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| NEXUS BY DIVADAISY |
CHAPTER 4 PART 1 |
Scars are souvenirs you never lose, the past is never far. . .
Todd's last remembered semi-conscious thought was that he was probably dying followed by the realization that he didn't particularly care. Live. Die. Stay. Go. What did it really matter? If he lived it would be alone; if he died it would also be alone. Right? But there were other memories too—fragments…heat (fire)…water (too deep)…cold…nauseous (waves)…vomiting (seasick)…pain…pain…but he had deserved it. Yes, he still deserved it. Were these thoughts? Dreams? He couldn't say. Then, it didn't hurt anymore and he realized he was breathing. Still breathing. He concentrated on that for a few seconds, realizing that he wasn't cold anymore; he was warm. The hard ground beneath him…wasn't. It was soft. It felt…nice.
He thought that he might try to open his eyes. If he could see then this probably wasn't just a nice dream. Most of his dreams were black, shadowy, like charcoal drawings in shades of grey. He was never sure if he was blind in them or if it was just too dark to see. If he could see now, he reasoned, if there was light, then maybe he was really awake. If he was awake, then he was still alive.
He opened his eyes cautiously, slowly, expecting some kind of sensory assault. But there was no great shock of sunlight, no stinging rays. It was definitely daytime and there was light, but no sky. Instead he saw…a ceiling? Old. Plaster cracked and peeling. Where the hell am I, he wondered. A room, but where? He closed his eyes again and inhaled to breathe in the air around him, trying to get his bearings. It was an old trick from his childhood, when waking in the Manning household was always an uncertain proposition: Was breakfast cooking? Yes? Then Mom must not have a hangover. Good sign. Is the toast burnt? Yes? Then she was distracted. Bad sign. Daddy would not be happy. Very bad. Todd had learned that it was always better to have as much information as possible about the circumstances of the day from the very beginning. It was the only way to survive. You had to be vigilant—always. Otherwise, bad things could happen. People got hurt.
The air around him was filled with clues. Dampness, dust, mildew—old building. Sweat, b.o.—probably me, he thought. Nice things too, though. Fabric softener—April freshness—clean sheets. Coffee. Perfume—woman.
He absorbed all of this even as he was subconsciously aware that he must not be alone. He had heard the hushed movements of another around him, but they had been unprovocative noises. A cabinet opened and closed. Water turned on at the tap. A sharp blip and splatter as it hit stainless steel and then the flat dense thunder of the stream entering some kind of container. The clickclickshooooosh of a gas burner igniting. The sizzle and hiss of cold pressed against hot. Domestic sounds. He opened his eyes again and pulled himself up on his elbows with some difficulty. His body seemed so heavy, weighted, almost like he'd been drugged. Had he been drugged? Where was he and who…
She was standing with her back to him in front of a tiny stove in a tiny kitchenette. The room was dim, the only light from one small window across from him—bar covered and grimy from the dust and dirt of the sidewalk it overlooked. Besides the bed the only other furnishings in the room were a small round table, an oversized wooden chair with a blanket draped over it, a bedside table topped with a tacky sixties, retro-style lamp, and a large chest of drawers that sat positioned between two doors to his left. The kitchenette was on his right and there was another door next to it but all the doors were closed. One of them had to be an exit, but which one?
He watched the woman, seemingly oblivious to him. She was thin, not too tall. She had longish hair, darkish too, but hard to tell exactly in the dim lighting. He watched as she scrubbed a small space of counter that looked, at least from his angle, perfectly clean already. Her hair kept falling in her eyes and she kept grasping the stray strands on the left side and hooking them behind her ear. Then she'd give the ends a little swipe before scrubbing away more non-existent dirt. The hair would fall again and again she'd flip it back and smooth the ends…something familiar about that… He thought that he should say something—hi, who are you, where am I, what the hell happened to me—but he didn't know what she wanted, or what she might already have gotten from him. He searched his head for something, some memory of meeting a woman, but could find nothing. He remembered, vaguely, a store. He had needed another drink and… Oh, god. He remembered the woman there. How he had scared her. And her kid, she had a kid. He had done it on purpose too. And it had felt so good. God, how good it had felt for just a moment…but this wasn't the same woman. The other, she was cheap looking…whorish. This one, at least from behind, looked…well, not cheap. She was dressed casually, jeans and a t-shirt, but the clothes weren't too tight in any place or too loose either. He thought she kind of looked like a soccer mom.
