Born Savages - Cora Brent Page 0,14

good reason in the world for me to go down this road. One. And I don’t even know whether she wants anything to do with me. Or if she’s even worth the trouble at this point.

Shit.

First love.

Only love.

A strange and turbulent summer that was the best and worst part of my life.

I keep the windows wide open in the pickup as I slowly thread my way down through the cool greenery of the mountain roads. I appreciate it all; the fresh wisps of summer, the fluttering hands of the forest.

Where I’m going will be much hotter, much harsher. There’s no place to fucking hide there.

Thinking about her, even the most fleeting of memories, tends to lengthen my dick. That’s no way to start a long road trip. So instead I think about the long, wandering years since then; a thousand adventures and disasters that blur together and are all equally trivial.

No good. Today it all leads back to her. After all, nobody who spends twenty-three years on this earth is a blank slate. We are the sum of our pains and trials, joys and heartaches. It’s impossible to guess them all. And to really understand anything about what’s happening today you have to go backwards first.

You have to understand what happened five years ago….

CHAPTER FIVE

Five Years Ago: Part 1

Almost as soon as they land in New York they are leaving.

The woman surrounds herself with people who are paid to tend to her belongings, offer her drinks, escort her to the decadent lounge where the wealthy are not required to mingle with ordinary people. She is agitated, clawing at the inside of her palms with her fingernails, as is her habit when the universe has gone out of order.

Oscar suspects the city has bad memories for her. His mother is a collector of bad memories. They are finally overcrowding her mind.

He is disappointed to be leaving so soon. He knew this place once, New York. This was where he lived, although he remembers little about it except bad smells and cold alleys. He looks out the windows and sees nothing of beauty; only the industrial background of a major international airport. It manages to look ugly even in the balmy spell of early summer. But he had glimpsed the legendary skyline as the plane descended and badly wanted to see it up close. Briefly he considers leaving the woman here and disappearing into the throngs of weary travelers.

“Oscar,” the woman croaks and holds out a thin hand to him as a weak smile tries to take custody of her face.

Much of the time she forgets he exists but now she would like him to sit beside her. He sinks into a plush armchair and tries not to look at her face. It’s cracked and drawn, a face of pain, a face that seems even more ugly because for so long it was beautiful.

He decides he must be a complete asshole for even noticing these things.

Oscar searches for things to say to his mother. They should have things to say to one another. But she’s fretful and distracted. Anyway, his mind keeps going in odd directions, thinking about the strangeness of being in his own country again. Then he starts thinking about the girls he knew from his latest school. Some were girlfriends for brief stretches of angst-filled time. Others were just dirty hookups. Oscar doesn’t miss any of them. But he idly catalogues them in his mind because it’s something to do while he sits beside a ruined woman, waiting for their plane to refuel.

“You’ll enjoy being there,” says Oscar’s mother as she rubs at her temples and then slides her large sunglasses back onto her thin face. She has acquired a curious, affected accent from all her years of travel. Oscar has no such accent. He’s convinced hers is deliberate.

She smiles at him again and he sees his distorted reflection in her dark lenses. “I loved Atlantis as a child. My father filmed seven movies there. You’ve seen them, haven’t you, his movies? Yes, I’m sure I showed them to you. When he bought the place he decided to live there part time and had a house built. None of the artificial buildings they added to the set could tame that wild beauty, just as it couldn’t tame your grandfather. I wish you’d known Rex. He was a king. He was…”

Oscar’s mother loses her train of thought as she stares off into the past. Her lip quivers. Oscar reaches for