Interlude #2
(It’s a Little Like Life Isn’t it.)
When Ryan woke it was to a strange room he never remembered entering. It was a simply furnished box no more than twenty feet square, but the furnishings were expensive, and the room was clean. His fingertips slid over the sheets on which he lay with no resistance, and though Ryan had never owned anything made of silk he recognised it when he saw it. The pillow was made of something that had no weight. It was like resting his head on mist, and the bed itself was made of wood so dark it first appeared to be carved from black obsidian.
Ryan was still dressed in the clothes of the previous night. On his shirt was a smear of blood where he had wiped his fist. He glanced at his knuckles and saw they were bruised and cut but no longer bleeding. He felt the pain of a body that had performed vigorous and unaccustomed exercise, he had also felt the pain of being beaten, and what he felt was undeniably the former. It was one of those good pains that reminded him he was alive and alive he was. Far more alive than he had been in a long, long time.
He swung his feet from off the bed and stood. He then stretched and felt some of his joints pop under the strain. The previous night had been hard on him but far harder on the man he was asked to confront. The job had been a simple collection from someone who would not have wanted he wanted to collect. His new benefactor had known that the man couldn’t pay and had told Ryan of the fact.
“I trust you are not averse to violence,” JC said, smiling. From this Ryan knew all he needed to know and was glad of the opportunity. Nothing more was said as they drove. Ryan watched the lights through the tinted windows but didn’t pay attention to which direction the car took. He didn’t care. He had walked out of the home he had tried to build and had no intention of going back regardless of where this vehicle took him.
The journey ended in a district where the homes were far above anything he could ever afford. They had passed through a gate to get to it, and on the gate was a guard that waved them through without even checking the car’s occupants. It was then that Ryan realised JC was no ordinary man, and either he had found someone he should stay close to, or run from. His instincts told him to run, but his need for self-destruction kept his feet still. The car moved deeper into the community, slowed, and then stopped outside a large building that looked like it had been plucked from a sunny hillside in Spain. It appeared deeply incongruent against the dark skies and flat landscape but oozed wealth.
“I would like you to knock on the door and ask the person who answers for three-and-a-half. The person will refuse or feign confusion. When they do I want you to assault them. Do you understand Ryan?”
“Not really, but it doesn’t matter,” Ryan replied. “I just say ‘three-and-a-half’?”
“Yes. Do you want to know what that means?”
“No.”
“Good. Please hurt the person so badly that they require medical assistance. Do you have any questions or concerns?”
“No.”
“We shall wait.”
Ryan climbed from the car into the cool night air. It seemed colder than it had earlier. He glanced along the street. The homes were placed well apart, and there was little chance of anyone seeing him. He approached the gate to the property and saw a small keypad, with a larger button over the numbers. He ignored it and climbed over the gate instead.
He assumed he was on camera, a home as expensive as this one would certainly have a CCTV system, but he could not bring himself to care. They already had a record of his face, but they also had a record of the car he had arrived in.
JC didn’t care, and neither did Ryan. He wasn’t putting any faith in the old man.
Let’s burn it all down, he thought.
He approached the door and began to pound on it. Inside he heard people conversing in hushed, frightened tones. He knew that they knew what was going to transpire. When the door opened the face that greeted Ryan was resigned, and Ryan knew he had nothing to worry about.
There was nothing quite like inflicting pain to make you forget your woes. You could say that a pain shared is a pain halved. Ryan had smiled as the blood flew; he should have it printed on a t-shirt.
The remainder of the night was now a blur. He remembered beating someone, he could not recall a face, and he remembered someone screaming. Then he had returned to the car, and they had driven away. It had not been a getaway. The car eased into the road even as the screams cut through the night.
JC had offered Ryan a drink, and he accepted.
The next moment he woke to silk sheets in a room he had never seen before. The door to the room opened easily, swinging on well-oiled hinges into a hallway that was the width of a room. Ryan looked to his right and saw a wall, and then to his left, where he saw an intersecting corridor.
He turned and made for it.
As he arrived at the intersection he heard a voice, so he followed the sound. To his right large windows displayed a garden with neatly trimmed lawns and shaped foliage. To his left was a red wall broken with paintings of men from another age. They looked like any old painting he had seen in movies or on TV, but then he noticed that the men all looked similar.
The high ceiling above him made way for an even higher ceiling made of metal and glass.
“Ryan, how are you? I hope you slept well?”
