What was that?

   I don’t know if I hadn’t rested well enough or maybe it was the fact that I was using earplugs to block all sounds coming from my annoying roommates.  I had fallen asleep, like always, almost at three in the morning and wasn’t expecting to have nothing notable to tell when I woke up. But then, nightmares and dreams happen and apparently my brain is very active these days.

I know I had a very active dream first. I don’t really remember what it was about but I do remember when I woke up, covered in sweat, in the middle of the night. Something had scared me or made me run because I was panting and sweating and trying to breath. But, after all, I was still sleepy so I fell asleep again and that next dream I remember very well.

 It happened in an airport, just after I had arrived from somewhere to Brasilia. I have no idea if it was actually Brasilia. I have never been there myself but in the dream it was pretty clear that was the city I was in. I walked around the airport and remembered walking with one bag and looking at the incredible ceiling of the terminal and thinking that not so many people used the airport. My subconscious didn’t really add that much people to the dream, only some background “extras”. I walked a lot on that airport, watching the stores and just enjoying myself.

 Then, after many corridors, I arrived at what appeared to be a hotel reception. There, there was a woman who checked me in and joined me to my room, which had all curtains and blinds closed. Somehow, I didn’t think it was strange or weird in any way. When she left, I immediately lay down and rested for a while. Then, I noticed that it was actually very early in the day still and that I had to take advantage of whatever time I had in the city so I had thought of getting a taxi to take me downtown.

 But this I only thought of. Apparently, I couldn’t’ move from the bed anymore but I really wanted to. I didn’t want to waste any time of my trip, which was short I guess, but nothing could make my legs move. I could see the sunlight filtering through the curtains and somehow that made me even sleepier than I already was.

 I fell asleep in a dream and woke up a bit later, the orange light of the afternoon entering the room.  Again, I got worried I was wasting my time in Brasilia so this time I was able to stand up and go to the bathroom. There, I washed my face and started thinking that maybe I had no money to pay the hotel fee. I worried as I checked my bag and went around the room. But then I remembered I did have money so it wasn’t a problem. Curiously, I thought of a trip I was going to make in real life, as if the two events had some relation with the other.

 I went back to sitting in bed and thought of buying a low-cost ticket to Rio and check the city there, doing a favela tour and taking lots of pictures. But I never got out of the hotel room; I didn’t seem capable to do so. I woke up slowly, still thinking about the money. I was sweating a bit and my covers were all around the place. The cold wind of the night was freezing my feet and I had to fix it all to lie there more comfortably. It was late and I had cancelled my alarm clock, which I put on everyday to wake up early to write. I didn’t write a word that day.

  That day, a Saturday, I decided to relax completely. I didn’t do my daily workout either and showered after 1 PM. The rest of the day was relaxing, except for the fact that an apparently important football game was going to take place and there was people everywhere, including my apartment, waiting for it to happen.

 Decided to avoid that, I left to have lunch and then wander around. I ended up exercising after all when I had to walk eight kilometers to my house just because I wanted to take a stroll by the ocean, which was covered by greyish clouds and seemed not to be in the right mood for anyone to come close. I had thought the weather would be better but it wasn’t. When I got home, my feet hurt and I was tired. That Saturday I fell asleep pretty late too, even though I was tired. Something always distracts me.

 I ended up having another dream. Or maybe it was a nightmare. It had different stages or levels or whatever you want to call them but they were all related: it was about me and my father and how we couldn’t really communicate with each other. We argued about thing I don’t remember in different locations that had absolutely nothing to do with is. I think one of them was the former house of my grandfather and another one looked like a market but one that I had never seen before.

 The dream was exhausting. Even being in it, I could notice my body wasn’t working correctly. I was breathing heavily and I couldn’t help thinking it was because I seemed to run after my father a lot in the dream. We moved around the scene like it was a theatre stage and it made me dizzy but I went on doing it exactly the same way because, somehow, it made sense that I did it that way.

 He was being very harsh with me. He insulted me in front of other family members and we fought and I wanted him to understand something but I don’t really remember what that was. And he called me a failure I think and then I realized I couldn’t speak. I tried very hard but couldn’t. My face felt drowned and I woke up then.

