Mountain Qualia

NaNoWriMo Day 20

To be a guest in the street, you have lived in for all those years is a feast for undeserved nostalgia. It was no longer his house. Tipi knew this already. Since he had embodied mount Meru he had regained most of his before memories. The recollections of the two years in enlightenment were still gone. If he had to believe Kalisa they would never return because he had been part of a larger consciousness and Joakim's brained were not the rest place for these memories it seemed. It had also eaten away a bit of the memories of the period just before being taken over by the hive mind.

But even the memories of this street and this house were less lively than he had hoped. From Canada and Austria, the prospect of leading a normal life was enticing. But now he was here, including the painful memories and the seducing qualities had disappeared. Still, there was no other place to go.  He knew he had sold the house, but the details of the transaction eluded him. It must have been a moment before everything went dark for Joakim.

He rang the doorbell but nobody opened. He took a few steps back and saw that the lights were on upstairs. It was early in the evening, so Tipi had hoped for someone to be home and still awake. He knocked hard on the door and then checked the windows upstairs again. The curtains moved and there was a quick peek. Then the curtain opened wide, and a woman looked down at Tipi and then disappeared again. From the street you could hear the woman barge down the stairs. She opened the door half out of breath.

"Tipi, I assume?" she said leaning against the doorpost, more a way to catch her breath than to give off a laissez-faire attitude. "I didn't expect you here."

"We know each other?"

"No, not really, but after we bought this house, we received a letter. It had a picture of you in it. Wait here." She took a few steps into the house and rummaged through a drawer full of nicknacks. She fished out a photograph and showed it to Tipi. "This. This is you, right?"

"It sure is. Do you know why someone sent you this letter?"

"No, not a clue."

"This was my house, I lived here."

"Makes sense," she said. "There was something else. A brief note, but I lost it. It wasn't terribly important, it only said that if the man from the photograph would come by I had to give him a key."

"A key?"

The woman with short, very red hair, hit herself on the forehead. "The key. Where do I have it?"

"Everything alright, Tilda?" a man called from upstairs.

"Yes, yes," she replied. She was digging in the same drawer again. "There it is, a key on a cord, on a chain, on a label"

"What's it for?"

"It might have been on the note, but I don't know. But here, take it." Then she whispered. "Look, I have to go. You shouldn't come here anymore. Bye."

And before Tipi could say anything the door closed in his face and holding nothing more than the photograph and a key on a cord on a chain on a label. The label contained an address. St. John's street, number 12. He knew the address; it was a half hour's walk. He wondered who sent the letter. Maybe he had done it himself? Did he know he would lose his consciousness or was it done while he was enlightened? The house was a closed chapter. From the outside it looked like his house but it had also changed. And the inside had been completely overturned. While he had found his way on the streets, he had hoped to at least find a familiar friendly face to help him stay the nigth somewhere. 

He checked out the address on the key first, before concerning himself with a place for the night. It was now well in the evening when he arrived in a quiet back road which was lined with garage boxes. He tried to open garage box number twelve, as showed on the key label. The key did not fit. That was highly unexpected and also highly inconvenient.

He remembered having a thing with twelves. So if Tipi could not get his hands on a storage unit on number twelve he would code it so it would be twelve anyway. Twelve is a dozen but only in the decimal system. What is twelve in the duodecimal system? 10 would be twelve, and 12 would then be fourteen. He checked the door on number 14 and it fit. John 14/12; Very truly I tell you, whoever believes in me will do the works I have been doing, and they will do even greater things than these, because I am going to the Father.

Tipi opened the garage box and found it mostly empty. There was a mountain bike, and a backpack. The backpack contained a laptop, a smartphone, a wad of cash bound with rubber bands and a wallet. The walled contained bank cards, driver's license and his passport. He opened the passport and stared at his face staring back at him. He had an identity again. But still no place to be, no home to call home. The storage box was cold and with the stuff taken out it would be empty. He stuffed his new items in the bag he was already carrying all the way from Austria. This now contained some spare clothes and toiletries and the rest of his money.

He put a breath of fresh air into the tubes of the mountain bike and drove to a nearby hotel. There was no light on this bike so he hoped he would not get stopped and fined on the way. He wasn't. The streets were just as quiet here as the rest of Europe he had seen along the way. Nobody ventured outside unless they had to. The first hotel he saw was closed and another one did not accept anyone without a longstanding reservation and certified health check.

Joakim ventured more to the outskirts of town and found a small motel there that was both open and welcoming. He registered, covering his face with a mask het had created from an old ragged t-shirt. He dropped on the bed was to most standards awful. He hurt his ankle because the bed was too short and he gravitated to a sinkhole in the middle of the bed. But by golly did it feel good to have.a rest in a place that he could call his own for at least the time that he had paid for. He brushed his teeth and then fell asleep almost immediately.

The next day he had a simple breakfast in the hall downstairs. Instead of venturing in town he went back to his room and put up the do-not-disturb sign to keep the cleaning staff away. There was nothing for him out there except contamination. He decided, instead, to inspect his belongings. The laptop and smartphone came packed with cables so he hooked them both into the wall sockets.

Charging lights appeared and sure enough, after a while both devices sprung to life. He let his fingers type his laptop password from muscle memory. He spent the rest of the day looking at pictures in his phone and reading all kinds of documents. It took a few minutes for all the e-mail to download into his mail application. Sadly enough, he saw nothing worthwhile. It was mostly spam and newsletters, but since this was a few years worth of junk he sorted it some other time. There were too many interesting documents. Some were filled with lousy poems, notes for something he could not remember and manuscripts of stories. There was a word list in what he recognized was the language toki pona.