FEAR OF THE DAWN, PART I

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Submitted Date 08/16/2018
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I miss waking up late.  I miss the lazy, exaggerated, undeserved morning ritual of stretching and moaning with delight while everyone else has been at work for three hours. Pretty smug of me, but it was one of the greatest perks of my old life. There’s a dirty satisfaction in knowing the sun’s been slowly warming your body while other people sit in meetings. It was very cat-like. 

Well, that’s all in the past. For everyone. Except the cats. Maybe it’ll happen to them someday, too.

Three years in, and we still don’t know why this all happens?  Can’t be random. I mean, over half the planet is covered in water, right? And nobody wakes up in a river or at the bottom of the ocean. A good number of folks would be drowned by now if there wasn’t some method to all this. What a horrible thought!  Everyone always says the worst way to die is drowning, but I think waking up underwater and THEN drowning wins, hands down.

Sometimes, it isn’t half bad. I woke up in Tahiti once. Almost made up for that time in the Arctic Circle.  Frostbite settles in quicker than you might think. Mostly, it’s some nondescript place in an ordinary town in god knows what country. I almost never get the language right. It’s amazing how many times I’ve confused Spanish for Italian or Brooklyn for Staten Island.

I don’t even consider myself a musician anymore. Trumpet, thirty years. Stop playing for a week and you lose the embouchure it took decades to perfect. Should’ve studied something academic when I had the chance, so I didn’t need to carry around anything with me other than my brain.

Oh yeah, and waking up with nothing but the clothes on your back…not as liberating as the socialists used to think! No money, no phone. God, I miss my hat. I used to get so many compliments on that thing.

“HEY! One helluva lid, buddy!”

“Got it in New York City, Fourteenth Street!”

Palm trees. Hmm, we’re either in Florida or Egypt. Or Mexico. Maybe Australia. Geography, that’s what I should’ve studied in school. Trumpet? What was I thinking?!

So the last time I got my hands on a horn was about four months ago. I woke up, just like everyone else in the world, not knowing where the heck I was. Most of the time, I wake up in the dirt, but I lucked out for once. I had a real honest to goodness mattress underneath me. Not too firm, not too soft. Just right. Ok, maybe it was too firm, but who the heck cares when you’re off the floor for a change.

The sun was already high, so I’m guessing it was about noon or one o’clock. Felt like old times after a gig! Of course I only had a few seconds to enjoy it, what with the usual crying and the screaming that happens when the whole planet opens its eyes at the same moment.

No cries this time. No screams. I was alone in a room somewhere, but I could hear a commotion coming from the hallway, so at least one or two others landed here with me. I cleared my throat, and the noises outside stopped. Two coughs slowly came from the other side of the door: one male, one female.

Good response. I got to my feet and and ran my fingers through my hair in an effort to look respectable. I caught sight of myself in the mirror to the right of the bed and, you know, I didn’t look half bad! I gotta be honest, five years ago, I looked half dead.

I started to get my bearings and realized the room was on the small side. Eastern Europe, maybe.  No writing anywhere, but the bedding had that look. Before I could reach the doorknob, it began to turn slowly. I stepped back quietly and coughed again. The knob stopped turning.

One thing we all learned quickly was how to communicate without speaking. If you can’t figure out where you are, you at least want to know if you’re alone or if you’re gonna have someone’s hands around your throat before too long. A cough was the easiest way to let others know you were there and aware, not another raving lunatic. A lot of people just lost it in the beginning. Sad.

So if someone responds to your cough in kind, it’s like a universal handshake. But it could also mean, back off, buddy. In this case, whoever was on the other side of the door got the gist and stepped away, letting me make the next move.

I slowly pulled the door in and a woman stood smiling at me with a shorter man, popping his head around her shoulder. His face was the upside-down opposite of hers. His eyes narrowed to slits as I slowly moved out of the doorframe, gesturing for them to cross the threshold.

“Dhanyavaad,” the woman said, bowing her head slightly as she entered the room.  Alone, the man awkwardly left his hands hanging in the air as if he were a mime, still hiding behind the woman. His eyes darted back and forth and then he stepped into the room, closing the door quickly behind him.

“Where the hell are we?” he asked, looking for a strategic place to either stand or hide. I guessed he was from the Midwest like me, maybe somewhere near Kentucky. Thin mustache. Puffy cheeks like a chipmunk. He quickly crossed the room and pulled the window curtains aside, keeping the rest of his body flat against the wall.

“No one’s going to gun you down at this hour, Ohio.” I shot him a look and then moved my gaze out through the window. “World’s only been awake five-six minutes.  Hard to get your hands on a weapon that quick.”

Flurries were drifting past the frosted pane of glass. Ukraine? Russia? I didn’t even know what countries still existed, if any.

“Indiana, not that you asked.” The man let go of the curtain and ran his hands nervously down the front of his black jeans.

Not wanting to give him any control over the moment, I turned to my other guest. I bowed my head with a tilt and a genuine smile to set her at ease.

Nothing is ever easy for a woman, much less in today’s world. If all this were an elaborate experiment to bring about the goodness in humanity and unify us all, it fell apart somewhere along the way.  Men are horrible by nature, and I’d seen a number of us become animals overnight. A smile spread easily across her face and she bowed slightly, hands clasped together in front of her.

“Aaradhya,” she said bringing her palm to rest flat against her chest as she spoke and then returned it back to the safety of the other hand.

Her outfit was a simple grey floor-length dress, fringed with white at the bottom, matching the ends of her sleeves. I still expect people to start saying things in broken English like, “I come from a land far away,” just like they do in the movies, but then you realize just how many people there really are in the world, and that they don’t have any idea who you are or why they should even care.

“Carter,” I said, imitating her gestures of greeting. She had to trust at least one of us if we were all going to make it to nine o’clock in the evening.

You could try and fight it, but it wouldn’t do any good. That’s when you closed your eyes. We all did. No matter what you’re doing, thinking or feeling, we’d all drift into a dreamless sleep.

I was about to make up an elaborate gesture that stood for “breakfast,” when a gentle sound made the three of us press our faces against the cool glass of the window. It almost camouflaged itself between the falling snowflakes, light and carefree on the wind. But we all heard the faint melody coming from somewhere across the street.

It was a piano. Someone was playing Autumn Leaves.

Hot damn.

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