The Chamber Singer
The Chamber Singer
by elder_bonnie
Rating: PG
Word count: 10,388
Genre: Original fiction
Summary:
Everyone reaches that point in life, that trough where things seem at their worst. Where nothing ever seems to work out and where absolutely nothing matters. Some people never pull themselves out. Thomas Hensen's intervention is anything but conventional.
Author's Notes: This is meant to have a vague, cloudy context for a kind of assumptive, fill-in-the-blanks yourself kind of atmosphere, and I apologize if it seems jumpy and confusing. The entire story is primarily an exercise in descriptive writing, and I hope you can enjoy it for what it is :) Thank you for reading!
Tom Hensen had never considered himself a religious sort of person. He could count on his fingers the number of times he'd gone to church for the service itself, during those lulls in the year when life seemed to be frozen for a breath of a day, and everyone gathered together in churches and cathedrals, joining one another in the Community of Holiday Cheer, a stronger force in this bitter, materialistic world than the community of Christ was.
This Sunday started out no different than the hundreds of Sundays Tom had passed through before. He awoke among the gray, dingy sheets of a bed that hadn't been remade in nearly six months, his eyes so thick with sleep and his head so full of hangover, it took him a long few minutes to drudge up the rest of his consciousness to follow that small blip of brain activity which had first woken him up. A peep at the offending red numbers upon his nightstand revealed to him that it was nearly noon, an observation he could not have made any other way shy of walking outside and observing the sunlight for himself. His window, a thick, greasy block of glass murky with age, offered him a unique view of the building adjacent his, the brick walls of the two apartment complexes not five feet apart.
Very little sunlight ever made it through that window, leaving Tom's small bedroom in a perpetual state of gloom and dim. What did make it through the crumbling brick walls was an ambient cacophony of the city, bouncing up between the buildings. The thrum and blare of traffic, growing and ebbing in decibels like a sonic tide, pulled his thoughts further from their grog. Bacon flavored the air, informing him that his roommate was up - had been up for some time - and had prepared a decent breakfast. Robbie never made bacon, unless he had the time to make the eggs and pancakes to go with it.
Tom uttered something akin to a groan and rubbed at one eye with stiff fingers, inching out from under the covers and standing with a belabored stretch. It had been one week since he'd lost his job, and he hadn't bothered to shower since. He decided to remedy that.
“Oh good, you're alive.”
“Morning, Rob,” Tom mumbled, brushing his hand over his still-damp hair. “Thanks for cooking.”
“I like to cook on Sundays. Slow mornings are ideal for perfecting my sunny-side-up execution. Bacon?”
“Please.” Tom straddled one of the stools that lined his side of the island, resting his elbows on the counter and crossing his arms as Robbie portioned out his breakfast. Robbie was a bit shorter than Tom, with a neat, trimmed nest of dark brown hair framing his face and mouth. The sleeves of his red and black plaid flannel were rolled up to the elbows. Tom couldn't get over how incredibly hairy and tan and masculine the smaller man was. He glanced down at his own hands, thin and vaguely feminine.
“Have you proposed yet?” Tom suddenly asked, if a bit reluctantly, stretching his arm upward to pull the long sleeve away from his wrist before taking the plate Robbie offered.
“What?” came the off-beat reply.
“You've been dating, what, three years now? What's the hold up?”
Robbie pulled back one side of his mouth and drew his eyebrows down. “It's more complicated than that, Thomas.”
“How so?” Tom asked around a mouthful of pancake.
“Well aside from buying a ring, which I can't afford, asking her parents, who'd sooner see me at the bottom of the Potomac than within 20 feet of their daughter, and finding time among my academic schedule to actually have the wedding... Then there's the fact that we... I don't think she's ready. I'm not ready.” Then, almost as an afterthought; “You wouldn't really get it.”
Tom iced up considerably at those words, but bit down on his bacon and remained silent.
After a moment of uncomfortable silence, “Did you dye your hair?”
Tom glanced up at Robbie, confused. “No, why?”
Robbie shrugged. “It looks blonder.”
“My hair can't get any blonder.”
Robbie's eyes fixed to a point above Tom's line of sight for a few seconds, observing his hair before replying, “no, you're right. I think I just got used to the grease from the last few days. It looks lighter than it did.”
“Thanks,” Tom said dryly.
“You know what I don't understand?”
“What's that?”
“Why you aren't having breakfast with Chloe.” Robbie was too good at picking up on subtleties, Tom decided. “I mean, don't get me wrong, I'm flattered you like my cooking. But I know for a fact that Chloe's ten times the better chef than I am and you've never taken my cooking over hers. You haven't left the apartment in days, and she hasn't been over. What's the deal?”
At that question, Tom couldn't help but ice up again. He felt the bitter sting of regret and envy, and engaged in a staring contest with his glass of orange juice.
“Still a sensitive subject, is it?”
“You could stand to be a bit more.”
“What?”
“Sensitive, asshole.”
Robbie's eyes soared into his hairline. “If it evokes that kind of language from you, I guess I could.”
Tom pinched his eyes. He almost always regretted any conversation with Robbie that took a semi-serious turn. The guy was a fantastic roommate; he held a job that ensured he always paid for his half of the rent and utilities, he was a brilliant student working toward his masters in architecture, and his demeanor around women was flawless. He was confident, fit, and very pleasant on the eyes, and yet, at least as far as his interactions with Tom were concerned, his sympathies were lacking.
“Whelp,” Robbie began, taking generous helpings of eggs, pancakes, and bacon onto his own plate, “I'm going to head upstairs and Skype with Angie. You mind putting the leftovers away when you're done?” And without waiting for an answer, Robbie scooped up his plate, his cup of cranberry juice, and shuffled his way to the stairs.
Tom absently stabbed at his spartan eggs with his fork, gently scraping along the bottom of the plate. His appetite was quickly abating. A glance out the sink's window revealed an incredibly blue sky and sunny stretch of street. Apparently the world had been continuing on outside of his gloomy bedroom chamber without him.
He needed to get out. And the stupid dishes could wait.
-----
The air was a bit nippier than he had expected. Tom popped the faded collar of his black leather jacket and wedged his hands into stretched, crumb-lined pockets. His first instinct was, unfortunately, to head straight for Chloe's apartment, but another half second of lucidity brought him around to more common sense. The streets were busier than usual with post-Sunday-service traffic, families and friends heading out to large afternoon lunches before returning home for afternoon naps and watching sports games on TV. He was sure that most every coffee shop, music store and book nook within walking distance would be too busy, hardly the places of solitude he needed. Wanted. Did he really need to be alone right now? Was continuing to avoid Chloe really what was best? Why the hell had he left the apartment? What was he supposed to do?
Tom stood there on the sidewalk in front of his apartment building's stoop, the epitome of an apathetic transient to all other eyes, his own gaze fixed on a point on the asphalt just a few yards in front of him. The passing of cars and taxis hardly deterred his gaze's intensity. He was waging a desperate internal debate with himself. It was nearly four minutes before he finally made a decision and turned left.
-----
“Hello?”
“Hey. Chloe. ...It's me, it's... it's Tom.”
“...”
“Um, I was just wondering if, uh.... if I could, um, come up for a minute? And... and talk to you, maybe?”
“....I thought you didn't want to talk?”
“I didn't. But, uh... I just... Well, I need to, now.”
“Uh huh.”
“...”
“Look, Tom, I'm pretty busy. I've got to get my images in order for tonight, I haven't even taken them to the printer's yet.”
“Oh. Yeah, your... your gallery thing is tonight, isn't it?”
“Yeah.”
“Um... Heh. I don't suppose... I'm still invited?”
“I thought you weren't interested in any of this stuff.”
“Look, can we talk upstairs? Please?”
“...”
-----
She opened the door a foot and a half and leaned against the frame, her arm raised and lying parallel to the door itself. Her eyes seemed tired, more tired than Tom could remember, and her chin length hair was pulled back into a disarray of a ponytail with a tan scrunchy somehow holding most of it away from her face. There were still wisps of dark hair feathering her cheeks, softening her face in spite of the wary way she looked at him, lips pinched in an expression Tom had been fortunate enough to only ever see a handful of times during their relationship. She was wearing one of her old sweatshirts, a thick grey heather knit that hung off of her sharp shoulders and engulfed her small hands so completely from view. She didn't speak, but merely regarded him with those tired eyes, their bronze shades dulled and dim. Instinctively, it made Tom want to shrink away from her. From what he had done.
"Hey,” he said quietly, hands still in his pockets.
“Hey,” was her equally soft reply.
A few seconds passed, and then, “...may I come in?”
She spread the door open another inch and backed away, rubbing at her arm as she returned to her computer. It sat on a small desk that nestled up against the only window in the living room. Tom gingerly stepped inside, retracting a hand from a pocket and closing the door behind him. Once shut, that hand snaked back to that pocket as though afraid of exposure. The latch had clicked with a ring of finality, enclosing him inside that apartment and reminding him of what he couldn't back down from.
Chloe sat down at her computer and returned to the photo editing she had been doing before Tom buzzed up. Tom was left standing in front of her door, eyes touching various parts of the room but always coming back to her. He saw the picture frame that held an image of the two of them together at the beach. She hadn't gotten rid of it yet. A good sign, he supposed. Maybe. A few dishes were sitting in the sink; a strainer, a small pot and a spatula. She'd made macaroni again. A stack of unopened envelopes sat behind her computer. Bills were still unpaid. Magazines strewn across the coffee table, scraps and shards of glossy paper lying around them like so much carnage. Scrapbooking. An outlet she rarely went back to. Everything in her apartment was communicating to Tom with the simplicity of a picture book. Communicating to him how not-ok she was.
She still hadn't said anything. Her feet were braced up on the desk chair she sat in, her legs blocking most of her torso from view. Her eyes were fixated upon the computer screen. Her middle finger repeated the same figure eight motion over the mouse-pad again and again, the rest of her form still and poetic. The noonday light beamed right through her window, warming her sweatshirt, haloing her face, stretching over the carpet in paneled squares. There was always light coming through that window. Large, clean, clear, and facing an ever-open expanse of sky. He had always preferred coming here to spending time in his own room. He'd be immensely comforted if she couldn't remember what his own room looked like.
Tom moved forward, toward her. On the way, he slid his toes under the footrest for her rocking chair and pulled it toward her desk with his foot. Then he straddled it and pulled his hands from his pockets at last, lacing their fingers together and letting them dangle between his legs. He squinted up at her silhouette, seeing nothing but sun and shadow when he sought her face.
Tom licked his lower lip.
“I'm sorry.”
Chloe's finger stilled. Her eyes didn't leave the screen. She swallowed.
Tom swallowed.
“I can't... begin to imagine...” He exhaled shakily. “You don't deserve... this. Me.”
She was breathing so slowly.
“If it's hurting me this much, I can't imagine how...” He was incapable of speaking above a hush.
“Is there.....” His thumbs began stroking each other. “...anything I can do? Any way to... to save this? Us?”
A cloud veiled the sun. Her eyes were wet. Her eyes were on his face.
“I don't know,” she said.
-----
The inky streets, varnished with rain, seemed to blend into the nothing on the horizon. Ironically vibrant neon bled in childlike brush strokes across the oily pavement, creating for Tom the effect of walking stories above the street, the lit walls of the buildings around him descending further in reflection down into oblivion. Rain pattered around him, tapping his uncovered head and hunched shoulders. A ring of muddy navy encircled the hems of his jeans, the rainwater that seeped up numbing his ankles. He listened to the shushing curtain that the rain pulled over everything, calmed beyond description by its soft, constant static.
He lifted his head and briefly closed his eyes, inhaling the uncharacteristically fresh, vivid night air. A cloud puffed past his face as he exhaled, unable to repress a hum of contentment so light as to dissipate with the hum of traffic, rare and intermittent. The entire scene that he trudged through was sketched out like a piece fit for the Modern Art wing, and every colored gleam of light shone trough the rain like a saxophone's wail.
