Enjoy!
JRA
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The reluctant night sky eventually embraced the morning light as an angry lover would their other after being scorned yet needing the warmth of their affections. The nagging presence of a daunting task filled her body and the hands that touch in a speaking way banishing the unwelcome guest from her temple was absent. A familiar ache took up station just above her eyes busy with the work of shooting detrimental thoughts across the landscape of her mind.
Her bed most days a missed friend she enjoyed visiting now a foe singing lullabies of temptation purposefully working against her ambition. Ignoring its songs she rose and found her phone on the nightstand, longing for its message of good news. This messenger had failed; still, she was without word from Him.
She felt the stab of betrayal, preferring its precision and quickness over the heart ripping claws of something ill fated which leaves one to mend an impossible wound impervious to time.
She sighed and with that made the decision with the fury of jealousy and the quickness of faith to shield her lands from the stations fire if only from those thoughts.
She had an exam to write and needed the focus of a sniper whose aim was rue and never failed.
Surreal yet real, the adrenalin’s effect was wearing thin, allowing the throbbing pain to sleuth its way through His left side. He was damaged, this much he knew. The intoxicating effect blurred the scene about him; a melee of limbed chaos. He could hear his name being shouted but the faces he saw, crowding and running into the streets, mouthed nothing but long animalistic screams.
He stumbled a few feet and caught himself against a hollowed cinder wall when he felt something pulling at his arm. He dipped his head around and saw a face, which took a few moments to recognize.
'Habbibi! Hurry! Hurry! This way!' Sayid yelled.
Chaos reigned in the streets. Surrounding buildings had been damaged by the collapse. Debris was strewn in every direction. Its result was injury. Dozens more of innocent people bled through dust covered skin. Sayid pulled Him up, dragging him along. If it weren't for the blood all over Him, one might think him drunk, unable to walk a straight line, stumbling on stones and mortar. They hurried in the direction of the white Benz, which was parked where Sayid had dropped him off, ironically only fifty yards from where he had been taken - from what remained of where he had been.
Through the haze He was in, he managed to remember his cell and jump drive. He broke free of Sayid and tripped towards the spot it had been left. Sayid screamed after him, 'No, we have to get away from here!'
He reached the spot and found both items, looking odd just lying there on the ground, somehow untouched. People ran down the alleyway screaming and shouting and moaning. He picked them up and turned back to Sayid. Trying to run again, he fell, dropping the phone, its battery bouncing on the pavement. Sayid grabbed him again, this time by the collar, and dragged him.
'I can't leave it!' He shouted at Sayid, who then picked up both the phone and the battery. 'Sharmout' Sayid cursed in Arabic. They made it to the car, pulling the door open. Sayid pushed him into the passenger side, throwing the cell, battery and jump drive on his lap.
The world started to go dark on Him as the scrambled sounds of the frantic street faded, muted by the car door slammed shut, and before he passed out he looked down at his camera, in his bloodied hands, and grinned.
In the darkness, the blurred shape of a woman working at something in the corner trumpeted his heart.
'Hey' He spoke softly.
His body was exhausted and sore, he could barely keep his eyes open let alone line up his thoughts, but he was ever so thankful that he was home.
'I'm so sorry, babe. I didn't think it would turn out this way. I got the shots, though' He could barely get through his sentence.
'Shhh' she sounded out with Nightingale empathy. He closed his eyes, fighting to reopen them, but couldn't. He was out for hours.
He felt her hand touching his left side, a damp cloth being gently dragged over his skin. A loving touch caressed his face quelling the fitful pain.
'I love you so much' he exalted.
The hand moved away quickly and down he went again. His wounds needed the healing power of sleep.
He dreamt. Strange and disjointed rememberings of high school basketball practice, countless lay-up drills and then the crowd cheering with seconds left on the clock. He needed to shoot a three pointer, but the ball was impossibly heavy. Then he was in his car with friends laughing and having a good time, but the gas gauge was past empty and he needed to get to Her. John, his agent kept calling, yet every time he picked up the phone he could hear John, but John could not hear him. Pain. Intense shooting pain in his side.
Through what seemed like an Irish fog, a woman spooned broth into his mouth, hot and thick, his eyes weighted, the real world still vignetted with darkness. Time, not a thing at all, just convoluted nothingness in a dark space. His pain: his only comrade, ever present, the only real thing.
He could feel the heat like molten lava just beneath the surface of his nakedness. He lay sweating, soaking the sheets. His body fought hard to stave off infection and mend itself. He slipped in and out of consciousness, at times conscious enough to hear voices - a familiar one that he could not put a face to and a female voice that spoke not English - then the darkness would pull him back down.
