Wonderland

Chapter 1
The Wake Up

John rested his head on the pillow. He had been awake for about an hour. It wasn’t the memories of the night before that kept him from rousing, but more a quiet fear of the day ahead and all that it had in store for him. This was how it was for him every morning. Always the fear, never the regret.

For John, routine was always the order of the day.

So, at night, he’d sometimes punctuate the tedium by bringing home some hapless partner to writhe and thrust and sweat the hours away with. Not every night. But just often enough for him to forget about the pain of the evenings he spent alone.

He could hear the soft rhythm of a woman breathing. He could tell she was lying on his side, her back to his. The beat of her breath was slow, as if she held each one close to her like a precious childhood memento.

He remembered something about the redhead next to him; a confident tongue, strong yet somehow careful, hidden inside a willing, expert mouth. His sex didn’t ache like it sometimes did. The soft sting of irritation was a usual sign of the untrained. She must’ve been almost as talented as she’d looked. He had long since outgrown bringing home the desperate. Lately, he had challenged himself to find innocence behind confidence, intensity under the modest, the charm underneath the cold.

John’s face remained firm as he played through the nights events. The conversation was easy. He had little need to spend too much plying her. She was into him for him, or so she had said. But John knew better. He just wasn’t of the mind to care.

He remembered the stairs to his apartment in the city. They had begun to twine themselves together at the bottom of the steps. Her coat. Then his. She flipped off her heels. He removed his tie. She unbuttoned his shirt. He pressed her against the wall.

Interrupting his recollections, the woman beside him had started to wake. He didn’t say anything. He never liked this bit. Goodbyes, like promises, were something John best left to the quiet hum of silence. He wanted to go back to sleep. He wanted to leave her to be the one to scribble a phone number, any phone number, on the strategically placed notepad on the bedside table.

Now that his eyes weren’t so glued over, he saw the shifting shadows of her silhouette wander along the wall of his bedroom. He saw breasts. Then a neck. A nose. Simple, drawn lips. The arch of her back. Legs.

Lots of legs. She was tall. Maybe as tall as John was. She was standing now. She’d been careful not to take the sheets with her. She moved quietly. Despite her infatuation with heels, her feet still carried her waif-like frame with ease. She found a piece of clothing. Then another. John remembered black pants. He might have been wrong. In any case, it was an outfit that she could have worn to work, save for the boutique top. He remembered that it was an off-putting crème colour. But as was with most fashion now, it was not designed to stoke the fires of the Picasso within, but was instead intended to direct attention to the plunging neck and the soft, porcelain skin of her chest. He didn’t mind it. He wasn’t a connoisseur of women’s clothing. His hobby was collecting those who wore it.

He heard her clear her throat. She was testing him. Probing for a sign that he was awake, or at the very least, not far from it. He could sense her looking for indication that he was again in the realm of the living, and not just prancing through an early morning dream. It was still dark outside. The sky was awash with that bronzed shade of navy that comes before each dawn. The few stars in the sky that could outshine the orange and white hue of the city were dimmer than they had been. Ready to retire from the sky and rest till evening, where they would once again take their place.

John didn’t move. Didn’t breathe. He wanted her out. Just like all the others.

She had stopped looking for him, and now looked for herself. She shoved her stockings – pilthy things that she never liked wearing – into her purse. Then she found her pants. Then underwear. Next, just at the foot of the bed, a bra. She could see her top in the doorway. She’d get it in a moment. She clutched her things to her naked self, as if a spotlight was shining on her; as if she were a player, but on the wrong stage.

John just shut his eyes and wished her away.

He could hear her dressing in the kitchen. She left her heels off, preferring to carry them rather than tap away into the timber floor. The last thing she wanted was to be confronted by the voice of the prior evening. He was a brief, fleeting moment, a fling, as it were. Nothing to be ashamed of. But not something needing to be eagerly remembered, either.

She was now dressed, standing taller than she had been in the bedroom. Now that there wasn’t a chance of being seen, she could be confident, proud, dignified. She didn’t have to think of herself as just some girl who needed a fuck. The sooner she could be outside, the sooner she could stop feeling like she had been tried and worn. Soiled. Violated.

She opened the door with a click, and was then outside. Into the street and back to the city she came from. A new day. Begun in the same clothes she had ended the one before it in. And just like that she was gone.

Just like all the others.

John tried not to dwell on how this morning looked and felt like nearly all of the others. He had trained himself to push aside the heaviness of solitude and just suffer under the numbing hum of routine. From a stable footing, John’s father used to say, one could leap a mountain.

As a child, he used to like his father’s aphorisms.

