Part 1, Chapter 8

 

VIII: The Sea

The following day, it occurred to Paula that they had no calendar or device with which they could track the passage of time. In fact, they had no idea what time of year it was at all—for all they knew, the hot, sunny days were characteristic of the middle of winter in such a tropical location. And still worse: they had no conception of what year it was.

              Their sense of time, then, was calibrated around the night they woke up in the abandoned stadium. Paula took one of the sticks of chalk from the board in the bedroom and, as the chalkboard itself was now reserved for deducing their pasts, made short strokes on one of the grey bedroom walls, each tally representing a day that had passed since the first night. Ray laughed to himself, feeling like they were prisoners counting down the days until their release.

              It had been only six days since they’d woken up in the stadium; not even a week, and yet already Ray felt as though he could tell stories and reminisce about things they’d experienced. He was beginning, he felt, to build a more complete image of Paula in his head—she was no longer a stranger, and he was becoming accustomed to what was typical of her behavior. Naturally, as he got to know Paula, he lent less and less weight to any critique that escaped her mouth, so great in breadth were her verbal treatises on how things should and shouldn’t be. Over the course of six days, she had completely transformed in his eyes. He remembered (sometimes, regretfully, with fondness) the time during which she’d said not much of anything. But then he’d snap out of such terrible thoughts—Paula was critical, and held herself at times like a bird of prey, but she was in any case wildly entertaining to him, and had her moments of kindness. He was aware, now, how the bizarreness of their situation bore down on her mental state, and hesitated to think ill of her. Besides, Ray was of such a tolerating disposition that even if she were indeed someone whom most people would find insufferably irritating, it would likely pass right over him. Though this configuring of Paula as a person, of course, and for that matter of Ray’s own temperament, had only occurred in those past six days.

              “Six days… That’s a six-day minimum since I last took a shower,” Paula said, horrified. She pulled nervously at her hair, which she’d tied into a ponytail that fell over her shoulder.

              Oh, showers! Ray had forgotten about those.

              Unfortunately for Paula, a shower was not among the features deemed essential by whoever had been living here before them; the extent of bathroom-like facilities in the underground chamber were the ominous hole of a toilet in the corner of the bedroom, and the little basin sink in the kitchen, neither of which were choice candidates for a full-body wash.

              “What if we go swimming?” he said.

              “I don’t have a bathing suit.”

              “I mean, yeah, we’d have to be in what we’re wearing now, but then our clothes’ll get washed too, so not all bad.”

              Paula raised an eyebrow. “You think seawater will clean your clothes?”

              Ray’s mind was already elsewhere. He was watching Hitchcock, who was standing before the final door of the chamber they hadn’t gotten to unlock—the door had remained untouched in the past days, with its ugly electronic lock. The bird’s attention was so fixed on the door that he didn’t notice as one of his claws began to scrape backward, sliding on the cement floor, before he corrected it and snapped back into his stance.

              Ray clicked his tongue at the bird beckoningly. Hitchcock broke his pose, peered back at Ray, and then fluttered over to join him on the sofa.

“We’re goin’ swimming, little dude.”

The bird pecked at his cheek, fluffed its feathers, then huffed a reluctant agreement.

             

 

The seawater did not clean their clothes. The water was dark with seaweed blooms and sediment that had been stirred up into the water by strong winds earlier in the day. The scent of salt was strong in the air, and if he let his feet touch the seafloor as he floated, his soles brushed against slimy patches of seagrass that seemed to try to grip his ankles.

Though it was daytime, and the sun was so bright there was no way anyone would notice any sort of glow from Paula’s sunglasses, Ray wasn’t in the mood to surround himself with blasting reggaeton music and the booming voices of beachgoers; so they hung back in an unpopulated stretch of beach, where the only movement on the shore came from laughing gulls and the odd skitter of a lizard.

Hitchcock wasn’t sure what to think of the water. He had been perched on Ray’s shoulder as he entered the water, but then Ray had begun to move into deeper water, where the water reached his shoulders; so Hitchcock had sought higher ground in the form of the top of Ray’s head. When Ray dove forward and submerged himself completely in the water, Hitchcock spazzed and flew to the dry security of the sand, in which he promptly buried himself.

When Paula entered the water behind him, Ray heard a light fizz, and he saw that the water around her hands was, almost imperceptibly, bubbling.

(Was that really possible?)

He squinted through the bright sun, thinking perhaps it’d only been a product of her hands stirring air into the water as she moved, but the effervescence was much too consistent. Maybe the bubbles were rising from somewhere in the seafloor, then—some creature or pocket of air in the sand. But Paula waded deeper, and the bubbling followed her hands as they moved through the water.

“This is kind of nice, actually,” Paula said, and Ray could see that her lips had curled into a smile. She was floating face-up, bobbing softly up and down with the swell of the ocean. Her skin was glowing in the warm sunlight. Ray was cast into a momentary shadow from a flock of brown pelicans gliding overhead.

“Bubbles,” Ray said ever-so-eloquently, and raised his index finger at her.

Paula lifted her head and noticed the tiny pockets of air rising to the surface of the water. She propelled herself backward, but saw that they followed her.

“I think they’re from your hands,” Ray said.

“What?” She fidgeted with her hands, opening and closing them. “Do I have something on my hands or something…?”

She rubbed them together as if trying to clean them, but as soon as they were back under the water the simmering started again.

Ray waded closer. “I think it’s safe to say a fever wouldn’t do this.”

She outstretched her arms in the water. “How is this even possible?” She turned to Ray frantically, voice rising. “That’s boiling. I’m boiling the water? Is this gonna hurt me?”

