Alex Pak (The AP Code)

The gun shot not only stunned Alex but the guards too. In their entire career, they had seen the loving relationship of the daughter and the father. Their pointed hands became loose as they witnessed the cold blooded murder; right there Alex kicked a few and got out of their hands. Some punches to the guard standing beside him made the guard nearly unconscious. Alex snatched they cuff keys from his fist and ran to the door.

Before the guards could make their head clear or hear Block’s instructions to kill him, he had been gone far.

Far from Christy; whose blood had now started to dry on the pavement. Alex turned his head while running and threw a last but deep glimpse on her dead eyes that were open and watching him. Pain had been frozen in them_ forever.

Life had become a pool of strangers coming and leaving, wrapped in their own worries and laughter that had nothing to do with him. He lost the counting of days and night; time was all the circle of a clock that kept on completing its cycle without knowing its habits_ without knowing how important that circle had become for the crowd in suits......

“This way…” as soon as Alex and Christy were out of the cloud of gases and smoke, Alex was the one who showed way to both of them. He knew the twists and turns of the building more than Christy, so he just held her wrist and dragged her towards the west side doors.
Right after they managed to pass the final exit of the building, the open sky felt like an ultimate exposure. Only after few steps, they had to hide themselves behind house walls to avoid getting into contact of any “awake” members of House of the Yellow Moon. Few could be seen at different places, looting and hooting as Alex experienced before; but this time, though Christy’s feet stopped again and again, but Alex paid least attention to them and kept moving away from the populated area. At one end if there were the gangsters, on the end of the streets were the suited men of David Block who seemed extra alert to search through people.

The gun shot had thrown Alex Pak into a deep dark silence; or maybe he wasn’t grounded; he went on falling down a tunnel of unconsciousness. What could be on the other side? Anything horrible could be; to give human goose bumps of death or afterlife. Surprisingly there was no pain; but who could have time to get surprised in such situation anyway. Moments passed, minutes, and God knows how many hours of that breath drenching darkness.

At last he had hit the light; and even before that there were sounds that woke him up at somewhere. This little finger tip unconsciously tapped on a hard surface; muffled voice tones grew louder to bring him to consciousness and then orange light appeared on his shut eyelids, forcing him to open them somehow.

Alex had improved with his ability to dig through the riddles. Once the golden pendant of alphabet “L” dropped from the eagle’s neck, rest was easy; he captured “I” from the centre of a huge windmill; “F” from a strip club logo and “E” was found floating in a pond under a lid of green mosses. He had to dive in the shallow looking waters to make his way to “E” but not only the alphabet sensed being caught; Alex was forced to be drowned along it which continued to swirl him back into the rolling cave between dreams and reality. And he was finally awake to his breathing life like a pin drops on gravity......

Sometimes just a moment is enough to shatter the whole building of our self made opinions. An unexpected realization, an epiphany or a sudden exposure of truth might turn our authentic philosophies upside down, roll our dreams into mud and nothingness and put a question mark over the subjects that we might have been holding the dearest to our hearts....

Cold sweat droplets jiggled and joined into tiny drops to flow down his both temple sides. The cold weather couldn’t decipher his exertion and aggression and left him alone to sweat against its frosty mode and run over the thin white snow bed to an unknown man-less destination.

The image of the man in the limousine had seemed familiar but when he saw the same person in the poster near the street, it repeatedly hammered in his head; no amount of running seemed to blur the strong ripples in the quiet ocean of his memories. He was David Block, how could he forget him? Though Alex had managed to flee from the sight of the limousine before they could dart at him; but even his enormous amount of running remained unable to help him escape from his unlocked inner demons. He knew this man’s face very well, including several other monstrous expressions. He knew all the brutality hidden behind the luxurious golden frames and his elegant facial features. He was made hard to forget, but how can one forget the most intense horrors of one’s life?.....

She had eyes made of dark green emerald; that turned into half sun when exposed to straight light or smile. But her smile was rare; he didn’t know why and that was just another question from the pile of his lost memory. He had guessed about her happy expressions only when he saw her standing on the roadside, facing morning beams. She knew him but to an extent he knew her_ from a discovered corner of his heart that he was forced to forget by the suited assassins. Surely, the pushed back memories into the sub conscious were so strong that they kept tickling back into his vision.....

“A distant shriek of a child, thrilled, shivering with joy while going down a slide; spread through the clouds covering my vision. I was walking_ but where? I forced halt my steps and tried to be receptive towards my senses. Light, noise, breeze; my eyes at once almost closed to manage the sunlight as if they had just woke up in the middle of a day. Weird, isn’t it? I had been stepping ahead like a pedestrian for don’t know how long but was just as unconscious as a sleeping man. Where was I going? I struggled to remember how I got in this green crowded park but memories seemed to fade. I was left with only question marks and the girl. I think, it was the girl from my inside again who had something to do with the edge of my ignorant situation. And okay, what else I could think of; she was the only face I was left with in my memory bucket. She had held my hand just before I had fallen to the deserted land near that deadly building. But wait_ there was no grass ahead. I must have twisted my path in this mystical sleeping walk. Was I dreaming then or am I dreaming now?”

