There were so many lights. They flickered and flashed past her eyes in dazzling displays. The world seemed to be in a racing spin. Lucia Audaz tried to blink away the dizziness, but that only made things worse. The skin on her face felt electrified. The sweat on her brow was so cold. She wanted to wipe it away. Her hands felt like rocks at the end of her arms. She couldn’t tell if they were even her arms at all. Are my arms still there? Are any of my limbs still attached? Nothing was right. The world wasn’t as it should have been. It was rejecting her. Lucia Audaz’s head swam, making her stomach turn somewhere in her disconnected body. A man leaned into her field of vision. At least she wasn’t on the kitchen floor anymore. The smell of coffee burned in her nose.
“Can you hear me?”
The voice was a muffled echo. It sounded like her husband’s. But he was dead. Lucia Audaz peered up with wide eyes at the figure hovering over her. Is this what this is, she thought. I’m dying? That’s why it all feels so strange. And that’s why I can see my beloved.
“Mrs. Audaz, can you hear me,” the paramedic asked again. Her dilated eyes were swimming in a barely conscious state. “She’s right on the edge,” he said over his shoulder to the driver of the ambulance.
The siren wailed beyond the brightly lit interior of the ambulance. Lucia could clearly see the sterile environment of the mobile doctor’s office. She could easily discern the young, sandy-blonde haired man trying to keep her alive. Silly boy, she thought. You shouldn’t waste your time. That’s when the pain returned. It pressed on her whole body at once, like all the gravity of the world had forgotten about her and then found her again, over compensating for its mistake. Her nerves fired, sending numbing shocks through her muscles.
The young man above her slipped back into shadow. It wasn’t the paramedic anymore. Her husband had returned, watching down over her, his life-long love. They would be united at last. The world was rejecting her, it was changing and didn’t want her in it. Lucia Audaz’s lips curled as if to smile. She had been waiting to smile at her husband. At last, she was ready to be with him. The dazzling lights in her eyes faded slowly to black. The last thing she remembered thinking was a hope her son would forgive her.
* * * *
The wind that blew against his skin felt so odd in the early morning air. Carlos Columbus Audaz stood under the flickering, mustard-yellow glow of a buzzing street lamp. The cool, bitter breeze whipped at the small, wrinkled piece of paper clutched in his fingers. He looked down at it strangely, perplexed as to why he was still holding onto it.
The sleek, unblemished sedan he had quickly come to know so well Carlos caught himself thinking of it as his own, was sitting along the curb in front of his home when he emerged from Alex’s backyard. The sun had sunk below the roof lines of the neighborhood. It was way past the regular time for the driver to be in the area.
“I’m sorry, sir. I was told to return immediately,” the driver said as Carlos had approached from across the street. “We have to go right now, sir.”
Carlos looked at him strangely. The driver seemed to read the question in Carlos’ eyes. “It’s your mother, sir. She’s in the-”
Carlos wasn’t listening. He had bolted into the house, his voice echoing through each room and down the short hallways. No one answered back. His uncle, his sister, his mother and aunt were all missing from the aging abode that never seemed totally quiet or empty. That evening, it didn’t even feel quite like the home he had grown up in. There was a cold and ghostly feeling penetrating the richly painted walls lined with hundreds of framed family photographs.
Carlos saw the note taped to his bedroom door. It was scribbled by his uncle. His mother had collapsed on the kitchen floor earlier that day. Carlos clutched the vanilla-colored scrap of paper tightly in his hand as he turned and hurried back outside to the waiting car, the driver already seated behind the wheel. Carlos couldn’t remember if he had closed the front door, let alone locked it.
The ride to the hospital had been a nervous blur. Staring out over the cracked and empty sidewalk of the abandoned neighborhood in the early morning light, Carlos still couldn’t really remember it. He had just walked from there, yet, still could hardly recall the way. The cold air rolled past him again, sending chills up his arms. It rattled and shuffled bits of trash hugging the curb and the walls of nearby buildings. Carlos blinked, trying to remember why, exactly, he had wandered into that specific part of the city.