He walked aimlessly for an indeterminable amount of time, eventually losing track of where he was or where he was going. The buildings around him became unfamiliar, the street names different; the part of town he was now in was a stranger to him, in look and mood. Tom suddenly stopped at an intersection and raised his head, blinking at the unfamiliar landmarks around him. He eventually came to realize what had pulled him from his somber reverie; the traffic. Cars edged in and out of the streets, sidling past each other, windshield wipers rigidly waving at their neighbors. A busier part of town. Likely a bar nearby.
The thought, however, of shuffling to the nearest bar to saturate his emotions was both tempting and repulsive to Tom. His hands, which had been burrowed into his pockets, lifted as he attempted to shake a layer of water off of his coat, trying to make a decision. It was then, caught up in a strangely busy intersection late at night, that he heard it - for what he was sure in hindsight was for the first time in his life.
It came from behind him. An incandescent column of sound that spilled onto the street with the opening of a door, like the way petals spread when a flower blooms. It was faint, as though reaching through from another plane. Tom, completely enraptured, hardly thought to turn or determine from whence the sound came before the same door closed and he found himself once again enclosed in the dark curtain of that damp Sunday night. He shuddered, lost in the memory of what that sound was, hardly seeing the rainwater that dripped into his eyes.
Another moment and he was pulled to rationale again by an interaction. Someone rushed past him, a flurry of umbrella, water, boot, and huff. Blinking, Tom lifted his head to follow the stranger with his eyes. The man, features enfolded within the over-broad, hiked-up collar of his coat, leapt the carved stone steps of the building behind Tom, a building the young man now faced with apprehension. The stranger shook out his umbrella with a frantic flail of his wrist and pulled open one of the large, plain wooden doors that led into a comparatively simple cathedral. The moment the door opened, Tom found himself awash with that sound again.
Voices. They were just voices.
But they were singing nothing Tom had ever heard before. It wasn't of this world, the music they were making. And it speared his soul to feel again.
He couldn't remember the last time he had set foot in a church, much less a cathedral. Tom stood on the sidewalk and surveyed the Gothic building warily, his eyes darting over its features, constantly flitting back to the closed doors. He couldn't go inside. He wasn't a part of that world, of their community - never had been. He'd never had any reason to like any of those people - though, to be fair, he had no just reason to dislike them other than their air of moral superiority. He'd been witness to enough Christian hypocrisy to not want any part of their idle, feckless doctrine. Religion in general. If there was someone out there, anyone out there who might be looking out for him, he'd never seen or felt them. His family was nonexistent, his job was terminated, his roommate was insufferable, his love life was a cracking carcass. His life had no direction, no purpose, and he had no use for religion in it.
With an uncomfortable glance down the street, Tom sniffed and scuffed the sidewalk with his heel, sending a forming puddle into hapless confusion, its murky reflections of the city's lights shifting into a Monet of indeterminable shapes and bringing Tom's thoughts back to ground level as he looked into it.
What was he doing here?
The puddle began to still. He needed to go home.
Tom pulled at his nose and turned, preparing to leave all and throw himself back into squalor, but something stayed him, something inexplicable kept his toe from lifting from the sidewalk, half-poised to walk away. Tom lowered his hand, rubbed his thumb and forefinger together, and faced the cathedral again. That sound. The sound of a multitude of human voices creating a chord he had never heard before, a music that was not of the earth. There was something other-worldly about it that had latched onto a piece of himself that he rarely acknowledged. The need to hear that sound again was what kept him from leaving this unfamiliar place and trudging back to what life he was failing to live.
Tom took a deep, sharp breath and ascended the cathedral steps, watching the doors grow larger with each footfall. Upon reaching the top, he simply stood and observed those doors, observed their large iron handles. His hand left his pocket, paused, suspended. Then he slowly wrapped his fingers around the cold, wet metal and pulled.
-----
The music was so much more distinct now and it seeped into him, somehow able, as he stepped into the foyer, to combat the chill of the rain that had pervaded his muscles without his knowledge. He kept his fingers braced upon the heavy door behind him, slowing it down so as not to create an audible disturbance when it closed. The foyer stretched a good fifty feet to his left and to his right, and there was an imposing wall just fifteen feet in front of him that ran the length of the foyer. Within this wall, there were two sets of doors on either end that were closed, guarding the way into the cathedral's main chamber. The foyer was drafty and hushed; a young woman stood behind a counter, straightening a pile of brochures with chipped purple nails. An older man was shrugging into a long coat and checking his phone. A considerably much older woman was shuffling into the foyer from the right, emerging from a side hallway or hidden staircase that likely led to a bathroom. Tom bent his neck back and looked at the ceiling - it was covered with murals of unfamiliar saints and indecipherable Latin script that shone gold at him. Every little sound, from the old man's cough to the scuff of a shoe to the flap of paper was magnified tenfold in that open space, bouncing off of the stone walls. Tom felt like a trapped bird.
His eyes moved to follow the old woman as her bony hands grasped the handle of one of the massive doors leading into the cathedral's main chamber. Without thinking, Tom quickly stepped over and behind her, moving his own hand into her line of vision. The woman quickly realized what he was trying to do, and so she let go and stepped back. Tom pulled on the door, a bit more forcefully than was necessary - it was not nearly as heavy as he had anticipated. Regardless, the look of kindness and gratitude that the old woman bestowed upon him was comparable to a parting cloud on a dismal, sunless day. An equally genuine smile sneaked, unbidden, across Tom's lips in return as the old woman moved inside.
Tom looked around the door, daring to peer within, and caught his breath.
The ceiling was well over 100 feet tall. Thick stone columns rose from the marbled floors to support the massive dome in the center, which brandished countless murals and mosaics that blended into one another. Rows upon rows of benches filled the entire floor space, each one brimming with people who were just as captivated by the music that was being produced as Tom was. There was a raised platform at the very far end of the cathedral, upon which there stood a group of twenty or so people. The women wore long, elegant black dresses, and the men wore black vests over white shirts with billowy sleeves - reminiscent to Tom of respectable pirates. They were singing, and their voices were the sound of clouds and light and wings. Each individual voice rose, a cord of sound to weave into a tapestry of shine and soul that resonated into a new chord all its own. It was the kind of music that reminded you of why humankind ever created music. Except, what Tom was hearing now could hardly have been the make of any earthbound soul, so beautiful and intricate it was. Tom couldn't bring himself to move, though subconsciously his hand grasped at the front of his shirt, just over his sternum, twisting the fabric as his eyes stayed fixated upon the artists so far away.
Suddenly, a cold hand covered his own. With a start, Tom's eyes darted down into the still-warm face of the old woman he had helped. With surpassing understanding, she gently loosed his grip from his shirt and silently pulled him into the cathedral chamber. Tom, hardly capable of refusing, followed her meekly. With every step, he seemed to feel smaller and smaller. The old woman didn't lead him to a seat, where he would have felt all the more ostentatious and out of place. She simply led him to the side, keeping close to the back wall, and placed him aside the rear pillar. And it was from this subtle vantage point that Tom was able to listen to the rest of the performance, constantly battling the urge to flee with the need to never stop hearing what he was hearing. His soul couldn't bear it if he left before every drop of sound was lifted from the air.
-----
It was well after 1:00 a.m. when Tom’s tired feet finally brought him to the base of the steps leading up to his apartment. The rain had since stopped, but the city air still held onto every smell the rain had brought along. The kind of smells that weren’t necessarily fresh so much as real. Everything dripped and shone as though coated by a layer of black ice. Tom sniffed, his shoulders hunched and his drying hair matted to his brow. A cough, a cloud of breath in the cold air, a suppressed shudder at the memory of what he had left three short hours before, and Tom at last began to drag himself up the few steps to the door. The streets were quiet. The night was quiet. But Tom’s ears still rang, his chest still swelled with the balm he had received.
Tom’s cold, thin fingers slid slowly around the colder, slick neck of the door handle before he remembered that a key was needed. His hand returned to its pocket, but he already knew the keys weren’t there. Nor were they in his other coat pocket. Another cough, a huff, a cloud of breath as Tom’s hands darted in and out of every pocket on his person, but his search did not end as he had hoped. Tom blinked and rubbed at his numb nose with equally numb fingers, turning and looking up and down the street aimlessly. He spent a long minute standing alone upon that stoop, hands shoved into his pockets and his shoulders pulled up to his chin, his gaze unwaveringly fixed upon a point far beneath the sidewalk through which it pierced.
Tom didn’t care for introspection, but it was hard to avoid in settings such as this. He especially didn’t care for introspection when all his thoughts returned to him were varied forms of 'your life is pitiable. Your life is pointless. You are pointless.'
This mindset, this depression that had bound him for the past month... it was crippling him, and he couldn't seem to pull out of it. His girlfriend, a woman he had fully intended to marry someday, had fallen from his hands, by no one's fault but his own. His job, the only pillar supporting his finances, his ability to pay his half of the rent, and, consequently, the only thing that prevented his friendship with Robert from crumbling into the gaping maw that had consumed nearly ever relationship he'd ever had, had been wrestled from his weak grasp. He didn't have enough money to last him more than two months, and Robert was not going to want to support him until he could find another job. Because Robert was an ass, and Tom had cried wolf too many times in the past.
But who else could he go to? The father he never communicated with had remarried a decade ago and had his own family, apart from Tom, to take care of. His mother had remarried as well, just over a year ago, but the relationship between Tom and his new stepfather was even worse that what existed between him and his real father. And his younger brother? Still in college on the other side of the country.
Tom's gaze was broken as a small, glistening car splashed down the street, driving past the spot on the sidewalk where his eyes had been fixed. It sped past, one of its tires cutting down the middle of a puddle and throwing a curtain of water up and over the sidewalk.
He blinked furiously. He was being ridiculous. This moping, this self-pity - it was in no way productive. Tom wiped a hand across his face and turned back to his door, knocking repeatedly until a light came on in the window to his left, followed shortly by a shirtless, squinting, and clearly pissed off Robert.
-----
The cathedral was nearly entirely empty. And it was extremely unsettling to him. The atmosphere was different - forlorn, empty. Quiet. The expansive space only seemed to make the deafening silence all the more pronounced, the lack of sound pounding down upon his ears as though reality were trying to grind him into the ground. Tom pressed his hands together and rubbed them absently, his eyes roaming the pillars and walls and windows with awe. Despite the uncomfortable feeling he had being here when the cathedral was so lifeless, it was nothing compared to the uncomfortable feeling he had had while attending the other night, when the cathedral was full of people he would never be able to relate to. Who could never relate to him.
He stepped forward, noting the colored marble of the floor beneath his feet, cold and elegant. A small pedestal held a large bowl of water that he had witnessed others dip their fingers into before drawing the cross across their chests. Special church water, then. Or something. Walking around it, he looked to his left and right and noted small alcoves that hid open doorways, behind which could be seen twin stone staircases that spiraled up to higher levels. His curiosity ensnaring him, Tom made his way toward the doorway on his right, moving through it and beginning an ascent of the stairs.
He was only ten steps in when he suddenly heard the loud creak of a door from the other end of the cathedral, then light, enthusiastic chatter filled the endless space. Frozen, Tom didn't know what to do but listen as more and more voices joined the first couple, comfortable conversation and a clatter of footsteps. They didn't seem to be coming any closer to his end of the cathedral, he was thankful to discern, but it was apparent they weren't going to leave any time soon. Tom bent down, trying to see down the steps and into the cathedral, but he was too far up the stairs to see much more than the floor and the base of the opposite wall. He was too frightened to descend again and leave through the main doors. They would see him. They would wonder why he was there. Or worse. They would ask him to leave.
Tom was at an impasse as to what to do, and it was a long few moments before he finally made up his mind to continue upward. He was still curious as to what lay in the upper levels, and he wasn't about to reveal himself to whoever was down there. He was also curious to know what so many people would be doing in a cathedral this early in the afternoon, when a concert wasn't scheduled.