But as a man, he knew such things were only said to elicit a smile, a way of handing a small child a piece of the horizon, small enough so that it could fit into the palm of their hand. The beauty was in the giving, not whether there was truth to it or not. And there wasn’t. In reality, of course, the horizon is always just simply too far away.

He was naked. But no matter. The shower wasn’t too far away. His bedroom, which was more the size of a living room, was equipped with an ensuite. The bathroom itself had marble tiling, with stainless steel cupboards and faucets and a rather stylishly designed shower, big enough for two.

John stood and stumbled his way into the bathroom. His legs still felt drunk. He scratched his thighs, iced with the red stain of her lipstick. The night was still fuzzy, but things were coming back. They had made it into the bed before they did too much. Her being into him and all meant he was the one on his back, at least at first. His thighs had just been her entrée.

He turned on the water and waited for the steam. He stared at the tiling in the shower stall, not really thinking about anything. He was always hypnotized by the falling water in the shower. He had fallen asleep while standing up many a time that way. He broke the stare once he saw the quick puffs of steam jump from the white, pristine tiles. John cursed as he stepped into the shower and found the water too hot. He quickly swung his arm onto the other tap and turned, trying to swing a balance onto him before he turned red, and raw.

He was soon done washing the night away.

He sought out his running clothes. It was barely past six o’clock, and though it was cold outside, there didn’t seem to be too much wind, though that had never stopped him anyway. A pair of shorts and a t-shirt would do. If it felt like the Antarctic when he would get outside, he would just have to run faster.

John was an endorphin addict. He didn’t give a damn what he looked like, though he looked better than some of the men he’d see advertising the clothes that he liked to wear. He had a cyclists face. A mouth framed by impressive but not exaggerated cheeks. A chin that was lean and pronounced. He was the human form of a foreign accent, beautiful in that slight kind of way. But he ran to satisfy the craving, not the look. Running was his way of getting the fix. He would be cranky and agitated if he didn’t. He sometimes thought that he should try and wean himself away from it. Let himself retire from his present routine and let himself enjoy sleeping-in some more. But every time he tried he only wished for the empty morning road again.

He liked hearing his footsteps. He liked hearing the sound of the wet sand that clung to the soles of his shoes as they hit the pavement.

Running every day meant that often his legs were heavy. His muscles weren’t being given time to stretch and grow and knit. But he just forced his knees higher to compensate, leant forward a bit, and kept going anyway. This wasn’t an exercise in beauty therapy. It was about the rhythm, and letting some morning air into the routine that never seemed to change.

Once he was outside and on his usual route, he tried to forget how stupid it was of him to shower before he ran. It was a force of habit. Whenever there was a woman left over from the night he would try and cleanse himself of her before anything else. Once the tart had left his abode he felt it was most important that trace of her be erased as soon as possible. It seemed silly in hindsight. But necessary in the moment.

Twenty minutes went by. Then thirty. Then forty. This was a long run. Maybe ten kilometres today.

The endorphins were bringing his memory back.

He played the night out from where she first took him into her mouth.
She was topless by then. And she kept her eyes where they should’ve been. Her mouth knew its terrain well. Up and down and deeper. The crown of his sex had rimmed her tonsils on just her third try. She didn’t flinch. No reflex. Not even a blink. She had kept her focus. He hated it when they smiled.

He had grown firmer as her hands began to wander. She kept to her task like a loyal and experienced servant. She had to slow and readjust her angle once he was rock hard. But she kept to it. Her breaths came slower as she fired her tongue into action. It leapt and wrapped and slipped around him. She wanted the night to last, or at least wanted some of him for her, so she teased him with a flick and a swirl, studying the piece of him she wanted inside of her. She let her mouth jump over his manhood a few times, and with one last great lunge took most of him in. She pulled hard on his shaft with her mouth, just trying to keep him where she wanted; at the ready.

His brow had let out a bead or two of sweat as she tugged away, her mouth dribbled and melted around his warm hardness. She could have done better, but not everyone could be as skilled as the women at the end of the bar often were. Not that John ever paid for it. Even the talented liked to practice without the usual fee from time to time.

She had kept on as she was for a time, but not too long. John could feel himself leaving the plateau and heading upwards to arousal, but he had brought her chin towards his chest just enough for her to know to slow. They kissed. One of those smacking, abbreviated kinds of kisses that only strangers can share.

With a rushed thrust of her hand she removed her underwear and exposed herself. It was a trick manoeuvre she had learned somewhere, as it let her bring herself closer to his middle without bucking away to get them around her knees. She did it well, but she was going too fast. There was still more by way of foreplay needed, John had thought, but she was too drunk to get the timing right and simply positioned herself at the ready, carelessly wanting to feel full, and filled.

