Cal Hudson (![[info]](https://www.insanejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} supraliminal) wrote in ![[info]](https://www.insanejournal.com/img/community.gif){kind=small} rooms,@ 2014-04-05 21:47:00 |
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Who: Cal H and Steve R
What: A rude welcome to Marvel-land.
When: On crossing.
Where: Street in broad daylight.
Cal didn't want to set one foot through the door. The glassy cool of the storage unit, processed air and dark and boxes and boxes of other people's things, surrounded him. It was the one door in the place that didn't send flitters of panic up his spine, the kind of irrepressible fear that tasted like youth on his tongue. That felt like being trapped, caged in by gently decaying but by no means as destroyed luxury, the hotel throwing a party as if to soften the blow of locking the doors behind them. Vegas moved on behind the front doors of the hotel, or at least, he thought it did. Perhaps, Cal thought wildly, with his back set to the wall of the storage unit and the impeccable, expensive shirt rumpled where he'd shoved at the doors and through the boxes to see if there was another way out, Vegas had been trapped too. Caught like a fly in amber. Held there by whatever force kept them inevitably, unceasingly revolving around the bastard hotel. He had come to in a street, like any street he'd known in New York, into a back alley behind a bar, trash cans and a vagrant the only witness. The door had been right there, and he had panicked, yanked the door open and seen - as he had expected - the corridors of the hotel. And on the pages of the book, the corners and borders of the jigsaw filled in by other people's stories of the same thing. Trapped here. Cal closed the book now, it lay on his knees. He did not accept. He did not yield. He would think of a way out. Cal was a man much used to thinking ways out of things. He had been through long years of expensive schooling, designed to hone his thinking to a scalpel point and had the privileged expectation that the obstacles in his path would be ones he could surmount. The few problems that could not be resolved with thought were either inconsequential, or Cal dismissed as insolvable. Valerie had been one such, thought, even at length, did not provide an answer and he pushed it away as anomalous, those things that could not be seen to resolution. He did not see resolution now. He did not want to go back through the door. The wallet in his pocket was not unduly thick, and there were no cards in it. There was an additional key on the ring in his hand apart from the one that had unlocked the storage unit and would, he was certain, unlock the door. It doubtless led to an apartment somewhere, but Cal refused to look at the address on the identification in the wallet. The wallet belonged to the place beyond the door. He did not, ergo the wallet was not his. Quod erat demonstrandum. Except the way out was no longer a way out, and his own wallet - his initials irritatingly on display (a Christmas gift from his mother who had taken to buying him things with his initials on them as if this would remind him of the depressing weight of the family history that required subsequent spawn to inherit its interminable length) was beyond the locked door. He did not wish to go downstairs. He did not wish to try the doors once again. But the storage unit held nothing but his own leather portfolio, with a handful of papers in which suggested perhaps the hotel thought of him as a lawyer beyond the door it had constructed, as well as the one to Vegas. If there was no way out, he would have to try to find one in the world beyond. Courses of action, however hysterical, made Cal feel better and having determined his own action propelled him back through the door into the chilly environs of New York. The alley was the same. The vagrant looked at him with the glassy non-comprehension of the drunk or one who had seen all the strange New York could provide, and proceeded to ignore him as Cal stumbled beyond the back-alley and into the street. It wasn't one he recognized but the general direction appeared to be the Lower East Side of Manhattan, familiar. He was being stared at, which was not something he was used to, but he assigned to the wild, dark hair, frowsed from having run his fingers through it and the disarray of his clothes. They thought him upset, perhaps. A drunk. That their children were at risk - one woman drew her boy to her with a protective hand on his shoulder - there was a buzzing in his ears, like a fly, like a host of flies, all cramming in at the same time. Cal rubbed at his ear; they would really think he was mad now, except; what's wrong with that man I hope he's not going to do something- I don't like Tuesdays at all maybe it'll be better when she leaves I don't think I can- is he going to walk into traffic? God that would really be- maybe I should cut my hair. maybe then he'd notice me- what is he DOING?- He twisted, turned, the buzzing rose to a mild roar, a tangle of noise that could not be pulled apart. The trash can at the curb began to rattle, ominously, the lid clattering. Cal stared at it as it began to shake. |