There was no confusion about where he was. The glow of the street lamps bounced off the wall of the studio to his right. Halfway down the abandoned street and halfway parked on the sidewalk was the burned and hollowed shell of a small car. Storefront windows were smashed in. The exposed interiors were deathly quiet. The charred marks of searing flames long extinguished stained the walls around window frames on the buildings stretching stoutly upward. There was a strong, bitter scent in the air. It was a rich, burning smell that lingered in Carlos’ nostrils. Blood, he wondered. He walked a little ways more onto the deserted battle field, stopping a dozen steps from the tortured skeleton of the burned vehicle.
For a moment, Carlos’ mind drifted back to the broken swing in Alex’s backyard. The image inspiring fragmented emotions lasted hardly a second before his mind leapt forward to the hospital. Carlos quickly recalled bursting through a pair of heavy double doors that were loud enough when they moved to alert the whole hospital.
“What happened? How is she? Where is she,” he had asked in rapid succession as soon as he spotted his family.
His uncle and sister took turns trying to explain what had happened, how they had found Carlos’ mother collapsed on the kitchen floor. Carlos kept glancing at his aunt. She sat silently in one of the thinly upholstered chairs of the waiting area. Her brown eyes were staring blankly at the floor, her thoughts a long way from the soda-stained carpet and aging magazines.
Carlos had felt himself being subtly backed toward one of the over-used chairs of the waiting area. He lifted his eyes past his family at the sound of heavy double doors opening nearby. A doctor with thinning, sandy blonde hair and dry, sagging green eyes approached the family. The look on his face, the way he tried to avoid making any direct eye contact with them, revealed the seriousness he had yet to convey as he walked closer.
Lucia Audaz was stable but in serious condition. Her outlook, however, was grave. It was news that sent Carlos’ sister to her knees on the rough carpet. She wasn’t sobbing or crying as she sat helpless on the floor. Instead, her body shook with the emotional shock of the doctor’s prognosis. Carlos was listening to the doctor but he was also staring at his sister. He wanted to sink to his own knees beside her, to share in the tidal wave of grief overflowing in her heart. He wanted to share the burden of that pain, of the growing sense of loss. It would have been the most brotherly thing he could think of to do.
But, in that moment, at the cusp of the world that had seemed so familiar suddenly coming apart and radically changing into something new, unexpected, and unrecognizable, Carlos felt no pain or grief. As he had stood in that small waiting area with his family and the doctor barely speaking above a tired mumble, Carlos couldn’t find it in himself to surrender the emotions he was feeling to be the comfort and rock he knew was probably most needed by those around him. Where there should have been grief, there was empty anger. A bitter, putrid anger that consumed him so easily. It was fueled by the mounting stresses that seemed to be bombarding him without mercy, like the universe was punishing him and only him. Carlos’ unstoppable, boiling anger was also being fed by an undeniable guilt.
What do I have to feel guilty over, he asked himself, standing on the edge of the cracked, grease, and city-stained sidewalk. Carlos lifted his eyes from the cool, underused asphalt to the scene around him. He thought of everything that had been happening in his life, the decisions made, words said, desires and passions given in to. They seemed to have all culminated to put him right there in that spot, as if he had been destined to be there all along. The violence-scarred, terrorized, abandoned neighborhood was a symbol of Carlos’ tortured soul and he knew it.
Everything, he thought, answering his own question. I have everything to feel guilty over.
Carlos stepped off the curb, officially entering the place of unsettling chaos he had tried so desperately to run from. He considered how silly that notion was and how close to it he had always been. The chilled wind picked up again, stirring the smells flooding the quiet street. It shook the broken fragments of glass still clinging to the splintered windowsills. It lifted the scent of singed iron from the stains of dried blood marking the path and course of the sweeping, savage violence. Carlos tried not to look at them. He tried not to follow the browning streaks, unwashed by rain or city worker, into the dark, open cavities of storefronts and homes. The darkness swollen within each wounded edifice of former prosperity and worthwhile endeavors was as thick and cold as the darkness within himself.
