The Mortal Fringe (19 page)

"I apologize, if we ever made you feel
important to us" He disappears afterwards.

My whole world is brought to pieces by
that final statement. The conviction in his words and his voice
tone were such that I believe what he said. I am nothing, I was
nothing from the very beginning, nothing but an animal that was
more fun to hunt if he believed that he mattered.

"She will kill you too!" I scream to
the top of my lungs "She has never cared about you more that she
cared about me! You are just another piece on that shitty puzzle!"
I stop to breathe “That's the only thing you can do,
Kill.

I stop again to look around the room
and see if anything of what I said got to his mind or ears.
Apparently it didn't, not to his.

Suddenly, a force as powerful as an
earthquake throws me against the wall, I hit myself almost in every
bruise from the night before. It happens again, and with me, half
of the objects in the room fly against the walls.

"Shut up."

"Elizabeth?" I ask, almost shouting.
She was here, momentarily, but here, with me. I call once more for
her even though I know I will get no answer.

The last hit against the wall has
opened up some of last night cuts and bruises and I am bleeding
enough to start feeling dizziness.

I stand up holding myself against the
wall and walk to the bathroom. I take my blooded clothes off and
carefully step into the shower. When the water hits my body my
bruises sting, I do my best to contain a painful grunt but I can't
help my legs from giving out once more. My knees hit the shower's
floor, resulting in terrible pain and a hideous sound. Half of my
body is in terrible pain and the other half is absent, like if it
wasn't more than mere clay, dispossessed of all life. The water
keeps pouring on me and I don't feel the pain of my bruises
anymore, I'm blacking out. I can't stand this any longer. I can't
fight anymore. I fall on my back and I lose sight of the world,
leaving nothing but the dark of my eyes and the pouring water
between me and the moment of my undoing.

When I open my eyes I feel like if
months had gone by since I stepped into the shower. My body is
still wet, with water so cold that I can't stop trembling. My back
hurts from lying on this icy ground for hours, and standing up
becomes an impossible task to fulfill. One of my legs is completely
asleep, I can't feel it and I can barely move it. I walk out the
bathroom with nothing but the towel I picked up when I stepped out
of the shower.

The room is as empty as it was,
nothing here reminds me of a life, or a nice experience. My mind is
playing too many games with me, I even see the walls getting closer
to each other, pushing me out of my own reality. It takes a while,
but I finally focus on what is real and what it is not and I start
walking towards my bed. I pass the exact place where Constance hit
me and I sit on the soft bed that has been keeping my nightmares
for all this time.

I look at the bed table, and the
haunting pages of that book look at me, I know it, that's why I am
here right now, like this, because I knew too much. So I take the
book and with an act of rage I rip it off in half. I have the cover
on one hand and the rest of the book in the other. I would throw it
away, trash it out, but something in me has been ripped off with
that brown cover. Finally, and before doing something I could
regret one day, I take out my suitcase and I put the remains of the
rotten book in it, being this the moment when my life in Barcelona
begins to end, and my way back home starts, with something as
insignificant as the packing of a book.

I lie on my bed, and with my eyes
closed I think about all that happened during these past hours, and
by the end of the very last memory, there's only one thing I can
think to myself, proudly.

"I'm still living."

CHAPTER 27

Dear Mr. Stills

These are the complete details of
your flight reservation

FLIGHT NUMBER A470AB

ELECTRONIC 350559082

DATE & TIME / DECEMBER 23,
2013, 10:53 AM

ARRIVING / New York

TOTAL PRICE / 600.12 USD

Thank you for your
attention.

American Airlines.

One week.

These past days I have not been
myself, all the exams have taken my thoughts away to fill my head
up with names and dates that I will probably never have to use
again. Now that the last months here have been put to test, I can
officially say that my life away from home is finished. My suitcase
is on Jay's bed, as I presume he will not be back before I leave, I
am just going to put it there to fill it up every day until the
very last second. As for now, it is just half empty.

I run into Jessica on my way back from
the last exam, the one with Constance, which I am sure I will fail
even though I deserve the highest grade in the class, if not by its
content, it should be for what she's made me go through.
Unfortunately, Jessica remembers about my invitation to Christmas
party, and my shyness and my desire of having a quiet final week
make it impossible for me to politely withdraw my
invitation.

"Yes" I say "I'll be in touch" I
promise with one of those stupid smiles on my face.

The arrangement is so weird that she
will be the one picking me up, since she moved out last week and I
have no idea of where she lives now, I do not object. However, if
my mother ever knows about that, she will probably freak out, not
that she is a very conservative person, but she likes all those
corny things about the boy picking up the girl right before the
dance. Well, I won't have that, and honestly, I wouldn't even have
the dance if I was more of a selfish person.

Neither Elizabeth nor Jay have given
any sign of life for the last week, I have not even felt their
presence as I used to do when they first disappeared. To my own
surprise, I don't think about them all the time now either, which
to a certain extent, I think it's good.

I have a thousand unread emails from
my mother, she is most likely going to kill me since I have been
missing for the last weeks. I log into Skype and luckily for me,
she is online.

"Where the hell have you been?!" she
screams when I first appear on screen.

"Hi mom" I say avoiding her first
answer

"Don't you "hi mom" me, little man. I
was worried about you, Alexander!" she makes an ugly, dramatic, and
more than usual pause- have you quitted eating?

"No mom, I'm fine, I actually was very
busy."

