Prologue: Of Cups and Men

My thirteenth birthday was a weird day for me.

Do not worry, this will not be a book about a child. It is just the prologue that talks about my childhood, or one event in particular that sets the tone for the rest of this story. Now, I cannot really say whether it was formative in any way. In fact, I doubt a single event can be called formative. Traumatic, yes. But one trauma should not define a person for life, should it? Victims of abuse will disagree with me, but they should ask themselves a question: was it just one event that did it? My thirteenth birthday was weird, but it was one of many days like that. Not the first, and not the last.

I grew up in a rich country house with my parents, my aunt, and a host of servants. I had everything I could ever want, including the love of those around me. But, of course, that was not enough it never is for anybody. For me, it was the love of my father that I lacked.

See, my father was not the type of person who loved people. I am sure he loved my mother, in multiple positions, and loved other women too, and loved his country, and loved money… So okay, he was the kind of person who loved, but not his little boy. Ha! See? I told you!

He was not the kind of man who would love a little boy because he was a rough crook. How did you think we ended up with a country house and servants? We were not nobility, we did not inherit money. My mother was an assistant cook before she married my father. My aunt was a go-go dancer. My father was a professional troublemaker turned killer, turned drug dealer, turned club owner, turned gang boss.

Here is what was so weird about my thirteenth birthday. Keep reading. Go on, do not dwell on this paragraph, move to the next one.

I woke up early, excited to learn what my presents would be. I was a little shit like that, all I cared about were things. And being cool. I still do. So I woke up at the break of dawn, which was like five in the morning, and sprung out of bed. I roamed the house for a little while, but then decided to make myself more mysterious by going fishing. I left a note on the fridge and took my fishing gear to the larger lake that we owned. The larger lake had larger fish. I am serious, they were the size of dogs.

Well, maybe not dogs.

So anyway, it was quite a hike from the house, usually took me maybe half an hour to get there. It was early, but I could already tell it was going to be a hot day, so I probably put a wet handkerchief on my neck. A trick our gardener Hugo taught me to keep the heat at bay. I had my rod over my shoulder and a bucket of worms in my hand. I was probably whistling too, a little cliche fucker.

The lake was surrounded by thick woods with tall slim trees, the dreary kind, with old leaves all over the ground. It was not really dark in the woods, not much shade either, it was more of a grey area. You could never really tell what the sky was like in those woods, whether it was overcast or clear, it was always the same shade of grey in the woods. I find that weird now, but as a child, I learned the world from what I saw and what I saw was what I learned from.

On my way to the lake, I had a favorite path. It was a kind of natural gutter, as it a small stream passed through it at some point in the past. For some reason, old leaves kept away from there, another thing I find uncanny now but which I simply accepted back then. I followed the gutter, calling it Ye Olde Roade in my heart and thought about all the presents I would get. I would return home around midday with some fish for Veronica (our cook) and casually say hello to my mother and my aunt. They would probably be sitting in the parlor, looking like two pin up queens, one in red, one in black, talking about something artsy but vulgar. They actually set a pretty high standard for the women I would allow into my life later. They would greet me with dangerous smiles. They would mention my birthday. I would be nonchalant about it, the little thirteen-year-old shit I was. “Oh, is it? Oh Lordy, Lordy, I must have lost my head this morning. It’s so peaceful out there.” Then I would get some amazing gifts. And late in the evening, after the party, my father would call me into his office and give me the Talk About Becoming a Grown Up. He would smell of expensive cigars and even more expensive whiskey. A rough smile would linger on his lip. The kind of smile you only see on men who are not afraid of anything. Not other men, not lions and tigers, not asteroids, not even gods and demons. He would pass on something really important to me. Some secret all men learned at some point which made them fearless and strong, and give their lives a purpose.

None of that would happen, but I did not know.

I continued down Ye Olde Roade until I saw a dead man lying in the middle of it. His clothes were tattered and musty from the weather, he smelled of fish and mustard. He was lying face down. I stopped.

Poke the dead guy, poke the corpse with a stick! Children in a movie would think. You know which movie I mean. The good one. But I did not understand back then and I do not understand now why that would satisfy someone’s curiosity. What is in a poke that makes a man learn about something?

To me the corpse was extremely interesting. At some level, I probably thought it was a birthday present from God himself. Oh Lordy, Lordy!

I approached to get a better look. The smell hit my nostrils like a widow’s umbrella on a train, so I repurposed my neck-kerchief to serve as my mouth-and-nose-kerchief, as any gentleman would, and edged even closer to the dead man.

As I had expected, having learned from books and movies all about dead men, he did not speak, did not move, did not offer any insight into the eternal nature of things. He just lay there, being all decomposing and smug. Well, not smug. He looked rather pathetic, to be honest. And ordinary.

Until I finally clocked it. I knew from the start something was not right about the man but it took my little-boy brain a minute to process and return the result. The man had too many ears. Way, way too many. They were different sizes, but all looked pretty much the same, like exact copies of one proto-ear pasted at random spots on the sides of his head. I wondered how many eyes he had, but I shuddered at the thought of turning him over to see.

I wondered if that gave him any sort of advantage at all. Did he have super hearing? Was he a brilliant musician? Or a music critic? Or a professional listener of some sorts, perhaps listening for faults in engines, able to tell when they were about to break, even though no other symptoms were present?

One thing was weirder than his head full of ears, though. It was the cup he was holding in his hand. It was flat on the ground, so anything inside should have spilled and dried up long ago. Not from this cup. It was filled with a brown tea-like or coffee-like substance that appeared to be fully liquid, not solid, not a jelly, not anything else. (I do not know what else it could be. Perhaps some sort of plasma?) Yet it stayed in the cup, its surface at a right angle to the ground, parallel to the vector of gravity which was against the laws of physics. It was against the laws of man and God, God damn it!

I crouched down low to take a better look. Not daring to touch the cup, I picked up a pebble and threw it gently at the surface of the liquid. It sank without a trace. More than without a trace, it sank away and away into some unknown abyss of brown-reddish tea-coffee that hated science and laughed in the face of reason.

I turned around, trying to keep my cool, and walked on back home. Little shit. I walked back home to face the reality of my birthday, formulating the perfect lie to explain why I was coming back from the fishing trip early.

And shit like that happened all the time when I was growing up. I thought it would stop once I left the old continent, but it seemed to follow me overseas as well. I knew from books and TV that shit like that was not normal, and I was pretty sure nobody else came across shit like that… Unless they were hiding it from me, like I was hiding it from them. But still, shit like that happened to me all the time and I could not make peace with it until I discovered the source. But let me tell you another time.

Posted by: Paweł Kowaluk