“Uh—,” He paused. Of course, he had no substantial answers. “I mean, it doesn’t hurt, right?”

“No, but—my hands don’t even feel that hot, look—” She stretched a hand towards Ray and tried to touch it to his arm, but he jumped back.

“Maybe don’t do that. Just—hold your hand in place for a sec.”

Paula’s arm was still, palm facing him.

Slowly and carefully so as not to accidentally touch her skin, Ray held up his hand close to hers. Even with a gap between them, he could feel the heat radiating off of her palm.

“No, your hand definitely is that hot. It just doesn’t bother you, for some reason I can’t even begin to get.”

She stared intently at her hands as if they’d tell her something. But on the surface, they looked perfectly normal—the same tone as the rest of her skin, and certainly with no signs of burning. She lowered them back into the water, then reclined onto her back and floated gently on the murky waves.

 

 

As the sun rose and set over the mangroves, and the moon continued its dance through its phases, The Hole—the name they’d given to the underground chamber—became less a shelter and more a home for Ray and Paula. With the dilapidated building blocks of a barely-surviving and progressively rotting kitchen, trips to the dumpster in search of anything worth salvaging (which Paula protested every time for the sake of decency and hygiene), and walks along the beach, they’d managed to build themselves somewhat of a routine, and with it a sense of normalcy that both comforted them and numbed them to the prior urgency of solving their pasts. Days passed during which the chalkboard remained unamended and virtually forgotten as their progress on investigating what had led them to the abandoned stadium slowed and tired under the beating humid heat.

But what did remain one of the central objects of their attention were Paula’s hands, and whatever thing within her seemed to painlessly create heat from nothing. With every passing day, Paula became more confident in whatever was causing this, and learned that her hands weren’t perpetually so hot—in fact, she’d somehow figured out a way to calm or inspire the heat herself, which she described as feeling like using some invisible muscle. As she grew comfortable with the heat not seeming to harm her, her anxiety over it began to fade.

There came a day when the stove refused to lend its heat to the pot of uncooked pasta Ray had put down on it. Paula, having been watching the culinary expedition from her spot leaning against the wall, moved to the stove and cupped her palms around the pot, and at once Ray understood what she was attempting. In moments tiny bubbles appeared at the bottom of the pot, then fizzled up to the water’s surface. Then the bubbles grew in size and quantity and intensity, vibrating with heat until the water had risen into a rolling boil that pulsed steam into their faces. Hitchcock, during that meal and many others, ate with them, plucking tiny bits from Ray’s plate.

As they settled into their lives in The Hole, they also became less fearful of the island’s many visitors, having learned the patterns and locations of their visits, and having grown accustomed to the fact that under the sunglasses Paula’s eyes really were unobtrusive—and soon they had become perhaps too comfortable, with Ray’s collection of items having escalated from things people had discarded or left behind, to things people had simply taken their eyes off of momentarily. It was in this way that Ray had begun to partake in what he and Paula called “shopping”, during which he stealthily perused and took from the buffet of items lying on beach towels as their owners bathed in the warm turquoise seawater.

The first item Ray acquired was a navy hoodie, whose theft he virtuously excused by reminding himself of its uselessness to anyone in the subtropical heat of the island. Its owner had thrown it onto the sand next to a backpack (which Ray had graciously left there, despite how stupid it was for his owner to have left it behind so carelessly) while he visited a taco truck. Of course, he couldn’t leave Paula without new clothes, especially considering how image-conscious she was, so after stashing the hoodie in a bed of cocoplum, he resumed his shopping.

              Paula had set her eyes on a denim jacket and pointed it out to Ray. The only issue was that its owner, a woman reclining on a towel and reading a book, was somehow still wearing it through the heat—so Paula, suddenly inspired by her desire for the piece, sat down near the woman and dug her hands into the sand. Ray had stayed back, unsure what she was attempting.

In a few moments, the woman shed the jacket and skirt covering her bikini, and left to cool off in the water. At once Ray understood, with something between uneasiness and wonder—Paula had heated the sand around the woman with her own hands, and had made her grow too hot to keep the jacket on.

              She and Ray pulled this stunt many times, though nearly every time it was for an item of clothing or an accessory that Paula wanted. In time she had accumulated the equivalent of a whole wardrobe, which she organized as neatly as possible by folding the clothes and arranging them in little stacks in the corner of the bedroom—all of the clothes aggressively feminine, many of which included some form of pink and begged with their flashiness for the admiration of onlookers (which Ray thought made them questionable choices of clothing, considering how much effort they’d been putting into keeping her eyes away from passerby’s attention). Ray, meanwhile, though Paula had forced him to commandeer a couple of extra t-shirts for the sake of hygiene, was perfectly content with his navy hoodie, somehow even through the burning sun. It didn’t look particularly high-quality, and it wasn’t new (the outer fabric had already started to pill), but there was something about the bagginess that just felt right—or maybe it was while wearing something so dark a color, it would be harder for Paula to spot patches of dirt or mud that had flung themselves onto the fabric and tell him to wash it.

              With the food and running water of The Hole having pushed them out of their state of survivalism, suddenly they found themselves with an abundance of free time—most of which they spent on various daytrips around the island, lounging on the beach and climbing structures they were certainly not supposed to climb (some abandoned, some still in use) to get views of the dusk sky. A favorite became a decidedly unattractive beige cube of a public restroom, which had a trash can just the right height from which to bound onto the roof and bask in the dying light of the day. Sunset, more than any other time of day, had become a ritual meeting time between the two of them; it was the time at which Ray and Paula’s energy overlapped, with Paula sleeping in a couple of hours and Ray only beginning to feel revitalized, and it was the time at which the diffusion of light over the world was enough for Paula to see, but not enough for Ray to shield his eyes with his hands.

