Original Fiction for NaNoWriMo 2008 - Cobalt Blue - Chapter 2 (original) (raw)
Title: Cobalt Blue.
Author: Datenshi Blue
Cobalt Blue By Datenshi Blue
CHAPTER 2
Six months earlier.
“Wake up, you damn fool!”
David looked up from the sofa he was lying down on and raised an eyebrow. He did not move, did not even blink. He simply closed his eyes again and made a small dismissive gesture with his right hand.
“Don’t dare to wave me away, you dolt. Wake up already. How long are you going to stay like that, messing around, painting dead stuff like that? How long do you think I can keep selling your work if you don’t start painting again? This shit you call art is nothing but pretty landscapes full of nothing! Wake up already!”
David knew she was right, but he could not bother to give a damn. He was dead inside, anyway, so who cared if his work was as dead as him? He did not, for starters. He was pretty amazed, actually, at the way she was able to sell his stuff. They were pretty paints, sure enough, but empty. As empty as he was. Ah, the beauty of it all. He felt so much like an eighteenth century artist, all depressed and empty and full of ennui.
“Come on, David! It’s been eight years. It’s about damned time you started living again. You’re wasting away your life, you’re making your art pay for your mistakes and you’re throwing away the only thing that would never fail you. What else is there but art? You are a fucking good artist, why are you doing this to yourself?”
She was holding his last canvas with both her hands, looking at it with a disdainful expression in her eyes. Her mouth was a tight line, so tight, actually, that her red-coloured lips were almost white. She was pretty pissed, he could tell. Dark red, almost purple, locks were framing her petite face. She was beautiful, in some “I’m a businesswoman so don’t underestimate me” way that was almost comical. It was almost as if she was always trying to look uglier than she was just so people would take her seriously. But she was damned good at her job. She could sell a turd if she put her mind to it. She had actually sold some turds in his name during the last years.
“Sondra.” David’s voice was weak and bored. He sighed and got up, managing to put his body in a sitting position. The living room was kind of spinning around him. Too much whisky last night. He could not even remember how he got home in the first place. He pressed his fingers to his temples and closed his eyes, feeling sick.
“Oh, my God. A hangover. A damn hangover. You went out to get wasted last night, didn’t you? What are you, a fucking teenager? Goddammit, David, you’re thirty five years old, what do you think you’re doing? Honestly, I thought…”
“Sondra, for fuck’s sake. Shut the hell up, already, dammit.”
That left her speechless. David Cole never swore. She had known him for over ten years and she had never seen him lose his temper or raise his voice. In fact, she was always amazed at the way he seemed to be able to talk without contracting words. David always spoke slowly and clearly, and extremely politely, with a soft voice, and he always seemed to have something interesting to say. He did not waste words. He could keep his silence if he thought there was nothing worth saying. Hearing him talk like that was a shock. Although, on the other hand, it made him almost human.
“Take that fucking canvas, if you will, and leave me the bloody hell alone already. I am not up for this shit today. Come again tomorrow and lecture me all you want. But today I want to be left alone. It is my miserable life, it is my miserable art and they are my miserable memories keeping me prisoner inside an empty world with no feelings at all. If you do not mind, I would like to spend the day alone and drink until I lose my senses again. Yeah, that sounds like a plan. Now take the canvas and sell it, or burn it, or throw it away, I do not give a damn. Just leave already. I want to be alone and spend my time crying, swearing and, generally speaking, wallowing in unhealthy but comforting self-pity.”
“Jesus, David. You lost someone dear to you, all right. We all have gone through that at some point in our lives. But it was eight years ago. It’s about time you get your shit together.”
“Right, right. Tomorrow.”
David lay down on the sofa again, trying to ignore the way the world kept spinning around him, even after closing his eyes. It almost made him give up on his plan of getting drunk again today. He already felt miserable enough to be satisfied. Ah, the irony of it.
“Damn. You’re such a good for nothing man.”
David could hear her leaving, the clicking of her high heels on the floor toward the front door. After she slammed the door behind her – making him wince and moan when the thundering sound worsened an already splitting headache – he dared to open his eyes to look around. She had taken the canvas all right. He snorted. If she managed to sell this one, he would have to give her a medal. It was shit. An empty landscape that lacked originality in every brush. It had nothing to make it special. He had not even tried this time. He did not give a damn about his art anymore. He had lost the fire that had made him special eight years ago. Trying to get his talent back was as useless as trying to… well, whatever. He was not in a state of mind clear enough to think of proper metaphors today. After all, the only sentence that came to mind was that it was as useless as trying to raise a dead from their tomb, and that was so not a proper metaphor. At least not today.
