U and I, or Before The Bomb Went Off
The bomb had gone off before I could say anything else. A booming brouhaha shook the building and rains of limbs and ashes fell down from the anthracite sky above. I walked out alive. The rest did not.
I walked to a stream nearby, its tranquility jumbled with the chaotic post-apocalyptic mess that resonated in the distance. I took off my boots and plunged my swollen feet into the ice-cold water. My feet had the same hue as him now, seconds before the bomb exploded. Red with fury — fury and sorrow. In the distance, flashing red and blue lights took control of the ashy atmosphere. It could have been fireworks — the explosion, the colours. It could have been a feast of some kind — but it wasn’t.
As my feet reduced in size, the sirens and the blinking lights grew louder. I turned around and saw something in the distance that intrigued me. His yellow monochrome shirt fluttered in the distance. Along the short shore of the stream a family passed by — I heard the voice of a child “what do you think happened?”. I wish I could have explained, but I never got the chance to do so.
I had helped U a long-time ago. Saved his life, actually. We had met years back, a couple of months after my college graduation. I was working in a bar then, in a camp-site, in the middle of nowhere. U happened to be a regular. Every year, during the two last weeks of July, U entered the camp with dignity and grace. Or this at least I was told. He drove a sports car — whose brand was impossible to decipher. Some rare Italian nonpareil.
I remember it too vividly. The day I saw U for the very first time. The chirping cicadas and the scorching summer heat embraced each other as I tried my best to stop the salty sweat from penetrating into a customer’s beer. The motor roared from miles away — I glared behind me, almost dropping one of the multiple pints I held on the plastic tray. Here he was, left hand on the wheel, right hand around the neck of the woman sitting on the passenger seat. She wore large blacked-out shades — she reminded me of someone, but the inability of accessing her eyes made it difficult to remember.
As the car came to a stop, perfectly parked between two yellow Renault Kangoo vans, the mysterious couple stepped out onto the paved path of dust at the entrance of the campsite. U, whose name at the time I didn’t know, wore a perfect tan and a green polo shirt, with the collar brought up. It suited him — much more than it would suit me, that’s for sure. Light-beige linen pants and navy blue espadrilles covered the bottom half of his body. This man, was a heartthrob. At least, that’s what I thought of U when I first saw him.
The woman with him wore a purple dress, high-heels and an aura of pride; of pride and prejudice. A narrow grin formed as she stepped out of the car. I couldn’t see her eyes, but I was almost sure that she adopted a judgemental gaze — looking down at us all, campers and camp-workers. A group of bikers entered the camp, criss-crossing the pathway of my gaze, blocking U from my sight; soon after, they disappeared into the reception room.
I wouldn’t see U, or the girl with him until the hottest night of the year. I remember the date perfectly: July 29th. I remember it because an old lady from the campsite died that day. She had a heatstroke, the ambulance took two hours to come because of how far the nearest city was. Her body laid dead in the middle of the camp for these hours — for two whole hours. It was the first time I had seen a dead body. Hard to forget.
U entered the bar at around 9pm, a pink buttoned down with crocodiles and cargo shorts fitted him to perfection. I was behind the bar, serving pints of beer on the chain — a programmed cyber-organism, a factory robot. Every beer was the same, enough foam to please the Brits and to not bother the Dutch.
I saw him from the corner of my eye. He approached the wooden, foul-smelling bar counter, followed by the woman with the blacked-out shades. That’s how I had decided to call her — even though tonight she did not wear any. I caught a glimpse of her eyes, pupils the colour of winter moss newly washed with frost. On her right eye: a brown mark tainted the white pool around which her pupil bathed. She was no longer the woman with sunglasses. She was the woman with the birthmark on her eye.
“Two glasses of red, please”. His raspy voice trembled with virility.
I could not help but pause and take a deep look into his eyes. They were filled with a pale blue nonchalance. I nodded, grabbed the already opened bottle and filled the glasses. He replied with a thankful nod and a handful of coins. I stared at them with admiration as they found a seat in the corner of the dimmed-out bar. The sound of jubilant jazz jams and beaten billiard balls filling the room began to fade out as my focus narrowed on the mysterious couple. In a hypnotic trance, I walked to their table. I was bounded by an intangible rope dragging me towards them. The birthmark on her eye shifted as they both turned their attention towards me.
Before I could say anything — as if he knew the inner workings of my mind, U handed me a card. Its rugged texture was tattooed with a single letter: U. The left corner of the card had the drawing of a flower. A flower with five petals. I chuckled nervously, unable to mutter anything other than a thank you. Again, I was answered with a firm nod and a broken smile from the both of them. I walked away with the card in hand, leaving U and the woman with the birthmark behind me.
…
There was a storm that night.
I woke up in a panic from the same, incessant, recurring dream.
I am alone in a dusty town, there is nothing in sight, nothing to be heard and I have nowhere to go. Everything is dark, the sky an omnipresent sheet of darkness. It consumes everything around me, getting closer. The silence rushes out from the opaque screen, chilling every pore in my body. The sky falls onto me. I gasp for breath, I suffocate, I drown — I push through, my head exiting back into the breathable world, but I am dragged back into the void. I had been looking for silence my entire life, but now that I hear it, I want to leave. Leave far from this silent storm of darkness. An upside-down skyward flood beating down on me and on the earth below. That’s my dream.
I awoke from it once again, to the sound of plummeting, torrential rains.
Water dripped inside my caravan. I had forgotten to close the sun-roof. The unbearable summer heat and the tempestuous summer storms. The opposite elements working together to attack me. Barefoot in puddles of dark water, I closed the trap door. A sudden, roaring thud and an abrupt shake assaulted the caravan. The ravaged roots of trees could no longer hold under the turbulent downpour — one of the colossal wooden titans fell on top of my mobile home.
