Forest of Rope

Chapter 24

Why am I still alive?

It was the bee in his bonnet, the thorn in his side.

As he lay upside down, hanging drowsily across the side of the unmade bed, Riley Steward brooded on his mortality. He felt stung and paralysed by his hangover, lost in a transcendental haze of self-absorption. Outside his little bubble of concentration, the fizzle of rushing water and the droning hum of the bathroom extractor fan evaporated distortedly out of earshot. He no longer felt present in the room. Everything seemed to be swimming away with a rush of blood to the head, blurring his vision.

The only thing that remained in his line of sight was a single, trespassing fruit fly which scuttled prodigiously up and down the same stretch of wallpaper.

He traced its movements unconsciously. The insect ran itself in circles at random over and over again, directionless and indecisive. Bewitched by its brainless fluidity of movement, Riley found the energy to reach out his hand and crush the thing dead with a swift strike of his fist.

Almost immediately he regretted it. Riley examined the tiny pulp which stuck to his palm and wiped some of it on the underside of the bed, feeling a tangled repentance for what he had done. At one extreme, he felt cruel for acting so maliciously against something that had done him no harm. And at the other, he rationalised that he’d acted pre-emptively out of anticipation that the fruit fly would have bothered him later.

This was a relatively new feeling for Riley. After all, he’d spent most of his life sitting on the fence and letting life pass him by. When he really thought about it, that was probably why he’d settled for Alexis in the first place. But now, Riley saw things differently. All of a sudden he was acting on impulse, throwing dice with his future and wellbeing, deserting family and friends without a second glance, picking fights and avoiding reality like the plague.

Something had changed inside of him, that’s what he’d told June at the bar the previous night.

‘Are you awake? I can’t tell.’

The bubble burst. Riley flipped over to greet who he assumed to be his wife, caressing herself inquisitively in a brightly coloured, short-cut kimono with her hair tied up delicately in a bun. He rubbed his eyes in disbelief, almost certain that he was still daydreaming.

‘I thought you were in the shower,’ he yawned, scratching his head and stretching.

‘Yeah like an hour ago,’ she said, rolling her highlighted eyes.

‘So, what are you doing dressed like that?’

Alexis threw her manicured hands down at the sides of her outfit stubbornly.

Riley noticed it stretched a little tight over her wide hips.

‘What you don’t like it?’

‘Um, sure,’ he chuckled, which did little to sway her. She pounced on him retributively, pinning him down and straddling him. Riley smiled, cradling her warmth as she kissed him, cunningly wiping the remainder of fruit fly pulp on the headboard Alexis pressed him up against.

                                                            *

Home had never felt so far behind.

According to Riley’s phone, it was yesterday in San Francisco when he and Alexis left the hotel room to explore the mysteries of Tokyo.

They started arm in arm down the tightly compressed streets, roaming cluelessly under a beating golden sun. The metropolis buzzed and rushed and pushed and shoved around them, a continuous rush hour. The majority of the day was spent getting lost, wandering aimlessly from district to district.  They clung to each other for security, steering themselves through shops, markets and arcades like lost children. Down at their waists, the locals sifted by in their thousands, passing straight through them as if they were ghosts.

Alexis took it upon herself to get a closer look at anything that peaked her interest. She dragged Riley by the hand into a series of peculiar stores, trying on clothes, testing out devices and tasting free samples. It was exhausting to keep up with her.

‘Could we take a break maybe?’ Riley later pleaded for mercy. ‘I don’t know how much longer I can stand myself upright.’

Alexis compromised, leading them through a busy market to get to a sushi bar. She left him outside looking bewildered at the rows upon rows of stalls while she went inside to procure something edible. Riley found a seat and used the opportunity to recapture his breath.

A tickle in his throat made him stir uneasily while he waited. The strange smells and vapours that wafted languidly around the market did not seem to agree with him. He pinched at the collar of his jacket, loosening the tension to give him more room to breathe. It didn’t help. The more air he took in the worse it got. He soon began to splutter and wheeze, retching uncontrollably.

Eyes clouding gray with tears, Riley dashed out of his seat, seeking shelter from the scented fumes. With one hand on his burning throat and the other fending away the dense crowds, he steered himself to a tiny alleyway and excreted a manifestation of blood and undigested noodles into a gutter.