The Golden Plating
This is the completed version of an excerpt I posted on my old website. If I were to publish it, it would be a part of a collection of short stories, but I’m posting it here for general review and to keep a record. I hope you enjoy!
The cabin was a small space, lined with rust-colored wood paneling and worn-out furniture, smelling faintly of cigarette smoke and sweat. I suppose I was to blame for the smell.
This trip was the consequence of years of admittedly poor planning. Outside of my publisher and three or four of my friends, nobody else knew I was coming here. I barely knew for certain until the week before.
After a long and bumpy bus ride, I found myself getting off at a signpost, on which the name of the cabin was carved. “Hotel California”. Below that was a tagline, typed out and printed on big white paper, “You can check out, but you can never leave!”.
I could hardly see why. This rundown, shoddy excuse for a residence was no hotel, and I was fairly certain that I was more than a few time zones away from California. If the aim of the slogan was for me to be unnerved, it had succeeded. Getting off the bus, I was met with a wide-eyed look from the bus driver just before he made a beeline for the nearest highway.
The signpost itself was an ostentatious one, located between shacks and gaudily colored buildings. I had walked down the adjacent alley, between men washing their clothes and tired mothers chasing after their kids to find that it opened up into a suspiciously empty road with the same tacky buildings, only it was emptier and had a mud path smack in the middle. The path took me through rows of trees, leaves crumpled and brown in the middle of autumn. The trees seemed to form a neat line bordering the path, as if they were guarding the well-kept secret at the end of the dirt road. Finally, after what felt like hours of walking, I found myself looking at the cabin, facing an identical dirty signpost to the one I had seen earlier.
I stopped to have a smoke, the packet of Marlboros trembling between my fingers as I reached for it. My body was telling me I needed more exercise, even as I puffed on my cigarette. I pushed ahead and opened the door to the cabin with the keys the agents had mailed me.
****
After I swept the floors, dusted the furniture, and sprayed the room thoroughly, I sat down on the couch, and was almost immediately greeted by the floor.
The cabin’s living room is the first thing one sees when they open the door, adjacent to which is a kitchen floor with white tile, a stark contrast to the reddish-brown of the rest of the cabin. In the corner of the living room there was a bookshelf, almost empty save for 2 books, neither of which had titles on their cover. Next to the bookshelf there was a brown wooden staircase, which looked as if it would collapse if I even tried to climb it. I decided then that upstairs was off limits to me.
The couches (now couch, the other one had unfortunately been crippled by my rear end) in the living room faced a fireplace, and to the left of that fireplace was a polished wooden desk and chair. There was a notepad strewn across, seemingly empty, and a fountain pen. In the corner sat a bottle of ink, and as I examined it, I found an inscription in golden plating underneath the table.
“To my sunshine. May the words you write here bring me back to you.” There was no name underneath.
I sat down at the desk, setting my heavy backpack and sleeping bag aside. There was no bed here, so the bag would have to make do. I opened the notepad and flipped through the pages. Save for the middle page, which had a rather crude drawing, there was nothing on it. I decided that this would be where my novel began.
****
The minute handle on the miserable clock above the bookshelf painstakingly made its way to 4:30. The wooden desk was next to the window, and the startling brown was turned into a sickening shade of ochre by the dim yellow streetlamp outside. I went to go sit down at the desk, rubbing the sleep out of my eyes as I pulled out the chair. It made an incredibly unpleasant sound.
Flipping open the notepad, I take my pen and begin to write. “As the windows of the luxury two-seater opened, a bouquet of flowers was flung out of it”. Lighting a cigarette, I sat back, satisfied with having written a whole sentence. That may be all I write for a while, I thought despondently to myself. I spent the next forty minutes just sitting there, staring out into the trees through the dense smoke coming from between my fingers.
Seven months ago, I promised her I would quit, and she never failed to follow up with me. Then again, she wasn’t there to scold me, so I could smoke as much as I wanted. The acrid taste in my mouth seemed to get worse with every waking second that I didn’t spend writing, so I finally picked it up and went back to work.
“The man who flung those flowers out did so with practiced apathy, as if it were the easiest thing in the world, but in spite of his best efforts, he found himself looking for every turn in the road he could find, just so he could go and retrieve them.”
I heaved a long, weary sigh as I read it over. The words had found their way out of my body and onto the paper, where they took form like an abandoned construction site.
