1
There was stinking heartfelt silence, my eyes fixed at my feet. It was just between the three of us, adeptly localized by an almost sorcerous nature. Now we were the ones preoccupied, transfixed and oblivious to the rowdy life of the bar. There was a strange feeling lurking about, much like the calling. Creeping in like an illness. Grass through the cracks. I felt my stomach lurch into my chest, asphyxiating. I was drowning in it, paddling to keep my head above it. Terrified of what might happen if I gave in. It was eerily familiar, a calculating little thing that would consume me. Of course I knew how it would end, and I did not want that… not here, not now.
"What was it like?" Macxermillio asked eagerly. His eyes gleaming with what looked like dismay. Awestruck more than anything. That much was evident in his voice, but he was like one who has lost grasp of adequate consciousness.
Macfearson wandered about struggling with the right way to put it. “It was,” he sighed, “it was red, immense and felt like home.”
“What did you see?”
“Something growing in the fields. The crop, Macx.” Macfearson stared at him, his eyes teary. “There was blood,” he continued in what was more like a moan, his face soppy like a romantic confessing his love in a mist of an emotional climatic turmoil, “We gotta find it. If not die for it, die trying. Everything you said was right. It is the truth which we have known all along. Our souls were never wrong. It was overwhelming; maybe…maybe that’s how heaven feels like. Maybe that is what the lifelings mean by bliss. It is greater than love, ecstasy, that pang of happiness or life itself. It is a daydream come true, fantasy made into reality. I cannot convey what I feel or felt with words for you to comprehend it, much like a near-death experience you must experience it.”
My vision got blurred by tears. I knew what he meant. The sheer beauty, without even flaunting it. Those moments when your emotions surge like a tide and nothing seemed to matter but it, this enigmatic thing upon you. Suddenly everything you ever loved, everything you are and all pleasures are minor and irrelevant; all of that drifts into nothingness and the crop remains the only thing. Sole beauty. That was the crop, that was the fields. Surpassed your true love telling you she loves you back and knowing it to be truest of all truths. The cure for AIDS or Cancer. It is all that matters. This life is a grain of sand compared to its magnitude.
I gazed at Macxermillio, his face almost unrecognizable, “I need to get a drink.”
He left for the bar.
“Why have you hardened your heart so when you have seen what I have seen?” Macfearson asked.
"Because we can't trust anything the calling shows us. I know you don't believe it, but I think it is just here to destroy us and stop us from achieving this. It sees we are heading in the right direction so now it is desperate," I said.
Macfearson snorted. "Or maybe number twenty-one is the answer. Maybe it knew we would be here with her." He shifted his gaze to Kim who was busy reassuring her friends she is fine accompanying me. "She is no lifeling and she is no deathling... You feel it. You can't put her in a category because her nature allows her to adapt. That is why she whores herself...she moulds to every shape and changes into every substance. She is the perfect sample and maybe that is why we saw that vision today."
“You are wrong. If the calling is this desperate it goes to show that what we are about to do here today is even bigger. Perhaps there is something it would hate if we discovered.”
He sighed. “Listen to me. I don’t know what you have against sampling a whore and if that fails we could easily come back here and continue with your process. This way we can do both. Just me and you, no Mac. He is too slow.”
I shook my head. “You know he won’t allow it. He knows it’s stupid. This is bloodthirstiness toying with our minds. The kinda thing that is self-destructive and he is well aware of that. The truth is we can’t trust your judgment, not until Tuesday when |I see Cheryl.”
“I feel something when you speak to her... It’s not lust for her blood. I feel purpose and duty, something I never felt before. It’s as if my heart touches the essence of her spirit. She is something else. A lamb for the sacrificial altar. Talk to her some more and tell me if there is nothing that you feel. A deep rage, love and hatred for her, a lust not just for her blood but her essence and life. You want to preserve it and honour it, it’s as if you can’t stand it but at the same time you can’t live without it. You also care for her. Tell me you don’t pick up on it.”
2
I took three shots of rum, the past flashing behind my closed eyes as I squeamishly swallowed. The broken, the lost and the irretrievable. The things that are forever out of reach, in between all the sanely insane deeds I would take on to try reclaim knowing full well I would fall short. And also vivid images of the bleak future that lay ahead for the hooker.The bar folks lumbered about as I lumbered in my past, a resourceful reflection of the future. Think this: it is not old habits die hard, it is duty and natural instinct taking over (pure and blameless).
Kim beckoned me to the table just when her friends left. Her shoulders were lifted and she had a grin on her face. Her eagerness too apparent. Those sparkling eyes stirred me in the core. I was struck by the sudden power they held on me, at that moment it was difficult to tell what emotions they were evoking.
Oh, beautiful Miss Bersert, I found myself smiling back.
“I am sorry about that,” she said as I sat down, gentle and genuinely friendly.
“It’s chilled,” I said, feeling the possession of alcohol taking place. The ease and certainty I would have my way coming with it.