The final locked door of The Hole, sitting quietly untouched to the right of the bedroom’s entrance, had come to be ignored by Ray and Paula for some reason neither of them considered tangible nor could explain. It was as if there was some shroud shielding it from their vision; on the few occasions that he did notice the door, he couldn’t help feeling some small, distant call of dread within himself that kept him from acting on his passing curiosity, and each time he soon would abandon the door for some other task or for Paula calling to him.

It was a week before their attention had been properly called back to the door, and it was not the door itself that drew their interest; instead, it was Hitchcock. The bird, once again, had taken to standing before the door. In the past few instances since the first, Ray had called to his bird and the bird had forgotten the door in favor of perching somewhere by Ray. But this time, Hitchcock seemed unaware altogether of Ray’s voice.

“Hey,” Ray said, “dude.” He waved his fingers in front of the raven’s eyes, but the bird did not move. “Y’okay, little guy?”

“Maybe he’s having a seizure,” Paula said.

Ray tisked. “Don’t say that. He’s okay, he just…really likes that door.”

They waited in tense silence for the bird to make any sort of movement, but Hitchcock was still for several more minutes.

“Hey, look, come play with your sand,” Ray said, sifting his hand through the little pile in the corner of the main room (To Paula’s dismay, Ray had decided, after Hitchcock had made it abundantly clear of his love for the material during their nightly walks along the beach, to bring a pile of grey sand into the underground chamber—it was for enrichment, he insisted.)

Finally, Hitchcock ruffled his feathers, cocked his head at Ray, and then flew onto the top of Ray’s head. He gave Ray’s scalp a sharp peck, then bounded towards his pile of sand and buried himself.

“Look, see?” Ray said. “He’s fine.”

But the bird’s relentless interest in the door was enough to push Ray over the edge, and finally he decided he would resist his avoidance and inspect it. It was plain and grey, like the other two doors in the chamber. The door had an electronic lock with a raised keypad; there was no sort of lockpicking he knew he could attempt on it. Additionally, unlike the other two doors, this door had a little glass window at eye level. Internally, he berated himself for having avoided the door. How had he not been curious enough to peek through the glass? He could tell even from the other side of the room that it was dark past the window, but there still could’ve been something visible. He stepped closer to the door pressed his face against the window.

As he peered into the darkness past the door, his insides turned cold. On the other side was a long hallway with a low ceiling, which made him feel confined only by looking at it. There was no source of light in the hall apart from the weak beam that entered through the window from the main room. Along one side of the wall, there were two doors, and Ray could see the faint outline of another at the end. The door at the end was identical to all the others, plain and grey, but above its frame was spray-painted in an industrial font:

CONTAINMENT

Ray strode into the bedroom and snatched a stub of chalk. Paula looked up from the desk in the bedroom, where she was playing a game of solitaire with a damaged pack of cards he’d scavenged. She looked up expectantly as he entered the room, awaiting an explanation for so purposeful an entrance.

“Maybe we can actually use some of this board for stuff about The Hole, too,” Ray said. “Y’know, just weird things we notice. ’Cause it’s kind of intriguing, right?”

“Sure.” Paula tipped her head thoughtfully. “But not with your handwriting.”

She rose from the desk and erased all the words they’d on the right half of the board and rewrote them on the left side with the others, then drew a line down the middle.

“Okay,” she said. “Left side will be things about us. Right side, the Hole. Give me things to write.”

“Weird journal,” he said. “And the hand hurting thing…manhole in the middle of the woods, with no path to it or anything…that locked door…”

“Why the door?”

“Have you looked past? The hallway?”

“No.”

“There are more doors down the hall. And at the end, it just says, ‘CONTAINMENT’.”

She furrowed her brow. “CONTAINMENT?”

She walked to the door and looked through the window herself for a long moment. He worried for a moment that the hall had reinspired her distaste for living down there, and dreaded a comment about how they ought to leave.

But quietly, Paula nodded, returned to the bedroom, and added ‘locked door’ to the board. “Food stock and bed, and a whole kitchen, like someone was legitimately living down here…” she added.

After rewriting some letters so that they matched the cleanness and clarity of the others, Paula nodded at the board, satisfied with her work, and returned to her game of solitaire at the desk. Ray sat at the edge of the pathetic bed and stared at the words on the board, chin resting in his hands, until the first sting of hunger—or frustration at having no revelatory theories concerning the words—drove him into the kitchen.

Part 1, Chapter 7

 

VII: The Sun

Ray jolted awake on the pink sofa to a shoulder-punch from Paula.

“Wh…?” He rubbed his aching side and squinted open tired eyes. He wasn’t sure how much sleep he’d gotten, but he could physically feel the weight of his eyebags. All things considered, the sofa had proven to be comfortable, its cushions likely having softened over years of abuse and enduring massive weight.

“You’ve slept enough. Up.”

Something about Paula’s clothing looked different. He knew before that her tank top was supposed to be white under the dust and spots of dried mud, but now it very nearly was white.

“What’d you do to your shirt?”

“It’s called washing, Ray. I used water and soap, and I suggest you try it, too.”

Wait…how long had he been asleep? He’d only intended a quick nap to wake himself up. He rushed over to the ladder, stumbling as he slowly regained his balance from being deep in sleep, and pushed open the heavy lid of the manhole. The sky was still bright and blue through the layers of interlocked sea grape and peppertree—he hadn’t missed it.

As he passed the remainder of the afternoon, he periodically opened the lid to check the sky. He was waiting for the day to take its first step towards darkness—for the first hint of imminent sunset.

