Thursday, December 15, 2016

Finding Mary (Part 4)

15 DEC 2016
Prague, CZ

Part 4: The Darkening




In the Beginning was the Word; John 1:1

An hour had passed since Mathos had sat down on the bench on Platform 2 and the Diet cola he had consumed earlier was now rapidly filling his bladder.  He had always like the expression that "you don't buy drinks, you rent them." 

The signs to the WC led him down the steps from platform 2 and through a cold, gray maze of granite toward a remote corner of the old train station. The communist era station retained all the oppressive darkness that had marked the corresponding part of the country’s history. Even though it was more or less alive with people, the station still felt dead. He walked among the massive columns, not exactly brown, but brown nonetheless, that punctuated the cavernous space in front of the, now shuttered, ticket windows. Eventually, the path through the station led to a small dimly lit room with a cardboard sign stuck on the wall next to the door that read ‘Muzi.’ 

The first thing Mathos noticed as he entered the room was a slightly pungent odor he often associated with humans that didn’t bathe as often as he might have wished. The unbathed humans in Prague usually took the form of homeless people who, more or less, lived on the city’s well-heated trams during the harsh winter months. He could recall many times when his old knees had prompted him to sit down behind or in front of, one of these destinationless riders and the memory of the smell, if left unchecked, could still produce the mild pharyngeal spasms that often herald the onset of emesis. However, in this situation, the slightly pungent smell was not linked to any particular person; instead it was a smell that covered the surfaces of the room the way sweat covers your skin on a hot, humid night; even if you can’t see it, you can always feel it. 

To his right were two rust stained sinks with corroded gray faucet handles. Handles that had been turned so many times that the dirt and grime of the hands that had turned them had now become incorporated into the metal of which they were made and no amount of cleaning could restore their former luster. From the looks of things, he wasn’t the only one who realized the futility of trying to clean the stains from the sinks, apparently whoever was responsible for cleaning had also come to the same conclusion. 

To his left, as he walked in, was a wooden door with a small window cut, almost, but not quite, in the center. It was in his nature to be a tad retentive regarding symmetry, or a lack thereof, and the slightly offset window was the psychological equivalent of hang nail. Attached to the door, just below the off-center window, was a small improvised shelf, supported by a couple of metal brackets, which had probably been salvaged from some discarded item. In his newly adopted country, one man’s trash was very often another man’s treasure and so it was with the mismatched pieces of metal that now supported the small shelf under the off-center window. 

The sole purpose of the little shelf was to hold a small plate, which was about the size of a coffee cup saucer. Next to the plate and buried under several layers of yellowed cellophane type was a piece of paper with “3 Kc?” scribbled in faded blue ink. Mathos dug into the right front pocket of his jeans and pulled out a handful of coins. From which he withdrew, three, one-krone coins, formed them into a neat little stack, and put the three coins precisely in the center of the plate. He had only just turned to walk when a hand, only slightly less grimy than the faucets, silently emerged through the little cut-out window, raked the stack of coins off the plate and disappeared back behind the door. It seemed likely that the hand and wrist were attached to a person, although, the evidence for such an assumption was not overwhelming. The scene brought back distant memories of a toy he had as a child. The toy was called the Magic Hand Grabbing Toy Bank. That he remembered the toy at all he found amazing, that he still remembered the name he found reassuring. It meant that  while age had robbed him of many things, his memory, for the most part, was not one of them, something that routinely presented itself as both a blessing and a curse. 

Mathos walked past the sinks and into a second room; to the left were four toilet stalls,three of the stalls had doors deeply inscribed with odd-looking graffiti, while the forth stall was door-less. Across from the stalls was a wall with three rectangles of formerly white porcelain. A low platform of slate provided a perch on which to stand and a channel between the porcelain and the platform provided a drain for the urine that flowed off the porcelain during micturition. In essence you just pissed on a wall. Since you really couldn't miss, there was a certain logic to this style of urinal. 