 But when I did, I strangely still dreaming because I kept talking or, at least, trying to talk. I opened and closed my mouth and reached for something or someone that wasn’t there and all of this happened in my bed. I had my eyes opened and I remember it vividly. I fell asleep right back and then my voice did work and I could speak and tell him what I felt but he didn’t seem to care about what I had to say. He was so mean and harsh that, when I woke up for good, I realized he wasn’t really my father.

 I had to recover myself from that dream, trying to slow down my breathing and walking outside to turn off that damn light the idiots I live with always leave on. When I went back to bed I felt my back being very wet and I wondered if wearing pajama pants had anything to do with that. After all, I normally slept in my underwear and without a t-shirt even and now I was wearing it all. Did that made me dream so much?

 It was 7AM, according to my cellphone. I still had some hours to rest so I decided to try and use them to calm myself down and breathe easily. I tried to think of places filled with nature and calm and I remembered two beautiful parks I had been in Amsterdam. Both day I had been freezing but I always liked to go to places were normal people went instead of the ones filled with tourists only.

 That apparently helped because I fell asleep for three hours but when I woke up, I gave myself some more minutes to relax, to keep my eyes closed and to breath in order to calm myself down.

 Two nights in a row my brain had given me reasons to run around and worry and try to solve problems that weren’t there. Or were they? What did those dreams meant, if they meant anything at all? I’ve never really bought into all of that psychological shit that says that if you dream about flying it means something. I don’t think the brain is that smart But I do think you dream from your memory and it curious why your subconscious uses certain memories to play around.

 Waking up in the middle of the night, or morning, sweaty and tired, is something that hadn’t happened to me in a while. Normally I don’t remember what I dream but this time it was like both times I had actually just been in those places. And maybe they were nightmares but I have no idea of telling because there wasn’t something obviously scary about them.

 I just decided to write it all down because I don’t want to forget anything about it. Maybe those dreams will come in handy one day. Or maybe writing them down will make them go away or at least change. Who knows?

Ballad of the dead

   A couple of crows flew by, landing next to a large mausoleum, belonging to a general who had died long ago, in a battle no one remembered, in a country no one cared about anymore. The crows turned around on their dark feet and gazed at what appeared to be a shadow slowly walking up the hill. But the shadows was not such, she was a beautiful woman all dressed in black, walking slowly, trying not to make a strong effort climbing the hill that served as a cemetery in this region. The place was beautiful but grim and grey because of the many storm clouds travelling through the sky. Rain had already fallen and it would possibly fall again soon.

 The woman passed the general’s mausoleum and also a small patch of grass where several small crosses indicated the presence of bones belonging to several unidentified soldiers. But they were not marked as “unknown”, they were just marked with white crosses and some dead flowers. She only glanced at them, putting then her hands inside her pockets. A gust of wind had swept through the hill and she had received it full on her face. She was trembling and apparently had the urge to go back, because she stopped and turned around and looked at the town, which could be seen perfectly from there. She had been born in that place long ago and had left soon after. She didn’t know the place like her father and her grandfather before him. She was just there to see them.

 Finally, she took a left on a row of tombstones and knelt at the end of that path, were flowers and grass grew large and beautiful because of the soil that was so rich in nutrients. She caressed the tombstone, cleaned it with her hands covered in gloves and read the name of her father, slowly, as if she had no idea who he was. Almost instantly, a big lonely tear ran down one of her cheeks. And then, another one. Finally, she really cried, she allowed herself to do what she hadn’t done in all these years. She cried because she hadn’t been there when he had died and she cried because she had left home so young and had put them all at bay, fearing they might convince her to make the same mistakes they did.

 She wasn’t scared when a voice, a very cold and raspy voice, asked her not to cry anymore. She said, out loud, that she couldn’t bring herself to stop, because she felt guilty and needed to get it all out of her system.

   - So it’s all about you?