JC sat behind a large black-marble desk the same size as a pool table. It was the first time Ryan had seen the man properly. His journey the previous night had been shrouded in the shadow of the chemicals running through his veins, but Ryan knew who he was instantly.
It was his bearing that imbued Ryan with such certainty. Though he was old and frail he had the bearing of a man who could make others whimper on a whim. He sat with the casual purpose of an internationally renowned surgeon consulting with the kind of client who could afford such a talent. He leaned back in his chair and placed one hand on the desk, his other held a telephone handset. His fingers were long, with nails like a woman’s. Near his hand was a small keyboard, flanking it was two plants and a telephone. JC replaced the receiver and though Ryan saw neither a single wire nor a single sheet of paper, it was obvious he had stepped into someone’s office.
“I slept well, thank you. I don’t remember how I got here though,” Ryan said. He examined the keyboard. It looked like a typewriter, but Ryan thought it was one of those mini-computers he had seen on TV.
“You were rather out of it.” JC tapped a few keys on the keyboard and then closed the computer. He smiled knowingly. “If I did not know better, I would have thought you under the influence of some mind-altering substance.”
He pointed over to a seat. Ryan walked over and took it. Around him, the room was bathed in sunlight, but Ryan could not see clearly through the glass to the outside world. Inside the conservatory were rows of raised planters. They were large enough to use as a burial plot for a medium-sized elephant, and some of the plants were tall enough to block his view. It made the room’s size difficult to calculate, but Ryan would not be surprised if it were the size of a football field. The air smelt of pine and lavender, and Ryan could easily understand why the man had made this his office.
“It is lovely here isn’t it,” JC said, his eyes not leaving Ryan’s face. He watched as the young man’s gaze moved over the high ceiling and manicured plants. JC stayed silent and allowed the scene to have the desired effect.
“It is,” Ryan said finally, “you’re a lucky man.”
“Lucky?” JC raised his eyebrows in good-natured incredulity. “None of it, Ryan. What you see is what I have earned, nothing less.”
It was Ryan’s turn to look incredulous.
“If it was just a case of hard work, we’d all live as kings.”
“Oh, Ryan, don’t you believe that faff. ’Luck’ is for those who don’t securely grasp the horns of fate. ‘Failure’ is for those who aren’t willing to make the sacrifices they need to make.”
“Everything that happened to me was my fault then?” Ryan responded quietly. In another place his tone would have been menacing, but not here, not now. JC sat silently for a moment. His face showed none of the fear Ryan would have normally expected. His eyes closed and his brow furrowed.
“Ryan, the truth is that you are a man born out of his own time. You know what you want and what you must do to acquire it, but you are held fast by lesser men with greater power.”
“My fault then.”
JC sighed. It was the drawn-out breath of a man teaching a particularly stubborn child.
“If that is what you believe, then my point is summarily proven.” JC watched the confusion flicker across the young man’s face, and he let out another sigh. “There is always a stronger force, Ryan. The strongest swimmer cannot swim against the tide indefinitely. No matter your strength there is always something too heavy. You cannot, by force of will alone fight against the powers that be. Not even I could.”
“Then how…”
“You become stronger and failing that you ally yourself to a larger force still. Much as you have allied yourself to me.”
Ryan didn’t immediately respond. His face showed nothing of what was whirring within his mind, and JC did nothing to reveal what was within his own. It was a moment of stalemate, a poker-face standoff with no pot to win.
“So” Ryan began slowly. “Who have you allied yourself to?”
Just as slowly JC began to smile.
“And that is exactly the question I would expect from someone seeking a ladder to climb.”
JC called for his butler, a tall thin man who looked even older than his employer, and a few minutes later he produced a bottle of 50-year-old rum found its way in front of Ryan. JC poured his drink, allowing Ryan to let his eye roam over the foliage. There were flowers there he couldn’t name, petals of strange shapes that looked nothing like anything he had ever seen before. The more he looked, the more he saw that confounded him. Ryan was not an educated man. He never completed high school and the idea of further education would have made him laugh. Education wasn’t for people like Ryan, it was for people starting a journey through the system, not people rejected by it.
“If I may ask Ryan,” JC looked through the fluid in the heavy tumbler as the light that filtered through the conservatory glass, “how did you feel about your assignment last night?”
“There’s nothing to…”
“No Ryan, please. How did you feel about it; really?”