She turned suddenly, while he was still considering what to say, and gasped, surprised to see him awake, apparently. Surprised to see him alive? But he knew to stay quiet, unresponsive, until he had a better understanding of what their…relationship…might be. He had played it cool—didn't make a move, didn't say a word. He let her do the talking so he could figure out what her game was and not give away the fact that he was really scared as hell because he couldn't remember anything about this…situation. After she turned, he could see that she was pretty—no supermodel but the kind of girl you'd notice on the street. She was nervous too. She kept rocking back and forth from one foot to the other, wringing her hands—no, not her hands, her wrists. She kept clutching her left wrist with her right hand and rubbing it, then alternating, clutching the right wrist with her left hand, until finally she just wrapped her arms around her abdomen and stood silently. He looked her up and down admiringly, noting that she wasn't wearing any shoes. She can't run very far with bare feet, the demon inside whispered. He decided she wasn't a threat. At least, not one he couldn't handle.
She asked him something about how he felt, if he had any questions. She even knew his name. He was about to answer, to admit that he was having trouble remembering how they'd met, maybe make some joke about steering clear of the hard stuff for a while so he could make a quick exit, when he noticed that lying on the table behind her was his wallet with its contents, including all of his pictures of Starr, spread out for viewing. Immediately his radar clicked on and the needle on his scheming bitch detector went wild. Something was up. He didn't just lay out his wallet for anybody. He yelled at her, scared her for a moment. He wanted to know who she was and what was going on but just then the kettle on the stove started to whistle and she turned her back to him again so he couldn't read her face. But her posture told him that her nervousness had vanished. She asked him if he remembered her and turned to face him without any outward signs of agitation. Suddenly she acted like she was the one in control. Two can play that game, he thought. He laid back on the bed, acted like he didn't give a shit what she thought, didn't care who she was or what she thought she was owed. But she just smiled at him. And he could feel something in the back of his head tickling away. Some memory wanted to surface.
When she walked around the bed and sat on the floor practically eye-level with him and looked at him so intently, with some sadness but also with an air of conspiracy, he started to really worry. He wouldn't have… He couldn't have… They didn't have…sex, did they? He had some distant recollection of hands on him, maybe hers. If not hers, then whose hands were they? Maybe it was all just a dream. Yeah, that's it, he thought, just a dream. He wouldn't have…done…anything with this chick. Not that he couldn't, but he just… Delgado, she… Well, it wasn't like he owed her any kind of fidelity. She sure hadn't stayed faithful to him for very long, but he just wouldn't have done it with some strange chick that he didn't even know and who could have god only knew what kind of diseases or…he wouldn't do that, right? At least, not anymore.
Still, he couldn't shake the feeling that there was something familiar about this girl…woman.
She pushed her hair back behind her ears on both sides and asked him to study her face, even lifted her chin so he could see every inch of it. The faded sunlight from the window shone in on her and he could see that her hair was lighter than he had at first thought, not blonde, not brown—somewhere in between. She was pretty, though. Her face was young, smooth and unlined. She was his age, maybe a little older. Yet, there was a sadness in her look that added time to her eyes, as though they had seen more than they wanted to and lost more than they should have. There was no brightness in them only existence.
When he had looked her face over completely and she was satisfied that he was really concentrating on her she told him to picture it beaten up. Black eye, bloody nose and mouth, bruised. "Do you see it?" she asked him. "Do you remember me now, Todd?"
And suddenly, he did.
They stared at each other for a few tense moments. Her look was so expectant, so hopeful. She wanted him to remember. He could tell. She looked away first, not wanting to be the one to say it. It was another life and she had been a different person then.
Finally Todd spoke, "You look…different than you did back then. Back at L.U.…Lisa."
She flinched at the sound of her name, cleared her throat lightly . "Lisa Jane, but I just go by Jane now, okay? Just…don't call me that other name anymore." She didn't look at him as she spoke. Her eyes darted about the room like she'd never seen it before, like she was mapping the layout of some foreign landscape instead of the single cell she'd called home for over a year.
"Jane, huh? Okay. If that's what you want."
"You remember then? Everything?" she asked. She wanted to make sure they were on the same page of this pulp novel that had become both of their lives.
Todd rolled onto his back and stared up at the peeling plaster on the ceiling. Most of it had peeled away in tiny confetti-like slivers, but there was a larger chunk peeling directly over his head in the center of the double bed. Its curves and shadows gave the illusion of the face of a little boy with a shy smile, like he was almost afraid to do it. Todd put his hands over his face, felt the scruffy beard he'd grown over the course of…how many days? He let his hands climb up into his matted mane of hair and wondered what the rest of him looked like.