 The voice was right. She was crying just to cry, just to make herself feel better and free of any guilt from having been responsible for her father’s death. She knew she hadn’t been there, that she had been missed and they had asked her to return so many times. But, to her, that town was death itself and tried not to go back for many years.

 The woman had finally decided to do it, to confront her life and just do what she had to do.  But apparently it hadn’t been enough. Because now she saw him, her dad, standing in front of her, judging her choices and thoughts and actions. He was silent and wouldn’t say a single word about anything. He had always been like that, even when she was a kid, he would just look at her and she could know what he thought of her just by paying attention at his expressions.

 It was his fault too and that had to be proof. He had always been so far, so private and cold. How could have he asked for more from her when she never saw anything more at home. Her mother was not much different. She would always get busy doing something, just in order not to be depressed. She had some sever episodes when she couldn’t even see other people but she couldn’t be alone either. Besides, she suffered from migraines, so things where always charged with a level of tension no kid should ever have to bear.

 So the daughter stood up and followed the image of her father, that had stopped looking at her and was now just walking through the graves as if he had know the place like the palm of his hand. They didn’t have to walk much to find the grave of the mother, where the woman pour some more tear and realized how unfair she had been with all of them. She sat down on the damp grass and just touched the stone, the letters of her mother’s name and asked her why she had been so distant, why they had been so judgmental when they had raised her to be exactly who she had grown up to be.

 The woman had a nice boyfriend, a good job and a home, where she was happy most of the time. She had come to this town to be miserable, as miserable as she had ever been in all her life away from them. And now they looked at her as if she was the one who had been wrong, as if she had been the one that had caused the rupture between all of them, causing her to flee that life that was unbearable to any living person.

And then she remembered little Roby. His death had occurred six months after she had left to the city. Of course, she heard they had blame it all on her. They said he had been heartbroken that she had left because he had lost his big sister but that was just another lie, another attempt to make her feel worthless. The kid was too young to even notice he had a sister. And he had been born with so many problems. She cried for him to but they were tears of anger that she shed all over the graves of small boys and girls that had died long ago, Roby among them. She dedicated all those tears to damn, as they needed to know how wrong their parents were.

 Her parents, on the other hands, started talking and talking, and she was not interested in hearing anything they had to say. She stood up and ran up the hill, as fast as she could until she fell to the ground, having stepped on a large rock covered in moss. The fall had hurt but not as much as it hurt to hear them accusing her for so many things that she hadn’t even been there for and for other things that she didn’t even remembered. Her mother’s voice was especially annoying, very loud sometimes, the voice of someone who doesn’t speak too much.

 The woman slowly stood up and cursed her parents, told them to burn in hell or in heaven or wherever their real souls were. She yelled at them, saying that she was tired of having to carry the weight of a family that had been crumbling own for so long. Her father was a worthless maggot and her mother a crazy bitch.

    - There you have it! Now leave me alone!

 They did stop talking but they didn’t leave, their images still standing by, waiting for her to say something more. And she did. She told them it had been their fault that Roby died and it also had been their fault hat he existed, that he lived for such a short period of time suffering every single day. It was because of their sick minds and bodies that he had been born with so many problems and it was that that killed him, not her or anyone else for that matter.

 She walked the remainder of the hill and when she was at the top. She noticed the son was filtering through the clouds of rain. She felt its rays touching her skin, making her feel like she had finally done what she had to do, what she hadn’t been able to do when they were all alive. But then, they reappeared and several other figures like them. Their faces accused them of being of the same family, generations and generations of unstable people that had been raising awful families for children to turn into maniacs themselves. She had seen the light beforehand and she had been so grateful for it.

 They grew closer and closer and she just felt her body give in, kneeling there, being caressed by the cold wind of a region filled with people that were more dead than alive. She raised her hands to the sun and begged for peace and calm in her life. All the images of relatives looked at her and only one came closer and touched her head softly. She looked at the ghost and realized it was her grandmother, the only one that she had talked to during her exile in the city. She understood why she had fled and she didn’t judge. And now, even dead, she was on her side.

 That same night, the woman drove back to the city and she never heard or saw anyone again. Her prayers had been answered and she would never have to be a victim of her family anymore.

