Holy City: Chapter Thirteen - Part One

V carefully took off his stolen boots and left them at the front door. In bare feet, he walked into the 2 rooms that made up the Apricot Suite. Everywhere he looked throughout the suite there were smaller thinner versions of the screens that dominated the world outside. They were seamlessly planted into the walls like mirrors that stole images instead of reflected them. Unlike the seeming randomness of the outside world that carelessly mixed the blunt advertisements from the screens above with what passed for reality on the streets below with little regard to function and no regard to form, the 2 rooms of the Apricot Suite showcased sleek designs that made form and function invisible blending the modern and the ancient as if there was no such thing as modern or ancient.

The luxury of the suite was not just a luxury of comfort but a luxury of aesthetics. In the shelter, cots had been placed where they needed to be placed so people could sleep on them. In the Apricot Suite, beds and couches and sofa chairs were placed where they needed to be placed to be pleasing to the eye. V wanted to believe this meant a sacrifice of the joys of comfort, but as he sat in one exquisitely designed seating instrument after another, he had to admit the suite was superior to the shelter in every way. If money could not buy happiness in Vitesia, it did purchase surroundings of a type of comfort and beauty that those struggling many stories below would not know. V felt guilty.

With collapsing feet and tired knees V took off his new suit and placed it over one of the chairs. He walked into the bathroom of the suite. It was an oasis within an oasis. It was a refuge from a world of vertically and horizontally stretching concrete slabs. The shower had a door that did not look like a door. It was glass of such purity that it was invisible to the naked eye and easy to run into if one were not careful. The walls behind the invisible door were made of a beautiful light brown marble that had been imported from another country where sculpture still had importance. The shower itself was large enough to be its own suite in a different less luxurious hotel. The floor of the shower was beautiful tile to match the beautiful marble walls. Tile that imitated the baths of the villas of the wealthy from centuries ago.

V stepped into the invisible shower with his shirt and shorts still on. He turned on the shower and washed his hair first, his clothes still on. He took off his clothes one garment at a time. He washed the individual garments by hand as if they were the only things he owned, which in a way was true. He cleaned them under the running water, cracked hands scraping against fabric and soap. V washed the last several days away from the coarse material. His fingers ached as he pressed them against synthetic fibers that were created from unnatural processes. He scrubbed and kept scrubbing until they were purified by the water.

When he was done, he carefully hung each item of clothing on a rack next to a counter made of stone. He returned naked to the shower. The water was still running. V stepped into the running water. He closed his eyes and let the water run over him. Water running over his head and down his body, V was reborn.

The shower was a luxury both because such things had been denied to him for a long time and because the shower of the Apricot Suite was luxurious. It was called a rainforest shower although rainforests were mostly on other continents far away from this one.

V dipped his head and closed his eyes. Water fell from his face as if he were weeping. The dirt from his body pooled around the drain and then sunk down the drain. V reached out with his arms and braced himself against the marble wall of the shower. He stayed in that position for a lifetime. He heard music in his head. Music from the life outside of the suite and the hotel and music from the falling water. He couldn’t believe such a simple thing could bring him such joy. He opened his eyes. The water kept falling. He didn’t want to leave the embrace of the water. But it was time to return to the real world.

V was tired. In fact, he was exhausted. V laid down in the master bed and turned off the lights and waited. He could still hear the music from the world outside. It stayed in his head and grew louder the longer he laid there. The music kept growing louder, all of the sounds of modern society bouncing in his head, voices drowned out by the mechanical inventions of many centuries.

He rolled to one side and then another. The bed was comfortable, should have been comfortable, but the rest which came as such welcome relief when he laid down in the shelter the previous night and when he laid down in his prison cell at the Accadan Checkpoint, remained beyond his grasp. The more he tried to force himself to relax, the less restful he became. Five minutes felt like hours as he forced himself to stay in one place. He closed his eyes, pressing them tight, but time would not move. He put his arm over his eyes, trying to block out all light, yet time still would not move. His body would not obey his mind.

V sat up in bed and looked at his new suit. It dangled lifeless over the top of a chair, suspended in air, waiting to be reanimated by moving flesh. It wasn’t even midnight and V already knew he wasn’t going to get any rest on this night, not in this room. He decided to leave.

Previous Chapter: Chapter Twelve
Next Chapter: Chapter Thirteen - Part Two