The Road (That Curiosity Created).
I really need to apologise for this. All of it. As far as short stories go, this one needs an apology. It's awfully thrown together and completely fails in its purpose. And as always, I can never figure out a proper way to close things, leaving a feeling of being incomplete. It also needs to be spell-checked.
In any case. A short story about a young man with a spiritual emptiness, and the lengths he goes to in order to fill himself with... something to make the pain of emptiness less obvious.
The phone made his sister sound worse than she actually was. Shriller. Angrier. More urgent. He smiled indulgently into the phone as she told him that their parents were worried, that he was being an idiot, that they called the university and they were still willing to accept him back, that so much money had gone into his so-called education, that he was a disappointment, anything to get a him upset, angry, something. Desperate for a reaction.
And then he told her he loved her, and smiled when he hung up on her indignant shriek, dropping the phone into the toilet and flushing. Ten minutes later he caught a connecting flight to Cambodia.
Cambodia was beautiful. The taste of dust and sweat permanently coated his tongue the whole time, and the sweat glued his button-up to his chest. As he milled, lost and clueless, through the crowd, a group of children brushed by him. He didn't know what prompted them, but they stopped and looked back at him, as if waiting for something. He gave them a grin, making it clear he knew exactly what had just happened, and he didn't care a bit. A girl with one arm broke away from the group, stood before him, and offered him back his wallet. He took out half the bills and handed it back to her, telling her he wasn't going to need it. He felt lighter than one wallet afterward.
In Vietnam, he traded his cooking pots from his camping gear for a bicycle. After a block, the front wheel fell off. Esteban just shrugged. He'd always wanted to learn how to ride a unicycle.
He stopped by a trade market in Laos on his way to Thailand, at a food stand. The man who cooked there spoke broken English, but he spoke his thoughts clearer than any American Esteban had met. He met the man's father, who only spoke Lao, and had no legs. They spoke through the son as a middle-man, and at the end of it they gave him the a free bowl of noodles, and Esteban gave them all of his clothes, except for his boots, his work jeans, and the shirt on his back. He waved them off, and then headed West.
For two months he worked in a Thai restaurant, washing dishes and learning the food by eye. By the end of it he knew how to say "idiot" in Northern Thai, and on his last night there he prepared a meal for them all They told him it was the worst thing they'd ever tasted, he had accused them of lying, and then they got massively drunk.
He caught a train to India that was packed tighter than a cage full of chickens at market, and then hopped trains, hitched rides, and walked wherever he could. On one train, he found a girl squeezed into the corner, amazingly serene despite her situation. He let her sit on his shoulders, and eventually found her mother. She was an older woman, or maybe just a woman older than her years. She thanked him in Indian, and then in English when he didn't understand. She got excited when he told her that he had lived in America, telling him that she was learning English because her husband had immigrated to America and was working to bring their daughter and her over to live with him. They spoke about America and India. She asked about New York, Los Angeles, California, Hollywood. He asked about the Gangas, the Taj Mahal, Bodhgaya, the Amritsar. She made him promise to meet her again in America.
It as only after he got off he realised he'd never asked her name.
He stayed with a Buddhist monk in New Delhi. He sought spiritual awakening at every traditional and non-traditional centre. He studied their beliefs and ceremonies. He learned prayers, calligraphy and tea ceremonies. He visited a Hindu wise man, a Sikh guru and a Jain Saadhu. He found so much beauty and humanity, but when he prayed he heard only silence answer him.
On the way back from work, he saw a three legged cat successfully fight off a dog three times her size to protect her litter of kittens, all of whom but one were already dead. He broke down in the middle of the road, and he laughed until he cried, and then he cried until he threw up. For the first time since he was ten-years-old, that night he prayed honestly and without fear or reservation. He had nothing to ask God. Nothing to tell him. He just needed to put to use the new found faith that was tearing his soul into desperate shreds.
He had spent nine months in India when he met a Spanish man in a bar. They found each other like fate had directed them, and fell in love with talking to one another, with rediscovering a language they'd sorely missed without even realising it. His name was Alejandro, and he had the darkest eyes Esteban had ever seen. They drank their way back to his hotel, and kissed their way up to his room. It was Esteban's first time with another man. Maybe it was the alcohol, maybe it was because of how smoothly one action flowed into another, but he didn't realise it until the morning after, when Indian sunlight draped itself across the bed like a cliché and he felt Alejandro's foot rubbing a this calf. It was a beautiful moment.