Messenger

   It was the children that love to look at him more than anyone else. Maybe it was because he was some kind of a novelty in their lives, having seen only their parents all their lives. The man in the bed just lay there, having been unconscious since the day he appeared in the front lawn of their cabin, far into the tundra. They had a decent life there, maybe not very exciting but they it was consistent and it was mostly safe to raise a family and to create values that in the rest of the world we in decline.

 The man they had found had his nose broken and several bruises all over his body, as if someone or something had kicked him repeatedly. He had some older scars and he had a black eye that healed pretty quickly. Yet, he wouldn’t wake up. Mama would try different salts and medicines they had, she tried the fat of the animals they hunted and several leafs and fruits from the forest but he appeared to be oblivious to an of them. Father was a bit more violent and would yell in different volumes to try and wake him up. He would say different kinds of things including asking him if he was a soldier or a spy but it never worked.

 After the first month, they got really worried. Even the children, who love to go into that room and play around the man, were now tired of him been asleep and wanted him to live, maybe even to tell them their story. The kids, boy and girls of around ten years old, jumped all around the poor man and screamed like crazy, hoping it would work but it didn’t. They pushed him hard and were even as violent or more than their father. They cried and screamed and the kicked him and screamed again but eventually they would just make their parents crazy so they stopped.

 Outside, winter was finally over and the sun was beginning to be a little stronger. In this region of the world, winter never really ended and it was cold all year except for some days were things appeared to change. Anyway, the fact was that there was no more snow and the temperature was tolerable so Father took both kids hunting one day and retook the lessons he had been giving them before the winter. He had been teaching them about the bow and arrow and how to use them and how not to scare your prey.

 As the kids and their father bonded, Mother stayed in and cooked some deer meat she had frozen a week before. Deer meat was the best kind of food one could find in the region as it was soft but also rich in nutrients and could pass for cow meat, which they never consumed. She chopped some of the vegetables they grew on the greenhouse and put them in the pot with the meat. She realized she had forgotten to chop the onion so proceeded to do it but them a muffled voice, more of a complaint, was heard all over the house. She turned and screamed her lungs out.

 The youngest heard her and ran as fast as he could to the house, followed by his sister and Father. When they got there, the man that had been in bed for so many months was laying face down on the kitchen floor, now drooling and making a very strange sound. The Mother was livid, shaking like crazy. She was still holding the big knife she used to chop things and only let it go when her husband pulled it away from her. He then checked the pulse of the man on the floor and realized he was still alive and that his pulse was faster than before. He asked everyone to help him carry back to the room and there they tied one hand to the bed, preventing another scare.

 At dinner, everyone ate their deer in silence. They didn’t talk, ever, during meals, but this time Mother started crying and told Father she couldn’t keep living like this, with that man being captive in and improvised room. It was like keeping a prisoner and that didn’t make senses. She proposed to take him to the authorities, even if it meant travelling a full day to reach the nearest settlement. The Father did not respond, not right then at least. He had never trusted the authorities, even if it had been the government itself the one that had gave them authorization to live there.

 He finally said he would think about it. He wanted to know that man wasn’t going to die in the middle of the journey. And he really wanted to know who he was and why he was wandering so far into the tundra. Mother did not insist, changing the subject to the children not eating because of the earlier scare. She was right: they had always thought of the man in the bed as some sort of good elf but after hearing their mother’s tale of how he yelled something she couldn’t understand and then collapsed and drooled making sounds, it scared them.

 The next day, the Father tried again to make the man talk. This time, he didn’t yell or pushed him. He just sat down by his side and started reading the man in the bed the contract the government had given him in order to be able to live there. He started reading from the very beginning, with a normal pace and changing pages with a gracious move of the hand. The document consisted of at least twelve pages, detailing every single aspect the family had to take into account while living there.

 Back when he had signed the contract, it was only Father and Mother. But the contract specified how many children they could have living in that house, the dimensions of he house itself, which animals they could hunt and which ones they couldn’t, from where they could grab the water to survive and which trees they could use for heating and so on. Every single detail about living in that remote region of the world was in those pages and Father read every single one of them. But he didn’t need to as he knew them by heart.

