Soul Mates (11 page)

Everyone had picked up their utensils and had gone at their dinners with zeal, as the service 
was
 quite slow and appetites had swelled. Lilith forked a piece of gnocchi, maneuvered her fingers so that she was now flimsily holding the fork between her thumb and pointer finger, as she lethargically brought it up to her mouth, looked at it for a second, and slowly put it in her mouth, deep in thought. She looked across the restaurant and spotted their waiter with the end of his sleeve tattoos coquettishly peeking out of the bottom of his shirt cuffs. He was clearing off an empty table where the patrons had left, first absentmindedly stealing a look into and then placing the check-book into the front slot of his apron. He moved on to placing all of the table’s empty glasses onto a brown drink tray. There must have been at least ten glasses precariously perched, jingling their chiming song as each step lightly vibrated the tightly packed glasses against one another.

Lilith looked at that waiter, and squinted her eyes ever so slightly, a gesture that would have remained undetected until perhaps the third loop of an instant replay.

The waiter’s tray was wobbling, the glasses listing this way and that, left, then right, and back to the left, the waiter trying desperately to find the tray’s center of gravity once again.

KER-PSSSSHHHH!

Water glasses, beer pilsners, rock glasses, wine glasses cascaded to the uncarpeted hardwood floor and smashed into thousands of pieces. Sprinklings of glass mixing in with the leavings of soda, water and alcoholic beverages wove a carpet of incandescent peril on the restaurant floor as the ceiling lights reflected off of the large and microscopic glass shards alike. The floor around the table from which the glasses came looked like a polluted and poisoned lake with white-caps.

The owner or manager rushed over to the waiter who was and earlier that evening looked to be in his mid-thirties, but now looked like a sheepish teenager, said something inaudible and crooked his pointer and middle fingers in unison in a “come-hither” gesticulation. The waiter followed the owner/manager off of the dining room floor and into the back, just as a piercing scream erupted at the Swanson’s table; it was Cindy.

Tyler was utterly startled, jumping in his seat and dropping his fork, clanging into his plate.

“What!? WHAT!?” Ray shouted at his wife with a look comprised of two-parts worry and one-part contempt on his face.

“It’s a dead c-c-cockroach!” she answered before dry-heaving off to the side of her table and quickly getting up to run to the ladies room.

“Ugh! For the love of God!” Ray screeched in a sophomoric tone.

Tyler looked at his girlfriend, who sat there, hands clasped together, thumbs lightly tapping eachother slowly and rhythmically. Lilith just gave that signature shoulder shrug accompanied by that cold smirk, which Tyler had noticed, over time, became her trademark. “Things happen,” that shrug said. Yes, things certainly did happen.

*   *   *

             
 
Victor DeFazio, now 
former
 waiter of Buon Mangia, had been down on his luck. He was starting to get his life back on track after finalizing the divorce between himself and his bed-wandering wife (ex-wife) Lee-Ann. There had been false reports of felonious assaults and harassment, all of which Victor had to answer to in the form of false arrests and preposterous restraining orders. He had even lost his teaching job when the police came and took him out of Alan B. Shepard High School in handcuffs. In this contemporary and warped society, allegations were enough to not only tarnish, but destroy a man’s career.

Yes, Victor would fight the good-fight, embroiling himself in a lengthy and costly legal battle which, fortunately, he 
did
 suddenly have the time for seeing as how he was newly unemployed, but was lacking the sufficient funds to do so. He supposed he would be at the mercy of a lawyer, who would hopefully do his work pro-bono until it came time for a settlement.

A friend of his had put in a recommendation for Victor with the owner of Buon Mangia. Regardless of the fact that Victor didn’t have the required three years of restaurant experience, the owner decided to give him a shot anyway. After all, Giuseppe Fratelli, the owner of Buon Mangia, was coming up on his busy season and could use the extra help, however temporary.

Victor had a teaching degree and would no doubt feel underemployed as a server, but it was a band-aid on a wound that needed stitches. It would do for a quick fix and so that he could conserve a bit of pride by not having to rely on the aid of not only the government, but also his fellow taxpayers. Something would 
have to
 be done about his situation sooner than later. Just until he was able to either get his teaching job back, once the allegations were proven to be spurious or he could secure another teaching position. Simple as that, right?