David pressed the back of his hand against his closed eyes swallowing a sob first, mixing it up with a laugh next. Eight years, that was right. Eight long years of despair, loneliness and emptiness. He was so sick of all of it. Especially the angst. He had always despised angst and here he was, angsting like a teenager. He had brought pathos to a new level of mockery.
The day before, he had followed his every year routine. He had got up slightly later than usual. He had gulped down one cup of coffee so strong that it almost brought tears to his eyes. He had nibbled on a French toast that he had been totally unable to bring himself to eat. And, finally, failing in his attempt to push it any further away, he had left home on his yearly visit to the cemetery. On his way there, David had bought a big bouquet of white roses that he had left on top of the gray stone of the tomb.
He knew leaving flowers on top of a gravestone was a no-go. They would rot and stain the stone and he would have to come back some other day and clean the mess. But what else could he do? The white roses were already a habit, one he could not live without now. It was funny how rational he could be for some things, and how irrational for some others. If he did not pay his visit to the gravestone, if he did not leave the white roses there, if he did not talk to himself, aloud, breaking the silence of the peaceful cemetery, he would not be able to sleep at night. Yeah, he had tried. A couple of times during these long and painful eight years he had tried, but he had only managed to succeed on delaying the whole ritual one day. Unable to get a blink of sleep, he would get up the next morning with his mind set on getting the white roses, leaving them on top of the tomb and coming back to the cemetery a week or so later, to clean the gravestone. Who cared about a little harmless ritual if that brought along a dreamless, peaceful night?
There was the second part to his ritual, too. Not so harmless, at least to his body and health, but equally peaceful. After the cemetery visit and a quick lunch at home, he would stroll around the city, wasting time – as if he did anything else than waste time day after day, anyway – and he would go from library to library, scrolling through the books, not buying a single thing, until he arrived at the City Star, a nice-looking hotel with a comfortable bar in which he would simply sit down and gulp down whisky after whisky until a blessed numbness took hold not only of his mind, but also of his whole body.
The barman at City Star was a nice guy he had known for a lifetime – or so it seemed, even if it had only been eight years – who would simply refill his glass once and again. No words spoken. No questions asked. The guy was just the source of some certain, welcomed, and blessed blankness. David had told him enough of his story years ago. The guy, Jack was his name, had listened in silence and had shown some sympathy that had almost made David feel human again, except he could not care enough to give a damn.
David was not entirely sure why things had gone differently last night. Perhaps because it was a weekend, and there was jazz music live at the City Star. Music always managed to break his pace and mess his world. He had drunk faster and harder than ever, and by the time he had thought he should be going home he was so wasted that he could not even get to his feet. He would have giggled like a teenager if the situation had not been so ridiculous and humiliating. He remembered Jack asking if he felt all right, or need any help, and David had been unable to find the words to answer him. He had shaken his head, managing to make an already unstable world spin around him at many miles per hour – very much like it was still spinning now, except it was going way more slowly this time – and had to grab the wooden bar in front of him to prevent himself from glamorously falling on his face.
“You know, I think I am a little drunk,” he had said, smiling apologetically, listening to his own voice as if it was a stranger’s. His tongue had been furry and sticky and he had not been able to manage to form the words correctly. Funny how he himself had been able to notice the way he was speaking, just like some ugly, loser of a drunkard of any serial B movie, but could not do anything to help it. That had brought another girly giggle to his lips. “Oh, my God, Jack, I think I am thoroughly wasted. Care to call me a taxi?” Except it had sounded more like “Oh, m’God, Jaaaaaaack, I ding am dorely waste. Gare t’gall m’a taxi?” It was a miracle that Jack had understood even one of the words he said, but the man was a barman - had been a barman for half his life - so perhaps decoding drunkard’s words came with the job.
David was sure that Jack had told him something along the lines of getting on with his life and stop mourning already, but he could not be sure. He hoped it was just his imagination because one of the things he most dearly respected about that man was that he never seemed to judge David, never had given him any unwelcomed advice. But the whole night was blurry. There was only the distinct feeling of having some good old jazz music surrounding him to the point he thought it would drive him crazy. David used to love jazz music, but he was not so big on it anymore. Coincidentally, he had started hating it eight years ago.
