Please Don't Go (23 page)

“
You will wish for such. Soon enough.”

“
I’ll wish for
what
? Death?”

“
You’ll wish that you had been burned in a funeral pyre, as they would a witch. It would be more pleasant... and much quicker.” She paused, but then added, “There’s a kindness to you. That won’t last, though. It never does.”

“
I know who you are,” Zephyr threatened, even from his state of apparent immobility. “Emily.”

She laughed out loud, throwing her hairbrush to the ground. It sunk through the murky fog that surrounded them, absorbed into the nothingness beneath their dangling feet. “You’re quite the humorist! I would have never guessed it, behind all that vapid logic. A pretty face with a fattened tongue, so very full of himself, but all the while acting like a lowly peasant for the world to appreciate. Another spoiled boy without anything to offer the world. For the record, I do not know of an Emily. You are grossly mistaken.” As Rattup had claimed, there had been no Emily. There was a girl based upon Emily, but that was not her name.

“
Let me go,” he demanded, though unsure that he was actually being held against his will. He then tried to move his arms and legs, but found that they failed him, detached from his mental and physical will. There was nothing perceivable actually binding him in place; no ropes, no chains, no straps. Just air. And that foggy residue that lurked about them like rabid circling dogs. “Let me go. Now.”

“
You should not have spit at him. That was uncalled for.”

“
He deserved it for what he said.” Zephyr paused, adding, “Or were his strings being pulled?”

“
We’ll never know, will we?” She smirked, revealing an incongruous curl to her upper lip. She looked as though her face had been bludgeoned, but that she had been healed, on the majority, for a long period of time. The traces remained, the tattoo permanent, but the immediate pains were vanished.

He tried again to wiggle his arms and legs, groaning in frustration. She stepped closer and kissed him on the cheek. “Aren’t you a silly animal? I can’t wait to play with you.”

Zephyr closed his eyes, belting with all the lung power he could muster in this strange new world that surrounded him, “Let me go!”

He reopened his eyes, and Aleesha greeted him. He recognized her for her reddish flaming curls of hair. Her eyes, as Rattup had described, screamed with a palpable energy, a javelin of life force that consumed any and all beings who happened to step in their path. Aleesha whispered into his ear, “You’re just too handsome for words. She’s right, you know. It’s going to be a gas. All of us, together. Playing.” She hesitated, biting her lip and gazing into Zephyr’s terror-stricken eyes, adding, “Playing like adults do.” Her eyes filled with a cloudy white fog, like the one that surrounded them in this.... dream?

A honk sounded beyond the layers of fluffy infinity. “Time to wake up,” Aleesha noted, pouting. “Go now.” A second honk blared.

***

Zephyr awakened.

The couch felt rockier and less forgiving than it had before. What was once a cushy flesh of soft fabrics and cottony caverns had become a stone slab, partially frozen and detestably sharp, as though the mirage had been crippled and shattered. A throbbing emanated from Zephyr’s forehead, as well as from his hips. His wrists were tingling. Placing his hand to his brow, he felt flakes of dried blood that sent shocks of pain through his head upon touch. Sucking in a quick breath of pained air, he glanced towards the front door, where Charles Rattup stood, solid and prideful.

A horn sounded outside again, as it had in the threshold between his dream and wakefulness.

“
My chariot has arrived,” Charles stated. “He’s probably running that clock already, so I best get my little doggies moving.”

He stood with his head held higher than Zephyr could recall previously. His face seemed different, smoother, as though he had been wearing a Halloween mask before. “What is this?” Zephyr blurted at the shockingly well dressed man before him. He tried to recall, through the hazy bits of brain that were trickling back to life, what had happened to him to arrive him at this couch, and in such pain. He felt his head again. Had Rattup attacked him? The last recollection he could cobble together was of launching his grade-school-student blast of petty warm spit into the old codger’s face. “Charles?”

