Apotheosis Read online

  Apotheosis

  A Novel

  Joshua Edward Smith

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictionally. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or to actual events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  The ebook version is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. The ebook version may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person.

  Copyright © 2018 Joshua Edward Smith. All rights reserved. Including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof, in any form. No part of this text may be reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the author.

  Physical Book ISBN: 978-1-9834-4675-7

  Version 2018.01.17

  For my tribe.

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  TWENTY-ONE

  TWENTY-TWO

  TWENTY-THREE

  TWENTY-FOUR

  TWENTY-FIVE

  TWENTY-SIX

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  TWENTY-NINE

  THIRTY

  THIRTY-ONE

  THIRTY-TWO

  THIRTY-THREE

  THIRTY-FOUR

  THIRTY-FIVE

  THIRTY-SIX

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  THIRTY-NINE

  FORTY

  FORTY-ONE

  FORTY-TWO

  FORTY-THREE

  Apotheosis

  ONE

  She couldn’t take her eyes off his face. He was telling a story about the time he traveled to Tibet. She thought she should be paying more attention to his words, but that face. That neck. That jaw line. His voice was soothing, like music. It didn’t matter what he was saying—just keep talking and I’ll be happy. There was a small hint of an accent. Someplace in the western part of the country. Texas maybe.

  She had never traveled anywhere as exotic as Tibet. She should. She had money and no obligations other than work. She could travel. Maybe they could travel together. Her ex never wanted to travel. He worked hard and played harder and didn’t see any need to go anywhere else. But she was free of him now. She could travel if she wanted to.

  Cynthia nodded and smiled. Anything to keep him talking, so she could luxuriate in the music of that voice. She glanced down at her body, naked under a single sheet. And over at his. She never slept naked. Always in a nightgown. It was a little outside her comfort zone to be naked while sleeping. But of course, they weren’t sleeping. They were talking. She pinched the sheet between her toes and tugged it down a little exposing her breasts. Lying sideways like this, her chest looked like that of a much younger woman.

  She glanced up at him and noticed he was now staring at her erect nipples. She scanned down and was reasonably sure she could see a change in the profile of the sheet in front of his hips. How did I get here? What did I do to deserve this luck? Cynthia hadn’t been this content in… maybe ever? She thought back to the early days of her marriage. It was a heady stew of excitement and lust. Randy kept her on edge, and the tension was high. It was a good time, but it was totally different than this.

  Her marriage had fallen apart so slowly she hardly noticed it happening. They talked less and less. He drank more and more. The sex ended and she didn’t even miss it. And then suddenly he was gone. Getting another girl pregnant will do that, she supposed. Ah, pregnancy. Her white whale. By the time they noticed they couldn’t seem to get pregnant, neither of them cared. She now figured it was something wrong with her own plumbing, since he didn’t have any trouble knocking that young thing up. She didn’t care whether she was capable of having children. She never had that desire to be a mother. Cynthia never had the desire to be much of anything. Right now she desired to slide on top of this delicious man.

  Her gambit with the sheet hadn’t worked, though. He was six layers deep in his tale and he wasn’t about to be ripped away from it. That was fine. Just keep talking. She felt so much love. It filled her up. She smiled at him as she watched the little expressions on his face. The hint of a smirk when he talked about the local girl he met, hinting at a whole subplot he was skipping because she wasn’t the right audience for it. The eye roll when he talked about the other Americans he ran into, leaving him wishing he had told everyone he was Canadian, instead.

  She looked down at his hands. They were strong and weathered. One was on the bed with his fingers spread like he was going to play the knife game. She eased her hand over and tapped her index finger next to his thumb. Position one. Then between his thumb and index finger. Position two. Back to one. She started tapping her finger onto the bed, faster and faster. Her finger was the knife. She became aware that he had stopped talking, but she had to finish the game. Several taps later she looked up at him sheepishly.

  He had a huge smile on his face. “You nicked my pinky a little. I might bleed out.”

  Cynthia laughed. “I’m sorry. I have no idea what came over me.”

  “I love that side of you,” he said. “The silly girl who suddenly decides to play the knife game with my fingers.”

  “Is that right?” she asked, sitting up a little, her breasts falling completely clear of the sheet. “Is that the side you like?”

  He raised his eyebrows and looked at her display. “Yes. Now, as I was saying…”

  And she lost him into the story again. She ran her fingertips along his pinky finger where she had mortally wounded him a moment ago. She leaned down and kissed it gently. Then she ran her fingers along the back of his hand and up his arm. She listened to his story as she made a path among the grasslands of his forearm. Exploring every freckle, every hair. She had never known such happiness.

  She heard the sound of wind chimes. They blended nicely with his voice, but he stopped talking when he heard them. “What is that sound?” he asked.

  She listened a moment. “Oh. Shit. That’s my phone alarm. Have we been talking all night? I’m going to be a zombie at work tomorrow. Well today, I guess. Ugh. Hang on.” She rolled away from him and silenced the 5:30 alarm on her phone.

