‘I don’t know what came over me’ was an apt way to put it. He knew as he was doing it that he would sorely regret it, yet he did it anyways. He was asked out for dinner, and he had reacted to it immaturely, impulsively, stupidly, as though someone had proposed him for his hand in marriage. And all for what? He had made a complete and utter fool of himself.

No money, no identity—nothing. Everything was lost the moment he had fled.

He was still Jane Doe. He was still no better off than when he had first started. Worse, in fact, because now he had run out of time. Now, there was nothing to do, was there, but to brace himself to spend a night outside?

“What the hell am I doing, God…”

The sheer embarrassment he had put himself through paled much of the jubilance of the afternoon for him. Still, it was a jarring thing to know just how quickly he had fallen into the throes of destitution. All it took was for him to have the wrong sort of currency. Then, situational poverty had followed suit. Having lived his life so far in the relative comfort of a lower-upper-class household where he seldom had to worry too deeply about his own well-being—food, water, shelter were just one of those things he had, like everyone else he knew in his life, taken for granted. Now, to be deprived of these basic essentials he had always considered his inviolable human rights—and for such a stupid reason—he was too confounded to know even how to respond. There was a lesson to be learned here, to be sure.

While most people lived their lives intricately secured to the world by friends, family, lovers, pets, debts, inheritance, job, aspirations—Satou, as things stood, had no one but himself. Untethered, worlds apart, he had no one to fall back to; and if he messed up, like he had messed up, he was falling straight down to the bottom with little to no means to pull himself back up. He knew that. Even as he walked out of the bakery he had known that. And yet,

Somehow, everything could’ve all worked out in the end.

Yes. Somehow, everything could’ve all worked out if he hadn’t done anything, anything at all, but that, he would’ve been fine. If the officer had later on down the line made some daring advances, he could’ve just flatly refused. It would’ve been a trivial thing to do. After all, women rejected men all the time, no? No reason or excuses needed, just a flat-out ‘no’; the officer would’ve left him alone; politely, too. His first day could’ve ended right then and there; and right about now he would’ve been a hotel room, looking forward for what tomorrow had waiting for him.

Instead, I go ahead and do that… Just what the hell were you thinking. Idiot…

Vague images and intrusive thoughts came by and went. The officer and what he had done kept coming back to his mind. Time passed. He tried to lie down. As expected, his clothes did nothing to dampen the cold and hard wooden splats of the bench. The edges poked him right where it hurted him: on his pelvis and on his ribs; and he had to curl up to properly lie down in the first place. But, even then, his legs had to dangle out the handrail for him to fit.

“I can’t sleep like this…”

He couldn’t sleep here even if he wanted to. Someone was bound to come and kick him out.

He remembered the park. “Maybe I could go back there.” He could sky gaze. With a satchel for a pillow, he could lie down on the grass and sleep there. But, then, it would be prickly, and uncomfortably cold and wet with dew when morning would roll around? No, let’s not. He wasn’t even sure if the park was still open at such late hours. Probably not… What’s the time?

No, wait—What kind of line of thought was he pursuing here? Why was he thinking about where he could go to sleep at? I still have money. It’s not like I’m broke here. He could not give up, not like this. If only for the sake of his pride, his self-esteem or what was left of it if nothing else, he could not resign himself to be homeless, even for a night.

“But what the hell do I do…”

The frustration was enough to make him want to cry. He felt helpless. Was there nothing he could do?

The florist all of a sudden came to mind; and an idea he had discarded earlier suddenly sounded feasible again.

If he had failed with her—so what? There were plenty others still, more willing.

If he was frank with them—and why should he be not frank with them—would they not help him out? If he made his circumstances clear, made them understand, that, without their help, that he would be helpless, homeless, have no means to support himself, that he had no money to check-in to a place to stay or buy himself food—would they not take pity?

They wouldn’t suspect his pleas for foul-play, would they? He was well-dressed enough; civilized-looking. He did not look like a tramp, did he? No, far from it. He resembled a tourist, an exchange student travelling alone from a well-off family. He looked like a traveler—yes, a traveler! He should go with that! A traveler from faraway. It wouldn’t even be a lie!

