by Peter Foley
“What now, Thomas?” Drew asks.
“Tom, call me Tom. I won the bed, but I don’t want it here, I’m going to…” Tom pauses, giving all his strength to the struggle. “I’m going to move it to the corner.”
“Righto, if you must, allow me.”
“No! Don’t do it! Don’t help me. I’ve got this,” Tom gasps.
“You most certainly haven’t, son.” Drew crouches to inspect the legs of the bed.
“A man doesn’t require help unless he asks for it. I can look after myself. If you hear me ask for help, then help, if not, never ever try to help me; a man has to face his challenges head on.”
“Why?”
“If you help me when I don’t want any help you rob me of my victory. When I set out to do something, I mean to do it, single-handedly. You should never assist a man unless he requests it directly. If you take away a man’s struggle, you rob him of his pride.” Tom’s face flushes beet red, his neck, cheeks and eyes are all fiercely tight with the struggle of lifting and talking. “I don’t need pity. I’ve always been alone and I’ve always had to take care of things myself. I’m an orphan, you know,” he says, straining his last words and becoming even redder in the face he reapplies upward pressure to the unmoving bed.
“Tom, going at life all alone is a terrible way about things. You’ll realize that when you’re older, like me. You’ll learn that struggling alone is in vain. For instance, this bed – it’s bolted to the ground.”
“Oh.” Tom releases the bed, stands up, puts his hands on his waist and breathes heavily. “You know what? I think that bed looks great where it is.”
“So no parents then? Sorry to hear that, Tom,” Drew says, still crouching and looking under the bed.
“It’s hardly your fault. You do look familiar though. What’s your full name?” Tom wipes the effort off his brow.
“Drew Samuel.”
“Drew Samuel?” Tom looks over Drew’s head. He knots his face and murmurs something low, “Not Drew Samuel – the DJ?”
“Yes. You’ve heard of me?”
“Yeah. I remember, about ten years ago, that song was everywhere. What was it called? One second, I’m sure it’s on the tip of my tongue.” Tom protrudes that exact pink item out of his mouth and to the corner of his lips.
“Churchill?” Drew offers.
“Why did you do that? Don’t tell me! Now let me think… The song was called… Churchill, yes, that’s correct. I heard it everywhere when I was, like, nine years old. How come you didn’t release anything after that?”
“I’ve released seven albums since then.” Drew screws up his chin.
“Oh. Not very good ones, I suppose?”
“I suppose not,” Drew says, choking a laugh.
Tom looks about the room. “How come you ended up in this bunker?”
“I basically just kind of, ended up here. What about you? Do you know what happened to your parents?”
“I’ve no idea. I’ve never had parents, as far as I can remember. They’re dead, I suppose,” Tom says casually as he takes a seat on his bed, leaning forward he drags his bag over to his feet.
“No foster parents or anything like that?” Drew takes a seat on his own bed across from Tom.
“No. Actually, yes, for a while.” Tom unzips his bag and plunges one arm inside. “I was always fighting with the other kids at the foster home, so they were eager to see the back of me, I think.” He relaxes his bag arm in contemplation. “After a particularly bad week of fighting, they decided to give me to a very big family across town. The family was a bit odd, they used to adopt orphans for kickbacks. I don’t know how it worked, but the government would give them money to look after them, so they took as many as they could. Food and clothes cost hurt the bottom line of the business, so me and the other kids never had much of anything.
“We all used to sleep in the basement,” he says, looking into his bag, then at Drew. “Anyway, one day I had enough, so I ran away, naturally, but only back to the foster home, it was the only other place that existed in my world. You should have seen the look on the faces of the staff when I turned up! They wanted to take me back to the family. I refused by kicking and screaming like only a little boy can. Eventually, after I promised to stop fighting, they said I didn’t have to go back, but on one condition: I’d have to work for my bed.
“So, I’d cook and clean and do anything they needed around the foster home, and that was how it was. Years later, a man and woman came asking after a little girl, Cindy, they said her name was. The orphanage said they couldn’t help, but it didn’t stop the man and woman from coming around every week and asking questions. They would ask anyone they could find about Cindy.
“I knew her, she was in the family, in the basement. One week I told them what I knew. They told me they were her biological parents. So, they went looking and found her at that house, in the basement, half starving, of course. They reported the foster parents and the whole thing was in the papers – ‘Local foster family found guilty of neglect’, or something. I don’t know what happened to the other kids. The foster home started paying me for my work after that, and they put me in a school, so I used the money I saved from my job and enrolled in college. That’s why I have these,” Tom says, as he finally brings his hand from deep within his bag. With a flourish he produces four large textbooks. “These are my future; business and economics. It took all my savings, but I enrolled on a course at Cal State, a CBE in business and economics, and that’s how I’ll make a success of my life. The foster home I work at is part of the church, so I was told about this place and brought here. This bunker’s a place to stay, probably as good as any other place.”
Drew stretches out on his loser’s bed. “Tom, can I ask you a question?”
“Sure, Pops. Fire away.” Tom is leafing through a book with a red cover.
“Do you believe the Pastor? I mean, the things he says?”
