Hello. Sam Stefanik here. Welcome to the sixth installment of 'Crown Vic to a Parallel World.' Finally, we have a chapter title that isn't a question. YAY statements!! Thanks for sticking with it.
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6
Turkey and Bourbon Whiskey
We explored the suite. In the corners where the partition walls met the outside wall, there were two more doors, one on each side of the sitting room. These led to identical bedrooms with relaxing lavender walls. The furniture amounted to a massive bed with a lavender spread and no headboard or footboard, two glossy-white hard-surface night stands, a long, white bureau with a frameless mirror on top, and a wardrobe cabinet the size of a side-by-side refrigerator. The outside wall of the bedroom had two more double-wide windows guarded by heavy white drapes and another door to the balcony.
On the far wall, next to the bureau, another door led to an extra-large bathroom. It was a square room, half the size of the bedroom, with an octagonal clear-glass shower stall in the middle. The stall was big enough to be a gang shower for a football team and had about nine adjustable heads on semi-rigid tubes hanging down from the ceiling. These could be extended and positioned individually like the shade of a goose-neck lamp. Behind and to the left of the stall were dull black walls, below was a dull black floor, the opposite walls were floor to ceiling mirrors. It looked like a movie set, but what kind of movie I couldn't tell. Another door in the left-hand black wall led to a very small white room, like a powder room, with just a toilet and sink.
The bathroom left me scratching my head, but I didn't ask for an explanation. I'd already had enough weirdness for one day and I was hungry. "Do you think this place has room service?" I asked. "They should, it's a good hotel. I'll call down. What do you want to eat?" He asked as he went back to the sitting room. One of the desks near the windows supported a shining-black rectangular plate, on which sat another, smaller shining-black rectangular plate. He picked up the smaller plate, held it, and directed a cocked-head questioning look at me.
"See if they have a Thanksgiving platter. If they do, just have them send the largest size and a bottle of whiskey."
"Thanksgiving?" He asked, the question on his face still firmly in place.
I rubbed the back of my neck in frustration and rattled off what I wanted. "Turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, carrots, green beans, tons of gravy, dinner rolls, butter, salt, pepper, pumpkin pie, whipped cream, black coffee. If they have that or any portion of that, I'll take it...a lot of it...and whiskey, a lot of that to. I prefer bourbon, but anything eighty-proof that comes in a bottle will do."
He skipped my irritation and asked a sensible question that I found frustrating in spite of, or perhaps because of, how sensible it was. "How much is `a lot' of food?"
I rubbed my neck again. "Order as much as you would eat, then order it again. That oughta be close."
He set about calling the order in. I went onto the balcony and lit a smoke. Our suite was on the back of the hotel, facing another of the vast parks that I'd seen so much of. I leaned on a railing made of gold metal tubing to watch people stroll in the deepening twilight.
The door opened behind me for Shawn to announce that dinner would be up in five minutes. It seemed impossible to get dinner anywhere in five minutes, but breakfast that morning had been that fast. What did I know? I savored my cigarette, mashed the butt to dust against the railing, and returned to the sitting room to see Shawn hovering over a white cart that hadn't been there before. It was covered with plates of food under glass domes with a blue-labeled bottle standing sentry among them.
"That was fast." I commented. He didn't say anything. He didn't say anything all through the meal. He sat with his plate in his lap and ate a bite of meat, a bite of vegetables, and a bite of starch, one after the other. When his plate was empty, he set it back on the cart and stared at nothing while I continued with my much larger meal. When I finished, he pushed the cart into the hallway and came back to sit on the sofa and look at the wall.
The way he withdrew, I assumed he needed some time to process what we'd learned that day. I didn't want to disturb his thinking and it was time for a cigarette and a drink. I took my bottle, a glass I'd retained from the cart, and my cigarettes out to the balcony. It was full dark. The column street-lights in the park across the way were lit along the trails. A few stragglers strolled around. One park-bench supported a necking couple. It was the most human thing I'd seen in a while. I dragged an armless lounge chair to the railing, sat, and filled my glass. I had a deep drink, then another, then drained the glass and lit a cigarette.