Alejandro was a pilot who constantly grieved for Spain. Maybe it was meeting Esteban that sparked it, or maybe it was something he had been considering for a long time, but he made a decision to fly back home, and invited Esteban to come with him. He lived with Alejandro in Madrid for three weeks, but an old friend came knocking; the gnawing emptiness that had caused him to fly half way around the world, shedding his belongings along the way like a winter coat. He told Alejandro that he had to leave, and while the man had told him with tears in his eyes and surprising passion that he loved him, he didn't ask Esteban to stay. He was beautiful, and he loved him for it.
He hitch-hiked his way to a small town that smelled like roses. A girl in the market caught his eye, dancing with a young boy. He followed her until she turned around suddenly and told him her name was Elena. She took him home, introducing him to her grandfather, Emilio. Emilio was a guitar make in his nineties who was going deaf and well passed senile. He shook constantly, but there was more than insanity that shone in his eyes.
They traded stories. Emilio's wife, Sofia, had died giving birth to their only child, Victor. He raised the child on his own, just him, Victor, and the guitars. When he was eighteen, Victor immigrated to America, the land of opportunity, after fighting with Emilio about his future. Both men were too stubborn to apologise, and so Emilio never contacted nor heard from Victor again, until he was told that his son and the daughter-in-law he'd never met had died in a car accident, leaving their infant daughter without parents. Someone had cared enough for that child to not want her to end up in foster care, and so Emilio raised another child on his own. Just him, Elena, and the guitars.
Emilio loved those guitars, deeper than he loved any human. Deeper than many parents loved their own children. He showed off his guitars with suck reverent pride, and Elena said nothing. He tried to show to Esteban the way in which he made the guitars, but his hands shook and shook and he dropped his tools, until at last he gave up and threw away the guitar, cursing heavily, leaving in a fit.
Elena was six years older than Esteban, but so beautiful. That night she led him up to her bedroom, and they made love. When she thought he was asleep, she climbed out of bed and went downstairs. Esteban followed her, wearing the sheet around his waist like a sarong. He said in the corner, in faithful silence, and watched as she worked on the thrown guitar, all through the night.
The next morning, Elena introduced Esteban to Emilio, as if the previous day had never happened. Emilio asked familiar questions, and told him the same stories. With pride left unbruised from yesterday, he told Esteban about his guitars, showing him the one Elena had worked on through the night, telling him how he had made it. Elena didn't say a word.
Esteban's ghost was always eating him up, however. He told them the next morning he needed to leave. That night they held a party in the yard. Elena tried to teach him how to dance, and was surprised to find out that he already knew how. Esteban played Emilio's guitars, and they drank and laughed and danced. Emilio eventually took Esteban to the side, pushing the guitar Elena had finished into his hands. With a misery Esteban had gone his whole life absent of, Emilio told him he had not made the guitar. But it had been made, he had added, and it had been made for you.
Elena turned away from where she thought Esteban didn't know she was watching. She didn't say good-bye the next morning either.
He headed north, to France, hitch-hiking most of the way. Near the border, he caught a ride with a trucker. The man kept a paperback on his dashboard, so worn down the page corners curved and the front cover was falling off. They talked about travelling, each with great passion. Joseph, the driver, drove between France and Spain. He said he'd never needed to go anywhere else. He picked up a lot of hitch-hikers, and shared stories with Esteban about them.
He'd picked up a French business man who had lost his way after his car broke down and he tried to walk to the nearest town. When the man had seen Jospeh's book, he'd picked it up, commenting that he'd read it before but never got to the ending. He'd immediately flipped to the end of the book, and had been horrified to find that the pages had been ripped out, and then tried to throw it out the window. Joseph had stopped him, telling him that it had been that way since he'd bought it second-hand. When Esteban had asked why he kept it, he told him the same answer he'd told the business man.
"Why not? It's the greatest book I've ever read. The ending has an amazing tendency of changing every time."