Tom laughs. “Hell no, I don’t even think the Pastor believes the things he says anymore. He’s insane. You heard him earlier today, he wasn’t always like that. He used to preach the gospel, the Bible and that’s all, but then he went away for a few years on a mission to Brazil, but the rumor was he was actually in a mental asylum, who knows? He came back and started a charitable foundation, which he used to buy the foster home and other places. Then things started changing, he slowly changed what he preaches.
“Ever since he came back he wants people to worship him more and more, everything he does is staged to get attention. He’ll go very far out of his way to help you and make you indebted to him. I’ve seen it time and again since I was little, and usually that’s enough to make people love him. He’s got the power and money to make things happen. I suppose it’s not bad, really, if good things come of it. In one way, he’s like a genie, or maybe the devil, he’ll make your wish come true, but only if you give him your soul. But, if that approach doesn’t work, he’ll try another way; if being nice doesn’t work he’ll be aggressive to get your attention, to get your loyalty. He’s very clever, he can analyze people and see that they’re weak too, then he’ll be that thing. Some people are weak to flattery, some to kindness, some to fear and threats. He figures people out and gives them whatever they need to fall for him. Drew? Drew?”
At this point, Drew started to snore, having fallen into a deep noisy sleep.
19
The past is gone
“Up to the ceiling! Down on the ground! Hold, two, three. Up to the ceiling!”
Blinking, bleary and altogether out of sorts, Drew rolls over in his bed and opens a fuzzy confused eye to the noise in his room. From his pillow, he sees some movement.
“Up to the ceiling, down on the ground! Hold, two, three, now back up to the ceiling!”
Tom, barefoot and gasping for air, is midway through a performance in the middle of the floor. It’s a motion, as suggested, of jumping to touch the ceiling then falling down flat on his stomach and stretching his arms out by
his side.
“What are you doing?” Drew asks, in a distant haze.
“This is what they do in the special service. It’s how the green berets stay in shape.” Tom exhales. “They’re famous for it.”
“Are they now?”
“Don’t be grumpy, Drew. It’s time to get up, I’m glad you’re finally awake. I was thinking about twisting your ear through the night because, wow, you snore.”
“No I don’t.” Drew rolls over and covers his head with his pillow.
“Yes, you do, and you fart in your sleep too. I think you farted yourself awake at one point.”
“Was that what that was? I thought I heard a noise, I thought we had a burglar.”
“A farting burglar?” Tom smirks. Halting his exercise, he bends over and rests his hands on his thighs. “Come on,” he says, catching his breath, “let’s get a shower and have some breakfast so we can start the day properly.”
“If we must,” Drew says, throwing his pillow on the floor.
“We must at some point so it might as well be now.”
“Righto.” Drew rolls out of bed and immediately trips over Tom’s red rucksack. “What’s that doing over here?”
“I threw it at you in the night to try and stop you snoring. Wow, you’re a heavy sleeper!”
“Now, that is true. It’s a special skill. I’ve honed it over many years of sleeping on tour buses. You roll and jostle around something awful on a tour bus bed. You feel every pothole on the road and every gear change from the driver, every bit of steering and rumbling can be felt through the thin mattress in a bunk the size of a coffin. That’s why I improved my drinking game, to induce a kind of paralytic sleep that can’t easily be broken. Even without booze, I can sleep a hurricane away in a stationary bed like this one. This room is a real leg-up from a tour bus.”
Tom puts on his socks. “You make touring sound terrible.”
“You get swept up. The trouble is, before long, you get financially dependent on it, and after ten years of touring you get stuck with it. What else is a thirty-two-year-old DJ supposed to do?”
“Business and economics,” Tom says, without hesitation. He pats the books by his pillow.
“I don’t know if I’m fit for that. It might be too late for me. You study hard, Tom, make something of yourself and don’t be like me.”
“I won’t.” Tom smiles.
“I’ll probably end up a roadie. I don’t mind that.” Drew sits up in bed and rests his head on his hand. Some lines appear on his forehead, his lips pout a little and his eyes look over the room. “You know, Tom, lately, I’ve started to feel that my touring habits are proving disadvantageous in the normal world, in the fixed urban life, I mean. In the real world, daily drinking to the point of unconsciousness has always been frowned upon, but on the road it used to be considered decent, especially by the touring elders; the roadies. The old boys of the touring world are a unique breed.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. You don’t see many of the original roadies about these days, due to their advancing years; we all get older, don’t we? And things never stay the same, do they? I remember when I got on a tour bus for the first time, I was so nervous. There I was, on my first tour as a DJ with all these grizzled old vets working for me; the original roadies.
“But that’s when I had a road crew, not like today. Back then I had expensive tours organized by the record label. Ah, those early successful days! Hopes and dreams. What happened to them? Now all I have is a fella named Bobby and a career which is pretty much done. In those first years, I had roadies for sound, lights, stage, set, clothing, catering, everything… big venues and big crowds too. I remember making a celebrity appearance at a mall in New York after my first album dropped. It was Easter Sunday and a group of kids were waiting in line to meet the Easter Bunny when I walked in. As soon as they saw me they forgot all about the Easter Bunny and sprinted over for an autograph. I thought, ‘Wow, I’m more popular than the Easter Bunny – on his day’. What a shame, if only that second tour had sold better…”
Putting on his sneakers, Tom looks up at Drew, and says, “Drew, you’re not all bad, you know. You can always decide to do something else with your life. Don’t let your past define you.”