Music probably had a lot to do with his abusing alcohol last night. It would have been quite smarter to up and leave when he saw there was someone playing piano live. But heart and brains are not usually of the same mind, and it had been such a long time since he had listened to someone playing piano live that he could not force himself to leave. Instead, he did force himself to gulp down glass after glass at light speed, while telling himself all the while that that one was the last piece, and he would be leaving right after it was over.
The thing is that at some point the music had stopped, but he had kept drinking. He did not know for how long, since by the time the pianist had finished his shift he had already drunk himself nearly to unconsciousness. At the very least, he had drunk himself to oblivion. And it felt so right that he had kept it on.
And that was the reason why he could not remember how the hell he had gone back home. He had woken up in his bed, smelling like alcohol and tobacco, his shoes neatly placed at the foot of the bed. There was a glass of water on the bedside table and the mere thought of taking a sip from it had made him retch. He had actually run to the bathroom – if you could call that clumsy stomping “running” – to vomit everything, back to his first meal, by the looks of it. To David, it seemed that he was actually throwing up stuff he had eaten even in previous lives. Hardly had he ever felt so sick in his entire life.
And now his head was killing him. He had a hell of a headache. It actually was the mother of all headaches, torturing him ever since he had opened his eyes in the morning. After throwing up for what seemed like hours and a hot repairing shower, he had thrown himself on to the sofa and had been lying there all day, vegetating. Until Sondra came, bringing all her nagging along.
David had to admit that he was a little surprised. He had taken for granted that she would not accept that last canvas, would throw it to his face or break it on top of his head. The painting was crap of the worst kind, so she deserved, at the very least, the satisfaction of destroying the thing. She had taken it, nevertheless, so David was pretty sure she would manage to sell it. It was impressive; David could not fathom how she did it.
It had not been nice of him to make her leave like that, shouting and cursing and all. But David really felt like shit and could not bring himself to face her. Not today. Perhaps not ever.
It was on days like these that David felt like hiding under his bed’s covers and not ever coming out. In fact, the idea of suicide – old and romantic suicide, so eighteenth century like, too – had passed his mind a couple of times. But really, it was not just that he did not have the courage to go through with it. It was also that there would be someone who would be terribly disappointed on him. It did not matter that that certain someone was already dead. David believed in karma, even if he swore that he did not believe in anything anymore, and he was also a little superstitious. What if he took his own life and could not be reunited – ever – with the one he loved? It made no sense, and he did not know what to believe. But just in case, he thought he had better respect his own life. At least for the time being.
Perhaps, as some corny dialogue from some old corny movie went, one day he would be able to wake up not having to remind himself that he had to breathe all day.
In any case, David felt that he had arrived at some kind of crossroad. Or a dead-end street. It made no difference to him. He needed to make a decision. Perhaps he should retire, stop painting altogether and find some job, one a little less fulfilling – as if painting was fulfilling at all anymore - but something that would give him a little of stability. Since art did not matter anymore, did not change anything anymore, this was another thing that made no difference to him. So yes, perhaps he should go find some job, whatever, something that would grant him an income and that would keep him busy every day. Too busy to be thinking so much as he did these days.
But he would reflect about that again tomorrow. Today he had an ugly headache that was getting the whole of his attention, and not only that, he had to decide whether he went back to the City Star to get drunk again - not that he had managed to get rid of all the alcohol he had consumed the day before yet – or he wandered around, or he went back to the cemetery or he simply stayed at home, vegetating like some old ruin on his sofa. And, honestly, with that awful splitting headache, that seemed like a good option, at least for now.
And, hey, there had been an improvement. The world was not spinning around him anymore. Granted, it would start again if he moved even an inch, but for now, everything was back to a very welcomed motionless calmness. Ah, the beauty of a good hangover. Just for the chance to forget about everything for a couple of hours you had a hell of a lot to suffer in return. But that was the thing about life. Nothing came for free. For everything you did, for everything you got, there was a price to pay. And sometimes it was such a high price – no fair exchange in existential matters - that you ended up with a mortgage over your own life. It was not exactly funny. Not funny at all. And yet, David had to laugh again. An awful sound breaking the silence, all full of bitterness and misery.
David was laughing, but he felt like crying.