Lunatics

Lunatics · Chap 016 · Far from paradise

16 · Far from paradise

HE OPENED his eyes and had a hard time to recognize where he was. He knew he was terribly hungry and his mouth tasted awful. His breath was fowl. He tried to clean his lips with his right hand but his elbow was painful. Maybe I broke this shit. His back was hurtful too. What the fuck… He could feel a slight smell of lavender under the strong stench of vomit.

The intelliglass let the light in without hurting his eyes. There was a picture on the wall he had seen before. Many times. Ibin has one of those. It was a poster with a Vermeer, one of his favourites. Under the painting, a bookcase with History volumes bound in percalux. An old green armchair sat beside a high brown lampshade.

The young man turned his head slowly until he saw Dante’s eyes looking at him.

As a frightened cat, Chico Manoel jumped off the couch, his heart beating fast. The sounds of the world went off while the thump-thump of his own heart was the only thing he could clearly hear.

Instantaneously, he remembered everything from the previous night. He looked for a clock and found a small communicator on the wall beside the entrance door. It was off. He tried to turn it on with voice commands, but the machine did not start. With a light pressure with his middle finger, he opened the manual controls and turned the machine on. It was 8:15AM.

He had to talk to Ibrahim. There were only fifteen minutes left before his friend would leave home to work. He found the button to liberate the keyboard and dialled Ibrahim’s home number.

The answering reel made him furious. He left a rough message.

“Where are you, Ibin? What made you jump out of bed so early today? Especially today… I’m in trouble and I need you to give me back my jacket…” He paused, not knowing what else to say. “I’ll contact you soon. Don’t call my personal comm nor my house’s. It ain’t safe. I’m serious, this is a case of life or death…” Another pause. This is so lame! “Yeah! I mean it!”

He cut the call off and went to the bathroom, mad at himself for not being able to remember his friend’s personal number. I should’ve learned it by heart long ago.

He found a medikit and prepared a bath. Nothing would answer his voice commands. He took all his clothes off, taking extra care on his right arm, where the crust of blood had pasted with the fibers of his shirt. The little he had eaten the day before provoked a disaster that left the air momentarily non breathable.

While bathing, he redrew the plans of escape. He used the towel he found there to dry himself and smiled to his own reflection in the mirror, as usual. Not bad. Not bad at all.

He bandaged his right elbow. It would work until he could have proper medical care later. His clothes were ruined.

He entered the minimally decorated bedroom: a double bed, a side cabinet with a black lampshade, a wooden chair under the curtained window, and a bookcase filled with art books. A huge wardrobe covered one of the walls. Behind one of the doors, piles of porn magazines with naked men—solo and having sex—and tons of boxes that Chico Manoel guessed to be porn reels. The other door hid what he wanted: clothes—very good ones. Although the dead man was shorter and a bit fatter, Chico Manoel did not have to look long to find something that would fit his size and shape.

From the cabinet, he took a beautiful pair of shades and put it into one of the pockets of a trenchcoat he found behind the third door. He had no need or curiosity to open any of the other two compartments.

In the kitchen, separate from the living by a wall, both refrigerator and freezer had been furnished with A1 articles. He prepared his first meal with pleasure. He could see Dante’s body from where he sat.

He ate everything while avoiding looking at the dead and trying to understand the poster on the wall. It was a map of Brasilia with its federal units—Panama, Amazone, Neosaara, Andinos, Agreste, Piratininga, and Pampas—and the territories—Fernando de Noronha, Abrolhos, Malvinas, and the Antarctic base—where the History professor had fixed colour pins. There were pins over important cities as well as small towns. The old goat was planning to travel? To all these places? With Dante dead, it would become a mystery for whoever might have time to scavenger his hidden secrets.

He finished his meal and thought it would be useless to put everything uneaten back to the fridge. He left the used plates and cutlery without washing them. Everything there would rot, as would Dante’s cadaver. It was his contribution to the decadence of the building and to the happiness of the rats and carnivore insects.

Back in the bathroom, he took his IDCard from his ruined clothes and put on his shoes. Took another look in the mirror and smiled again.

From Dante’s pockets he fetched the dead man’s IDCard.

You won’t need it anymore, old goat. It will be useful for me.

He read the name Belizarius Dante printed on the card. The old man had been born more than eighty years back in Panama.

Chico Manoel was about to leave the apartment when he noticed the book under the body of the dead man. He felt the goosebumps after reading the title of the pocket paperback. Human Presence in Mars: The Truth About the Colonization of the Red Planet. He scratched the nape of his own neck.

What a bloody coincidence!

He took the book and squeezed it in a big front pocket of the trenchcoat. Back in the kitchen, he took a pack with salty crackers and left by the back door, leaving it open. He would rather use the stairs than bumping into one of Dante’s few neighbours.

While descending through the staircase he thought of something that made him shiver. Dante’s paradise will soon be a sample of the fucking hell.