Pictures of Autumn
By Proserpine
one ~ everything's gotta change
but you don't need my pictures on your wall
you say you need no one
and you don't need my secret midnight call
I guess you need no one
There was a half-empty bottle of 180 proof Everclear sitting in the dust under the bed. It was blue glass, with a black, green, and gold sticker that read in fine print: DO NOT INGEST WITH MEDICATION. Most people didn't bother to read the fine print, and unfortunately for Helga Patacki, she was one of them. Approximately half an hour ago, she had taken six ibuprofen to combat a head-splitting hangover, washed down with a few hearty swigs of Everclear. It had just barely seen fit to kick in.
Normally, Helga wasn't a big drinker. It was just lately. The road had gotten ...stressful. Her currently falling apart love life had upped the ante, and everything had just gotten to be too much. This became frighteningly apparent as she tumbled, as if in slow motion, onto the bed. It groaned its disapproval, and with a wail of protest from the rusty springs, caved in with a flurry of stuffing and dust. Helga, incapacitated, plunged on.
*~*
Halfway across the globe, sitting in a cell lit only by the grate in the ceiling and ankle deep water that smelled strongly of rotting crustaceans, was one Arnold. It was, he supposed, the price of peace. "Damned inconvenient," he muttered to no one in particular. Every morning and night, he had to climb to a ledge of rock fifteen feet up and stay there until the tides ebbed and the metal trapdoor at the bottom of his cell opened to drain everything. That was where he sat now, reading a dog-eared copy of Don Quixote for the fifteenth time that belonged to his guard, Fernando. It was all in Spanish.
Food came twice a day if he was lucky, and a bottle of water. He used those bottles to toss out of the top of the grate, with a message written on the wrapper. This was not one of those days. Six months, seven days, nine hours and fifteen minutes. The length of time of his imprisonment. He had made an attempt to stay in the country by wedding one of the locals, but his arrest had taken care of that ideal straightway. Well, you're in the country now, aren't you?
"Someone to see you, Señor Arnaldo." A long, ugly face peered through the bars on the door, and Arnold carefully wrapped the book back up in plastic and shimmied down the rocks. Fernando smiled toothily through the bars, and said, in Spanish, "The Doña Lila Hernandez, señor. My superiors give you five minutes alone. I give you fifteen."
"Thanks, Fernando." Arnold replied, and the door opened clumsily. He limped carefully onto the miserable balcony of the castle dungeons, mindful to keep his eyes down and his posture submissive as Fernando handcuffed him to the chair. He did not want a repeat of the last beating.
Arnold was in luck. At the far end of the balcony sat a graceful lady with her back to him. "Lila?"
She half-turned, her sunglasses making it impossible for him to see what was in her eyes. "Arnold? Is that...you?"
He moved forwards slowly, favoring his left leg. Life had made him handsome, in a way that mere airbrushing cannot. He had a tawny, scraggly beard streaked gold, red, and bronze, and there was a certain pride to his step that the guards had been unable to beat out of him. "Lila...I dreamed you would come. Did you get my letter?"
She looked perplexed. "What letter?"
Arnold's heart sank. Motioning her closer, so Fernando could not make out his English, he whispered "I've been sending out messages in bottles. I thought, that maybe, with your gracious influence--"
"My influence? Pah!" Lila spat, tossing the long red waves that spilled from beneath her scarf, wrapped movie star style. She removed her huge sunglasses, peering pityingly at him. "Do you need anything?" Her nose wrinkled prettily. "A razor? A bath? A phone call? Some things are within my power."
"I need you to help me," Arnold hissed, his heart sinking more and more with each passing second she smiled at him. "Please, Lila. For old times' sake."
"Dear, innocent Arnold. How I envy you." This Harpy was not the equally sweet and innocent Lila of his childhood, but a colder, crueler one. Dimly, he remembered the day he had seen her for the last time, a young Peace Corps volunteer, dressed in green and brown. Earnestly, he prayed to the gods that this was some sort of false, sick joke. But the gods had long since become atheists, and no longer believed in Arnold. "I shall light candles for your soul."
"I could make you a goddess on paper. If you let me go, I can clear your name. I swear."
She laughed gaily. "Clear my name! Why, you are an idealist! And what then? My family is dead. I have nothing left in Brooklyn. I am already a goddess here. I want for nothing. It is not in my power to free you, Arnold. Leave that to the Embassy."
*~*
Helga was not experiencing the same luck as Arnold, unfortunately. There was no Doña Lila to save her. And without further ado, she continued on to the light at the end of the tunnel.
*~*
"But Lila," Arnold began, rubbing his chin, "they say you married him. Don Miguel. The dictator."
She smiled sadly, the first time he had seen something real in her eyes. In the years that had passed between them, he had grown more beautiful and more sure of himself. He had lived. Which was more than she was doing now, existing from day to day in a reality of drugs and boredom. To want for nothing...
"Oh, Arnold," Lila spoke delicately, as if treading through a minefield. "Not everything can be mended as easily as either you or I would like. You are an unimportant prisoner. A student. A journalist. It would be dangerous to set you free, and dangerous to kill you. You know too much. Miguel agrees, or else you would be dead by now."
"Dangerous?" He jabbed. "For who? For me? Or for you?"
"I..." She bit her lip, and he took advantage of her uncertainty.
"If not for me, then for yourself. We had something once, Lila. Something pure and beautiful. Don't you remember? Or are you too jaded?"
It was the wrong thing to say. Lila's face shut down, and her eyes glittered like the hard faces of cut gems. Of course she remembered--Arnold, laughing drunkenly, his arms wrapped loosely around that vulgar Helga as the whole room spun and she ran blindly home through the insipid darkness. "You made me a fool. In front of everyone. With her."
Arnold's face paled. "What do you mean?"
"As if you don't know!" She closed her eyes, and clenched her fists, and began to back carefully away from him. "How many other parties did you and your little friends 'forget' to invite me to? I was a laughingstock that whole time and I never knew."
"You wouldn't have understood." They were my family. Together, we survived...
"I don't want to hear your excuses!" She raged. "You and your secret societies! Rhonda tried to tell me--and I never believed her. Not until I saw it on graduation night with my own eyes." Arnold, his head resting in Helga's lap, a tiny smile playing about her lips. And then she saw me watching from the door, and that smile widened... "Did you ever wonder about prom night? Well...now you know."
"I couldn't have invited you, Lila," Arnold sagged in the chair tiredly. The conversation and too much sun had drained him. "I tried--with them, with you. But there was no point."
"No, you didn't. You covered it up. You broke my heart. There is no more sweet, innocent Lila. You destroyed her."
He paled even more, if that was possible. "I can't accept responsibility for that."
"No, but you will." And with those parting words, Lila deserted the love of her innocence to rot in a Guatemalan prison cell, cursing the day he had ever heard of the Doña Lila, and her penchant to break men's souls.
*~*