She looks at me with a disapproval
look.

"My sweet boy" she is suddenly
emotional "I am dying to see you."

Dying, yeah, me too, I think after
listening to her voice and realizing that the moment when all will
go dark for me is approaching faster than I'd imagined.

"My flight leaves on the 23rd, I was
just sending you an email. Could you pick me up? "

"Are you sure you don't prefer asking
Dick, honey? You don't need to do this if you don't
want."

All of a sudden I realize how much I
have missed her, after all, we only have one mother and I would lie
to myself if I did not say that I want to see her badly.

"Yes, I'm sure, that's why I came here
for, remember?" I say smiling "Besides, I haven't heard of Richard
ever since I left, so I'm guessing he would not be up for
it."

She smiles and tries to hide her need
for crying.

"23rd it is then, I'll be
there."

"Thank you mom."

We spend the next half hour talking
about nothing in particular, there's a lot we both need to catch up
with. She tells me how the whole neighborhood is still trying to
get hold to those Super Bowl tickets, some of them have even
offered her incredible sums of money.

"But I would not sell them!" She
stands strong with her opinion even though I think she should
have.

And after a long while, the question
that I had been hoping she would not ask, came.

"How is your sweet friend Elizabeth?"
the smile on her face makes me think that she pictured me coming
back home as an engaged boy. I talked about Elizabeth in my last
email, but I didn't think she would remember about it. But since I
disappeared for weeks, I guess she has probably been reading that
email every now and then to keep telling herself that I was
alright.

"We fell apart" if you could consider
it that way “a little."

"That's too bad."

Memories about the last months and my
last days with Elizabeth start to come back and I know that it will
be too hard to handle in front of my mom, so I make up an excuse to
hang up and once I have, I leave the room and go outside to catch
some fresh air.

"Why did you have to disappear? Why
did you even approach me in the first place, you should have taken
my soul right away, that was enough. Now the only thing you will
get is the rotten shadow of what my soul once was, and that is just
thanks to you. You asked for me to trust you, and I did. Now I ask
the same from you, I am not going to suffer for you again, I am not
going to risk anything for you again. My life is mine, and I am not
going to waste it for you, not anymore. You have played me. I did
trust you, the only one I've trusted in a very long
time.

You will not hear from me again,
not ever. What we had you ended the moment you disappeared. What we
had, you killed. I once read that you immortals had a special
ability to read people's minds, and I know you can do that better
than any other, so I hope you are listening to everything I'm
saying. I can't go on like this, knowing that you are hiding from
me, somewhere. Waiting for the right moment.

You will not hear from me again,
not ever.

Trust me."

CHAPTER 28

Settling in was difficult, but moving
out is harder. Almost everything is on its place now; my clothes
are carefully packed along with some of the stuff I've bought
throughout the whole semester, and the rest of my belongings are
either in a backpack or on my bed, waiting to be stored. Only a
handful of books remain on my desk, some of them are mine, the rest
belong to the University library, I've had no time to take them
back to where they belong lately, but I will do it before I leave.
The room looks so empty that it feels bad being in here, as if I
was a stranger, or in a white cell, with nothing to do or wish
for.

Not even Jay's freaky posters are here
anymore, whether he took them out or they just vanished, I don't
know, but the white wall is everything my eyes get to see, and it
makes me sad. Sad because so much has happened here, and after I
go, no one will ever know it happened. Someone will live here next
semester, maybe next week, and never could he imagine what happened
here, how myths became real, how everything became
possible.

These three days will be special. I'll
make the most of them, I will even try to enjoy the Christmas
party. Whatever could have happened, it didn't, and now I'm free to
live my last hours in Barcelona as freely as I desire.

I see the streets in a very different
way, I've always noticed how they shed life to the people walking
through them, but today I see the magic they hold, the inspiration
they bring to me and the wish to remain walking them over and over
again, with no intention of stopping. That's how magical I find it
here. No monuments that I may have seen can match the beauty hidden
in the narrow streets of the old city and the perfect geometry of
the new one. Everything has made this a worth dying for experience;
the city, the people, the living. I won't dream today, nor will I
dream tomorrow, I'm more interested in real life today, and every
day that follows.

It is on my way back that I hear my
mother's voice in my head when I walk past a flower shop, I can
hear her yelling at me «if you don't go and pick the poor girl up,
the least you could do is buy her some flowers, you little man», I
laugh afterwards, I remember when she used to use that voice tone,
I miss it. I wonder what she would say now, although she is
probably with David.

I walk into the flower store and the
lady behind the desk knows exactly that I have no idea of what I'm
doing here. She speaks English, but not fluently. Eventually, and
after a fair round of misunderstandings, I get a simple and yet
nice pack of blue roses. I liked the colors, and I am glad I did
not go for the typical red ones, I don't want to be boring from
moment one. She tells me that my date will be most happy with my
small token, I am glad she thinks so, as I am not confident about
tonight.

When I get back in the deserted room I
realize that my last walk around Barcelona has taken me longer than
I anticipated, so I get my clothes out, I make sure they look
alright and not too stupid for a party, I put the flowers on the
bed and walk straight into the bathroom.

I shower as quickly as I can, trying
not to think about the pain of the bruises I have left, even though
they are not many, they do still hurt. I am done in less than ten
minutes. I know that Jessica will be knocking at my door anytime
now and I don't want to keep her waiting; that would not be a good
start.