by C.P. Kemabia
THE NIGHTWALKER
C. P. Kemabia
Copyright © C.P. Kemabia, 2014
All rights reserved
Disclaimer
This ebook is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
TO MY GRANDFATHER
AND THE FAMILY HE STARTED...
THE NIGHTWALKER
1
Antwone Devaux slept with the feeling that he had swallowed a living snake. And the snake was moving, coiling and uncoiling around his internal organs, gobbling his pounding heart… And so Antwone woke; his face beading with cold sweat.
He looked over to his digital clock set on the nightstand, and was not surprised to see that it was still two in the morning.
An electric fan was whirring away, dispersing the hot air that stuffed his spacious hotel room which was presently illuminated by a duo of naked bulbs placed at diametrically-opposed nooks of the room, so as to create a better light diffusion throughout. That was the idea, anyway, since their watty glares were so dim they could hardly be said to light anything at all.
But maybe it was just a smoky impression created by the remnants of sleep in his half-closed eyes.
Antwone lazily dropped his tired hand to the carpeted floor, and his fingers hung there for a while. Then, with a new life coming into them, they started threading... and groping. After they gently bumped against an empty beer can, Antwone lifted his hand again and rested it on his flat chest.
Lying there face up, he thought of nothing and felt his mind slowly return to him, like a sturdy boomerang that booms off far into the air and then arches back in its prime momentum for a triumphal return.
Antwone kicked the bedcover away and sat up on his bed, feeling a little strange. The air conditioning was out of service and the nights were cool and moist in the spring. But later they could also become cold.
Antwone had been told about the defective air-conditioning before checking into the room, which was a cross between a loft and a student lounge. But the panoramic view of the city the room offered had sold him completely, so much that he had asked to be accommodated with a fan instead. Now he tried not to mind the moist because it wasn’t a sticky kind of moist. And it wasn’t responsible for keeping him awake.
He looked down across the carpeted floor. It was littered with travel magazines, scrap paper and, obviously, an upturned beer can. Somewhere in the clutter, an ashtray overflowed with cigarette ends.
Antwone swung his feet over and got up from the bed. He then seated himself behind his chaotic-looking writing table where a typewriter and a ream of print papers took pride of place over a rooster of many stationery items. He looked at the paper rode around the typewriter platen. He looked at what was typed upon it... the last paragraph:
She had seen many things that other people wouldn’t believe. It was not for the faintest of heart. It was a plague-ridden food for the soul. A disease of the mind. The curse of the last woman alive. And yet, she had seen it all... All of it.
Antwone stared at the page for several minutes. A deeper level of understanding seemed to crawl on his face.
Alone on the page, the words were somehow conjuring odd images in his mind. Images he hadn’t had overnight when he’d written them. With apprehension, he put his fingers to the keyboard and did not dare make any sudden movement. It was always the same deal. The typewriter – the conduit through which his inner-self flowed into the world – was making it difficult to churn out a single word.
Before, when he used to write just for the sake of it, his relationship with the words was an easy one. He didn’t have to try too hard. He didn’t need a muse to get a good amount of work done. Things had now changed, with the growing expectation from everyone … the publisher … the readers… Even Ava Goldberg, his dedicated literary agent, was pestering him into repeating the success of his previous novels by aping them to some degree and, in her own suggestion, by bringing elements of commerciality to the fore in any forthcoming output. As if you could shortchange success.
Sitting at his writing desk these days gave him something of a fright. The kind of fright you might feel when you see a total stranger at your doorstep at two o’clock in the morning.
Antwone looked at the page and was surprised to see that he had unwittingly typed something:
Expectation is the defoliant of the flower of creativity. It cripples the hands that nurture the soil upon which bloom true, unassailable art…
He quickly struck out that reedy verse and, without second thoughts, as if to redeem himself from his absentmindedness, his fingers hammered away:
However, when that night she looked into the eye of the abyss, what she saw was beautiful. Yet it wasn’t for those who celebrated beauty. It was a devastating silence for the ears, an advanced tumor in the eye, the curse of the last woman alive. Right at that moment, she knew what needed to be done to ease the pain.
He stopped; wound the cylinder knob and the paper advanced vertically. He read the new text and was only half satisfied with it. His writing desk was by the window, and outside it, the city lay dormant, smothered by the dark mass of the night. There was something about it to be reckoned with. Something that mere words could not even begin to cover.
Antwone pushed his chair back. He suddenly felt rotten. His room was rotten. His writing was rotten… It was fifteen past two and yet he did not seem to mind his wakefulness at this wee hour. All nighters had become a normal state of affairs with him. He knew what to do to get himself going. And so he grabbed a coat, pocketed a pack of cigarettes and some chewing gum he luckily found among a heap of crumpled paper.
He did not switch the lights off when he left his hotel room.
Down in the lobby, the night reception clerk, a fresh-faced young stud in livery, was dozing off behind the front desk, his head tilted awkwardly, one cheek resting on his flat hand, one eye open, the other closed. He opened them both as soon as he saw Antwone come out of the elevator.
“How are you doing, sir?” he said. “Can I help you with something, sir?”
“Just going out for a stroll.”
“Want me to call a cab for you?”
“A stroll, I said.”
“Yeah, right––sorry,” the reception clerk said with a smile. “I suppose to air things out up here”—he tapped his brow—“a little walk at this hour is a good exercise.”