In France, he took a job at a micro-winery. He learnt about wine, and how in French cuisine, wine should go with dishes to best accent them. He toured other wineries, and in the year he spent there, visiting Paris completely slipped his mind.
He caught a ferry across the channel, and from there did a shameless tour of all the castles, cathedrals, and ruins in the UK. He met an American medieval history professor named Albert Wilson on vacation at Framlingham Castle, where they plotted to tour the island together. During their time spent together, he found out that Albert was actually hiding from a bad divorce, taking solace in old battles rather than facing the modern ones he had to deal with. When Esteban related the tales of his journey so far, and the whim on which it was concieved, Albert was enraptured. They spent a night drinking in a Scottish pub, and when Esteban woke up the next morning, Albert had left a note, telling him he'd gone to Tibet. He left Esteban with the keys to his car.
In Ireland, he found a pub that seemed to have set itself up in a general store. When he went in to buy jerky, he met an old man who was quite drunk and owned a local amateur brewery. When Esteban told him he'd spent some time working in wineries around France, he forced him to accept a beer on him, and took great delight in telling him why Irish beer was the best in the world, about what set it apart in flavour and quality, and what the criteria for a proper Irish beer was. Then the bartender started arguing with him, doing his best to correct Esteban on the misconceptions placed into his head. He started with a free beer, and ended up with a job at the pub.
He saved up enough to fly back to America, where a friend of the owner of the Irish pub set him up with work, and somewhere to stay. It was a bar for retired cops and soldiers, an entire wall covered with portraits of the deceased, none of the pride lost in the very simple header, "Those Who Died In Service."
In his time working in that bar, he eventually heard the story behind every single face, sometimes thrown at him like an angry admonishment, other times in soft, sad, quiet voices, where half of it was left unsaid. Every dead man and woman was loved as a friend, as a brother, as a sister, as a father, as a mother, as a son and a daughter. He learned every name to every face.
There was a regular at the bar who came in every night, sat in the same place, ordered the same drink, and never said a word. Esteban soon learned to serve him without speaking, though never stopped asking for his name. Eventually someone told him.
Harry Dawson came from a background of domestic violence. Like many, he sought violence to forget violence, and rather than breaking the law, he joined the army to help uphold and safe keep its constitutions. He found a better family in his fellow soldiers than he did his blood relatives. He grew up in the army. He was good at being a soldier and good at following orders. He wasn't good at people. He never married. He'd never learned - never even considered - how to be anything but a soldier. He'd been promoted and promoted and promoted, and done things he never thought was right, but always thought was necessary, because the army told him so. And then he did something he thought was right and necessary, and had been dishonourably discharged. He didn’t even argue. Because he as a good soldier, and the army said it so it was right. But the hardest way to realise you had literally nothing but your job was to lose it.
One night Harry called him over. It was the first time Esteban had ever heard him speak. His voice was rough like someone had gone at his throat with a cheese grater, but it was gentle and slow and honest. Esteban didn’t need to hear it twice to realise that Harry was a good man. He said he’d heard Esteban’s story. He asked about this and that. He asked about landmarks and food and cliché things you ask people who have been on holiday. Then he asked what it was like to willingly give away everything he had. Esteban couldn’t think of a reply, as he hadn’t thought about it at the time or since, so he made a joke instead. He didn’t remember what he said. Harry had laughed anyway. He remember that when he got off work that night, it had been cold. Harry had been there, and he gave Esteban his jacket - his old military jacket. It had been warmed from the heat of Harry’s skin and the alcohol he’d been sweating, and Esteban didn’t have the patience for cold weather to refuse. Harry left before Esteban had a chance to give it back to him.
He didn’t come into the bar the next night. He didn’t come in the night afterward, or the night after that. After a few days, someone put Harry’s picture on the wall. Nothing was said, and no one took it down. Esteban quit, and took the jacket with him.
He found someone’s phone on the street. He knew it was wrong, but without a job or anywhere to live, with only his clothes, his guitar, and an old military jacket, he didn’t have another opportunity. He called his sister in Puerto Rica. He was surprised to learn it had only been under three years since he’d last heard her voice, filtered through panic and anger, on the other side of the phone. At first she didn’t recognise his voice, and then she couldn’t talk because she was crying. She asked him if he was coming home. He was living in a cardboard box, playing for food. For the time being, however, he didn’t feel that aching hunger. So he told her not yet, and hung up.