His first week at the restaurant was tragic. He had gotten patron’s orders incorrect, brought food to wrong tables, dropped food, etc. The second week was a little better, making sporadic minor missteps, but 
nothing
 like his first week at the restaurant. His worst blunder was entirely forgetting a table that had sat down when he was busy until they finally just left. He was improving though; and then, in walked Lilith (and the Swansons).

He never had a chance.

Giuseppe had warned him multiple times his first couple of weeks that he took a chance on him on the recommendation of Victor’s friend, (who was also Giuseppe’s friend) and to “please not make a jerk-off out of him.”

Breaking the tray of glasses the night Lilith had come to dine with the Swansons was the breaking point for Fratelli, no pun intended.

“I’m-a so sorry Bictor. I just didn’t-a know how little experience you-a had.” Giuseppe started in his thick Sicilian accent, “I’m-a gonna have to let you go. I’m-a sorry, Bictor. Good luck.”       

It was more than Victor could handle at once. That night, Victor had finalized the idea he’d had for the last several months in his dream.

He woke up that morning, climbed to the roof of his apartment building, an apartmen
t
i
n
which he was now staying because his ex-wife was living in his house with her new “cock-of-the-month,” with his acoustic guitar and sat with his legs hanging the over the edge of his apartment building. He played the entire set that he used to play with his band in college on Friday nights at Dorfmann’s Pub, located in the next county. After he finished, he put his guitar aside, stood up, and swan-dived fifty-plus feet onto the roof of his own car. His ex-wife had taken everything from him, his job, his house, his life…he didn’t want her to inherit his car too, or if she did, it wouldn’t be in the pristine condition she had remembered it.

While it would be somewhat knee-jerk and hasty to blame a suicide on losing his job at Buon Mangia, as suicide victims tend to have so much more tormenting them than a single event, as Victor did, his untimely release from Buon Mangia, at the hands of Lilith certainly did not help his situation.   

Chapter 3

“Are alarm bells ringing in your heads yet making your existence, or what’s left of it, all the more punishing yet?”

Ardelio

Chapter 1

At around the same time that Lilith and the Swansons were leaving the restaurant, with a comped meal, Giuseppe’s sincerest apologies, and a proverbial blank check in order to make things up to them, Jim Colabza was just getting out of his shower and preparing for a shave before he hit the sack for the night.

Jim was a night owl and usually fell asleep with the television on and showing 
Seinfeld
 reruns, but he had picked up Stephen King’s 
Pet Sematary
 at a neighbor’s garage sale the previous week. The desire to begin reading Stephen King titles had been a somewhat subliminal thought stemming from his childhood when a King novel was a fixture on his father’s oak night stand. Jim had been meaning to give them a try based not only his father’s say so, but also on the say so of millions upon millions of readers. The trouble was that the mere sight of the size of a Stephen King nove
l,
aside from the ominous cover ar
t,
was intimidating to the casual reader. You could knock a man unconscious with a first edition copy of 
Under the Dome
 or 
IT
, to name just a couple of the author’s tomes. 
Pet Sematary
 had been one of the novels where King showed his word processor some much needed and appreciated (by some) restraint. The story was unnerving and gripping; it captured Jim’s attention immediately.

Jim’s intention was to read for a solid hour before he drifted off to sleep, but his reading session was cut short once he reached the point in the novel where the main character, Lewis Creed, is investigating the forbidden land beyond a natural barrier which lay on his recently purchased property. The description of how the ancient (mythical?) creature, the Wendigo, was looking for the foolish trespasser while uttering its ghostly moans and cries off in the distance of the poisoned woods was too much for Jim to handle without daylight as his trusty companion. He would go back to his book at work during one of his free periods the following day under the haven and sanctity of a well-lit faculty room.

Jim waited for his goose-flesh to subside and slowly lowered his back to its place on the mattress and his head on the pillow.

“I think I better stick to 
Seinfeld
 before bed,” Jim said to his empty bedroom as he switched the television on and found Cosmo Kramer kicking change all over a pizza counter after the proprietor informed him he would only accept bills.

