Hostia ( chapter 3)

  “Hostia” ( chapter 3)

“I am delving into it”- , he replied.

Risk, obsession, acrid taste and perception.

Rupert Valis kept staring at the marble-like table he used as occasional dashboard.

The rain hitting the ground, while the noisy traffic incorporated every sound, life, word.

The asphalt looked like a painted surface, with raw sketches left over.

She couldn't keeping herself from weeping. Her face, a middle aged beauty at large, covered in shattered make-up. Still, she carried sexual attraction, an unintentional hooking up thrown around the room. A desperate atmosphere mitigated by this strange feeling: her beauty quitting all the conversation, as if it was impossible not to notice her evident fascination.

“ Val, please go and find her. Please. I need to hug my daughter again. I can't stand losing her”.

Her breast pushing against the white t-shirt she wore. The prominent nipples against the cotton texture, waiting for a caressing hand.

That was Valis' erratic thinking; after the splitting up with his wife, sex became the missing factor. He ended up with nothing after the marriage collapsed: his emotional life annihilated, sex a like vacant place.

Glancing at her blossoming breast made him feel lonely. That flesh being a warning sign, whose message was clear: now you can enjoy your time, alone, a solitary man struggling with making a life. Surviving and all.

“I'll trying my...”

“No, that's not enough. I don't care about your suspension ..”- her hands tight.

Tension invading all her muscles. Her nerves shaken by the entangled emotions flowing under her skin, across her head.

“It was not a suspension. Expulsion is more appropriate, if we come to words. Better overpass that. We haven't got time to debate. As i was telling you, i swear that i am trying and i will try my best to find her. You have my word.”

His eyes resembled pale grey circles. Fleeting spheres , directionless points.

All his memories afflicting his concentration. Staying focused requiring too much work in that very moment.

His head frizzling like an electric device about to burn out.

Gazing at him, she used all the remaining energies to beg Valis, with a broken voice, an everlasting moaning.

The most recurrent words being: Kidnapping; Pagan cult; Sect; Daughter; Please; Save her; Find her.

Not necessarily following this sequence and order.

Valis was not a bad man.

His friends used to say that he joined the police to bring some order into the chaotic mess of his life.

He was brought up with a few comforts and a lot of violence.

His father's belt over his back, the following wounds stamped there, his mother screaming over the floor were placed among the brightest memories gathered from his youth.

Those marks of unpredictable utterance ( a choke stifling his happiness) could have pushed an Everyman to suicidal tendencies; but Valis didn't give up.

He was protecting his mother and younger sister from the nightmares that hit him during the nights, just like an iron hammer.

His mother had gone through all that hell, trying to drive all her husband's violence against herself.

But she couldn't help fainting or losing control after being beaten so hard. Her drunken husband punching and kicking around, unable to recover his balance.

Now, after his father had died, his mother got older and his sister took her way, Valis couldn't succeed in the only one thing he needed: erasing the swamps of his past- yes,swamp was the term he liked most to define all that shambles.

Tabula rasa. That could have been the starting point from where to begin.

But, not to mention the panic, he had to face interminable pain, when his head and chest caused unbearable agony to him.

At first, he tried to cope with those aches, quivering beneath his skin like thorns activating electric charges.

Then, while years passed by, he got addicted to painkillers.

He wasn't sure but he started to think that those drugs regularly ended up with altering his psychic balance.

But the consequences of that were even worse.

While being on duty-working as a police officer in New York city- he happened to feel bad, facing a sort of breakdown-some would say a kind of mental disorder,but he constantly avoided this word- , even experiencing hallucinations, shivering, weaknesses and so on.

But the specific factor determining his expulsion from the Police corps was something quite simple and self-evident: during different circumstances he behaved abusing aggressive manners while involved in demanding missions, requiring cold blooded operations and interventions.

Beside that, he couldn't calm down his nerves, arguing regularly with his colleague, named Jean.

She always refrained from reporting that in official records, thus glossing over the facts in the signed papers.

It was no secret that she liked him.

When he was getting through the troubled waters of his marriage, Jean supported him, listening to all his shouts, complaints, sorrows and doubts, caressing his fears to make them sleep, as if cuddling her baby in the cradle, lullabying.

Valis was her desire, her baby to feed up, her colleague to get along with.

Jean never confessed her inner feelings to him; she tended to think that men are not truthful or mature.

So, even caring for him a lot, she kept her feelings deeply hidden in her heart, waiting for the proper time to open them.

Her eyes were intense and dark blue; her mother used to tell her that she thrived just to steal that wonderful colour from the night sky.

She was 35 years old. Firm. Strong and sensitive at the same time. But everything fragile inside her was deliberately concealed in her appearence and during the daily routine.

Walking frantically along the room, Valis would reveal his innermost concern; immersed in this anxious flowing of thoughts, his steps hitting the ground sounded gloomy.

He couldn't express the thought coming to the surface of his reasoning-”I walk totally in the dark; i don't know where to start.”

The woman was so desperate that her voice faded away. Her voluptuous body remained there,turned into an hopeless lament,calling to life.