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I miss this. What are you talking about? Here. Now.
It's different. Different how? It's different like
it used to be.
Renzo is lying naked in bed, the glaze quickly fading to a languid
heaviness in his limbs. The beat of his heart is still abnormally fast,
but he tries to ignore what it means by breathing deeply, closing his
eyes, and lying as still as possible. He hopes to induce sleep by
telling himself that he has to be tired.
The Hollywood Safe House was
a name he and Katie had coined for his
current apartment, an unremarkable one bedroom bachelor pad
located
two blocks off the Strip. After he had moved out of his studio in
Katie's duct tape incident was legendary in the canon of their
friendship, a definitive occurence that had taken place at the end of
one particularly long night. Renzo and Katie had oozed in
somewhere
around dawn, each riding out the end of a few pills and in sore need of
a beer and a pile of wool blankets. A detectable glow had already
appeared on
the eastern horizon as they were driving home. Immediately after
entering his apartment, Katie had duct taped garbage bags
over all of the visible windows, and then had commenced a ritualistic
lighting of scented
candles around the edges of the room. Throughout the strange ceremony
she had been wearing nothing but one of his old sweatshirts and a pair
of white panties, strangely unconscientious of the unspoken physical
boundaries that had always existed between them. It's not daytime yet, she said,
testing the strength of the tape on the nearest window. If you say so, he replied. Are you listening to me? I can't sleep
unless you tell me it's still night. Ok, he said, and he had done so. The memory has a
strange resonance, an artistic kind of melancholy one expects to see
in
certain kinds of films.
Renzo rolls over, suddenly aware that he is clenching his teeth and
does
his best to stop it. The sky outside the window might still be of the
deepest night, but he knows dawn is fast approaching. Beats of sweat
have collected on his forehead. It will be hours before he is able to
fall asleep. |