He hadn’t wanted her to stop her oral performance completely, but only for her to slow down and taste the scenery. Nevertheless, she fixed her knees to sides of his chest and let herself down on him.

From there everything was too mechanical to bother remembering. She had, he figured, simply closed her eyes and thought of some Prince or other hero as she rammed and swayed over him. He, in a daze of alcohol and sadness, had simply merged the memory of this moment with the others of the same ilk. It was happening a lot lately. The old ways just weren’t taking away the despair like they used to.

And so he kept running.

It had been a half an hour now, and he was jogging up the slow hill back to his apartment building at the top of the terrace. It was a decent enough inner-city neighbourhood. There weren’t enough tenants though, and there never would be. An economic downturn that John had seen coming had sent the interest rates up a few fractions, which, in the present climate of being spending and bigger dreams had spelt disaster for many an investor. That explained why no-one owned the apartments, but not why no-one wanted to live in them. The city, for all potential tenants were concerned, had gone the way of all cities. The markets had moved, the suburbs had sprawled, and the young, fuelled by the angst from stolen futures had left for elsewhere; searching for that place with the perfect cocktail of music, folklore, and where maybe even the men weren’t as callous as he.

The city, like John, had needed some morning air.

The hazed disc of the dawn sun was hidden behind the glass and steel buildings of the downtown district. John had always found comfort in the lofty shadows of early morning. In the light of dawn, no object ever has a blunt, dark trail bleeding from its tail. Instead, the street lights and the amber glow mixed together and cast shadows in every which way. It was nature’s way of showing ambiguity. To John, it was the world painting itself to appear as it really was, if but only for an hour or so.

He especially liked how the shadows didn’t always have to follow him, but would be thrown off into the distance ahead by stream of light behind him. To him it was poetry. For it was only in the night that the prose broke out. The days, however, just simply hummed along, unremarkable, indistinguishable. They never even needed a shadow.

And shadows was what John was all about.

He was successful. Or, he thought, he was once, and the word ‘successful’ was just like a stain that doesn’t ever go away. He had started a company that took anonymous phone calls from employees of large corporations who complained of improper or illegal activities. If, for example, someone on nightshift at a supermarket somewhere was stealing stock, you rang a number that put you through to John’s company’s call-centre that took the complaint and forwarded the allegations on to whoever within the supermarket organisation was responsible for staff. Over the years, his clientele had expanded, gaining contracts in the larger grocery firms were one thing, but now the company had specialised departments that could conduct espionage in other more elitist corporate structures. It wasn’t something he advertised, but John’s company could call nearly three hundred of the Fortune 500 companies clients.

At the beginning, his company was independent. It was a legitimate business, and it kept its dealings honest. But now that they had expanded into providing internal review services for entire national governments, as well as mixing it with the top companies in the world, things were often getting complicated. Publicising the discovery of a billion dollar fraud in a top aerospace company had to be weighed against the impending renewal of the contract with the government for whom his company also had dealings. It wasn’t honest, it wasn’t legitimate, and it was why John stayed away from his office as much as he could.

Today he had to go in. There was a board meeting, and being Chairman he had to go. He never liked Board meetings. His aides had all told him his board members were the smartest, brightest, and best in their fields of expertise, and that the company couldn’t afford to do without them. But to John they were just the kind of people he loathed. John was only twenty-eight, and yet no other board member was under fifty. They were ivy-leaguers, the kind of people who disappear after four or eight years to chair a Congressional campaign, or worse, run for Congress themselves.

Back at his apartment building, he climbed the steel stairs of the fire-exit on the side of the building and went into the corridor that accessed his apartment. The whole floor was his, of course, but there was a separate way for the janitor and the other maintenance staff. He leisurely showered, flicking on the radio as he towelled down. It was Tuesday, it said, and overcast.

‘What else is new?’ said John, with a smirk.

Walking into the kitchen, now dressed in black suit and dark grey silk tie with a crisp, white shirt, John found himself some breakfast by pouring some boring old cereal into a bowl. He didn’t feel like adding the milk that morning, so he ate it raw.
John found a note tacked onto the message board on the back of his door. It was from the woman of the night before. She had written him her thanks, and signed it with a first name.

John picked it from the board and scrunched the note into a ball, casting it into the trash can beside the fridge.

‘Yeah, thanks, sure,’ he muttered to himself.

In a moment he was out the door, leather saddle bag and all. His Blackberry and Laptop were inside, along with papers he guessed he should take with him to the office, not that he really thought it would matter. Chairing the meeting meant he could get away with not knowing what was going on. Power has its perks.

He thought for a second about the note in the trash can. For a split second he searched for her name, and then, knowing that the sadness of the day was about to set in, he stopped.

The night was never meant for the day.