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tkc-info · 3 years ago

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Carpe Diem

Day 7 - night

@wagner-fell @chibi-tsukiko @littleturtle95

2018

“And what do you usually do for Departure Night?” Barbara asked at breakfast.

Caleb looked up from his cereal bowl, but never stopped eating, to meet her eyes. Urick’s mother was a chubby, short Black woman in her fifties. She worked in a nursery home in Aboveground Winchester, so she usually wore aquamarine scrubs exclusively. However today she’d come down for breakfast dressed in 1950s casual clothes, her hair —which she wore in locks— up in a messy bun.

“I don’t celebrate Departure Night,” Caleb said. He probably should’ve used the plural form instead of referring only to himself, but remembering he’d been part of a family unit hurt too much.

Barbara tsked in disapproval. Caleb did his best not to flinch at the sound. “Departure Night is a celebration for all of The Kinship, of course,” she said as she poured honey onto a tower of pancakes “Every Saz can have fun during it, but we doppelgängers live for Departure Night. You have to do something special today.”

Caleb shrugged. “Never really saw the point of it.”

Back when everything was okay, his family just watched the Khioax setting fire to the Vessel, and the news that followed it for a while before turning off the TV. Then they would go play some music like every other, unremarkable night.

“Nonsense,” Barbara set the honey aside and joined Caleb at the kitchen counter “You’re spending tonight with me. We’re going to Las Vegas.”

“Pardon?”

“Didn’t you hear me? Kid, you need to clean your ears thoroughly if you didn’t, because I was very clear.”

Caleb felt his face go red —from indignation or embarrassment, he didn’t know. “My ears are clean.”

Barbara hummed in a weird way. “Whatever you say,” she turned her face to the door “I hope these kids come down soon, I need to get some stuff from Target and the automaton has run out of battery.”

“You could be the one going.”

“If you come with me.”

Caleb didn’t say anything else, and Barbara laughed.

Truthfully, he, too, hoped someone would walk into the kitchen, especially if that someone was Urick. Barbara never failed to make Caleb uncomfortable; she always invited him to go on walks with him, prepared delicious food so that ‘the kid could eat some much-needed spices’, or Irish or French dishes because ‘now that the kid is with us, we have to adapt our diet a little bit’, she always offered to buy him clothes he didn’t need for no reason other than they would look good on him. Caleb wasn’t used to this attentiveness, his parents had never been there much. He felt more at ease with Urick, who was calmer and slightly more withdrawn into himself.

“I’m thinking of cooking one of my inventions for dinner,” Barbara mused “And I will need beef for it. Airele,” her oldest child after Urick “Is friends with this guy from that one expensive butchers, so she can get a discount. Then I need—”

Barbara began listing every ingredient she would need for tonight. To Caleb’s mild horror, she loved cooking made-up dishes that somehow tried to mesh a myriad of cuisines. Sometimes, the outcome was delicious; others, Caleb would rather eat in his former school’s cafeteria. Tonight’s dinner probably fell into the former category, but still.

“We’ll watch the Khioax while we have dinner, and then you and I will take a portal to Las Vegas.”

Caleb chocked on his cereal. “I really have to go?”

“Of course,” Barbara said, eating her pancakes without a care of the panic Caleb was going through “You’re a doppelgänger. Doppelgängers don’t stay Departure Night holed up in their houses, that’s for the rest of the Saz. Don’t worry, kid, you’ll love my friends, and Las Vegas consumed in fire is always a gorgeous sight.”

Caleb would rather not see Las Vegas on fire. Not because he was afraid —it wasn’t fire that had taken his parents’s lives— but rather because everyone would be partying and, for one, he didn’t want to party with a bunch of middle-aged women. He didn’t even like partying, at all.

He was about to protest when Urick walked into the kitchen, followed by his other three siblings.

“About time you four showed up,” Barbara greeted, with a big smile she directed not at them, but at Caleb. The message behind it was painfully clear: he would spend Departure Night with her, and there wouldn’t be any further discussion about it.

For the first time in the fourteen years he’d been alive, Caleb wished he were something other than a doppelgänger. A wraith, a conductor like Urick, a puppeteer… if he were anything but a doppelgänger, he wouldn’t have to ride a tiny taxi with six very loud, very glittery, middle-aged women who screamed ‘what happens in Las Vegas stays in Las Vegas’ like a drunken mantra.

Earlier that night, Barbara had changed into a neon green Italian Renaissance dress with a sweeping décolletage and glitter everywhere, and buried her hair under a blond wig that made her forehead four times bigger. The dress code she and her friends were following, Barbara had explained to a horror-struck Caleb, was ‘modern rainbow’.

