ADAM’S LOFT, PROXIMA CITY
FRIDAY, 9:02 A.M.
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Adam had the fleeting sensation of leaving one dream to enter another, so much so that it took him a while to locate himself in time and space.
The light of day filtered through the slits in the blinds, just behind his head, and the dull murmur of city traffic slowly reached his ears.
It was morning. He was home and had woken up.
Then, his memory brought back the sound of soft music, the image of people chatting under the dim light of the bar, and the taste of drinks, of excesses. And so, Adam remained lying on his bed, his auburn skin standing out between the white sheets, his green eyes fixed on the ceiling lamp and his gaze lost in the night before.
He flipped, and there was the girl, lying face down next to him, naked, with one foot up, her long dark hair falling over her shoulders, checking her phone, as relaxed and natural as if she were lying on the beach.
“Hi, gorgeous,” he greeted.
Whatever she was doing with her phone, it surely had her hooked.
“Hi,” she greeted back. “Hey—You wanna know what my friend Tiffany says about you?”
Adam rolled his eyes. Here we go again.
“That I’m a horrible person you need to stay away from?” he guessed. “Tell your friend Tiffany to be more original.”
The girl chuckled.
“That you’re a one-night stand magnet, with no promises of stability,” she said, reading a long text from that Tiffany girl. “That your dandy reputation and your business success are the only outstanding thing about your personality—And listen to what she writes, ‘Having distanced himself from the bad star under which he was born, has helped him get to where he is.’ Then she says that any gaps you have left from your past have been covered with the snobbish paraphernalia of your almost newly acquired social status.”
Adam considered what he heard. “Having distanced himself from the bad star under which he was born, huh? That’s a new one. Your friend Tiffany—Wow! She sure knows how to write an essay!”
“She’s a philosophy teacher,” she said.
“Oh, right! Tiffany!” A vague image of the girl appeared in his mind. “I remember her. We’ve shared a couple of hours together. Yeah. A lovely girl she was. Well, glad to know I wasn’t the only pretentious one who managed to make something interesting out of his life.”
Stretching, Adam got off the bed. His bare feet touched the soft carpet. He pushed his hair back, a slightly messy reddish mid-length, and approached the railing in front of him.
The bedroom was on a platform at the top of that gigantic wood and steel loft that was his home, and from up there, like a king looking over his domain, he took time to appreciate each section; the living room with its comfortable couches, the small spotlights that descended from the ceiling beams, ready to be turned on as soon as the night fell to highlight the perfect modern decoration and the huge photographs that hung here and there on the walls; everything. There was not a day that he didn’t feel comfortable in that place.
He turned to the girl who, as he could see, still had no intention of getting out of bed or interrupting the quite entertaining exchange of texts with her friend, and he was about to violate his own habit and offered her to order something for breakfast.
But Mother Nature knocked on his abdomen’s doors, and he knew that today wouldn’t be the day he would change his normality.
“Alright. Time to go home,” he said, breaking the spell that tied the girl to her phone.
“Aren’t we staying here until nightfall?” she asked. “Y’know, we could order food and stuff.”
Adam put on his pants. “Well, we mortals have to go to work,” he said, “and my schedule for today is criminally extensive.”
He was overplaying it, of course, but he knew he was handsome, and he knew that, with his gesture of ‘I wish it weren’t so, but what else could I do?’ could overturn any argument against it.
She turned her attention back to her phone.
“I thought big business owners do their job over the phone.”
“The owners maybe, but I’m not the owner. I’m just a purchasing manager.”
The girl snorted, and he stopped as if the snort had been a warning signal. What did that sound supposedly mean? ‘I know, but you know what I mean,’ or ‘Are you serious? Did I waste my night spending it with the wrong guy?’
“But you are kind of rich, aren’t you?” she finally said, an ambiguous response that fell right between those two alternatives.
Adam picked up his shirt off the floor and hung it on the rack.
“I live well, yes,” he nodded. “Your friend already said it. I’m good at business, and the company I work for pays me well.”
A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.
“Guess so. Tiffany told me you work for Homam Enterprises,” she said, adding in a falsetto, “Entire generations leading the market, bringing you the best technology. Yeah, I’ve seen the ads, y’know?”
Adam fixed his hair in front of the standing mirror.
“And do you know why we lead the market?” he asked then, shooting her a look through the reflection. “Because we have a management department that always shows up to work.”
The young woman looked for her dress that had been tangled between the sheets and put it on.
Message received, he smiled to himself. He took her phone from the bed and put it in her purse to speed up the farewell, and then, in a very gentlemanly manner, led her to the staircase leading down from the bedroom platform and escorted her out of the loft.
Clack, clack, clack, sounded her heels as she walked through the beautiful parquet floor. Ziz, ziz, ziz, made his feet as he slipped barefoot across the polished wood.
“Hey, why are you kicking me out like this?” she asked. “You have a girlfriend, right?”
“What? No.”
The girl snapped her fingers and turned toward him.
“I know!” she said, all excited, as if she’d solved a great riddle. “You’re married, right?!—And you want me out before she gets home!”
Adam opened the door.
“Barbara, we’re not playing guessing games.”
“Grace,” she said. “My name is Grace, not Barbara.”
“Grace, of course! Listen, Grace, you want the truth? I don’t have a girlfriend and I’m not married. I just feel like spending some time alone with the toilet. Got it?”