When it was time, he took one of the towels that had made up his former bed into the kitchenette and laid it flat on the cracked and lopsided counter. Then out of the cupboard he gathered the stash of snacks and the bottle of soda he’d taken with the help of Hitchcock, as well as two (questionably discolored) plastic cups from the cupboard (he brushed the dust off first—he was man of hygiene). Then he tied the ends of the towel over the pile of goods into an ugly, but functioning, sack. He threw it over his shoulder and held it where the four corners knotted together. It was awkward to carry, but sort of fun; it made him feel like he was a man about to set off on a long journey. That, or a homeless man (which, really, he sort of was).

“Hey, I want to show you something,” he called to Paula.

“What?”

“Come follow me,” he said, “It’s outside.”

She followed behind with eyebrows knitted in suspicion as he climbed the ladder. Hitchcock, perched on the armrest of the sofa, sensed the excitement and lighted, following suit.

“What, is it something you found in the dumpster?” she asked once they had gotten to their feet on the surface. Hitchcock fluttered through the opening, and then she kicked the lid shut. But then she saw Ray was starting off in the opposite direction to the dumpster. “It’s not something bad, is it?”

“No, no, it’s not bad,” Ray said. Hitchcock landed on his shoulder and ruffled his feathers.

“What’s with the towel?”

“You’ll see! Patience, woman.” Paula shot him a look.

As they trudged through the mangroves, the woods gave its crown to the nocturnal, and soon the trees and underbrush were singing with frogs and crickets. Though the sun still hung in the sky, the approaching twilight had whisked away the brutality of the day’s heat, so that Ray didn’t dread leaving the shade of the canopy when they reached the woods’ end.

Now the abandoned stadium was in view, and they slunk around the edge of the asphalt until they reached the fence gate encircling it. He led them through the gap in the fence through which they’d exited on the night they’d woken up, and entered the jungle of graffiti and crumbling cement.

“Why are we back here? Did you figure something out?” Paula asked, voice rising with interest.

Ray felt a little guilty now. “Uhh, no. No, sorry,” he said, “It’s a little less…significant to our livelihood. But still cool.”

They’d reached the wooden boards that bridged the ground floor to the roof of the stadium. Under the cape of night, and with only Hitchcock to accompany him, the rotting platform had seemed a fun challenge within the bounds of danger a street cat would traverse—completely agreeable to Ray. But now that he’d come with Paula, the peril of the gaping holes in the wood and the worrying thinness of the wood stung a bit more sharply, and he wondered if she’d even want to try.

“Okay, this is the hard part,” he said. “It’s totally fine though, promise. I literally did it last night.”

“What do you mean, ‘this’? What’s ‘this’?”

“Climbing. Climbing this thing. We’re going up to the roof.”

“The roof? We’re climbing that thing? That splinter?”

Ray chewed his lip uncertainly.

“You can hold on to me if you want.”

“No, thank you.”

Steadily, they stepped onto the platform, leaning forward to keep their body weight balanced. A warm gust tugged at the board, and the wood creaked feebly. At one point Paula’s foot nearly slipped through one of the gaps, and Hitchcock chuffed as if to laugh at her. It was so steep that while climbing, they were nearly on all fours, so close were their hands to the wood in front of them.

Finally, they reached the concrete edge of the roof, and took the last ambitious steps off the platform. The air up here still carried the salt of the ocean, but was stripped of the murky stench of the mangroves. Under the light of the bronzing sky, the dull grey concrete glowed with warmth, and Paula’s sunglasses were turned so bright an orange they appeared fluorescent.

He opened his hands and gestured towards the horizon of the city skyline. “It’s the sunset!”

Paula cracked a smile. “This is what you wanted to show me?”

Ray sat down at the ledge of the roof, overlooking the city. He set down the sack beside him and untied the ends of the towel, revealing the mound of colorful plastic snack packaging. There were plantain chips, and cookies, and granola bars, and gummies, and all sorts of things that looked so artificial even Ray called into question their safety for human consumption.

“What? Where did you get all of this?” Paula asked, beaming. She sat to his side, so that her legs also hung off the edge.

“I found them,” he said proudly.

The smile vanished. She furrowed her brow. “You found them? You didn’t fish them out of the trash, did you?”

“No, no!” Ray said, waving his hand, “They’re clean, they’re clean, alright? From a vending machine. Totally luxury. I swear.”

Paula rummaged through the pile. “Some of these look so familiar,” she said distantly. She picked a bag of Swedish Fish. “These are pleasing to the eye. I think I’ve had these.”

Ray couldn’t have explained what Swedish Fish were. He wasn’t sure he’d even heard the name before. But somehow, he had a gut sensation that liking them was an incorrect perspective.

He took the soda bottle and fiddled around with it. He hadn’t realized bottle caps were so difficult to remove. Suddenly the raven jumped down from his shoulder and took the cap in his mouth, twisting his beak to the side until it flung off and bounced down the cement to the rows of seats far below their dangling feet.

“Ah. Thank you, Hitchcock.”

“You named that thing?”

“I did name that ‘thing’, and I think he appreciates it.”

He poured half the bottle into his cup, and half into hers, and they took sips of the fizzy soda. It was the strangest sensation—like his mouth was sparkling, and his nose burning, but not in an unpleasant way.

The sky seemed to fizz, too, as the setting sun sent sparks of bright orange to the edges of great cumulus clouds so vast they stretched directly above Ray’s head. From here the entire earth seemed to be dipped in a golden haze, like the light itself was a tangible veil hanging in the air. In the distance, the humidity in the air made the city skyline faint and misty.

