The weathered wooden slats of Castle Apartment’s rooftop shed moaned as Leo leaned against them. Like a cowboy leaning against the wall of a saloon, he surveyed the small bundle of buildings below him. He brought a cool glass bottle of Coke up to his lips, and relished in the sugary zing that rattled up and down his spine. Leo felt as if he had accomplished what he set out to do when he first signed the lease on apartment 1121. He’d sat there in the murky carpeted room, and waited for the landlord to return with the papers. He was an old man, with dark red hair who talked out of the corner of his mouth, the rest of his face crumpling around his lips. He had handed Leo an old monogrammed pen to sign the papers, he remembers accidentally pricking is finger on the rusty clip as he began to write.
His heart sank at the hellish symmetry his memories supplied.
“I signed my life away that day,” muttered Leo as he pulled a cigarette out from behind his ear. He fiddled with the cigarette, having bummed it off of Kindra on his way upstairs; he realized his matchbook was still on his coffee table.
“Hellish symmetry,” he thought as he tucked the cigarette back into his wispy gray hair.
With his new perspective on life, Leo had the feeling that he’d broken some dam somewhere in his head; he felt the rush of blood to foreign areas of his brain, and the elation of a thousand little wildlife activists. He now felt out of touch with the Castle Lonlies, after so many years of guiding them through the mire of their nighttime desolation. He came to this small decaying urban shithole to escape his father’s serum, and to find his own. However, only finding booze and flat Coca-Cola, it took Leo accepting his father – and his ghost – to stand straighter than ever before.
He needed to leave, take a permanent vacation to the West Coast: where he’d always believed his true parents had their roots. He’d seen pictures of thirty-five year old men with gray hair like his, surfers who spent so much time under the sun that the color evaporated from their hair, leaving it eternally frazzled and unkempt. He’d be accepted there, where everyone was tall and lanky, the vastness of the ocean fostering their skyward growth. Where his craggy face would be thrown off as “weatherworn” not “acne-scarred.”
All this thinking made Leo jittery with anticipation as he lined up his Coke bottle on the concrete rim of the roof. The bottle caught the light of the sun, the glass attempting in vein to vacuum-seal the brilliance that radiated through it. Unlike the bottle, Leo had somehow managed to siphon some of world’s brilliance into his own cavities. Back at the church, on his knees before the humbling leviathan of his father’s morals, Leo managed to peer through the metaphorical keyhole and glean a quick glimpse of his life away from this town.
He needed to leave. He had to leave. Having exhausted the town, the town was now exhausting him; Leo felt that if he stayed, he’d end up nothing more than exhaust. Leo stood on the roof, mesmerized by the horizon, the gears in his mind forming an escape route. He’d sell his apartment, he’d cash his last paycheck, and he’d buy a plane ticket to the other side of the continent.
No comments:
Post a Comment