Carlos realized that was what he was trying not to see. It had nothing to do with the blood on the ground, as disgusting as it was. He stopped near the burned, hollowed vehicle left to rot on the curb. Even as he stared at the partially melted and twisted steel skeleton, as he tried to keep his thoughts focused, he couldn’t stop the feeling of his skin crawling. The sun was beginning to rise, its sharp bands of orange and yellow light reaching above the cityscape. Yet, none of it seemed to be piercing the shadows hovering in the street. What light there was seemed gray and muted. The darkness stalking within the silent buildings appeared undeterred by the waxing light of day. He felt eyes on him, watching the subtle movement of his arms and shoulders, the loose hairs on his head bustling softly in the wind.
Carlos turned swiftly and suddenly on his heels. The feeling had quickly become too much. He didn’t like it. It was scaring him which was making him angry, reigniting the rage that had been cooling since he left the hospital. He wanted to turn and face down the sense of evil permeating from the cavernous buildings and narrow, sinewy alleyways. He wanted to see the eyes, the faces of malice peering omnisciently out at him.
Carlos had turned to face the slender, well-groomed form of Mr. Simon.
“Hello C.C.,” Mr. Simon said quietly with a strange politeness. “What are you doing out here this early in the morning?”
Carlos watched the thinly framed man with the smooth, flawless face. His cheeks were slightly pale from the long winter and days of travel. He kept his hands in the pockets of his long, expensive coat. The material was of the finest quality, just like the obvious, precise, and skilled tailoring evident from even a dozen steps away. Mr. Simon was either very wealthy or very, very well connected. No average citizen would be able to hold onto something so extravagant without finding themselves being labled a hoarder.
“I needed some air,” Carlos finally responded. It wasn’t a lie.
“So you went for a walk at the crack of dawn?”
“Yes.”
Mr. Simon stared at Carlos. The expression on his face took on a calculated smugness as he added, “All the way from the hospital, I gather?”
Carlos stiffened. He couldn’t hide the surprise riddled in his wide eyes. “Yes. My mother-”
“Your mother. Yes, I know,” Mr. Simon interrupted. He took a step off the curb, walking slowly, casually into the empty street. Spent bullet shells were visible on top of the solid, slightly faded lines long ago painted down the center of the blacktop. “And yet, you felt compelled to leave and...walk all the way down here.”
Carlos watched Mr. Simon walk in a slow arch from the sidewalk into the street. He furrowed his brow, conquering the surprise and intimidation he had been feeling since first catching sight of the bureaucrat standing at the edge of the shadows. “I wouldn’t say compelled is an accurate description. I needed some time to think and went for a walk. I didn’t really feel compelled to end up anywhere.”
“Nonetheless, here you are.”
“Why does it bother you so much that I’m on this street?”
Mr. Simon looked up at Carlos. He grinned pleasantly. His voice was polite, even slightly upbeat. He never seemed directly hostile or aggressive. Compared to Carlos, he was a master at hiding his emotions. It made Carlos wonder if he had any at all. “It doesn’t bother me at all, C.C.. I’m simply curious.”
“Why?”
Mr. Simon pursed his soft lips slightly. There was the subtlest sheen on the tender, lightly red flesh. “Obviously, this is not the sort of area a person like you would venture voluntarily. Not unless you knew someone here, which you don’t. Not unless you had business here, which you don’t.” Mr. Simon started walking again as he was speaking. It was just a few steps to the burned-out chunk of blackened steel that had been a car only days before. “You’ve never been very wealthy, though, your income now is far better than most around you,” Mr. Simon continued.
Carlos watched the strange man silently. He was unsettled by what Mr. Simon said, but didn’t know what to say himself in response.
“That wall that separates the studio from this street may just be thick concrete to most, but for you it’s something more. It’s like the space between two planets, two entirely different worlds. You always knew this world was here. And, you probably even believed you understood it, at a basic, maybe scientific and clinical level. But then...something happened and you were faced with the realization that you have absolutely no idea what happens here, beyond the wall-beyond the space between your world and this one.”
Carlos watch him incredulously. “What’s your point, Mr. Simon?”
Mr. Simon looked up from the flakes of carbon he had been chipping at with his fingernail on a piece of the car’s skeleton. “My point?” He chuckled once, then answered, “Welcome to the Moon, C.C..”
Carlos stood uncomfortably on the sidewalk. He realized he was leaning back in just the slightest way. He didn’t move yet. Instead, he simply stared at Mr. Simon as the mysterious, government avatar continued to speak.