  She rolled back and he was gone. She scanned the dark room. Where the fuck did he go? She looked down and noticed she was no longer naked. She was wearing a nightgown. Like every morning. She looked back at his side of the bed. It hadn’t been slept in.

  Cynthia was rattled. She sat up and tried to get her bearings. What the fuck? Logic told her that she had been dreaming. That he wasn’t real. But her heart, her gut, and her loins told her something else. He was there. He is real. She swung her legs off the bed and went to shower. She could still hear his voice echoing in her head. Still see his face. She had just met her soul mate. She was sure of it.

  ¤

  Cynthia parked in the structure and managed to get all the way to her cubicle without talking to anyone. A small victory. Her head was in a fog. Whatever had happened last night might technically have been a dream, but it was so much more than that. She had undergone a profound change that she couldn’t begin to understand. She decided to lose herself in her work.

  It was pure drudgery. She worked for an insurance company, and her job was to help people file the claims against their Flexible Spending Accounts. There wa
s nothing flexible about the rules people had to follow, and she spent her days telling people why the paperwork they filed was wrong. “I’m sorry, I know that this bill is from the MRI service, but it doesn’t say what they did… Yes, I know that doing an MRI is the only thing an MRI service does… Right, but it actually has to say what service was performed… Yes, I know it’s frustrating, but we don’t make these rules… Congress, I guess? I’m not sure, actually. But someone in the government… Yes, I know it is your money, but we aren’t allowed to give it back without proper documentation… Absolutely, my supervisor would love to talk to you.”

  During these calls, the customers would invariably ask her to wait as they rifled through whatever paperwork they had, trying to find something—anything—that would have the magic set of items on the same page: provider, date, patient name, service performed. And when they asked her to wait, her inner narrative would take over. Most days this would focus on what went wrong with her marriage, or what she was going to do when she finally reached retirement in another twenty years, or why she bothered getting that MBA when there was no opportunity for advancement here, or what she might have for dinner that night. But today she had a whole new bundle of feelings to unpack.

  What does it mean? Am I just lonely? Is my single existence finally catching up to me, and my mind has invented this man to fill the needs I didn’t know I had? I loved the way he looked at my chest. That desire in a man’s eyes. And down below. To be desired like that. Randy was so lustful when we first got together. He desired me like that. What happened there? Was it me? Did I end our sex life? Maybe I did. He never seemed all that interested. But maybe I wasn’t interested and he was just reflecting that. He certainly was interested in that girl he left me for. She let out a long sigh as the customer came back on the line to yell at her some more.

  Several calls later, she found herself back in the monologue. What was the significance of the story he was telling me? Tibet… why Tibet? And the knife game. What was that about? I don’t think I’ve ever tried that, even as a kid. Have I? Wait… no, I have. I remember now. We used to use a pencil. Was I any good at it? Cynthia was using her headset, so her hands were free. She tried playing the game on her desk using a capped pen. She was not nearly as good as she had been in the dream.

  She spent the morning hiding in her cube, dealing with customer after customer. Ordeal after ordeal. She liked to think that her work was something like raking a Zen garden. It didn’t matter that no progress was ever made. Raking the sand was its own reward. Every claim form was another grain of sand that she helped move from here to there. When her stomach dutifully informed her that it was time for lunch, she stood and stretched. As she did, she caught a glimpse of something in her neighbor’s cube.

  She walked around the partition. Alice wasn’t there. Sitting on the desk, buried among the pictures of her twenty-seven thousand cats, was a picture of the man from her dream. It was him. She was positive. She glanced around. Nobody was in the corridor between this particular set of cubes. She reached in and picked up the picture to get a closer look. Same jaw. Same shoulders and chest. His hands were not visible. She wished she could see those hands again. The scene looked a little… off. Too perfect. He was almost laughing, but there wasn’t anyone else with him. And the background was all out of focus. Like a picture a photographer would take, not Alice with her smartphone.

  “Isn’t he gorgeous?”

  Cynthia spun around and almost hit Alice with the picture in her hands. “Oh my God! You startled me!”

  Alice smiled as Cynthia handed her the picture. “I’m sorry,” she continued. “I was snooping and you totally caught me. Who is this guy?”

  Alice carefully placed the frame back in its proper place. “I don’t know.”

  It took Cynthia a moment to process what she had just heard. “Wait. What? What do you mean you don’t know?”

  Alice looked at her feet. “This is embarrassing.”

  Cynthia put a hand on Alice’s shoulder. “I don’t understand.”

  Alice looked her in the eye and shrugged. “I liked the frame. I was going to put a picture of Mister Pickles in it,” she said, pointing at one of her cats. “But I kind of fell in love with the guy in the frame. And I thought it might be nice to look at him when I’m talking to some idiot who can’t file the right fucking paperwork, you know?”

  Cynthia laughed. “Oh, I know! So that’s just the stock photo that came with the frame?”

