Main Character Vibes

With the waning of youth, comes a desire for companionship

Five days earlier

And so, the gray crescent of the moon lingered on in the early hours of the morning sky; like a streetlamp that someone forgot to switch off before dawn had arrived. Hovering over the city, it was stealing from the stoic morning light of late October. Despite that, the Saturday sunrise beamed through the large windowpanes of his above-store apartment and swayed over Wayne's sleeping face.

Wayne had always relied on his biological clock for waking up, and it never failed him. Throughout his arduous forty-year career as a successful investment banker, his body had conditioned the instinct for waking up at 5:00 am on the dot. Be it weekdays or weekends, sunshine or overcast, he no longer needed the services of any digital roosters to wake him up.

Wayne lived in a one-bedroom apartment in a shophouse building that he owned in its entirety; furnished like the poetry of his good taste. He had invested in this property during the late 80s and since then it had grown exponentially in value. It was prime real estate located in the heart of downtown Toronto – a five-minute walk from the haughty tower of the Toronto Stock Exchange. Despite its greyness, the property was picturesque, a gothic-era-inspired building with a rubble-coursed stonework veneer, pointed arches, lancet windows and tracery, spires with crockets.

The city had recently granted the property landmark status, which further propelled its value to even greater heights. Wealth and fortune seemed to follow Wayne wherever he went. It was as if he was blessed by a financial system of which he was a prodigal son. He was so well-off that if he ever was to get robbed, it wouldn't be a robbery, it would be a heist. During the peak of his career in high finance, he had been planning to live out his dream retirement of owning and operating a landmark art gallery in the city. Which he was now fruitfully doing.

Wayne was an exceptionally handsome and ruggedly fit silver fox in his early sixties; somehow visibly exempt from the touch of time, by sheer will, or mere luck, the old man's winter was always spring. He was an eloquent retiree with a voluminous head of salt and pepper hair. More salt than pepper. His eyes always carried an ambitious glint of pragmatism. Through them, you could infer that he was privy to rather large ideas.

Before his retirement, Wayne was a man who dedicated most of his waking hours to his career. His now ex-wife and his only daughter often complained about his absence at home. Even when they would summer on the plush golden coasts of the French Riviera. But servicing the movers and shakers of the material world demanded his utmost time and attention.

It was tremendous pressure on his shoulders to be an agent of prosperity. An agent who was responsible for judiciously allocating preposterous sums of capital and resources. But he found happiness in it. To him, happiness was merely a side effect. Much like how summer was only appreciated to the degree that winter was abysmal – happiness lay in the actual pursuit of it.

He was a man whose pedigree and heritage were an unbroken continuum. A man from another time. A time when giants roamed the earth. Which aptly gained him the reputation of being "the giant slayer" during his illustrious career of advising corporations and governments on multibillion-dollar mergers and acquisitions. But to him, it was merely the necessary eventuality of his tightly held belief that a man was only as capable as his courage to execute his imagination. In the investment banking world, Wayne was as close to the fountainhead of wealth creation as it possibly gets. It was a profession that olden times had dubbed its agents to be makers of kings and purveyors of empires. But in modern times that simply translated to a life of great affluence and some political influence...and his life bore the fruits of such a primordial profession.

His only daughter was the product of Canada's finest private schools. She was now married and living her dream in Paris as a successful fashion designer. His wife had left him shortly thereafter. She was living her dream as an affluent divorcee who trotted the globe with nameless romantic partners who kept her company at night. Her absence left no dent on Wayne.

But with the waning of youth, comes a desire for companionship. After his daughter had left for Paris, he was haunted by the undue spaciousness of his lofty estate. It was too much of an empty nest for just one man. So, he sold it and embraced downsizing to his above-store apartment if it meant living in the beating heart of downtown Toronto. The city lived in Wayne as much as Wayne lived in the city. Here, he was tethered to the life source of Toronto's commercial vitality and lived right above his beloved art gallery.

Although he was a man of industry, Wayne had a philosophical temperament about him. Which, during his career, had always served him whenever he was enticing new clients. Moreover, he had a penchant for the finer things in life. He relished in fine arts, high literature, and exquisite culture. This is why upon retirement he was all too eager to trade the world of high finance for the world of fine arts.

Wayne's love for art was of utmost devoutness, almost to the point of religious idolatry. He was a man who sanctified the arts. He believed that all holy artifacts of the church were, in essence, an artistic expression of some distant divine ideal. Despite his belief that all hallows were artistic in nature, he had the wisdom to know that not all art should be hallowed.

As the 5:00 am sun began peeking from behind the haughty towers of downtown Toronto, Wayne leaped out of bed energetically and began his morning stretching routine. After loosening his sleepily tight muscles, he went into the bathroom to groom himself meticulously. Not that his work demanded it, after all, he was retired. But old habits die hard. And some of them even achieve immortality.

After briskly slipping into his training gear, he programmed his digital wristwatch to monitor his vitals before heading out of the apartment. The man was data-driven. Every day at 6:00 am he would go for a morning jog to greet the day at High Park – Toronto's version of Central Park. However, with the infirmity of age, his morning jog was slowly transforming into a morning walk; slow and easy exactly like how molasses moves.

His coiffured silver head shone under the clear blue sky of the warm October Saturday. His sprightly clean-shaven face glistened with sweat as his face caught the sun at the most complimentary angle and held it there.

Wayne derived tremendous inspiration from jogging amongst the proud downtown towers; the majestic structures that pierced the heavens like the towers of ancient Babylon. At the heart of every major city in the world, such towers were erected as monuments of the civilized world. An ode to high finance. Symbols of mankind's achievements. And just like them, Wayne, himself, felt like a manifestation of those realizations. Realizations that stood the test of time in as much as they partook in the creation of its history. Even in retirement, that fact of his life filled him with pride and vigor every morning during his jog.

High Park was a five-minute jog from Wayne's place. It was where, in the shining hours of early golden light, he had first encountered Elias...