“You’ve been wanting to see this place since the day I arrived. You and young Mr. Vale heard the scene unfolding from right...” Mr. Simon turned and pointed toward the wall on the opposite side of the street. “...over there.”
He turned back to face Carlos once more. “So, C.C., what do you see? Is this place what you thought it would be?”
Carlos swallowed. “I...I didn’t know what it would be. I didn’t really know what I was expecting.” Reason, he told himself. But now you see yourself. Now, you see the chaos within and not just without. “I think I wanted to know why more than anything else.”
“Why, what,” Mr. Simon asked.
“Why a place like this, that seemed to be functioning well and normal enough could break down so suddenly and violently like this. Why a place so close...” Carlos took a breath, surprised by the thought about to be given voice. He could have used this second stretching into many to change the wording. He decided to go with it, letting the new reality of his changed world sink in. “...So close to me could come apart and collapse like this.”
Carlos blinked and Mr. Simon seemed to suddenly be in his face. The man was standing less than an arm’s length away, barely a step onto the sidewalk. His elbows stayed bent as he gripped both of Carlos’ shoulders. “It’s simple, C.C.,” Mr. Simon said with a beaming smile.
“It happened because these people were abandoned, forgotten about, and lied to. The beloved free market didn’t deem them worthy and so it left them behind to their own devices. That’s why we exist, C.C.. That’s what makes our jobs so important!”
Carlos took a quiet breath. “It is?”
“Yes! It’s so beautiful, C.C.. We will tear down the lies and replace them with the sights and sounds that will illuminate everyone! It will feel so good it will become truth! Our truth will save everyone and that will save the world! But we can’t do it alone. We need visionaries like you C.C. We need you to stand with us. We can save neighborhoods like this one from this kind of despair.” Mr. Simon made sure he had Carlos’ gaze before he added, “With us, you can save your mother.”
Carlos gasped audibly.
Mr. Simon’s face saddened. Carlos couldn’t tell if the pity in his beedy eyes was genuine. “The doctors...they told you there was nothing they could do, right?”
Carlos looked away from Mr. Simon for a moment. “More or less,” he said, the pain from the long night behind him coming through, unstoppably, in his voice. “Some of your friends were there, too.” Carlos returned his gaze toward Mr. Simon. “I guess to help remind the people doing their jobs what that actually meant.”
Mr. Simon shook his head. “Now that was unfair, C.C.. While they are certainly not my friends, like me they also have jobs to do. It is nothing personal. Times are tough and resources are getting tight. Sometimes that means rationing.”
Carlos’ skin suddenly began to crawl. A chill ran up and down his spine. Mr. Simon’s hand was on his shoulder. He spoke softly, tenderly like a man who understood the pain of another, but has never actually endured the strife he extended his sympathies toward. “Sometimes that means making the tough choice.”
Carlos narrowed his eyes. “What choice?”
Mr. Simon didn’t hesitate to answer. “To sacrifice, even the ones we love, for the greater good. Our salvation depends on it. Neighborhoods and streets like this one depend on our ability to do the hard things...the hardest of hard.”
Carlos didn’t respond. He merely looked away.
“But,” Mr. Simon said, “there are those too important to simply let go and allow to wither away in pain and suffering.”
Carlos took a deep breath. The ground under his feet felt unsteady. The air had a strangeness to it he couldn’t identify. “Why,” he asked.
“Because I believe your mother is a powerful source of influence and strength for you. We need you to be strong, C.C.. So, I believe your mother should receive all the care she possibly can.”
Carlos looked up at Mr. Simon again. “And in exchange?”
Mr. Simon’s face had not changed. He still had a hand on one of Carlos’ shoulders. “Join us. Dedicate your skills, strength, and talent to benefiting the greater good. It’s all any of us can do. But, if you do this, if you agree to continue working for us, your mother will be taken care of. I promise you that.”
Carlos stared at Mr. Simon for a long moment. He turned his head, sensing the brightening sunlight piercing the cold, gray mist permeating the long street. If he wasn’t so consumed by Mr. Simon’s proposition and the answer he felt rising out of his throat, Carlos might have paused a moment more to actually wonder why the warmth of the sun felt so faded and far away. Instead, he faced Mr. Simon and took a deep breath.
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