“That’s right.”
Antwone made to walk away from the small talk.
“How’s your book coming along, sir?” the clerk eagerly asked.
Antwone shrugged. The young man had immediately recognized Antwone a month ago when he had checked in. He’d also claimed to be a fan of Antwone’s last novel and didn’t shy from offering some mild criticism about what he deemed a flawless piece of experimental fiction, by and large, he had so pointedly remarked.
“It’s coming at a slow pace,” Antwone answered at last, not to be rude.
“Well, if you’d like a pair of eyes to read what you’ve got so far”—he pointed at his eyes—“these ones right here would be honored beyond measure.”
“I’ll keep them in mind, thanks.”
The reception clerk grinned. Antwone walked through the revolving door and was out onto the street. The arc-light on the hotel signboard was spilling over him. The air was gusty and fresher and swooped right up his nostrils. The sky looked like a heavenly plateau mottled with hazy specks of silvery mud. He did not know where that imagery came from. Or if he knew, he’d forgotten.
Antwone looked left, off toward Wilshire Boulevard and right
off toward South Fairfax Avenue. Either direction was sort of blurred out with faint pole and neon lights.
Quite a few places were still open. Some even ran twenty-four hours a day. Others just ran at night, offering all kinds of pay-by-the-hour pleasurable services. And some services were costlier than others.
Antwone shook a cigarette stick out from his pack, lit up and got a move on.
He walked toward the Wilshire Boulevard and felt the old grievance that he had left behind on the page, back in his hotel room. It was to escape the old confrontation with a page you don’t get along so easily with that he now took solitary walks at night.
He was more inspired in the day anyway. Things would come back to him, broken up maybe, like a mirror that’s fragmented and that only reflects parts of the whole picture. But things would get back to him eventually.
As he walked on, passing up storefronts, cars, trees, buildings and even a huge motor truck that was parked at an odd angle on the curb, he felt a little fuzzy around the edges because he was way behind in his sleep. He walked as if he was sleepwalking … a dead man walking into the night at the eve of his life, he thought.
A respectable-looking man accosted him and interrupted his thoughts. The forty--year-old man had quite a demure way about himself. He was wearing a yellow-grey suit jacket with ripped-away jeans and smiled profusely enough to dispel any idea that, given the hour, his intentions were on the criminal side.
When Antwone accepted him for what he was – rather for what he was not, namely a mugger – the stranger proceeded to relate to Antwone a problem that involved needing a few bucks to catch the metro downtown.
Having just rode into town on a bus and having been deceptively stripped of all his possessions, he was now in a bind and had no one else to turn to. The people he was visiting were probably worried sick by now, not having heard from him and he feared they might resort to engage the services of the police for help.
The man said the right words and coordinated his hand gestures to stimulate the intended sympathy in Antwone’s heart. He looked very respectable… His story, on the other hand, sounded hard to swallow. But the man looked very respectable. Everything about him seemed okay.
Antwone handed him a banknote of twenty dollars and walked away while the man waved after him and said something he could not make out.
At night, things looked very different from their regular aspect in the daytime. The places, the people … everything seemed to change, seemed to become something else, for better or worse. It was not a conscious transformation. It was not even apparent. But it was there. And Antwone had seen it. He had seen it in the people he had observed, sometimes just to see what they did and how they did it, in the name of character research.
What was it that the pseudo-antagonist of Knight of Rain, his latest novel, had said about people?
I mean, look at them: execs, jobbers, dopers, cheaters, fuckers… They look all alike in the crowds; they walk the sidewalks at night, confident in their lies and mischief of the day. But they are in a hell. And they’re going to die in a hell, just like the rest of us!
On Orange Street, Antwone passed in front of a drugstore surmounted with a faltering green-lit sign and before he got to the next junction, he stopped, doubled back and entered the drugstore. A few minutes later, he came out popping white little pills into his mouth and went on.
At about fifteen past four, after roving past an elementary school, a public park and all the litter-strewn streets in between those two tidy establishments, Antwone arrived at Colgate Avenue and gladdened for he was not far from his end destination.
From there he walked along Hauser Boulevard to a roundabout and up to a little intersection off a side street.
He stood there leisurely, hands deep in his coat’s pockets, the wind sweeping around him, streetlights creating a superimposed dark shadow beneath him and yet having a colorful effect on his face.
Antwone gazed up at a multistory building that was topped by a sizeable weather beacon. And the beacon was effusively brilliant against the dark cloak of the night sky, as brilliant as the stars themselves if they’d been out tonight.
Antwone stuck a cigarette in his mouth and did not light it up right away. His eyes were greatly taken by the sheer whiteness, the utter radiance of that beacon up there. And his mind spun as his eyes soaked up the sights.
Some memories of yore swirled back into being in the part of his brain that dealt with repression. But it was alright though; because somehow these memories were fodder to his creative wholesomeness. And when, by chance, he’d found the building with the weather beacon atop it, he had known that he would come back to see it, again and again and again…
The sound of a homeless person pushing an old caddy with rickety wheels pulled Antwone out of his reverie.
He stepped aside to not be in the way of the caddy and the homeless person nodded at him in passing.
After that, Antwone lit up his cigarette and cast another eye toward the weather beacon. But he knew he was done with the sighting and felt like going back to his hotel.
He hailed a taxicab for the trip back…
2