He dreamt of home, strange dreams in which nothing really happened but the day-to-day things, like preparing dinner for Her or working in his office. Some of them could not be called dreams for they were simply things that had happened, replayed in his mind. Memories revisited, born of a subconscious longing.
One such memory dream was of His first date with Her. They had know each other for nearly two years and had become official in their relationship, not to mention that they had been sleeping together for nearly a year before that. Yet between their combined schedules they realized that they had in fact never had a proper date. It had come up plainly during a hangover conversation en route to Starbucks the morning after a house party His roommate had thrown for his girlfriend.
‘We should go see a movie sometime. It’s been so long since I’ve seen anything at the show’ she had said.
‘We haven’t ever really done anything like that, have we?’ he asked, surprised at that fact.
‘No, I guess we haven’t’ she agreed.
‘Come to think of it, we’ve never actually had a proper date. Well, that’s going to change’ he said, the two laughing at themselves.
‘Lets do it properly, we’ll go to dinner then to a show’ he continued plotting.
‘That sounds amazing’ she concluded.
They had met through work, both of them employed at a hotel downtown. He had taken the job as a temporary fix to subsidize his acting, which had fallen off the gravy train, due to the strength of the Canadian dollar, however, bills still needed to get paid and when a buddy offered to get him in, he jumped at it. He worked evenings in the valet department, chauffeuring guests about town in the hotels fleet of classic cars. The job was a blast, especially working with a half dozen of his actor friends, it felt more like hanging out than work.
She was there working in the Concierge department, a summer job her father had set up through his connections at the hotel. She had wanted to work, though her parents would have rather she worked at the camp she had been doing most summers. But this timing would play a huge role in setting into motion things that would change both of their lives.
They had met in passing a few times. He was good friends with Jack, also a Concierge, and they would usually head out after work to drink Belgium beer together. The first time they had met, the conversation was nothing more then Jack making polite introductions.
‘It’s nice to meet you’ He had said.
‘Nice meeting you, as well’ She had returned.
‘Alright Jack, what do you say? Let’s get out of here.’ He changed the subject back to the evening ahead of them without the slightest understanding of who this girl would become to him. And that was it. Not that anything beyond that would have happened. He, at the time, was in a relationship, and She was just another face that worked where he did. Working in a hotel requires that you meet hundreds of people a day, and she was one of them. How little He knew of how important She would become.
Slowly over time He found himself talking with Her with much more frequency. His relationship had ended and She gave him something he had never known, though he did not realize it at the time.
He marveled at how easily the two could talk about anything and everything, jumping from ridiculous Hollywood gossip to the most intense discussions about politics and religion, topics that usually ended with one party angry at the other, but it wasn’t that way with them. Either they agreed on ideologies or challenged each other enough with logic to see the other’s point.
Over the course of a year or so they began having drinks after work, usually with others, then slowly it became just the two of them. Jack had moved on from the hotel to pursue a different line of work and others got fired or quit, and the rest got bored with going to the same place - so that became their routine, just the two of them having drinks and conversing.
He found himself looking forward to the days he knew she would be working and spending the shift with Her just talking. Then one day, unprepared and seemingly out of the clear blue sky, He was watching her from afar. She was helping a guest plan a trip to Niagara Falls. It filled him with a feeling he to this day cannot properly describe. His whole being and everything he ever knew as truth now felt helpless and moot if it couldn’t be with her. In that moment, when she looked over for a split second smiling at him, he knew, he felt for her, a love that he thought only existed in movies and long winded novels, the love that elders and dreamers talked about his whole life. ‘You’ll know it when it happens, and it will happen when you least expect it’. This was it! It was happening, and happening to him.
Things moved quickly after that. She felt for him, as he did for her, and the fact that they had become such good friends before hand had built them an immovable foundation for which they could build their pillars that would, in time, stretch well into the future and weather any tempest life would invariably put upon them.
And so one Saturday evening, two confessed lovers whom had known each other for years, met downtown and had their first real dinner date. They had decided to splurge on a fancy Bay street eatery, laughing their way through course after course, enjoying the food and wine immensely, though enjoying each other even more. They had an infections way about them. People seemed to go out of their way if only to steal a glimpse of how happiness should be. They ended up being late for the show. The film that they had intended to see had sold out so they settled for some random picture, which they never ended up seeing the end of. Their need to be together, that need to touch and share in each other’s bodies, floated them back to his place; a hunger beyond famine, for each others lips, body and soul. They made love that night, well into the small hours of dawn, quenching their lustful thirst then falling into peaceful slumber in each other’s arms.
