Christopher's Song (Indefinite Hiatus)

Chapter 1

Daniel floated in a warm, thick liquid. A muffled melody seeped into his mind, stirring and yet soothing him. The haunting strains held tranquility; still there was an undercurrent bright with both promise and fear. Teetering on the brink of consciousness in that place between sleep and wakefulness, he felt an unusual sense of excitement. This time he felt sure he would retain the elusive recurrent melody of his dreams. As his mind reached out to capture the tune, he came fully awake, and the sun shining through his window slapped him in the face, jarring all thoughts of music from his mind.

The sun was bright, way too bright. Daniel tried opening his eyes a crack and was rewarded with lancing pain, like a quick blast of torture, shut off a few seconds after he quickly closed his eyes. Why? Why the tormenting brightness? He tried slitting his eyes open again, and this time the pain wasn't quite so bad. Maybe because he'd been prepared? He craned his neck a little to catch sight of the clock on the nightstand. Ouch, movement was bad. Maybe he wasn't as prepared as he'd thought.

What was the source of this physical agony, he asked himself? He took mental inventory of his body. His head continued to pound, even with his eyes shut, but the feeling like a hot knife stabbing into his brain had receded with the light. His mouth tasted like a sewer. Some sort of foul crust coated his tongue. As he moved his tongue to check the top of his mouth, he gagged as a wave of nausea enveloped him. Opening his mouth, he sucked in great gulps of air, determined to still the roiling antics of his stomach. He felt a sheen of perspiration break upon his brow as the nausea receded into an uneasy queasiness. Cautiously, he lifted his arm to run his fingers tentatively through the disarrayed mass of blond curls. When he did, the cuff of his denim shirt brushed his forehead. His shirt? He slowly opened his eyes and stared at his arm, still clad in the shirt he wore last night to his 18th birthday celebration. Sluggishly, comprehension began to dawn as he reviewed the previous night in his mind.

The guys from the band insisted on taking him and his twin brother Ethan to a club to celebrate their majority. Initially their friends declared it was the twins' civic duty to get drunk on their eighteenth birthday. The two had firmly declined, feeling the need to be in control of their faculties at all times, afraid that somehow they would reveal the secret they had shared since birth. Still, a famed jazz musician was playing, and so the boys went along to the club, vowing to drink only coke. And they kept their resolve, resisting the lighthearted attempts of the others to get them to indulge. But this morning's symptoms, strangely like those associated with a hangover, seemed to indicate otherwise.

Closing his eyes tightly and concentrating, Daniel focused his mind on the previous evening. He heard snatches of laughter. A pretty waitress kept their coke glasses filled from a pitcher while she winked at the guys of the band. There was music, magnificent jazz strains filled the mind and engaged the soul. At some point he and Ethan were on stage, weaving their musical magic, unbelievably accompanied by a jazz great. As the song progressed something surfaced in his mind, an unusual dissonance. He vaguely recalled an incident with drinks near the stage all suddenly boiling, and a lot of glasses shattering? That didn't make sense, and things weren't very clear up until he remembered being half-carried, half-stumbling from the room. He saw the worried face of the pretty waitress, holding a bottle of vodka in one hand and accepting a wad of bills from one of his friends with the other, while she watched the band members drag Ethan and him out into the night.

Now it all made sense. The boys paid the waitress to spike their drinks with a liquor so bland it was easily disguised in a mixed drink. Happy freaking birthday. What time did the clock say? It was after noon, anyway, and there were things to be done. He knew there was something important happening today, but he couldn't remember what it was; Ethan would know if there was something particularly pressing.