It took the better part of a complete episode of his favorite show to bring his nerves from a red-line to a cool and purring cruise. Once he was confident that the fear-provoking thoughts that the book had left in his mind were completely out of his system, he shut the television off. After the first episode of 
Seinfeld
 ended, he got to enjoy an encore presentation of George Costanza claiming he was a marine biologist in order to impress his date. All that was left before turning in was to ritualistically pass some gas, which Jim used as a civilian version of “Taps” playing over a public address system, signifying that the end of the day was indeed official.

Jim Colabza was swallowed by sleep minutes later

*   *   *

 
            
 
At 3:16am, the 3 o’clock hour being the rumored epoch in which the cavalcade of unwanted manifestations are rumored to be at their peak, Jim Colabza began to stir in his bed. 

Regardless of the countless belief systems and religious practices, 3 of the clock holds a connotation to some. Whether it is the Catholic tradition which believes that the 3 o’clock hour is the hour in which evil mocks the Holy Trinity, or otherwise, the time has held an ill-omened significance for centuries. 

Jim stirred again, switching his sleeping position onto his back, while uttering a frail whimper. The temperature in the room began to drop; almost beyond notice, at first, and then turning the previously cozy bedroom into a frigid meat locker. Puffs of vapor could be seen lazily jettisoning from Jim’s nose and slightly agape mouth in meandering tendrils. A cold tempest blew through the room, blowing his school progress reports onto the floor and scattering them like scared rodents, as what appeared to be heat waves (although no heat was present in the frosty room) that one might see over a torrid desert highway began to manifest about two feet above Jim’s slumbering body. 

Jim began to stir again, the look of strain and a painful grimace appeared on his face even though he was still asleep.

MmmmUHHHHH!
 What started out as a garden variety moan one might hear sleeping next to their spouse in the middle of the night suddenly morphed into a moan that came to an abrupt crescendo, as if someone dropped a packed suitcase onto his mid-section unexpectedly. 

Jim’s eyelids slammed open…
wide
 open. A mere three inches or so from his face was the face of a female; not that she looked feminine per se, but he could tell by the distorted curves throughout the rest of the manifestation’s body that whatever species this was, if it was a species at all, it was the female counterpart of that species. He still was not sure of that, nor did he really care. 

He was staring into the icy silver eyes of the 
thing
 and could see yellowed fangs protruding from its mouth at maniacal angles. He could smell the 
thing’s
 breath, humid and smelling faintly of an odd concoction of road-kill and lemon Pledge.   

One of the 
thing’s
 hands were covering Jim Colabza’s mouth. The gesture seemed to be more symbolic than anything else because although he could feel the subtle pressure of the 
thing’s
 hand covering his mouth, it wasn’t pressed tight enough to stop him from screaming. 

Screaming
; what a good i
d
–

But Jim couldn’t scream. He had felt as if his mouth was sewn shut with steel thread. As panic began to wash over Jim, he tried to flail his body out from underneath the apparition that was over him (on him?), but found that not only could he not budge his body an inch…a 
millimeter
, but he couldn’t even wiggle a finger if his life depended on it, and, as it turned out, it just might. 

Jim could feel a commanding weight on his chest, a weight that was far heavier than the 
thing
 looked like it was capable of displacing, even if it was carrying a bundle of bricks. He was froze
n–
suspended in his bed at this phantasm’s mercy. He was certain that he was not dreaming. The most lucid dreams were never this clear. The detail of the room was much more than any dream-state could provide. His shower robe was hanging on the back of his closet door at the same ridiculous angle he had hung it up in, too lazy at the end of the night to fix it. It wasn’t going anywhere. How about the progress reports? He didn’t see them on his dresser anymore, but he strained his neck, trying to move the best he could, his tendons trying to make a break for it out of his skin as he angled his eyes down to the floor. There they were, his progress reports strewn about all over his floor, making the perfect abstract flooring that you might see in an LSD trip. Even in the dark room he could see his dark red pen marks on the reports. His senses were heightened, he thought, and he thought he knew why: There was a message to be heard in this ordeal, and he had better not miss it, so help him God. 

For the first time in the struggle, the 
thing
 croaked something audible.