I set the pen down and lit another cigarette. This was going to be a very long morning.
****
A sharp series of knocks woke me from a dreamless sleep, and I jolted awake, hands sore and aching from resting my head on them against the desk. I ambled towards the door, rubbing the sleep still out of my eyes, and opened it quickly, as fast as I could to avoid having to listen to the scraping of wood on wood. Only her shadow kept the sunlight from nearly blinding me.
“You didn’t pick up your phone”
“I’ve been writing, had to go somewhere for a while”
“You haven’t responded to me for weeks”
She pushed past me into the cabin and planted her feet firmly on my sleeping bag, making it almost certain that I would sleep on her dusty boot prints, “This is new, even for you. Isolating yourself in a cabin to write?”
“How did you find out where I was?”
“I asked your buddy, the guy with the glasses. I can’t ever remember his name”
“Why are you talking to him?”
“Why aren’t you talking to me?”
“Why should I?”
She sighed, rubbed her eyes with both palms, and put a finger up as if to object. It was almost forever before she put it down, not breaking eye contact with me. Her eyes gradually began to water.
“That isn’t fair to me, and I don’t know how I can explain myself to you”, she said to me, slowly, as her voice began to tremble. It was almost real to me.
I shrugged and swallowed the lump that had gradually been building in my throat. “Not like it’s going to make a difference. I remember that you made me a promise, and then you broke it.”
She opened her mouth to speak, eyes brimming with indignation and fury, but then held her tongue. Instead of saying anything, she just stood there with her head hung, arms tensely held to her sides. Our conversation had come to an end.
****
“She danced in her solitude, moving gracefully from one broken relationship to the next. She tangoed between the entanglements, and she waltzed towards an ignominious end. In the chamber of her solitude, there was a silent applause.”
I set the pen down once more, an action that had become so familiar that my hand instinctively reached for my Reds. Lighting my millionth cigarette of the day, I rested my chin on my fist, twirling my pen in my hand and staring at the disjointed paragraphs that would make up my next great novel.
So far, I’d written nothing more than a couple of sentences, but I didn’t have the thread that would string them all together. My pack of cigarettes had become much lighter, and I had nothing to show for it. Luckily, I’d brought spares.
I hadn’t quite given enough thought to this novel. I once tried to explain at a speaking event that writing was quite like being thrown into the ocean with weights tied to your ankles. No matter how much you try to swim to the surface, eventually you get tired, and the weight pulls you deep under. The stories you write are nothing more than the water that fills your lungs, I had said. That was my last speaking event, both with an audience and with my publisher. His last communication was a tersely worded memo, stating that after this next novel, he and I would no longer be associated. I couldn’t have been happier with this decision myself; he was starting to become a weight.
Still, I often thought about the good days. Before being my publisher, he was my friend in college, and he adored me. It’s certainly true that he took our friendship far more seriously than I did, and when I would sit in class doing my best to remember the difference between alkanes and alkenes, he’d look over to my notebook and read the piteous short stories I conjured up. In his mind, I think I must have resembled Ozymandias. Even so, our friendship was preserved best back when neither of us took life or each other as anything more than face value, and it ought to have died then.
I looked towards the clock, with flecks of gold and rust all over the steel frame. The dusty handles remained pointed towards 4:30. Great, the clock was broken now. All I had to count the hours was my old piece-of-shit watch and the sun. I looked outside towards the dying lamp, the sole source of light in the nighttime. The sky above me had turned a shade of blue, its shallow calm interrupted by a fierce, dying streak of orange beneath the horizon. It was as if the sun threw a tantrum, raging against the dying of the light.
****
Rubbing the sleep out of my eyes, I extrapolated that it must be closer to 7:00. That meant that it would be time to make a meal for myself. When it came to groceries, I was grievously unprepared, but the travel company had assured me that there would be food provided. I decided to head to the kitchen to make myself an unappetizing meal with whatever I could find in the fridge. As I got up from my sleeping bag, I felt the familiar sound of glass breaking under pressure and cursed myself. Now my watch was broken too.
“Do you think you could’ve done better?”
The familiar, mellifluous voice came over from just near the staircase.
“Do better? I had you as my best friend”
He stepped over the sleeping bag to come stand next to me as I hunched over the stove.
“Vegetable soup. I knew you couldn’t cook, but seriously?”