The rest of her friends were clad in similarly-ridiculous attires: Aztec nobility’s clothing, only hot pink and glittery; a bright, glittery, yellow hanfu from the Ming dynasty; glittery peasant clothes from the Holy Roman Empire the colour of fresh blood; the garments of an Ethiopian queen in the 17th century soaked in neon orange and glitter. One of them had interpreted ‘modern’ to mean ‘futuristic’. She had showed up wearing an azure, glittery thong and skimpy bra paired up with the boots Ariana Grande had worn in Break Free, but with more glitter.

It was all a bit too much. Caleb couldn’t take his eyes off Stripper Lady. He was afraid she’d move too fast and her breasts would slip out, or—

Thankfully, the taxi halted to a stop before Caleb could finish that thought.

“Let’s go girls!” Hanfu-lady screeched, kicking the passenger door open and stumbling outside.

“What happens in Las Vegas stays in Las Vegas!” Ethiopian-queen shouted.

The rest of the women echoed some variation of ‘yes’. To Caleb’s mortification, Barbara slurred, “Slay queen!”

Once Caleb, the last on the vehicle, managed to get out, the taxi honked loudly and sped away so fast it left skid marks on the pavement.

“Kid, come here,” Barbara wobbled to Caleb’s side and hooked an arm around him.

“Did you really have water at dinner or vodka?”

“Vodka.”

“By Roxia.”

“Doesn’t matter,” Barbara’s hands settled on his shoulders “Listen here, kid, you’re going to watch this whole place being set on fire with us, but I advise you to flee afterwards. Go to another party, find yourself someone to dance with or just dance alone, climb the fake Eiffel Tower. Anything but being with us unless you want to witness Lizzie,” she nodded towards Stripper Lady “Trying to lure some poor man into being her sixth husband.”

Stripper Lady was applying glitter around her pale collar bone and cleavage. The realisation of why she was dressed like that made Caleb want to puke.

“Can’t I leave now?” he asked Barbara.

“No,” she turned to Bloody Peasant “Kungundt, lead the way.”

“Aye!”

And so Caleb was ushered through the streets of Mirror Las Vegas to a large plaza. Departure Night proper had yet to start —not a lick of fire was to be seen anywhere— but it would soon. The plaza, a gigantic space with 19th-century pavement painted as gold and towering buildings fashioned after Rococo palaces, was crowded with doppelgängers dressed in antithetical attires. Caleb saw both people who resembled Barbara and her friends, as well as people in comfortable tracksuits. However, all of them were facing a screen propped up against the facade of the biggest building.

The screen lit up seconds after they arrived.

“Just in time,” Pink Aztec breathed.

A feminine figure came into view. A leather cape shadowed her face; coats and gloves hid everything about her but for her mouth. Yrr Skuldottir, Commander-in-chief of the Archaic Army.

She was standing behind an armchair in a drawing room decorated lavishly in some South Asian style Caleb couldn’t quite name; her arms crossed and her legs spread out into a defensive stance. A door creaked open somewhere off camera, and a man and a woman approached the Commander-in-chief. The man was tall, extremely handsome, and red headed. Judging by her wrinkled, brown face and silver-coloured hair, she must’ve been in her nineties.

Caleb was new to this whole celebrating-Departure-Night-as-a-doppelgänger thing, but he was accustomed to the Khioax’s speech. Every Saz was. Lalima Osmani would say some pretty words about burning the past year —bidding thus a farewell to everything good and bad— and building the new year with the ashes, in a pre-recorded clip. Then, the video would switch to a life recording of the Khioax and the Commander-in-chief (unfortunately, without Levi Greerson) in an Icelandic beach.

“Five minutes, girls,” Barbara whispered, dark eyes trained on the screen. What with how quiet everyone was, it probably felt wrong to speak any louder.

The Khioax was walking barefoot on black sand to the shore, where the Commander-in-chief waited for her, torch in hand. The plaza reverberated with the sounds of the fire dancing besides her. An ancient warship made of wood, the Vessel, floated in the water at her back.

According to Saz folklore, the Vessel was the last home of the souls of the deceased, the Charon which would guide them to the spiritual afterlife while their mortal remains flourished as trees in some faraway cemetery. For that, the Vessel’s every inch was adorned with carvings of names. Though Caleb couldn’t read any of them, he wondered whether his parents’s were there. Gabrielle and Frank Verninac.

The Commander-in-chief bestowed the torch upon the Khioax, who slowly made her way into the water. It must’ve been freezing, but she let out no signs of discomfort.