Then, parting through the chatter, one clear, perfect female voice began to sing.
Tom was scrambling toward the top of the steps. They spiraled up and up, and Tom followed them past the exit for the second floor, wanting to go as high up as they would take him. The third floor was where they ended, and he carefully slipped his head through the open doorway.
He observed a small balcony scattered with wooden chairs in haphazard rows, all facing an old wooden organ at the front near a thick railing, behind which all Tom could see was air. Air, space, and light that filled the upper part of the cathedral. He couldn't see the floor level, couldn't see any of the people below, and so he braved himself to step out onto the balcony and creep toward the edge. The closer he got, the lower he crouched, until he was scooting along the floor up to the stone railing, which was held up with short stone pillars. He peered between two of them, at last able to see the people below and, most importantly, the figure of the woman who was singing.
It wasn't a very large group of people. There were perhaps twenty of them milling about, gathering materials, trying to get organized. But standing upon the center of the platform near the front was a young woman. He could hardly make her out from such a great height, but he could see that her hair was long, brown, and straight. She was wearing jeans and a dark green sweater, but nothing else was discernible. Save her voice.
She was singing on her own, either practicing or warming up, while the others around her began to congregate on the platform. Tom had heard women sing before, sure. But never this style. It was a language he didn't understand - likely Latin, he later deduced - and it was almost entrancing. Was entrancing. The words, alien and full of meanings he couldn't grasp, were the most moving lyrics he had ever heard. And her voice... it wasn't that thick, strong stripe of red that forced itself out of a stereo or a pair of headphones, but more of a feather light ribbon of yellow or robin blue that floated up and up and up...
It stopped.
Tom, his eyes having been glued to where the girl had been standing, suddenly realized that she had stopped singing and that the group of people had formed into three short rows on a small set of risers that had been constructed without his notice. But he easily spotted the girl again. She stood slightly to the left of center in the front row. And before them all, facing them and leaving his features hidden from Tom, was a thin man who gave a clipped command and suddenly began majestically flailing his arms about.
The entire group burst into song.
Tens of threads and cords splitting into the air all at once, and Tom found himself suddenly overwhelmed with light.
Actual light.
All of the sudden there were thin, writhing beams searing the air. Everywhere. And every color imaginable. Bright gold shot up into the highest reaches of the cathedral, chased by shards of deep violet, stripes of dangerously vivid red, vibrant green, impossible blue, delicate pink, every shade there ever was and every shade he'd never seen. They were following the sounds below, alive with the music Tom was hearing. They soared and swooped with the melody, intersected and twisted with the harmony, and occasionally would collide in a violent explosion of color and light when the singing grew in volume and intensity, hitting mini-climaxes in the melody.
Tom had to fight not to cover his eyes with his hands, so intense was this strange, frightening, beautiful display of what was impossible. It was like something out of a movie, so surreal and fantastical as all this was. He could feel the air around him begin to move faster and faster, crackling with an unseen energy and slipping under the hem of his old jacket and tousling his hair. But it wasn't violent. If anything, it was calming and perfectly silent, save for the chamber music coming from down below.
Tom leaned forward slightly, his hands braced on the railing as he dared look down into what had become a cauldron of color and light. Waves and clouds whirled and twisted, pulling and pushing and completely obscuring from view any shape or shadow of what was beneath. He could see nothing of the cathedral floor, or of the singers from whence the music came.
It was inhuman, what he was hearing. No one could sing this loud, with this much intensity. Something greater had to be enhancing everything around him, to make it seem like the music was coming from every crevice in the walls and ceiling, from the very air in front of his face. Something that was far more powerful and had a greater purpose than what Tom knew he could even begin to conceive.
And as though in response to his very thoughts... she appeared.
She emerged from the mist before him, tendrils of cloud and color and light sliding from her outstretched arms, a gown of black lace clinging to her torso and drifting away from her figure at the arms and legs. Her long, straight hair was such a dark shade of sienna as to almost appear black. It floated around her figure, reaching well past her hips. Her skin was dark - a mix of gold and almond brown - and her features were round and wise.
Tom felt his cheeks begin to flush as she came nearer, floating toward him. She suddenly threw herself forward, cutting through the clouds of color and grasping the railing, thrusting her face within an inch of Tom's.
He swallowed. An unreadable grin graced her features, her hair gently whirling around them on lazy wafts of air before she suddenly pushed off from the railing, spreading her arms wide and throwing herself down into the mist that had filled the three-story high chamber, head thrown back and her teeth bared with a smile.
“Wait!” Tom cried, his hand outstretched toward where she had disappeared.
The music finally reached its crescendo. One soul-splitting sound that gripped Tom so tightly it made him gasp.
It took him all of two seconds to decide to leap in after her.
He pushed off the floor. One foot on the railing. Arms spread wide, Tom leaped into the air.
The colors and lights sped past him in a silent hurricane.
But he didn't fall.
Naturally.
Instead, he felt his momentum slowly wind down, as though seeped from him, until he found himself floating in what he guessed was the center of the cathedral's main chamber, high above the ground, surrounded by sparking beams of light and cloud, entirely weightless. His jacket repeatedly attempted to float up and over his shoulders, spreading behind him like an ill-fitting cloak. Tom waggled his feet back and forth a bit, finding he could do little to shift his position in the air. He continued to try, however, and only succeeded in twisting upside down.
He was in the midst of struggling to right himself when he felt a gentle touch upon the base of his skull, and he quite suddenly found himself right side up and face to face with that woman in lace. Her smile was still there, but her lips were closed and her head was cocked slightly to the side. Her dark, scotch eyes searched his with such intensity that he was sure he could feel the panels of his soul being pried apart and brushed aside.
Tom swallowed again. He opened his mouth, trying to think of something to say to her, but she silenced his intentions with a slow shake of her head. Then she lifted one delicate hand, placed a finger upon his forehead, and disappeared in a violent shred of grey smoke.
Not a moment later, Tom felt the floor gently press up against his feet, and jumped, startled, as every wisp of smoke and mist, every drop of color, every thread of light and sound simultaneously snapped away from him, as though repelled, powerfully sucked out of the building.
He stood there, alone in the main hall, looking around himself and up at the ceiling and balcony, both so high above him now. The choir was gone. All was silent.
“Hello?” he called out cautiously, his own dry baritone fading into the cavernous space and dying out quickly.
Nothing came back to him but more silence.
Tom turned slowly, hearing only the feather faint scuff of his shoes against the marble floor. Outside it was dark. The only light now came from a series of dark gold light fixtures upon the walls and pillars, small bulbs hanging from long chains and casting spheres of light across the ground. The rest of the cathedral was shrouded in shadow, save for a handful of long tables set here and there against the walls, upon which sat rows upon rows of red candles, each one lit with a tiny tongue of flame. These flames danced independently of each other, throwing flickering shapes and shadows upon the walls against which they were set. Like a throng of energetic interpretive dancers.
These lights were all that lit the chamber. Everything was dark and burnished, and much more solemn than before. The silence was almost worse than when Tom had first come that afternoon. But it had only been a half hour at best. It couldn't possibly be dark outside already...
His thoughts pittered away as the feathered brush of light feet slowly approaching him from behind reached his ears. Tom turned and watched as the woman in lace walked toward him, an alluring sway in her stride. The long, smooth sleeves of her gown fell from her shoulders and draped next to the folds of her skirt, giving her the appearance of approaching Tom within a shapeless mass of fabric. Save for the black lace that clung to her chest and waist, leaving her shoulders and collarbone bare. But what caught Tom's attention the most vividly was the fact that her hair, once straight and impossibly long, now hung just past her mid-back. And it tumbled down over the front of her chest in grand curls.
Tom's mouth was dry. He tried to stand a little straighter as she continued to walk a few more steps toward him, eventually coming to a stop just four feet away.
“Thomas,” she said. Her voice was bourbon.
Tom struggled to swallow, clearing his throat with a whisper of a cough. “Who are you?” he at last managed to ask.
The woman smiled that smile of hers again, her eyes shifting across his face, his jacket, his hands, up to his hair, back to his eyes. “I am yours,” she said to him as though it were the most obvious thing in the world, her head once again cocked ever-so-slightly.
Tom's eyebrows soared. “I'm sorry?”
This time she showed her teeth when she smiled. “Not in the way you are assuming, unfortunately. I am simply that part of you.”
“What?”
“This was your doing,” she continued, stretching her arms out to either side to take in the entirety of the cathedral.
“I'm s-” Tom blinked. “I don't understand.”
Her arms lowered. “Thomas,” she almost chided. Almost. “You created all this. Created me. I am that part of you that you've forgotten. Where your creativity, your imagination, your confidence... have been hard-pressed to breathe. To live. I am the vessel created by that part of your mind to plead with you.”
“Plead with me?”
She said no more presently, merely continued to search him with scotch eyes.
Tom shifted his weight a little awkwardly, licked his lips. He moved his hands a little as he spoke. “Do you... have a name?”
Another smile. “Whatever you deem to give me. As I said. I am yours.”
Tom's mouth pulled sideways and his brows furrowed. “Um... all right. Carmen?”
The smile faltered. “Carmen?”
“Uh... yes. Sure? Carmen. You look like a Carmen.”
The woman pulled her head to the side in disbelief. “I, of all, know full well that you are capable of a better name than Carmen, Thomas.”
“Do I even have to name you?”
“You inquired first, Thomas. No, I do not need a name."
“No, I'm giving you a name. Just... gimme a minute. I'll think of something.”
Without waiting for him to say anything more, the woman slipped around him and padded in soft shoes toward one of the tables alight with so many candles. Tom, eyes unfocused in thought, subconsciously turned to follow her, surprised when she suddenly pressed into his line of vision again, holding one of the candles in her hand.
He started.
Her hair was still voluminous and deep brown, but the dress she wore was a dark, burnished red. It came just past her knees and the sleeves were wide straps that only stretched from her lower shoulder to just above her elbow.
“Why do you do that?” he asked her over the top of the candle.
She allowed a slight, innocent shrug. “I do not really control it,” she said. “You should ask your own subconscious. The part of you that created me.”
“But why you? Why not... I don't know. Someone I know? I've never seen a girl like you before.”
Another shrug. The tiny light from the candle continued to dance about, casting its shadows now upon the features of both their faces in turn. She honestly didn't know, Tom realized. She truly was just a figment of his imagination. But why he had created a woman who looked like her, he couldn't figure out. It didn't really matter. This entire escapade was in his head, and still above his pay grade.
“What's this for?” he asked of her, gently, with a nod to the candle.
“This,” she said, bringing the candle close to her lips, “is every aspect of your life.” And then, with the smallest, sharpest puff of air, she blew the candle out.
The entire cathedral drowned in darkness.
Tom gasped softly, startled, and felt forward with his hands. Nothing.
Then a single, tiny flame shot to life with an audible poof, inside the candle the woman held. She had backed away from him.
But even by that single, pitiful candle, Tom could see that she had changed again. Or rather, that he, somehow, had changed her.
She was Chloe.
She wore the same oversized sweater she had been wearing when he had visited her earlier yesterday, her soft hair pulled back in the same haphazard ponytail. Her features were deceptively apathetic as she stood, watching him with pursed lips.
“Chloe?” he said softly, hands still outstretched slightly.
She lifted one eyebrow. “Chloe. Is that what you've decided to call me?”
Tom shook his head very slowly, at a loss as to what this meant. Did he still have feelings for Chloe? Of course he did. “But why,” he started to project his thoughts vocally, “would I - my subconscious - create two completely insignificant women to me, and then....” he lifted his hand toward Chloe and let it drop to his thigh with muffled clap. “And then create you?”
Another shrug was his only response. Chloe, or his projection of her, lifted the candle very, very close to her face and examined it with wide, intrigued eyes. “So curious,” she murmured, “why my shape, my face, is shifting so much at all. Why can you not make up your mind, Thomas?” Her eyes lifted from the flame and focused intently upon him. “What is it you want?”
