redemption's vessel

A Story by lazylines

excerpt

....The baristas are bouncing about; Shelley King sings over the whitish noise of the morning’s conversational irrelevance. The walls are painted mocha and the floor is tiled green. The grout, filthy with the dirt of wandering soles, meets the brown and green somewhere in the middle. He places himself in line, considers the time of day, and wonders where the last few hours have gone. Did he fall asleep again? Is his mind just so far gone that it wanders beyond the linear limitations of reality? He is tired, almost to the point of complete shut down. The lost time is surely the byproduct of weary cerebrum. Slumber poised to take him from the holly of waking time in which he has bedded down.

“What was I thinking?” he thinks aloud, while staring into a glass box filled with pastries.

A voice answers. “If I had to guess, you were thinking about espresso, and from the looks of you, I would say a good bit of it.”

An eternity for a brain seems to pass as the connection of addressee and addresser is considered. His attention now drawn to a small smiling girl standing behind the counter, a tattoo of a butterfly stretched across her throat. He examines her and contemplates her body beneath the full-length apron. Her programmed expression, part joy, part sincere personal interest begins to fade into quizzical discomfort over the silence.

“I meant it literally.” He says.

She snaps too. “Huh?” A furrowed brow and chin tucking visually punctuate her monosyllabic response

“What was I thinking, is a question that I am asking my self literally. I have forgotten the last several hours of thought, and find myself wondering what I was thinking, you know, during that lost time. I didn’t mean to ask it out loud though, sorry.” He continues. “Have you ever seen Papillion?”

“Is that a movie?” she asks.

A man standing on line behind him sighs and looks at his watch.

“Yeah, book too I think, it’s about a guy that refuses to be imprisoned; your tattoo makes me think of it. He has a tattoo of a butterfly on his chest.” He stops talking and digs loose money from his pocket, awkwardly punctuating the conversation.

“Well, what can I getcha?” she asks.

“Four shots of espresso would be fantastic.” She picks up a cup and begins to write the specifics on the side with a stubby grease pen.

“What’s your name?” she asks.

“Andy” he replies. She writes it on the cup.

“That will be four ninety-eight, please.”

He hands her the exact amount, after slowly counting out the change, and moves to the other end of the counter to wait for his drink. The banging and slurping carry his attention, as the tattooed girl processes his order. She reports to his end of the counter, places a large brown drink on its surface, looks up and smiles.

“When Winnie the Pooh lost his honey, he sat on a log and said ‘think, think, think!’ out loud. That is what I do when I need to remember something. It works pretty well.”

Her sincerity is so out of place that he has to wrestle with it for a moment, “Thanks, I’ll try it.”

He turns to the door and struggles toward it. He steps out and on to the brick paved sidewalk turns and starts aimlessly shuffling, his only intention to sip his potently caffeinated beverage. Extreme fatigue seems to, at a certain point; pull the color from his world. This always happens on the third or fourth sleepless day. This is when the ideas come, this is when all that does not make sense leads to some grand explanation, and this is why he will not sleep.

Traffic passes him slowly, while students stand, gossip, run, walk, converse on cell phones, and shop. He is alone, and at the same time completely immersed in their world, he is a rock seeking out the bottom of an ocean. Then, it happens, the moment, the reason, the point. It has come this way before; a vision laying the answers out before him. It is all there inside her. She is the current representation of the culmination of his existence, carrying the clues to why, as pilot fish follow a shark.

She glides across his frame of vision the way the shadow of a cloud would slide across the blue grass hills of Kentucky. As she passes, an opaque veil lifts with her heels, leaving a more vibrant world. The grey and grainy pigment surrounding him sips touches of color, as if from her soul. Each step reveals a small piece of a new world. The journey, wholly as he can observe, is for the purpose of his own enlightenment. She has caught his eye, and he has stopped dreaming. They have never spoken, but she knows him. Regardless of appearance, their past encounters materialize before his mind’s eye. Through nightmares and daydreams, eyes of sorrow and faces of regret haunt him.

The sun is nestled low in the late afternoon, orange and purple streaming from it, it is an explosion, and it is crashing into the earth so slowly that its movement is all but frozen. A wind chills his skin, carrying a lone soul truth, a foreshadowing to an unpleasant but real epiphany, an idea that he cannot seem to get his hands around, but only brace himself for, knowing that it will hit him with its own brutal caring intention.

