Confound Interest

by Zuku Saki

part 1 of 2

“Good morning Mr. Peal,” she said, looking down at me. I wasn’t sure who she was, but for some reason I felt completely comforted in her presence. The glaring white of the room behind her in unison with her own sterile white garments afforded the pale skin of her face the rare opportunity to be the darker element in contrast. Her skin was transfigured into a glowing frame for her wide blue eyes and pink lips.

I tried to sit up but was unable to lift my head.

“Miss? Nurse? Where exactly...?” I stammered mindlessly, having trouble finding the words I was searching for.

“Shhhh.” The woman in white placed her finger to her lips as she closed the distance between us.

“There’s a... there’s a strap on my head!” For a moment panic ran through my veins, and I began to fight the strap I thought was holding my head in place. I struggled and struggled until my neck felt like it could take no more. The woman in white stood there and quietly smiled as I writhed around just a foot or two away, waiting for me to give up.

“There’s no strap on your head. Now relax, we have a much faster way of doing this now.”

With that, she smoothly placed a mask over my nose and mouth and secured it behind my head. Somehow she was able to lift my head to perform this task without effort, a perplexity I would have to consider later.

I can’t recall the sequence of events that led me there but I found myself floating on my back in some kind of pool of warm water. It felt like piss. Am I floating in my own bodily fluids? Am I alive?

I couldn’t move my head much but I could see the woman in white peripherally. Before I knew what was happening I was pushed under the surface of the piss water, breathing through the mask strapped to my head. I found I could finally move my body freely.

Although my recollection of the next few hours I was in this bizarre facility is sparse, there are a few scattered details that I can clearly recall. I remember getting out of the pool myself, emerging naked from the water and nimbly walking and moving my extremities about as if they were brand new appendages.

I remember getting dressed in a locker room and being given a cloth, zippered duffel bag. I remember the blonde broad saying goodbye and smiling at me with her shiny bright whites like a girl from a chewing gum commercial. I never learned her name but I’ll never forget her face.

* * *

It came to be nightfall as I found myself sitting on a park bench, lazily attempting to piece the day together. Using the blue illumination from the closest street lamp I finally decided to investigate the contents of the duffel bag.

I obviously had lots of questions as to my situation, but these thoughts were not at the forefront of my current frame of mind; I was perfectly content at the time just sitting on the park bench watching the oddly dressed people stroll by. The duffel bag just seemed like something to temporarily entertain my curiosity, something to pass the time while I tried to piece the larger puzzle together in my head.

When I opened the bag I saw some crumpled shirts, a eyeglass case and some other items that appeared vaguely familiar. I dug through the items to survey what else I had and found nothing but cash. Piles of cash. Hundred-dollar bills, fifty-dollar bills and rolls of some smaller denominations.

I quickly closed the bag and looked around me in a telling way that I immediately regretted. Had I done something wrong? Was I being paid for something?

Holding the bag closer to my body I opened it again, this time only a crack, making sure I hadn’t hallucinated the small fortune inside. There must have been about fifty thousand dollars in there, a bit more than I had in my savings account; it was hard to make a more exact guess, because counting it where I sat would have been obliviously foolish.

As I dug my hand through the wads of money I came across an index card with a handwritten address: “454 Forest Hill Road.” I had never seen or heard this address before, but I knew exactly where it was.

I was becoming more lucid, and I realized that I was in the town I had lived in all of my life: Darling Springs. It all seemed familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. Across the street from the bench I was sitting on was the old Figment & Co. department store. I could clearly recognize the structure of the front of the building and the ledge on top from which Pete Gnochman, the general manager when I was a teenager, jumped to his death after being caught purloining unmentionables from the women’s department. No one recognized him as Pete until he was at the morgue and they washed away his mascara and rouge.

The remembrance plaque the store had put up for him was gone, and in its place was a sign that stated the building’s current purpose as a hotel. It seemed odd that the plaque would be gone, the entire point of a remembrance plaque being to remember something after it happened.

The small bench I was sitting on was at the edge of Joyford Park, a park I used to play football in as a kid. The big field no longer seemed to exist but I recognized the oak tree in the center of the park... it seemed so grandiose now, gnarled and knotted seemingly from the sapience of old age.

I looked at the index card again. Forest Hill Road was the home of many posh mansions and gated estates on the outskirts of town; what on earth was I doing with this address? All my life in this town and I had never even driven down that road.

A more familiar address kept appearing in my mind as I stared at the index card reading the Forest Hill Road address: 1172 Vilford Avenue. That was home... I knew that much. It felt like the first certainty I had ever come across, the only sure thing I had ever known. I had to get home and see my wife and daughter! Whatever happened, I knew they’d be worried sick about me.

Darling Springs isn’t the sort of town where one can just call a taxi along the road, even in the center of town. One would be lucky to find a passing motorist at mid-day. This didn’t seem to be the case that particular day, as many small cars passed me by as I walked down the sidewalk.

Unfortunately, I was unable to peer in any of the opaque windows, and none of them stopped or slowed down for me and my outstretched thumb. Giving up on the idea of catching a ride, I set out on foot for home with a newfound sense of energy and purpose.