“Do better? I had you for a best friend”
He sighed deeply, and pushed the horn-rimmed glasses up his nose, “How many times are we going to do this back-and-forth? You’re always making me the bad guy in these arguments”
Lighting a cigarette, I looked at him for a second, studying his features. The sad, yet charming smile that won over so many of our teachers, the wide and deep set eyes behind the glasses that gave him the illusion of pensiveness whenever he kept silent. He was the picture of my greatest envies, but he looked at me like the sun rose in my eyes. How I hated him.
I turned back to the pot as the ash from my cigarette made its way down to my soup, and huffed, as I normally did when I expected more from him. He always knew the right thing to say. That’s why we had been friends for so many years.
Hands on his hips, he said, “There’s a time for being sulky, and there’s a time to genuinely think about what it is you’ve done. You’ve driven everybody in your life away for this dream of comfortable, untethered solitude, but you throw a fit and drive yourself to madness when you realize that you’re finally alone. Now that everybody’s left you, all you have to talk to are the ghosts of your mistakes. In spite of that, in spite of the gaping hole in your heart that you insist on widening, and in spite of all the love you’ve won so unfairly, you still have your pride? That damn ego that we all hated?”
The soup was done. Pouring it delicately into a bowl, I turned to face him to see him wiping his eyes with his sleeve. He looked up at me again, tears in his brown, sunken eyes, “You’ve been so lucky, you’ve had people love you whether or not you wanted them to. I’m only here because you finally realized that you missed me.”
I looked at him. For the first time, it was like I was really looking at him. A man I’d known for so long, but never really known the depths of. And just like that, he too had left me.
“If I was really that lucky, then why did you go? I needed you, but you still went, and for good too.” I cleared my throat, so that he couldn’t hear my voice break. That time had long since passed.
“And why did you come back now? Did you really think it would make a difference? Did you hope it would help me do better? I had you for a best friend, didn’t I?” My voice finally gave way, and the words came out through bitter, almost childish sobs.
He bowed his head, “I regret that I didn’t tell you about it sooner. My biggest mistake was keeping myself away from you, and for that I’m so deeply sorry. But it’s like I said, I’m here because you missed me.”
And just like that, like the first time all those years ago, when the smell of rain in the air made us happy and the windows of the classroom were filled with amber, he was gone.
****
Sitting at my desk, I continued to let the pen work. I didn’t know anymore where the story was going, only that it had to keep going. There was something to be written, but I hadn’t found it yet. I continued, writing sorry monologues as the weights on my ankles pulled me deeper into still waters.
“In the chamber of her solitude, there was a silent applause. To an observer, it would seem like the world stood still, but to her, it was reality. Content with the empty chairs before her, she placed both palms on her head, and fell dramatically to the floor.”
I heard a chair scrape beside me. Once again, she had come to nitpick.
“It hardly seems fair, does it? You make me look like the villain in this. Haven’t you thought once about your own role?”
I turned to face her, and finally I could see her. In the dim lighting of the streetlamp, her face looked like a chiaroscuro painting. Her brown hair fell perfectly down her forehead, and her inscrutable eyes peered through me. Her face was blank, a feature I’d never seen it wear, and I couldn’t tell if she was trying not to laugh or cry.
“To be clear, you’re not the villain, it’s meta. Also, I’m okay with who I am.”
At that, she chuckled derisively, “You’re okay with who you are? When we were together, you barely gave me the time of day, and when you did you never asked after me. You decided what I wore, but you never once gave me a compliment. You didn’t even notice when I would do my hair, even when I did it specially for you! When I did love you, you looked everywhere but at me. It’s a miracle you even know what I look like.”
She chuckled again, and it escalated into laughter. Not the carefree, joyous kind that I rarely ever saw, but instead a mocking, condescending laughter. My chest began to burn, and the words tumbled out of me.
“I apologized! I apologized time and again, and I have done everything I possibly could to make it right. I spent months on end buying you whatever I could with my shitty salary and I tried to pay attention to these petty, insignificant details that you were so fixated on. I even played nice with your insufferable friends. What more could you possibly want from me?!”
The laughter stopped. Instead, it was replaced by a look of abject disappointment. It nearly shattered what little resolve I had left. Still, the words were finding their way out, and more water filled my lungs.
“I did everything to atone, but I cannot change who I am. Those are the cards I’ve been dealt, and you were wrong for ever hoping that I could be better. I can’t, and that’s it. I don’t want you haunting me anymore, telling me what I could have changed. There is no change for me.”
