Proyas

(the events described below take place approximately one year after Simon's disappearance)

If it isn’t dawn already, it soon will be. I open my eyes again and shift on the mattress, my muscles incapable of rest or relaxation. My digital watch stares me in the face, lying smug and cocksure in it’s place next to the mattress.
This is impossible. Insomnia. It’s never quite as romantic as one would imagine, at least not when you haven’t slept for eight days straight... nor really done anything except lie there and stare at nothing. Well, okay, not nothing... I know every crack and imperfection in the sheer white walls of the room. There’s a small spider that lives in the corner behind Simon’s magazines. How it manages to catch enough flies down there is beyond me. I’m convinced that it’s either living on dust, or sucking my blood when I’m not looking.
I finally rise to commit the mortal sin of gluttony, raiding the uncomfortably new refrigerator even though sustenance is the last thing I need. The thing is, though, that there’s just no way of knowing. I could be starving, but in all honesty, I’ve forgotten how that feels. My final decision is a compromise of sorts: I open a milk carton. Not too thrilled at the smell that greets me, I open a beer, the can’s sharp crack-hiss about as unglamorous and impotent as possible. I stare into the fridge as the door drifts lazily closed.
The kitchen is inhabited by another electronic device that taunts me mercilessly: the phone. The goddamn fucking phone. There’s a shitty weirdness to how stuff like phones and cars have become more than the sum of their parts. They’re status symbols now, affirmations of your quality of life and your rank among whichever social hierarchy you belong to.
People with lives have friends; those with friends receive calls. Am I therefore to deduct that if no-one calls me, I have no life? What about people who receive calls, but have no lives? Do they lead a better existence than those without friends? Friends often result in complications... or so I’m told.
I sip the beer. What would happen if I called the bastard? Where is he? And what about Mark? Simon would have told Mark where he was going. An uncomfortable swell of jealousy rises momentarily within me, like an underwater eruption channeled into a house’s plumbing and singeing the unfortunate soul seated on the toilet. I belch.
Wait a minute. That’s it. I’ll fucking call Mark.

***

A girl answers the phone. I freak out and hang up. After a few seconds, I pick up the phone and hit redial.
“This sucks,” I say to the dial tone. “I mean, it’s not as if Mark will have found his phone in the time it took me to do that.”
“Hallo?” says the girl’s voice. I realise she probably heard the last of my monologue. I take another swig of beer, but it goes down the wrong pipe and I cough convulsively, unable to speak.
“Hallo?” the girl says again, followed by some angry and inquisitive foreign words. The only word I manage to squeeze out of my throat is “Uhrml,” and then she hangs up.
I dial again, and again the girl answers, delivering a long string of foreign words that sound positively insulting.
“Can I speak to Mark, please?”
“Ha?”
“May I speak to Mark,” I repeat. “Dude,” I add after a pause, instantly wishing I hadn’t. “Or, you know, whatever,” I also add in the worst save in the history of man.
“Oh. Who is this?”
“This is his friend Warren.”
“Hallo?”
“Warren?” I offer tentatively.
“He’s not here,” she guesses rather than affirms.
“Um, okay. What’s your name?”
“What?”
“I’m sorry, what’s your name, please?”
“Um, Owsluygh.”
“I’m sorry, what? How’s what?”
“No, my name. Ows-luygh,” she almost yells, extremely annoyed.
“Okay. I’m Warren.” Wait, didn’t I already say that?
“Okay. Should I tell Mark you called?”
“Should you tell who what?”
She honks a honk of pretentious exacperation.
“Should I tell Mark that you called?”
“No, I want you to tell him to check if his refrigerator’s running.”
“What?”
“Of course I want you to tell him I called! You think I’m calling because I wanted to have some bullshit conversation with you? What the fuck’s the matter with you? Is everyone fucking retarded in this country?”
There is another honk, and she hangs up.
That went well.

***

When I first came here about a year ago with Simon, Dario and Vermont, I quickly realised I was going to need some serious curtains if I was going to survive. I spent my first month’s allowance on a pair of two-inch thick, wine-red wool curtains that took me four hours to put up, followed by a day trip to Dario’s girlfriend’s house to wash the second curtain after Vermont threw up on it and fell asleep in it, which was followed by Simon and Dario pissing on him (and the curtain, obviously).
I’m proud of my curtains, and they have served me well. If they hadn’t been there last fall, it would have been considerably harder to have sex with Laura while Vendredi listened to his huge Bose headphones last fall, and that date with Annelise probably wouldn’t even have happened. Man, did that girl love curtains.
Drawing my curtains gives me the same satisfaction as pet owners get from feeding their pets, or so I would imagine. I feel them glowing with pleasure as they bask in my firm, yet gentle carress, and can practically hear them purr as I pull them apart to allow some shockingly drab sunlight in. Me and My Curtains smirk conspiratorially at one another, for we both know that the sunlight is only a temporary visitor, a tenant whose rent we will suckle away from it like milk from the teat of a rural Chinese whore before evicting it mercilessly, tossing it’s earthly posessions from a second story balcony as it begs us for a second chance.
So you can imagine how close my dissappointment bordered on shock when I draw the curtains to reveal Vendredi standing outside my apartment trying to ring the doorbell. He turns and sees me, the darkness inside forcing him to squint.
We stand there for a while, not really sure how to react. Finally, Vendredi tries pushing the doorbell button one more time. He looks back at me, confused, and waves awkwardly. I sigh slightly and swallow as I start towards the door.

***

“I, uh, I think your doorbell might be, like, broken, or something.”
“I was in the bathroom. The doorbell works,” I lie.
“So, uh, what’s up.”
“Not much, really.”
The apartment I rent is decidedly spacious, but asides from my beautiful curtains, there’s not really much to speak of in it. I sit on my mattress and Vendredi on the floor accross from me.
“Yeah. Um, I was like, wondering if there’s like, uh...” Vendredi trails off in midsentence, staring into space as he talks.
“Uh-huh. Yeah. Okay, look. I was kind of on my way out, so uh... yeah.”
Vendredi suddenly looks at me. “Okay. That’s okay. I’ll just... stay here, I guess.”
Oh dear God, no! “Stay here?” I ask, straining not to raise my voice.
“Uh, yeah, ‘cause like, uh, Tanner’s like, back, and uh...”
“Wait a minute, wait a minute, what?” I blurt out in less than a second.
“Yeah, he, uh... he’s like here and, uh, I think he’s like, moving in with Biz, and uh... yeah.”
“And what?” I feel like screaming into the ultrasonic range.
“...and so I guess I like, have to leave... and stuff.”
“I’m sorry, am I missing something here? Didn’t Tanner shoot Biscuit in the foot with a harpoon when they were in New York?”
“Uh...”
My mind races. How did Tanner get back here? Didn’t he get deported? Didn’t he spend the last of his money on that stupid fucking car? And what would he be doing here anyway? I thought he hated this place.
I chew my lip nervously and glance around the room for no particular reason, and suddenly notice that Vendredi hasn’t been staring at nothing, he’s been staring at Simon’s magazines...
...what did he say?
“Wait a minute, b-back up a second. You-you’re what? Staying here? As in living here?” My brain screams at me, but my mouth stays silent.
“Uh, yeah, I guess. I mean, if it’s like... okay and stuff.”
I fall into a euphoric daze as the sheer horror of living with Vendredi capsizes my mind into a bottomless and terrifying ocean of Leviathans and Kraakens hell-bent on the consumption of my mortal soul.

to be continued