"When it all comes crashing down And it's winter all year round And the sky is fire red And the world is Just a shelter underground When there's nothing left to lose And the lost cannot be found I'll find you." { Kerli - "I'll Find You"}
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[Part 4]
He was woken up not by the voice of God, but by the sound of thunder. Perhaps they are indeed one and the same.
Groggily he looked up at the darkening sky, and then checked his watch - designer, a present from his ex-fiancée. The shock quickly remedied his lingering fatigue, because according to his expensive watch, he was due to check out of the hotel room he never slept in approximately an hour ago, and it would require wings and a miracle to get him to the airport on time. Producing his phone from his pocket and ignoring 6 weeks' worth of ignored blocked call notifications, he phoned the hotel and the airport. Luckily for him, his flight was canceled due to the weather and the kind hotel receptionist allowed him to extend his stay. Unluckily for him, it started to pour down rain in torrents.
He would never know what possessed him when, thoroughly drenched and still far from the hotel, he decided to take refuge in Catholic church. Christ Our Hope, the sign read. There were beautiful, old churches in Germany, some many centuries old. Cathedrals with large stained glass mosaics depicting stories from the Bible, and spires that extend up into the heavens themselves. This church was quite humble in comparison. He would also never know if he was raised Catholic, because memories from when he was a child simply did not have a chance to take root in his mind when it was constantly bombarded with the thoughts of others. It would not surprise him if any parents he might have had had tried to take him to church, maybe to pray the devil out of him. If he had ever learned them to begin with, the rituals and customs of the church had been long forgotten, but the words, "Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned," were somehow ready on his lips.
Schuldig took a seat in the back row. There were a few other parishioners present, lighting candles and reciting rosaries.
/Hail Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners.../
/Let it be operable, let it be operable, God, let it be.../
/Tell me what to do, God. Give me a sign. Show me.../
He doubted there was a God up there listening to their prayers, but he certainly was.
"Can I help you, my son?" A middle-aged, balding, round Italian-American priest interrupted his unholy eavesdropping. "A towel, perhaps?" the priest offered, humbly holding out the towel in his hands.
Schuldig blinked, tuning back into reality, and looked down, noticing a small puddle had formed around him. He accepted the towel with an apologetic smile and began to sop up the water. "Sorry, thank you."
"You're not from around here, are you?" the priest asked, picking up on his accent. "May I ask what you're doing here?"
"No, I'm not from around here. I'm..." He paused. What was he doing, anyway? "I'm looking for something."
"Hmm, I see," the priest said thoughtfully. "Are we talking about a spiritual something, or a physical something?"
"Physical, you might say."
"Have you tried petitioning St. Anthony?"
Schuldig shook his head. "No, I'm sorry, I'm not Catholic."
The priest smiled warmly. "That's alright. St. Anthony helps anyone who asks. If you're looking for a lost object, a lost person, a lost soul... Well, St. Anthony's the go-to guy. It's worth a try. I can teach you how, if you want to."
Schuldig sighed. The priest apparently meant well, and there were probably worse ways he could waste his time than humoring an old man of the cloth. "Alright."
"Do you want the short version, or the long version?"
"Short version, if you don't mind."
The priest nodded and recited the folk charm famous to American Catholics, "St. Anthony, St. Anthony, please come down. Something's lost that can't be found."
Schuldig mumbled it to himself. It seemed simple enough. "Thank you," he said politely, and then folded the towel neatly before handing it back to the priest. "I should be leaving." He stood to go and looked back over his shoulder at the priest. "Thank you again, Father."
"May you find what you're looking for. God be with you, my son."
"You'll be fine," Crawford had said to him five years ago when he abandoned him at a boarding gate at an airport in Berlin. Schuldig meant to turn back and ask him, "why?" Just "why?" But Crawford had already started to walk away, and he kept on walking without even a glance over his shoulder. He had wanted to shout something, to make a scene like they do in the movies, to make him look back and come back and take him back, but his pride would not allow that.
"'St. Anthony, St. Anthony, please come down. Something's lost that can't be found.' Now where's my fucking passport... You've got to be kidding me..."