“Oh!” The young girl blushed, then sighed as if accepting defeat, and shook her head in a gesture that said, ‘You’re hopeless.’ “You know something?” she said and pointed to a large portrait that hung on the wall next to the living room couches.
It was a black-and-white photograph of Adam in which he showed himself half-naked, wearing only white underwear, while walking among the huge rocks of a cliff by the sea. It was clearly a professional job with a few years on it; not only did he look younger there, but if she compared the muscular tone and the impeccable state of his abs captured by the camera with what she now had in front of her… Well, even though what she had in the flesh didn’t look bad, it was obvious dedication to the body was no longer the homeowner’s priority.
“My friend Tiffany was right about you,” she said, patting him lightly on the abdomen. “You did a lot to get here, but it’s time to take a fresh path and let go of the past completely.”
“Bye, Grace, and say ‘hi’ to Tiffany,” he said and kissed her goodbye.
She winked at him and left with a smile.
Adam closed the door and hurried to the bathroom to please Mother Nature.
“Take a fresh path and let go of the past,” he sighed, repeating what had been rattling in his head. “The bad star I was born under—Ha! Why no one warned me poetess and philosophers were on the loose today!”
He took a shower, and though he didn’t need to, shaved like every morning; still had no wrinkles to hide and liked to see his face clear. He would drop by his office. The day before, he had left early to go to the bar with that Grace—not Barbara—girl and he hadn’t had time to see the stocktaking results of the week.
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Adam had Homam Enterprises’ head offices less than twenty-five blocks from his loft, so most of the time, he chose to walk there. Perhaps that might seem not relevant but for someone who lived in Proxima, not having to suffer the maelstrom of peak-hour traffic jams or having to lock himself on the subway who knows for how long to get to his office, was a blessing.
The lavish and intimidating Proxima, with its titanic skyscrapers, its freeways, and intricate highway overpasses always busy, along with gardens and walkways that snaked the heights around the buildings, was almost a living entity that could drive anyone crazy. And, if he needed to be reminded, he only had to see the faces of those behind a steering wheel, in front of a red light, or those who rushed to reach the metro that departed at 11 o’clock because they couldn’t afford to wait for the one which left at 11.05.
“Manny, can’t you see he’s a robot?”
“It doesn’t matter if it’s a robot! He’s been programmed to guard the damn cars, Claudia, and I wanna know where the hell mine is!”
Or, as he walked to and from work, he too might witness scenes like that: a middle-aged couple arguing with the parking meter robot, a funny-looking parking meter with arms and wheels.
“Mr. Smith, your vehicle has been towed away for having violated traffic law 451 of the Proxima district,” the robot announced, indifferent to the anger of his interlocutor. “You should go to the nearest headquarters of…”
Of course, there were also more pleasant situations than that.
Crossing one of the bridges over an avenue, passing by the holographic map of the city that indicated, ‘You are here,’ two pretty young girls—tourists, by their way of dressing and the enormous backpacks they carried on their backs—interrupted Adam’s walk.
“Excuse me, could you tell us how to get to the Cyan Area?” asked one.
“I think we’re lost,” the other admitted with a charming smile.
Adam kindly pointed out on the projection what they were to do.
The map was a reconstruction of the city, divided into areas of different colors following the RGB additive model: three intertwined globes, red on top, green on the left, and blue on the right. At the intersections were yellow, cyan, and magenta, and in the center, white.
“Where you guys come from?” he asked. Pass up the opportunity to strike up a conversation with cute girls? No way.
The young girls exchanged glances and a laugh. “Did the accent give us away? Or was it our backpacks?”
“That you asked me about the map,” Adam laughed. “The Proxima Citizen may not know the name of the neighborhood in which he’s lived all his life, but he’ll know how to get from one color to the other.”
One of the girls made a gesture as if to say, ‘Busted!’
“We come from Lobdell,” she said then.
“Wow! Far. That’s in the Plutonia district, right?”
They both nodded, delighted. “Do you know it?”
“Lobdell? No, I haven’t had the pleasure, but I used to visit Plutonia often... when I modeled.”
“Hey!” the girl grabbed her friend’s arm. “Are we lucky to have bumped into someone famous!”
Adam dismissed it with a nod, though flattered nonetheless. “You guys come to the Proxima beaches?” he asked.
“Kinda. We are doing the ‘three big P’s of Rodinia’ circuit. You know it?”
“Touring the tourist spots of Proxima, Principia, and Plutonia, the three great metropolises of the continent, in less than a week,” he said. “Quite a journey!”
“Don’t even say it! We did Plutonia in two days. We arrived here yesterday, and tomorrow we’ll leave for Principia. From one side to the other!” answered the girl.
“Rodinia is a giant continent, but we will not give up!” the other joked.
“Well, if you need a tour guide…” Adam said and winked at them.
The girls said goodbye with a smile and he continued on his way.
Similar situations were everyday things; he used to experience them when he walked from his house in the Urie neighborhood, on the edge of the Yellow Area, a sector that encompassed several family neighborhoods, to his work in the Red Area, a bustling area full of businesses and corporate buildings, among them, that of Homam Enterprises.
How carefree Adam’s life had been up to that point. Little did he know everything was about to go downhill in a few hours.