“
Mr. Rattup now. Please,” he replied, adjusting the lapels of his navy blue suit jacket. He was dressed as Zephyr would imagine a high class naval officer would, with all the frills short of a cap with an anchor stitched upon it. He wore a bright blue ascot, tucked beneath the collar of his dressy jacket. His pants were hemmed and ironed into a perfect pleat down the front of his knees. His black shoes sparkled bright, as if shined with diamond dust. In each hand, he held a fat suitcase, each on the verging of busting wide open. “The books in my collection are a gift from me to you. Like your DVDs to me. You can keep those, as well. I’m not really interested in modern film. Really, I’m more of a classical bookworm. In case you’re wondering, we’ve decided that you would stay on here as a permanent house guest, in my stead. This was not a last minute decision, young man, so put that right out of your mind. While the shame of spitting in my face was something I care to soon forget, the machinations of this transition have been in play since the moment I spotted you outside my door. You may rack your brain about the history of this seemingly horrible conspiracy, but please know that it is
your turn
and that I am quite tired.
Exhausted
, really. She picks her men like any other temptress would at a beer-soaked bar of truckers and sailors. When the decision is made, the decision is final. She is very
particular
in that way.”

“
I’ll break your scrawny neck,” Zephyr mumbled, readying himself to pounce upon Rattup. When he stiffened his legs to up himself and attack, he found that they were locked in place, shackled. Like his dream, he thought. Chained by his immediate atmosphere. An invisible hand clutched his left leg, squeezing so hard that he yelped in pain. Another hand grappled at his right arm. Hot breath fell upon his face and he shifted his neck to avoid that steamy garbage smell. “I’ll fucking strangle you,” he repeated in his struggle. He fought the hands about him, but found that they were far too powerful, tightening and pushing upon him with the force of ten muscle-bound men.

“
Don’t fight her.”

“
Let go of me,” he warned the thing that was imprisoning him with its vicious hands. He repeated this to Rattup, shouting across the room, “Tell it to let go of me!”

“
I have nothing to do with this, kid. I wish you well. Be careful, she’s a fiery bitch with fangs and horns.”

Zephyr groaned and the horn beeped again, from which Zephyr assumed was some sort of taxi.

“
Goodbye, my dear,” he said. Zephyr felt the force on his hands ease up at this statement and he soon realized that Charles Rattup, the lying faking son of a bitch, was not speaking to him anymore. He was addressing, as it seemed, his personal ghost and captor, the specter that Zephyr had doubted the existence of so many times. That illusion was faded. “I’ll think of you often, but never with a smile,” Rattup said to her. He listened for something, nodding. She was speaking to him. “The memories we’ve shared. What a rotten whore.” He shook his head in recognition of the past that quickly flashed through his mind, as though he was dying. He was, Zephyr decided at that moment, perpetually maddened by his own form of Stockholm Syndrome, that he had come to love his captor at some incomprehensible level of human emotion. “Hugs and kisses,” he said sarcastically, turning towards the door, opening it. He paused.

“
I’m not joking!” Zephyr shouted for some reason he could not work out in his dizzy (concussioned?) mind.
Joking
. Surely, Charles Rattup was playing the cruelest prank in the history of man, like had happened to his Galway story’s doppelganger at breakfast. “
I get it
. Enough!” Zephyr added. He giggled a sad little giggle and awaited the end of the man’s jest.

Mr. Charles Rattup placed a fedora on his head, which had been hanging for so very long on a hook next to his front door. He whistled to himself as he stepped through and slammed the door behind him, saying not another word.

Struggling to move himself from the confines of the couch, Zephyr tried to scream for help, hoping that the taxi driver would hear his desperate pleas. His yell was interrupted by a thick oily rag, shoved into his mouth by one of the invisible hands, those clambering transparent things that were more potent than he could combat. He had not seen the rag, since it was simply not there in the breath of one moment, and there the next, crammed into his gullet with no regard for his personal safety.

Zephyr sat calmly, the smell of the oily rag turning his stomach sour, waiting for the twisted joke to end, for some pseudo-celebrity hidden-camera host to burst through the door and laugh in his frightened, trembling face. He waited for ten minutes. Then he waited for twenty more minutes, breathing through his nose, nauseous from the rag’s fumes, displacing his thoughts like a worthless trinket. Thirty minutes passed, then forty.