He honestly had no idea what he wanted. It was something he had given up trying to ask of himself as of late. He sidestepped the question, rhetorical or not. “What did you mean when you said that that candle was every aspect of my life?”
Chloe smiled, a smile like a pressed flower that was so characteristic of the woman he had hurt that it cut into Tom's chest almost like physical pain. One of his hands knotted into the fabric of his jacket, just above his collarbone. Only this time, the sensation was the antithesis of what he'd experienced in the cathedral last night.
“You are so careless, Thomas,” she said, a pitying tilt to her head. One that Tom was sad to admit he had been on the receiving of more than once when interacting with the real Chloe. “It stems from a basic lack of self-motivation, self-discipline, and self-worth. Your entire life is a result of your own mindset. How can anyone respect someone who so despises himself?”
Tom quickly noted the turn the conversation had taken, and not without some bitterness. If what they were having could even be called a conversation. It was one-sided, after all. “So,” he ventured, attempting to understand what she was telling him. “I'm entirely to blame for everything that has gone wrong in my life? I'm pretty sure I already-”
“No, Thomas,” she interrupted, “Not to blame for everything. But this,” she held up the candle again, grasping it tightly in one hand and holding it out toward Tom. “This is your saving grace.”
“.....what?”
“You have systematically cut out almost every part of your life that ever had any meaning to you, Thomas. And this is all that is left,” she said, looking meaningfully at the candle that she held aloft.
Tom spread his hands. “Look, Chl-..... I don't... understand what it is you're trying to tell me. I know that my life is not up to par. I know that I haven't made the best decisions lately, if ever. But I don't know what my subconscious could possibly have to tell me that I don't already know.”
“This is your faith, Thomas,” she said, of the pitifully tiny candle flame. “And it is dying.”
“My faith?”
“Yes, Thomas. And it is from your faith that you must begin to rebuild what you have let die.”
“How?”
Chloe held the candle out to her side, waited a breath of a moment, then let it drop.
The second it hit the marble floor, everything beneath them both shattered into a thousand shards of glass.
The sound was deafening. Tom couldn't help the yell that escaped his throat as he began to fall. He was falling within the center of a tornado of fire and light and wind. And this wind was shattering. It whipped him so roughly, his jacket nearly torn from his shoulders, his limbs pressed this way and that. He tumbled over himself again and again, throwing his hands out to brace himself upon something, anything, the air itself, anything to slow his descent into whatever lay below.
-----
The first thing that he became aware of was the gentle push of wind at his back. But not the wind he had fallen through, no. This wind was... earthly. Normal. And it was cold. He was outside. The sounds of the city came to him, but they seemed to be far off, as though coming to him from behind a hill or far below. Tom opened his eyes.
What met his sight was nothing but air. Air and tall buildings and the upper halves of skyscrapers and a dizzying drop seven or eight stories below to the city floor.
Tom was on top of the cathedral, standing just beside the small spire that protruded from the very top of the tallest dome. The dark green metal was stained with streaks from rain and decay. Tom had never before been afraid of heights, but he couldn't convince himself that he wasn't just the least bit uncomfortable. He hand snaked to the side, toward the spire, his movements slow for fear of throwing his balance too much. He grasped the thick pole of metal and pulled himself toward it, grasping it with his other hand and planting his feet on either side. Once he had secured himself to his satisfaction, he allowed himself to scout around for Chloe. But he didn't find her where he had expected. And she wasn't Chloe anymore.
To his left, floating above the dome as though she were swimming in water, was a curly haired red head. Her features were round and freckles dusted the bridge of her nose, yet despite the softness of her face she still seemed incredibly wise and perhaps even a bit intimidating.
“Hey,” Tom said lamely, for lack of anything else.
She looked at him, smiled, and almost immediately returned her attention to the sights around them. The wind from behind caught up her shoulder-length curls and calmly tossed them about her face. She did nothing to tame them. She was wearing a white tunic-like shirt with long, billowy sleeves and a wide blue belt cinching it at the waist, and light blue jeans tucked into tall brown boots.
“Why did you bring me up here?” Tom asked.
She shrugged. “I told you, Thomas. I am not in control.”
“Right. Right. My subconscious is doing this. I'm the one sending myself tumbling into fiery abysses and the like.”
She only smiled, still looking out over the city. The sky was awash with grey, one large slate of dreary color.
Tom pressed his cheek against the spire, exhaling with a bit of a whoosh. “Can we try something?” he muttered against the metal, still looking out at the city himself. She turned to look at him expectantly. He said, “If you're my subconscious, can I just order you to answer my questions regardless of whether or not you think I already know the answer?”
She smiled, patted her hair down with one hand, and spread her other arm out so she could lean back, reclining on air. She kicked one leg forward absently. “I will answer your questions as best I can,” she said.
Tom nodded. “Ok, good. Good. All right.” He pursed his lips and suppressed a shiver. The air was very cold. “Do I hate myself as much as I think I do?”
“Of course not.”
“Well that's good,” he murmured. “Um. Why am I changing your appearance so much?”
“I am the embodiment of beauty to you. Of the sort of strong, unrealistically beautiful women you are attracted to. And you are very particular, Thomas. Very fickle.”
“Am I?” Tom wasn't entirely sure how to respond to that. He supposed it was true. He had never been very attracted to women he saw just walking down the street. They were always magazine models or famous actresses that could ever snare his interest. Or figments of his imagination. His subconscious, in this case. Which, he supposed, were the same thing. He realized, with a pang of self-loathing, that it was for this reason he had fallen so hard for Chloe - the only “real” woman who had ever paid him mind - and, consequently, why he had ruined things. No matter how unintentional his actions had been, he'd always known what the consequence was going to be. Yet he did it anyway. Tom frowned, pensive, as his hands white-knuckled the spire.
“Ok. Ok, answer me this,” he said, deciding to be a little more straightforward. “What the hell do I want from life?”
There was no immediate answer, and Tom lifted his head from resting on the spire to look at the woman. She was floating a little closer to him than before.
She was watching a lone bird circle the sky not far from where they were perched, its black wings a stark contrast against the grey clouds.
“You want purpose,” she finally said.
“Purpose.”
“You want happiness. Security. Friends. Love. But above all else, meaning.”
Tom waggled his head back and forth. “Doesn't everyone? I guess I kind of already knew all that.” He couldn't help but wrinkle his nose a bit, peering down into the streets. The cars looked like small pixels navigating a virtual maze. “My issue, I think,” he said, “is that I'm not sure how to get any of those things.”
“You have to change, Thomas.”
A resigned huff. “Change how?”
She shrugged yet again. “I cannot tell you what you do not know. But I can tell you that the change will not be an easy one. However. Once you have reformed yourself, you will be able to acquire all of those things you desire from life.”
“You're being frustratingly vauge.”
“You do not fully understand what it is you must do. More importantly,” she sat up, draping her hands over her knees, which were crossed in Indian-style in the air. “You are not sure if you want to change at all.”
Tom clung to the spire with a death grip when the wind suddenly picked up, his jacket flapping around his torso. The cold wind slid under his shirt and down his neck, flattening his hair and pressing him against the metal. It grew and grew in strength, forcefully trying to shove him into the air and off the spire. Any response he had begun to form, mental or verbal, was lost the moment a merciless gale tore him from the roof completely.
-----
A soft, high-pitched note beeped in time to the pounding in his head. There was a pressure against his temples - gentle, but uncomfortable still. The air smelled of starch and plastic, and it was with a reluctant effort that Tom managed to open his eyelids.
A plain, white paneled ceiling occupied the majority of his vision.
In confusion, Tom attempted to turn his head to get a better look at his surroundings. Unfortunately, the smallest movement sent a spasm of pain up his neck.
“Tom?”
Despite the result his first attempt had given him, Tom reflexively tried to turn his head in the opposite direction to look at who had spoken from his right, but his neck flared again. Tom bit back a grunt.
“Oh my god. Tom. You're awake.” This declaration was followed up with a string of shocked explicatives, followed by the snap and click of a phone being opened and dialed.
“Robbie?” he muttered, confused as to why it had taken him so long to recognize the other man's unmistakable voice.
“Yeah, he's awake,” he heard Robbie murmur. “I know, I don't know. I'll be here, just hurry down. Ok.” The phone clacked shut. “Tom?”
Tom suddenly found his field of vision filled with the all-too-close face of one Robert, dark brown eyes searching his own with unveiled concern.
“What's goin' on?” Tom said, finding his voice a little scratchy.
“What do you remember?” Robbie asked, not moving his face. Tom was going cross-eyed trying to focus on the man's dark features.
“Um. I don't know. I don't know where... what's going on?” he repeated.
A pair of vertical eyebrows formed on Robbie's brow. “You've been unconscious for the last four days. How are you feeling?”
“Four days?” That wasn't possible. He'd been at the cathedral just then. On the roof, with... with...
“No no, Tom. Tom, you need to lie back down.”
“Get off.”
“Tom, you shouldn't be trying to get up, you've- Tom. Tom. Nurse!”
Tom collapsed back onto the bed in defeat, fixing a stony gaze upon his roommate. Robert was unaffected.
A brief moment of uncomfortable silence.
“You're lucky, you know,” Robert finally offered.
“How so?”
“Any faster, or any other angle, and you'd be dead.”
“What are you talking about? What happened?”
Robert leaned forward in the plush purple hospital chair he occupied, lacing his fingers together and resting his elbows on his knees. He seemed genuinely surprised. “You really don't know?”
Tom shook his head as best he could.
Robert licked his lips. He seemed to pull back on his tone, just slightly. “It may be hard, but try to take me seriously when I tell you that you were hit by a car the other night. You had gone for a walk. It was raining. You were pretty far from the apartment. I was surprised you'd walked as far as you did.”
Tom tried to process all of this around the throbbing headache that was beginning to form behind his eyes. Robert must have noticed something surface on Tom's face, because next thing Tom knew, a nurse was injecting something into his IV and raising his bed so that he could sit up comfortably.
“Thank you,” he managed to murmur to her before she left again.
“Better?” Robert asked.
“Give it a minute to kick in,” Tom chided, adjusting his covers and hospital gown. He took a moment to really look at himself. His arms were covered in a mesh of nicks and scrapes already well-scabbed and healing. The last three fingers of his left hand were splinted together, and as he lifted his right hand to his face, he could feel the thick gauze wrapped around his head.
“Was it bad?” he asked.
Robert's mouth turned down. “It could have been much worse, let's just say that. And it was only half your fault.”
“My fault?”
“Technically you were at a crosswalk and had the right of way, but her light was green and visibility was already bad enough.”
“She?”
There was a knock on the closed door, and as Robert stood to answer it, Tom allowed himself to think. To really think. The night was rainy. The last time he could remember walking through the city on a rainy evening was just two nights ago. Or so he thought. After he had visited Chloe. So everything up until that point was real...
But what about the music? That cathedral? Did it even exist? Did music like that really endure on a human plane of existence? He could still feel the physical balm it had put on his soul. He could still feel the bittersweet torment at hearing those sounds and the rush of emotions he had experienced. But had he ever really heard it? Had it even happened? He realized with a pang of self-pity that he needed it to be real. He had to believe that some sort of healing had begun to take place.
Robert opened the door and Tom, who's eyes' focus was floating somewhere upon the wall across from him, suddenly found his line of sight filled with a female figure who moved to stand at the end of the bed. With difficulty, Tom brought his eyes into focus on the newcomer's dark green sweater.
“Tom,” Robert began, “this is Riann. She was the driver. She's been in here every day to check up on you.”
