Page 345 - TheRedSon_PrintInterior_430pp_5.5x8.5_9-22-2019_v1

I searched not only the room, but portions of the complex
itself, an endless wonderland of misery and waste. And while
I glimpsed more than was healthy for a sober mind, I did
not alight upon anything slightly resembling a meaningful
thing, unspent of its ominous burden. When I appeared
before a great iron door, distinct for its possession of an
apparent function beyond reflecting fruitlessness, I thought
my quest nearing completion. My father had grown sorely
bored of our stay in the apartment complex, so I thought
to enliven his spirts by allowing him to cleave through the
door. It might have opened on its own, as I spied no lock, but
my father was in dire need of his own purpose.
The entrance was no match for him, and its remains
tumbled like dull broken glass down a narrow stairwell that
sank into blackened oblivion. There was no sound and no
darkness, just a sort of hallway-shaped absence. But the
more I studied the void, the more I realized its nothingness
a product of my own, apparently unconscious desire not to
see it for what it was. Also, my apartment’s ancientness had
either followed me from my room or had slipped itself from
the void, as a profound expanse of time opened upon me—a
second stairwell, its every step an epoch removed from me,
unfurling, leading down.
Eventually, after some very bemused theorizing as to
cause, I heard a sound—drums. They were indistinct at first,
but gradually increasing. They came from beyond infinite
distances I could only faintly detect. It was the hidden
staccato of my private song, stretching out into the clearest
notes I’d yet to hear, and still it slept, coiled and waiting.
Before I could attempt to total the slivers of clarity I’d been
provided, the void swept me from the stairwell, and then
some. I was all but lost to the crashing waves of waking
when something spoke to me, whispered perhaps, from
sleep. It said, “And still, there shall be hope.”
Into the crush, again. Memories and dreams and pain and
loss and love—a confusion of waking and dreaming and
348 | Mark Anzalone