Friday
In the storm that picked his dirty corner of the urban world to stop by and drop a shitload of water on him, there was a blessing carried. The time and the place were impeccable, the weather was punctual. If not for all that crashing and bursting in the sky, if not for the icy wind which was cutting down the boulevard, there would have been more people outside. Barry easily resembled the usual wanderers of the neighborhood, the hunched drug addicts getting lost around the corner he was trying to conquer, but normal people still stared or, if bored, reported things to the police.
If not for the tumult dropping from the fluffy black clouds, someone could have heard the cussing and swearing he was delivering inside the hood of his sweater. But most of all, he saw, if it was not for the ocean of water poured on the street, coursing down in the direction opposite to his, there would have been blood, blood steps, blood smears following him like a shadow, bloody hand prints on the bricks of the wall he was clinging to. Instead of leaving a trace, Barry was swimming, up a current of despair, towards hope. It was a good omen, if such thing still existed in his circumstances.
Swimming, the word made him smile, although his face didn’t welcome the expression since the muscles around his mouth and nose and eyes and everywhere were aching and brushing with fire. He smiled inside. He felt clean, strangely. He was not swimming, he was not entirely walking either, no, at this point, he couldn’t walk. The tiny ball of metal that had dug through his stomach had traveled slightly on the left side and was weighing heavier on his left leg, making it impossible to land a full sole on the ground. He was dragging and wobbling, but he was making progress. Without a doubt, the peak of frustration for a person like himself, the Bolt, who was accustomed to high speeds in his existence, to have to advance at such a snail’s pace, but he had to be patient. First, the bus, he sighed, and now, this pedestrian situation.
I would be more patient if there wasn’t blood in my shoe, he thought back to the voice, subjugated at how negative and victim-shaming his inner dialogue was while he believed that he deserved, if not respect, at least mercy. If you haven’t noticed, a jolt of pain darted up from his belly, imprisoned his flank in some burning teeth, so he paused for a couple of seconds, leaning forward with one hand on his knee. No fuck, not on that knee, that knee was shaky as hell. He closed his eyes, let the electricity from the sky hover and mix with his own, basked into several consecutive rolls of thunder. There is blood in my shoe.
Barry Masquevert, walk, for the love of God. There were only twenty more meters left before reaching his destination, “walk, walk” He used a pipe sticking out of the wall to lift himself back to ninety percent of a bipedal position, pushed himself forward with an old rusty mailbox. So. SLOW. One foot. The other foot.
The pain at the center of his body was so complete that it climbed up and rolled itself around his neck like a scarf, caressing the back of his skull. It scooped him low, vibrating through his lower abdomen, threatening him to pee his pants, THAT is a big no-no, Masquevert, you hear me? Get your shit together RIGHT NOW He managed to get himself back into the walk without such catastrophe and, patiently, he won the distance to the door he had been so desperate to reach. Finally. He had visited that very spot many times before, kind of aimlessly, which in itself constituted a change: he couldn’t say that he was aimless anymore. For sure, his aim had grown with the urgency that was presently his. He found the name on the list of inhabitants of the building, experienced a moment of hesitation in front of the bell.
No, you fucking idiot, you’re not going to ring the bell. Barry waited for one more pang of fire to have completed its lap inside his entrails to open his eyes and look up. Ms White lived on the first floor, which was why she had had some rolled down shutters installed in some sleek boxes on top of her windows with the French doors. But she rarely used them, he knew, because she had a cat and she let him watch the street at night when she was sleeping. Only once had he known her to roll down the thin metal curtain, and it had been the big looting weekend of 2020, when people went crazy for toilet paper and found the shops empty, bought some guns instead. He had watched intensely back then, making sure no one would break into her flat. He didn’t trust those metal shutters.
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As he lifted his eyes up, a lot of water from the sky filled them and menaced to drown him on the spot, but he saw it. The iron fence around the little balcony, it was only two meters above him. Barry knew he had to act fast, before the storm passed, so he shut his eyes and summoned all the focus he could, listen you little shit, you will only have one go, he kept on calling himself some bird names and pep-talking with himself in the most aggressive manner but, focusing indeed, he was successful in summoning a few wires of blue light. The meteorological conditions were optimal for this kind of vertical bolting, meeting between clouds and concrete crust, creating invisible buzzing steps in the air, so Barry took that and, to the people around the scene, he disappeared from sight.
Launched by the electricity, he saw the wall become his new ground, sensed his knees regain flexibility, bend, and his arms thrown forward slid through the air, both his hands locking on the balcony railing. The anguish that had been wringing out his stomach was relegated to the back, some bottom of consciousness and some dulled down corner of his awareness, and Barry soaked up the relish, closed his eyes, breathed in some wet and cold air, no relishing, no blissing, no relief, the voice said, WHAT? The pampering force of the bolt suddenly dried out without warning, leaving him prey to the gravity under him. He felt himself fall downward again, horrified, tightened his hands on the rail.
His own weight pulled hard and the middle of his body burst in pain from the jerk, one of his hands let go of its grip, “NO!” he yelled, horrified, “no please!” With monumental effort, he flung his hand up again and felt it close on the iron bar, but that was not going to hold long, especially not with all that water making everything slippery. Barry followed the swinging of his current motion, hanging on the side of the balcony, and threw his right leg up too, then the left one, gasping through the agony. He was able to glue himself against the railing. He expelled some burning air from his lungs, hugged the balustrade desperately in a mix of grunts and sobs and then he tumbled over it. At last, he crashed flat in the center of the balcony, one foot inside a plant pot, the other dangling down.
As much as he desired immensely to take a break, Barry knew he couldn’t lie there defeated under the water and between the urban garden Ms White had quite poorly recreated on her balcony. The storm had again dissimulated his very raucous invasion but the weather wasn’t going to stay this benevolent forever. “Move, move” he said to himself in a raspy breath, rolled heavily on his right side, spent another minute un-tucking his left arm from under his body and then he pulled himself up next to the tall window, pasted against the wall to remain as unseen as possible.
He straightened his knees, gained altitude, one hand gripping his stomach in misery. There was a bulky and burning piece of concrete stuck diagonally in the middle of his gut. Like the times the metaphorical dumb kid was touching the hot stove and reflex-removed his hand right away in a warning tale, only the stove was inside his abdomen and he couldn’t remove anything. Enough with the pessimism, get your game on. It was now. He was at the right height, at the right angle, just behind the glass. Out of breath, he leaned and introduced his nose into the frame of the window, his heart exploding in his chest. What would he see?
He knew the details of the apartment but the first thing he noticed was that Ms White must have gotten rid of the ugly peacock fresco she had chosen to display before just above her couch in the living room, and had replaced it with an ornament of cozy lights, some warm colors. She was sitting underneath, typing something on her laptop with a glass of wine on the side. He noticed her old cat napping next to her, the shape of his body similar to a bread loaf; he knew the animal was completely deaf, which would probably be nice for what was to come.
Barry didn’t have a choice anymore. First of all because he had come all this way and he didn’t have any other agenda, any other solution to his ordeal, not one teammate left on Earth, but more and more because he felt on the verge of passing out. Running out of time, he observed sadly. The pain was gnawing at him, the edges of his eyes obscured by the dark butterflies. For certain, he would not be able to change his mind and climb down this balcony in any other way than falling, so it was out of the question. The bolting power had deserted his organism and he was empty. No more magic.
He tried to relax his shoulders, extended a shaky arm towards the glass of the window, hid his bloody fingers inside the sleeve and simply knocked. Two little but forceful knocks.