On the four-mile walk, which seemed almost instinctual, I couldn’t help struggling with the familiarity of my surroundings. I was in a town I had grown up in, but everything around me seemed so foreign. Buildings looked familiar, the lay-out of the town looked familiar... everything else just seemed off. Irregular somehow.

* * *

Three hours and a sore in-step later, I arrived at my house. Another wave of familiarity swept over me; it was almost as I had imagined it to be, hours before on the bench. I walked up the front steps and tried to open the front door. It was locked. I sat on a chair on the front porch and dug through the duffel bag for a set of keys. They had to be somewhere.

The residents of the house, meanwhile, were quite concerned amongst themselves as to the fact of there being a middle-aged man on their porch. Samantha Prestaine, proud wife of the not-so-proud Fredrick Prestaine of Prestaine Candy Company family fame, rushed down the stairs with her husband trailing a great length behind. She stopped at the bottom of the steps and motioned silently for the meek Fred to hurry up and see who it was.

Fred was a wimp. As I would learn straight from the source a few days later, Fred didn’t inherit any of the Prestaine Candy Company and did not even receive a job there. He wasn’t a Prestaine by blood but rather had been adopted by the family at the age of nine and took the Prestaine name as his own. He had seven brothers and sisters, all true-blooded Prestaines. The will had left him out in the cold with a small sum of money and no holdings in the company. He did better than his brother Daniel, however, who was left out of the will not because of blood lineage but simply because he really, really despised candy.

As it happens, only one out of a hundred thousand children are born without a sweet tooth. In the Prestaine family this was simply unacceptable, and he was constantly teased by his parents and siblings. He became an orthodontist. The other six children made out like little bandits, and Fred hated them for it. Fred had slowly morphed into a sad excuse for a man and was frightened of anything and everything including a stranger on his porch.

“Okay, get back and I’ll see who it is,” Fred whispered as he crept up towards the door. Fred flipped on the light switch and peeked out the small window in the door. What he saw made his rather dull mind, at least for an instant, spin and reel with thoughts. Not good thoughts, mind you, but sinister, selfish thoughts, as Fred gawked at a man with a duffel bag full of cash. On his porch.

My account of Fred’s actions can’t be considered as absolute fact as I am relying on a combination of his version of the story told to me much later and pure, imaginative conjecture to piece together exactly what was going on behind that door.

The porch light being turned on startled me from my position in front of my duffel bag, elbow deep in cash trying to find a set of keys that I was not sure even existed. With my guard down about the cash, since this was my house after all, I took my time zippering up the bag and getting myself situated before walking up to the door and knocking on it.

The door opened very soon after I knocked and I was greeted by Fred Prestaine, standing in the doorway with an air of self confidence as believable as his toupee. Fred hadn’t felt this alive in years, itching out of his skin for a way to get into that bag.

“Hi,” Fred said, trying to sound as amicable as possible. “Come in.”

“Do I know you?” I asked.

“I don’t know. Do you?” Fred responded.

I entered the house, and the space seemed so familiar, but there were many things that felt different. The house was decorated in a very strange style, one I know my wife would never have chosen. I looked about the entrance to the house while Fred and Samantha watched quietly. Fred whispered something in Samantha’s ear.

“Who are you? What is all this stuff?” I asked the couple.

“I’d like to ask you the same thing,” Fred said.

“I live here,” I explained. “I think you are the ones who need to explain.”

“Excuse me? You live here? What are you talking about, we’ve lived here for thirty-five years!”

I looked around, suddenly panic-stricken. How could it be my house if these were not my possessions? I felt foolish.

“If you’ll excuse me, it appears I’m mistaken,” I politely said and turned around, still not completely convinced.

Fred’s brain did a dance while his mouth tried to follow. “Why don’t you... why don’t you come in for a cup of coffee. Do you drink coffee? Let’s have a cup of coffee, okay?” he asked me in a condescending tone usually reserved for toddlers and the mentally inept.

I may have been confused but I was not ignorant. He wasn’t my friend. I had no idea who he was. I had nothing to worry about as Fred was slightly older than I, and noticeably weaker, but it just didn’t seem worth the trouble to stay around. He wouldn’t be taking anything from me. Regardless, my grip tightened on the straps of the bag as his eyes darted around the room like a bank robber high on crack.

“No thank you,” I addressed him politely, shifting the bag under my arm like a wide receiver cradling a football safely to the end zone. I nodded at Samantha and went out the door. Fred stood at the window and watched as I walked down the road, going outside when I was far enough away and continuing to look from the sidewalk.

“What is it?” Samantha asked.

Fred was already daydreaming about being as rich as his pseudo-family. “Nothing,” he told his wife while he tried to mentally calculate the worth of the bag. If it was mostly thousand-dollar bills, he thought, there must be at least half of a million dollars in there. Probably more.

Fred went back into his house to retrieve his hat and glasses and fed his wife a transparent excuse before disappearing down the sidewalk after the duffel bag and the oddly dressed man carrying it. Or at least that’s what he told me happened.

* * *

Proceed to part 2...