked myself and kissed Mary on the forehead. She smiled and cuddled in between my arms. I was about to fall asleep when a sense of piercing dread stabbed me like a claymore through the heart. Standing up like a madman, Mary still asleep, I ran across the upper hallway to the door of Corey’s room. Hesitated as I held the knob between my greasy fingers.
I opened the door. The bed was neatly made, intact. Corey was gone, nowhere to be found.
As sudden realisation began to burn my body like a flame tornado, the screeching sound of tyres invaded my ears until a rumbling wide opened my eyes and lift my face from the notebook I was working in. I woke up.
I was in my studio alone, dark and cold, among dozens of sketches and crumbs from various snacks I had been munching at during daytime as I tried to finish my story, which my mental fog prevented.
Tears began to slide down my cheeks and into my mouth. I cried a lot. I wrote a lot. I cried while writing. I wrote while crying.
“The young lady kept fighting to stay awake. She could only think of her fiancé. That was her conscious motor that prevented her from finally succumbing to the grim wings of death. The cabin was so cozy now. Nothing like the battlefield ever was. The Confederates had rescued her, but couldn’t find the young man who was earlier accompanying her.”
I kept writing, fighting to stay awake. Sipping Nucan water as I discarded every paper stained with tears into the bin. I looked over at the plywood plane I thought existed behind the nook. No plywood plane. No hole in the wall.
I chugged the whole can of Nucan water. Seconds later I fell asleep again.
● ● ● ●
My mouth was so dry I was afraid I could never be able to speak a word again. I tried to sit in the bed but the woman who was cooking for me stopped me suddenly.
“Do not force yourself. The baby”, she whispered.
Instantly, I remembered everything. My baby was inside me. Still alive. I tearlessly cried, due to dehydration. The gentle woman gave me water and confirmed me that we were going to be just fine. I grabbed my slimy, dirt-stained sandy blond hair, and tied a knot with it.
“Thank you”, I said to her, still feeling the cold water drip from my swollen lips, down my chin and onto my lap.
“I’m going to fetch some firewood. Stay still”, said the woman. She looked like she was in her middle forties, and wore a silky kerchief above her head, covering her slightly grayish brunette hair.
I just looked around the place. It was a cabin, not so big. It had a stove, a fireplace, and some furniture. There were two shotguns on the end of the eastern wall. Beneath them there was displayed a Dixie flag, a little scruffy, probably eaten by moths. There was a single window, in whose sill sat two unlit candles.
Then I started touching my body, as my muscles still felt a bit numb, but I could sense my hands going through my breasts, my ribs, and stopping in my bloated tummy. I caressed it gently and started thinking of names if it was a boy, or a girl.
“Corey…”, and I let out a sigh of hope, until I realised I couldn’t feel my legs.
A faint whimpering started to penetrate the atmosphere. The crackling fire and the branches colliding by the wind were being overshadowed now by the growing intensity of the wail. Some woman was through a lot of suffering. It became more and more loud until I could feel it inside my head.
I couldn’t stand up obviously, so I crawled. I crawled to the door, whose other side looked like the origin of that uncontrollable lament.
● ● ● ●
I was standing, as the door opened and showed me a pitch dark room if it weren’t for a single flickering lightbulb hanging from a white beam over a purple ceiling. Roman was sitting on a chair, looking overly concerned. There was a large table between him, at whose other end, in another chair, sat a sandy blond haired woman, crying histerically, covering her face with her pinkish hands.
“Roman!”, I screamed. They both looked at me as the beautiful woman stopped crying for a moment.
“You owe me a wrench.”
Silence took over the place for maybe ten seconds, then I chuckled. And Roman chuckled too. Then the woman chuckled too. In a matter of seconds the three of us were laughing prominently. It was not an innocent, fleeting laugh. It was a heavy, intense, tiring laughter. Hands were being thrashed around in the air. Tables were being smashed, and tears of joy forming altogether at the corners of our eyes. Roman took the wrench out of his pocket, in a whim, and started smashing the table with it. I stomped the ground with my brown shoes. A bee stung me.
I woke up.
I got out of the bed and went directly downstairs. The wooden stairs screeched through every step. The dining room was run down. There were slashed wires hanging from the ceiling where once was a good looking ceiling fan. Family photos were upside down on the counters. Paintings were tilted and the paint on the walls had been scraping through years now.
The papers on the desk were covered in thick coats of dust and spider webs bloomed proudly at the sides. Scattered waste covered the foul smelling carpet, crusty in some places. There was also no light in the hallway that went to the other kitchen. I went to the regular kitchen to fetch some water. I took a glimpse sideways at my reflection in the tinted microwave glass. I couldn’t recognize my wrinkled, bearded face, with prominent white hair growing atop my head.
I dropped the water and, shaking, I just went outside, through the screaming front door. It was midnight. I wandered over the neighborhood for what it seemed like hours. No one was around. Nobody existed. I was all alone in what once was a thriving city, now as ghastly as a lifeless cemetery. Probably half the homes had their front doors left wide open, letting the cruel winter wind inside. Hundreds, or thousands of souls, once waking up and wandering forever, realising their eternal loneliness was not worth a dime taking a breath again.
I tried to run but I couldn’t. I tried to scream but I couldn’t. I couldn’t take my suffocating clothes off either. I kneeled. Rain began to pour. Acid, hot rain. It penetrated into my skin. My skin crackled. My hair peeled and fell off my head.
I woke up. But the sizzling kept going…
● ● ● ●