He glanced over at Paula. She was sitting hunched forward, as if trying to submerge herself deeper into the sunset, staying completely still. He looked back down at the cup in his hands and watched in admiration of the sun’s reflection in the drink, and pretended he’d caught a part of the sun to keep.

“I’m supposed to be better than this,” Paula said suddenly.

Ray looked at her quietly. He’d envisioned snacking and looking at pretty colors, but evidently the sunset was making her introspective.

“None of this was supposed to happen,” she said.

Ray wanted to say, Well, there’s really no way of knowing that if you can’t remember anything about your life, but he stopped the words from blurting out.

“I think all of this was supposed to happen,” he said instead.

Paula looked at him doubtfully. “You’re not upset? It doesn’t mess with you, knowing there’s a massive gaping hole in your life? Or not even a hole, just an expanse of nothing up until a few days ago?”

He fidgeted with his cup, moving it so that the soda swirled and made a tiny carbonated whirlpool. “No, not really. It’s like, I don’t know what I’m missing. You know? I can’t be sad about something I can’t even remember. Maybe my life totally sucked before. I don’t know.”

“But maybe it didn’t. Maybe you had a family that loved you, and friends, and a nice house.”

Ray scratched his head thoughtfully. “I mean, either way, it’s not something that can be helped. It’s not an actionable thing. So I don’t see a point in upsetting myself over it.”

“I just feel like—like—” She was digging her nails into her scalp. “Like something was stolen from me. You know? Like I’m supposed to be doing something. Achieving things. And now, maybe it’ll all be nothing. Maybe I’ll do nothing. Maybe this is it, and I’ll just sit back and this is life now, and I’ll just let this be my entire life forever. Living in a hole in the ground, and eating expired food, and never knowing what the hell is wrong with me.”

“I don’t think you’re the kind of person to do that,” he said.

Paula threw her hands up. “I don’t know! Maybe I am! Maybe I am the kind of person to always do that. How could I know otherwise?”

“I haven’t known you for very long, and even I feel like I already know otherwise.”

She turned her head to face him. “Maybe I’m dangerous. Maybe I’m a bad person. Maybe I’ll hurt you.”

He eyed her. “Will you?”

Hitchcock croaked.

“I don’t know, I don’t think so, but I don’t know! I don’t know myself.”

“I think,” he said slowly, “you need to relax. Right now—in this moment—everything is okay.”

“Is it?”

“Dude, we’re alive,” he said. “We woke up in a dying stadium in the middle of an island with zero memory of who we are, all janked-up and bruised, and we’re surviving.” He lifted his head and watched the sun burning red as it lowered itself beneath the darkening horizon. “That’s pretty crazy. All things considered, I think we’re killing it.”

Paula’s eyes wandered to the rows of old plastic seats far below and took a deep breath. In the darkening atmosphere, the light from her eyes was becoming more visible behind her shades, and her cheeks glowed in the warm radiance. Even at this altitude, the light was attracting moths that flitted about her face.

Ray raised his cup and nudged Paula’s. “C’mon, cheers me. To killing it.”

If she’d had visible pupils, he was sure she’d have rolled her eyes at him. But she grabbed her cup and touched it to his. “To killing it.”

 

Part 1, Chapter 6

 

VI: Soda

 

It wasn’t long before Ray had set his heart on another session of shopping in the open dumpster, his mind flashing with all the wonderful, strange items he would find discarded inside (wonderful only, in all honesty, to Ray, as it was as standard a collection of garbage as what would be found in any other dumpster). This time, Paula could see; and when they arrived at the scene she beheld the garish sofa that had managed to stay in the exact same location it was in since the last time they visited the dumpster, leaned against the outside of the metal bin.

She gasped as they approached, and had her eyes been uncovered Ray was sure they’d be shining with infatuation. Her hands were laced together, and a smile had broken onto her face. The sofa was a tint of pink so saturated it stung to look at. He cast his eyes to the gravel, which in the area surrounding the sofa seemed to be tinted pink as well, so aggressive was the light bouncing from the furniture.

“Yeah, it’s no surprise you like it,” he said, “It burns my vision as much as your eyes do.”

She tilted her head admiringly at the sofa. She wouldn’t take her gaze off it.

“You’re not trying to suggest we bring it back, right?” he asked.

Paula pouted and rubbed her hands possessively on the matted fabric. “How could we not? We’re in desperate need of seating furniture, Ray—you sleep on a pile of towels.”

“I like the towels! Anyway, I thought you hated getting things from the dumpster.”

“It’s not in the dumpster, it’s beside the dumpster.”

He squinted at it through the harsh sunlight, sighed, and lifted one side.

 

It felt like hours before they reached the entrance to the chamber with the forsaken pink sofa, fending off hordes of mosquitoes and the sharp points of saw palmettos that adored piercing through their clothes. At first, Ray had held one side and Paula the other, but soon their arms grew weary, and they opted for the slightly more comfortable but far less efficient approach of dragging the sofa through the underbrush (with Paula wincing every time a spot of mud launched itself onto the fabric).

And though Ray had already been annoyed at having to expend so much of his fleeting daytime energy on lugging the unsightly furniture, he became even more annoyed when he looked at the diameter of the manhole cover, sweat rolling down the back of his neck, and saw that it was certainly too narrow to fit the sofa. Now that he gazed at the entrance to the chamber—how had they not considered this before? It was what, thirty feet to the bottom? Even if it would fit, what would they have done? Thrown it down the ditch?