In any case. A short story about a young man with a spiritual emptiness, and the lengths he goes to in order to fill himself with... something to make the pain of emptiness less obvious.
The phone made his sister sound worse than she actually was. Shriller. Angrier. More urgent. He smiled indulgently into the phone as she told him that their parents were worried, that he was being an idiot, that they called the university and they were still willing to accept him back, that so much money had gone into his so-called education, that he was a disappointment, anything to get a him upset, angry, something. Desperate for a reaction.
And then he told her he loved her, and smiled when he hung up on her indignant shriek, dropping the phone into the toilet and flushing. Ten minutes later he caught a connecting flight to Cambodia.
Cambodia was beautiful. The taste of dust and sweat permanently coated his tongue the whole time, and the sweat glued his button-up to his chest. As he milled, lost and clueless, through the crowd, a group of children brushed by him. He didn't know what prompted them, but they stopped and looked back at him, as if waiting for something. He gave them a grin, making it clear he knew exactly what had just happened, and he didn't care a bit. A girl with one arm broke away from the group, stood before him, and offered him back his wallet. He took out half the bills and handed it back to her, telling her he wasn't going to need it. He felt lighter than one wallet afterward.
In Vietnam, he traded his cooking pots from his camping gear for a bicycle. After a block, the front wheel fell off. Esteban just shrugged. He'd always wanted to learn how to ride a unicycle.
He stopped by a trade market in Laos on his way to Thailand, at a food stand. The man who cooked there spoke broken English, but he spoke his thoughts clearer than any American Esteban had met. He met the man's father, who only spoke Lao, and had no legs. They spoke through the son as a middle-man, and at the end of it they gave him the a free bowl of noodles, and Esteban gave them all of his clothes, except for his boots, his work jeans, and the shirt on his back. He waved them off, and then headed West.
For two months he worked in a Thai restaurant, washing dishes and learning the food by eye. By the end of it he knew how to say "idiot" in Northern Thai, and on his last night there he prepared a meal for them all They told him it was the worst thing they'd ever tasted, he had accused them of lying, and then they got massively drunk.
He caught a train to India that was packed tighter than a cage full of chickens at market, and then hopped trains, hitched rides, and walked wherever he could. On one train, he found a girl squeezed into the corner, amazingly serene despite her situation. He let her sit on his shoulders, and eventually found her mother. She was an older woman, or maybe just a woman older than her years. She thanked him in Indian, and then in English when he didn't understand. She got excited when he told her that he had lived in America, telling him that she was learning English because her husband had immigrated to America and was working to bring their daughter and her over to live with him. They spoke about America and India. She asked about New York, Los Angeles, California, Hollywood. He asked about the Gangas, the Taj Mahal, Bodhgaya, the Amritsar. She made him promise to meet her again in America.
It as only after he got off he realised he'd never asked her name.
He stayed with a Buddhist monk in New Delhi. He sought spiritual awakening at every traditional and non-traditional centre. He studied their beliefs and ceremonies. He learned prayers, calligraphy and tea ceremonies. He visited a Hindu wise man, a Sikh guru and a Jain Saadhu. He found so much beauty and humanity, but when he prayed he heard only silence answer him.
On the way back from work, he saw a three legged cat successfully fight off a dog three times her size to protect her litter of kittens, all of whom but one were already dead. He broke down in the middle of the road, and he laughed until he cried, and then he cried until he threw up. For the first time since he was ten-years-old, that night he prayed honestly and without fear or reservation. He had nothing to ask God. Nothing to tell him. He just needed to put to use the new found faith that was tearing his soul into desperate shreds.
He had spent nine months in India when he met a Spanish man in a bar. They found each other like fate had directed them, and fell in love with talking to one another, with rediscovering a language they'd sorely missed without even realising it. His name was Alejandro, and he had the darkest eyes Esteban had ever seen. They drank their way back to his hotel, and kissed their way up to his room. It was Esteban's first time with another man. Maybe it was the alcohol, maybe it was because of how smoothly one action flowed into another, but he didn't realise it until the morning after, when Indian sunlight draped itself across the bed like a cliché and he felt Alejandro's foot rubbing a this calf. It was a beautiful moment.