Tom lifted his eyes to her smiling face and felt his heart falter. It hadn't happened. It hadn't been real, none of it. But her long, straight brown hair and shape were unmistakable, even from this close, and he could suddenly hear her music again, as though she were singing it there in the hospital room. His chamber singer.
by elder_bonnie
Rating: PG
Word count: 10,388
Genre: Original fiction
Summary:
Everyone reaches that point in life, that trough where things seem at their worst. Where nothing ever seems to work out and where absolutely nothing matters. Some people never pull themselves out. Thomas Hensen's intervention is anything but conventional.
Author's Notes: This is meant to have a vague, cloudy context for a kind of assumptive, fill-in-the-blanks yourself kind of atmosphere, and I apologize if it seems jumpy and confusing. The entire story is primarily an exercise in descriptive writing, and I hope you can enjoy it for what it is :) Thank you for reading!
Tom Hensen had never considered himself a religious sort of person. He could count on his fingers the number of times he'd gone to church for the service itself, during those lulls in the year when life seemed to be frozen for a breath of a day, and everyone gathered together in churches and cathedrals, joining one another in the Community of Holiday Cheer, a stronger force in this bitter, materialistic world than the community of Christ was.
This Sunday started out no different than the hundreds of Sundays Tom had passed through before. He awoke among the gray, dingy sheets of a bed that hadn't been remade in nearly six months, his eyes so thick with sleep and his head so full of hangover, it took him a long few minutes to drudge up the rest of his consciousness to follow that small blip of brain activity which had first woken him up. A peep at the offending red numbers upon his nightstand revealed to him that it was nearly noon, an observation he could not have made any other way shy of walking outside and observing the sunlight for himself. His window, a thick, greasy block of glass murky with age, offered him a unique view of the building adjacent his, the brick walls of the two apartment complexes not five feet apart.
Very little sunlight ever made it through that window, leaving Tom's small bedroom in a perpetual state of gloom and dim. What did make it through the crumbling brick walls was an ambient cacophony of the city, bouncing up between the buildings. The thrum and blare of traffic, growing and ebbing in decibels like a sonic tide, pulled his thoughts further from their grog. Bacon flavored the air, informing him that his roommate was up - had been up for some time - and had prepared a decent breakfast. Robbie never made bacon, unless he had the time to make the eggs and pancakes to go with it.
Tom uttered something akin to a groan and rubbed at one eye with stiff fingers, inching out from under the covers and standing with a belabored stretch. It had been one week since he'd lost his job, and he hadn't bothered to shower since. He decided to remedy that.
“Oh good, you're alive.”
“Morning, Rob,” Tom mumbled, brushing his hand over his still-damp hair. “Thanks for cooking.”
“I like to cook on Sundays. Slow mornings are ideal for perfecting my sunny-side-up execution. Bacon?”
“Please.” Tom straddled one of the stools that lined his side of the island, resting his elbows on the counter and crossing his arms as Robbie portioned out his breakfast. Robbie was a bit shorter than Tom, with a neat, trimmed nest of dark brown hair framing his face and mouth. The sleeves of his red and black plaid flannel were rolled up to the elbows. Tom couldn't get over how incredibly hairy and tan and masculine the smaller man was. He glanced down at his own hands, thin and vaguely feminine.
“Have you proposed yet?” Tom suddenly asked, if a bit reluctantly, stretching his arm upward to pull the long sleeve away from his wrist before taking the plate Robbie offered.
“What?” came the off-beat reply.
“You've been dating, what, three years now? What's the hold up?”
Robbie pulled back one side of his mouth and drew his eyebrows down. “It's more complicated than that, Thomas.”
“How so?” Tom asked around a mouthful of pancake.
“Well aside from buying a ring, which I can't afford, asking her parents, who'd sooner see me at the bottom of the Potomac than within 20 feet of their daughter, and finding time among my academic schedule to actually have the wedding... Then there's the fact that we... I don't think she's ready. I'm not ready.” Then, almost as an afterthought; “You wouldn't really get it.”
Tom iced up considerably at those words, but bit down on his bacon and remained silent.
After a moment of uncomfortable silence, “Did you dye your hair?”
Tom glanced up at Robbie, confused. “No, why?”
Robbie shrugged. “It looks blonder.”
“My hair can't get any blonder.”
Robbie's eyes fixed to a point above Tom's line of sight for a few seconds, observing his hair before replying, “no, you're right. I think I just got used to the grease from the last few days. It looks lighter than it did.”
“Thanks,” Tom said dryly.
“You know what I don't understand?”
“What's that?”
“Why you aren't having breakfast with Chloe.” Robbie was too good at picking up on subtleties, Tom decided. “I mean, don't get me wrong, I'm flattered you like my cooking. But I know for a fact that Chloe's ten times the better chef than I am and you've never taken my cooking over hers. You haven't left the apartment in days, and she hasn't been over. What's the deal?”
At that question, Tom couldn't help but ice up again. He felt the bitter sting of regret and envy, and engaged in a staring contest with his glass of orange juice.
“Still a sensitive subject, is it?”
“You could stand to be a bit more.”
“What?”
“Sensitive, asshole.”
Robbie's eyes soared into his hairline. “If it evokes that kind of language from you, I guess I could.”
Tom pinched his eyes. He almost always regretted any conversation with Robbie that took a semi-serious turn. The guy was a fantastic roommate; he held a job that ensured he always paid for his half of the rent and utilities, he was a brilliant student working toward his masters in architecture, and his demeanor around women was flawless. He was confident, fit, and very pleasant on the eyes, and yet, at least as far as his interactions with Tom were concerned, his sympathies were lacking.
“Whelp,” Robbie began, taking generous helpings of eggs, pancakes, and bacon onto his own plate, “I'm going to head upstairs and Skype with Angie. You mind putting the leftovers away when you're done?” And without waiting for an answer, Robbie scooped up his plate, his cup of cranberry juice, and shuffled his way to the stairs.
Tom absently stabbed at his spartan eggs with his fork, gently scraping along the bottom of the plate. His appetite was quickly abating. A glance out the sink's window revealed an incredibly blue sky and sunny stretch of street. Apparently the world had been continuing on outside of his gloomy bedroom chamber without him.
He needed to get out. And the stupid dishes could wait.
-----
The air was a bit nippier than he had expected. Tom popped the faded collar of his black leather jacket and wedged his hands into stretched, crumb-lined pockets. His first instinct was, unfortunately, to head straight for Chloe's apartment, but another half second of lucidity brought him around to more common sense. The streets were busier than usual with post-Sunday-service traffic, families and friends heading out to large afternoon lunches before returning home for afternoon naps and watching sports games on TV. He was sure that most every coffee shop, music store and book nook within walking distance would be too busy, hardly the places of solitude he needed. Wanted. Did he really need to be alone right now? Was continuing to avoid Chloe really what was best? Why the hell had he left the apartment? What was he supposed to do?
Tom stood there on the sidewalk in front of his apartment building's stoop, the epitome of an apathetic transient to all other eyes, his own gaze fixed on a point on the asphalt just a few yards in front of him. The passing of cars and taxis hardly deterred his gaze's intensity. He was waging a desperate internal debate with himself. It was nearly four minutes before he finally made a decision and turned left.
-----
“Hello?”
“Hey. Chloe. ...It's me, it's... it's Tom.”
“...”
“Um, I was just wondering if, uh.... if I could, um, come up for a minute? And... and talk to you, maybe?”
“....I thought you didn't want to talk?”
“I didn't. But, uh... I just... Well, I need to, now.”
“Uh huh.”
“...”
“Look, Tom, I'm pretty busy. I've got to get my images in order for tonight, I haven't even taken them to the printer's yet.”
“Oh. Yeah, your... your gallery thing is tonight, isn't it?”
“Yeah.”
“Um... Heh. I don't suppose... I'm still invited?”
“I thought you weren't interested in any of this stuff.”
“Look, can we talk upstairs? Please?”
“...”
-----
She opened the door a foot and a half and leaned against the frame, her arm raised and lying parallel to the door itself. Her eyes seemed tired, more tired than Tom could remember, and her chin length hair was pulled back into a disarray of a ponytail with a tan scrunchy somehow holding most of it away from her face. There were still wisps of dark hair feathering her cheeks, softening her face in spite of the wary way she looked at him, lips pinched in an expression Tom had been fortunate enough to only ever see a handful of times during their relationship. She was wearing one of her old sweatshirts, a thick grey heather knit that hung off of her sharp shoulders and engulfed her small hands so completely from view. She didn't speak, but merely regarded him with those tired eyes, their bronze shades dulled and dim. Instinctively, it made Tom want to shrink away from her. From what he had done.
"Hey,” he said quietly, hands still in his pockets.
“Hey,” was her equally soft reply.
A few seconds passed, and then, “...may I come in?”
She spread the door open another inch and backed away, rubbing at her arm as she returned to her computer. It sat on a small desk that nestled up against the only window in the living room. Tom gingerly stepped inside, retracting a hand from a pocket and closing the door behind him. Once shut, that hand snaked back to that pocket as though afraid of exposure. The latch had clicked with a ring of finality, enclosing him inside that apartment and reminding him of what he couldn't back down from.
Chloe sat down at her computer and returned to the photo editing she had been doing before Tom buzzed up. Tom was left standing in front of her door, eyes touching various parts of the room but always coming back to her. He saw the picture frame that held an image of the two of them together at the beach. She hadn't gotten rid of it yet. A good sign, he supposed. Maybe. A few dishes were sitting in the sink; a strainer, a small pot and a spatula. She'd made macaroni again. A stack of unopened envelopes sat behind her computer. Bills were still unpaid. Magazines strewn across the coffee table, scraps and shards of glossy paper lying around them like so much carnage. Scrapbooking. An outlet she rarely went back to. Everything in her apartment was communicating to Tom with the simplicity of a picture book. Communicating to him how not-ok she was.
She still hadn't said anything. Her feet were braced up on the desk chair she sat in, her legs blocking most of her torso from view. Her eyes were fixated upon the computer screen. Her middle finger repeated the same figure eight motion over the mouse-pad again and again, the rest of her form still and poetic. The noonday light beamed right through her window, warming her sweatshirt, haloing her face, stretching over the carpet in paneled squares. There was always light coming through that window. Large, clean, clear, and facing an ever-open expanse of sky. He had always preferred coming here to spending time in his own room. He'd be immensely comforted if she couldn't remember what his own room looked like.
Tom moved forward, toward her. On the way, he slid his toes under the footrest for her rocking chair and pulled it toward her desk with his foot. Then he straddled it and pulled his hands from his pockets at last, lacing their fingers together and letting them dangle between his legs. He squinted up at her silhouette, seeing nothing but sun and shadow when he sought her face.
Tom licked his lower lip.
“I'm sorry.”
Chloe's finger stilled. Her eyes didn't leave the screen. She swallowed.
Tom swallowed.
“I can't... begin to imagine...” He exhaled shakily. “You don't deserve... this. Me.”
She was breathing so slowly.
“If it's hurting me this much, I can't imagine how...” He was incapable of speaking above a hush.
“Is there.....” His thumbs began stroking each other. “...anything I can do? Any way to... to save this? Us?”
A cloud veiled the sun. Her eyes were wet. Her eyes were on his face.
“I don't know,” she said.
-----
The inky streets, varnished with rain, seemed to blend into the nothing on the horizon. Ironically vibrant neon bled in childlike brush strokes across the oily pavement, creating for Tom the effect of walking stories above the street, the lit walls of the buildings around him descending further in reflection down into oblivion. Rain pattered around him, tapping his uncovered head and hunched shoulders. A ring of muddy navy encircled the hems of his jeans, the rainwater that seeped up numbing his ankles. He listened to the shushing curtain that the rain pulled over everything, calmed beyond description by its soft, constant static.
He lifted his head and briefly closed his eyes, inhaling the uncharacteristically fresh, vivid night air. A cloud puffed past his face as he exhaled, unable to repress a hum of contentment so light as to dissipate with the hum of traffic, rare and intermittent. The entire scene that he trudged through was sketched out like a piece fit for the Modern Art wing, and every colored gleam of light shone trough the rain like a saxophone's wail.