Paula insisted that they would find a way and began tearing off the cushions. The underlying frame was smaller, and reluctantly Ray prepared to push the cushionless sofa down the hole while Paula held the lid open. But it wasn’t long until Paula, horrified at Ray’s carelessness with the sofa and exclaiming that he’d ruin it (had it not been long since ruined?!), demanded that they switch roles—so Paula now was tilting the sofa into the entrance, and Ray had just gripped the handle of the lid when—

“OW! SHIT!”

Ray jumped back from the lid, letting it clamp down forcefully onto the sofa while it was half-way in, and Paula scowled. “What?”

“It’s hot!”

“What, the lid?”

“Yeah, it—,” cautiously, he tapped a finger to the metal. “It’s burning.”

Paula cocked her head inquisitively. “No, I don’t think it was.”

“No, look, touch it.”

Paula gripped the handle with her hand and pulled the lid open. “Are you serious? You’re so dramatic. It’s a little warm, but that’s it.”

Ray was dumbfounded. His hand stung and pulsed from the burn. Still, his curiosity led his hand to touch the handle again, just to see:

He winced and pulled his hand back immediately. “It’s hotter! What—?”

He thought for a moment. “Lemme see your hand.”

“Why?”

“Just—lemme see something.”

Paula held out her hand, palm-up. He brushed his fingertips lightly against it. It was scorching.

Ray lifted his eyes to look at Paula. “Do you feel okay?”

“I did, but now you’re worrying me.”

“No, it just—I’m wondering if you have a fever or something. Your hand’s really hot.”

“You think I’m sick?”

“I don’t know, maybe. A fever’s when you get really hot when you’re sick, right?”

“I don’t feel sick.”

Ray drummed his fingers against his side. “Well, maybe you should take it easy for a little, just in case.”

Ray promised he’d do his best to care for the precious sofa, and was able to press it against the walls of the ditch as he descended the ladder, reducing the blow to a fall of only a few feet when he neared the bottom. Paula brought the cushions down as she descended after him, and soon they’d arranged the sofa neatly in the main room of the chamber.

“Oh, hey, you don’t have to sleep on the floor anymore!” Paula beamed. “You can sleep on the couch!”

Ray would have almost preferred to continue curling up on his pile of towels, but he had begun waking up with a sore neck and back, and conceded.

 

 

By the time Paula had fallen asleep, Ray’s energy was renewed. Now it was time for the second half of his day, during which he would bask in the quiet of night and go wherever he pleased.

He lifted Hitchcock onto his shoulder, then climbed the ladder and left. The sky was a bright pink, but grew duller and darker with every gust of wind, taking on the deep blue cape it would wear for the duration of the night. He broke through the dense woods, out onto the beach where they’d spent the first night, as the last of the sun’s color faded from the sky, and once again receded into his thoughts.

By the time he became aware of his surroundings again, he saw that he had ended up wandering far to one end of the island. Here, there was a compact roofed structure, perhaps a public restroom, one of whose walls boasted a vending machine. 

The bright colors and varied shapes of the snacks and drinks encased within the glass captivated him, and instantly he felt like a small child. He was drawn to the front of the machine and pressed his palms against the glass, eyes widened.

But he had, of course, no money with which to purchase anything, and quietly he mourned what could have been.

Then he had an idea.

“Hey, Hitchcock,” he whispered to the bird, “you wanna do something really cool?”

He offered a hand to the bird, which he stepped onto to perch. Ray moved his hand so that he looked Hitchcock straight in the eye. “I will give you so much sand/pencils if you do this for me.”

The bird cocked his head expectantly.

Ray pointed at a green bottle of soda with a colorful pink label reading “Dragon’s Dew”. There was only one left. “Get this for me,” he said, tapping at the glass.

“Oh, my God,” Ray chuckled in gleeful disbelief as the bird jumped up and flapped awkwardly through the flap of the vending machine. He watched through the glass as the bird swiveled itself up through the obstacle course of metal coils and packaged snacks. With his beak Hitchcock gripped the top of the bottle and tipped it forward until it fell, clattering onto the bottom of the machine and rolling to the exit flap, where Ray fished it out, beaming.

“You know what? Get all of it. All of it,” Ray said, gesturing to the other snacks.

In fluttering crashes, the bird swarmed around the inside of the machine, knocking plastic packages of candy and chips and things Ray couldn’t really identify as any real food down to the bottom, where Ray snatched them and stuffed as many as he could into his pockets.

By the time of his return, Paula was still asleep, curled up on the mattress. He stashed away the snacks in the kitchenette’s cupboard for later.

 

 

“Oh, look at this,” Paula exclaimed from the other room. “This is weird.”

Ray rubbed his eyes and stumbled over sleepily. She was standing before one of the walls in the bedroom, where there hung a thin board of wood. “Come look over here,” she said. “It’s a mirror.”

              She was prying off one of the edges of the wood board, and Ray saw that the wood was in fact fastened (poorly) with nails to something behind it on the wall. He followed where Paula was pointed and peeked behind the wood to see the reflective surface.

              “Why would someone board up a mirror…?” Ray muttered.

              “It’s strange, right?” she said, and stared at the mirror scrutinizingly. “I actually can’t think of a single logical reason.”

              With his hands, Ray pried off the three nails holding the wood board to the frame of the mirror, and then leaned it against the wall. The mirror was a bit dull in the corners and layered with dust, but otherwise looked perfectly normal.

              They stood together before the mirror and gazed at their reflections.

              This was the first time Ray had seen himself.

              His eyes were piercingly dark, and the skin under them a bluish hue as if he’d gotten no sleep. His hair was just as dark, and long and shabby so that it nearly covered his eyes. The bridge of his nose was high and long, and his eyebrows thick and expressive.

