Toni, Coltor, and the Comet: Chapter 4

Chapter 4: The Uncertainty Principle: Toni

Rating: 13+: Strong Language

Toni watches the full moon’s light wash across Coltor's profile as he stands in silence, staring at the ocean. The rotten egg smell dulls and fades as her senses grow accustomed to its sting. Cicadas and night critters engage in a cacophony that fills the silence between them. Toni taps her phone screen and quickly glances at the time; 11:45 PM. 

Coltor’s sudden shift in demeanor is startling, but she doesn’t feel the urge to question his behavior or ask him to stay. Her heartbeat steadily increases at the thought of being alone on the beach again after that strange old man, but she figures that no one will be coming to this part of the lot past midnight. She glances over and sees the cameramen packing their bags on the more lush side of Acosta Azucar’s grass lot.

“Thanks for your help,” she says, eyeing a line of bullet ants heading toward the shoreline riddled with plastic waste.

He briefly turns to her, a sudden stern expression lining his blue eyes, making him look more intimidating and cold than he initially appeared. “I would have done it for anyone,” he says in a matter-of-fact tone, that makes Toni feel stupid for paying the compliment. 

She pulls at the ends of her tank top and turns her gaze up to the sky. The sudden frigidity between them is starting to make her uncomfortable, so she decides to do him the honor of letting him leave.

“Well I’m grateful that someone like you was here to help me,” she says focusing her attention back on his face. “I don’t know what I would’ve done if you weren’t here.”

He returns her stare with a cold intensity that confuses her, but she chooses to ignore it. 

He clenches his angular jaw and stares at the ground as the ringlets of his curly brown hair fall breezily around his temples. He scratches his head, then toys with the handles of his camping backpack. 

Why isn’t he leaving? Toni stares at him for a moment, then feels annoyance rise in her chest at his conflicting body signals. She puffs air slowly through pursed lips and focuses her attention back on her telescope. 

She’s had enough bizarre happenings for the night and is just ready to find a watch spot to set up blink shots for her surveillance of “The Big One”. She pushes her eye to the telescope's eyepiece and sees Jupiter's warm orange faintly gleaming next to a spray of stars. She visualizes the drawing, “The Planet Jupiter” by Etienne Leopold, and tries to sync the shapes of the drawing with what’s right in front of her. 

She sighs, and mumbles, “This focuser isn’t strong enough to see Jupiter’s storms,” she twists the focuser gently until the blurry orange image starts to clarify and show the waves of clouds resting on the surface of the planet. She sharply pulls her head back, Wait, I’ve never been able to focus this well on Jupiter with this telescope. She pushes her head forward again and stares at Jupiter’s Great Red Spot. “This shouldn’t be possible,” she furrows her brow.

She turns back to see Coltor two meters ahead diagonal from where she sits on the grass. She watches his lonely frame retreat silently as the mellow rumble of the ocean fills the night, and the moonlight shines on the right side of his body. He carries his lanky frame across the lot, neither fast nor slow while watching the ground beneath his feet as he walks. 

Toni feels an odd sense of sadness wash over her at the sight, and scoots away from her scope. It would have been nice to show this to him. She abruptly shakes her head, What the hell? The spontaneous thought disturbs her, Why did I just think that? She folds her long legs and tilts them to the side, one leg resting atop the other in a half repose. She shakes her head again and feels a yawn reach up the back of her throat and escape her mouth. 

“What a night,” she whispers as she slowly packs her notebooks into her backpack. She removes the small blue stool from beneath her telescope and pushes in the hinges of her tripod. She stares at the broken hinge, then sighs, “This all started with you,”

As she picks up the blue stool, she thinks about her sister and feels irritated all over again.

This is all Brittany’s fault, she thinks as she rams her folded telescope back into her backpack. And this weird ass beach. She looks up at the stars and takes a deep breath; their glittering radiance relaxing her. 

There is a safety in the heavenly bodies, a predictability that comes with them. For millions of eons, the stars have sat resolutely unchanged in the night sky. The same stars decorating El Puerto’s night sky were the same stars sitting in front of Clyde Tombaugh’s telescope and Etienne Leopold’s brush. The thought relaxes her and grounds her in the moment, as she pushes herself off the ground and slings her backpack over her shoulder.