Alright. He had the idea down. “Ask.” Go flat to flat, knock on doors, and ask strangers in their homes if they would be kind enough to exchange their ducats with him for his riyals. Beg, in other words; though he wouldn’t use that word. The possibility that he would be met with frowns and winces was always a possibility, even if they would reluctantly relent out of politeness’ sake in the end, which did perturb Satou, who was reticent to face any more awkward scenes. The possibility did make him waver a little; but here, there was no dilemma. If he noticed them shrink, wince, curt their tone, show reluctance or timidity, or if they outright refused to give him money, then he would ask them for their spare change; but only then. That should seal the deal. Making them see that he had lowered his bargain was a sure-fire way to make them diffident to refuse a second time. “A classic salesmen tactic, if a bit scummy.”

And what better place to start than where he had holed himself up currently? Somehow, someway—aimlessly wandering through the urban maze with no direction in mind but ‘to get away’, had led him farther and farther from Ednin’s King’s Crossing, to one of its many affluent suburbs.

Craning his head back, Satou stared at the night sky, and listened. A deep and hearty laughter seemed to grow out of it.

This novel is published on a different platform. Support the original author by finding the official source.

Now that he was paying attention, he began to hear more. Listen… The silence was not so quiet after all.

Clinks of cocktails, ice tumbling in glasses of gin, something about a ‘ten-day vacation to Oben Fal’, a poodle barking in an adjacent room, a piano being practiced—slightly amateurish, discordant at times, but no less worse off for it—life went on beyond the confines of these four limestone walls, completely oblivious to his deceptively unremarkable plight.

Satou had taken refuge in an enclosed courtyard—for all intent and purposes, a second vestibule—and he had been idling here for more than a few hours. The residential apartment freckled with iron-laced balconies peered down at him—or not at him—but at the courtyard’s center-piece: a life-sized sculpture of an angel that stood on a white marble fountain.

Beyond it, were double-doors that would lead him in. And behind him, was the way out—through an arched-passageway and onto the main street, where the relative absence of parked cars had been a sight for him to behold, who had only ever seen streets, wide or narrow, more or less cramped full of cars. Here, in Ednin, it was a rare sight to see more than three motorcars parked across an entire block, and here in this neighborhood, there were around five. Other than a woman, no longer young, smoking on the ninth-floor balcony too lost with her own life to bother to look down, there was no one else.

Rich and wealthy folks lived here, in these ten-storey baroque apartments. Besides the staff it must take to man and upkeep such an impressive building, the tenants here, mostly the ones with larger families, had also employed under them their own personal stay-in cooks, servants, and maids, who lived inside their own quarters; no doubt the people who lived here spent their wealth and riches not too infrequently on leisure, wisdom, relation, and the infrequent charity who sought out their empathy. Would a hundred riyals really be considered a huge sum by a gentry with such deep pockets?

Now that he had put his thoughts into words, he began to feel a little more optimistic. His chances of success looked bright. Then why the wait? He didn’t know the time, but he knew it was getting late; too late. He needed to hurry, before only night owls would bother to open their doors, and even they won’t be too friendly to welcome late and unexpected visitors.

Yosh!

All fired up, Satou sprung up, pushing his knees. It was now or never.

Before he left, he quenched his thirst from an ornate stone basin that jutted out from a nearby wall.

He found it awkward at first, to try and catch the sprout as it shot up right at your face, but quickly he got the hang of it.

Then, wiping his face half-drenched with the back of his hand, he admired the angel as he passed it.

It seemed to be a recurring motif throughout this city, these angels. This one, the eighth one he had come across today, had only one wing, not because the other had been broken off and never repaired; but because it was done so by design. Whether the angel was a man or a woman was hard to tell, but he was beautiful. An exotic beauty… With one wing without its pair coyly wrapped round his his bare shoulder, his loose-fitted robe teasingly fell, revealing the outlines of his pale and anorexic figure. The flat-chested androgynous, white as porcelain, must’ve no doubt been white as porcelain if he did exist or had in the ancient past, which, given his fantastical circumstances—who knew? He was in another world, after all. With half-lidded eyes, and a sly coquettish smile, the beautiful one-winged Hermes admired the undulating ripples forming beneath his bare feet. Or—No. Was he admiring himself—his own reflection?