              Paula was gazing at herself, too. Her face was only a few inches from the glass, as if she were debating trying to enter the mirror. The soft warm glow radiating from her glasses bounced off the mirror and illuminated her cheeks.

              “Is that really what I look like?” she whispered.

              She touched a hand to her forehead.

              Ray turned his gaze to her. He didn’t see anything wrong.

              Gently, she moved a hand through her hair, and brushed out the more tangled areas. She touched a spot of acne on her forehead and rubbed a smudge of dirt off her chin.

              “Nothing wrong with looking a little rough,” he laughed half-heartedly. “Hey, maybe that’s why the guy covered up the mirror—so he wouldn’t have to look at himself.”

Her lips were quivering. She turned away from the mirror and sat on the edge of the bed. Ray wasn’t quite sure how to react. He sat down next to her. She was gripping the sheets so tightly her hands shook. Then beneath him Ray felt a warmth. He touched his hand to the sheets, and realized the heat was coming from Paula.

“You okay?”

Her grip on the sheets loosened, and the warmth dissipated.

“I’m fine,” she said flatly. She wore a blank expression. “I’m gonna go read through the journal again.”

Part 1, Chapter 5

 

 

 

V: The Bedroom

 

 

              They stood in the newly unlocked bedroom, every breath of dusty air tickling the back of Ray’s throat. Paula’s arms were crossed, and her whole stance had shifted into one that was serious, calculating. They’d turned on another pathetic bulb in the bedroom, which hung like a vine from the ceiling, its cord twisted and fraying. Its light was cold and shy, bathing the room in a bluish hue reminiscent of moonlight.

“These are the papers I mentioned—the really boring journal entries.” He gestured to the pages he’d discarded to the floor. “Those are the ones I already read.”

She whipped her head and scowled at him. “Are you serious? You’ve been throwing them onto the floor?” She shook her head. “We’re going to go through these papers, and we’re going to do it in an organized fashion. It looks like they’re all dated.” She collected a couple dozen of the papers into a neat stack and flipped through them with quick fingers. “June 9^th, April 12^th, May 21^st…”

She laid them one by one on the floor in order of date, moving them to create extra space as she picked up more pages and scanned for their dates. Ray picked up the remaining pages and together they worked until the entries were arranged from oldest to newest.

Paula held her hands up, surveying their work. “Now we read them.”

She knelt by the papers and Ray did the same. He did his best to fix his mind to the task, but the mundanity of the subject matter and the repetition of the writer’s awfully dull daily tasks made his eyes defocus and find more interest in clusters of dirt on the floor.

“Second time he’s said this,” she said, tapping her finger to the top paragraph of the tenth page. Ray snapped out of his staring-into-space and followed her finger to the line: My hand hurts. “And look, this is in present tense,” she added, “But everything else is in past tense.”

She was right; everything before and after that line was written in past tense—like a real-time interjection from the writer.

Paula kept reading, dragging her finger down the sides of the pages as she skimmed.

“Again,” she said, tapping another line on the thirteenth page: My hand hurts.

Now his attention was properly back on the journal entries. That was a bit strange. He read alongside her pace, now. Again, on the bottom of the fifteenth page: My hand hurts. Then again on the seventeenth. Then on the eighteenth and nineteenth.

Great frequency…Yes, now his mind quite locked in.

What information could be extracted from that? What could be causing someone’s hand to hurt, with greater frequency, and such that it did not seem to get better over the course of months?

              “If it were an injury, I’d think the pain would go down over time,” Ray said. “Maybe it’s like a disease?”

              “One that didn’t get treated.”

              “Or where treatment just didn’t work.” Ray scanned the pages over. “But the rest of it’s weird, too, right? Who’d write something like this? I get having a journal if you have a life, but this guy just writes about drinking water and walking around the room.”

              Paula clicked her tongue pensively. “Maybe there’s something wrong with him in the head.”

              “Or ‘her’.”

              “Or ‘her’, yes.”

              The black bird, having heard all the chatter in the bedroom, entered and eyed the papers curiously before fluttering onto Ray’s shoulder to participate in the conversation. Paula’s attention was pulled away from the journal.

“It’s still down here, I see,” she observed in an irritated tone.

“I tried getting him out, I swear!” he said. “He wouldn’t leave!”

Paula made a motion with her head that gave the impression of rolling her eyes and, to Ray’s delight, didn’t press further about the bird and returned her attention to the journal. The bird fluffed its feathers, then gave a shake and settled himself. Its claws dug into his sleeve and sparked pinching pain in Ray’s arm, but he was too enamored with the bird’s trust of him to want to shoo it away.

After the discussion was concluded (with no further concrete ideas as to the odd journal entries), Paula organized the pages into a neat stack, organized by date, and set them on the desk. Then she put her hands on her hips as she surveyed the rest of the room, and though Ray couldn’t even see her eyes he could feel them noting faults and planning rectifications. Eventually, her gaze had settled on the chalkboard.

They scrutinized all the faded writing on the board, but all of it was so smudged and faint that it was illegible. The only clear writing on the board was in fact not on the board itself, but on a sticky note that had been posted on the border, reading: GLOVES! in neat, elegant cursive—most certainly it had been written by a hand different than the one who’d written the journal entries.

              “We’re going to write down anything we think might be related to our pasts up here,” Paula said, “so we can visualize it and think about it more clearly.” She wiped the remaining chalk marks from the board with the side of her palm and then picked up one of the white stubs. “Abandoned stadium,” she said, and wrote it on the board in print. As she pressed the stub to the board, the tip of it crumbled in a ghostly cloud and left streaks of white on the floor. “Glowing eyes…sunglasses that partially rid me of blindness…”

“Partially?”