A noisy dream; that’s all his days and nights were being about lately. And today had been different; it pained and he had to flap his lashes with eyes shut like struggling out of the shell of an injected sleep, striving to slit open the closed halves of his lids. Today was different because the noise of his dream had become real and clearer and was constantly growing louder like hammering him from nearby. Pain!...

 

She dies on a Tuesday.

He finds her body bent triple against the bathtub: feet to knees, knees to hips, hips to a head fixed by a stillness that slips frosted fingers along the bumps of his spine. A syringe sits in the palm of her hand. A line of blood slides from a puncture in the crook of her elbow....

She scoops the money out of the guitar case and counts it while Alex frowns at the fraying edges of his strings.

“So?” he asks, settling the instrument in its case. She shakes her head. “Can we pay off the motel at least?”

“Only if we don’t eat.” The sun is setting over the emptying street and the sky burns redder than her cheeks, pinched crimson in frustration.

“It’ll be okay,” Alex says, touching her shoulder, “we have some ramen left—”

She shrugs him off. “We’re going to die this way, you know.”...

At first, she’s gone for a reasonable amount of time—in the studio for eight in the morning, home by six—and Alex manages, spends his days making people coffee and trying to impress the producers in the hope that they’ll listen to his demo. They waste the evenings curled together on the couch with takeaway cartons and classic films in a vague approximation of a relationship and it works, mostly....

The ship docks twenty-seven minutes late; its floodlights, muted to a pale yellow, nudge against the blackness of the early morning air. Alex watches from the harbour as the captain, a white smudge against the charcoal backdrop, scurries out of the bridge and below deck. The mules lining the perimeter of the shipyard drop their cigarettes and sink into the underbelly of the vessel in a disjointed line.

Before Alex can follow, her voice startles him into stillness. “My father won’t be happy about this.”....

 

It spills out of her like wine from punctured skins: “This is going nowhere.”

Their eyes halfway meet, cast to the peripheral space between their strangers’ bodies, semi-apologetic. Alex deflates.

Finally.

And then the elevator shudders to a halt.

---

 

No one is answering the emergency phone. Alex isn’t sure what to do beyond yell into the receiver anyway and slam the flat of his hands against the elevator doors. Neither proves remotely effective. His frustrated sigh is met with total silence and he turns to find her curled into the corner like a world-wary new-born.

“Hey.” He steeples his fingers under her chin and tilts her face upward. The sound of her gasping unfurls, hissed exhalations that break like waves on the metal walls and seem to swallow what little space there is. “It’s okay.”

And then Alex is singing. He’s not sure where the idea comes from, but the panic pinched into her brow pulls a melody from between his lips like some unconscious instinct.

How sweet it is to be loved by you…

 His voice is pitchy, out of practice, but he carries the tune well enough that her breathing sinks into the rhythm of the song as her careful voice, sweet and fragile as sugar glass, stutters to life alongside his.

---

 

“Better?”

“Yes. Thank you.”

The too-loud tone of the emergency phone defibrillates the quiet. Alex snatches it from its cradle and shouts flustered criticisms at the man on the other end, who promises to have the elevator doors open as soon as possible.

Inevitably, nostalgia creeps in.

Do you remember when…?

He does. Of course he does.

 

(The hours pass as minutes, just like that.)

---

 

She reminds him of their very first Christmas together.

He’d scattered scented candles in every room so that the house had smelled of spiced apples and nutmeg, substitute holiday aromas for the turkey they didn’t even attempt to cook. Instead they reheated leftover Chinese food and drank Irish cream whisky in front of the open fire. She recalls that he’d made her a mix tape of songs that reminded him of her, and her smile summons the heat of the flames to simmer just beneath his skin.

She doesn’t remember what she gave him.

“A photo album,” he recollects, “and a polaroid camera.” He watches the memory flicker like a film reel across her eyes.

“Yes,” she says. “All our memories, and the means to record the ones to come.”

And then falls a silence that doesn’t sit right, all awkward edges that stick between Alex’s ribs; that this is the last memory they’ll share is a weight that can’t be carried by words.

---

 

“Tell me a story,” she demands.

He has never been able to deny her anything.

---

 

“Once upon a time, there was a girl. She rarely smiled. There was a boy, too. He wasn’t good for much, not really, but together they did okay, until the girl stopped smiling entirely, which made the boy feel good for even less. They didn’t know how to fix it, so they didn’t.”

There’s a pause, and then:

“That’s a terrible story.”

Alex half-smiles. “So change it.”