  Alice grimaced as she nodded. “Yup.”

  Cynthia was crestfallen. “Well fuck.”

  Alice screwed up her eyebrows.

  “I thought I knew him, that’s all. But I guess not,” Cynthia explained.

  Alice nodded. “I wish I knew him. God, he’s gorgeous. Anyway, wanna get lunch?”

  “Sure,” Cynthia agreed, and the two headed down the corridor.

  TWO

  Cynthia curled up on the couch with a glass of wine and her Kindle, but didn’t have a chance to use either before her phone lit up. It was her mother. She took a quick gulp of wine and answered. “Hi, Mom.”

  “Hello sweetheart. How are you doing?”

  “I’m alright.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Oh, it’s nothing, really.”

  “I’m your mother. I know when something is wrong.”

  “Ugh. It’s literally nothing. I had a weird dream last night and I’m still a little shaken by it.”

  “Do you want to talk about it?” her mother asked.

  “Not really.”

  “Okay, honey. So how was your day?”

  The conversation carried on for about twenty minutes. Cynthia wanted to talk to someone about what she was going through, but that someone wasn’t her mother. She didn’t have a someone in that role in her life at the moment. She needed a friend. Someone who wouldn’t judge her for her weird obsession with the man from the picture frame. A man she had taken to calling Mister Pickles, because of Alice’s comment, and because she wanted to see his pickle again.

  Mister Pickles, how did you get into my head? Did I see you on her desk before and not notice? I mean—that has to be what happened, right? But how could I not notice you? You are so fucking beautiful. Or did you come to my dream first, and the picture was just kismet? Our connection is strong. That must be it.

  She sipped her wine and then rolled it around in the glass, watching it drip slowly down the sides. She wanted to see him again. She needed to. She needed to hear his voice and explore his skin.

  She poked at her phone, intent on finding him. But she had absolutely nothing to go on. She thought perhaps kismet would come to her aid, so she image searched random words. Tibet, knife game, handsome. She had no luck at all.

  She put away her phone and picked up the Kindle and dove into her book. Mister Pickles would have to wait.

  ¤

  The air was cool, but she was warm in her sweater, and his arm around her made her feel incredibly safe. They sat on the porch swing. His feet, clad in cowboy boots, were crossed at the ankle and resting on the table. Hers were tucked underneath her. He rocked them ever so slightly as they listened to the crickets and watched the fireflies.

  “This is pretty much perfect,” Cynthia said.

  “I agree,” he replied, with that slight accent she still couldn’t quite place. He pulled her closer, and she drank in the smell of him.

  “I love you so much,” she said, lifting her head to look at him.

  He smiled and leaned down to kiss her. They shared a long, soft kiss. “I love you,” he whispered.

  She liked how he said it. Not ‘I love you, too’ like he was just keeping pace. Simply ‘I love you’ as a statement of fact. It meant more that way. She felt so loved. So safe. “Will you tell me the rest of the story?” she asked. “When we were interrupted, I think you were about to climb a mountain or something?”

  “Oh, yes,” he laughed. “Now, I’ve done plenty of rock climbing in my day. The weather w
as good, and we had the right equipment, and the terrain looked manageable—”

  “I sense a ‘but’ coming,” she said.

  He laughed again. “Yes! But, there was one thing we didn’t plan on.”

  Cynthia listened as he dug in to another story from his trip to Tibet. She ran her finger along his jaw as he spoke, feeling the stubble against her skin. Then she curled into his chest. She realized that she could hear his voice resonating in his chest with one ear pressed against him and still make out the words clearly with her other ear. It added a whole new dimension to the musical quality of his voice.

  She explored the hand that held her as he talked. Tracing the veins that ran up the back and around his fingers. Imagining those hands exploring her body, controlling it. She desperately wanted to feel those hands on her body again. Again? Well certainly. They were naked and talking before, they must have had sex, right? She wasn’t sure. Well, that could be easily remedied anyway. Once they finished out here, they could retire to the bedroom.

  His story continued and she listened, asking a small question now and then to keep him going. She couldn’t care less about the story. She only wanted to listen to his voice.

  She felt herself dozing off. I shouldn’t have had so much wine, she thought. But sleep was calling her and she knew she had to follow it.

  She awoke to wind chimes from her phone alarm at 5:30.

  Fuck, she thought.

  ¤

  Cynthia was on a mission. She arrived at work early and immediately snatched the framed picture from Alice’s cube. She slipped the photo out and took it to the office scanner. Scanning paperwork was a big part of her job, so she was quite adept at using the machine. In no time, she had the frame back on Alice’s desk and a digital copy on her computer.

  She loaded the picture into Google image search and started poring through the results. She found the same picture in an ad campaign for mattresses, but that was it. She sat back in her chair and thought about what to do next.

  “Hey, there’s our guy!” Alice’s voice startled Cynthia, who spun in her chair and looked up.