EPTANTON escaped into prison at the age of 22, just another suited gunslinger in Central. It took three years before he even figured out what he was running from.
Three years here and he still dreamed of her, hope fading nightly. All the girls he’d fucked, all the speed he took, and he’d still chase after her jet-black eyes in his sleep, illuminated by reflected orange streetlamps beneath a cold gray sky, running away from him with carefree laughter toward the Gothic spires from his past which he could never reach.
She lived a long way over the Pacific now, and he was no Casanova, no Lothario. But the dreams came in through the polluted night sky like live wire voodoo, and he’d cry for it, cry in his sleep, and wake alone in the dark, curled in his forty-sixth-floor-coffin, his hands clawed into mattress, temper foam bunched between his fingers, trying to reach for the girl that wasn’t there.
How quickly it had happened, from a glance in class to heated bodies inside that photography darkroom, to the knowing smiles on his friend’s faces at that party, to the look on his girlfriend’s face when he opened the door to his room holding all his freshly cleaned bedsheets under those lanky arms. The torn foil packet she’d held in her bone-white knuckles. It rattled with her trembling, as if talking for her wounded soul.
He was running from the guilt.
He’d tried so hard, so hard to forget her shaking hands as she threw the evidence of his infidelity in his face, her angry nails as she drew red lines across his cheeks. He tried to forgot how she slammed the door, opened it, screamed his new earned name, then softly closed it and collapsed against the wall. He tried but still remembered opening the door a minute later and finding nothing but a few strands of her long, black hair on the carpet where she sat, still with her smell on them, of jasmine and coriander.
He looked at his cell phone again. The SMS read that she was back in her hometown, back on the island, meeting her old friends. It included a polite reminder to keep please keep the messenger anonymous. He remembered her final text to him.
“Everyone else feels the age-old emotion named guilt. Except you.”
Once he’d been a gunslinger, hottest outlaw from the wild, wild East. Freed of constraints, he lived a carefree life in college, screwing around with the girls faster than a quant fund rebalanced its portfolio. He had no constraints on life.
The world was his oyster. And then it snapped shut. But he was happy.
He’d loved her. His one and only. In his mind, she was beyond beautiful—her body like a jet fighter, not a cubic centimeter of wasted space, her mind just as lethal and keen. He no longer remembered chasing after her, though his romantic antics still the stuff of legend at the college years later, recounted by upperclassmen to underclassmen as a fairytale. How, once, when he had no money but all the confidence of a magician, he’d plowed a fifty-meter heart in the snow for her on Valentine’s Day with nothing more than a pair of old hiking boots.
That love was gone forever now, like tears in the rain.
And he’d definitely forgotten that first kiss. Beneath a darkened sky, the howling wind against their cramped dormitory, his hands on her shoulders, his thin lips against her ruby red. And Sinatra’s voice filling their hearts, telling him that he must have her.
He took another shot of the heavy alcohol, the sour whisky that none of the Hong Kongers drank, that was still less lonely than him. He looked up at the ceiling.
Alone. It was a small room filled with mementos from his past lives. The Express shirts from back when he used to go clubbing. The silver-blue argyle sweater from when he still paid tuition. The gray hoodie from his high school swimming days, back when his shoulders were still wider than his waistline.
He remembered the girl from high school. He he’d fucked around on her, with the brainy debater, the sleek, slim swimmer. The giggling volleyball players. It didn’t take much to bag them, just a few drinks and a ride in his parent’s Mercedes. He still laughed when he thought of all the unlucky fools which had sat on that leather backseat.
He willed himself to forget it. 100-hour workweeks had helped, but not completely.
The party outside his room was still noisy, still fresh. New people were streaming in, their hearts held open by liberal amounts of pretty interns and Bailey’s.
And then one of those moments came, when a dozen different conversations simultaneously ceased. A tinkling laugh rang out like rain, acid rain. Ivana, that’s what her name was. He wondered how many of her fellow analysts were stealing glances at her ass right now. If he had been two years younger he would have wanted a piece of that, too.
But after the giggle, that’s when he heard the words. At first, he couldn’t believe it, but then it became clear—someone was singing it. Singing his song. The song with which he had wooed the girl of his dreams.
Tricked by the music, his memory would not cooperate. He remembered how her heart had tapped a rhythm on his fingertips, and how that beat had quickened as his hand moved from her neck to her shoulder, to her breast.
He stopped trying to forget. The whiskey burned another trail down his throat.
This night, he thought. Before the night was through, he would find her. And he would hope that she would still forgive him.
So they could get it right again.
He crossed his fingers and opened his bedroom door. No one looked at him as he left. Just another suited gunslinger in Central.