“A vain angel, you are?”

The angel continued to smile.

Beauty enamored him. Wherever Satou saw it: in people’s faces, figures, gestures, places urbane or sublime, or in pieces of music or works of art—beauty enamored him wherever he found it. Beauty was his bane, and it was his bane tonight, when, despite knowing that he had to hurry, he stood there longer than he should’ve.

He let his hand float under the undulating pool. Crystal clear as it looked, the water was just as freezing cold.

Then, shaking his hands dry, putting his gloves back on, he finally headed through the double-doors.

Instantly, warmth enveloped him. Light-fixtures ran the entire length of the corridor on either side; and a couple must’ve entered at the same time as him from the main entrance, because an elevator muffled in an argument rumbled up to the fifth floor; not that that mattered. The living quarters began from the 1st floor, and for that he could simply take the stairs.

The stairwell, right by the superintendent’s office, was suffocatingly narrow, probably because it was meant for the staff to use. The steps ran both ways—up and down; and downstairs when he peered over he saw the basement, the boiler room, the maintenance room, the breaker room, and the storage room buried under all the treasures extricated from the wastebaskets upstairs: broken lamps, broken vases, broken chairs, broken perambulators, and so on, all in one monstrous heap. There was bound to be one person downstairs, but only the hum of a noisy fan drafted up from the dim-lit abyss.

Mindful of how he cushioned his footsteps, Satou furtively made his way up. He craned his neck over the drop to see how far this penrose went; and then, if his foot hadn’t grazed past it by mistake, then he would’ve never seen it. “…” Right by his foot, there it was, unassuming, worn and left behind: a black billfold.

Heat rose to his chest when he saw it. He hadn’t done anything yet. He hadn’t even thought about doing anything. Nothing concrete had yet formed in his mind. But already, he felt like a common thief. He knew what his body was thinking; and anyone who would’ve seen him then would’ve thought the same: that this young woman was thinking of stealing it.

It was just his luck that he was in the back halls, where no one came or went, not at such late hours.

Satou hesitated, this time, not out of indecision, but out of his cowardice.

He walked up and down the stairwell, making sure there no one was nearby (of course, there was no one; he knew that, and yet he still checked), and—no, what the hell was he doing? If he was going to do it then do it already. With a deft swipe of his arm, as though he had bent down to tighten his laces, he whisked the billfold as he made his way down the stairs.

There, he thought. The deed was done. The billfold lay deep within the satchel, and no one had seen him do it. No one, as far he knew. He had done it as naturally as he could’ve made it, though, this sleight of hand would’ve only looked natural had he done it while making his way up the stairs, not down; but no matter. No one had seen him do it. No one at all.

He left through the same doors he had walked in from, and quickly he strode across the courtyard with his head kept down. Furtively, and with a heavy heart, he bowed to the angel as he passed by him; apologized to him for ‘doing this’ but ‘I am desperate’, and “I didn’t have much of a choice, so please, don’t curse me, if that’s something you can do…”

From the courtyard into an arched-passageway. Right before the gates was a watchman’s booth encased in the side of the wall. The watchman, who hadn’t been there when he entered, was now manning his post. If Satou was noticed walking past then the watchman gave no sign of it. A swish of the newspaper being flipped, which almost gave Satou a heart attack.

He didn’t see me, Satou reassured himself. No one saw me.

The watchman at best could’ve seen his side-profile. He was clumsy on his way out courtyard. He had almost tripped. No, he had tripped; just saved himself before his knees could hit the ground. The solitary smoker on the ninth-floor could’ve then glanced down and seen him; but even then, she could’ve only made out a vague figure. She could not have seen his face, and even if she did, Satou consoled himself: No one had seen him do it. No one had caught him red-handed, in the act, and he was safe, safe except from himself and his stupidity he could never completely account for.

Like Raskolnikov, Satou thought, his crime had been a perfect one. Nothing but his only his own folly could bring him down.