“You’re a wise one, young Tom. Here I am, harping on about my hardships to an orphan, no offense.”
“None taken. Now stop being pathetic.” Tom finishes his shoestrings with an emphatic tug. “Drew, you didn’t mention if you came here with anyone or not.”
“As it happens, I did. On my way here in the car I saw a woman on the streets and offered her a ride to this place. I haven’t seen her since. I hope she’s okay.”
“She’ll be fine,” Tom says, standing up from his bed. “If she made it inside, not much can go wrong. Mother will have found her a room and she’ll be bunking with someone and doing what we’re all doing – waiting for the hurricane to end. Now, come on, let’s get on with the morning.”
20
Do not stand in a place of danger trusting in miracles
This morning is a very different morning. Indeed, this day is already a very different day from any other Hazel can immediately recollect. This morning, there will be no Flynn to sit on her desk like a pile of work, there will be no desk at all for that matter, or office or sun or sky. She’ll have only the cracked concrete ceiling above her head from dawn till dusk, decorated with unmoving blemishes, pits and marks, its cold expanse is her new horizon, its dangling bulb is her new sun, its stains are her only clouds. In place of California’s morning warmth, she has only a rigid cobwebbed slab of dull gray.
Her morning commute, usually a calming walk along the hot sandy beach, seems like a distant place she wasted with morning frustrations. Her walk this morning is a brisk, shoeless, dusty commute from her small box bedroom to a damp shower block.
Waiting her turn for a shower cubicle, she taps her feet fretfully. Listening to the sound of someone else’s shower from behind a closed door, it occurs to her that her usual trials and tribulations are gone. She finds herself missing them dearly. Yes. This temporary life inside the shelter feels as if it belongs to someone else, these odd circumstances seem as if they are in someone else’s control. If it were her choice, she wouldn’t have to line up for an overused lukewarm shower, and she wouldn’t have to dry her body with a towel too small for its purpose. In fact, she wouldn’t have come to this place at all. No, she’d be in a known place with known challenges, and that place wouldn’t present such a puzzle to her nerves.
Too many questions, apprehensions and worries swim in the current of Hazel’s thoughts. As the shower pours, so do her anxieties, first as single drops then as a deluge. The uneasy stream springs from many places: the Pastor’s beliefs, his unknown intentions and the fervor of his followers. Images of these things distract, occupy and swell into a new feeling she has no name for. It’s a feeling of fatigue and constant dreadful calculation, of weighing up likelihoods and possibilities fused, yet conflicting with the inclination to present a friendly exterior to the people around her that have been so kind yet seem so dangerous in their collective intensity.
Drying her body and wet hair with a coarse small towel, she grows sure that her apprehensions are valid and one by one, in due time, they will come to life. Dressing in yesterday’s clothes, she stands and with a short sharp breath she composes herself for her first full day as a citizen of Salvation, and for the first undefined danger to reveal itself.
21
Diary of Courtney Weaver. March 2021
I’m not sure what date it is, but I suppose it’s morning now. I’m not sure where I am, but I suppose I’m safe. Fortunately, I was able to get some paper and a pencil from the children. They are all such sweet little things, I don’t think they realize there’s a hurricane outside, or maybe they don’t care. I don’t blame them. I don’t care. I should have stayed outside and let the hurricane take me to Ethan.
I’m in a large bunker of s
ome kind. It has a strange damp smell, but I’m getting used to it now, I hardly notice it.
I have no perception of the hurricane from inside here. The walls are very thick, made of concrete. I haven’t seen a TV or a radio. I don’t remember where I put my phone, my bag. I’ve lost all contact with the outside, and with who I used to be. I’m slipping away.
There’s at least half a day that I can’t account for. Immediately after Ethan passed, I waited and waited for help. Eventually, the police and later the ambulance came. From that point, I remember Ethan being loaded into an ambulance, then I fell and I haven’t got back up.
When I arrived in this bunker the Pastor greeted me personally. His wife gave me a bed to sleep in. There’s nothing extraordinary about the room. It’s small and very basic. The bed seems comfortable enough. The frame looks homemade, it’s unpainted, rough wood. The sheets look handmade too. They’re garish brownish orange color in effect, with a circular pattern of various shades of orange that would’ve been normal in the 1970s. But they’re comfortable and well made; someone worked hard to make these. The sheets seem to be a conspicuous attempt to relax the space, but they do little to make up for the lack of windows. The light is dim from one bulb. A large loudspeaker is mounted on the wall between the beds. The Pastor wasn’t lying when he said he had a PA system. They’re everywhere. I bet these speakers can talk to every corner, every corridor and every bed.
Each bed sits at opposite ends of the room. There’s enough floor space between the beds for them to feel separated from one another, which is good, because I share the room with another woman. She seems nice, silent.