Ryan looked at the man and watched him as he appeared to investigate the rum without much concern for Ryan’s answer, but Ryan knew differently. It was clear by the man’s intonation that the question was important. Something weighed on Ryan’s answer, so Ryan thought before delivering it.
“At first it was just about making a bit of money.” Ryan investigated his glass. The sides of it were cut into tiny triangles, echoing the shape of the glass itself. It was beautiful. “When he started to … beg… honestly, it made me angrier than expected.” He looked from the glass to JC, who he saw was looking back at him. “You shouldn’t make deals you can’t …” He struggled for the appropriate word.
“Complete?” JC offered. “Fulfil?”
“Whatever…” Ryan moved his attention back to his glass. He drained it and reached for the bottle. “No one keeps their word anymore, and if Dad taught me anything it was the importance of keeping your word.”
“Did you love your father?”
“I hated him. Loved him. Mourned him when he was still alive and was glad when he died.”
JC rose from his chair and took the bottle from Ryan. He poured for Ryan, then himself.
“That sounds rather a tumultuous relationship.”
Ryan laughed. The sound rose at the end, sounding as if it might break into a sob if prolonged. He pressed the glass to his lips and drained it once more.
“This bottle,” JC shook it, looking momentarily dismayed there was so little left, “cost me thirty-five thousand. I have bottles that could fetch a hundred thousand at auction. Not that I would ever sell. Alcohol is made for drinking, after all.” JC filled Ryan’s glass from the half-empty bottle. “This would make your tab, not that you have one, about eight thousand so far tonight.”
Ryan looked at the glass in his hand and placed its rim against his lips. He sipped slowly, savouring the taste for the first time. He rolled the rum around his mouth. The taste reminded him of something sweet that had been barbecued.
“Half a bottle is gone and you’re only now tasting it,” JC said. “It’s a little like life isn’t it.”
It is a little like life. Ryan thought. It’s searching in all the wrong places, for all the wrong things. He looked through the glass he held. The facets of the tumbler reflected light through the amber fluid, and Ryan made out the foliage beyond it as if through a fairground mirror. He didn’t see JC watching him. The old man leaned against his marble desk, the drink in his hand see-sawing up to his lips as he examined the young man’s reaction.
For a time neither spoke. They sipped at the expensive rum and listened to the plants around them grow. Ryan forgot where he was as his mind wandered through a life that was at once eventful and ultimately pointless. Decisions made by the whims of the moment reverberated through his life in ever more pointless moments of pain. Some were inflicted on him, others he inflicted on those around him, but all led nowhere.
“How did you feel concerning your assignment, Ryan? What were your plans for the proceeds you earned?” JC’s tone was gentle, and the words carefully chosen, well placed to needle Ryan in just the right places.
Ryan didn’t answer, he didn’t appear to hear JC’s words. He sipped at the drink that would cost him more than a month’s wages and thought of just how little he had achieved. Even with what he had earned the night before he couldn’t even cover his tab if JC called it in. He sipped more of the drink, smelling fruit and tasting charcoal.
“So, what if I wanted to earn more?” Ryan said. He hadn’t intended to speak aloud, and his words had been quietly spoken, but age had done nothing to dim JC’s senses.
“We do have an opportunity,” JC said, but Ryan missed the word ‘we.’ The old man paused a moment, considering his words before he continued. “Your previous work was in transportation was it not?”
Ryan nodded.
“So, you can drive a heavy goods vehicle?”
Again, Ryan nodded.
“Excellent. Tonight, I will have a new job for you.”
“One that pays?” Ryan asked.
“Not only that my boy,” JC smiled, “but if done correctly, one that will make you indispensable to those I serve.”
“So, you do serve someone?”
“We all serve.” He smiled a smile that hinted at secrets. “But not all of us know that we serve.” JC sat in his chair behind the huge desk and picked up the phone. “You need to wash up, you smell rather bad, and I shall find you something less offensive smelling to wear. Would that be agreeable?”
Ryan nodded. He should have felt offended. He should have bristled at the comment, but he recognised that JC just spoke what he thought was true, and it was certainly true that Ryan needed clean clothes.
JC waved Ryan out, and Ryan obliged the old man without a word.
Finding his way back to his room wasn’t difficult. As he arrived at the door he wondered if everything was nothing more than an allegory. As he showed in the small on-suite he thought the same about the water running over him. Symbols and signs, signs, and symbols. We all serve, he thought, but not all of us know that we serve.