Page 29 of A Life Imagined
Rayan couldn’t face the prospect of returning to the Jungle.He didn’t want to think of the people living there and what awaited them.For several days, all he’d done was hang around the house, making excuses.The situation felt increasingly hopeless.The idea that he could possibly help was nothing more than a misguided delusion.
That morning, he was lying on the sofa in the living room, a book open on his chest, not even pretending to read, when Mathias appeared above him.
“Eat.”Mathias shoved a bowl of oatmeal into his hands.“You’re getting scrawny.”
Rayan took the bowl and sat up.He’d been lost in his own thoughts and hadn’t even heard Mathias in the kitchen.Rayan brought a spoonful to his mouth.It was hot and bland and oddly comforting.
Mathias sat down in a chair across from the sofa and lit a cigarette.He was shaved and dressed in his suit but apparently in no hurry to leave.
“Don’t you need to get to the warehouse?”
“I don’t need to do shit.”Mathias stretched out his legs and took a long drag.
Rayan ate another spoon of what could have easily passed for prison gruel.Despite Rayan’s pestering, Mathias was sparing when it came to the details of his childhood.Rayan did know that Mathias had spent much of it fending for himself, a fact that had revealed itself in his approach to cooking.Mathias prepared food with an austere efficiency, with flavor and variety coming second to practical considerations, like volume and nutrition.Food, for him, was a simple equation of empty and full—no different from the fuel gauge in a car—though he had a peculiar habit of ignoring the warning light, and then Rayan had to take it upon himself to feed the man before he self-destructed.Mathias hungry was a force to be reckoned with.Regardless, he’d been surprisingly receptive to Rayan’s culinary dabbling.Not that he took obvious pleasure in the meals Rayan prepared, but he certainly ate them without complaint.
“What’s happening in the world?”Rayan asked.
For three days, the newspaper had gone missing from the house.He knew it wasn’t René’s fault—despite the kid’s less-than-stellar track record.Mathias had been deliberately shielding Rayan from the reporting on the latest incident.At this point, it was a common occurrence to find articles with confronting images and headlines detailing the number of people drowned.There existed a collective resignation at how normal these stories had become.The thought made his stomach turn.
Mathias shrugged.“New day, same stories.”
“War, contested elections, environmental ruin?”
“That about covers it.”
They sat in silence, the events of the past few days hanging over them.Rayan spooned more oatmeal into his mouth.He was ashamed by how much he’d leaned on Mathias.While he’d been humbled by Mathias’s gracious handling of him, he was tired of his issues dominating their shared experience.
“Tell me about where you went to school in Montreal.”Rayan could still conjure the photo of Mathias in his mother’s entranceway, the powder-blue shirt and striped tie coupled with his cold expression.
“What’s to tell?”
“It was a private school, right?You had to wear uniforms?”
Mathias smirked, exhaling twin streams of smoke from his nostrils.“Now, that’s a troubling predilection.”
Rayan snickered.“What were you like back then?When you were—”
“Young and innocent?”Mathias supplied.“I’ll save you the suspense—I was never innocent.”
“Did the teachers like you?”
“I think you can gauge the answer to that.”
Rayan gave a soft laugh and took another spoonful of the porridge.
“They hated me.They would have expelled me if they could,” Mathias said.
“What stopped them?”
“Proof.No one could ever pin anything on me.”The man’s mouth tweaked in what appeared to be quiet pride.“I once paid a kid a hundred bucks to fess up to breaking another boy’s nose.”
“What else did you do?”
“Ran a couple betting pools, sold pills.I dangled the class representative from the second-floor window for refusing to pay his tab.He never settled late after that.”
Rayan shook his head with a grin.
“I told you it was baked in.”Mathias blew smoke through his teeth.
