Christian shook his head from side to side. The arctic air was getting to him, making him think frenetic thoughts, ones that didn’t belong inside his head.
Chapter Two
The man sat up straight, gasping for air as if he hadn’t taken a breath in years. His lungs fought for air inside of his chest. Christian thought he might wheeze his way to the pearly gates right then and there, judging by the sound of those painful gulps. “Daddy,” Paulie said, gasping at the sight of the man coming back to life, resurrecting himself on their hideous brown couch.
The man turned his head, carefully studying the room around him, and looked at Christian. The fellow’s eyeballs were huge inside of his head, bigger than cantaloupes. “Howdy,” said Christian, kicking himself for sounding so awkward. Howdy? Who the hell says howdy to somebody who just came back from the dead on their living room furniture? The guy was going to think Christian was a moron.
With a slow nod, the icy traveler placed both booted feet on the floor, now sitting in the upright position. He looked back and forth between Paulie and Christian, exhaling a long plume of more normal sounding breath. The stranger on their couch wiped away some icy snot from beneath his nostrils, shaking his head from side to side, as if to shake the death away from his body, which had been clinging to the tendrils of his soul only moments earlier. Christian wasn’t a church-going type, though people always assumed that, because of his given name, but he swore that this was the closest thing to the whole Jesus-slash-Lazarus story he’d ever witnessed. He initially gave the guy’s odds at two or three days at the most, and here he was—living and breathing and readying himself to stand up.
Introductions were in order.
“I’m Christian. This is my son Paulie. We found you outside the window. I think you were just about on death’s door. Not sure if you remember anything at all.”
The man nodded, almost testing his neck muscles as he did so, unsure if they still operated as they once did. A vacant look filled his eyes. For all this man on their couch knew, he was certifiably dead. Maybe he thought this was heaven. Maybe he thought it was hell. If Christian had to label it one or the other, he would have picked hell.
“Are you hungry?” Christian asked.
The man shook his head while he rubbed his lips with the back of his hand. They were so chapped that they bled a bit when he did this. Christian was pretty sure that a hefty tug would have pulled them right off his face, if given enough oomph.
“You probably need to use the bathroom.”
“He did pee-pee in his pants,” Paulie (a blush creeping into his cheeks) commentated to his father. That observation was true, but Christian didn’t want to embarrass the frozen fellow. During his seven hours of unconsciousness (or death? Hadn’t the poor schmuck died?), their visitor had urinated in his pants. It wasn’t much more than a small dark spot on his crotch, but it was enough to be noticed. He wouldn’t bring it up to the man, even if his son didn’t have an appropriate filter not to.
Christian kept his distance from the blank-faced wanderer, pointing towards the kitchen. “Bathroom is through there. I put some fresh clothes in there for you, too. You’re a bit bigger than me… hell, a whole lot bigger than me… but I think they ought to fit you. They’re from my college years, when I drank way too much beer.” Christian chuckled to himself, hoping that the man on his couch would respond with some free-hearted banter of his own, but he said nothing. Expressed nothing. Their wordless guest was just a blank shell of a man, with nothing to say.
Standing up from the couch, the man teetered back and forth for a moment. Christian lunged forward at first, hoping he could catch him if he fell, but the man steadied himself on his own. “Easy there, fella,” Christian said, speaking to his houseguest like one would a horse.
The silent stranger put up his hands, gesturing to keep a distance. He closed his eyes, breathing slowly. It almost sounded like he was counting beneath his breath. “One, two, three…,” but then the man fell quiet again, taking his first step towards Christian, then changing direction towards the kitchen, as Christian indicated a moment earlier.
“We’ll stoke a fire in a few so we can get you warmed up. We’ve been conserving the firewood, but we can make an exception for a weary traveler,” Christian said, trying very much to sound folksy. In reality, he ended up sounding more like a desperate asshole. It had been several weeks since he had any adult contact, save for the window-to-window conversations between the neighbor, Marianne, who lived next door. It would be nice to sit down with another adult, to talk about this ridiculous shit-storm that the planet was thrown into.
The man nodded, walking through the kitchen. His legs wobbled as he walked.
When the bathroom door closed, Christian said to his son, “Go down in the basement and get one of those logs in the red and white packages. We’ll get a fire going for our guest.”
Paulie’s eyes lit up. They’d been rationing logs to an extreme. Christian hadn’t broken out any of the logs yet, still unsure of how long the storm would last. It’ll last forever; he kept thinking, whenever he considered how goddamned cold he was. It might just last forever.
While the boy was downstairs fetching the log, Christian opened up a can of minestrone soup, dumping it into a steel pot. Once they had the fire going, he could heat the soup up over the flames, just to take the cold edge off it, at the very least. It was cold enough that any heated food went icy cold on its own in less than a few minutes. Warm was the new hot.
The bathroom door opened and the stranger walked out, offering his hand to Christian.
“Thank you, sir. Name’s Edgar. You saved my life.”
“Well, I didn’t really…,” he started to reply, shaking Edgar’s frigid hand gladly.
“No. Listen here, friend. You saved my life. I owe you one. How can I help out?”
His eyes dug right through Christian, as if they were laser beams with a trajectory for his brain. An unbridled intensity radiated from Edgar, as if he was about to plop down on the floor and do one hundred pushups. He was a bit of a portly man, but not entirely out of shape. He had strong hands, as Christian discovered in Edgar’s overly masculine handshake, but there was also a quiet softness to him. There was something welcoming about that mixture.
“Maybe you can help Paulie get a fire going?” Christian pointed towards the cabinet directly across from the kitchen table. “Middle drawer, there’s a grill lighter. It’s one of those fake logs, so all you have to do is torch the bag and it’ll catch.”
Edgar gave a furtive nod, staring longingly at the soup can that Christian threw in the garbage bin. “You gonna tell me your name?” he asked, and Christian felt his stomach plummet. The tone that Edgar asked it in was particular nasty; battery acid dripping from his tongue. When the silence became uncomfortable, Edgar started to laugh heartily, in a way that only a man who came back from the dead on a shit-brown couch could laugh in the moments following resurrection. He clapped his hands on Christian’s shoulder. “Christian, right?”
Once again, Christian’s stomach plummeted another couple of inches inside of him, if that was even possible. Paulie was coming up the stairs now, clutching the phony-baloney log to his chest, smirking at the heavy man standing in his kitchen. Edgar was clutching his bearish claw on Christian’s shoulder.