"Only one of you can go in at a time," the disgruntled nurse seemed to bark with hands placed firmly on her hips, elbows pointed out as though to create a strict wall of authority. Her expression softened when she turned to Christine, however. "You're his daughter. I think you should have your time with him first." Her eyes pointed towards Erik and narrowed as she continued to talk to the young woman. "Take your time too, you can use the whole hour if you want."
Erik felt the trepidation from Christine, who was fearful of seeing her father again in such a state, hooked to tubes and blinking machines.
"I'll wait right here," she managed to say as she moved towards a lonely looking chair sitting against the stark white wall of the corridor. The nurse did not react to this with anything but a slight nod and a quick glance at Erik with an unspoken statement of disgust in her eyes before she turned and shuffled back down the hall, the squeaking of her black orthopedic shoes serving as her exit music.
For a moment he stood there with a fluttering sort of uncertainty that was so foreign to him–what was it about this girl that he would let her bring so much upheaval into his eternally quiet and saltine bland existence? His hands clenched a few times in quick succession as he fought the urge to say something pitiful and unhelpful to the girl in reassurance. Perhaps he should say something to the effect of, 'It's alright, I'll be back in a moment.' or 'Everything is going to be fine', but the words felt like a thick gray paste, dry and crumbling, on his tongue. He decided against offering her something so feeble and turned on his heel to enter her father's room instead.
The room was not as dim as it had been an hour prior and the man in the bed was wide awake and burning a painful hole into Erik with the intense, warning stare of a protective father. Erik had the opportunity to have many confrontations in his past. He had stood before unhappy, demanding rulers and engaged in one-on-one combat with men who aimed to kill him for his difference. Once, he even stood before his own mother, legs trembling with childish trepidation, as he dared to ask for the one thing his little heart at the time knew it could never have–the tender gift of a mother's love. But never had any of those unpleasant meetings involved the unapproving parent of a woman he had the fancy of courting–he could never have dreamed of such a thing for himself!
"What the hell are you?" the father demanded with a gravel-rough voice. The words were spoken in Swedish. "And why have you attached yourself to my daughter?"
Ah, so there was not to be any pleasantries or awkward chit-chat. No issue there, as Erik despised the frivolous exercise anyhow. His feet carried him as smoothly as silk to the window on the other side of the room and Erik flicked open a slit in the blinds with two of his fingers so he could peer out at the horrible modern landscaping of the hospital courtyard. The morning sun had just begun to open the clusters of purple pansies that sat in concrete flower boxes.
"Your daughter knows," he dismissed as he continued to scan the unimaginative layout of the courtyard. "I trust you value her judgment."
The father released a pained, disgruntled sigh behind him.
"She isn't always well," Viktor replied morosely, but his words were still guarded by a thin cage of anger.
Still looking out the window, Erik dismissed the father's words.
"She's the one who discovered her mother," he stated with the bluntness of a butter knife, and, just as he intended it, he could feel how violently it disarmed Viktor. Erik released the blinds and turned around to see the profile of a man in severe conflict. The room fell into a stunned silence for several minutes as the emotions from the man in the bed grew from flabbergast to crippling grief. This subject opened a box inside Viktor that held his soul's greatest wound, raw and festered, it had never healed in the slightest, but grew increasingly worse with the progression of life.
"Christine," Viktor choked out the name and it emerged broken in two pieces. He fought to keep the bark of a sob in his throat. "She told you about that?"
"In a way."
Viktor began to shudder and cough, his face tight in an expression of physical and mental agony. Erik could feel the man's distress as it filled the room like a potent gas of toxic despair and shame. Erik could relive the scene through the tender, innocent eyes of a ten-year-old Christine. The memory was sketchy and patchy, as though she had tried to scratch it from her memory, but the main themes of it were in place–there were some images a mind simply could not forget.
"I thought Rebecca was getting better," Viktor said. The words were caught between a low wail and a sigh. "She had a bright smile all week, her eyes…there was no sadness. Then Friday came. She cleaned the house and then…then she…" The sentence trailed off, never to continue. "I could have never dreamed she would ever be that unhappy."