Looking down, he noticed several oddly colored shoe-shaped spots on the slate platform at the base of the wall. The spots suggested that not all the urine meant for the drain, actually ended up in the drain. The errant urine probably, at least in part, contributed to the rather unpleasant odor that hung in the air. 

The room was dank, cold, and only partially lit; most of the light bulbs were burned out, and probably had been for the last decade. The combination of the dirt brown tiles on the walls and the slate gray floor imparted a feeling to the room that could best be described, depending on the dose of your anti-depressant, as either mildly or moderately dispiriting. The pipes exiting from the top of each porcelain slab had, at one time, produced a steady stream of water to wash away the urine, but corrosion, neglect, and rust had long ago put an end to the flow of water. This meant that the job of removing the urine had been outsourced to gravity and evaporation, which was at best not terribly effective. As Mathos stepped up onto the platform, the stench of stale urine, rising from the conduit at his feet, filled his nostrils. He looked down and saw that his boots fit perfectly into the oddly colored spots. Mathos wasn’t too thrilled by the idea that some of his urine was about to be reflected back onto his boots, however, in the scheme of things it was a rather minor problem and certainly the least of his worries. 

Of all the things in our field of vision, it is often hard to explain why one thing catches our eye while other things go unnoticed. In this case, his eyes focused on what appeared to be a small chip in the off-white porcelain in front of him. Under the scrutiny of his somewhat failing vision, the small black spot slowly revealed itself as a newborn fly. Looking about, and as his eyes slowly adapted to the dimness, more of the little blacks spots started to appear, just like stars in the heavens after sunset – first one, then five, then ten, then too many to count. Together they stood motionless, the flies, because it was too cold for them to move and Mathos, because of the darkening. Like unwelcome guests, he had gotten used to not having much control over their arrival, although they usually came in the dark, usually, but not always.

In those days men will seek death and will not find it; they will desire death, but death will flee from them. Revelation 9:6

 

Sunday, December 11, 2016

Finding Mary (Part 3)

11 DEC 2016
Prague, CZ

Part 3: That God Damn Dog



They had all died that night, so the email from Kyle regarding Mary’s suicide had come as no real surprise. It was something he had expected and had been expecting for many years. In some ways, Mathos was impressed that Mary's after-life had lasted as long as it did. Mathos also had to admit, that he was mildly impressed that he too had lasted that long as well.


Mary had been living on borrowed time; of course, they had all been living on borrowed time and the person they had borrowed it from was not someone known for charity. They had borrowed it from God and he was a fastidious record keeper with the same penchant for forgiveness of late payments as the Italian mafia.
 

That Damn Dog

 

It's possible that Mary wouldn’t have lived a day longer, but then again, maybe she would have, if it hadn’t been for that dog, that God damned dog. They had always blamed that dog, and why not? Whoever heard of human trash, like those living in that squalid dump that doubled as a house, keeping an indoor dog? They had spent two agonizing days watching that house and not one sign of a dog, in two days they hadn’t seen a single sign of  a dog. Who lets a dog shit and piss in a house? Perhaps it would have gone differently had they known about that dog – or perhaps not. There was no way of really knowing for sure, but even after all the years and all the houses, Mathos could still remember every single night he had sat alone in the dark, thinking – "that damned dog, what am I and what might I have been, if not for that God damned dog?"

Then Abishai, son of Zeruiah, said to the king, "Why should this dead dog curse my lord the king? Let me go over and cut off his head."; 2 Samuel 16:9


For Mathos, coming to terms with Mary’s suicide would involve reconciling it with her prior death, which would make understanding her suicide, or at least explaining her suicide, a bit more difficult than most; although, oddly enough, it would also make it more sensible and reasonable than most suicides. It would be during, or perhaps because of, his efforts to understand Mary’s death that Mathos would discover that the old train station he had chosen to sit and quickly ponder Mary's death, was more than just a train station; it was a train station with a secret.