The night was perfectly warm with no humidity. A moonless sky filled with winking stars stretched its darkness over the land. A soft breeze stirred the air and carried my smoke away. The door opened behind me and Shawn walked into the dark. He pulled a chair near mine and sat. "It's nice here." I said on a smokey exhale. "Back home, it's grey and cold. Here it's warm and fine." I drew on my cigarette and pointed it toward the necking couple. "Look down there, you see those two on the bench?"
He looked through the rail and nodded, but didn't speak. I fell silent and smoked peacefully. He leaned back, folded his hands in his lap, and said something I didn't hear.
"What?"
"I don't want to die." He breathed to the darkness. "I don't want this world to end. I'm so scared."
I refilled my glass, drained half of it, and thought about that. I, like his uncle, refused to tell him that everything would be alright. I didn't know it would be and I hate empty platitudes. The thought of empty platitudes reminded me of my father. Prick that he was, he would have said the world ending was God's will. Thoughts of the old man soured the mellow buzz I was working toward and darkened my thoughts. I knocked off the rest of my drink and set the glass down to leave my hand free to stretch my watchband. I reminded myself that my father wasn't the issue. Shawn just exposed a piece of himself to me and I needed to say something, though there wasn't much I could say.
I took a stab at a response. "I don't have the answers. I know these things always look worse at night than they do in the day. It will seem easier tomorrow. Daylight makes things seem possible; darkness makes them hopeless. As for tonight, I don't know. The bottle they sent is big enough for both of us. You want to get fucked up?"
He croaked and sniffed and whispered a question that showed his good sense. "Does it help?"
I refilled my glass and had a long swallow. I held the remaining amber between him and me. "Ever hear the saying `nothing is there in the dark that isn't there in the light?' The same is true about getting drunk. All your misery is there whether you're drunk or sober. Being drunk is like turning the lights out for a little while. That's why I do it anyway."
"Are you sad?"
"Yes, Shawn." I stubbed a cigarette out on the leg of the chair and lit another. "I'm a sad, miserable human being, so every night, I drink and I chain smoke and I say a little prayer to a god I don't believe in that the morning never comes."
He sat up straight, his eyes flashed in the muted light that filtered through the living room curtains. "That sounds terrible."
I drew on my cigarette and nodded in agreement. "It is terrible but that's not the point. I've given you my answer. Do you want to get fucked up or not? I won't judge you either way. I long ago abandoned the right to judge anyone."
He hesitated and leaned back in his chair. "No, I don't think I will. Maybe I need to be afraid for a while."
"Your choice."
I emptied my glass and refilled it. We sat in silence looking out into the night. The necking couple finished necking and walked toward the hotel. His arm slid around her waist, he whispered in her ear as they walked. She laughed like the tinkling of fine chimes. The sound of her laugh followed the couple as they disappeared around the edge of the building. It faded and became memory before Shawn spoke again.
"Would you tell me why you're sad?" A tentative, small version of his voice asked.
I sipped my whiskey. It was doing its job well. I was approaching the place I wanted to be, the place I searched for every night but found only rarely. "No, I won't. We are still strangers and I don't tell my troubles to people I don't know. I don't tell them to my friends either. A man who burdens his friends, soon will not have any." I said, repeating what was either a half-remembered moral from a fable or a half-remembered paper strip from a fortune cookie. "My demons are my own and I don't share them. Besides, letting you into my personal hell will not make yours any easier to deal with."
"What is `hell?'"
His question surprised me, and then it didn't. He and I hadn't discussed the religion of Solum. I didn't know if there was one. The idea that they wouldn't have the concept of heaven and hell wasn't any more far-fetched than anything else I'd learned that day. I gave him the minimum explanation he needed to understand my words. "It's a fictional place where bad people go when they die. In hell, they spend eternity in fire and torment for the evil they committed when they were alive."
"You think I have a personal hell?"
I stood from my chair, stretched my arms over my head and yawned with the combined exhaustion of a busy and stressful day. I moved to lean my back against the gold railing between him and the view. "Everyone lives in a hell of their own making. Some are deeper and blacker than others, some deal with it better than others, but every adult has dark terrible things locked inside them. I do, your uncle does, you do. Regret, doubt, fear, and hate are part of what makes us human. A young lion kills the old, and he doesn't feel anything. A man kills another man and that act marks him, changes him, becomes part of him."