"You blame yourself," Erik said, unable to feel any empathy despite the father's raw pain wrapping tightly around him like a moth's cocoon. He imagined his own mother placed in the same morbid scene and nothing roused or stirred in his cactus heart. Only through Christine's memory could he feel the horror and anguish that macabre discovery evoked.
Viktor did not respond, but his breathing grew heavier. The thick grief poured from his soul and continued to move about the room, but there was something else there, something that Erik had somehow missed in his distraction. The sick tingle that signals impending death. Erik was at the bed in three strides.
"How are you feeling?" he asked with the stern professionalism of a physician before touching his fingers to the feeble man's shoulders.
Whatever he had expected to feel upon contact, it was quickly dwarfed by the enormous mass of emotion and memory that assaulted him. He was caught in the maelstrom of regret and shame. The events played out too quickly for him to fully process, like tumbling through several films. Police investigating his home. The flash of a camera. His rage. That's my wife! Don't take a picture of her like this! The words 'self-inflicted' on the most innocuous looking document. His disbelief–there must have been a mistake. My wife would never…Then a funeral, too sunny and warm to match the occasion. The sweat beneath his suit. Then, the image of a daughter, inconsolable and grief stricken, desperately in need of a father whose own grief placed an uncrossable moat between them for a decade. She lost herself to books and daydreams, talking to shadows and creating stories of fantastical angels–the angel of music…. Soon, she began to disappear before his eyes, physically wasting away and he was lost! He was so lost! It's my fault! My wife is dead, and my daughter is dying and I'm to blame. Then, last, the image of a sun-haired youth, kind and desperate to impress. Raoul save her…
That was all he could take. He ripped himself away from the father, horrified to discover his own awful face was as tear soaked as the dying man before him.
"No," he snarled, wiping away the evidence of the tears. "I will save her." As Viktor looked on in abject confusion, Erik stormed out of the hospital room with the awful emotions tied to his heels.
"Wait," the ill father pleaded to his stony back, but it was futile. Erik was in no mood to continue.
Christine was still there, curled up on the sad little chair.
"I will come for you this evening," he curtly announced in stark betrayal of the swarm of ugly emotions taking him over inside. "Visit with your father."
She was given no opportunity to respond, for just as quickly as he had said the words, was he stalking down the hall. The fresh experience of regret and shame he felt from the father mirrored his own too well. The face of a man, arm raised in resigned farewell, came to him again and again as he made his way down the hall. He could hear the thundering sound of hooves in soft sand accompanying his flight from love–if it was love. Would he know love if he saw it? And was it necessary for him to feel this sense of loss so potently still? That was eons ago–that mistake was impossible to reconcile! He couldn't possibly have asked the little idiot of a man to join him.
And now, Christine. His feelings twinned those he felt for Daroga–though perhaps less difficult to understand. Want. Need. Desire. Possession. He could understand these things. His entire life was dictated by their unyielding and exacting demands. It was the other ones. Those chimera emotions that shifted their shape each time he tried to analyze them. In a sea of familiarity, they were strangers to him, and they remained that way. Who truly understood love? Was that why there were so many god-damned songs in its honor? Could it be possible that the rest of the world was just as lost and ignorant as he was?
He snorted like a bull when he saw Iris standing in the waiting room and he cursed every murderer in the city for putting her presence in his life. He briefly wondered about the reaper who collected the souls he had claimed, certainly they couldn't be as unpalatable as this one.
"If it isn't Mr. One and Only—which, by the way dude, is not true. There's more than one soul eater. You lied."
"I did not lie!" he snapped back like a bullwhip, to which she just folded her arms over her chest and cocked an eyebrow in subtle amusement.
"Alright, so you think you told the truth. I'm just saying you are wrong. My friend who I was chatting with this morning said they met an Eater in the last decade, and apparently he didn't look like something from 28 days later."
"I do not know what that means," he growled.
"It's a movie about zombies, actually one of the better ones. You really need to get cultured, dude."
He narrowed his eyes on her with raised hackles.
"I am cultured," he gritted, "About all that is important."
She rolled her eyes, "Whatever, man. Well, now you know."
