Resurrection

Chapter Sixteen

Coldness was loathsome to Theo, especially when he chose to employ it.  He much preferred the warmth of nostalgia, the unexpected smile of company, the grin from a silent joke that hung in the air between companions.  But when it was necessary, coldness landed squarely in his repertoire as if his effusive hospitality and open-hearted sociability had been nothing more than well-rehearsed techniques.

And, when Theo dared turn a precise eye to his own private collection of nightmares, maybe coldness had been the thread of strength at his core that had kept him alive for so long.  Kept him sane.

Theophilus Castellanos stood in his study with a hand steadying himself at the sink.  He was bent over it like a scolded dog made to observe the scene of its piss.  With heavy breaths that fogged the glass, he slowly craned his neck upward to face his reflection..

"Funny how these things come in twos," he said to himself.

But of course, it made sense.  Life rarely kept its challenges compartmentalized neatly for one to approach at their leisure and with adequate preparation.  Often the disasters dovetailed, combining their infuriating fibers to make a marathon of their conquering.

Claire on one end, basically a stranger for whom Theo had felt an immediate empathy.  He hadn't seen the shadow hovering about her right away, but after catching small distortions in the walls next to her, or the blurring of a light behind her shoulder, or the slightest of wrinkles on her shirt where none had previously been, it had become apparent to him.  This woman was invisibly chained.

And at the other end, a memory come to life, perhaps his first true calling to confront the undefined darkness.  Eddie, for whom a mixture of deep affection and thorny regret entangled within him, had come from a vast chasm of years of silence.  Perhaps the worst part of the call had been that Eddie hadn't wanted to catch up, to see how his old friend from a decade ago was faring.  No, the call had come out of necessity, out of Eddie's inability to get his hands around the problem, and that was what made the cold wire inside emerge.

He missed that brute.  Missed him terribly.  And to think that he'd only reached out to his friend in a moment of desperation when there had been literal years of opportunity to make a conciliatory call under less dire circumstances... It wasn't quite disrespectful, but had troubled him enough to make Theo discourage his friend during the phone call.  All for an orphan who Eddie suspected could "wake up" the dead.

In Theo's flurry of emotions at the call, his mind had glanced over the juicy information.  That coldness gave him distance, when he could have listened a little more closely.  An orphan from Mexico, his dead mother and pastor's brother in the car, and the other driver involved in the accident should have been dead, but two had come out alive.  He had no idea how to make the phone call with the boy tomorrow morning of use to Eddie, but nonetheless, he found the idea of a conversation with Ezequiel fascinating.

"Curioser and curioser."

Theo felt the draw inside, that creeping obsession with the unanswerable boiling up.  The emotional upset he'd felt after the phone call was melting in the face of a hundred questions, a hundred deep and dark questions that most people would rather not ask.  And the answers were only a state away.

"Heel, Theophilus!  There's a Berlioz to evict."

The real world was a tangle of social niceties, monetary mindfulness, and the fraught web of human relationships.  The other side, the invisible reality, was heavy with hidden answers he could find if he ventured far enough into the darkness.  Theo was comfortable in the dark.

Knowing what would come later, Theo took a key from the ring in his pocket and unlocked one of the large black cabinets against the wall.  An entire host of contents that Claire would have found illuminating was revealed, but Theo had one goal.  On the top shelf, a large down comforter and a plush pillow were neatly stored away.  He drew them out and tossed them in a heap to the couch next to the piano, and locked the cabinet.

He flung open the medicine cabinet above his sink and grabbed a plain-looking tincture from the top shelf.  He spun open the stopper and with it extracted the smallest amount of the pungent yellowish liquid inside the bottle.

"Brindis!" he cheered to no one in his study as he raised the dropper over his wide-open eyes and squeezed two drops into each eye.

The familiar burn made him screw his face up.  He jigged around in his clunky boots for a few seconds to resist throwing his fingers into his eyes and quickly screwed the dropper-top into the tincture.  With practiced aim, he reached up to the top shelf and slid the tincture back into place, shutting the medicine cabinet and flinging his hands as if he were buttoning a showstopper in a musical.  Finally, the burning in his eyes settled into more of a warm buzz, like cozy electricity.

The world swam beneath a veneer of viscous brown, thick like unfiltered olive oil.  Wispy shapes criss-crossed the view outside his window.  His own reflection began to lose shape.  The color in his hair began to melt into his face.  His black coat became a huge cape, fluttering in the non-wind.

He looked away from the mirror before Mirrami could appear to distract him.

The laughter outside his study door congealed into a steady human foghorn muffled with a pillow.  The geometry of the room multiplied into complex corners and simultaneously became opaque and two-dimensional.  When he looked down, he was both connected to the floor and miles away from the million threads of fiber in the carpet.

"Oops, there goes gravity."

Before the sludge could swallow him, Theo drew a small bottle of pills from his pocket and tossed an Adderall into his mouth– the pill threatened to dance off of his palm with teeny insults.  While it scampered in his mouth, he reached for the coffee pot, which had been off for at least an hour and contained about three quarters of a carafe of cold coffee.  In a monstrous series of gulps, he downed the coffee and with it the protesting Adderall.  The taste hit his tongue like a snakebite and he welcomed the sharpness of the strong drink.  He felt dribbles down the corners of his mouth and wiped them away with his leather-strung hand.  He carefully set the coffee pot into the sink as if it were a sleeping infant.  A rumble emanated from his gut. His belch echoed into the study like a cannonball firing into a canyon.

"Breathe, ye wench, breathe."

Theo willed himself to stand still and stare at the upright piano against the wall.  The black and white keys kept switching places, dancing over each other and landing in stubborn groups of black keys clumped against each other.  The piano lid threatened to slam shut, trembling in place.

Finally, as he breathed and observed, willing the surge of caffeine to make its way into his body, Theo felt the world settle a bit.  The piano keys stopped moving, although he could tell they really wanted to break ranks into other octaves.  The floor became solid and stable again.  The club music became less strangled and simply thumped in the background of his mind now.

Slowly he peeked at the mirror to see if Mirrami had appeared, but he'd been spared the encounter.  This time.

The edges clear again, he had one foot in both worlds at last.  One foot in the Gadmop, and one in the miasma of what lay beyond, mixed with the projections of his unleashed subconscious.    Right where he needed to be to see.  To really see.

"Time to go to work."