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.