His fury passed as quickly as a storm which could be coerced by the gentlest breeze. This was a revelation he had not been prepared to receive. Another Eater…another lonely soul crawling through the throngs of humanity in the same manner as he.
"I had just assumed…" he murmured, his eyes tracing the shapes of ancient memories on the floor. "I can't recall any memories of others. My predecessor never spoke of them." he muttered to himself. "I suppose it should not surprise me; I'm not summoned often."
"Maybe that's part of your penance–all the waiting and the living and that shit that goes down when you actually eat a soul." She shrugged and stuck her hands in her pockets, her fingers hooking into her front belt loops. "You can actually truly live though."
"Live…" he repeated dryly, with eyes squinting like he was seeing something he did not recognize.
"Yeah, you know–what you did before you died? This time with less murder and more junk food. Of all the trappings of life, it's Flaming Hot Cheetos I miss the most–you should really try them."
"I had never truly lived," he scoffed. "I had experienced, yes, but I never felt those pinnacles of joy, not even a small bouquet of carefully collected happy moments. And how I hated the world for it!" He turned his back on her and prepared to make his exit. "I was born broken." he bitterly added.
"You're just going to just walk away after dropping that poetry?" Iris chuckled, but it lacked genuine cheer. "I don't think people are born broken, my guy. I think they're shaped by environment and choice. You need to find out what shaped you and confront it."
He whipped back around, suddenly ready for another battle of words.
"Oh?" he snarled, "And what about you, little pest–what made you jump from that building and kill an innocent mother?"
Her eyes narrowed in silent warning, and she turned on her heel to leave. There was a couple walking through the waiting room at just that unfortunate moment to see a madman yelling about complicated suicide. They hurried past, as though they could catch whatever insanity possessed him.
"I'm not sure you deserve to hear my story, asshole," Iris replied, mid step. Her hands had left her pockets now and one was pushing back her hair in a manner that spoke of nervousness. "You're like talking to a vacuum cleaner. You never listen and all you do is suck."
He huffed, but it came out softly. An unpleasant feeling had resulted in what he had just said to her. He felt somehow responsible for changing the trajectory of her mood.
"My mother hated me," he said. The words did not require any coercion from his mouth, they instead catapulted their way out. "I grew to hate her in return."
Iris folded her arms over her chest in wary acceptance.
"That's a start," she said, "Why did she hate you?"
"I wasn't born perfect," he replied. "My father abandoned her for it."
Iris sighed.
"He abandoned you because he wasn't capable of being a good husband and father," she said. "It sounds like your mother really dropped the ball too. She should have done right by you."
He snorted.
"She did what any mother would do with a child born like me."
"Sit down, Erik," she gestured to the chair, and he very reluctantly acquiesced to sit. "I only have a few more minutes before this next collection." She took a seat beside him. Taking a deep breath, she began. "My parents stayed together for my sake. They thought it would damage me to break the family apart, but the alternative was worse. I watched them despise one another more and more every day. I heard the vicious arguments behind the bedroom door they thought I couldn't hear. I heard the names they called each other and the disgust in their voices. They were both built from head to toe with resentment–like that was all they were anymore. My father started sleeping with some woman he worked with–he wasn't fucking subtle about it either, and my mother developed a significant shopping addiction, but sometimes I think she spent all that money out of spite for my father," She exhaled a breath that sounded like a sigh and a laugh at the same time.
"When I was 12, we had to go to some family member's wedding–some cousin twice removed or some shit. It was obnoxious and expensive, and my parents took full advantage of the open bar. My mother got drunk–like super drunk–which I rarely saw, and she and my dad went at it in the parking lot of the venue. I guess the celebration of love must have put their lack of it into sharp relief. When I showed up my father was storming off to drink some more. And I'll never forget the way my mother turned to me, looked me square in the eyes and said 'Never get married. Every quirk that endeared them to you will become everything you hate.' After that night I never saw them in the same room together and when they were, they refused to acknowledge one another." At this point she had stood and was pacing.