I looked down to see the cigarette between my fingers had gone out. I flicked it over the railing and lit another. I inhaled the smoke and sighed it from my lungs. "I'm sorry, Shawn. I guess the stress of the day has been too much for me. I drank too fast and the whiskey is climbing on top of me. When I start pontificating, I know it's time for bed. I think I'll have this cigarette and say goodnight."
I finished the smoke and drained my glass again. I picked the bottle up and pointed it at him. "Last chance." I offered. He shook his head. "Fair enough, goodnight then." I gathered myself for the short walk to the bedroom.
I got inside, shut the door, and leaned against it. The bed looked inviting, mental fatigue and bourbon weighed me down. I leaned on the wall, stripped to my new briefs, and tossed the clothes in a technicolor pile. I climbed between the sheets and had almost drifted off when a barely audible tapping called me back. "Yeah, what?" I said too loud and sat up.
The door opened just far enough for Shawn to stick his head into the room. "Can I...uh...can I talk to you for a second?" The fingers of his right hand appeared around the door and gripped the wood hard.
"As long as you don't expect anything coherent." I muttered.
"What's that?"
"Nothing. Just come in. What do you want?"
He crept into the room like he was afraid of waking me and stopped at the foot of my bed. He'd changed his clothes. A form-fitting black, crew-neck t-shirt and snug black shorts, like boxer-briefs, replaced the neon from earlier. "Church...can I...uh...I'd like to...if it's OK...uhmm."
I rubbed my eyes with the heels of my hands. "I'm begging you, Shawn, just spit it out."
"I don't want to be alone." He blurted in an urgent whisper. "Can I sleep here...with you? I'm not asking you for sex. If it makes you uncomfortable, say so, but I...I...I'm so scared and so lonely. I really need...I just need to be near someone. Please...please, I can sleep on top of the sheet."
His request scared me. He sounded so pitiful, I hated to refuse, but I didn't see any options. I found him far too attractive to sleep in the same bed as him without embarrassing myself. My watch found its way between my fingers where I stretched it to the limit. I tried to say `no' without sounding harsh. "I don't think that's a good idea."
"Why," he pleaded, "is it because you find me attractive?"
I looked at him as hard as I could, trying to judge his expression in the dark, but I couldn't see him well enough to do it. It was pointless to deny how I felt, he was right. He was either very perceptive or I was very transparent. Either way, I had no choice but to admit something to him that I'd never admitted to anyone. I'd barely admitted it to myself. "Yes, I think you're attractive. Does that bother you?"
He shook his head hard enough to set his hair swinging and falling over his face. "No," he brushed the hair back, "it's a nice compliment. I...since you did what you did...yesterday...I've been thinking about it. You're a good man. I feel safe with you."
I couldn't argue with that, even though I was a little irritated with him for seeing me as non-threatening to his virtue. I made a quick and probably irresponsible decision, much like the one I'd made the previous night when I agreed to let him drive me and my car to Baltimore. I flipped the covers down on the empty right-hand side of the wide bed. "Come on, don't worry about sleeping on top. Just hop in."
He jumped in, pulled the covers up, and settled immediately. "Thank you." He whispered and sounded completely relaxed.
I laid back down and shut my eyes. Shawn tossed around, then tossed around some more. "Church, can I..."
"Whatever you need." I said without opening my eyes. I expected he wanted a larger share of the covers, and I was willing to agree to anything if it would settle him down. He didn't want more blanket. He lifted my arm, put it around him, then snuggled to my side using my bicep as a pillow. I had a small internal freak-out at the closeness, but didn't say anything.
"Is this OK?" He breathed.
"Sure," I said with all the calm I could force into my voice, "get some sleep." He felt incredible pressed against me, the warmth of his body, the soft sound of his breathing. I'd never been that close to a man before. There was something wonderfully comfortable about him. The closeness didn't spark any animal fantasies, he just felt good.
Steady, rhythmic breathing told me he was asleep. I couldn't believe the trust. He didn't know me from Adam, but after a day's acquaintance, he was sleeping next to me, completely vulnerable. I wondered what I'd done to put him so at ease. I gave up wondering anything; I was too tired and too drunk. My mind shut down. I drifted into oblivion.