It was two hours before his rescheduled flight was about to start boarding, and Schuldig's passport was nowhere to be found. And for a non-US citizen, that meant he would be missing his flight if he couldn't find it. He eventually gave up, resigning himself to spending at least one more day in this city while he searched for his passport. If that didn't work, he'd be heading out first thing in the morning to go wait in the local German Consulate branch of Hell's Waiting Room to apply for a replacement. He traced his steps of where he had been since arriving in Seattle, eventually leading him back to the pier. There was no passport there waiting for him, but the sun was starting to set, and there is of course nothing in the world like west coast sunsets.
The sunset was gorgeous, just as it should be. In the distance, he saw the wharf where some workers were just finishing up a hard day of labor. It looking like they were working on a ship, a big fancy one that looked awfully expensive. He felt drawn to wander over and take a gander, but first he'd wait for the sunset to finish. "St. Anthony, St. Anthony..." he found himself reciting under his breathe. As the last bright hues of the watercolor sky started to fade into dusk, he had a feeling that he might find what he was looking for after all.
Weeks of dreams and bad feelings, with nothing concrete to back it up were beginning to take their toll on him. It got so bad that even the men he worked with - insular, irritating clods with barely two brain cells to pass between them, for the most part - were beginning to notice.
"You look like shit today, Moore," said the foreman, taking him aside after the work was done for the day. "We're almost done with this job; are you going to manage it?"
Crawford raked a hand through his disheveled hair. "Of course," he said, feigning a confidence he in no way felt. "I just haven't been sleeping well is all."
The foreman glared at him. "Take a day or two off and sleep," he said finally. "Tired means accidents, and accidents mean delays. Delays cost money. It's cheaper for me to kick you off my dock for a day or two than foot your hospital bill."
Crawford sighed, but it wasn't as though he needed the money. But if the punishing combination of hard labour and heavy drink wasn't letting him sleep, he doubted two days with nothing to do but dwell on things would do much good. He caught a brief mental flash of a pleasant wooden door, but it was nothing useful.
The bell rang, signaling the end of the workday, and his coworkers sloughed off the deck like so much debris, milling around to figure out what to do with their evening. The foreman clapped Crawford on the back and Crawford was startled to realise there was actual concern prompting the command to take a few days to himself.
He wandered slightly behind the milling crowd as they surged towards the streets and their cars or the bars. The sun was just beginning to sink below the horizon, painting the sky a beautiful shade of reddish-purple, with streaks of pink highlighting the clouds. A few faint stars were beginning to peek out into the fading light.
A bird caught the sun and glinted bright white for a moment as it flew overhead, the motion catching Crawford's eye. He traced the arc of its flight as it took off over the city, and his gaze was drawn by an unfamiliar face lurking near the wharf. They'd had a few curious gawkers come to peer at the transformation of the freighter taking place in the quay, but it had gradually tapered off. The visitor was therefore unexpected, and Crawford wondered if he was there to meet one of the workers.
A street-light flickered to life above the waiting man's head, and Crawford sucked in a breath so hard he choked on saliva when it tried to go down his windpipe. The waiting man's hair was flaming red.
Despair, a boon companion since he'd walked away from them all with a last hopeful prayer that they'd fall into better lives than what he could offer them, swelled behind his ribs until his body felt too small to contain it.
/Maybe I'll go find a woman,/ he thought. /Someone blonde and stupid./ Anything to take his mind off his regrets. A quick vision swam to life behind his eyes - a neon-lit sign reading "Ambush" and a dark-eyed blonde woman, petite and simpering over a cherry-red drink in a dim bar. He grunted assent; she was the opposite of what haunted him, and would be a perfect balm to his bruised feelings.
/In my next life,/ he decided, /I'm going to become a monk and join a monastery on the top of a mountain. I'm so over this kind of feeling./
It ruffled him that he could still be so easily affected. Without quite knowing how he knew, his feet set him on the path towards the bar, where a woman who called herself Cherie was waiting for him.