She pulls out her cell phone, the battery symbol now red, and thumbs to a screenshot of a hand-drawn map of the inn she’s staying in’s bus route. She remembers checking in with a man whose face she couldn’t remember, and quickly dumping her luggage on the floor of the lobby, before racing out the door. The drawing was a lopsided rectangle with several sticks as trees and a curvy path cutting through Acosta Azucar and ending in a circle with the words, “bus stop”, in front of another straight line. She squints while looking at the map.

I should have asked that guy for directions before I left.   

She walks forward and slides her thumbs beneath the straps of her backpack, as the night grows deeper the farther she retreats from the ocean. Without the reflection of the moon’s light on the ocean, the surrounding palm trees swallow the night sky around her and frame the factory in haunting darkness. She turns around and sees the blue stool still sitting on the ground in the spot where she had left it. When did I put that down? She approaches the stool to pick it up, but a cool burst of wind pushes her from the left. She turns, and sees Coltor’s lanky frame now miniscule from the distance, staring at the ocean. 

His shoulders rise and fall with a deep sigh, as he hangs his head with both arms propped limply atop his knees. “Timur, I promised you I’d come back didn’t I?” she mutters as a tear falls gently down her cheek. She wipes the tear slowly, then shakes her head. She forces her eyes shut, then rubs them.  Timur? She rolls the name around in her head, searching her database of people, but the name Timur never appears. The words left her mouth involuntarily, feeling like someone else’s, yet completely her own. She pushes the thought away and says, “Maybe I’m tired.” She turns and walks through the side door of the empty factory, “Yeah, that’s what it is.” 

Wide splashes of moonlight gleam through the broken windows and paint the sugar factory’s floor with large splotches of light. The smell of the factory is dusty and metallic, yet still carries a subtle sweet scent from the sugar cane.  The sounds of mice and scurrying critters scuttle past Toni’s left side, which causes her to jump. “Shit!” She grabs the strap of her backpack with her left hand, then slides her right hand into her pocket for her cell phone. She quickly taps the flashlight icon and uses the faint light to guide her through the lower floor of the factory.

“Just keep going forward,” she swallows, “Keep your breathing together, it’s alright.”

She keeps her eyes down in front of her and passes clumps of crystallized sugar now turned black from decay. A gust of wind pushes against the windows and slithers through its cracks, rattling the exposed glass and vines. The sound awakens some of the critters in the building which causes loose factory parts to clang together from behind Toni.

 She whips her head around— casting her cell phone’s insufficient light on the twenty-meter-high ceiling behind her. The light shows the dwelling of one hundred bats hanging from exposed metal beams on the caved-in metal ceiling of the factory. She gasps, then quickly covers her mouth to suppress a scream. Oh fuck, She turns her cellphone’s light off and continues to tiptoe through the first floor of the dark factory. The front door should be this way. She places each foot gently in front of the other and uses the speckling of full moonlight to trace her way through the first level. Her feet graze against wild ivy, beer bottles, and soft patches of bare grass.

“Just a couple more feet and I’ll be at the front,” she whispers. If her predictions were close to correct, there should be an assortment of old wrenches, metal gears, and sugar cane juicers about a meter and a half in front of her; which leads directly to the door in front of the dirt road, where the inn’s bus would be picking her up. She taps her phone’s screen–12:12 AM.

“Shit!” she begins running through the factory, cradling her cellphone to her chest. The bus for the inn does their last pick-ups to Acosta Azucar at 12:15 AM every night. She brazenly runs in the dark, her feet clanging against bottles and hitting metal machine parts. The sting of the metal hitting her foot makes her hiss in pain, but she tries to remain quiet so as to not disturb the bats. 

She feels the familiar cluster of slender pieces of metal gears underneath her feet and immediately makes a right turn leading to the outside. Light breaks from a lone solar street lamp, and casts its scanty rays, now flickering above her. She places her hands on her knees and looks up at the bus from beneath her curly bangs— a sigh of relief escaping her lips.

There is no bus stop, only a metal pole, leaning sideways from hurricane winds, and fifteen palm trees curving slightly inward from the evening breeze. The purr of the inn’s bus mixes with her panting and breaks through the mosquito’s symphony. She pushes her hands off her knees and walks toward the bus which she realizes is just a mud-caked white sprinter van sitting in the middle of an empty dirt road. 

Key marks, bird poop, and animal markings decorate the exterior, with the words, “Esme’s Sueño” painted on the front right side in red. Framing these words is a painting of two separate black trees with seven roots protruding from the bottom of each tree. Both trees have six roots of the same size, but the seventh root of each tree extends farther than the others. The seventh root on both trees reach toward each other,  and tie into a knot at the base of the words, “Esme’s Sueño”

Toni stares at the drawing of the trees’ interlinking roots and feels a slight pain sting her upper left chest. She rubs at the spot slowly, while staring at the trees. 

