THE CHANGE - CHAPTER FORTY

PART THIRTEEN - CHARLIE MAKES HIMSELF AT HOME / MEMORIES SLAIN ON MEMORY LANE

PART THIRTEEN

CHARLIE MAKES HIMSELF AT HOME

SATURDAY, DECEMBER 19TH

MALIBU, CA

FORTY

By then, I was officially drunk. So I staggered down to Liam’s bedroom, and pissed all over his bed. Not that he’d ever get to fuck in it again, but just on general principles. Cackling, as I shook the last drops loose, and zipped.

In the hallway, I teetered, bumping into the wall, and knocked a framed photo of Liam to the floor. “Oops!” I said, then knocked a few more down, just for the fuck of it.

Till I reached the door I was looking for.

The only one I was scared to enter.

* * *

It was a very nice room, with a very nice bed. I recognized her taste, her aesthetic, at once. The walls were painted like a desert sunset at magic hour: gold and blue with cloudlike splashes of pink and plum in the heavens, above warm earth tones with little flashes of yellow like the last rays of sun peeking in.

There was no art on the walls. The walls were the art. There were also no pictures of her, or Liam. It was a serene, meditative space. The kind of space I could easily see her in, if I simply ignored the fresh images burned into my mind’s eye.

I soaked it all in, because it felt so familiar. So comforting. So calm. My eyes softened at the sight of it, my drunken anger peeling back.

“Oh, god damn it,” I sighed, and sighed again as I walked around the room, just touching things. Taking it in. Opening her closet, just to look at her clothes. Opening her drawers, though I did not rifle through them. Peeked into her bathroom, just to see where she bathed.

Then back to the bed I turned. Approaching it warily.

Before dropping to my knees in front of it, leaning into her pillows, and deeply inhaling…

* * *

…as I remembered the first time I met her. At a Black Lives Matter protest, in the summer of 2016. I was living in downtown Portland then, coming fresh off a graveyard shift at a construction site. Still wearing my security guard uniform, and in no mood for bullshit. Just trying to cross the park on my way home from work, and wanting nothing to do with any of it.

But a bunch of whipped-up Proud Boys had come across the bridge from Vancouver, Washington to “counter-protest”, which basically meant to stir some shit, waving Confederate flags and generally making America great again by provoking racial violence. This was in the middle of Ker-Flump’s first campaign, so his goon squads were out in full force, pledging their allegiance in advance for the totalitarianism to come.

And while the protesters were not pushovers by any means – I gotta admit, I was impressed by their resolve – most of them had not come prepared for assholes with baseball bats.