He walked aimlessly for an indeterminable amount of time, eventually losing track of where he was or where he was going. The buildings around him became unfamiliar, the street names different; the part of town he was now in was a stranger to him, in look and mood. Tom suddenly stopped at an intersection and raised his head, blinking at the unfamiliar landmarks around him. He eventually came to realize what had pulled him from his somber reverie; the traffic. Cars edged in and out of the streets, sidling past each other, windshield wipers rigidly waving at their neighbors. A busier part of town. Likely a bar nearby.
The thought, however, of shuffling to the nearest bar to saturate his emotions was both tempting and repulsive to Tom. His hands, which had been burrowed into his pockets, lifted as he attempted to shake a layer of water off of his coat, trying to make a decision. It was then, caught up in a strangely busy intersection late at night, that he heard it - for what he was sure in hindsight was for the first time in his life.
It came from behind him. An incandescent column of sound that spilled onto the street with the opening of a door, like the way petals spread when a flower blooms. It was faint, as though reaching through from another plane. Tom, completely enraptured, hardly thought to turn or determine from whence the sound came before the same door closed and he found himself once again enclosed in the dark curtain of that damp Sunday night. He shuddered, lost in the memory of what that sound was, hardly seeing the rainwater that dripped into his eyes.
Another moment and he was pulled to rationale again by an interaction. Someone rushed past him, a flurry of umbrella, water, boot, and huff. Blinking, Tom lifted his head to follow the stranger with his eyes. The man, features enfolded within the over-broad, hiked-up collar of his coat, leapt the carved stone steps of the building behind Tom, a building the young man now faced with apprehension. The stranger shook out his umbrella with a frantic flail of his wrist and pulled open one of the large, plain wooden doors that led into a comparatively simple cathedral. The moment the door opened, Tom found himself awash with that sound again.
Voices. They were just voices.
But they were singing nothing Tom had ever heard before. It wasn't of this world, the music they were making. And it speared his soul to feel again.
He couldn't remember the last time he had set foot in a church, much less a cathedral. Tom stood on the sidewalk and surveyed the Gothic building warily, his eyes darting over its features, constantly flitting back to the closed doors. He couldn't go inside. He wasn't a part of that world, of their community - never had been. He'd never had any reason to like any of those people - though, to be fair, he had no just reason to dislike them other than their air of moral superiority. He'd been witness to enough Christian hypocrisy to not want any part of their idle, feckless doctrine. Religion in general. If there was someone out there, anyone out there who might be looking out for him, he'd never seen or felt them. His family was nonexistent, his job was terminated, his roommate was insufferable, his love life was a cracking carcass. His life had no direction, no purpose, and he had no use for religion in it.
With an uncomfortable glance down the street, Tom sniffed and scuffed the sidewalk with his heel, sending a forming puddle into hapless confusion, its murky reflections of the city's lights shifting into a Monet of indeterminable shapes and bringing Tom's thoughts back to ground level as he looked into it.
What was he doing here?
The puddle began to still. He needed to go home.
Tom pulled at his nose and turned, preparing to leave all and throw himself back into squalor, but something stayed him, something inexplicable kept his toe from lifting from the sidewalk, half-poised to walk away. Tom lowered his hand, rubbed his thumb and forefinger together, and faced the cathedral again. That sound. The sound of a multitude of human voices creating a chord he had never heard before, a music that was not of the earth. There was something other-worldly about it that had latched onto a piece of himself that he rarely acknowledged. The need to hear that sound again was what kept him from leaving this unfamiliar place and trudging back to what life he was failing to live.
Tom took a deep, sharp breath and ascended the cathedral steps, watching the doors grow larger with each footfall. Upon reaching the top, he simply stood and observed those doors, observed their large iron handles. His hand left his pocket, paused, suspended. Then he slowly wrapped his fingers around the cold, wet metal and pulled.
-----
The music was so much more distinct now and it seeped into him, somehow able, as he stepped into the foyer, to combat the chill of the rain that had pervaded his muscles without his knowledge. He kept his fingers braced upon the heavy door behind him, slowing it down so as not to create an audible disturbance when it closed. The foyer stretched a good fifty feet to his left and to his right, and there was an imposing wall just fifteen feet in front of him that ran the length of the foyer. Within this wall, there were two sets of doors on either end that were closed, guarding the way into the cathedral's main chamber. The foyer was drafty and hushed; a young woman stood behind a counter, straightening a pile of brochures with chipped purple nails. An older man was shrugging into a long coat and checking his phone. A considerably much older woman was shuffling into the foyer from the right, emerging from a side hallway or hidden staircase that likely led to a bathroom. Tom bent his neck back and looked at the ceiling - it was covered with murals of unfamiliar saints and indecipherable Latin script that shone gold at him. Every little sound, from the old man's cough to the scuff of a shoe to the flap of paper was magnified tenfold in that open space, bouncing off of the stone walls. Tom felt like a trapped bird.
His eyes moved to follow the old woman as her bony hands grasped the handle of one of the massive doors leading into the cathedral's main chamber. Without thinking, Tom quickly stepped over and behind her, moving his own hand into her line of vision. The woman quickly realized what he was trying to do, and so she let go and stepped back. Tom pulled on the door, a bit more forcefully than was necessary - it was not nearly as heavy as he had anticipated. Regardless, the look of kindness and gratitude that the old woman bestowed upon him was comparable to a parting cloud on a dismal, sunless day. An equally genuine smile sneaked, unbidden, across Tom's lips in return as the old woman moved inside.
Tom looked around the door, daring to peer within, and caught his breath.
The ceiling was well over 100 feet tall. Thick stone columns rose from the marbled floors to support the massive dome in the center, which brandished countless murals and mosaics that blended into one another. Rows upon rows of benches filled the entire floor space, each one brimming with people who were just as captivated by the music that was being produced as Tom was. There was a raised platform at the very far end of the cathedral, upon which there stood a group of twenty or so people. The women wore long, elegant black dresses, and the men wore black vests over white shirts with billowy sleeves - reminiscent to Tom of respectable pirates. They were singing, and their voices were the sound of clouds and light and wings. Each individual voice rose, a cord of sound to weave into a tapestry of shine and soul that resonated into a new chord all its own. It was the kind of music that reminded you of why humankind ever created music. Except, what Tom was hearing now could hardly have been the make of any earthbound soul, so beautiful and intricate it was. Tom couldn't bring himself to move, though subconsciously his hand grasped at the front of his shirt, just over his sternum, twisting the fabric as his eyes stayed fixated upon the artists so far away.
Suddenly, a cold hand covered his own. With a start, Tom's eyes darted down into the still-warm face of the old woman he had helped. With surpassing understanding, she gently loosed his grip from his shirt and silently pulled him into the cathedral chamber. Tom, hardly capable of refusing, followed her meekly. With every step, he seemed to feel smaller and smaller. The old woman didn't lead him to a seat, where he would have felt all the more ostentatious and out of place. She simply led him to the side, keeping close to the back wall, and placed him aside the rear pillar. And it was from this subtle vantage point that Tom was able to listen to the rest of the performance, constantly battling the urge to flee with the need to never stop hearing what he was hearing. His soul couldn't bear it if he left before every drop of sound was lifted from the air.
-----
It was well after 1:00 a.m. when Tom’s tired feet finally brought him to the base of the steps leading up to his apartment. The rain had since stopped, but the city air still held onto every smell the rain had brought along. The kind of smells that weren’t necessarily fresh so much as real. Everything dripped and shone as though coated by a layer of black ice. Tom sniffed, his shoulders hunched and his drying hair matted to his brow. A cough, a cloud of breath in the cold air, a suppressed shudder at the memory of what he had left three short hours before, and Tom at last began to drag himself up the few steps to the door. The streets were quiet. The night was quiet. But Tom’s ears still rang, his chest still swelled with the balm he had received.
Tom’s cold, thin fingers slid slowly around the colder, slick neck of the door handle before he remembered that a key was needed. His hand returned to its pocket, but he already knew the keys weren’t there. Nor were they in his other coat pocket. Another cough, a huff, a cloud of breath as Tom’s hands darted in and out of every pocket on his person, but his search did not end as he had hoped. Tom blinked and rubbed at his numb nose with equally numb fingers, turning and looking up and down the street aimlessly. He spent a long minute standing alone upon that stoop, hands shoved into his pockets and his shoulders pulled up to his chin, his gaze unwaveringly fixed upon a point far beneath the sidewalk through which it pierced.
Tom didn’t care for introspection, but it was hard to avoid in settings such as this. He especially didn’t care for introspection when all his thoughts returned to him were varied forms of 'your life is pitiable. Your life is pointless. You are pointless.'
This mindset, this depression that had bound him for the past month... it was crippling him, and he couldn't seem to pull out of it. His girlfriend, a woman he had fully intended to marry someday, had fallen from his hands, by no one's fault but his own. His job, the only pillar supporting his finances, his ability to pay his half of the rent, and, consequently, the only thing that prevented his friendship with Robert from crumbling into the gaping maw that had consumed nearly ever relationship he'd ever had, had been wrestled from his weak grasp. He didn't have enough money to last him more than two months, and Robert was not going to want to support him until he could find another job. Because Robert was an ass, and Tom had cried wolf too many times in the past.
But who else could he go to? The father he never communicated with had remarried a decade ago and had his own family, apart from Tom, to take care of. His mother had remarried as well, just over a year ago, but the relationship between Tom and his new stepfather was even worse that what existed between him and his real father. And his younger brother? Still in college on the other side of the country.
Tom's gaze was broken as a small, glistening car splashed down the street, driving past the spot on the sidewalk where his eyes had been fixed. It sped past, one of its tires cutting down the middle of a puddle and throwing a curtain of water up and over the sidewalk.
He blinked furiously. He was being ridiculous. This moping, this self-pity - it was in no way productive. Tom wiped a hand across his face and turned back to his door, knocking repeatedly until a light came on in the window to his left, followed shortly by a shirtless, squinting, and clearly pissed off Robert.
-----
The cathedral was nearly entirely empty. And it was extremely unsettling to him. The atmosphere was different - forlorn, empty. Quiet. The expansive space only seemed to make the deafening silence all the more pronounced, the lack of sound pounding down upon his ears as though reality were trying to grind him into the ground. Tom pressed his hands together and rubbed them absently, his eyes roaming the pillars and walls and windows with awe. Despite the uncomfortable feeling he had being here when the cathedral was so lifeless, it was nothing compared to the uncomfortable feeling he had had while attending the other night, when the cathedral was full of people he would never be able to relate to. Who could never relate to him.
He stepped forward, noting the colored marble of the floor beneath his feet, cold and elegant. A small pedestal held a large bowl of water that he had witnessed others dip their fingers into before drawing the cross across their chests. Special church water, then. Or something. Walking around it, he looked to his left and right and noted small alcoves that hid open doorways, behind which could be seen twin stone staircases that spiraled up to higher levels. His curiosity ensnaring him, Tom made his way toward the doorway on his right, moving through it and beginning an ascent of the stairs.
He was only ten steps in when he suddenly heard the loud creak of a door from the other end of the cathedral, then light, enthusiastic chatter filled the endless space. Frozen, Tom didn't know what to do but listen as more and more voices joined the first couple, comfortable conversation and a clatter of footsteps. They didn't seem to be coming any closer to his end of the cathedral, he was thankful to discern, but it was apparent they weren't going to leave any time soon. Tom bent down, trying to see down the steps and into the cathedral, but he was too far up the stairs to see much more than the floor and the base of the opposite wall. He was too frightened to descend again and leave through the main doors. They would see him. They would wonder why he was there. Or worse. They would ask him to leave.
Tom was at an impasse as to what to do, and it was a long few moments before he finally made up his mind to continue upward. He was still curious as to what lay in the upper levels, and he wasn't about to reveal himself to whoever was down there. He was also curious to know what so many people would be doing in a cathedral this early in the afternoon, when a concert wasn't scheduled.