She slips away gracefully, carrying with her all that shields his being. Now, in this clear new world, he is completely alone. He is one solitary man standing in front of a barreling idea, wide eyed, and lost for thought. It plummets down at him, encompassing all that he can see within an endless shadow. The people around him, at this point an afterthought, troll about void of color. “This revelation is my own,” he thinks to himself. His body does not move, his soul crushed by the weight of this meteoric conception. His tear ducts strain as all at once he considers what he could have, might have, or should have been. He becomes his own personal representation of failure. This instant he is no longer matter; all that defines him melts away. His mind leaks a visceral puddle of regret about his feet, his soul weeps for itself. He sheds the weight of his life, bleeding out on the sidewalk of a cookie-cutter college town.

He slips into an alley, uneven cement a comforting cushion, whooshing cars, blowing wind, and the padding of feet, a blended lullaby. He exits the waking world.

In the same town, at a different time, on the same day Aldridge Archibald Ashby Esq., an attorney of prominence in the handling of wills, the holding of items, and the keeping of secrets, a student of the clandestine, a master of anonymity, persistently dabs at his coffee dampened shorts.

“Sir, please allow me to apologize.” The nervous waiter wipes his hands down a long blue bistro apron.

“There was a time, young lad, when perilous thoughts would spring forth at the beckoning of such events… however, I have come to the understanding that Peter, or Simon, or Cephas, or Petros… whatever… he and I have enough to discuss… so you needn’t worry!”

Aldridge smiles while digging into his pocket and retrieving his billfold.

“If you are truly sorry, and appreciate that I have extended the lease on your patella, you will find a moment to slip out and down to the one of this towns finer purveyors, and purchase for me, a clean pair of shorts.” He hands the boy $100 dollars and looks down at his waist missing the vanity of yesterday. “Size forty two.”

“Avoid light tones, and return with my change… of course I assume that goes without saying!”

The boy snatches the money and turns to sprint taking with him Aldridge’s last bit of advice “move with alacrity son, and you will be rewarded.”

As the boy exits the patio, Aldridge returns to his own words from a moment ago: “Peter and I have enough to discuss.” His stomach ties itself up as a Catholic childhood transcends many callous years to illicit fear into the heart of an old attorney. Aldridge has a young client twenty years dead to obligate, and has come out of retirement in the pursuit of this endeavor. He finds another waiter and gestures to his full glass of water, which he raises it to his mouth. He returns it empty to the table while simultaneously wiping his wet lips with the sleeve of his shirt.

The new waiter arrives at the table and refills Aldridge’s water, then moves towards his nearly empty bottle of chardonnay with the good intention of transferring the contents into Aldridge’s nearly empty glass.

“Son, might you retrieve another glass for an old friend whom I do not necessarily expect to arrive… then split the last bit between the two… what would the world be with out good will and manners?” The boy rocks his head to his shoulder in pseudo response.

“I’ll be back in a moment with your friend’s glass, sir.”

Aldridge looks up at the boy. “Save haste for those moments that matter, if you are unsure, take my word that this is not one of those moments.”

The boy looks back over his shoulder with a smile one part amused at this odd characters dialog and one part appreciative of his patience. The glass hits the table; the waiter wipes the bottle and pours the wine at Aldridge’s request. As the new waiter walks away, the clumsy waiter returns, and hands over a paper shopping bag. Aldridge reaches in, retrieves the change, and hands it to the red-faced young man. “Keep it son, you have made a sound selection and wasted not a moment. Bring the bill!” The boy puts the tip in his apron and leaves the table.

“And now for a toast”

Aldridge turns to the empty chair across from him and raises his glass. The scattered late lunchers look on as if toasting with an empty seat is a normal activity.

“It appears, my dead friend that our moment lays around the bow, the boat is moored, the sailing has ceased, and Aldridge Archibald Ashby ESQ., attaché of slain slayers blows the dust from the housing of his craft.” He looks into heaven through the straw colored contents of his glass hoping to see the face of god. He is wanting guidance that he is not fool enough to ask for, though the bolt that would certainly strike him down would be a welcome end, this last task feels to hold the truth of his plight. Loud enough to draw the late lunchers eyes from their pink sparklers and cobb salads, his toast: “To redemption my one true friend and last remaining client!” The wine slides down his throat without the assistance of his esophagus.

Aldridge stands and smashes the empty glass on the ground. The late lunchers now curious all face him. He reaches across the table, retrieves the other glass, dumps its contents onto the patio, and then smashes it as well. He moves towards the gate, after leaving four one hundred dollar bills on the table. As he leaves, he remarks to the late lunchers

“When the sound of breaking glass is not accompanied by fear, you know that you are in a good place.”