Alejandro was a pilot who constantly grieved for Spain. Maybe it was meeting Esteban that sparked it, or maybe it was something he had been considering for a long time, but he made a decision to fly back home, and invited Esteban to come with him. He lived with Alejandro in Madrid for three weeks, but an old friend came knocking; the gnawing emptiness that had caused him to fly half way around the world, shedding his belongings along the way like a winter coat. He told Alejandro that he had to leave, and while the man had told him with tears in his eyes and surprising passion that he loved him, he didn't ask Esteban to stay. He was beautiful, and he loved him for it.
He hitch-hiked his way to a small town that smelled like roses. A girl in the market caught his eye, dancing with a young boy. He followed her until she turned around suddenly and told him her name was Elena. She took him home, introducing him to her grandfather, Emilio. Emilio was a guitar make in his nineties who was going deaf and well passed senile. He shook constantly, but there was more than insanity that shone in his eyes.
They traded stories. Emilio's wife, Sofia, had died giving birth to their only child, Victor. He raised the child on his own, just him, Victor, and the guitars. When he was eighteen, Victor immigrated to America, the land of opportunity, after fighting with Emilio about his future. Both men were too stubborn to apologise, and so Emilio never contacted nor heard from Victor again, until he was told that his son and the daughter-in-law he'd never met had died in a car accident, leaving their infant daughter without parents. Someone had cared enough for that child to not want her to end up in foster care, and so Emilio raised another child on his own. Just him, Elena, and the guitars.
Emilio loved those guitars, deeper than he loved any human. Deeper than many parents loved their own children. He showed off his guitars with suck reverent pride, and Elena said nothing. He tried to show to Esteban the way in which he made the guitars, but his hands shook and shook and he dropped his tools, until at last he gave up and threw away the guitar, cursing heavily, leaving in a fit.
Elena was six years older than Esteban, but so beautiful. That night she led him up to her bedroom, and they made love. When she thought he was asleep, she climbed out of bed and went downstairs. Esteban followed her, wearing the sheet around his waist like a sarong. He said in the corner, in faithful silence, and watched as she worked on the thrown guitar, all through the night.
The next morning, Elena introduced Esteban to Emilio, as if the previous day had never happened. Emilio asked familiar questions, and told him the same stories. With pride left unbruised from yesterday, he told Esteban about his guitars, showing him the one Elena had worked on through the night, telling him how he had made it. Elena didn't say a word.
Esteban's ghost was always eating him up, however. He told them the next morning he needed to leave. That night they held a party in the yard. Elena tried to teach him how to dance, and was surprised to find out that he already knew how. Esteban played Emilio's guitars, and they drank and laughed and danced. Emilio eventually took Esteban to the side, pushing the guitar Elena had finished into his hands. With a misery Esteban had gone his whole life absent of, Emilio told him he had not made the guitar. But it had been made, he had added, and it had been made for you.
Elena turned away from where she thought Esteban didn't know she was watching. She didn't say good-bye the next morning either.
He headed north, to France, hitch-hiking most of the way. Near the border, he caught a ride with a trucker. The man kept a paperback on his dashboard, so worn down the page corners curved and the front cover was falling off. They talked about travelling, each with great passion. Joseph, the driver, drove between France and Spain. He said he'd never needed to go anywhere else. He picked up a lot of hitch-hikers, and shared stories with Esteban about them.
He'd picked up a French business man who had lost his way after his car broke down and he tried to walk to the nearest town. When the man had seen Jospeh's book, he'd picked it up, commenting that he'd read it before but never got to the ending. He'd immediately flipped to the end of the book, and had been horrified to find that the pages had been ripped out, and then tried to throw it out the window. Joseph had stopped him, telling him that it had been that way since he'd bought it second-hand. When Esteban had asked why he kept it, he told him the same answer he'd told the business man.
"Why not? It's the greatest book I've ever read. The ending has an amazing tendency of changing every time."
In France, he took a job at a micro-winery. He learnt about wine, and how in French cuisine, wine should go with dishes to best accent them. He toured other wineries, and in the year he spent there, visiting Paris completely slipped his mind.
