Sunday

Smolder Comes To

Smolder’s eyes opened briefly. He was in a box of a room. A dull pain moved from his temple to the back of his neck as his lids shut again. But now he was conscious, if barely, and found that after a few paralyzing attempts that he could sit up. He was in a box alright, a cement one with no décor whatsoever, lit by a weak yellow bulb. In one corner was a melamine table with a ceramic water basin on it. A dresser lined another wall and had his clothes folded neatly at one side with a drink tray at the other. He was naked. The only other element in the room was the bed he was sitting on. He could feel, with certainty, the stretched springs beneath the thin mattress. Drowsiness hung on his hunched figure like a leaden weight threatening to pull him back into slumber, but he held himself upright and rubbed his throbbing head.

He lifted himself to his feet and made his way like a newborn colt to the table and poured out some water to splash across his face and dampen down his hair. He then turned to the dresser and found mostly melted ice in the bucket on the drink tray and three bottles of spirits. He poured himself a stiff bourbon and soda, sat back down on the bed and tried to clear his skull with a long pull from the glass.

A second pull helped. He washed his face a second time, smelled about his shoulder and armpit for traces of sour odors and washed the rest of his body with a dampened towel. Then he put on his clothes, noticing a tear on the right sleeve and a scuffed knee on the left leg of his trousers. A matching cut on his arm, one of just a few minor abrasions on his body, told him there must have been a struggle that came from his right and thrust him knee first to the ground. The bruise on his knee confirmed this. He marked that his clothes had been cleaned and pressed rather thoughtfully, though when he got to dressing his feet, he realized that the mystery cleaners provided only one sock, the other either being lost to combat or to laundry, both hazardous affairs for a sock.

Initially he could only remember the last time he opened his eyes – and even that was vague. Though it was uncomfortable to do so, he examined the room again and determined that when his eyes opened, he was probably in this room, the tint of light was familiar. Somebody was in there with him then, making some commotion. How long ago that was he could not say. Perhaps long enough to strip a man and do his laundry – assuming he was clothed at that point.

He forced his mind to dig into itself and make some account of how he ended up in his current situation. He felt as though he were starting from scratch, his consciousness suspended on a line in a black void that could have been boundless space or a vacuum. Without a memory, he could not gain his bearings. Eventually, he remembered the Agency. He worked for the Agency and his boss was the Old Man. He was likely on a case. He walked his memory forward, remembering more and more, first about his general identity, then about his daily activities. There was a nagging sensation around some horrible advice, nonsensical really, he read somewhere about the Treaty of Ghent from some unnamed character who attempted to involve himself in some decision or other. For some reason, this strange fellow was somebody he recalled paying attention to, as if some such character who played a role in something back then could be relevant still.

Then he remembered Miss Bailey and some of the details started falling into place. He took a third pull, getting to the ice of his glass, and put a name to the piss poor advice and the curious Treaty of Ghent fellow: Finknottle. Sir Augustus. And Smolder had left Houston to head to the Philippines, the last footprint on Finknottle's trail. Smolder remembered boarding the plane, but could not recall getting off.

He sat down in his aisle seat and took out a report he was reading and the stewardesses served dinner, a curious mixed vegetable dish with chicken on rice and a roll. For dessert there was some sort of gelatinous cube the shade of a faded Easter egg, pale green, like a leaf bleached dry in the sun. The taste of the cube was not readily determinable, perhaps because he had a can of Tsingtao on his palate, and that doesn’t easily go away.

Now that Smolder thought about it, the residue of Tsingtao was completely gone now, which meant that it was at least twenty-four hours since that meal on the plane. It was a safe benchmark, Smolder thought, unless of course the three pulls of bourbon might be masking the Tsingtao. He thought back to the previous times he had drunk Chinese beer and tried to gauge how prevalent and enduring the after taste is. He remembered once having a few bottles of the stuff, then drinking a fair amount of soju on top of it and the beer's aftertaste stubbornly remained in his mouth. He counted it a safe bet that it had been twenty four hours since he ate his meal on the plane.

A new wave of grogginess hit him. He was going down quick. He sniffed the his glass, then stumbled back to the bottle and sniffed it. It had the bitterness of what? Some drug the agency taught him about. Some drug that he wished he could remember now.

The yellow light went dim and dimmer and he crawled back as best he could to the thin mattress suspended by stretch worn springs serving as his bed. Did the lights go out before he made it?