The Khioax stopped a few steps away from the Vessel; if she reached with her hand, she’d be able to touch the tip of the bowsprit. She cleared her throat, and then spoke powerfully. “Let us say our goodbyes, and our greetings to what is to come. The fire will guide you, as it will guide me in the days to come. And the fire will heal us, as it has healed you in the days gone by.”

Murmurs rose up around Caleb. People were reciting the names —some sombrely, others almost like an afterthought— of those they’d lost along the past months. Caleb tried to say his parents’s names, but chocked on the words, his throat constricted around the vowels. Gabrielle Verninac. Frank Verninac, né O’Moran.

Mum.

Dad.

Dead all because of Caleb’s shortcomings.

Suddenly it was harder to breathe. He didn’t need to breathe when it was his animus what he was using, but Caleb didn’t remember that. His memory took him back to That Day, and, logically, he knew it had all passed, but still. He felt dirty. He couldn’t stop thinking about his parents. Did the people around him see how much of a monster he was? The man next to him, he was side-eyeing Caleb, judging him for not being able to say his parents’s names. Gabrielle and Frank —Caleb knew them, but.

He elbowed his way out of the throng of people, to the middle of a street empty but for a man behind an alcohol stall.

“Want booze?” the man slurred. He was drunk “It’s free.”

Caleb was too overwhelmed by everything to question why he was being offered alcohol. For one, animi couldn’t get drunk (one’s body had to get drunk first for inebriation to pass on to the animex), and he was a minor. None of that sank in at the time, though. Then, he only knew that he needed something that would cushion his pain, and since he didn’t have his headphones with him, alcohol might just as well be the next best thing. And if it wasn’t, it at least was the easiest to acquire.

He stretched out his left arm, palm spread open, to let the vendor know he accepted his offer. The events that happened next were all blurry: he got drunk instantly (placebo effect strengthened by the fact that it was his first time consuming), people pushed him away, somewhere with even more people, Las Vegas started burning and a group of girls shouted the lyrics to a song in Korean, he was laying on the pavement, running to a wall, spinning like a madman, but it was okay because everyone was equally as crazy as him.

He didn’t quite forget about his parents, rather their deaths became funny. Caleb had killed them, and somehow that made him laugh. Maniacally, but it was laughter nevertheless. The flames around him made him feel good. It was like he was burning in hell, like so many people, including himself, thought he would for various reasons. Religious, moral.

Hilarious.

Mirror Las Vegas was the ideal hell. Arching towers of gold, gilded streets, a city as wonderful and vane as the fattest diamond in the devil’s crown. Caleb felt like he had stepped into the physical definition of carpe diem: enjoy the moment, bask in it and its superficiality because your life is worth nothing, your future forever damned, so enjoy the present and do crazy things and laugh about Gabrielle and Frank Verninac being dead.

Suddenly, an upbeat melody began playing from who knew where, and his world’s definition intensified. Now this was an effective method to drown out his sorrow. Music. Just music. Magic.

“What’s your name?” a boy asked him.

They’d been dancing together, Caleb realised, really close together, though the alcohol and music and everything had made him oblivious to it. The boy was handsome, not that the flames made it possible to discern anything other than fleeting sharp angles and elongated shadows. His arm was around Caleb’s waist, pulling him closer.

“Tobias,” Caleb said; miraculously, he sounded sober.

“Really? Me, too. People call me Toby,” the boy, Toby, shouted over the music.

Caleb laughed. What were the chances of lying about your name to a stranger who shared your fake name?

“So,” Toby shouted “What are you studying?”

Confused, Caleb looked around. They were surrounded by people of collage age. Toby must’ve mistaken him for one; the flames created that optic illusion, he supposed.

Just because he found it funny, Caleb decided to continue his little mischief. “General Saz education,” it was what Urick had studied. Something about helping kids in human schools learn to control their insignia, The Kinship’s history, and stuff like that.

“That sounds so cool,” Toby shouted; he was always shouting “Do you want to be a teacher?”

Caleb nodded, and Toby shouted some other question. He might have been hot, but by Roxia could he be annoying. Caleb wanted to listen to the music and he wasn’t letting him. So, to get Toby to shut up, he kissed him square on the mouth.

He didn’t register that that was his first kiss. He only noticed the adrenaline that sped straight through his veins when Toby kissed him back, and then moved his body against Caleb’s to the rhythm of the reggae song. Now this was heaven. Carpe diem. Who was Caleb if not a living moment of lips on lips, clothed skin against clothed skin, ear-splitting symphonies, licking flames, a void where thoughts and memories were barred from existing.

Then and there, Caleb knew: this was a drug, the only thing that would keep the pain at bay.

Who were Gabrielle and Frank Verninac?

#oc-tober 2022 #oc tober 2022 #oc tober

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