He caught a ferry across the channel, and from there did a shameless tour of all the castles, cathedrals, and ruins in the UK. He met an American medieval history professor named Albert Wilson on vacation at Framlingham Castle, where they plotted to tour the island together. During their time spent together, he found out that Albert was actually hiding from a bad divorce, taking solace in old battles rather than facing the modern ones he had to deal with. When Esteban related the tales of his journey so far, and the whim on which it was concieved, Albert was enraptured. They spent a night drinking in a Scottish pub, and when Esteban woke up the next morning, Albert had left a note, telling him he'd gone to Tibet. He left Esteban with the keys to his car.
In Ireland, he found a pub that seemed to have set itself up in a general store. When he went in to buy jerky, he met an old man who was quite drunk and owned a local amateur brewery. When Esteban told him he'd spent some time working in wineries around France, he forced him to accept a beer on him, and took great delight in telling him why Irish beer was the best in the world, about what set it apart in flavour and quality, and what the criteria for a proper Irish beer was. Then the bartender started arguing with him, doing his best to correct Esteban on the misconceptions placed into his head. He started with a free beer, and ended up with a job at the pub.
He saved up enough to fly back to America, where a friend of the owner of the Irish pub set him up with work, and somewhere to stay. It was a bar for retired cops and soldiers, an entire wall covered with portraits of the deceased, none of the pride lost in the very simple header, "Those Who Died In Service."
In his time working in that bar, he eventually heard the story behind every single face, sometimes thrown at him like an angry admonishment, other times in soft, sad, quiet voices, where half of it was left unsaid. Every dead man and woman was loved as a friend, as a brother, as a sister, as a father, as a mother, as a son and a daughter. He learned every name to every face.
There was a regular at the bar who came in every night, sat in the same place, ordered the same drink, and never said a word. Esteban soon learned to serve him without speaking, though never stopped asking for his name. Eventually someone told him.
Harry Dawson came from a background of domestic violence. Like many, he sought violence to forget violence, and rather than breaking the law, he joined the army to help uphold and safe keep its constitutions. He found a better family in his fellow soldiers than he did his blood relatives. He grew up in the army. He was good at being a soldier and good at following orders. He wasn't good at people. He never married. He'd never learned - never even considered - how to be anything but a soldier. He'd been promoted and promoted and promoted, and done things he never thought was right, but always thought was necessary, because the army told him so. And then he did something he thought was right and necessary, and had been dishonourably discharged. He didn’t even argue. Because he as a good soldier, and the army said it so it was right. But the hardest way to realise you had literally nothing but your job was to lose it.
One night Harry called him over. It was the first time Esteban had ever heard him speak. His voice was rough like someone had gone at his throat with a cheese grater, but it was gentle and slow and honest. Esteban didn’t need to hear it twice to realise that Harry was a good man. He said he’d heard Esteban’s story. He asked about this and that. He asked about landmarks and food and cliché things you ask people who have been on holiday. Then he asked what it was like to willingly give away everything he had. Esteban couldn’t think of a reply, as he hadn’t thought about it at the time or since, so he made a joke instead. He didn’t remember what he said. Harry had laughed anyway. He remember that when he got off work that night, it had been cold. Harry had been there, and he gave Esteban his jacket - his old military jacket. It had been warmed from the heat of Harry’s skin and the alcohol he’d been sweating, and Esteban didn’t have the patience for cold weather to refuse. Harry left before Esteban had a chance to give it back to him.
He didn’t come into the bar the next night. He didn’t come in the night afterward, or the night after that. After a few days, someone put Harry’s picture on the wall. Nothing was said, and no one took it down. Esteban quit, and took the jacket with him.
He found someone’s phone on the street. He knew it was wrong, but without a job or anywhere to live, with only his clothes, his guitar, and an old military jacket, he didn’t have another opportunity. He called his sister in Puerto Rica. He was surprised to learn it had only been under three years since he’d last heard her voice, filtered through panic and anger, on the other side of the phone. At first she didn’t recognise his voice, and then she couldn’t talk because she was crying. She asked him if he was coming home. He was living in a cardboard box, playing for food. For the time being, however, he didn’t feel that aching hunger. So he told her not yet, and hung up.