 When he finished, he raised his head and realized the man had his eyes open. Without changing his pace or volume of voice, he asked the man who he was and what he was doing in his land. The man open his mouth but the words appeared to be trying to get out of it all at the same time. He grunted and tried again but nothing came out. He seemed to wanting to say something and he wasn’t happy at all when he couldn’t. He was certainly not happy when he couldn’t move one of his hands in order to complain. He looked at Father with red eyes, grunting.

 Kids and wife looked at Father, how he asked silence from the Man and slowly move his mouth, making soft sounds and then reciting all the letters of the alphabet. The Man stopped grunting and looked at Father. There was something dark, something mysterious in his voice. As he tried to recite the alphabet two, he started sweating and his eyes went very fast from Father to Mother and then to each of the kids. It was unsettling and combining it with the letters of the alphabet didn’t make it any better. Father continued, slowly, by spelling his name. He did it several times, pointing at himself with a finger.

 Then, he pointed at the man and fell silent. The man looked more scared that ever before and tried, again, to talk. At first, the same type of grunts returned to his mouth but then he tried to clear his mouth and a letter came out in a very deep voice. Mother let out a squeal and the kids’ mouths were very open. The letter was “D”. Father asked Mother something to write on and a pencil and she looked for them after snapping out of it. He wrote a big D and showed it the man, who nodded.

 The following letters where “A” and “N”, so they decided that his name was Dan. He started coughing like mad after he had said that last letter; coughing so hard blood came out of his mouth. Mother brought him something to clean himself with but he prevented her from coming neared. He saw the spots of blood in the covers with terror, his eyes also filled with blood. He looked at them, hopeless and guilty. Trying to calm him, the family came closer but he just said to more letters, which Father wrote.

 Something happened then that no one would ever be able to explain mainly because no person alive can really say what happened. Some say the gran began to shake, others say it was the roof that suddenly came off. All agree, however, that sound appeared to disappear for a moment in the world. Many years later they would found that house destroyed and the notebook where Father had written the word “DANGER”. In smaller writing, below, he had also written “deaf”, and that was it. No one ever knew what happened but it was clear the Man had failed to deliver his message.

Soon

   His body entered the water slowly and was soon covered in foam that smelled of vanilla. He sat down on the edge of the enormous Jacuzzi and just closed his eyes and pulled his head back. Adam was trying to relax after the party he had thrown, a luncheon in honor of all the donors that had decided to give money to the hospital his foundation ran. They were all nice people, always smiling and nodding and shaking hands with one another. Adam knew most of them really well, from other events and from social encounters, and he knew most of them wee awful people.

 He took advantage of their guilt to fuel his philanthropic endeavors with all the money they had to give which was a lot. They were owners of huge companies and brands and taking a thousand dollars out of their bank account was almost unnoticeable. Their guilt came from the fact that most of them were always doing something behind close doors, whether it was having an affair, or having links with organized crime or having some sort of sickness or condition that they didn’t want anyone to find out about, among other reasons.

 It’s not like they knew Adam knew but rather than they used any social service available to atone for their sins and guilt. For Adam, who was a young businessman and also the owner of several companies, that had to be taken advantage of, instead of potentially loosing that money to other “causes” like prostitutes or alcohol. He didn’t have to threaten or to convince anyone, they just did what he expected them to do and that had always been the case even when his father was alive.

 It had been five years ago that his father had died and had left him in charge of every single one of the companies he owned and also in possession of most of his estates. Of course, his siblings had attempted to fight this will but he soon clarified no one would be kicked out of nowhere and there would be no fighting among family members. He distributed the estate and was sure everyone was represented in the various businesses they had. That way he earned his family’s trust and also the respect of their community of wealth.

 In time, with his keen eye for business, he managed to win the respect of every single company owner in the country and was able to prove to them that his young age was not a downside of who he was but rather and interesting and potentially key characteristic. After all, his father had died when he was just twenty-seven years old and many in the companies and among his family thought he wasn’t mature enough. He had an older sister and his dad had partners who were more experienced. But the will of his father was respected and he ended up being what they all needed in order not to let everything be lost.