“It’s not perfect. There are some dark spots in my field of vision.” She moved on to the next line and continued: “Tattoos…raven….”

“Does the bird really count?”

She whipped her head around. “That,” she said, pointing with the chalk stub at Ray and the bird perched on his shoulder, “is not normal. It absolutely does count.”

“Add your hair.”

She touched a hand to her hair. “Why?”

“’Cause I’m starting to think it’s not actually dyed,” he said. “I don’t know if you can see well enough to tell, but look at the tip of your hair. It’s different from when we woke up.” The difference was slight, and only affected about an inch of her hair, but at the very tips the dark purple grew redder and paler, into a dull pink.

Paula stepped back after finishing her masterpiece, and together they admired the word map. Ray stared at the words blankly, as if simply looking at them would spark some kind of epiphany, but nothing came to him.

They spent the remainder of the day scouring the bedroom, in some way using the abundance of strange little items as a substitute for the lack of answers they’d found concerning their pasts; though it was another person’s items, and arguably items they had no business rummaging through, it was both entertaining as well as an activity that gave them the same emotional impression of solving something unknown.

However, though they were becoming well-acquainted with the room, they hadn’t found anything of supreme interest. It was a strange room, but a dull kind of strange—a strangeness characterized by how pervasively grey everything was. Even the books strewn about, which had faint ghosts of color in their covers, were faded and so deeply acquainted with dust that the particles had seemed to weave themselves into the fiber of the books. And the more they shifted around the items of the room, the more dust was released into the air, and the more it smelled of mold and faint burning.

Eventually Paula grew tired and, after shaking off as much dust as she could from the sheets and mattress, lay down on the bed. She had curled into a little ball, as though she were trying to minimize the surface area of her skin that would touch the sheets. Ray, however, had only grown more energetic, and had no intention of spending the next few hours alone underground. He shut the door to the bedroom behind him and headed towards the ladder.

As he stepped onto the first rung, he heard a flutter behind him and the bird, who had been inspecting the lopsided kitchen counter, appeared at the base of the ladder.

“Come with me,” he whispered to the bird. “We’ll get some fresh air.”

Ray ascended the ladder and pushed open the lid of the manhole, holding it in place as he crawled onto the damp earth. The bird beat its wings, feather-tips brushing the diameter of the passage, burst through the hole and landed beside him with a gust of wind. The drying leaves underneath the bird crackled as it dug its talons into the ground.

The world was so much more pleasant at night. The stars were a kind presence, and the moon lit his path enough for him to see. The Sun was a creature of overcompensation, of overdoing—but the moon was calm, measured. Here he could open his eyes wide and absorb his surroundings instead of seeing through the armor of squinting or shielding the light with his hands.

He emerged from the woods onto the beach, kicking sand and little green coconuts as he reviewed the day in his thoughts. As he walked the bird became occupied with its own activities, hopping from branch to branch and catching insects in its beak, but never strayed further than a few tree-length’s away from Ray.

Then his legs took him to the abandoned stadium. Tonight there were no workers, and all the tents and structures of the preceding days had been dismantled and carried away. On this side of the massive building, there was a makeshift ramp connecting the main level with all the rows of faded seats up to the roof of the stadium. It was old and rotted, composed of a rusted steel frame over which flat boards of wood had been laid, entirely graffitied so that none of the original wood color showed.

The movement he made towards the dilapidated ramp was so instantaneous it could hardly have been called a conscious decision, and in moments he was creeping upwards, arms spread outwards to keep his balance—between the boards of wood were wide gaps through which he could see the rows of seats below. As he stepped along the planks, the bird soared and dipped overhead, pivoting if it had wandered too far and wheeling back in Ray’s direction.

He cleared the final gap and leapt onto surface of the roof. Like the rest of the structure, it was thick grey concrete, smothered in color vandalism—much of it, cacography illegible to him, but still it pleased his eyes, and he traced his fingers along the painted loops and arches. Then seated himself at the ledge of the roof, legs dangling in the warm air, and the bird fluttered to a stop and rested beside him.  

“Why do you follow me?” Ray laughed. The bird ruffled its feathers and cooed.

“I think you’ve earned name privileges,” he said to the bird. Cautiously, he lifted his hand close to the bird, and then brushed his fingertips along its neck feathers. Now that he was observing the bird up close, its air of power struck him. It had a broad back, and a magnificent wingspan; and its beak was thick, the color of charcoal, with the sharpness of a blade. In the bird’s feathers he could see the light of the nearly full moon above them.

He craned his neck upwards towards the sky, and suddenly an image flashed before his eyes, briefly but vividly, like a bolt of lightning: a drawing, shabby and grainy as if done by a child with crayon, of the night sky. The sky was a scribbled mass of black. He wanted to believe it was a personal memory he had just recovered, but the flash was indistinguishable in specificity from any other vague information he retained in his brain.

He looked to the sky. The night sky wasn’t black, he thought, and wished he could tell that to whomever had made the drawing; it was blues, and purples, and greys that mingled and wove in and out of each other like paint. It was strange, and complex, and told of a depth and vastness the day only seemed to hide. Far in the distance, in the top floor of a high-rise past the placid bay, the light in a window extinguished.

Towards the coming of dawn, Ray returned to the underground chamber and fell asleep on the mound of salvaged towels in the main room. During the few hours of sleep he had before he woke to the noise of Paula stirring, he dreamt of a great mango tree towering over him, its hanging fruits swaying in the sultry breeze with all colors of the sunset. When he awoke, he remembered none of this.