“Yeah, um … where were we?”
I ogled at her glistening lips. Symmetrical teeth and her sexy nose. Her skin tone perfectly preserved, if not makeup. Her neck… her vulnerability undoing. A toy thing she seemed. A doll. A relic.
“I can’t recall,” I answered.
Silently, I watched her think back. Tapping her feet and eyes rolling. Her eyebrows creased.
“You are beautiful,” I blurted, distracting her process.
A smile flickered across her face, followed by a comically curious look. The fidgeting and the rolling eyes had paused.
“Where is this going?”
“Nowhere,” I mused.
She laughed. “Just as everything else.”
I considered. “It’s all nothingness.”
“Don’t think so.”
“Why ?”
“I feel it.”
I knew what was coming, I clenched my fists hoping this time it would be different. Cautious, I asked the fundamental question, “What else do you feel?”
She breathed as if she knew it too. “Abundance,” she answered, sounding more like a question than an answer.
“Of?”
“Love, happiness and life,” she shrugged.
Sigh.
She looked away almost troubled by whatever was going through her mind. “But … it’s just as everything else.”
Her beauty began to fade, and an image of something else was starting to take form. Her words were stripping her.
“Going nowhere?”
She locked my eyes with a ‘yes'. Like her superficiality, it was clearly conscious. She added onto it, "Disposable."
“Worthless?”
She closed her eyes taking air in. “Temporal.”
“Empty?”
Her eyes still closed. “Meaningful.”
Her answer reclaimed her beauty, but I was still intrigued by what I saw.
“Don’t try to see me,” she ordered, her tone meek and fierce at once.
As my face moulded into a charming persuasive look she laughed killing words in my mouth.
“I’m not gonna buy any of it,” she explained.
I narrowed my eyes, saddening even more. “You don’t see it? You have no faith nor hope? You don’t believe I might truly care?”
I had a compulsion to convince her the grass gets greener.
But greener, the more snakes, I thought to myself.
“Humans are corrupted easily. They smile at you while sticking a knife on your back. That is who they are, that is who we are. We are horrible evil monsters. We use charm and wit as bait,” She spoke earnestly.
“You can’t trust anyone?”
“No one.”
“Love? If there is anything that is real in this world I am sure it’s that.”
She studied me. She rolled her eyes and sighed in the I-have-heard-that-before gesture. “Not convinced.”
“Never will be?”
“‘Til the grave,” she spoke blandly.
I can make that sooner, I thought, You feel empty like I do.
I smiled. “Hope you get lucky soon.”
She giggled.
“I guess there is something you can always trust.”
“What?”
“That it’s just as everything else.”
3
Like everything else …
Pointless, vast, demeaning and undoing. Like everything else, a huge void filled with mere modifications. Nothing ideal, certain or right. Finding a place of loss and taking comfort in it. Taking comfort in what is missing, misery in search of that which is substantial. Its flaw depends on how you look at it because objectivity is a flaw. That which is intangible and disprovable has ultimate reality.
Just like the memories.
“I’m intrigued,” I said.
She accepted by a smile.
“You’ve had a fair share of scars?” I asked.
She giggled. “Now why would you think that? You are Psychology major?”
“I am, but not that kind. Organizational.”
“Then why? Read some stats on hookers and their daddy issues?”
"I'm sorry, but I keep on forgetting that fact."
She rubbed the tip of her finger on the rim of her glass slowly. “Then why?” her voice husky.
“I have a hunch.”
“Hmm… Intuitive,” she remarked.
We sat in silence for a while.
“So tell me about your life,” I requested.
She sighed, studied me and stared down. “We are not on a date, Mister. Why would I wanna tell you that?”
“You find me trustworthy. We agreed to sit here and talk. The time we have been here you never second guessed a drink I offered you. I would assume that someone in your profession would be cautious of men offering drinks. You not stupid neither am I, there is a wave of intuitive connection between us and it’s real as this table between us.” I paused. “Unlike everything else,” these last words just slipped out, not quite sure what I meant or what they meant or why they felt so right.
She sighed. The silence lingered, nothing but her solemn expression filling it.
“What?” I probed.
“Nothing.”
“There is no such thing.”
“Well, I don’t know what to say. Or rather I don’t want to speak,” realising what that could mean, she corrected, “At least not about that or maybe not now.”
“So you do wanna talk about it?”
“I don’t know,” she shrugged.
“This is a question of confidence,” I told her. “Whether you are confident enough to tell me?”
“No one ever wants to hear my story, at least that is what their reactions tell me. It’s a question of whether you’ve got the balls to sit through it,” She returned, her eyes laser-bright.
“Then I guess we have a need for some bondage here. Didn’t you say you wanted to know how I ended up here?”
I began to feel like I was in a presence of a lioness. With alcohol lubricating my mind, I had become quite impulsive. We sustained a gaze devouring each other. The shackles of inhibition were slipping away.
“I gotta go to the bathroom,” She got up.