Light from outside began to reflect inside the flooded room. I pushed the door out and signalled to the flashlight holding silhouettes. They waved back at me and made their way towards the caravan. The puzzling raindrops made it hard to identify any of them — but as their steps, deafened by the rain, got closer and grew bigger, I was hit with clairvoyance. A lightning flash unveiled their cloaked faces, it was U and the woman with him.
The clouds cracked and suddenly a thunderous roar. A flash of light struck the core of a sleeping willow, awakening and breaking it. The wood slid at a rapid pace and before I could even make up what was happening, time flickered as I jumped towards U, pushing him out of the way. The broken branch fell onto the pool of mud underneath, but not without taking a life with it. I looked down. The flashlight had fallen to her side. It shone bright on her face revealing the birthmark on her eye vanishing under the weight of her eyelid and the willow’s branch.
U stared at the lifeless body. He said nothing. The rain continued to assault the ground below. The wind kept blasting its breath on the leaves above. And U continued to stare at her, immovable. In a sudden spur, I wrapped my arms around him. He placed his head in the crease of my shoulder blade. I could no longer tell whether the water came from the sky or from his eyes. We stood there for what could have been an eternity. U and I became friends that day. Or so I thought.
We hung out every day since then that Summer. At the campsite we would spend our days chatting. It was mostly him talking, and I listened. It wasn’t effortful — on the other hand, his storytelling was remarkable — and even the most mundane stories sounded like Greek tragedies or Shakespearean comedies. We were the best of friends in the worst of worlds. He talked, and I listened.
But one day, a few months later, I stopped hearing from U.
At times, I would see the woman with the eye birthmark in the faintest of dreams. Haunting visions of her piercing, jaded eyes, moments before her death. This became just another one of those many, many recurring nightmares.
…
I met U again years later at a gala party filled with socialites and fake intellectuals — If there even was a thing as a ‘real intellectual’. My novel had recently been published by a large publishing house, and I had won the Montgomery award for the Most Promising Young Author. Things were looking up for me. I was sipping on some probably ridiculously expensive champagne when I saw him.
It was U. He wore haunt, hunger and a pale yellow shirt under a navy blue blazer. Denim jeans and moccasins draped his legs and feet. He had lost that vivacity, that aura he had the first time I met him.
I put my glass down and, zigzagging through the moving bodies in the room, came face to face with him. He stared and smiled. Before he could mutter a word I slashed at him with a face of anguish.
“Why?” I blurted.
“Why what?” He answered, genuinely puzzled by the question.
“You never wrote back. You never answered any of my calls.”
“You did not bring me anything more, that is all.”
“But I listened — “
He cut me. “And I thank you for that — but I had no more stories to tell.”
U took a deep look into my eyes. I was petrified.
“Friendship is the ship that never sinks — you’ve heard that, right? Well, I don’t agree. Friend-ships sink. Sure, even if the sea begins to roar and the waves crash onto the ship, breaking the bark apart, opening up its every pore, water filling it to the brim — sure, it can survive. But it is not in these roaring seas that this boat sinks. No, the boat of friendship often sinks on the calmest of seas, on the most tranquil tide, in the most peaceful of oceans. It is when there are no more waves, no land in sight, no wind blowing in its sail that this boat stops, sighs and sinks to the deepest depth.”
It stops, sighs, and sinks. I repeated those words in a whisper.
“Sure — then it can be brought back up. But that requires strength, time, effort. Painful effort. Effort that must be spent by both parties hauling the anchor back to the surface, saving whatever is left from the shipwreck lost in the lightless abyss.” He added.
“And that kind of effort, you’re not willing to spend it.”
He paused. The noise around us vanished for a beat.
“I am sorry.” He said, disingenuously.
Suddenly, an explosion was heard. There began an ominous rumbling in the deepest of depths. From the core of the Earth, a shake — an earthquake ready to transform the whole party, and the whole city to mounds of rubble. The earth shook with a rhythm. The dancing turned to running. Breathless screams filled the room as the walls crumbled onto some of the many so-called intellectuals. Their intellect wasn’t able to save them this time, supposedly. The smell of smoke, ash and blood ribboned into my nostrils.
Bodies disappeared and lives ended all around us. Neither one reacted. Maybe because we understood that this was life — a life built on destruction and loss. U had lost the girl with the birthmark on her eye, and I had lost him. Destroyed relationships. It can take years to build, but a split second to destroy.
Another explosion. Boom. Screams. A large silver columns of marble losing its balance and falling onto U. This time, I stayed still. Fossilised into the numbness. His painful cry was muted by the shrill sounds of shrieking and squealing.
He looked at me desperately, pleading for help. As I met his gaze of anguish, the past years dissolved into one moment — into this very moment. Everything that I accumulated over the years, all that I had felt, all the pain he had caused me, it all fused together into one dark obelisk, an obelisk that pierced the very entrails of my soul.
I stood there, observing him, stuck under the marble column that had fallen on him. We were living our last moments together, witnessing what seemed like the death and rebirth of a planet.
A few meters to my left, my eyes caught onto a large green door with a pushable handlebar. On it was written “Lifeline Exit — Use in Case of Emergency.” This was my way out. Before making a run for it it, I stopped, sighed and smiled at U. His vocal cords pushed out one final word.
“Please.”
“I am sorry.” I replied, opening and closing the door behind me.
And so now, years later, I could have saved his life once more — but there was no way I would ever feel that way again. So, the bomb went off, ripping U to pieces along with any leftover threads of our untimely friendship. In the end, I guess I finally got the chance of telling this story. This story of heartbreak. This story of unrequited love. This story of U and I.