Then, parting through the chatter, one clear, perfect female voice began to sing.
Tom was scrambling toward the top of the steps. They spiraled up and up, and Tom followed them past the exit for the second floor, wanting to go as high up as they would take him. The third floor was where they ended, and he carefully slipped his head through the open doorway.
He observed a small balcony scattered with wooden chairs in haphazard rows, all facing an old wooden organ at the front near a thick railing, behind which all Tom could see was air. Air, space, and light that filled the upper part of the cathedral. He couldn't see the floor level, couldn't see any of the people below, and so he braved himself to step out onto the balcony and creep toward the edge. The closer he got, the lower he crouched, until he was scooting along the floor up to the stone railing, which was held up with short stone pillars. He peered between two of them, at last able to see the people below and, most importantly, the figure of the woman who was singing.
It wasn't a very large group of people. There were perhaps twenty of them milling about, gathering materials, trying to get organized. But standing upon the center of the platform near the front was a young woman. He could hardly make her out from such a great height, but he could see that her hair was long, brown, and straight. She was wearing jeans and a dark green sweater, but nothing else was discernible. Save her voice.
She was singing on her own, either practicing or warming up, while the others around her began to congregate on the platform. Tom had heard women sing before, sure. But never this style. It was a language he didn't understand - likely Latin, he later deduced - and it was almost entrancing. Was entrancing. The words, alien and full of meanings he couldn't grasp, were the most moving lyrics he had ever heard. And her voice... it wasn't that thick, strong stripe of red that forced itself out of a stereo or a pair of headphones, but more of a feather light ribbon of yellow or robin blue that floated up and up and up...
It stopped.
Tom, his eyes having been glued to where the girl had been standing, suddenly realized that she had stopped singing and that the group of people had formed into three short rows on a small set of risers that had been constructed without his notice. But he easily spotted the girl again. She stood slightly to the left of center in the front row. And before them all, facing them and leaving his features hidden from Tom, was a thin man who gave a clipped command and suddenly began majestically flailing his arms about.
The entire group burst into song.
Tens of threads and cords splitting into the air all at once, and Tom found himself suddenly overwhelmed with light.
Actual light.
All of the sudden there were thin, writhing beams searing the air. Everywhere. And every color imaginable. Bright gold shot up into the highest reaches of the cathedral, chased by shards of deep violet, stripes of dangerously vivid red, vibrant green, impossible blue, delicate pink, every shade there ever was and every shade he'd never seen. They were following the sounds below, alive with the music Tom was hearing. They soared and swooped with the melody, intersected and twisted with the harmony, and occasionally would collide in a violent explosion of color and light when the singing grew in volume and intensity, hitting mini-climaxes in the melody.
Tom had to fight not to cover his eyes with his hands, so intense was this strange, frightening, beautiful display of what was impossible. It was like something out of a movie, so surreal and fantastical as all this was. He could feel the air around him begin to move faster and faster, crackling with an unseen energy and slipping under the hem of his old jacket and tousling his hair. But it wasn't violent. If anything, it was calming and perfectly silent, save for the chamber music coming from down below.
Tom leaned forward slightly, his hands braced on the railing as he dared look down into what had become a cauldron of color and light. Waves and clouds whirled and twisted, pulling and pushing and completely obscuring from view any shape or shadow of what was beneath. He could see nothing of the cathedral floor, or of the singers from whence the music came.
It was inhuman, what he was hearing. No one could sing this loud, with this much intensity. Something greater had to be enhancing everything around him, to make it seem like the music was coming from every crevice in the walls and ceiling, from the very air in front of his face. Something that was far more powerful and had a greater purpose than what Tom knew he could even begin to conceive.
And as though in response to his very thoughts... she appeared.
She emerged from the mist before him, tendrils of cloud and color and light sliding from her outstretched arms, a gown of black lace clinging to her torso and drifting away from her figure at the arms and legs. Her long, straight hair was such a dark shade of sienna as to almost appear black. It floated around her figure, reaching well past her hips. Her skin was dark - a mix of gold and almond brown - and her features were round and wise.
Tom felt his cheeks begin to flush as she came nearer, floating toward him. She suddenly threw herself forward, cutting through the clouds of color and grasping the railing, thrusting her face within an inch of Tom's.
He swallowed. An unreadable grin graced her features, her hair gently whirling around them on lazy wafts of air before she suddenly pushed off from the railing, spreading her arms wide and throwing herself down into the mist that had filled the three-story high chamber, head thrown back and her teeth bared with a smile.
“Wait!” Tom cried, his hand outstretched toward where she had disappeared.
The music finally reached its crescendo. One soul-splitting sound that gripped Tom so tightly it made him gasp.
It took him all of two seconds to decide to leap in after her.
He pushed off the floor. One foot on the railing. Arms spread wide, Tom leaped into the air.
The colors and lights sped past him in a silent hurricane.
But he didn't fall.
Naturally.
Instead, he felt his momentum slowly wind down, as though seeped from him, until he found himself floating in what he guessed was the center of the cathedral's main chamber, high above the ground, surrounded by sparking beams of light and cloud, entirely weightless. His jacket repeatedly attempted to float up and over his shoulders, spreading behind him like an ill-fitting cloak. Tom waggled his feet back and forth a bit, finding he could do little to shift his position in the air. He continued to try, however, and only succeeded in twisting upside down.
He was in the midst of struggling to right himself when he felt a gentle touch upon the base of his skull, and he quite suddenly found himself right side up and face to face with that woman in lace. Her smile was still there, but her lips were closed and her head was cocked slightly to the side. Her dark, scotch eyes searched his with such intensity that he was sure he could feel the panels of his soul being pried apart and brushed aside.
Tom swallowed again. He opened his mouth, trying to think of something to say to her, but she silenced his intentions with a slow shake of her head. Then she lifted one delicate hand, placed a finger upon his forehead, and disappeared in a violent shred of grey smoke.
Not a moment later, Tom felt the floor gently press up against his feet, and jumped, startled, as every wisp of smoke and mist, every drop of color, every thread of light and sound simultaneously snapped away from him, as though repelled, powerfully sucked out of the building.
He stood there, alone in the main hall, looking around himself and up at the ceiling and balcony, both so high above him now. The choir was gone. All was silent.
“Hello?” he called out cautiously, his own dry baritone fading into the cavernous space and dying out quickly.
Nothing came back to him but more silence.
Tom turned slowly, hearing only the feather faint scuff of his shoes against the marble floor. Outside it was dark. The only light now came from a series of dark gold light fixtures upon the walls and pillars, small bulbs hanging from long chains and casting spheres of light across the ground. The rest of the cathedral was shrouded in shadow, save for a handful of long tables set here and there against the walls, upon which sat rows upon rows of red candles, each one lit with a tiny tongue of flame. These flames danced independently of each other, throwing flickering shapes and shadows upon the walls against which they were set. Like a throng of energetic interpretive dancers.
These lights were all that lit the chamber. Everything was dark and burnished, and much more solemn than before. The silence was almost worse than when Tom had first come that afternoon. But it had only been a half hour at best. It couldn't possibly be dark outside already...
His thoughts pittered away as the feathered brush of light feet slowly approaching him from behind reached his ears. Tom turned and watched as the woman in lace walked toward him, an alluring sway in her stride. The long, smooth sleeves of her gown fell from her shoulders and draped next to the folds of her skirt, giving her the appearance of approaching Tom within a shapeless mass of fabric. Save for the black lace that clung to her chest and waist, leaving her shoulders and collarbone bare. But what caught Tom's attention the most vividly was the fact that her hair, once straight and impossibly long, now hung just past her mid-back. And it tumbled down over the front of her chest in grand curls.
Tom's mouth was dry. He tried to stand a little straighter as she continued to walk a few more steps toward him, eventually coming to a stop just four feet away.
“Thomas,” she said. Her voice was bourbon.
Tom struggled to swallow, clearing his throat with a whisper of a cough. “Who are you?” he at last managed to ask.
The woman smiled that smile of hers again, her eyes shifting across his face, his jacket, his hands, up to his hair, back to his eyes. “I am yours,” she said to him as though it were the most obvious thing in the world, her head once again cocked ever-so-slightly.
Tom's eyebrows soared. “I'm sorry?”
This time she showed her teeth when she smiled. “Not in the way you are assuming, unfortunately. I am simply that part of you.”
“What?”
“This was your doing,” she continued, stretching her arms out to either side to take in the entirety of the cathedral.
“I'm s-” Tom blinked. “I don't understand.”
Her arms lowered. “Thomas,” she almost chided. Almost. “You created all this. Created me. I am that part of you that you've forgotten. Where your creativity, your imagination, your confidence... have been hard-pressed to breathe. To live. I am the vessel created by that part of your mind to plead with you.”
“Plead with me?”
She said no more presently, merely continued to search him with scotch eyes.
Tom shifted his weight a little awkwardly, licked his lips. He moved his hands a little as he spoke. “Do you... have a name?”
Another smile. “Whatever you deem to give me. As I said. I am yours.”
Tom's mouth pulled sideways and his brows furrowed. “Um... all right. Carmen?”
The smile faltered. “Carmen?”
“Uh... yes. Sure? Carmen. You look like a Carmen.”
The woman pulled her head to the side in disbelief. “I, of all, know full well that you are capable of a better name than Carmen, Thomas.”
“Do I even have to name you?”
“You inquired first, Thomas. No, I do not need a name."
“No, I'm giving you a name. Just... gimme a minute. I'll think of something.”
Without waiting for him to say anything more, the woman slipped around him and padded in soft shoes toward one of the tables alight with so many candles. Tom, eyes unfocused in thought, subconsciously turned to follow her, surprised when she suddenly pressed into his line of vision again, holding one of the candles in her hand.
He started.
Her hair was still voluminous and deep brown, but the dress she wore was a dark, burnished red. It came just past her knees and the sleeves were wide straps that only stretched from her lower shoulder to just above her elbow.
“Why do you do that?” he asked her over the top of the candle.
She allowed a slight, innocent shrug. “I do not really control it,” she said. “You should ask your own subconscious. The part of you that created me.”
“But why you? Why not... I don't know. Someone I know? I've never seen a girl like you before.”
Another shrug. The tiny light from the candle continued to dance about, casting its shadows now upon the features of both their faces in turn. She honestly didn't know, Tom realized. She truly was just a figment of his imagination. But why he had created a woman who looked like her, he couldn't figure out. It didn't really matter. This entire escapade was in his head, and still above his pay grade.
“What's this for?” he asked of her, gently, with a nod to the candle.
“This,” she said, bringing the candle close to her lips, “is every aspect of your life.” And then, with the smallest, sharpest puff of air, she blew the candle out.
The entire cathedral drowned in darkness.
Tom gasped softly, startled, and felt forward with his hands. Nothing.
Then a single, tiny flame shot to life with an audible poof, inside the candle the woman held. She had backed away from him.
But even by that single, pitiful candle, Tom could see that she had changed again. Or rather, that he, somehow, had changed her.
She was Chloe.
She wore the same oversized sweater she had been wearing when he had visited her earlier yesterday, her soft hair pulled back in the same haphazard ponytail. Her features were deceptively apathetic as she stood, watching him with pursed lips.
“Chloe?” he said softly, hands still outstretched slightly.
She lifted one eyebrow. “Chloe. Is that what you've decided to call me?”
Tom shook his head very slowly, at a loss as to what this meant. Did he still have feelings for Chloe? Of course he did. “But why,” he started to project his thoughts vocally, “would I - my subconscious - create two completely insignificant women to me, and then....” he lifted his hand toward Chloe and let it drop to his thigh with muffled clap. “And then create you?”
Another shrug was his only response. Chloe, or his projection of her, lifted the candle very, very close to her face and examined it with wide, intrigued eyes. “So curious,” she murmured, “why my shape, my face, is shifting so much at all. Why can you not make up your mind, Thomas?” Her eyes lifted from the flame and focused intently upon him. “What is it you want?”
