The Fireplace - Chapter 2

He woke up the next morning with a mild hangover. It wasn’t a splitting headache as his body had already become accustomed to his irregular (or should he say overly regular) drinking habits.

Sometime in the middle of the night, his tired body had managed to move itself onto his bed – which he thought was no better than the floor except for having a few decimetres of elevation – and there he had laid until the birds were squabbling outside till he managed to pull himself out of bed.

He managed to travel to his slice of broken mirror almost on his hands and knees – his brain was accustomed to the alcohol, but his legs still complained.

He looked through his bleary eyes and stared at himself in the mirror. He was very dishevelled. All the washing-up he had done – combing his long, unruly black hair, washing his face and scrubbing diligently, cutting his nails and shaving his facial hair – still effectively showed in his face, but the sheer emotion in his eyes and around his mouth destroyed the comparative cleanness. He didn’t want to look into or even at his eyes because they humiliated him. He didn’t know why. He didn’t know how. But he only knew he had to look away, look to somewhere else.

He patted his cheek a few times and decided that while he was clean, he should try once again. But where? He thought desperately for somewhere he could go to promote himself. Without a place to publish his writing – without a sponsor – without a place to be human– he would starve. His stomach growled untimely to remind him.

He washed his face with a pitiful amount of water – he hadn’t paid his fees that month… at least the housing was free.

He looked around as he thought about that bitterly. For free? Yes. Good? Not even close. The walls were dark with leftover moisture and rotten wood. The room smelt of burning tar – because two buildings away was a tar factory, a grimy, dirty tar factory. The wallpaper barely existed except for some slivers of dirtied blue on the wall near the door. The room was so pitifully small he could barely fit in a desk and a bed at the same time – but then there was the fireplace.

He was very thankful there was a fireplace. Before, when he had been somewhat better in circumstances – when this part of Town had not been the wasteland of low-tech – when his poetry could still find places to be published – the fireplace had been lit with logs, cracking (albeit weakly) as he scribbled and wrote on his old notebooks. He would stick his feet towards it and the heat would lick at him. But as his fame dwindled and his pocket emptied, so did the fireplace. He remembered the last time it had been lit – it flickered, bursting into life, and then waned slowly, slowly, as it ate up the logs, as the cold weather chilled it. He remembered the colour of the coal as it subsided reluctantly, sizzling in a show of woeful defiance.

Oh, how he wished it to be lit now!

He had always needed some noise to think; he needed the crackling of the fire to feel alive, to feel that he existed, to feel that he wasn’t completely isolated (which was the truth) and to at least hold some sentiment of humanness.

Now, he felt like a deer standing at the edge of a small circular pack, slowly being devoured by the hungry robot wolves that growled and drooled at them.

Who were the others in the pack? He hoped he would find them in the small café he was about to go to.

He had never deigned to visit such a broken-down, third-rate place before. One of his friends had mentioned it to him before, speaking of it as a refuge for creators. Fern had once been the aloof antelope; now he was the scarred and mutilated deer who needed shelter in a pack.

It was a very broken-down place. The café (he could not identify the whole name from the plaque that was marred and acid rain-weathered) was almost what would be called a warehouse in times before – albeit rather a large warehouse. The door was transparent glass, but it was greasy enough that he could not see inside for the love of his life. He wiped his dusty shoes on the front door mat that was as mutilated as the shingled roof, and he opened the door.

A pleasant but overly loud tinkle startled him greatly; as he looked up in distress, he missed the concentrated gaze of all those in the café and the sudden pause in the river of conversation that continued a split second afterwards. The wind blew into the café, and some sitting across the door had to hold their things for them to not escape.

He stood there, disoriented. He stood in front of the open door for a second and looked at everyone there. The bartender – or whatever that position would be called – looked over at him and warmly beckoned him over.

The café was bigger than he thought; there were around twenty or thirty people squeezed and packed into metal and plastic chairs, sitting around small round tables and sipping their beverages out of cracked and old china cups. The warm orange lights were dim as the morning sun was streaking through the windows brilliantly. Implanted in the right-hand wall was the bartender’s station, full of an assortment of bottles, boxes and even some small Christmas decorations – Christmas? When was the last time he had celebrated that?

He hastily complied with the bartender’s waving and tried to compose himself as he looked at the young man across the counter.

“Hey,” the other said simply, and his voice was likeable enough, “Fern Edelweiss, is it?”

The very Fern Edelweiss himself blinked owlishly in confusion, “You know me?”

“Yeah,” the aproned man said casually as if he had not just grabbed a drowned man by his fingers because that was how Fern felt, “I read your poetry when I was really young, and a couple of times you did show up near our district. I know who you are.”

“I see you’re really disoriented here,” the other continued, his voice smooth and casual. In his daze, Fern managed to give him a once-over. The bartender could not have been more than twenty-seven; his upturned mouth and light, chopped hair betrayed his youthfulness.

“I’m Diaz. Just Diaz, nothing else. And I’m the second-in-command of this café,” Diaz waved proudly, “The Seasons & Nature Café if you couldn’t tell by the sign, by the way.”

As he spoke, the bartender juggled pieces of equipment around, probably making beverages for another customer, “Here, in the TSNC, we do all sorts of things. Poetry? In the far-right corner. That’ll be your favourite. Arts and Crafts are in the far-left corner. The short story and novel section are these three tables just in front of you, and the music section,” here Diaz pointed at a lone piano in the corner, with something draped over it, “is over there.”

Fern looked around, still partly in a daze, but by this time he had regained some of his normal shrewdness.

“Are these customers all…creators?” he opted for the most inclusive word he could find.

“Yes,” Diaz exclaimed happily, then his tone turned sombre, “We know lots of people like us – like you – are suffering from poverty, inebriation and even sometimes depression. Having a community like ours sure helps!”

Fern nodded, then his face turned slightly red, deciding to go straight to the point, “I’m penniless.”

Diaz wasn’t fazed in the least, “We all are. Don’t worry – everything is free provided you lend us a hand in the spring and autumn for harvests and do something useful like making literature – as long as you contribute, you get a piece of anything you want.” He leaned in mysteriously, “We also have a secret investor, but I can’t tell you much about that.”

Fern shook his head and muttered, “This is all too good to be true.”

Diaz laughed a little exasperatedly as he heard it, “Take your coffee. Expresso with nothing else and go to the poets’ section already.”

Fern went to the poets’ section while carrying his small cup of expresso – a drink he had last had around ten years ago.

He wondered what made him so meek all of a sudden – perhaps the shock and the dream-like quality of it all. Was this the community he wanted, or was it just a spectacular dream filled with frauds and tricksters? Fern couldn’t decide, and frankly, he didn’t want to.

The warmth of the coffee in his hands and the hum of voices around him were enough to make him happy, and for a moment, just a moment, he believed this was all real.