Any moment, it would end.

Jackie would undoubtedly find this anxious torture infinitely entertaining.

Any moment.

It would end.

Any moment.

***

Intermission: Freedom on the March

Charles Rattup walked through the children’s aisle. He ran his fingers along the glossy covers. Before he could contain his emotions, he had hopped and skipped his way to the Biography section. Wide signs hung from the ceiling indicating entire allotments of books. Categories galore, so many that he would have never fathomed it all in his wildest dreams. Gardening. Astrology. Horror. Science Fiction. Translations. Comic books. Entire walls of atlases. Rows upon rows of textbooks. Bins full of unmarked, miscellaneous tomes of knowledge and entertainment. He smelled the aroma of coffee, curling his nose into a facial homing pigeon. As he walked past a customer service desk, he asked the short stout woman there, “You sell coffee?”

“
Of course,” she replied, taken aback by his naivety.

“
Glorious.”

When he approached the alien café (built into a bookstore?), he first took notice that the patrons were reading books there. “They’ll spill coffee on those books,” he mumbled, a disdain that was detected by a fellow shopper who glanced at him without much judgment or care.

He ordered a coffee, regular. When the man at the counter offered Charles a “double caramel frappucino”, which were apparently on sale, the elder writer grimaced. “Just coffee, please. I’m not quite sure what you even said, but I take it as a form of insult.” He studied the myriad of tattoos upon the man’s forearms, repulsed by the self-destruction that the youth of today so reveled in, but then thought of his own bruised arms. Perhaps, he thought, we all had our own marks to bear, whether by choice or destiny.

On his way back to the endless multitude of books that overflowed from the aisles of the apparently corporate conglomerate bookstore, he brushed past a young woman. Jackie did not recognize him, and the same went for he to her. She had fashioned a plan with her beau, earlier in the day, that she and Zephyr would meet in the café. They would have a coffee and finger through some magazines (his favorite was
Fangoria
, hers was
Rolling Stone
). They would do so as a buildup to their eventual date night, a dramatic girly sort of film that she had been dying to see for some time. Zephyr was late- quite late in fact- to their rendezvous. Jackie, at the approaching pinnacle of frustration for his absurd ability to be late for just about everything in their lives, had walked back to the magazine rack with her
Rolling Stone
,
Spin
, and
Premiere
magazines, slammed them down upon the tiered shelves, and stormed from the store, mumbling aspersions beneath her breath. It was fast becoming commonplace for Zephyr to engage in such bull-headed ignorance. Added to his being overtly tardy, he had refused to answer his phone. It had not even gone to voicemail, meaning that he had shut the damn device off altogether. “There’s hell to pay,” Jackie had whispered to herself as she passed the unknowing old man in the dapper blue suit.

Rattup danced a silly jig down the aisles of the literature section, pulling his favorites from their spots, many of which he abandoned with The Boy in his oversized rat trap. How could one feel guilty of his crimes towards man when surrounded by such prettily worded prose? He grazed his hands along the collected works of Charles Dickens, giggling with delight.

He wondered how Zephyr was adapting to his newly crafted bondage. “No time to think such purposeless thoughts,” Charles Rattup stated his innermost musings aloud, catching the attention of many fellow shoppers, though they were absent from his proximal awareness. They might as well have been ghosts in the haunted mansion of his new found freedoms.

But now... this world. This new world of instant gratification. Gone were the days of scouring through countless dinghy bookstores for a certain piece of work that struck your fancy. Instant access, via computer terminals. It would map the location in the store that the book was housed. If it was not available, a screen would pop open that would prompt you of other locations or delivery options. Charles paused for a moment at one of these kiosks, marveling at it, peering over a man’s shoulder as he typed into the science fiction (more so than the books of that genre) contraption. “Is there a problem?” the man asked, and Charles only shook his head, dizzy by this miraculous kingdom he had stepped into the digital networked heart of.