“Rrrrrr-lllliiiioooo.” The voice, if you could call it that, was the most horrific sounding thing he had ever heard, wet, caked with phlegm, and indiscernible. It was deep and monstrous too, like when a child does their best to mimic a stereotypical monster’s voice. He almost could have laughed at that thought had he not been so paralyzed with fright. Immediately, Jim thought of the ghastly and maniacal distant chortling of the Wendigo stalking through the woods of central Maine.   

Jim winced and whimpered at whatever the 
thing
 had said…if anything. Unfortunately for Jim, the thing didn’t get the idea that Jim comprehended the message the first time. How perceptive. The thing backed its head up from Jim’s face, tilted its gray-hair covered head to the left as if it was trying desperately to understand a calculus problem. This was when Jim was frightened the most. After a few seconds of apparent contemplation, the specter darted its face back into Jim’s another time, making Jim whimper. He could feel warmth spreading into his pajama pants and almost instantly turning cold as the wind continued to draught through his room even though his windows were shut and locked. The thing tried again to get through to Jim.

“Arrrrdeeelllliiiiiooooo!”

Ardelio

Jim’s whimpers became stronger, fearing that the thing would slowly begin to tear him apart if he didn’t comprehend the message this time around. He squeezed his eyes shut, the same defense mechanism a child might employ: “If I can’t see it, it can’t see me.”

Jim creaked his eyes open slowly, completely unaware that the weight had been lifted from his torso and that he could now move his limbs. He looked around his warm and dark room, which was freezing mere seconds ago and saw nothing. Everything was in place, even his progress reports, which were still strewn about on the floor. Jim shuddered when he saw them. 

He got out of bed and wrote down the one word, or name, or whatever it was, that he had made out on the legal pad that he kept next to his bed, which he reserved for either a to-do list or interesting dreams. This qualified, although, he was quite certain that this was no more a dream than the Brooklyn Bridge was a giant shitting bird. 

Jim sketched the word/name “Ardelio” onto his legal pad, dropped it back onto his nightstand with a shuddering sigh, and began to strip his urine soaked pajama pants off of his body, as well as the sheets from his bed. What else was there to do? There was nary a possibility of returning to sleep for the remainder of that unforgiving night.   

Chapter 2

Finally, 6am came around and Jim could officially start his day. The last three hours ticked away with tormenting lethargy. He knew that even if he did work up the guts to crawl back into his be
d–
after the sheets were all changed and the mattress scrubbed, of cours
e–
that sleep would never come. So, he started his day obscenely early by cleaning his house. He figured if there was time to kill, what better way than to bring his furniture to a dull sparkle in the artificial light his lamps projected. Every lamp and light in the house was shining brightly, transforming each subsequent room from a precarious cave dwelling into a late 1800’s Victorian den of serenity. The 1890 Victorian house on Oleg Street was the house Jim fell in love with right after college. He spent all of his inheritance making it his, and did not regret one penny spent on it. 

After he completed his bout with cleaning, the clock read approximately 5:30, and Jim had decided that 5:30ish was late enough for him to jump into the shower and begin his work day. The shower was soothing, not only for the simple fact that subconsciously (or perhaps more obvious than that) he was washing away the filthy dried urine, although his bed and pajama bottoms took the brunt of it, it had no doubt leaked through to his skin and remained there. Jim would have hopped into the shower straight away after the accident, except for two reasons: First, the thought of going into the bathroom and just like in the worst “B” quality and predictable, but still scary movie, catching a glimpse of this “ardelio” woman in the mirror as he passed by it, was just too much for him to handle at this point. Second, he lived alone, and it was just piss after all. Sure, urea breaks down and irritates skin eventually. If he had a wife, or in his case, a life-partner, the embarrassment, not only of soiling his bed, but of being covered in his own waste, would have sent him running for the shower post haste. Being alone, he felt no sense of urgency to do so, because his “friend” may be waiting for him in the bathroom, not to mention the fact that when he cleaned his house, he would often sweat. He had no idea why. Jim Colabza was a fit man and didn’t exert an abnormal amount of energy when he cleaned his beloved home, but he sweat just the same. It more or less became a mental, but apparent physiological quirk with him. So, he figured, why shower and then get all sweaty again?