 However, he wasn’t perfect himself. It was not that Adam had any obvious flaw but rather that he had too much interest in his rivals and friends. He had many of them watched by private investigators, forming kind of a team that revealed to him every little dirty secret they all had behind close doors. This gave him the advantage in every business negotiation because, although he would never blackmail anyone, he knew how to use those secrets in his own advantage. He was truly obsessed with getting to know everything about a person and wouldn’t let his investigators rest if they hadn’t found anything meaty.

 In that luxurious bathtub, he would often have a bath, as he would check all the files on his investigations. He was very adamant that if there wasn’t any interesting discovery in the first month, he normally left the person alone unless it was a current rival of sorts. He didn’t want to be using all of that to be a rat. Business was business and that’s what it was all about but personal things, very personal ones were just out of bounds. He had discovered, for example, how some people he investigated were HIV positive or had cancer. This for example was never used against them and the files he had were destroyed because that was personal.

 What he liked to find was something like a love affair, like some weird transaction with the mob or something like that. Both those things made people feel very guilty and guilty people are not good for business. It was very easy beating them in that arena where he had learned to excel from a young age, thanks to the tutoring of his father. He used those really silly secrets to make them tremble in their pants and from there his victory was already settled.

 The fun thing about it all was that Adam tried to be the contrary of all those rivals. First of all, he wasn’t stupid enough to do something crooked. He had all kinds of advisors and people working for him that would tell him if he was making a mistake or how to achieve something without the need of dirty money or cheating. If he didn’t saw an honest way to do something, he simply didn’t do it. He was rich enough so it wasn’t that bad not to win more money. He wasn’t driven by money because he had learned to control his thirst for power.

 Besides, he was very open about his life, both personal and in business and was always very clear that he didn’t answer to any one in his personal decisions and that only his family mattered in his business ones. That was it so he wasn’t the best media character, even if some news outlets loved to show some pictures of him hugging beautiful models, kissing men and women or having luxurious holidays in some faraway hotspot.

 Adam was not about settling, that was true. He wouldn’t marry any women because he thought that kids would come soon and he didn’t wanted children not to have a father. Because he was always away for business, was always focused on that and had only a few very well defined moments during the week when he could just relax. He didn’t think a wife and kids deserved that, even if it came with all the money and privilege he had to offer. His mother insisted that he got married to continue the line and have someone inherit all of it when he died. And she was right but he had no idea how to accomplish that.

 He had also thought of the option of marrying a man but that had the same problems, minus the conceiving part that would be replaced by the whole process of adoption or by them using a surrogate mother, which was his favorite option of the two. Any way, he wouldn’t have time for them and he wanted to be able to share everything.

 The bottom thing was that he needed to love someone and that didn’t happen. He had sex often enough and went into dates and was charming as a man could be, but no one had really made him think about them as a potential wife or husband. He was very nice and a complete gentleman with them but he needed someone that gave him something he didn’t have, that made him feel unbalanced but, at the same time, that made him feel like everyone with that person was worth it.

 Adam was not very big on the concept of love. He thought it more like an alliance of sorts were two people realize they have to be together because they work much better as a team. He knew many people like that, friends and family, and he had the image of his parents, who had always loved each other just like that, helping each other and being the best partners one could ever see.

 With the soothing sound of water around him, Adam realized that some day he would want children, that one day he would want to wake up and find someone he loved to smell next to him. He was only thirty two years old and thought that maybe it could happen the next day or in a couple of years but he was sure it would happen because, sometimes, he felt that need but it wasn’t as strong as it could be. He knew it wasn’t strong enough yet.

 He then stood up and walked naked towards a wall, where some wind blowers dried him up. He had to stand there like the Vitruvius man, feeling the soft caress of all that wind. Then, his mouth began to feel dry and the world around him started to get distorted. He felt dizzy and tried to hold on to the well but he just fell to the ground, a marvelous granite floor.