She stared at me, blank as could be, “You could have. I did. Your friend did. We all changed so that you could love us more, but if it were true that only the things you love can change, then maybe you would have too. Maybe it wasn’t me that you didn’t care for, but yourself, and it is true that I can’t change that. Still, I had faith in you. I believed in you. Could you think of a more dangerous thing?”
She got up to leave and laid her hand on my shoulder. Out of instinct, I went to lean on her arm, only to find that she had pulled it away. How foolish was I to have let such a good thing die?
****
I woke up to sunlight streaming through the window. Rubbing the sleep out of my heavy eyes, I turned my head towards the clock, only to find that both hands were pointed at 12. I knew from the angle of the sun in the window that it was neither noon nor midnight, but it wasn’t news to me that the clock was broken. Then again, didn’t it show 4:30?
Kicking myself out of the sleeping bag, I ambled towards the wall near the stairwell, and made yet another scratch. I’m sure I’d have to pay the damages for it, but I had been living there for the better part of 5 months. At this point, I might as well have rented the place out.
The days passed slowly, spent at my desk, in the kitchen or in the sprawling backyard, which was connected to a forest that I dared not venture into. For exercise, I made do with simple activities: jumping jacks, push-ups, the like. I spent my mornings exercising, my afternoons reading and rereading the 2 books left over in the bookshelf — A Wild Sheep Chase by Haruki Murakami and No Exit by Jean Paul Sartre, and my evenings exhausting the ink in my pen. The notepad I was writing in had gradually begun to run out of paper, leaving my exhaustive and pathetic novel with very little way to go.
On some evenings, he would visit again. Looking through his glasses, with his arms crossed against his chest, he’d watch me go through the motions, saying almost nothing except for, “Please go. Please.” I ignored him and continued. Sometimes she would come too, but would leave whenever I would turn to look at her.
One day, as I finished 20 push-ups with no small effort, I heard him ask me silently, “Why didn’t you attend the funeral?”
I got up, and went for a cigarette, knowing how much he hated the smell. He was still crouching by my sleeping bag where I had done my workout for the day, but his eyes were fixated on me.
I shrugged and turned my attention to preparing dinner for myself. In the water in the saucepan, I looked into the eyes of my reflection, searching desperately for a way to answer him.
“Lots of people came, but nobody I really knew.” he continued, oblivious to my silence, “Still, I only looked for you. When I couldn’t see you, it hurt me more than you could have imagined.”
I continued to stare at the saucepan, the water boiling aimlessly. I could no longer distract myself, so I turned to face him, and once again I saw tears behind those glasses.
“It hurt me deeply. How I hoped, for every minute of those awful 3 hours, that you would be there. Even now, as I stand here, I’m still waiting for you to come around.”
He was right, I didn’t attend that awful funeral. I couldn’t bring myself to imagine that not a few days after we graduated, he had locked himself in his room, tied a rope to his ceiling fan, and put his head through the noose, all without so much as a note or a goodbye. I had instead chosen the coward’s way out, to remember him with his evergreen smile and unending patience with me, instead of having to watch his body burn, with closed eyes that would never again laugh like they used to.
I could feel the weight of his ghostly eyes on me, even as I turned my gaze away from him and focused on my dinner. My best friend had left me so unceremoniously, and I didn’t even know that it was our last goodbye. And now, as I watched him fade back into non-existence, I choked on the words I wanted to say.
The day I made my 187th scratch, I cried.
I didn’t know what brought it about. The day had been the same as usual: exercise, food and watching the birds, when suddenly I felt tears falling down my face. Then came the runny nose, and before I knew it, I was curled up on the backyard, crying as the vivid blue of the afternoon sky faded into a moody grey. Once I had opened my eyes, the setting sun glared at me through my tears. Now no more than a furious dot, it seemed to remind me that I have only had it for company. It was only then that I began to think, and the only thought I could birth brought me to tears yet again.
I was bathed in daylight, but by the time I had come out of my reverie of self-pity and bitter sobs, the sun had set. There was no telling if the sun would ever come out again.
****
The cabin that was meant to be a sanctuary to me had become my home now. The grass outside had scarcely grown, but instead turned an enigmatic shade of emerald. Each blade looked at me with a warm smile, like I was an aging monarch. The king of sorrows, who had long forgotten his kingdom.