"I need a shower," he said.
"Can you stand?" she asked. "You've been out of it for a while."
"Yeah, I think so."
She rose from her seated position on the floor, all in one motion, and turned to open the closest of the two doors behind her. She reached inside and flicked a switch revealing a cramped bathroom barely accessible to one person. She reached behind the door and pulled out a long purple terry robe—oversized and fluffy. Todd had rolled to the edge of the bed and was carefully arranging his still shaky limbs into a sitting position. He was really wiped out, a lot less sure of his ability to stand than he had let on.
Jane leaned against the bathroom door jamb with the robe cradled in her arms, watching. Todd rested a moment and then carefully began to rise to a standing position using the bedside table for leverage. When he was almost all the way up he slowly let go of the table, testing out his balance before straightening up completely. He took a few tentative steps towards Jane, wobbling a couple of times. She made no effort to help him. When he finally reached the bathroom door—a journey of about five feet—Jane held the robe out to him. He was taller than she had remembered. Or maybe I've just gotten smaller,she thought.
"Put this on and throw me your clothes. I'll take them to Mr. Kim's laundry down the block. He's good and he's fast," she said.
"Purple?" he scowled, arching that eyebrow at her again, but this time with annoyance rather than malevolence.
"I like purple."
Todd went into the bathroom and started to get undressed. He caught sight of himself in the small mirror over the sink and couldn't believe the reflection. It was awful. He was awful. Disgusting. Whatever had happened here between him and Jane, he was pretty sure it hadn't involved sex…at all. He looked like a bum. "Christ, I wouldn't spit on me," he said to the stranger looking back at him. Then he turned away and finished undressing before putting on Jane's purple robe. He opened the door slowly. Jane was standing in the same spot, her hands clasped behind her back, except now she had on sensible shoes and a warm wool coat.
"The robe fits," Todd said.
"It's a man's robe," she answered matter-of-factly.
"I'm sorry about the way I look," he said, his eyes falling to the floor. She just shrugged slightly.
"Alive always looks better than dead, I think."
He held his clothes out to her but she didn't reach for them. "You never answered my question," she said.
"What?" he asked although he already knew.
"Do you really remember everything?"
He let the clothes fall on the floor next to her but she didn't move and she didn't break his gaze. He leaned up against the door of the bathroom and sighed. He could feel the throbbing headache beginning in his temples. He reached out to her cautiously, his movements deliberately slow so she wouldn't be frightened. He touched the crest of her left cheek with his fingertips. He followed the ridge of the bone and with his index finger softly indicated four individual points along its curve—one, two, three, four—the imaginary tattoos of a remembered bruise. She didn't move or even attempt to pull away. She stood like a statue, although considerably softer than granite. Todd let his hand fall away from her.
"He left his mark on you right there," he said. "I remember, Jane, I do. I remember everything that happened at KAD. I remember…everything we did. I remember all my brothers and all their girls. I will always remember." A tear had silently formed in the corner of Jane's eye and as it escaped its orbit and rolled down her cheek in the spot Todd had just touched, he turned to go back into the bathroom. "KADs…we're brothers for life. Womb to tomb, you know?"
After he closed the door Jane wiped the useless tear from her face and bent down to gather up his clothes. She stuffed them into a paper bag, grabbed her keys from the dresser, took a fifty from Todd's wallet and headed for the door. She didn't really like going out much during the day, but after being cooped up in a room with Todd Manning for two days she was looking forward to some fresh air—even daylight air.
She climbed the steps to the sidewalk, blinded by the sun, and stopped at the top. It was a beautiful day in the world. The freezing cold of the past week seemed to have been replaced by an Indian summer. The wild wind that rolled off the Lake and seemed to find you no matter how carefully you hid, between high-rises and tenements alike, seemed to have been tamed for now. Instead Jane found a cool breeze with barely a hint of autumn in it. But she put on her gloves anyway.
She looked down at the heating grate where she had found Todd. There was an empty bottle laying on it. She reached through the railing and picked it up, sniffed the open top. She whispered to herself then, "I know, Todd. Womb to tomb…and cradle to casket. I know."
She pitched the empty bottle on the pile of trash next to the stoop and headed down the block to see Mr. Kim.
*lyric credit: "Name" by Goo Goo Dolls from the cd A Boy Named Goo
To be continued...
