Synesthesia: Chapter Twenty-Nine
serial fiction
The minty, planty smell of Hoka guy’s pride at his ugly Phoenix mansion pricked at my sinuses and made my eyes water as he led us from room to room, showing off his game room, his “home cinema” with its projector pointed at a blank white wall, and his innumerable glass curio cases encasing his “collectibles,” which seemed to be his preferred term for the faded plastic action figures he’d apparently held onto over the last three or four decades.
Jacob rubbed his eyes and looked like he was on the verge of falling asleep, but he dragged his feet along obediently and clung to his mother’s hand as we passed into yet another room full of floor-to-ceiling glass cases.
“And these are my He-Man collectibles,” Hoka guy was saying, gesturing broadly toward the cases with one arm as if he were a tour guide at the Louvre. I nodded politely, wanting nothing more than to get out of this house and back on the road.
Hoka guy turned toward one of the cases to point something out to us, and suddenly the eucalyptus stink was covered over with the perfect, beautiful, flawless scent of orange blossoms.
At that exact instant, Jacob started crying.
Amber knelt down beside him to comfort him, but Jacob just raised one small arm and pointed accusingly at a life-sized poster of Skeletor.
Jacob kept bawling, and the orange blossoms kept coming. I closed my eyes and sucked in the glorious scent of fear through my nostrils.
But it was already polluted, tainted with the moldy, mildewy smell of panic.
I opened my eyes.
Hoka guy was standing in front of the poster, trying and failing to block the boy’s view of the offending image, while Amber hugged and rocked Jacob, who was now half-crying, half-shrieking, tears and snot flowing out of his face.
In disgust, I exited the room and tried to make my way back to the front door through the maze of rooms and hallways we’d been led through for the past half-hour or so.
Instead of the oversized marble foyer, though, I found myself in a pink room with a high four-poster bed at its center. There were, remarkably, no glass cases in here, no action figures, no giant posters of cartoon characters.
What there was was an enormous oil painting on one wall of a fat woman in a pale pink ballgown, like some plus-plus-sized Barbie come to life.
One of her dark eyes stared out of the painting and straight at me, leaving me feeling unsettled and vaguely afraid. Her other eye drifted off to one side, as if it couldn’t be bothered with me.
“You found her,” came a voice from behind me.
I jumped, startled.
It was Hoka guy.
“I found who?” I asked.
He sighed, gazing at the painting on the wall opposite us.
“Roberta,” he breathed reverently.
I looked again at the painting, squinting my eyes in confusion.
“That’s Roberta?” I asked.
Eucalyptus hit me again like a smack in the face.
“Yeah,” he said, walking up to the painting and tracing one finger along the curve where Roberta’s waist might have been, if she had had one.
The eucalyptus faded into freshly baked bread.
He looked so pathetic standing there, gazing up at the face in the painting. A note of watermelon heartbreak drifted across the space between us, hitting me like a summer picnic.
“You really miss her, huh?” I said, feeling sorry for him against my will.
He nodded, the bread smell coming to the fore again.
An idea popped into my head.
“Have you tried apologizing to her?” I suggested.
Hoka guy said nothing. He just kept staring up at Roberta’s painted face.
Then he frowned, and the sour smell of milk gone bad filled the room.
“She’d never forgive me,” he mumbled, looking down at the floor. The aroma of buttered-popcorn shame cleared away the sour-milk smell of hopelessness.
Hokas’ constant change of emotions was starting to give me a stomachache. I took one step backward, then another, hoping to slip out of the room unnoticed.
But he turned to look at me, and suddenly I felt like I was under a microscope.
“You wouldn’t understand, would you?” he asked. “You’ve never loved anyone.”
I would have expected his words to sting, but they didn’t. They just articulated something I’d always known to be true.
I stood there a minute, then shook my head.
“No,” I answered. “I guess not.”
After a glass of juice and a nap, Jacob had fully recovered from his terrifying encounter with the Skeletor poster. The four of us sat at a gargantuan solid-wood dining table over plates of lettuce-wrapped bison burgers and roasted cauliflower as the sun dipped below the horizon.
“So what’s our plan for tomorrow?” Hoka guy inquired brightly. He’d taken a shower and changed out of his “RUN FOR YOUR LIFE” shirt and soiled blue jogging shorts, so that now I hardly recognized him. Amber and Jacob, too, had cleaned up and changed into some of their newly purchased clothes. I suddenly felt grimy in my same old black clothes, and I regretted not spending some of Amber’s stolen money on a wardrobe upgrade at the outdoor mall when I’d had the chance.
At least I had my new sandals.
Amber looked around the room—at its gaudy chandelier, its textured beige walls, its oversized wooden fork and spoon hanging on either side of foot-high black capital letters commanding us to “EAT.”
She smiled, and the whole room stank of shit.
“Maybe we could stay here a while,” she suggested.
Hokas smiled too, and the shit smell intensified.
I set my fork down next to my untouched cauliflower. The two of them looked over at me as it clattered against the brown ceramic plate.
“Hold on,” I said, feeling anger rise in me. “I thought you two hated each other. Or at least that you hated him, Amber.”
Amber’s cheeks flushed just slightly, and I smelled cotton candy over the strong, meaty aroma of bison.
“We were just going to drop you off and then be on our way,” I continued, glaring at Hokas. “Then you gave us a tour, and a meal, and… Are we just going to live here now?”
Jacob’s eyes lit up at my question. “Can I have the Spider-Man room?” he asked.
I twisted my napkin in disgust.
“Come on, Zodiac, it’s not so bad here,” Amber said.
“Fine,” I said, my eyes stinging. “You stay, then. But tomorrow morning, I’m out of here.”
Jacob poked at his bison burger with his fork. “So can I have the Spider-Man room?” he repeated.
I stood up and walked out the front door and into the night.
I needed to be away from all of this.