The act of scratching the wall with the buckle of my long-dead watch to mark the passing of days had become more habitual than necessary. Consequentially, I had no clue how many weeks bid me goodbye. Maybe the last scratch was 193? No, it might have been 202. Or somewhere in between. I think.
I spent each day doing the exact same thing, like a jukebox with one record in it – Exercise, read, cook, sleep and repeat. Occasionally, I would cry from midday until the sun set, and it always lasted that long. The downpour began when the sun peaked in the sky, and elapsed the second that the angry man in the chariot gave up on me and disappeared far beyond the horizon.
One day, just as I had begun to weep on the deck of the backyard, I heard footsteps walking inside the house, and then I heard the sliding door to the backyard open. I turned to see a cow.
I hadn’t the faintest clue how it got the doors open, or how it made its way here.
The cow turned to me and spoke,
“How’s your day been?”
Wiping the tears from my eyes, I replied, “Not too awful. Can’t say too much has changed.”
“Have you?”
“Not much. Isn’t that a difficult question to answer?”
The cow looked at me, and I somehow got the notion that she was perplexed.
“If I were changing every time a new thought entered my brain, wouldn’t I be changing at every given second? To be clear, if I’m constantly changing, aren’t I still the same, for my change is constant?”
“Perhaps this is a Ship of Theseus situation. Maybe if I have enough new and transformative thoughts, I will change, but since the dilemma itself is unresolved and potentially begets a superposition of ideas, wouldn’t I also still be the same?”
The cow stared blankly at me, which I interpreted to be thought. After some time, she answered, “Maybe neither of those things matter. To change is to know that the things that once determined who you are needn’t be so, if you should will it to be. That way you’re neither changing nor constant. If you think your identity is tied to something, like a boat to its anchor, then you can choose to lift that anchor, or sever it altogether. In the end, it isn’t your new thoughts, but the actions you take to cement them, or maybe how you should embody these changes. Today, you simply are. Yesterday you simply were. Tomorrow you simply will be. And that thing that you are, were or will be, it can be different. That is change, is it not?”
I reached for the last cigarette in my pocket, and then decided against it. “Perhaps you’re right. But what are the guidelines?”
“To change? Why do you think there are any?”
“I can’t imagine you just flip a switch and become new. There must be some catch.”
The cow stared into some invisible void. Try as I might, cows are as inscrutable as they come.
Finally, after a long silence, she cleared her throat. To be precise, she let out a very loud MOO, but I interpreted that as her clearing her throat. Either that, or she was cussing me out, which would have been quite rude.
“When a rocket has to launch, to make its way to whatever destination it has set for itself within the cosmos, it eventually has to jettison its boosters. That is, parts of the rocket will provide the energy required to lift off, and then when their time has come, they detach and fall towards the earth. This helps the rocket make its way to outer space, but it makes you wonder: Does the rest of the rocket miss its parts? Surely if you were to ask it, it would say ‘Yes, most certainly. They were built with me, and I’m no longer the same without them.’ But then you would ask the rocket if it were happy to be in space, and it might say ‘Yes, absolutely. I had to get here.’”
I shook my head. I was not understanding this befuddling bovine.
“Where I’m going with this is simple: to change, to become someone new, we often leave parts of ourselves behind, those parts that have brought us this far but become redundant in doing so. We can miss those things, because they were a part of us, and what is loss but to no longer have a part of yourself? Perhaps to change is to mourn the person you used to be.”
And with that, she turned around and left, the same way she came in, with not so much as a goodbye. I had scarcely known her, and she scarcely knew me. Why then, did my chest ache so much?
****
Well after I had stopped counting the scratches, I packed my bag and left the cabin. No sentimental goodbye, no novel to show for my isolation. A few weeks before that, I stopped smoking, throwing each of my cigarette packets into the forest. I threw away the notepad I was writing, and used a screwdriver from my backpack to unscrew the golden inscription so that I could take it with me. I cleaned up the cabin and turned the stove on.
Instead of leaving through the front door, I walked into the backyard, straight into the forest that had scared me so.
After a few minutes of persistent walking, I came into a clearing, colored by the evening sunlight. There, standing in the clearing, were a man and a woman. The only two people who had done me the kindness of choosing to love me, and despite the tears in their eyes, they were smiling.
That was the last sunset I remember.