“Tempora mutantur,” she whispers involuntarily, “Tanah has arrived.”She walks forward slowly in a half daze, suddenly feeling intense pressure on the back of her head. She rubs her temples and blinks several times to clear the sensation. Latin? Tempora means time, but mutantur? Change? Times have changed? She scratches her head. Tanah? Is that another name?

The lights from the vehicle illuminate the dark road in front of the sugar factory and stir a flurry of light-hungry moths from their sleep. Toni grabs her backpack strap with one hand, then approaches the closed van, knocking three times on the side door. The door sputters open; its sliding hinge catching every ten centimeters with a slow creak.

After nearly two minutes of sliding, the door finally opens to reveal an olive-skinned heavy-set old woman. She’s wearing ill-fitting pale pink overalls with a red Coca-Cola t-shirt tucked messily into the front pouch while hunching over her phone. The woman sits with her right arm crossed over the steering wheel, while her left hand aimlessly scrolls on her cellphone. Her mass of wild black curly hair is stuffed sloppily into a high bun, with the lower ends splaying out. The woman doesn’t look up at Toni, while on her phone, and only continues to scroll. Toni hesitantly closes the distance between her and the van, then knocks twice on the side. She reaches into her pocket and pulls out her room key with a small piece of red cloth attached to it.

“Key,” the woman says without turning.

“It’s right here,” Toni says, jingling the key slightly.

The woman turns from her phone and glances at the red cloth, then at Toni’s face illuminated by the flickering street lamp. Her almond-shaped eyes grow wide with surprise, and her thin lips pull tightly into a straight line. The driver’s leather seat creaks as she adjusts herself into it, and stares at Toni in silence. A tremble travels across her wrinkled lips, and her pupils rapidly dart back and forth on Toni’s face.

Toni looks at the key, then back at the woman sitting frozen in front of her. She leans backward and double-checks the writing on the side of the van. Esme’s Sueño. This is it. She studies the woman staring at her in silence; not recognizing her from check-in. From what she remembers, a young guy in his twenties checked her in and told her about the pickups, he also put her bags into her room. She now remembers that the young man was portly just like this woman but had deep caramel skin, and eyes a little more far apart. But their noses were similar—the flat nose bridge and wide nostrils. Maybe that was just a coincidence? 

“I checked in with a younger guy earlier,” she extends the key towards the old woman,

“He said this bus always leaves at 12:15, right?”

The old woman, ignoring Toni’s question, continues to stare at her like a person who has just seen a ghost. The woman swallows, her chubby neck waving sluggishly with the gesture. Does she not understand what I’m saying? 

In broken Spanish, Toni says, “I have a room at the inn. Room 212.” she dangles the key slightly.

The old woman nods slowly, mouth slightly agape, as the hum of the engine intermingles with the night crickets' calls. Toni slowly approaches the vehicle, but the woman holds up her chubby hand.

“Stop,” she says. 

Toni freezes at the command. So she can speak English. 

“I can’t give you a ride,” the woman says wide-eyed.

“But I already checked in,” Toni sighs, pushing her bangs back with her left hand. 

“This bus is for the living,” the woman exhales sharply as her extended right arm trembles.

The living? What is this woman talking about? Toni suppresses her frustration and breathes in slowly to calm herself. 

“Look, I already paid for a two-week stay here, so can you,” she walks closer to the van, “just let me in.”

The woman reaches into her pocket and throws four mints directly at Toni’s face, causing the plastic wrappers to slightly scratch her cheek. Furious, Toni puts her right hand over her cheek and approaches the van with long strides. She slaps her left hand firmly on the upper frame of the door and stares directly at the old woman with a wide-eyed menacing glare. The old woman shrinks down in her chair and averts her eyes from Toni.

“You are going to let me in this van, and you are going to drive us back to the inn,” she says.

The old woman nods wordlessly while shaking. Toni slides the key back into her pocket and slowly breathes out to calm herself. As she extends her leg to climb into the van, a slow crunch followed by a jingle of keys sounds from behind her. 

“Caleta,” a male voice says from behind Toni, “Is everything alright?”

Toni whips her head around and, sees Coltor with a matching key with red cloth tied to the base, resting firmly between his fingers.

Chapter 5 coming soon. Thanks for reading.

Kenny <3