 

Once upon a time, she says, a boy told a girl a story.

It has yet to be finished.

He waits for her every night. She comes when he is on the very edge of sleep, curled on his side and facing the window. His eyes will droop and slowly shutter closed before some tangible shift in the air snaps them open, and there she will be, draped across his windowsill.

“Hey,” she says, and smiles; red-mouthed.

And so it begins.

 

---

 

She talks to him about his dreams; hearing his songs shouted back at him by stadiums of people alit with hero worship and adoration. At first Alex answers her into his pillow, his flushed face pressed firmly into the linen, but she slowly coaxes him up and out and into a live wire of excitement.

There is something about it—the fevered pitch of their hushed voices brushing up against each other under the soft cloak of darkness—that draws the words that sit stuck in his throat during daylight hours out into the open. His dreams seem less like dreams when he lays them at her feet. They solidify into possibility; reality.

It’s a comfortable illusion.

 

---

 

“What about you?” he asks one night, and never does again when her silhouette flickers like a candle flame biting too close to the wick.

They never touch. When the first slices of sunlight cut through the slats in the blinds and sully the slope of her ribs and thighs a dark orange Alex traces the gentle lines of her body with his eyes in lieu of his fingertips. Her caramel skin is a deep ochre under the dissolving darkness of daybreak and Alex balls his hands into fists around his bed sheets.

She laughs; slides the silk hem of her dress down past her knees and raises an eyebrow at him. Better?

Alex shakes his head. Not even close.

 

---

 

“Sometimes I feel like you are everything that matters in the world,” Alex admits, a hairs-breadth from sleep.

He spends his days hauling sacks of cement in and out of vans with men that grunt obscenities between bouts of chain-smoking, their brows heavy with bitterness; his evenings he wastes in coffee shops with girls that snicker when his voice falls flat or his fingers slip on the strings of his guitar. His nights are when he comes alive.

“Sweet dreams, Alex,” she says.

He wakes the next morning to find her gone like always, the air unusually still.

 

---

 

“I love you,” he says, hope caught in his chest like an errant breath. Fear trembles just beneath it, the comfort of illusion wearing thin.

“It’s not real.” She is looking away from him, through the window and into the shadows of the city. “You should forget it.”

Alex almost laughs at the absurdity. Her eyes find his as he stands from the bed. They are hard; narrowed and black. “You’ll regret it,” she warns.

Alex stops just shy of the windowsill. He raises one hand, moving to cradle her jaw.

“I could never.”

 

They never touch; she disappears between one heartbeat and the next, the air thick with the elusiveness of dreams.

 

She isn’t at the motel. They’d shared a ride to the concert but Alex thinks she must have ducked out early with most of the crowd. He’s taken to wearing sunglasses on stage and getting the lighting crew to flood him with spotlights to obscure the rows of empty seats from his view. She calls it blinding himself to his failures.

He remembers when she used to watch from just behind the curtain. She could dance like nobody else he’d ever seen, and watching her had charged his blood with adrenaline that kicked his performance into a different realm. The crowd had fed on it, thrown it back at him, had him damn near drunk with the thrill...

 

The walk to the gallows is dead silent. The crowd is split on either side of Alex as the guards drag his shackled body along the gang walk. He feels their eyes on him as keenly as he does the silence pressing into his skull. He wishes they would spit or snarl at him, shake their fists or bayoneted rifles, anything to shift time out of this slow crawl towards death. It makes him want to vomit, and Alex realises that the Colonel must have commanded it.

He does not want to die with anger in his heart. He casts his eyes skyward, beyond the gallows, its arms near black against the bleached grey sky. On the stage built at its back the Colonel sits in his throne, eyes shadowed by the lid of his general’s helmet. Beside him stands his daughter...

 

 

The first thing Alex does is buy a gun. The paparazzi swarm him in flashing droves during daylight hours and so he waits until after dark, sneaks out of his gated community unnoticed and catches the clerk just as he’s about to close.

“This one’s a favourite with young men like yourself,” he says in a bored voice, one eye on the clock above the door. “Comes with one round of ammunition, no extra cost.”

It’s black, and heavy, and Alex’s index finger curls around the trigger as easily as he once bent to the will of a girl now gone, his money and pride in tow...

 

Alex stops at the first motel he comes across, a shabby building complex seven blocks from the bus station. The clerk behind the front desk says not a single word to him as he checks in; takes long drags of a thick cigar and thrusts a list of room prices under Alex’s nose. It’s dirt cheap and Alex is not required to present ID. He hands the clerk enough money to keep the cheapest room for a week and is gifted an old, rusting key in return.

The room houses a rickety bed with stained sheets and mismatched furniture, the bathroom black with mold. Alex doesn’t bother unpacking his things—they are too few for there to be any point. Instead, he withdraws a handful of money from his duffel bag, pockets it along with his room key and exits the motel...