He honestly had no idea what he wanted. It was something he had given up trying to ask of himself as of late. He sidestepped the question, rhetorical or not. “What did you mean when you said that that candle was every aspect of my life?”
Chloe smiled, a smile like a pressed flower that was so characteristic of the woman he had hurt that it cut into Tom's chest almost like physical pain. One of his hands knotted into the fabric of his jacket, just above his collarbone. Only this time, the sensation was the antithesis of what he'd experienced in the cathedral last night.
“You are so careless, Thomas,” she said, a pitying tilt to her head. One that Tom was sad to admit he had been on the receiving of more than once when interacting with the real Chloe. “It stems from a basic lack of self-motivation, self-discipline, and self-worth. Your entire life is a result of your own mindset. How can anyone respect someone who so despises himself?”
Tom quickly noted the turn the conversation had taken, and not without some bitterness. If what they were having could even be called a conversation. It was one-sided, after all. “So,” he ventured, attempting to understand what she was telling him. “I'm entirely to blame for everything that has gone wrong in my life? I'm pretty sure I already-”
“No, Thomas,” she interrupted, “Not to blame for everything. But this,” she held up the candle again, grasping it tightly in one hand and holding it out toward Tom. “This is your saving grace.”
“.....what?”
“You have systematically cut out almost every part of your life that ever had any meaning to you, Thomas. And this is all that is left,” she said, looking meaningfully at the candle that she held aloft.
Tom spread his hands. “Look, Chl-..... I don't... understand what it is you're trying to tell me. I know that my life is not up to par. I know that I haven't made the best decisions lately, if ever. But I don't know what my subconscious could possibly have to tell me that I don't already know.”
“This is your faith, Thomas,” she said, of the pitifully tiny candle flame. “And it is dying.”
“My faith?”
“Yes, Thomas. And it is from your faith that you must begin to rebuild what you have let die.”
“How?”
Chloe held the candle out to her side, waited a breath of a moment, then let it drop.
The second it hit the marble floor, everything beneath them both shattered into a thousand shards of glass.
The sound was deafening. Tom couldn't help the yell that escaped his throat as he began to fall. He was falling within the center of a tornado of fire and light and wind. And this wind was shattering. It whipped him so roughly, his jacket nearly torn from his shoulders, his limbs pressed this way and that. He tumbled over himself again and again, throwing his hands out to brace himself upon something, anything, the air itself, anything to slow his descent into whatever lay below.
-----
The first thing that he became aware of was the gentle push of wind at his back. But not the wind he had fallen through, no. This wind was... earthly. Normal. And it was cold. He was outside. The sounds of the city came to him, but they seemed to be far off, as though coming to him from behind a hill or far below. Tom opened his eyes.
What met his sight was nothing but air. Air and tall buildings and the upper halves of skyscrapers and a dizzying drop seven or eight stories below to the city floor.
Tom was on top of the cathedral, standing just beside the small spire that protruded from the very top of the tallest dome. The dark green metal was stained with streaks from rain and decay. Tom had never before been afraid of heights, but he couldn't convince himself that he wasn't just the least bit uncomfortable. He hand snaked to the side, toward the spire, his movements slow for fear of throwing his balance too much. He grasped the thick pole of metal and pulled himself toward it, grasping it with his other hand and planting his feet on either side. Once he had secured himself to his satisfaction, he allowed himself to scout around for Chloe. But he didn't find her where he had expected. And she wasn't Chloe anymore.
To his left, floating above the dome as though she were swimming in water, was a curly haired red head. Her features were round and freckles dusted the bridge of her nose, yet despite the softness of her face she still seemed incredibly wise and perhaps even a bit intimidating.
“Hey,” Tom said lamely, for lack of anything else.
She looked at him, smiled, and almost immediately returned her attention to the sights around them. The wind from behind caught up her shoulder-length curls and calmly tossed them about her face. She did nothing to tame them. She was wearing a white tunic-like shirt with long, billowy sleeves and a wide blue belt cinching it at the waist, and light blue jeans tucked into tall brown boots.
“Why did you bring me up here?” Tom asked.
She shrugged. “I told you, Thomas. I am not in control.”
“Right. Right. My subconscious is doing this. I'm the one sending myself tumbling into fiery abysses and the like.”
She only smiled, still looking out over the city. The sky was awash with grey, one large slate of dreary color.
Tom pressed his cheek against the spire, exhaling with a bit of a whoosh. “Can we try something?” he muttered against the metal, still looking out at the city himself. She turned to look at him expectantly. He said, “If you're my subconscious, can I just order you to answer my questions regardless of whether or not you think I already know the answer?”
She smiled, patted her hair down with one hand, and spread her other arm out so she could lean back, reclining on air. She kicked one leg forward absently. “I will answer your questions as best I can,” she said.
Tom nodded. “Ok, good. Good. All right.” He pursed his lips and suppressed a shiver. The air was very cold. “Do I hate myself as much as I think I do?”
“Of course not.”
“Well that's good,” he murmured. “Um. Why am I changing your appearance so much?”
“I am the embodiment of beauty to you. Of the sort of strong, unrealistically beautiful women you are attracted to. And you are very particular, Thomas. Very fickle.”
“Am I?” Tom wasn't entirely sure how to respond to that. He supposed it was true. He had never been very attracted to women he saw just walking down the street. They were always magazine models or famous actresses that could ever snare his interest. Or figments of his imagination. His subconscious, in this case. Which, he supposed, were the same thing. He realized, with a pang of self-loathing, that it was for this reason he had fallen so hard for Chloe - the only “real” woman who had ever paid him mind - and, consequently, why he had ruined things. No matter how unintentional his actions had been, he'd always known what the consequence was going to be. Yet he did it anyway. Tom frowned, pensive, as his hands white-knuckled the spire.
“Ok. Ok, answer me this,” he said, deciding to be a little more straightforward. “What the hell do I want from life?”
There was no immediate answer, and Tom lifted his head from resting on the spire to look at the woman. She was floating a little closer to him than before.
She was watching a lone bird circle the sky not far from where they were perched, its black wings a stark contrast against the grey clouds.
“You want purpose,” she finally said.
“Purpose.”
“You want happiness. Security. Friends. Love. But above all else, meaning.”
Tom waggled his head back and forth. “Doesn't everyone? I guess I kind of already knew all that.” He couldn't help but wrinkle his nose a bit, peering down into the streets. The cars looked like small pixels navigating a virtual maze. “My issue, I think,” he said, “is that I'm not sure how to get any of those things.”
“You have to change, Thomas.”
A resigned huff. “Change how?”
She shrugged yet again. “I cannot tell you what you do not know. But I can tell you that the change will not be an easy one. However. Once you have reformed yourself, you will be able to acquire all of those things you desire from life.”
“You're being frustratingly vauge.”
“You do not fully understand what it is you must do. More importantly,” she sat up, draping her hands over her knees, which were crossed in Indian-style in the air. “You are not sure if you want to change at all.”
Tom clung to the spire with a death grip when the wind suddenly picked up, his jacket flapping around his torso. The cold wind slid under his shirt and down his neck, flattening his hair and pressing him against the metal. It grew and grew in strength, forcefully trying to shove him into the air and off the spire. Any response he had begun to form, mental or verbal, was lost the moment a merciless gale tore him from the roof completely.
-----
A soft, high-pitched note beeped in time to the pounding in his head. There was a pressure against his temples - gentle, but uncomfortable still. The air smelled of starch and plastic, and it was with a reluctant effort that Tom managed to open his eyelids.
A plain, white paneled ceiling occupied the majority of his vision.
In confusion, Tom attempted to turn his head to get a better look at his surroundings. Unfortunately, the smallest movement sent a spasm of pain up his neck.
“Tom?”
Despite the result his first attempt had given him, Tom reflexively tried to turn his head in the opposite direction to look at who had spoken from his right, but his neck flared again. Tom bit back a grunt.
“Oh my god. Tom. You're awake.” This declaration was followed up with a string of shocked explicatives, followed by the snap and click of a phone being opened and dialed.
“Robbie?” he muttered, confused as to why it had taken him so long to recognize the other man's unmistakable voice.
“Yeah, he's awake,” he heard Robbie murmur. “I know, I don't know. I'll be here, just hurry down. Ok.” The phone clacked shut. “Tom?”
Tom suddenly found his field of vision filled with the all-too-close face of one Robert, dark brown eyes searching his own with unveiled concern.
“What's goin' on?” Tom said, finding his voice a little scratchy.
“What do you remember?” Robbie asked, not moving his face. Tom was going cross-eyed trying to focus on the man's dark features.
“Um. I don't know. I don't know where... what's going on?” he repeated.
A pair of vertical eyebrows formed on Robbie's brow. “You've been unconscious for the last four days. How are you feeling?”
“Four days?” That wasn't possible. He'd been at the cathedral just then. On the roof, with... with...
“No no, Tom. Tom, you need to lie back down.”
“Get off.”
“Tom, you shouldn't be trying to get up, you've- Tom. Tom. Nurse!”
Tom collapsed back onto the bed in defeat, fixing a stony gaze upon his roommate. Robert was unaffected.
A brief moment of uncomfortable silence.
“You're lucky, you know,” Robert finally offered.
“How so?”
“Any faster, or any other angle, and you'd be dead.”
“What are you talking about? What happened?”
Robert leaned forward in the plush purple hospital chair he occupied, lacing his fingers together and resting his elbows on his knees. He seemed genuinely surprised. “You really don't know?”
Tom shook his head as best he could.
Robert licked his lips. He seemed to pull back on his tone, just slightly. “It may be hard, but try to take me seriously when I tell you that you were hit by a car the other night. You had gone for a walk. It was raining. You were pretty far from the apartment. I was surprised you'd walked as far as you did.”
Tom tried to process all of this around the throbbing headache that was beginning to form behind his eyes. Robert must have noticed something surface on Tom's face, because next thing Tom knew, a nurse was injecting something into his IV and raising his bed so that he could sit up comfortably.
“Thank you,” he managed to murmur to her before she left again.
“Better?” Robert asked.
“Give it a minute to kick in,” Tom chided, adjusting his covers and hospital gown. He took a moment to really look at himself. His arms were covered in a mesh of nicks and scrapes already well-scabbed and healing. The last three fingers of his left hand were splinted together, and as he lifted his right hand to his face, he could feel the thick gauze wrapped around his head.
“Was it bad?” he asked.
Robert's mouth turned down. “It could have been much worse, let's just say that. And it was only half your fault.”
“My fault?”
“Technically you were at a crosswalk and had the right of way, but her light was green and visibility was already bad enough.”
“She?”
There was a knock on the closed door, and as Robert stood to answer it, Tom allowed himself to think. To really think. The night was rainy. The last time he could remember walking through the city on a rainy evening was just two nights ago. Or so he thought. After he had visited Chloe. So everything up until that point was real...
But what about the music? That cathedral? Did it even exist? Did music like that really endure on a human plane of existence? He could still feel the physical balm it had put on his soul. He could still feel the bittersweet torment at hearing those sounds and the rush of emotions he had experienced. But had he ever really heard it? Had it even happened? He realized with a pang of self-pity that he needed it to be real. He had to believe that some sort of healing had begun to take place.
Robert opened the door and Tom, who's eyes' focus was floating somewhere upon the wall across from him, suddenly found his line of sight filled with a female figure who moved to stand at the end of the bed. With difficulty, Tom brought his eyes into focus on the newcomer's dark green sweater.
“Tom,” Robert began, “this is Riann. She was the driver. She's been in here every day to check up on you.”
Tom lifted his eyes to her smiling face and felt his heart falter. It hadn't happened. It hadn't been real, none of it. But her long, straight brown hair and shape were unmistakable, even from this close, and he could suddenly hear her music again, as though she were singing it there in the hospital room. His chamber singer.