Warm sunlight cascaded onto his face from the window and when he tried to rub his eyes he felt gauze on his left hand. He opened his eyes, puzzled as to why his hand was even wrapped, looked around the room, and total confusion set in. He swept his mind, but his search light of remembering was dim and unresponsive. Slowly, like the memories of a drunken evening, images came to him. Scattered and scary and horrific, yet like remembering some long ago television rerun.
All of it through his lens.
But where am I?
He attempted to get out of bed but was halted abruptly by a barbarous pain that issued a loud involuntary grunt. He clutched his side with his gauzed hand and saw that his torso was as well bandaged, stained on the left with jaundice crimson.
Sayid strolled into the room drinking a sweaty bottle of coke. ‘Finally you're up!' Sayid joked
'Where's my camera?' He asked almost angrily.
Sayid pointed to a bureau under the window where his camera - dirtied, bloodied, and looking so awful that it caused a whimper in his mind - sat. Sayid, sensing that He wanted the camera and also eager to see the shots He had taken, picked it up as one would a fragile crystal ornament and brought it to Him.
'Thank you Sayid' He said, trying not to grimace at the pain and took it from him like a practiced mother would a child. He wiped clean the playback LCD and turned the camera on. It was dead.
'Nothing's happening' Sayid pointed out.
'The battery's dead. Do you have my backpack?'
'Yes!' Sayid exclaimed and he was gone.
Left alone He began wiping the camera, using spit to loosen the dried blood and his gauze as a cloth. He managed most of it but failed to reach the stains in the fine impressions. He popped the lens cap off to see how dirty the lens was and saw, to his dismay for the second time this week, that the lens was cracked!
'Son-of-a-bitch!' he surrendered viscerally.
He felt nauseous. His stomach ached with cramps.
Sayid reemerged from the hall carrying His backpack, panting, slightly out of breath.
'What's happened?' Sayid asked through inhales.
'Another lens bites the dust.' He tried to make light of the situation.
Sayid passed him the backpack. 'Like the song,' he said smiling widely.
'Yeah!' He tried to chuckle. ‘Like the song'.
He had Sayid help him fish one of his spare batteries out of a small pouch and into the camera to replace the dead one. The camera came to life instantly and Sayid sat on the bed next to him to better see the photographs.
As He scrolled past some shots he had taken at the hotel his heart began to race and he could feel his palms starting to sweat with excitement. The last picture he had taken before he had left the hotel was from his window of the sun setting brilliantly over still palm trees. He paused for a split second and scrolled to the next shot.
There in the little lighted screen stood the leader of an extremist group, holding a photograph of a man that was single handedly responsible for so many useless deaths, and next to him -- 'Tamman!'
Sayid tore the camera out of His hands. 'How do I make it bigger? The picture. Make it bigger!' Sayid asked impatiently.
He had forgotten that this man was Sayids friend. Killed. Uselessly. He zoomed in on Tamman, the camera never leaving Sayids hands. 'This was a great man, Habbibi' Sayid said looking terribly sad while looking fondly at the image, the last image of his friend, Tamman.
He let a silence build, holding back all the questions he had for Sayid. Why was he friends with a soon-to-be terrorist? Why would anyone, after loosing a brother, want to follow in the same way?
He was about to ask Sayid how he and Tamman had even been friends. Sayid was Muslim but hated the extremist factions.
'The money I told you you needed to give to me. The ten thousand. It was going to be used by Tamman to escape, to get he and his mother to Australia so that he might live a life away from the people that cost him his brother'. Sayid’s eyes looked blood shot but He knew Sayid would not cry. 'Now he is dead. Just like his brother.' Sayid looked Him straight in the eyes. ‘He was a good man who loved his family unconditionally. You would have liked him very much… had things not happened as they did'. Sayid spoke with the most sincerity He had ever heard.
Sayid, with gentleness, surrendered the camera, putting it back into His hands and He, understanding the moment, sat in silence. Sayid had lost a friend, a friend that wanted more than the taste of revenge. More than to continue the circle of hatred that carries one like a current stronger than the strength it takes to break free. Tamman, rest in peace.
'You must be thirsty,’ Sayid said changing the subject harshly. ‘I will get you something to drink. And your bandages need changing'. He left the room.
When Sayid was gone, His attention pulled back to the photos he had taken. His curiosity momentarily masking the pain, He scrolled through them seeing the last shot he had taken of the leader and Tamman from a low angle and much to his enjoyment, the framing worked perfectly. This particular angle gave them a much more powerful, sinister appearance. He wiped the cold sweat from his brow and moved on to the next shot.
Horror.
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