"They put up that god-damned charade of a marriage until I was 18 and then they sat me down and revealed their pending separation to me all delicate-like," she let out a dry chuckle, "Like it was some well-kept secret that they hated each other for over a decade. I'm just trying to say, that parents can fuck us up, even the ones that don't outwardly abuse us and we have to make the best with what they have given us and know that they are also just flawed people too." She stood from her seat. "I think our therapy session is over."
"Why did you tell me all this?" he asked.
"You told me about your parents, so I told you about mine," she replied. "It's called conversing–I just do it with more enthusiasm."
She left the room without any generic words of courteous farewell, leaving Erik to sit there. Before Iris, he had never spent more than a few moments conversing with another being. He didn't dislike it–he remembered fondly of his long nights in Persia, hookah in hand as he and the Dargoa lounged upon plush cushions like indolent princes escaping their responsibilities. They spoke of everything, politics, music, dreams…From time to time, Erik had become too loose lipped from sweet wine and divulged the parts of himself he never allowed to see light, and Nadir, decent soul that he was, never seemed to judge him for it. With time, the Persian had managed to peel back the masks, layer by incremental layer, until he saw the throbbing heart of Erik's core self. Nadir was the only one he had ever let in and look what became of it.
A need suddenly filled him, becoming a near ache in his heart. It took him from the hospital across the buzzing city and into the quiet confines of a public library. Books were comfortable for him, but he required the knowledge of a librarian for what he sought.
At a checkout desk made of heavy oak, a frizzy haired woman with a modest floral print dress was engrossed in a project on the computer. Erik rapped his knuckles on the scuffed and worn desktop to grab her attention. She seemed flustered, but friendly, when she made eye contact.
"Are you looking for something?" she asked warmly, once her initial shock at his disheveled appearance waned.
"Where would I find the life details of a civilian in the historical record?" he asked, with a great deal of nervousness.
Her eyebrows raised in surprise.
"I thought you were just going to ask about getting a temporary WIFI password," she chuckled, "You say 'civilian', do you mean, someone who is not famous?"
"He was important at one time," Erik replied, softly. "In Persia he had a role in the courts, but he moved to Paris."
"There are ancestry sites you can visit." She fetched a piece of crudely cut scratch paper from a stack on the desk and began to write some addresses. "They will give you some birth and death dates. There's also a site I'll put on here that will let you search, and many times see a photo, of gravesites." Sliding the paper across the desk to Erik with a smile, she added. "These networks are free with the library, so I'm going to give you a temporary card. If you need a permanent card, you can always fill out an application."
He accepted the slip of paper with a very reluctant word of thanks, but the librarian merely went back to her computer task.
Two hours later, he was still on the library computer failing to find anything that matched his queries. There were plenty of Nadir in articles about the Persian court in the mid 1800's, even a photo of the Daroga, taken by the shah himself. Erik sought to print out this photo but lacked the dime on him to do so. Instead, he spent several minutes with the photo, almost laughing at the memory. The shah was obsessed with photography, though it was forbidden at the time. He had even sought to take Erik's photo, offering large sums of money for the opportunity. It never worked, of course, Erik would never allow his photo to be taken.
Only when he finally entered the grave finder site with slow, leaden fingers, did he find the answer to his terrible question. His heart plummeted when he took in the black and white text on the screen for a location of a grave in the Muslim section of the Paris Père Lachaise cemetery. Nadir's death happened only days from his own. He had known, logically, that he was gone, but seeing the proof was more than he could handle. Was Nadir surrounded by loved ones? Was it painful, his death? Could he somehow sense that he was chasing so close behind the death of a man he had loved far more than a friend or a brother?
Something broke within him. He stood on shaky legs and managed to get as far as a few feet before he could go no further. A gasp escaped him as the tears worked their way out of him like prisoners running for freedom. The sobs soon followed, He collapsed between the shelves of the Classic Literature section and fell into the physical effects of his despair.
A young woman, seeing his crisis, gently approached him.
"Are you okay?" she softly asked.
"My friend is dead," he choked out, his hands over his eyes as the tears continued to force their way out of him. "He's dead. He's dead! He's dead and buried!"
And the girl, the kind and compassionate soul that she was, placed her books aside and sat down on the floor next to him.
"I'm so sorry," she quietly said. "Do you want to tell me about him?"
And so, he did.
